Yves Lavigne wrote a great first book about the Hells Angels in the 1980s called "Hells Angels: Taking Care of Business" a pretty good book about an FBI infiltration of the Hells Angeles in the mid-1990s called "Hells Angels: Into the Abyss" and then this one in 1999, where he takes arguably his most important angle on his subject yet--the deadly Canadian Biker Wars that killed hundreds as the Angels and their rivals competed for drug territory in the mid 1990s--and boffs it. This book is padded with about 250 pages of government documentation serving no purpose other than to demonstrate the author did his homework (a well-researched narrative does that too) surrounding a narrative that reads like a police blotter. "And then the next thing after that happened" is not a way to tell a story. Its a way to show you've got enough facts to THEN tell a story.

I'll leave out that Lavigne likes to pause in the middle of reciting to lecture to deliver sermon at the wisdom level of a high school freshman. His tone is arrogant and mansplainy and someone of his experience should know better. But he doesn't. The Hells Angels is a dark fact of the world wide underground that hard to make boring. Lavigne manages to do that because I think deep down he believes he is more interesting than what he's writing about. ( )