Other Stuff
The Danish biker wars
Helle Bering-Jensen
American Scandinavian Foundation Spring/Summer 1997
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 8-10 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.
The bikers could well have fit into the Denmark of a 1000 years ago, the Denmark
of Viking kings Gorm the Old, Harold Bluetooth, and Sven Forkbeard for whom
revenge was a way of life. But they fit very badly into the Denmark of today,
which is a peaceful society that prides itself on the rational resolution of
disputes and on a prevailing community spirit. The Danes believe in social
rehabilitation. Convicted murderer Jorn "Jonke" Nielsen, for instance, was
housed in a so-called "open" prison where prisoners can come and go throughout
the day. He was even invited to speak to local groups of school children.
Obviously, the gangs' determination to fight each other to the death has no
place in this environment.
A Cycle of Violence
The March 10 murder sparked off a nauseating cycle of violence. On April 26,
Bandidos member Morten "Wooden Leg" Christiansen was wounded by a hand grenade
in his cell in Horserod state prison. On May 7, Hell's Angel Brian "the Break"
Jacobsen was wounded in an attack and lost a leg. On July 10, Bandidos member
Jim Verner was killed, and his body was found near an unexploded bomb. On July
15, Jan "the Face" Jensen was shot and killed in Drammen, Norway; he was
affiliated with Bandidos in Sweden. On July 21, a 12-pound unexploded bomb was
found near the Hell's Angels club house in Titangade in Copenhagen. On July 25,
Hell's Angel leader Jorn "Jonke" Nielsen was wounded in his cell in the minimum
security prison Jyderup, when armed gunmen sprayed him with bullets and tossed a
hand grenade into his cell for good measure. On August 14, a Bandidos
sympathizer was wounded by gunfire near Haslev. On September 2, a biker from the
Hell's Angel's support group MC Danmark was wounded by handgun fire. On
September 4, a car bomb was directed against MC Danmark. On September 12, a bomb
exploded in a stolen car near the Hell's Angels club house in Roskilde, which
was also sprayed by 250 bullets on September 22.
Citizens Confront the Threat
It's not surprising that Danish citizens were getting rather nervous. None had a
more unsettling experience than the residents of Polensgade in Copenhagen, who
woke up one morning in September to find that Hell's Angels had acquired the
house across from their community playground. Before long, the trademark
barricades and barbed wire of the club houses-or, as they are more appropriately
known, "the biker fortresses"-went up. Fearful for the safety of their families,
the residents became prisoners in their own homes, kept their children inside,
and rearranged their living rooms to get the sofa out of the line of fire. They
complained bitterly to the Social Democratic government of Prime Minister Poul
Nyrup Rasmussen.
The Politicians
In this kind of warfare, new methods of defense had to be found, some of which
were discomfiting to Danish politicians and law enforcement officials. Outside
the metropolitan area, police were making almost no progress in solving the
murders and attacks.
Urged in consultations with the FBI to get in touch with the criminals before
things got even worse, Danish police accumulated record-setting overtime hours
as they monitored the gangs' activities, made numerous arrests, and confiscated
large caches of weapons. According to then Attorney General Bjorn Westh, 10
times as many weapons were confiscated in 1996 as in 1995. In October, Denmark
was appointed to lead an international joint task force to contain organized
criminal gang activity and warfare. The task force included the 15 EU countries,
as well as non-EU members Norway and Switzerland, with cooperation from the FBI
and Interpol.
The problem remained, however, of how to deny bikers the use of their buildings
in residential neighborhoods, such as Polensgade, without tampering with the
civil liberties of other citizens. Denmark, like the United States, has
forsamlingfrihed (freedom of association), which has to be protected. The Danish
Constitution allows for the expropriation of private property for purposes such
as city planning, but legal scholars balked at the idea of using this provision
to expropriate the club houses. Some suggested using the Constitution's section
78, which makes it possible to ban organizations considered a threat to society,
a clause that had only been enforced twice before: in 1924 against a homosexual
organization, and in 1941 against the Communist Party. Obviously, that, too, had
significant civil liberties implications.
The Biker's Next Move
All these deliberations acquired new urgency on October 6, when the Hell's
Angels club house on Titangade was hit by rocket fire at 3 o'clock in the
morning. The attack was especially shocking because a big party was underway-a
"Viking fest," to which nearly 100 neighbors had been invited-when suddenly a
rocket was launched from the roof of a building across the street. The weapon
was a shoulder-held AT4-HEAT antitank grenade produced by the Swedish
manufacturer Bofors. The missile can penetrate a foot and a half of armored
steel and spews out a beam of deadly heat like a blowpipe, designed to fry the
occupants of a tank and cause its ammunition to explode. The missile went
straight through the wall, and the searing beam cut through the crowd, exiting
the room on the other side. The result was the instantaneous death of one biker
and of a 29-year-old woman, who lived in the neighborhood. She was the biker
wars' first "non-combatant" death. Over 20 other people were hospitalized with
burns. Again, Denmark made international news in a way that no wanted.
Action At Last
This incident was the last straw. An anti-crime package presented by the
government in October included improved witness protection; expanded use of wire
taps, searches, and confiscation of assets; harsher sentences for weapons
possession and drug dealing. The use of undercover sting-operations, however,
remains illegal.
More importantly from the perspective of ordinary Danes perhaps, on October 16,
Folketinget, the Danish parliament, passed legislation barring bikers from
occupying certain buildings, specifically their eight primary biker fortresses.
The constitutionality of this measure continues to be a matter of debate among
legal scholars, but so far its effectiveness is not in question. The police
supervised the evictions, which caused much rancor among the evicted. One group
is suing the state for loss of property, and while others even had the nerve to
turn up at local welfare offices to demand that authorities give them
"relocation assistance," a request that was indignantly rejected by most
jurisdictions. As Ramso's mayor, Poul Lindor Nielsen put it, "That cannot
possibly be the spirit of the law. It would be totally insane if ordinary
citizens had to pay for this." The gambit only succeeded in Norre Alslev on the
island of Falster, where the mayor preferred to give each biker an undisclosed
sum to get out of town with no delay.
Yet the bikers have not gone away. They continue to fight each other, but they
are out of residential areas, and are therefore less of a threat to general law
and order. Convictions were handed down in the Kastrup airport shooting in
December, and two Bandidos have been arrested for the rocket attack in Titangade.
It will take the concerted efforts of Danish law enforcement officials to stamp
out this scourge, but chances are good that Danes will have a more peaceful year
in 1997.
Helle Bering-Jensen is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Times.