Tag Archives: biker gangs

Bikers gather at an adult eatery? What could go wrong?

You’re a police official in a central Texas city. You hear that a group of motorcycle gangs is gathering at a place known as an “adult entertainment” business.

You know of the biker gangs’ reputation of criminal activity. You suspect many of them are packing guns. You know some of the gangs are rivals of the other gangs.

Gosh, what could possibly go wrong?

http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2015/05/mix-guns-alcohol-and-criminal-biker-gangs-who-couldnt-have-predicted-sundays-shootout-in-waco.html/

What went wrong went terribly wrong.

The bikers erupted in violence in Waco. Nine of them were killed in the fire fight.

The cops did present themselves in some force at the scene prior to the outburst, which began with a fistfight and escalated into gunfire.

As Jim Mitchell writes for the Dallas Morning News, the restaurant management seems to be the bad guys in this terrible incident.

According to Mitchell: “It is really troubling that police say the local restaurant managers refused to cooperate in tightening security, a claim restaurant managers dispute. No shirts, no shoes, no service is standard restaurant fare. But weapons and a meeting to carve up turf for criminal activity is no problem?”

The restaurant is Twin Peaks, which is a chain of adult-oriented businesses.

Might there be some avenue for prosecuting a business for conspiracy in the commission of a deadly riot?

Biker gang threat is quite real

The federal government is worried about biker gangs.

So the headline says on the link attached to this blog post.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/why-the-feds-are-worried-about-these-biker-gangs/ar-BBjVBAs

Bikers erupted in a violent spasm in Waco over the weekend. Nine of them were killed in a fire fight at an adult club. Local police are investigating this bizarre explosion of violence.

News of this carnage brought to my mind a seriously distant name from my past. This individual warned in the 1970s about his fear of biker gangs and he said at the time he thought bikers could become the next great “organized crime threat” facing the United States.

John Renfro served as sheriff of Clackamas County, Ore., where I got my start in daily print journalism. I was covering police and other agencies for the Oregon City Enterprise-Courier, a suburban daily about 15 miles south of Portland. I met the sheriff when I moved from covering sports for the paper to working as a general assignment reporter.

He told me way back then of his concern over bikers. I cannot recall the precise quotes he uttered nearly 40 years ago. Suffice to say he believed that the county where he served as sheriff was a prime place for the bikers to congregate and to do serious harm to the community.

Clackamas County was far more rural than it is today. It still includes many many miles of secluded roads and highways criss-crossing through heavily forested territory. It offers good cover for gangs of individuals — be they bikers or other thugs — to engage in such activity as drug manufacturing and trafficking.

I can’t say today whether Sheriff Renfro’s projection is coming true.

Still, the federal government ought to be wary of these outfits and the fact — as the shootout in Waco has demonstrated — that they’re heavily armed and dangerous.

As the Los Angeles Times reported on the Waco incident: “‘This is not a bunch of doctors and dentists and lawyers riding Harleys,’ said Waco Police Sgt. Patrick Swanton. The Department of Justice has identified seven motorcycle clubs that it believes are highly structured criminal enterprises, many of them allied in one form or another against the best-known gang, the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.”

“Highly structured criminal enterprise.” Isn’t that the same thing as organized criminals?