Drugs, torture and turf war: Europe’s biker gangs turn nasty

IN JUNE DUTCH police cracked open a shipping container on a farm and found it had been converted into a torture chamber, with walls covered in sound insulation and a dentist’s chair equipped with arm and leg restraints, as well as handcuffs, hacksaws and pliers. They were tipped off by an informant inside Caloh Wagoh, a Dutch motorcycle gang whose leader, “Keylow”, had been arrested and charged with running a murder-for-hire scheme. Prosecutors say a Moroccan-Dutch drug kingpin hired Caloh Wagoh to carry out 11 hits, five of which were executed. Keylow denies any involvement. When police asked him why hundreds of texts on his mobile phone referred to hit jobs, he said he was making a film on the subject.

The European drug trade has long-standing connections to outlaw motorcycle gangs. (These often call themselves “one-percenters”, a wry reference to an apocryphal statement that 99% of motorcycle club members are law-abiding citizens.) The Hells Angels and Bandidos gangs, formed in America, began opening chapters in Europe in the 1970s. They soon controlled much of the drug trade in cities like Copenhagen and Malmo.

In the so-called Great Nordic Biker War of the 1990s, these gangs and their allies went after each other with assault rifles, grenades and anti-tank weapons stolen from army bases. From the late 2000s,...