The Rock Machine motorcycle club is actively recruiting members in the Greater Toronto Area, but organizers say they're not worried about a repeat of the gang's bloody war with the Hells Angels in Quebec, which killed some 160 people.
The Rock Machine has signed up two dozen members so far in Greater Toronto, said the organizer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The attempt to revive the Rock Machine is potentially explosive, according to a retired enforcer who was involved in the Quebec biker war of the 1990s and early 2000s.
"I would be very surprised if (Rock Machine recruiters) don't get a visit" from Hell Angels, Normand Brisebois said in an interview.
Brisebois was a hitman working for the Dark Circle, a club aligned with the Rock Machine, during the Quebec hostilities. He now has a new identity after going into a witness protection program.
Brisebois said the Hells Angels are touchy about other clubs gaining a high profile but may be leery of instigating a biker war that would invite intense scrutiny by the police, media and politicians.
Victims of the Quebec biker strife included two prison guards and an 11-year-old boy hit by shrapnel from a car bomb. In the uproar that followed, police got more organized and politicians passed tougher laws.
The Angels have 10 chapters within a 90-minute drive of Toronto City Hall.
The month-old Rock Machine chapter in the GTA still needs a clubhouse, he said. It will be called the Ontario West chapter, while a chapter in the Kingston area, with a dozen members, will be known as Ontario East, he said.
He said his club won't recruit criminals, but also won't be mistaken for a curling club or the Shriners.
"We want to go back to the older ways, the way it was in the early '50s," he said. "When it was just a bunch of drunken toughs."
Some of the Rock Machine recruits are ex-Bandidos. Eight members of that gang's old Toronto chapter were found at the edge of a cornfield in Shedden, Ont., in April 2006. Six Bandidos and associates are to go to trial for those murders in September.
The newly formed Rock Machine has absorbed The Crew, a small club active in York Region and Western Canada, the organizer said. But most new members are in their 20s or 30s and have never been in a biker gang before.
The newly formed Rock Machine also has chapters in Winnipeg and Edmonton. One member is ex-Bandidos leader Ron Burling, now serving 17 years for kidnapping and torturing a drug rival, who had fingers crushed by a sledgehammer and a tattoo sliced off with a knife.
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