Hells Angels, Rival Battle In Scandinavia

------------------------------------------------------------------ THE HELLS ANGELS and the Bandidos are waging a real war in Scandinavia. Officials say it's not just about pride but also who runs crime - especially links to the former East bloc. ------------------------------------------------------------------

HASSLARP, Sweden - Siv Persson passed through this tiny farm town with the wariness of a lost motorist in a tough neighborhood.

"You'll understand if I don't stop or slow down," she said, hurriedly turning her car past the old fish market. "It is not a good idea."

Persson isn't just a passer-by; she is the local representative to the Swedish legislature. The fish market no longer sells seafood; it serves up a saucy chapter of the Oakland, Calif.-based Hells Angels.

And for months now, the lawmaker and the outlaw bikers - enemies to the core - have known no peace because of a bloody motorcycle war that is barreling across Scandinavia. The combat pits home-grown copycats of America's infamous biker gang against a chief rival, the Houston-based Bandidos.

The problem is straightforward: The Angels and the newly arrived Bandidos figure the land of the midnight sun isn't big enough for both of them. And in just the past three months, police say, four gang members have died to prove it.

Facing death threats herself, Persson carries a cellular phone. Her mail is screened for explosives. She can't even accept a bouquet of flowers without a security officer first picking through it.

Their lives also on the line, albeit for other reasons, the Hells Angels in Hasslarp dwell like caged animals behind a tall fence topped with barbed wire. Rooftop cameras survey goings-on. The clubhouse has a hole the size of several watermelons blown through an upstairs wall.

"We don't talk to the press, man," an Angel told a reporter, poking his head outside a metal gate plastered with a guard-dog warning.

Twice since last summer anti-tank missiles have pummeled the rural compound, fired by rival bikers holed up in a dairy farm-turned-fortress less than two miles away. The Bandidos, who police say heisted the weapons from a Swedish military depot, narrowly missed a neighboring house with children inside in one of the assaults.

Gangs `on top of each other'

Authorities estimate there are 1,000 outlaw bikers in Scandinavia, but the Hells Angels and Bandidos themselves are highly selective.

Even so, it is clear only one gang can stay, said Dag Gardare, a Stockholm police detective assigned to motorcycle gang crime. "It is not like in the United States, where it is big enough to have the Hells Angels in California and the Bandidos in Texas," Gardare said. "Here they are right on top of each other, like nowhere else in the world."

Ostensibly, the duel is about biker supremacy and was set off, according to one version, by an insulting barroom brawl in Denmark.

As the story goes, a desperate Hells Angel locked himself in the women's restroom to escape a carousing gang of Bandidos. That humbling episode - or perhaps one or many like it, since no one can say for certain - grew into a deadly tit-for-tat over biker honor and shame.

"There is a constant competition for gaining honor," said Joi Bay, a Copenhagen University sociologist who has spent time with the gangs. ". . . The only way to achieve honor is to steal it from another man, and that often leads to violence."

`This is about criminal market'

Scandinavia's biker front line extends through towns, big and small, from Denmark to Finland:

-- Airport shootouts in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Oslo, Norway.

-- Missile attacks on clubhouses in Sweden and Denmark.

-- A grenade attack at a Copenhagen prison.

-- More than 20 drive-by shootings and car bombings throughout Scandinavia.

The latest violence is only beginning, police say, in part because the contest seems to carry greater spoils than previous conflicts.

Individual bikers in Scandinavia have been known to run sophisticated rings involved in drugs, prostitution, arms smuggling and other illegal activities. The struggle now, police suspect, is for access to the former East bloc, including its flourishing organized crime.

"This isn't about motorcycles - it is about power, territory and the criminal market," said Gardare. "They usually travel by car or limousine, and 60 percent of them don't even have driver's licenses for motorcycles. Many of them were criminals before they joined these clubs - and they remain criminals."

Danish police say more than half of the Hells Angels and Bandidos are known criminals, and that has been enough for courts and legislators in Denmark and Sweden to authorize a crackdown on outlaw bikers. A 1994 report by the European Union said Denmark's 120 motorcycle gangs dominate organized crime there.

Since the latest round of killings started in March, authorities have routinely pulled over bikers and raided clubhouses. But police have been unable to cool the feud, and they acknowledge they are helpless to prevent public shootouts such as the March 10 ambush in a Copenhagen airport parking lot that killed a Danish Bandido leader and wounded two.

Police arrested six bikers in that attack, but it is unclear what fate awaits them. Throughout Scandinavia, frightened witnesses are seldom willing to testify in biker cases.

If it weren't for Persson, the legislator, Hasslarp's residents would have virtually no voice.

Said a middle-aged man, who like others asked not to be identified: "She's one tough lady."