Sunday afternoon's shootout between rival biker gangs in Waco, Texas, has left at least nine people dead, at least 18 wounded, and about 170 charged with various crimes.
There have been past, ongoing wars between motorcycle gangs, with significant body counts. But what made the Waco shooting so different — why one expert called it unprecedented — was that it was an extreme, singular event with at least five motorcycle gangs present.
Outlaw motorcycle gangs represent a small minority of gang activity in the United States. The FBI's 2013 National Gang Report estimated that 88 percent of gang members are in street gangs, 9.5 percent are in prison gangs, and the remaining 2.5 percent are in motorcycle gangs.
At the same time, motorcycle gangs tend to be disproportionately problematic for cops: in the same survey, 14 percent of law enforcement officials identified motorcycle gangs first among the most problematic gangs in their jurisdictions.
Despite occasional appearances in pop culture, outlaw motorcycle gang (OMG) activity and culture can be opaque. Here's a rundown of where outlaw gangs came from, what they do now, and why the Waco clash happened.
Where did outlaw motorcycle gangs come from?
As the Washington Post's Michael Miller recounts in an excellent piece on the history of outlaw motorcycle gangs, the culture took root in the wake of World War II, when millions of young men returned home and many struggled to re-acclimate to civilian life. "The anomie induced by the end of the war was crucial to the formation of the subculture; the relative affluence of the postwar years was even more vital to shaping its structure, image, and norms," University of North Texas professor and motorcycle gang expert James Quinn writes in a 2001 paper (hat tip Miller). The healthy postwar economy enabled the purchase of the motorcycles themselves (as did veterans' severance pay); nostalgia for the camaraderie and risk-taking of the war made the clubs' focus on male bonding and dangerous activities like, say, riding motorcycles particularly attractive.
The pivotal event that heralded the beginning of criminal motorcycle gang culture took place in Hollister, California, on July 4, 1947. An official American Motorcyclist Association race took place outside of town, after which a number of attendees (some members of motorcycle clubs, some not) spilled over into Hollister and proceeded to get extremely drunk and do minor damage to storefronts. William Dulaney — like Quinn an academic with an interest in outlaw biker culture — argues that the disturbance itself was relatively minor. But soon after, Life magazine ran an article on the event portraying it as an all-out riot, including this image by Barney Petersen of the San Francisco Chronicle depicting biker Eddie Davenport drinking on his motorcycle afterward amid empty beer bottles. Dulaney and other sources claim the photo was staged, but it helped cement the popular image of bikers as degenerates and hooligans:
Afterward, official motorcyclist organizations — most notably the AMA — fought back against the portrayal of bikers as drunken ruffians. Their actual statements, however, have been overshadowed by a most likely apocryphal story: that the AMA put out a press statement arguing that 99 percent of motorcyclists were "good, decent, law-abiding citizens," in Dulaney's words. The AMA has said it has no record that such a statement ever went out.
But the story gave rise to "one-percenter," a term referring to members of criminal motorcycle gangs like the Hells Angels and the Bandidos. If 99 percent of motorcyclists were law-abiding, the outlaw motorcycle gang members were the other guys, and proudly so. Even right after the Hollister debacle, more rough-and-tumble groups like the Boozefighters Motorcycle Clubs were relishing the rebuke. "While mainstream motorcyclists and motorcycling organizations were attempting to distance themselves from the myth of Hollister, clubs such as the Boozefighters were basking in it," Dulaney writes. "So it was that the birth of outlaw motorcycle clubs was the result of a siege that never took place."
What do outlaw motorcycle gangs do that makes them outlaws?
First, a note on terminology: originally, "outlaw motorcycle clubs" was simply used to refer to clubs unrecognized by the AMA. Dulaney, for example, draws a distinction between mere "outlaw" clubs and the true "one-percenter" clubs. But these days, "one-percenter" and "outlaw" are often used as synonyms.
Outlaw clubs tend to engage in the same kind of business enterprises as other criminal syndicates: drugs, weapons, prostitution, theft, etc. But it's worth keeping in mind that while law enforcement thinks about outlaw clubs as criminal operations, members themselves see them first and foremost as fraternal societies. "There is a fraternal side. They do toy runs and host motorcycle races and things like that, and that's very much part of their lives and something they're proud of," Quinn says. "They want to look like a normal fraternal organization like the Rotary Club or the Elks or whatever. They're not. There are elements of that sort of organization, they have elements of a gang in terms of loyalty and emotionality, and they have elements of corporate organization."
In his 2001 paper, Quinn explained that outlaw clubs began transforming into organized crime operations in the late 1960s and early '70s due to mutual distrust more than anything else. Bike gangs, he writes, "generally define territory in terms of entire cities, metropolitan areas, or states." That means clubs are naturally going to operate near one another, provoking mutual suspicion that spiraled into a "felt need to stockpile weapons and fortify properties," which "initially motivated organized crime involvements." It's a dynamic similar to the security dilemma that fuels arms races between nations.
One paper that tried to measure criminal activity among motorcycle gangs using news reports found the most common type of crime mentioned were "ongoing instrumental acts" — that is, crimes related to the ongoing criminal business operations of the clubs, like drug dealing or trafficking, weapons trafficking, money laundering, etc. Next most common were "planned aggressive acts," most notably including violent attacks on rival clubs and other enemies. After that, there are "spontaneous expressive acts" such as bar fights and brawls, and the least common type was "short-term instrumental acts," wherein a theft or other scheme is committed by an individual member rather than as part of a club-wide operation. Barker and Human conclude that the Big Four clubs (more on them below) "often operate as gangs oriented toward criminal profit rather than motorcycle clubs."
What are the main motorcycle gangs I should know about?
Traditionally, the main one-percenter gangs have been known as the "Big Four":
- The Hells Angels, founded in 1948 and made famous by Hunter S. Thompson in his 1967 book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. Associated with the late 1960s counterculture, they are perhaps best known for stabbing Meredith Hunter, an 18-year-old black man, to death during the Rolling Stones' set at the 1969 Altamont Free Concert, where the club had been hired to provide security.
- The Bandidos, founded by Donald Chambers in 1966. This is one of the two main clubs involved in the Waco shootout, and traditionally the gang in charge of Texas. They are an enemy of the Hells Angels.
- The Outlaws, which brand themselves as the original outlaw club, founded in 1935 before the postwar motorcycle club boom. Like the Bandidos, they are a traditional enemy of the Angels. Quinn says the Outlaws are particularly prominent east of the Mississippi.
- The Pagans, founded in 1959. According to Barker and Human, the Pagans are "the most secretive of the clubs" and "[do] not list their chapters and [do] not have chapters outside the United States. There are larger outlaw motorcycle clubs/gangs than the Pagans in the U.S. and internationally, however, the Pagans are included in the Big 4 designation because of their propensity toward violence and criminal activity." According to Quinn, they're a force in the mid-Atlantic.
In addition, the Mongols — a Latino gang centered in Los Angeles — have attained prominence in recent years. "The Mongols are a huge force in the United States and they're starting to go international," Quinn says. Barker has also written of a "Big Five" containing the traditional Big Four as well as the Sons of Silence, a smaller group strong in the Midwest. In addition to these six groups, the Justice Department also names the Black Pistons club (a "support club" for the Outlaws, from which the latter recruits members) and the Vagos on the West Coast.
Quinn says the Hells Angels and Bandidos are, at the moment, the dominant clubs worldwide, while "the Mongols are a huge force in the United States, and they're starting to go international."
The geographic distribution of the groups has changed considerably since the 1990s. "A couple of decades ago it would've been a real clear picture, with the Hells Angels in the West Coast and the Northeast, the Outlaws in a swath from Florida to Detroit and Chicago, the Bandidos from the Midwest down to Texas and up to Washington State, and the Mongols largely in Southern California," Quinn says. "Since then, all of those clubs have been expanding, and they've been expanding into each other's territories."
Who's allowed into biker gangs?
Motorcycle clubs tend to only admit men. "The culture of OMGs is notoriously misogynistic," Quinn, Anand Bosmia, Todd Petersen, Christoph Griessenauer, and Shane Tubbs write in a 2014 article for the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine on how ER personnel should deal with bikers, "and women affiliated with these gangs are generally forced into prostitution or street-level drug trafficking." A number of clubs, including the Hells Angels and the Outlaw Motorcycle Club, restrict membership to white men.
The Bandidos are somewhat less exclusionary, though still mostly white. Skip Hollandsworth at Texas Monthly noted that "although the club was made up mostly of white males, [Bandidos founder Donald] Chambers welcomed Hispanics, and for a couple of years, there was one black man who rode with the club. His nickname was Spook." The major exception to this pattern of white dominance is the Mongols, a primarily Latino biker club centered in Los Angeles with a history of anti-black violence.
How do motorcycle gangs relate to other kinds of organized crime?
In many cases, outlaw motorcycle gangs have connections to street gangs, prison gangs, and other criminal operations outside the biker world. The FBI gang report cites ties between the Bandidos and Los Zetas, the famously brutal Mexican drug cartel. Researcher Danielle Shields notes that the Mongols have collaborated with the Mexican Mafia on drug operations, though Mongols recruitment operations targeting street gang members caused a temporary rift.
There is also a long history of white nationalism in biking, both in explicitly white supremacist or neo-Nazi bike clubs and among members of more mainstream clubs. In 2008, for example, the Outlaws hosted a St. Patrick's Day event in Florida sponsored by the white supremacist groups Confederate Hammerskins and Blood & Honour America. Hells Angels members have, on at least some occasions, collaborated with the Aryan Brotherhood. It's not uncommon for biker gang members to have tattoos of the dual lightning bolt logo of the Nazi SS, but the Anti-Defamation League notes this is as often for shock value as for anything else.
What was the specific dispute in Waco? Has this kind of thing happened before?
At least five different gangs were present at Twin Peaks Restaurant when the Waco shootout began, but the instigating factor was a dispute between the Bandidos — the MC that's controlled Texas for years — and the Cossacks, a local gang attempting to make inroads in the state. The Cossacks have recently been discussing a possible alliance with the Hells Angels, the Bandidos' avowed enemies, and began wearing a Texas patch on their leather jackets, a move that Steve Cook, executive director of the Midwest Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association, told Libby Nelson was "basically a slap in the face to the Bandidos."
Cook told the Post's Miller that it appears the fight was expected by participants: "You can tell by the number of weapons involved that these guys came looking for a fight. They were prepared."
Quinn described the Waco shootout as "unprecedented." There have been past, ongoing wars between motorcycle gangs, with significant body counts, but without extreme singular events like the Waco shooting. The Great Nordic Biker War of the mid-1990s pitted the Angels and the Bandidos against each other, and resulted in a dozen murders and almost 80 shootings. The Quebec Biker war, beginning in the late '90s and continuing well into the 2000s, pitted Rock Machine — a local club that would ally with Bandidos — against the Hells Angels, and took about 150 lives. As Miller notes, in 2009 an ex-cop accused of killing eight Bandidos members alleged that the head of Bandidos worldwide, Jeff Pike, ordered the slayings.