The air still smelled of wet paint and new carpet when the guest of honor arrived, smartly turned out in a black turtleneck, cream sport jacket, wire-frame glasses, and steel ankle shackles. Maurice "Mom" Boucher's grand entrance brought an abrupt hush over the newly built courtroom. For months, newspapers had described his condition as dire: Some said he was clinically depressed, a result of his isolation as the sole occupant of an entire wing of a women's prison in northern Montreal; others said he was malnourished because he was eating nothing but packaged potato chips for fear of being poisoned.

But at this preliminary hearing in Montreal, the 48-year-old leader of the Canadian Hells Angels appeared to be neither. Flashing a smile fit for a presidential candidate, he waved to his battery of lawyers and supporters before playfully hop-stepping into his seat in the bulletproof-glass box guards call the aquarium. Life in a fishbowl, after all, isn't so bad when you're the piranha.

Since 1994, Boucher and the Hells Angels have waged a brutal war with a rival biker gang called the Rock Machine for control of Quebec's billion-dollar drug trade, according to investigators. Considering how little attention the story has attracted outside Canada, the toll is staggering: 162 dead, scores wounded. The victims include an 11-year-old boy killed by shrapnel from one of the more than 80 bombs bikers have planted around the province. Even the New York Mafia in its heyday never produced such carnage, or so terrorized civilians.

"It's an embarrassment," says Helene Brunet, who was waiting tables in a diner last year when a Hells Angels biker used her as a human shield in a machine-gun battle that left her clinging to life over a plate of pancakes. "The police and the courts do nothing. They're incapable of stopping them."

Boucher has looked untouchable since his last tour through the criminal-justice system, on charges of ordering the executions of two prison guards in 1997. Just before his arraignment, at Montreal's Palais de Justice, a Pontiac Trans Am crashed through the plate-glass doors, scattering the crowd in the lobby like bowling pins. When the trial got under way, Hells Angels members reportedly paid spectators to give up their seats so that bikers could fill the first several rows and glare menacingly at the jury. One juror broke down in tears when the judge denied her request to be excused. Near the end of the trial, Boucher was so confident he'd get off that he leaked word that he'd be at Montreal's Molson Centre that Friday night for the middleweight boxing championship. Sure enough, the jury acquitted him; two hours later, he accepted an ovation from the stadium crowd before taking his ringside seat.

This time, the Quebec authorities are taking no chances. Last March, 2,000 police officers fanned out and arrested 125 Hells Angels and associates, capping the largest investigation in the country's history. Then, at a cost of $16.5 million, the province constructed a state-of-the-art courthouse especially for the Hells Angels trials. It sits right next to the jail where Boucher currently resides and is linked to it by a secured underground tunnel. A one-way mirror shields the jury from view.

Yet despite his maximum-security confinement, Boucher appears to have had a hand in rebuilding his gang and annexing new turf in the neighboring province of Ontario. This expansion has unleashed a new wave of violence and ratcheted up already dangerous tensions with rival biker clubs in the United States and abroad, police say. If they are right, then the bloodshed in Canada may be only a dress rehearsal for a coming world war.

Boucher made no formal statement during the two-hour hearing last October, but one gesture seemed to sum up his feelings about the government's latest attempt to put him out of business. During a break in the proceedings, he stood up, turned around, and stuck out his ass at the spectators. Even the Anglophones in this French-speaking courtroom needed no translation.

Canada's Hells Angels are the offspring of the infamous gang that came to prominence in Northern California in the fifties under Sonny Barger. Barger proudly referred to his troops as the "one-percenters"-a response to the American Motorcycle Association's claim that 99 percent of bikers were law-abiding citizens. But if an outlaw identity has been a constant for the Hells Angels, its methods and goals have changed since the early days. "It's no longer like the old Hollywood movie where the gang comes riding into town on their Harleys," says biker-gang expert Allan Jenson, a police investigator in Bellingham, Washington. "Today these clubs are purely a business venture." Currently, the Hells Angels claim about 2,200 full-fledged, dues-paying members in 194 chapters based in 27 countries.

According to law-enforcement officials, its actual strength is even greater than the numbers suggest because each member is allowed to run his own "puppet club," typically made up of younger bikers eager to prove their valor in return for a shot at full membership. "People don't realize how powerful that makes them," says Tim McKinley, an FBI agent who began investigating biker gangs in the eighties, when the bureau reclassified them as organized-crime groups. "Each of these guys has 9 to 30 criminal minions out there working for him all the time."

No one embodies the modern, corporate Hells Angel better than Mom Boucher, who is often described as the "John Gotti of the bikers." Like Gotti, Boucher cultivated a bourgeois image and distanced himself from the dirty work carried out by his underlings. Until his latest arrest, he lived in the Montreal suburb Contrecoeur in a quaint country-style house with his wife and his son, Francis. (At age 17, in 1992, Francis organized Quebec's first-ever neo-Nazi festival; he now stands accused of eight counts of murder in the same case as his father's.) Boucher spent most of his time in a nondescript office building from which he ran several legitimate businesses: real-estate investment, air-duct cleaning, and used-car sales.

"He looked like a regular guy, like a businessman," says a Montreal policeman who worked the beat. "He didn't even ride his bike very often." Instead, he was usually driven to his office in a Suburban-chauffeured at one point by a former Montreal cop. "You can't be fooled by the image," McKinley says. "The Hells Angels are very savvy today. They do things like Toys for Tots rides to counter their reputation, but they're into everything from drugs to extortion to money laundering. We put a lot of them away every year, but it's certainly a growth industry."

If the Hells Angels' transition from random mayhem to more purposeful violence went unnoticed by most Americans, it may be because years of undisputed dominance in the United States made open warfare unnecessary. At first, the group enjoyed a similar preeminence among bikers north of the border. The Hells Angels set up its first Canadian chapter in 1977, in Montreal, during its first wave of international expansion. By 1985, it had added two more chapters in Quebec and taken over about 75 percent of the Montreal drug trade. "They had little resistance," says a Quebec police officer on the biker squad. "They quickly had their people set up in a lot of the bars in town."

At the time, Mom Boucher-a 28-year-old high-school dropout and son of a longshoreman-was making a name for himself on the streets of Montreal. He and his friend Salvatore Cazzetta were leaders of a small white-supremacist biker gang known as the SS. They were obvious Hells Angels candidates until a notorious incident known as the Lennoxville Massacre set them on separate paths. In March, 1985, the Hells chapter based in Lennoxville, about 90 miles east of Montreal, invited the members of the chapter from the town of Laval to a party. When the five Laval members arrived, they were ambushed and shot in the head; apparently their brethren suspected them of squandering drug profits by consuming too much of the product themselves. Two months later, divers found the decaying bodies wrapped in sleeping bags and tied to weightlifting plates at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River.

The Lennoxville Massacre was beyond the pale even for the criminal underworld, and it branded Quebec's Hells Angels as the most murderous bikers on the planet. Salvatore Cazzetta, for one, found Lennoxville an unforgivable breach of the outlaw code. Rather than joining the Hells, he formed his own, smaller gang, the Rock Machine, in 1986. "Sal once told me, 'Those guys, they operate their club in such a way that I didn't want to join them,'" says Fred Faucher, who soon joined Cazzetta's club himself. Unlike the Hells, Rock Machine members didn't identify themselves with colors or patches; each biker simply wore a gold ring with an eagle insignia.

Mom Boucher apparently did not share Cazzetta's concerns. Soon after finishing a 40-month sentence for armed sexual assault later that year, Boucher joined the Hells and quickly began to rise through the ranks. For several years, the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine co-existed peacefully. Law-enforcement officials believe this was due to Boucher's respect for the charismatic Cazzetta, who had connections to the Quebec Mafia, the only organized-crime group the bikers seemed unwilling to attack. In 1994, however, Cazzetta was arrested at a pit-bull farm for attempting to import eleven tons of cocaine. Boucher, who had recently moved up to president of the Montreal chapter of the Hells, began to put the clamps on the temporarily leaderless Rock Machine.

Guy Ouellette, a recently retired Quebec police investigator and biker expert, says the Hells sent their puppet clubs into bars controlled by the Rock Machine to persuade the owners and resident drug pushers to turn over their business. When they met with resistance, the bloodshed began. On July 14, 1994, two members of the Hells Angels' top puppet club, formed by Mom Boucher, walked into a motorcycle shop in downtown Montreal and gunned down a Rock Machine associate. "That was the beginning of the war," Ouellette says.

The following August, a remote-controlled bomb in a Jeep sliced a Rock Machine associate in half and sent shrapnel through the brain of 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers, who was playing in a nearby schoolyard. The boy died four days later. A month after that, the first full Hells Angels member was shot and killed, while getting into his car at a shopping mall. "The day of his funeral, nine bombs went off around the province," Ouellette says. "It was chaos."

As the corpses of bikers and bystanders piled up, the authorities reacted with what they assumed would be overwhelming force. They formed the Wolverines, a multidisciplinary team of 60 of the province's top investigators dedicated to dismantling the biker gangs. It was the largest special law-enforcement unit created in Quebec since 1970, when the government was battling radical Quebecois separatists. But the Wolverines (and the Rock Machine) were facing an unusually resourceful opponent. During a four-month jail stint at around this time-on a minor charge of carrying a 9-mm handgun-Boucher used the telephone to help charter a new Hells chapter. Known as the Nomads, they were a sort of all-star dream team drawn from the best bikers in the region. Boucher was their leader. "The Nomads are known as the warriors of the Hells Angels," says Richard Bourdon of the Canadian national police. "They are the most powerful because they are not bound by any territory."

Boucher made his influence felt inside prison, too. During his term, he organized a prison-wide boycott of his least favorite meal, shepherd's pie. "I'd never seen anything like it," a prison official says. "He had the whole place in the palm of his hand." The Hells have a network of inmates called the Big House Brotherhood, which sells drugs-and keeps up the rivalry with other gangs. Less than a month after Boucher was released, bikers rioted at Quebec's main jail, the official says: "One of Boucher's top guys winked, and the next thing you know, about 60 guys started breaking down the place." The entire jail had to be put on lockdown for two months. From then on, every new prisoner had to declare an affiliation: Hells Angels in one wing; Rock Machine in another.

With approximately 60 members and associates in its two chapters (Montreal and Quebec City), the Rock Machine was about half the size of the Hells and had nowhere near as many support clubs. In 1997, with its founder, Cazzetta, still behind bars and the club described by police as "on its last gasp," the ambitious young Fred Faucher began a series of maneuvers that would ensure the survival of the Rock Machine in the near term-and, police say, place the leadership of the club in his hands by the end of the year.

Born in 1969 in Quebec City to a plumber and a housewife, Faucher dropped out of high school and briefly held a job installing sprinkler systems before joining the Rock Machine. Faucher is something of a traditionalist-he was one of the few bikers who still wore his hair long-but he was savvy enough to see that if the Rock Machine was to compete with the Hells it would have to adopt a corporate mind-set. "Like any other company needs to expand as much as it can, that's what we were trying to do," he says.

So Faucher went calling on a bigger, more established firm: the Bandidos, a Hells Angels-style motorcycle club formed in Texas in 1966. (Their motto: "We are the people our parents warned us about.") The Bandidos had recently embarked on a worldwide expansion campaign considered to be a direct challenge to the Hells Angels, and were now approaching them in numbers and global reach. From 1994 to 1997, the Hells Angels and the Bandidos had battled in Scandinavia, launching shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles at each other's clubhouses. Nearly two dozen people were killed before the gangs declared a cease-fire in September 1997.

The next month, George Wegers, the international vice president of the Bandidos, traveled to Canada to check out the Rock Machine. Faucher had invited him, hoping the visit would end with an offer for the Rock Machine to be "patched over" to, or made an official chapter of, the Bandidos. "The Hells Angels, which is a worldwide organization-and well-organized, by the way-will never sit down with such a small group of people as the Rock Machine," Faucher says. "So the main goal was to be a part of an international club so one of these days they will agree to sit down to talk with us"-about sharing territory and, presumably, profits. Faucher threw a lavish dinner party in Wegers's honor at the swanky Quebec City restaurant L'Astral, but it came to an abrupt end when police stormed in and arrested Faucher and 22 fellow Rock Machine members. (Only three were convicted, for possession of firearms.) Wegers was deported.

And the police weren't the only ones monitoring the Rock Machine. Minutes of a West Coast Hells Angels chapter meeting on November 22, 1997, read, "We have a video of the Bandito [sic] George [Wegers] with the Rock Machine in Canada." Investigators believe the Hells Angels took Wegers's visit to Canada-Hells territory-as a sign of bad faith, especially in light of the truce in Scandinavia. Faucher suddenly found himself caught in an international-relations nightmare.

"I had no idea there would be that much politicking," he says. "When the Hells Angels realized that the Bandidos were in contact with the Rock Machine, they called meetings [with the Bandidos]. They said, 'Don't take in our enemies.' I don't know if it was a threat, but they were not happy about it. The Bandidos said, 'No, we're just partying with those guys. We're not going to patch them right away.' It was like politics, big time."

The conflict had other political consequences as well, as civilian casualties of the biker wars began to organize. In March 1997, police say, Fred Faucher had packed a truck with more than 100 pounds of dynamite and crashed it through the gates of the Hells Angels' clubhouse in Quebec City, barely escaping before the remote-control mechanism went off. The explosion rocked the residential neighborhood, tossing people from their beds, knocking doors off their hinges, and blowing the windows out of 22 buildings. Nine days later, 2,000 citizens marched on city hall to demand better police protection. Whether it was the fault of Canada's criminal-sentencing guidelines or infighting among the ranks of the Wolverines, the government's failure to end the violence vaulted into the national spotlight. Within weeks, the Canadian legislature passed a tough new bill giving police broader powers to investigate organized crime. As soon as it went into effect, Faucher, Boucher, and nearly all their followers were wiretapped and watched around the clock. Both leaders were believed to communicate with associates using chalk and blackboards.

To most observers, though, Mom Boucher appeared to take the crackdown as a personal challenge. In June and September of 1997, two off-duty prison guards were murdered in drive-by shootings. One of the gunmen would later testify that Boucher ordered the killings to send a message to would-be prison informers. (He also recalled being summoned to Boucher's house and sent up in a helicopter to patrol for rival gang members.) Boucher spent most of the following year behind bars, but the jury evidently didn't believe the gunman-the only witness, an ex-con-and Boucher was acquitted. From then on, he made a point of flaunting his apparent impunity (even while he, like Faucher, rarely left home without a bulletproof vest). He worked out daily at a gym across the street from a police precinct house. Two or three times a week, he held meetings at a food court in the building that housed the cops' investigative unit. Sometimes he even took snapshots of the detectives, with whom he was by then well-acquainted.

The violence grew more brazen, too. On September 13, 2000, veteran crime reporter Michel Auger was shot six times in the back on his way to his newspaper, Le Journal de Montreal. The day before, he had published an investigation of the bikers on the front page. Auger managed to survive-his doctors called it a miracle-but the attempted assassination of one of the country's best-known journalists ignited public outrage. In Ottawa, the nation's capital, Parliament held emergency hearings-in secret and under heavy guard, as some legislators had received death threats. (Police would later learn of a Hells Angels hit list targeting police officers, journalists, and high-ranking members of the provincial government.) "It's terror that reigns," said Gilles Duceppe, then the head of Canada's largest opposition party, before receiving death threats himself. "We don't want Colombia reproduced in Quebec."

Even Canada's criminal population began to take umbrage. Police say several underworld figures in Montreal sent word to Boucher to cool things down before the laws became so strict that none of them would be able to function. "There was huge pressure from the Italians, and even the Asian and Colombian gangs, for a truce," says a source at the Canadian intelligence agency. Finally, Fred Faucher would get his meeting with the Hells.

On October 8, 2000, Mom Boucher sat down with Faucher at the Bleu Marin. A photographer from the weekly crime tabloid Allo Police was invited to take pictures as the rival leaders smiled and shook hands. After the cameraman was shooed away, Boucher made an unexpected offer: He invited the Rock Machine to join the Hells Angels. "Their idea was if we sit all together, we can have something that will last forever," Faucher says. "'We have so many involved,' they said, 'so many people around us, so many support clubs.' All that would be ours."

For the Rock Machine, joining the Hells Angels seemed like an odd move-if not, in light of the Lennoxville Massacre, altogether naïve. Faucher, however, says he took the offer back to his troops. "We agreed that we'd stay together [as the Rock Machine] for another year, and get to know each other for a while and settle down the dust," he says.

Of course, that didn't happen. Two days after the meeting, Boucher was arrested again; the government had won the right to retry him for the murders of the two prison guards. Soon he would be charged with thirteen more murders and a host of other crimes in a case police had been developing for months with the help of an informant. Danny Kane, a 31-year-old contract killer for the Hells Angels, was living a double life in almost every way. At home, he was a husband and father of four. Away from home, he was the gay lover of a Hells Angels associate, a convicted killer whom he had met through a personal ad. And at work, as the driver and bodyguard for one of Boucher's top associates, he was secretly recording conversations and copying computer disks that police say documented a $1 billion-a-year cocaine empire headed by Boucher's Nomads. A few weeks after turning over his evidence, which police hope will deal a lethal blow to the Hells Angels, Kane was found dead in his garage of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

With Boucher locked up, the Rock Machine saw an opportunity. Five members-Faucher was not among them-flew to Germany and finally secured an official invitation to join the Bandidos. Police say the Rock Machine voted to accept the offer at a meeting on November 29, 2000, a move that is hard to interpret as anything but a battle cry. Faucher is adamant that the decision came after his last arrest, on December 6. "What we agreed on before I got locked in, I stood up to that," Faucher says. "You can tell Mom."

Either way, the Bandidos' arrival in Canada has triggered a worldwide expansion drive by both Hells Angels and Bandidos. Law-enforcement experts in the United States, including the FBI, say the actions resemble a military preparation. "There's friction in Germany, there's friction in New Mexico, there's friction in Colorado," says Patrick Schneider, a U.S. attorney based in Phoenix and the president of the International Outlaw Motorcycle Gang Investigators Association. "For the first time, you have the Hells Angels' world dominance being seriously challenged. One of two things has to happen: Either they work out an uneasy truce, divide up the territory and co-exist, or I can't see that there's going to be anything short of a bloodbath worldwide."

Today, Fred Faucher is serving twelve years in a Quebec City prison on 29 charges, including seven attempted bombings. Although his own life seems to be turning around-he has cut ties with his old gang and is taking courses toward a high-school diploma-he isn't optimistic about the biker war. "What I hope will happen and what I think will happen are two different things," he says. "But I'm not involved anymore. And if I was a kid of 21 today, for sure I wouldn't join. Back then, the biker lifestyle was different. It was, more than anything, shoot the shit, ride motorcycles, and party. It wasn't either you get killed or you get locked up, which is pretty much what it is today."

Mom Boucher goes on trial this month on two of the fifteen murder charges he faces. He hasn't spoken to the media since April 2000, when he attended the funeral of Normand Hamel, a fellow Nomad and one of his closest friends. Hamel was assassinated while taking his daughter to the pediatrician, a killing Boucher explained by saying, "It's a ball game and he was part of the same ball game as me." And Boucher looks determined to remain in the game, despite his solitary confinement, the 24-hour video surveillance, and the reports of ill health. On December 29, 2000, six weeks after his latest arrest, the Hells Angels threw a party at their heavily fortified clubhouse in Sorel, 40 miles northeast of Montreal. The occasion: a massive patch-over of 160 bikers from four independent gangs from Ontario. Home to Canada's largest city, Toronto, Ontario is probably the most lucrative drug market in the country. It is also the site of three new Bandidos chapters. The war has a new front.

Detective Guy Ouellette, who was patrolling the area outside the party that night, was summoned to the porch by a biker holding a cell phone. When Ouellette put the phone to his ear, he heard a familiar voice. It was Mom Boucher, calling from prison. Bonne Année, Boucher said. Happy New Year.