Busting Hell's Angels

With their studded leather jackets, their taste for swastikas and grisly death's-heads, their pulsing choppers, their scraggly beards and their penchant for violence, the Hell's Angels in the 1960s became the nightmarish flip side of the American dream. During the 1970s, however, they attempted to scrub their outlaw image, depicting themselves as a peaceable, nationwide "family" united by a love of the open road. Last week, as some 1,000 heavily armed law-enforcement agents in 50 locations around the country swooped down and arrested more than 100 Angels, the once chaotic band of bikers was depicted by authorities as a family, all right: a tightly run and well-disciplined crime family on wheels, raking in millions of dollars in illegal drug dealing.

The well-orchestrated raid by local police, the FBI and other federal agents netted a fearsome arsenal of weapons, ranging from UZI submachine guns to antitank weapons. Most of the bikers surrendered quietly, but in Connecticut a state trooper was shot in the hip by a suspect. The eleven-state offensive was the culmination of a three-year undercover operation dubbed Roughrider, part of a larger effort by Washington to snuff out new and unorthodox forms of organized crime. Authorities confiscated $2 million worth of illegal drugs during their investigation, including methamphetamines, cocaine and LSD. A similar multistate raid in February corralled about 90 members of a rival motorcycle gang, the Bandidos, on drug and weapons charges. Declared Attorney General Edwin Meese in announcing the operation: "Once again, we see the consummate value of the undercover technique in a particularly dangerous and difficult undertaking designed to penetrate and expose a major criminal enterprise."

Much of the information leading to the arrests came from Kevin Bonner, an intrepid FBI agent who went undercover for more than two years, infiltrating the motorcycle gang and crisscrossing the country to do drug deals with different Hell's Angels chapters. Bonner and an unnamed informant who traveled with him also unearthed leads on alleged bribery, extortion, contract murders and the harboring of fugitives by gang members. FBI Director William Webster claimed that the operation "averted five potential murders."

The arrests and searches took place in a number of cities, including Phoenix, New Haven, Conn., Boston, Cleveland, Omaha and Charlotte, N.C. Police in the East Village section of Manhattan, backed by a helicopter, an armored van and dogs, used sledgehammers to break into a building that served as a regional headquarters. Among the six Angels they arrested was a burly biker named Sandy Alexander, the reputed head of the national organization, who was captured when he clambered down a fire escape as an audience of 150 looked on.

Once the epitome of the helter-skelter ethic of life on the lam, authorities say, the Angels of late have embraced business-school techniques to run their operations, using computers to manage administrative and financial matters and imposing strict accountability on drug dealers. Each chapter of the Angels contributes profits from its deals to a national treasury. "Motorcycle gangs have come a long way in recent years," said FBI Agent James Greenleaf. "They are much more sophisticated than most people in society would expect."