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Also this issue: Shoot To Kill? Off the Mapp Charles In Charge At-Large Gripe The Bell Curve |
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February 27-March 5, 2003
city beat
 Mongolian Hot Pot: The Mongols Motorcycle Club apologizes for a casino fight in this ad in Hot Bike. |
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Of bikers and bosses, betting and brawling.
Philly's organized crime squad and the Highway Patrol are keeping close tabs on outlaw biker gangs despite a momentary lull in the war between the local Pagans and the out-of-town Hells Angels.
A number of Pagans from the South Philly chapter have switched sides and are now members of the Hells Angels -- the largest outlaw biker gang in the world.
The Pagan South Philly branch is now down to four lonely bikers. Maybe they need their own website to recruit more members?
Unlike the Pagans, the Hells Angels are a very media-savvy group. The Hells Angels have their own website, www.hells-angels.com. The site warns readers that the "Hells Angels and skull logo are trademarks owned by the Hells Angels Motorcycle Corporation, registered in the USA and in many other countries."
The Long Island chapter of the notorious Hells Angels goes even further. Its website link warns, "Besides all that copyright bullshit, if you try and steal from us, you will be beat'in with your own computer."
The Hells Angels website welcomes new chapters -- this month they added Lewiston, Maine, to the Hells Angels family. Also noted, new international members forming chapters in Sweden, France and Brazil. (What, nobody wants to join in Iraq?)
Currently, Chuck Zito, a former president of a Hells Angels chapter in New York, is doing a book tour promoting his memoir, Street Justice. Zito is a former bodyguard for several movie stars and is a cast member of Oz, the HBO prison drama.
Last year, former Oakland, Calif., Hells Angels prez, Ralph "Sonny" Barger, was out gallivanting around on a national publicity tour pushing his second book, Ridin' High, Livin' Free.
These are not the only tomes on the badass biker gang. Back in 1966, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson kicked off the literary fascination with the violence-prone Angels when he penned Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.
While the Hells Angels' East Coast enemies, the Pagans, have failed to go media, out on the West Coast it's a whole different story. The Hells Angels are involved in a power struggle with several different gangs across the country, including the Mongols, a mostly Hispanic outlaw biker gang based in Los Angeles.
Taking a page from the Hells Angels spinmeisters, the Mongols have placed a full-page ad in the upcoming March issue of Hot Bike, the Harley-Davidson enthusiasts magazine.
The ad proclaims that "the Mongols Motorcycle Club deeply regrets the incident at Harrah's Casino," and then goes on to explain that the Mongols had a right to defend their loved ones during the April 27, 2002, gunfight with the Hells Angels inside a Laughlin, Nev., casino that left three people dead and 12 injured. A casino videotape, now in police possession, allegedly shows a Hells Angel shooting a Mongol to death.
Less than an hour before the casino battle, a 28-year-old Hells Angel was gunned down in Ludlow, Calif., not far from the Nevada state line.
Just two months before the shootout in Nevada, more than 70 Pagans, including a South Philly tattoo parlor owner, crashed a Hells Angels party on Long Island.
During the melee that followed, one Pagan was killed and 73 were arrested. A Hells Angels member named Raymond Dwyer was charged with the killing, but was later acquitted of murder because the court decided he had killed the Pagan in self defense. Commenting on the verdict, Dwyer said, "God bless the United States of America and God bless the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club."
The New Jersey Casino Control Commission says it won't gamble on Joe Ligambi. The alleged Philly mob boss was banned from the Atlantic City casinos earlier this month. Ligambi joins 150 other people on the exclusion list. State investigators charge that Ligambi used the casinos to meet with mobsters from North Jersey and New York.
Neither Ligambi nor his attorney appeared before the Commission. Law enforcement sources claim Ligambi took over the Philly-South Jersey Cosa Nostra after Joey Merlino was arrested in 1999.
This isn't the first time Ligambi has had trouble down the shore. In the mid-1980s, when police claim Ligambi was a crime soldier in the Philadelphia mafia and "Little Nicky" Scarfo was boss, Ligambi and his family enjoyed spending their summers in Ocean City, N.J. The Ligambis vacationed in a condo alongside the boardwalk there.
But eventually Ligambi's alleged role in the Scarfo crime family became public knowledge and according to one longtime Ligambi pal, the condo association refused rent to the Ligambis. "He loved Ocean City," an underworld source told City Paper. "It's quiet and more family-oriented. No bars. No nightlife. That's what he wanted for his family and he was pissed when he couldn't go back there."
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