Winterhalder / Parke The Ultimate Biker Anthology

An Introduction To Books About Motorcycle Clubs & Outlaw Bikers
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9771747-9-9
Verlag: Blockhead City Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 306 Seiten

Reihe: The Ultimate Biker Anthology

Outlaw bikers and 1%er motorcycle clubs have always carefully guarded their privacy, however in recent years more and more books have come to be written by and about outlaw bikers, the lifestyle, and the realities of life inside the patched motorcycle club world. This anthology brings together some of the best authors in the world, who have recently written about motorcycle clubs, outlaw bikers and the biker culture. It features excerpts from internationally well-known authors such as Peter Edwards, Tony Thompson, Edward Winterhalder and Iain Parke, but also contains literary work from those who are relatively unknown and those who have only achieved recognition on a local scale. Covering both factual accounts of life inside clubs such as the Hells Angels, Satan's Choice, Bandidos, Rock Machine, and the Outlaws, as well as leading examples of biker based fiction that explore the images of bikers and crucial themes such as loyalty, respect and honor, this compilation is intended to introduce the reader to the secretive world of motorcycle clubs and outlaw bikers.

Iain Parke imports industrial quantities of Class A drugs, kills people and lies (a lot) for a living, being a British based crime fiction writer. He became obsessed with motorcycles at an early age, taking a six hundred mile cross-country tour to Cornwall as soon as he bought a moped at the tender age of sixteen. After working at a London dispatch job delivering parcels on a motorcycle, he built his first chopper in his bedroom at university, undeterred by the fact that the workshop was upstairs. Armed with a MBA degree, Iain first worked in insolvency and business restructuring in the UK and Africa, where he began work on his first thriller The Liquidator. The success of that novel propelled him to write a 'biker lit' trilogy about the Brethren Motorcycle Club, which has recently been optioned as a series for television in the UK. Today Iain lives off the grid, high up on the North Pennines in Northumberland with his wife, dogs, and a garage full of motorcycle restoration projects. He is currently working on a number of book projects, including another biker-based trilogy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Winterhalder, Edward

Parke, Iain

Leseproben

Big House Crew
By Peter Edwards
“Guys that don’t have anybody are preyed upon a lot.” Lorne Campbell on prison life It’s not unusual for prisoners to shake or even break down and blubber like babies by the time they’re fingerprinted at Millhaven super-maximum-security penitentiary. By this time, a prisoner has likely ridden for hours on a bus, with his hands cuffed together and his legs shackled to the floor. He has already passed along treeless lawns, through two nine-metre chain-link fences, each topped and linked in razor and barbed wire, and a metre-high “warning fence” that marks the outer limit of how far prisoners can walk from the exercise yard before deadly force can be used to stop them. He has also passed under guard towers, and if he looked up, he may have seen guards staring down at him, gripping machine guns. Once he has been escorted into the mesh-lined holding cell where he’s fingerprinted, the prisoner has become an unwilling member of a community comprising 525 of Canada’s meanest, most dysfunctional men. Odds are, even if he was once the toughest kid in the class, he’s not even close to the most feared convict on his new range. Millhaven, also known as “Thrill Haven,” was Canada’s highest-security prison, and a third of the inmates were serving life terms when Campbell arrived. Some locals and inmates believed it was built on a Native burial ground, making it forever cursed. The prison itself certainly had a nasty birth. It opened prematurely in 1971 to accommodate prisoners from nearby Kingston Penitentiary, which required an extensive cleanup after a bloody four-day riot that year. When he was there in 1972, Satan’s Choice president Bernie Guindon saw a prisoner lead another inmate across the weight room, stop, and pull out a hidden shank (an improvised knife). It was so smooth and seemingly effortless that it looked somehow choreographed, and it took just seconds for the shank to be thrust into the inmate’s chest a dozen times. “I went, ‘Wow, quick.’ It’s just like watching television.” Guindon saw another inmate get shanked in the exercise yard after demanding pharmaceuticals from fellow prisoners. That attacker also led his prey to a spot where he had hidden a shank. “Are you going to help?” an inmate asked. “No, he can die,” Guindon replied. “He was stealing pills.” Like all new arrivals, Campbell first went to the assessment centre in E-Unit. He was slated for psychological and IQ testing and an audience with Dr. George Ducolon Scott. A jaunty, charismatic, terrier-like little man, Scott had the all-knowing air of someone who had borne witness at least once to almost every form of human depravity. He once told the Ottawa Citizen that he was fascinated as a boy growing up in Kingston by what he imagined lay inside the stone walls of the Kingston Prison for Women, which loomed within eyeshot of his childhood home. Somehow, the sight of the prison stirred “a deeper part of my soul,” and tantalized him with a sense of mystery—“like running into the sun; you can’t quite see what’s there.” The doctor was in his early seventies when Campbell walked into his office, and by that time Scott had peered inside the minds of tens of thousands of prisoners. He hadn’t just asked them questions from across a desk, either. He had overseen LSD experimentation on prisoners funded by the Canadian Department of National Defence, as well as testing on the effects of shock therapy, sensory deprivation and pain tolerance. When the press caught wind of this in the 1990s, he dismissed suggestions that such experimentation reduced patients to the status of mere guinea pigs. “It’s a lot of bullshit,” Scott told the Ottawa Citizen. “It was good research back then. It was good research with good motivation, with good supervision, and the government sup- plied the bucks for the whole thing.” Pressed another time by the newspaper, he was even more to the point: “I am happy with myself. I don’t give a shit.” Unfortunately for the doctor, some people in power did give a shit. A dozen years after he met Campbell, Scott was stripped of his licence to practise medicine for testing of a profoundly lurid sort: using Sodium Pentothal and electroshock to drop female patients into an almost comatose state. Then he would implant sexual suggestions and revive them with Ritalin. But when Campbell met Scott that day in his office, the doctor still displayed the easy confidence of a man who enjoyed a secure, fascinating job for life, since there was little chance of prisons shutting down due to an outbreak of lawfulness. Every day, he could take a close-up view of varying degrees of deviance, and then stroll out again to have a quiet supper with his family in the comfort of his century-old hobby farm. “He took things in stride, like he was a movie star,” Campbell says. Given his decades of experience, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Dr. Scott seemed a little blasé as he scanned Campbell’s lengthy rap sheet of assaults and other bikerish misdeeds. “What are you here for?” the doctor asked. Campbell was sure he must already know, but he answered anyway. “Do you have any remorse for beating a man with a hammer?” “Actually, no. He deserved what he got.” Campbell’s reply didn’t seem to faze Scott even a bit. Finally, the doctor looked up and said, “You’re all right.” “I’ll never forget him saying, ‘You’re all right,’ after I was telling him about beating a guy with a hammer and selling dynamite,” Campbell says. Dr. Scott dropped his head again, the cue for Campbell to leave. With that, Campbell was dispatched to A-Unit, where he would spend half of each day in a cell measuring 3 metres by 2.1 metres. The other half of his new life was to be spent outside his cell, alongside inmates who were often happy, or at least indifferent, at the thought of slitting his throat. The only other biker in A-Unit was Ken Logan of the Lobos Motorcycle Club in Windsor. Logan ran a sports betting enterprise in which the payoff was money and cigarettes. The rest of the penitentiary’s bikers, including Rick Sauvé and Gary (Nutty) Comeau, were in J-Unit, Millhaven’s other general population wing. They were all classified as part of the “Big House Crew” by their clubs, the biker term for members behind prison bars. None of the bikers in the prison were from the hated Outlaws. Less than twelve hours after he arrived on the range, Campbell stood in the gymnasium with John Dunbar, also of the Lobos. Dunbar was a smallish, trim man whose appearance belied the enormity of his crime. He and fellow Lobo Ken Logan had gone into a house to kill a former Lobos president over a drug beef, and ended up also murdering another man and a woman when they showed up unexpectedly. Campbell and Dunbar had never met before, but as outlaw bikers they naturally gravitated to each other. It was a little after nine in the morning, and Campbell and Dunbar watched as an inmate picked up a baseball bat and walked briskly towards them. “Stand here, Lorne,” Dunbar said, and Campbell obeyed. Seconds later, the man with the bat clubbed Michel Lafleur, a member of the Front de Libération du Québec, to death. Lafleur was thirty-three and he had been behind bars for fourteen years, sentenced to a term of more than forty-one years for an assortment of crimes relating to the Quebec separatist group, including armed robbery and discharging a firearm with intent to kill. His role with the FLQ was to raise money through robbery, and he was already an inmate when fellow terrorists kidnapped Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross, eventually murdering Laporte. Lafleur’s murder was never solved, as no one in the gymnasium spoke with investigators, but it’s doubtful there were any great political under- tones to his death that morning in the exercise yard. Killings at Millhaven often happened for reasons that would seem petty to outsiders but which had a peculiar logic to someone inside the prison. “I was amazed that it happened so fast,” Campbell says. “I heard he was a good guy. I never talked to him. I saw him a few minutes and then he was dead.” “Within six months, you’ll have a sixth sense,” Dunbar told him, describing a heightened awareness akin to how birds know to hightail it before a storm. “You’ll know when something’s going to go down,” Dunbar continued. “It’s a feeling. So you just clear out.” As Campbell settled in, he thought about something Mike Everett had said when he’d dropped by to see Campbell, alluding to a potential threat. Everett had said something cryptic to the effect of: “If you’re classified for Millhaven, you have a problem with somebody there.” He declined to expand, leaving the impression it was an inter-club problem in which he couldn’t take sides. There was a barbecue at the prison during Campbell’s first week there, one of four held each year. It gave him a chance to look into Everett’s warning, and so he walked up to Sauvé. “I saw him and Nutty for the first time in five years. They had been in jail for five years.” Campbell had always confronted beefs head-on and that’s what he planned to do right now. “I asked Rick and Nutty in the first half-hour, ‘Who in...