Harpers

But the outlaw gangs are, implicitly, making another claim as well: that the state’s sovereignty doesn’t extend to all of its citizens in all circumstances. When, in the months before the Waco shoot-out, tensions were building between the Bandidos and the Cossacks, some of the gang leaders sent a clear and simple message to police: Stay out of this; let us sort it out. This goes further than laying claim to the right to use force. The more deeply embedded a person is in biker culture, the more he exists in a kind of parallel dimension, an alternate moral universe with its own laws and mores. That universe is a territorial shame-and-honor culture, in which it seems obvious to the Bandidos that, thanks to their large membership and venerable history, they should be able to dictate what other bike gangs wear on their vests and should be able to exact tribute for the privilege of a “TEXAS” bottom rocker. That view came to seem less than obvious to the Cossacks, but not because they believed such a system to violate the freedom of Americans; rather, they understood that such a system of territory and tribute depends utterly on the strength of those who would attempt to enforce it. When the kings grow weak, or their rivals grow strong, the time has come to test the existing hierarchy of power. And that’s what the Cossacks did.