Reviews for Angels of Death: Inside the Biker Gangs' Crime Empire

The average rating for Angels of Death: Inside the Biker Gangs' Crime Empire based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2007-06-28 00:00:00 Albert Tollas I only managed half of this book before I had to throw it down in anger. It shouldn't be read as a first time foray into the Hell's Angel world - it hardly contains any background information and is instead a one sided account of their crime fuelled ways. This would be ok if it came from both sides, the American Police as well as the Hells Angels themselves. But alas, this reads like one of those cop car chase programmes channel 5 show late at night. Everything is about how amazing the American police are, how their undercover missions broke down the Hell's Angels ways. It rarely shows any mistakes the police made, and instead is always from the point of view of a self-obssessed investigations officer. I'm going to read the Hell's Angel founder's account - Sonny Barger's autobiography and see what he's got to say. I doubt he's going to say that every single Hell's Angel member is a raping, drug dealing murderous drain on society. x

Review # 2 was written on 2010-06-06 00:00:00 Fil DiMaria Hmmm..... Whilst this book was informative on the organisation and structure of the Hells Angels, especially as they branched out to become a world-wide (rather than solely American) club, something with this book just didn't sit right with me. A sensational account of the activities of the Hells Angels as an international criminal organisation, given the title it shouldn't be surprising that this is extremely one-sided. Much of the 'evidence' presented is taken from interviews with the police and prosecutors, or taken from police transcripts and affidavits, but with the vast majority of cases yet to be proven via court trial I have an extremely hard time taking this as 'fact'. An early incident in the book possibly set me on guard for the rest - when describing the murder of Cynthia Garcia, who was last seen alive on CCTV with a couple of bikers, the authors state that on entering the Angels clubhouse and seeing the situation within Cynthia was 'horrified'. Now, unless the authors have psychic powers I have no idea how in the hell they would know how she felt and this made me leery of totally accepting anything else written within. For a book that sought to expose the criminal activity of the club it's probably a surprising side-effect that, to me, it seemed more a damning indictment of the law enforcement side. With corruption (in the form of individuals leaking information to the people who were being investigated, or taking bribes), incompetence and in-fighting ruining long-standing, extremely expensive investigations and then with those cases that did get to trial usually being thrown out, I felt that the only people who came out not looking like complete arses were the undercover officers who were put into extremely stressful situations, often for years at a time, only for their hard work to be completely undermined by the time the investigations were closed. Probably not the intended aim, but so it goes...