I was the one who was mumbling about the implausibility of
biker wars a while back, and I thought about biker wars
yesterday when I came across something similar. Everybody's
been talking about Lehane, and although it seems to me I read
something I didn't care for by him long ago, when I saw a
stack in the library, I took the one with the earliest
copyright date to see what everybody's talking about.
This was _A Drink before the War,_
and the "war" is a gang war among black teens and preteens. I
checked the copyright date again, and it's 1994. I was a
juror on a gang war trial in Philadelphia in 1970, and from
the testimony the mayhem was similar to what Lehane describes
for the 1990s, but I haven't heard of such activities in
Pennsylvania since the mid-1970s.
(There have been flare-ups of mayhem, e.g., the Junior Black
Mafia, but strictly drug-related stuff.) Is gang warfare like
biker wars--going on in Boston or Montreal but not in the
broadcast area for my local news?
BTW, that's a gory book, with even
the protagonists blowing away sundry miscreants in
self-defense and otherwise, spousal abuse keeping one
detective battered, child abuse initiating the current case
and having mutilated the other partner (who commits sexual
harassment), and Bubba being the worst case of psychotic
sidekick I've ever seen.
And it seems to me I recently read
another book whose PIs have offices in a church.
Joy
>
> John Farrow, City of Ice (1990). It's about the
biker war in Montreal (the
> Russian mafia is part of it), with a police
detective trying to solve a
> couple of murders. There is an espionage angle, as
well. Kind of gory, a
> few torture scenes. I found it especially
interesting because it takes
> place in Montreal, where I live, and especially
scary for the same reason.
> There was some discussion a while back about the
reality of biker gangs
and
> wars. They are a real problem here. The trial of the
head of the Nomads
> (Hell's Angels "elite"), Maurice "Mom" Boucher, just
wound up, with him
> being found guilty of ordering the murders of two
randomly selected prison
> guards. Another massive trial of 17 Hell's Angels is
still going on.
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