How ‘hybrid’ Nordic biker gangs are starting to replace the Hells Angels
Richard Orange – richard.orange@thelocal.com Published: 25 Oct, 2024
Biker gangs have been a big part of the criminal world in the Nordics for more than three decades, and now they’ve opened up to immigrants, with a leader from one of the new hybrid gangs attending the wedding of a high-profile Swedish politician.
During the Nordic Biker War of 30 years ago, the Hells Angels were big players, but a report out this month from the Swedish research organisation Acta Publica said that, in Sweden at least, the gang is a shadow of its former self. The other big player, Bandidos, has been hit with a temporary ban in Denmark, which risks becoming permanent.
This has opened space for new biker gangs, with one such group, Comanches, currently expanding rapidly. Comanches was formed last year by Nadim Khan, the central figure in VHK, a street gang from northern Copenhagen.
The President of the “Comanches MC South End” division in southern Sweden region Skåne caused a scandal at the start of this month by attending the wedding of Jimmie Åkesson, leader of the far-right Sweden Democrats.
Danish journalist Carsten Norton, author of the book Bandekrigerne fra Værebro, or “The Gang Warriors from Værebro”, pointed out the contradiction in a party which platforms itself as being both opposed to immigration and tough on crime as on having someone from Comanches at their wedding. The gang’s raison d’être is to be open to all ethnicities, and it is arguably the most criminal biker gang in the Nordics.
“Since the Comanches define themselves very explicitly as a multi-ethnic club, it’s kind of surprising,” he said. “They let in members from any ethnic background, and any background in any other street gang or biker club,” Norton told The Local.
While Hells Angels and Bandidos were motorcycle clubs which engaged in crime, he added, with the Comanches it was the other way around: they were a criminal gang which had formed a motorcycle club.
“The big difference between Comanches and the other biker gangs is that the other biker gangs are all international organisations which were imported to Denmark and Comanches is an organisation founded in Denmark that is now being exported to other countries, like Sweden, Spain, Morocco, Vietnam, Thailand and so on,” he said.
An MC gang for immigrants
Khan’s first move into MC gangs came when he started a branch of Satudarah, a Dutch multiethnic biker gang, along with a group of former members of Hells Angels. Satudarah was originally founded by immigrants from The Molluccas, a former Dutch colony in what is now Indonesia, in 1990 and in the 2010s expanded across Europe, before being banned in Germany in 2015, in The Netherlands in 2018, and in Norway last month.
Satudarah in Norway was up until 2023 taking orders from Khan in Denmark, according to Norway’s police service Kripos, and was ordered to be shut down after it was linked to a shooting outside the National Theatre in Oslo and a stabbing at a nightclub in Lillestrøm in 2023.The gang is thought to have disbanded in Sweden in 2022 after the gang’s local leader was shot dead at the Emporia shopping mall in Malmö.
Khan’s decision to launch a branch of Satudarah had come, Norton says, as a reaction to the founding of Loyal to Familia, which united disparate Copenhagen immigrant street gangs by adopting the patches, insignia and structure of biker gangs.
“Loyal to Familia was a way of uniting street gangs from the various neighbourhoods in greater Copenhagen and when they were founded, they had a conflict with VHK,” he said. “It turned out to be very difficult for VHK to fight Loyal to Familia, because all of a sudden they had more than 100 people, and they were all over town, so Satudarah was founded ten months after Loyal to Familia started its conflict with VHK.”
When Satudarah was banned, Khan relaunched it as Comanches. The openness to multiple ethnicities makes the Comanches a very different type of motorcycle club from Hells Angels, and even Bandidos, Norton said, as these two clubs tended to be mainly run by ethnic Danes. The Hells Angels, in particular, has historically excluded black people, which was the reason why, despite a loose alliance with VHK, VHK was never absorbed into the gang.
“This is why VHK was not allowed into Hells Angels — because they had two members with an African background,” Norton said, adding that the Danish branch of Hells Angels had been called before a world meeting of Hells Angels last year after admitting new members from a street gang called NNV, two of whom had African backgrounds.
“They were told ‘you’re not allowed to let in members with black skin,” he said. “I don’t know how they solved it, but it was definitely an issue.”
Bandidos, he stressed, have always been more open to other ethnicities, even if, unlike with Comanches, ethnic Danes were in a majority.
“They have always had members with Middle Eastern backgrounds, dark skin, whatever, and Hells Angels have more traditionally been, you know, pure white, old Danish guys.”
Kjetil Tunold, head of the organised crime section at Norway’s Kripos, said that Hells Angels and Bandidos in Norway had little respect for Satudarah.
“They don’t necessarily see them as an MC club. They see them more as a criminal gang,” he said. While Satudarah could recruit new members in a matter of weeks, he went on, Hells Angels could vet a potential recruit for years before allowing them into the club.
Hells Angels and Bandidos still biggest
Although Comanches has been in the headlines a lot, the upstart gang remains smaller than the more established Hells Angels and Bandidos, with around 20 members in Sweden and 170 in Denmark according to Acta Publica.
Lasse Boje, Director of Denmark’s National Unit for Special Crime, said earlier this year that the Bandidos were still the biggest and most violent of Denmark’s three main criminal biker gangs. “It is the group that is the largest. It is the most prone to conflicts and violence of the groups,” he told the Ritzau newswire as the government attempted to ban it.
Bandidos are throught to have around 280 members in Denmark.
According to Acta Publica, Hells Angels and Bandidos are also still by far the largest clubs in Sweden, with about 650 members shared roughly equally between them.
“From a recruitment perspective, Hells Angels are really running at low levels.” the report reads. “Acta Publica has been in contact with several people who attend parties and other events associated with Hells Angels in Sweden. Many no longer recognize the club compared to the glory days 10–20 years ago. Most observers see a kind of resignation in some members that wasn’t present before. Hells Angels seems to have fallen into a routine, and there is an age-related fatigue among the members.”
Comanches only had around 20 members in Sweden but was nonetheless “clearly more active than other clubs of around the same size”.
To what extent are biker gangs in the Nordics involved in gang conflicts?
According to the latest report on the gang and biker environment from the Danish police and the Acta Publica report, members of the Hells Angels, Bandidos, and Comanches have all been involved in gang conflicts in recent years.
The Danish police report claims that Hells Angels in Denmark have been in an ongoing conflict with Loyal to Familia since August last year, leading the Danish policy to temporarily close Hells Angels’ club houses. The conflict started when a Hells Angels associate was shot 30 times at Pusher Street in Christiania, Copenhagen, in August 2023, indicating the conflict might be linked to a cannabis turf war.
In August, a Hells Angels member was sentenced to eight years in prison in Denmark for possession of a large number of firearms.
Comanches in July 2024 began a conflict with an unnamed Danish criminal group, which according to Acta Publica is allied to the Rumba network run by Ismail Abdo, the former partner and now bitter rival of Raja Mawid, leader of the Foxtrot gang.
Several Swedish teenagers are currently held by police in Denmark after they were hired to carry out attacks on family members of the leadership of Comanches in Denmark. According to the Acta Publica report, the conflict related to a stolen consignment of drugs and came to an end when the Comanches made a reparatory payment.
In Sweden, the Bandidos are “significantly more criminally active”, than the Hells Angels, Acta Publica reported, although this does not mean there is no violence associated with the latter club.
The Acta Publica report claims that Hells Angels in Gothenburg have been threatening to kill a former member who defected to the Comanches, something which it warned could spark a conflict between the gangs in future. Linus Bergh, who was ejected from Hells Angels in Lidköping was murdered in 2022, nine days after joining Satudarah MC in the city.
In a previous report in 2023, Acta Publica reported that there had been turf wars between Bandidos and both the Foxtrot network and a street gang in southern Stockholm.
To what extent are biker gangs in the Nordics involved in crimes like drug trafficking?
Norton said that not all members of Hells Angels and Bandidos were active criminals who joined the clubs to commit crimes.
“There’s definitely a core of older members – in their 50s and some also in their 60s – who like motorcycles and leather jackets and long hair and beards, and old-school biker culture, and they want to be Hells Angels like in the old days,” he said.
“But a remarkable amount of members have a criminal record, and in the case of Comanches, members of the club have been involved in anything from scams, through racketeering, violence, threats, murders.”
t’s a similar story in Sweden and in Norway.
“If you look at Comanches members today, they’re been sentenced in the past for some pretty serious crimes, among them serious weapons offences, extortion and drugs crime,” Frederiksen, a former policeman who now works for Acta Publica, told SVT.
When the Norwegian Supreme Court this month banned Satudarah, it said that it had been convinced that the club was primarily a criminal organisation and only secondarily a motorcycle club.
“The Supreme Court finds that participants in the Satudarah MC have repeatedly committed serious offenses against the life, health and freedom of others, and that this criminal activity is sufficient to cause fear in the population,” it said in a press release. “The Supreme Court points out that even though the club refers to itself as a motorcycle club which is open to minorities, the motorcycle interest appears to be subordinate. For example, it is not a condition that participants have a motorcycle.”
Norton said police believed that the reason that the Scandinavian wings of the biker gangs all had representatives in the south of Spain was because of drug trafficking.
“Hells Angels, Bandidos, Comanches, and also some of the street gangs all have a representation in the south of Spain, close to Malaga, the big harbour,” he said. “If you ask the police, it’s definitely a strategic position they have there. It’s nice to have someone close to where the goods come in.”
Are the Bandidos and Hells Angels opening up to immigrant members?
Norton said that Comanches, and before them Loyal to Familia and Satudarah, had benefited from a big recruitment advantage over Hells Angels and Bandidos.
“They have been trying to absorb members of the gang environment, and they are merging the gang culture with the biker culture. I think that’s that’s part of the explanation for Satudarah’s and Comanches’ success in recruiting people, because they’re mixing the two worlds,” he said.
“Since they have a different ethnic profile to begin with than the biker gangs, they use that as an advantage when they recruit new members, so the older biker gangs have been confronted with this as a problem, because it might be more difficult for them to to attract younger people. I mean, the number of 16 to 18 year olds who are attracted to biker gangs is quite limited, so they have a much bigger recruitment base than the biker clubs.”
There are signs, though, he said that Hells Angels’ are relaxing their traditional reluctance to take in ethnically diverse new members.
“This group knows that its future members are not necessarily ethnic white Danes. They might be, you know, former street gang members who are willing to do ‘whatever it takes’, as I guess they would call it, and they have recruited a number of former street gang members, which has turned out to be difficult because some of some of these guys came with conflicts with LTF, for instance.”
For example, when Hells Angels recruited 20 to 30 members of the NNV street gang in Copenhagen, it reportedly only took four months before the new members left.
On the other hand, as Comanches has expanded into Sweden, it seems to have mainly attracted people with ethnic Swedish backgrounds. When the Swedish Comanches held a “Memorial run” for the murdered Linus Bergh in Lidköping in May this year, the Danish members were visibly more ethnically mixed than the Swedish ones.
The first Comanches club in Sweden, in Lidköping, was started by the father of Linus Bergh, a former Hells Angels member, and the Skåne president who attended Jimmie Åkesson’s wedding was ethnically Swedish, and had been a member of Bandidos Malmö when the club existed.
It still remains to be seen whether a new multi-ethnic biker gang can sustain itself in the long run and challenge the established gangs who have been active in the Nordics since the first Hells Angels chapter opened in Copenhagen in 1980.