“one-percenters”

A scourge in northern Europe, criminal motor bike gangs are making rapid inroads in the southeast of the continent as they bid to consolidate their grip on the drug-smuggling racket via the “Balkan Route” from Turkey.

Police say gangs affiliated to the Hell’s Angels network have made swift advances in Turkey and Albania as they use Turkey as a staging post for the onward transportation of drugs into Europe, a business so lucrative that turf wars are feared in a criminal fraternity noted for its violence.

In the past couple of years, Hell’s Angels gangs from outside these countries have built close relationships with local motor bike outlaws and with gangs in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. German outlaw motorcyclists of Turkish origin are also known to have defected to the Hell’s Angels’ “charter” in Turkey from the rival Bandidos faction in Germany.

Motor bike outlaws have been around for decades, their exploits immortalised in the 1967 book Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga by legendary American journalist Hunter S Thompson.
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2010/0731/1224275906385.html