Danish biker wars, The

Scandinavian Review, Spring/Summer 1997 by Helle Bering-Jensen

It began in March, 1996, in Kastrup Airport near Copenhagen..On most days, Kastrup is a place of quiet bustle and well-ordered lines, cheerful family reunions and excited vacationers. Newly renovated and bright, the airport has none of the intimidating size of Heathrow or Frankfurt, none of the filth and crush of humanity of JFK. On most days, Kastrup is a friendly place. But not on March 10, the day chosen by the motorcycle gang Hell's Angels to target members of the rival gang Bandidos, as members of both crews were returning from gatherings in Helsinki.

A Swedish eyewitness, Jan Anderson, later described the scene to the newspaper Kvaellsposten as something out of a Hollywood gangster movie. His vantage point was a double-decker tour bus that was taking him to the ferry in Dragor on the way back to Sweden. "About 810 men emerged from a parking place," he told the newspaper. "Two of them walked over to a parked vehicle and began shooting directly through the windshield." Soon after, Anderson's bus was nearly hit by the getaway car, which zig-zagged at high speed in and out of the oncoming traffic. "The getaway car came over the sidewalk towards us, and we almost had a frontal collision. Some 30-40 meters further on, I could see a guy dragging somebody away who was bleeding all over. The car was shot to pieces, two of the tires were flat, but the driver had escaped."

A Threat to Society

The incident, which made international news, left Danish Bandidos leader Uffe Larsen dead and three of his comrades wounded. It was the beginning of a cycle of escalating violence unlike anything Denmark had ever witnessed before, and it took the Danish police and the Danish government entirely by surprise.

As the wars of revenge raged back and forth across Denmark, two burning issues became dominant in 1996: how to deal with the organized criminality, extraordinary brutality, and contempt for life displayed by these gangs; and how to protect innocent civilians, who suddenly found themselves in the line of fire.

An earlier episode of gang warfare between Hell's Angels and the gang Bullshit in the mid-1 980s had left 13 people dead, mostly from gunshot wounds or stabbings. This time around, the bikers were equipped with much greater firepower, including bombs, grenades and shoulder-launched rockets, much of it stolen in Sweden. In October, 1996, the Bandidos shocked the country by launching a particularly murderous attack on a Hell's Angels clubhouse. In a residential Copenhagen street, the Bandidos fired anti-tank rockets into a crowd of 100 party-goers. This behavior finally prompted politicians and the police to take real action.

The Gangs in Denmark

How did the bikers end up on peaceful Danish soil, or in this part of the world at all? Like a cancer they have spread throughout Scandinavia, wreaking destruction from Helsinki to Oslo to Malmo. Bikers-in Danish rockere-have been tolerated for decades. Though regarded as counterculture troublemakers, they were considered fairly harmless. Some members of motorcycle clubs were social dropouts or petty criminals, but others led working lives apart from their motorcycle existence. As might be expected from the liberal Danish welfare state, their "club houses" were even subsidized by the government as places where people could enjoy their "hobby."

The American Connection

The American connection has complicated the picture. In effect, Denmark today is suffering from the repercussions of gang wars that played themselves out in the United States in the 1980s. Hell's Angels and Bandidos are part of the four big gangs that dominate the American biker scene, together with the Pagans and the Outlaws. In recent years, they have expanded their reach abroad. Hell's Angels, a Californiabased group started by returned World War II veterans, has had chapters in Denmark since 1985. In 1993 they were challenged by the Bandidos, a Texas-based group founded by Vietnam veterans, which consolidated a number of minor domestic Danish gangs such as Bullshit and the Undertakers. The event that set off the war in Scandinavia goes back to 1994, when a Hell's Angel was gunned down in Helsinki.

The total number of people involved is startlingly small given the amount of havoc they have wrought. Hell's Angels has three chapters in Denmark with 54 members, and Bandidos has four chapters with 50 members. In 1996, they were responsible for six murders, according to the police. That compares with a nationwide total the year before of 58 murders, in a population of some 5 million. To the number of bikers must be added minor affiliated gangs and assorted groupies, perhaps a few hundred all told. They are suspected of running narcotics and do a brisk business in smuggled and stolen weapons, including machine guns, shotguns, automatic weapons, handguns, hand grenades and homemade bombs. Their sporting mottoes reflect their credos: "No mercy," "God forgives, Bandidos don't," "Cut one and we all bleed," and the Danish Hell's Angels"' "We are the people our parents warned us about." The gangs' warped code of honor makes revenge imperative.