The self-dissolution of the criminal bikers’ association „Bandidos MC Federation West Central”, said to have taken place in April, could not deceive the security authorities about the gang’s continued criminal activities. Drug trafficking, bodily harm, human trafficking and (attempted) homicide are down to the association.
These „bikers“ mainly make headlines through their turf wars against other gangs in the milieu, which are also fought out with firearms. Vigilante justice is a declared component of the ideology and organisational structure of the „Bandidos“. What is described in terms of codes of honour and grandiloquent formulas is mostly mundane but bloody fighting over the profit opportunities in drug deals, prostitution and arms trafficking, which also hits uninvolved bystanders.
Where money, violence and radicalisation potential come together, right-wing radical actors, hardly surprisingly, scent opportunities for financing and recruitment. It is therefore scarcely astonishing that in recent years individuals and groups from neo-Nazi networks have increasingly moved into the bikers’ scene. In the case of the „Bandidos“ this is documented, for example, for people from the milieu of the Schleswig-Holstein neo-Nazi meeting place Club 88 after its dissolution in 2014, or for the neo-Nazi and former NPD cadre Peter Borchert. Appearances by RechtsRock groups such as the far-right hooligan band Kategorie C in Bandidos venues also point to close networking and a growing gain in influence on the part of right-wing actors.
The WerteInitiative welcomes the ban of the criminal association, whose orientation, structure and personnel can only be described as misanthropic and a general danger to the public. The logistics, networking and financing of such groups must be prevented by all the means available to the constitutional state.
The realisation that a legal measure does not always achieve the objective pursued, but that well-networked groups in particular dynamically reorganise and re-form themselves, must also remain present in the fight against other efforts hostile to democracy and to human beings.
