Perth, Australia (April 20, 2019) BTN — Five international motorcycle club members including three Gypsy Jokers and two associates of the club have been banned from entering the country after being stopped at Perth Airport.
The men all arrived in Perth in the past week to attend an event being held on Saturday night to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the motorcycle club.
Baggage search bench at Perth Airport
But the Australian Border Force (ABF) said they were all stopped and questioned before having their visas cancelled because "they presented a risk to the health, safety or good order of the Australian community, or a segment of the community".
The men included two Germans, aged 33 and 61, a 34-year-old Norwegian and two Spaniards aged 43 and 44. The ABF said the German pair, both members of the Gypsy Jokers, arrived in Perth on a flight from Hong Kong on Monday night.
The Spanish men, both club associates, also arrived on Monday on a flight from Dubai. The Norwegian member of the Gypsy Jokers arrived on a flight from Singapore on Wednesday. The ABF said the men were held at the Perth immigration detention centre before being sent home.
ABF regional commander for WA Rod O'Donnell said they were focussed on disrupting the activities of outlaw motorcycle gangs.
"These gangs pose a significant threat to our community and are known to be involved in serious criminal activity including drug trafficking and violent crime," he said. "Any non-citizen involved with a criminal organisation, including outlaw motorcycle gangs, can expect to have their Australian visa cancelled on arrival and be removed from the country."
The event to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Gypsy Jokers, at the motorcycle club's Maddington clubhouse in Perth's south-eastern suburbs, is expected to be watched closely by police.
Tampa, Florida (April 19, 2019) BTN — Sunday night, a car turned into the path of motorcyclist Mike Tapp on Dale Mabry Highway. To avoid a collision, the biker braked hard and lost control, throwing him and his passenger to the pavement.
The biker died and the passenger, his longtime girlfriend, was seriously injured. The driver of the car didn't stop and the Florida Highway Patrol is looking for the person who was behind the wheel.
Mike Tapp, Boston Mike to his friends, hugs friend Gina Henry in December after buying the 2016 Harley Davidson Street Glide at left. Tapp, 49, was killed Sunday when a driver turned into his path while he was riding on Dale Mabry Highway. [Courtesy of Andrew Mora]
It's the kind of crash that would have angered Mike Tapp and spurred him to action.
A friend of the couple, Andrew Mora, is now offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the identification of the driver. If Tapp were around, his friends say, he would light up Facebook with the reward offer, determined to do his part for members of his biker family. But the 49-year-old Tampa father was the motorcyclist killed in the crash, and his longtime partner, 46-year-old Kymberle Meade, is still in the hospital.
"He really was a pillar," said Mora, owner of Moramoto, the motorcycle dealership where Tapp bought the 2016 Harley-Davidson Street Glide he was riding Sunday. "If someone were in need, he would be the first to help."
Known as Boston Mike for his native city, Tapp had lived in Florida for many years. He and Meade had been together nearly three decades and had children together.
Tapp was a proud member of the American Outlaw Association, one of the biggest motorcycle clubs in the country, his friends said. Law enforcement considers the Outlaws a criminal gang, but Tapp was far from a menace to society, Mora said. For Tapp, the club was about camaraderie centered on a shared passion for riding.
When a friend needed a hand, Tapp would help spread the word, taking to Facebook and banging out public posts in all capital letters. Most days, he'd wake up early and send friends messages with irreverent memes and the latest news in the biker scene.
"He was the one of the funniest, most humble guys I've ever met," Mora said.
Tapp had worked a variety of jobs over the years, from fueling planes at a local airport to manning phones at corporate call centers, said friend Morley Henry, 35. Tapp and Meade often hosted cookouts where Tapp served up his signature chicken marsala.
"He was that personality who walks into a room and everything lights up," said Henry, a motorcycle technician at Moramoto. "It didn't matter was mood you were in, put a smile on your face. He went out of his way to make everybody happy."
In December, Tapp traded in his old Street Glide with 90,000 miles on the odometer and bought a 2016 model, Mora said. Within a couple of months, he put about 10,000 miles on that bike.
On the night of the crash, Tapp and Meade were riding north on Dale Mabry when the driver of a small, light-colored sedan heading south turned across their path to head east on West Idlewild Avenue, just north of Bill Currie Ford, according to the Florida Highway Patrol. Troopers released footage of the crash caught by a surveillance camera at the Volvo dealership across Dale Mabry, but the camera is too far way to determine the make and model of the car.
"You can see clearly the action of that car caused the crash even though they didn't collide," said Sgt. Steve Gaskins, a spokesman for the Highway Patrol.
It's unclear what, if anything, the driver would be charged with if identified, however. Troopers would have to confer with the Hillsborough State Attorney's Office, Gaskins said.
Mora said the driver should come forward. Otherwise, he's hoping his reward will provide an incentive to someone who knows something.
"We'll never have closure," Mora said, "so the only thing we can possibly have is justice."
Repentigny, Quebec (April 18, 2019) BTN – A police officer who was arrested along with dozens of people rounded up following a major drug trafficking investigation into the Hells Angels has been granted parole on the 18-month sentence he received in January.
Carl Ranger, a member of the Repentigny police when he was arrested in Project Objection last year, quit the police force shortly after he was charged. He admitted that in 2017 he approached an undercover agent who was involved in Project Objection and asked him for a $6,000 loan, and then broke the law to get it.
The undercover agent said he would agree to the loan if Ranger did a few favours for him. The first was to research a license plate in a police database for the undercover agent, who was posing as a criminal. After carrying out that task, Ranger agreed to transport 10,000 meth pills to a drug dealer and returned with $10,000 for the undercover agent.
When Ranger pleaded guilty in October, no evidence presented in court suggested that what he agreed to had anything to do with the Hells Angels. Several full-patch members of the motorcycle club have been arrested since April last year, when the first series of arrests were carried out. Some have since pleaded guilty to running drug trafficking networks in different parts of the province.
According to a written copy of the decision made by the Commission québécoise des libérations conditionnelles on Monday, Ranger said his career as a police officer spiralled after he discovered the body of a woman who had been murdered in 2008. He said he slipped into a depression following the gruesome discovery and he received minimal support from the police force. He said he drank more and fell into financial trouble after he took a leave of absence to deal with his depression.
Ranger was eligible for parole after having served one-sixth of his sentence.
New York, NY (April 16, 2019) BTN — Since 1968, 77 East Third Street in Manhattan's East Village housed the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club's New York City clubhouse and apartments for some of its members. But the building was recently sold and the Angels have purchased new digs, a former church on Long Island.
The New Yorker's Sarah Larson stopped by on moving day and wrote the article below.
On a drizzly Sunday at the end of March, a white-and-yellow moving van occupied a space in front of 77 East Third Street that had long been reserved—and carefully delineated with traffic cones—for gleaming Harley-Davidson choppers. From August, 1969, until that day, the six-story lightly gargoyled Renaissance Revival apartment building with a first-floor brick façade was the New York City headquarters of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Its distinctive front door, between two Doric columns painted with sevens, depicted a motorcycle-helmeted skeleton gleefully wielding a pitchfork atop a bed of flaming skulls.
A plaque read “in memory of big vinny 1948-1979: ‘when in doubt, knock ’em out.’ ” That day, the Post’s front-page headline was “hell freezes over: yuppies bounce snowflake bikers out of east village.” After fifty years, the Hells Angels were moving out.
Hells Angels near their New York clubhouse on East Third Street between First and Second Avenue in March 1971.
The building had functioned as both clubhouse and Angels-only apartment complex. Its buyer, Nathan Blatter, of Whitestone Realty Group, has been approached by someone who wants to open a Hells Angels museum there, but he is not interested. “It’s going to be a regular apartment building,” he said. That day, several brawny men in vests that said “prospect”—a club membership level between “hang-around” and “full patch”—did the heavy lifting from No. 77 to the van: a metal shelving unit, shipping containers, a stray broom. The club had been moving out piecemeal. Its infamous park-style sidewalk bench, tempting to look at but dangerous for civilians to sit on, was gone.
Earlier in the month, a student from the Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, next door, saw members moving boxes out of the basement; another neighbor reported seeing the emergence of “motorcycle stuff and other unmentionable paraphernalia.” He warned an onlooker to stay away. “It’s like a skunk—you touch it and you start to stink,” he said, and hurried off. Other neighbors, though wary of being identified, were more wistful. At a dive bar, two veterans of the eighties post-punk scene—call them Nancy and Janet—reminisced over a glass of house red, with ice cubes.
“I’m going to miss the sound of their motorcycles,” Janet said. She moved to the East Village in 1980. “They’d have big Fourth of July parties. We’d go up to my roof and the fireworks would come right up to your face.” The Angels launched their fireworks from metal garbage cans. (A local illustrator described this as “absolutely terrifying.”)
“The parties used to be great,” Nancy said. “Until the explosion.” In 1990, a garbage-can firecracker killed a fourteen-year-old boy.
Over the years, the East Village Angels both caused and prevented mayhem. In 1994, the Times characterized this mayhem, part “lore and part police reports,” as “countless decibel-cranking parties, LSD-laced misadventures, drug deals, orgies and random acts of violence against passers-by.” In recent years, parking-space tussles resulted in beatings and a shooting; a woman who pounded on the door, screaming, was badly beaten.
In 1978, the chapter president, Vincent (Big Vinny) Girolamo, of plaque fame, allegedly pushed his girlfriend off the roof, to her death. (He died, of stab wounds, before he could stand trial.) Innumerable bad vibes were doled out after unwanted bench-sitting, dog-peeing, and photography incidents. But, from the scuzz era to the N.Y.U.-and-condos era, club members also defended their neighbors; the Angels’ block was considered the safest around.
“I haven’t heard anybody say ‘Good riddance,’ ” Janet said.
“I’ll miss the way they decorated at Christmas,” Nancy said.
“They used to break people’s cameras,” Janet said. In the Instagram age, unwanted photography had skyrocketed.
The group is aggressively private. Only members were allowed inside the clubhouse—but Janet, decades ago, was invited in after a peppery conversation with an Angel. “I was scared shitless and trying to be tough,” she said. The interior, she recalled, “was like a suburban house”—couches and so on. “The women were cleaning and the men were partying.
Where were the Angels going? “I don’t know yet,” a prospect said. “Goin’ somewhere!” Would they miss the East Village? A wary, noncommittal nod. When the van was almost full, the Angels packed one final item: a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, eased onto a truck lift, raised up, and strapped in. A ponytailed Angel picked up a little girl, hoisted her onto his shoulders in front of the Big Vinny sign, and, smiling, posed for a picture. After some inter-Angel hugs and back pats, the men drove away. By the next afternoon, the plaques, signs, and flaming skulls were gone. ♦
