Pagans Motorcycle Club
THE PAGANS Pagans rank among the fiercest outlaw bikers in the U.S. with about 900 members in 44 chapters between New York and Florida. They are the only major gang without international chapters, although they have ties to gangs in Canada. Most chapters are in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland.
The Pagans are more nomadic than other clubs. Chapters have been known to move overnight.
The club also doesn't have a geographically fixed mother chapter like the Hell's Angels in Oakland, the Outlaws of Detroit and the Bandidos in Corpus Christi. Pagan operations are guided by a mother club made up of 13 to 20 former chapter presidents. They wear a black number 13 on the back of their colors to indicate their special status.
The mother club alternates meetings between Suffolk and Nassau counties in Long Island, New York.
Members meet at each other homes or elsewhere, rather than at clubhouses. The Pagan president and vice-president are figureheads who don't really run the club, although the president sets the price of drugs the gangs sells. As a show of class, the Pagans give their president, Paul "Ooch" Ferry, the same salary paid to the President of the United States (about $200,000 a year).
Prostitution is extremely profitable operation. Many of the Pagan girlfriends or female associates generated money for the club by selling themselves. Many of the women the Pagans put to work as prostitutes are runaways. The bikers gang rape them. They call it training and sometimes the Pagans photograph them for blackmail. Some girls are abused and then let go; some stay with the club; others are never found.
The Pagans' propensity for violence and their proximity to mob turf earns the club the best connections to traditional organized crime among the Big Four.
Pagans act as drug couriers, enforcers, bodyguards, and hit men for the mob, mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They associate with the Genovese and Gamino Family. Cooperation between the groups starts slowly, with Pagans being given menial task. Two prospects are asked to prove they are worthy of becoming Pagans by clubbing a trade unionist with baseball bats when he fails to vote the way the mob wants him to. Pagans and mobster gradually cooperate in extortions, counterfeiting, car theft and drug trafficking.
The Pagans make and distribute most of the methamphetamine and PCP in northeastern U.S. - about $15 million a year. They have their own chemists and laboratories, which supply dealers in Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, and Ohio. They also deal in cocaine, marijuana and killerweed (Parsley sprinkled with PCP).
The Pagan enforcement team is a gang of 13 members, Black T- shirt Gang. If there was a problem at any time the member got into two vans and were "TCB" (taking care of business). Reprisal from a Pagan consists usually of a .38 caliber double automatic Colt, two shots in the back of the head, stomping on the victim Just like a fish wrapped up in newspaper. That is the telltale signs of a Pagan hit.