`I'M A BETTER PERSON'
Programs in B.C. and Australia are helping gang members leave lives of crime behind
Just before former Australian (bikie) Sven Kelly went to prison in 2018 for doing the bidding of his old motorcycle club, his mates turned on him, kicked him out and even threatened him with death.
The betrayal came after Kelly — then the chapter president — pleaded guilty for his role in a violent home invasion involving several others linked to the gang.
They ousted him because he was “too high-profile to be doing the dirty work, which makes no sense to me because they sent me to do it,” Kelly recalled recently.
“It was actually shattering because I thought that I'd found my spot and every day it seemed to be a fight to keep that top position. Your best friend would backstab you to try and pull you down so he could step up.”
Now 51, Kelly has no illusions about life inside a motorcycle club.
After two stints with two different clubs that both ended with him in prison, he has turned his life around.
And he told Postmedia News that he couldn't have done it without the help of the Queensland Police Service Exit Program — modelled in part on one started in 2016 in the Lower Mainland by the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit (CFSEU).
“If it wasn't for the exit program, I think I'd be really struggling still. I wouldn't be where I am today,” Kelley says.
Whether in B.C. or on the stunning Australian Gold Coast, gang members who see the light want out.
It was May 2019 when Det. Sgt. Dominic Boland got the go-ahead to develop the unique Queensland program.
He began his research by interviewing 52 former bikers who left clubs on their own.
He asked why they joined in the first place, whether they had employment, their family situation, what their club life was like when they wore a patch.
The desire for some bikies, as they're known in Australia, to get out is strong — tough state legislation means extra long sentences if someone is convicted as a gang member.
“We've got legislation in Queensland that if you are a participant in a criminal organization, and you are convicted of a relevant offence, whilst being a participant, it's a mandatory seven years imprisonment, on top of your head sentence which must be served first,” acting Assistant Commissioner Roger Lowe told Postmedia.
There are other anti-biker laws in Queensland that don't exist in B.C. Clubhouses are illegal, as is the wearing of “colours” — the universal logoed vests that are the uniforms of biker gangs.
Lowe said it was a team effort to get the exit program off the ground. Some in the Queensland Police Service visited Nordic countries that had similar initiatives. Boland found details of CFSEU's program online and reached out to Staff Sgt. Lindsey Houghton.
“And his was still very much a pilot program at that point as well,” Boland said. “So he gave me his report, and also his assessment for the program.”
Houghton wasn't surprised when Boland contacted him. The B.C. program has “got the attention of other people, not just across Canada, but internationally,” he said.
“We're very happy to help because ... our gang landscape is connected to their gang landscape, and their gang landscape is connected to ours — especially, and specifically to outlaw motorcycle gangs. The Hells Angels and their puppet and support clubs aren't just in Canada, they're in Australia, they're worldwide,” Houghton told Postmedia.
“It's absolutely a mutual interest for all of us to be working together and sharing and creating capacity in other jurisdictions, because it just strengthens our side of the network.”
DOZENS HAVE LEFT GANGS
Boland pulled all the pieces together and worked with others to create the Queensland model, which launched in February 2021. So far they've referred 67 participants, including Kelly.
Lowe said Boland's research was key “because it drives the conversation about mental health, crisis, brotherhood, loyalty — all those elements that were really factors in the decision to leave a gang.”
The gang landscape in Queensland is different from B.C. as it's dominated by outlaw motorcycle clubs. Boland said there are about 750 bikers across Queensland in 13 gangs ranging from Hells Angels, Banditos and Comancheros to the Mongrel Mob, Finks and Lone Wolves.
In B.C., there are just over 100 Hells Angels and dozens more bikers in puppet clubs affiliated to the notorious biker gang. Other mid-level B.C. gangs like the Brothers Keepers and Wolfpack have links to the Hells Angels. But some, like the UN, are violent rivals.
Postmedia recently travelled to Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia to investigate the international links of B.C.-based organized crime groups, including the Hells Angels.
The Queensland program gets most of its referrals from parole officers and other social-service providers. Lowe said they make it clear to all potential applicants that it isn't an informers' program or a way for someone to get a reduced sentence by signing on.
The program refers participants to whatever services they need to get back on their feet and away from criminal activity.
Surprisingly, even higher-ranking bikers have signed up to get out, Boland said.
“We've got ex-presidents. We've got ex-sergeants-at-arms … there's all this brotherhood and camaraderie until suddenly there isn't. And then they're out,” he said.
By the end of 2023, B.C.'s CFSEU program had taken in 250 clients.
“We're very happy with how it's gone,” Houghton said.
The B.C. program offers those accepted “a wide array of services,” he said, including intensive counselling for past trauma in their lives. Some are victims of abuse or witnessed it growing up. Some have substance use issues or other family members “involved in gangs who are victims or perpetrators of gang violence.”
They may need help getting training or finding a job.
B.C. clients can get help with gang tattoo removal — something not yet available through the Queensland program.
But Kelly arranged for his own bikie tats to be covered up with black ink — including the small diamond on his arm with “one percenter” written in the middle, signifying a biker is operating outside of the law.
Since signing his disassociation pledge in 2021, Kelly has been featured in an anti-gang documentary with several national rugby stars.
`LOOKING FOR IDENTITY'
It's a 180-degree turn from his childhood growing up poor in the Bay of Plenty region of New Zealand, where Kelly was surrounded by gangs.
His uncle “pretty much taught me everything, like if you pull out a gun, you better use it, not to talk to cops,” he recalled. “I've always been looking for some identity. I just always stopped in the wrong places.”
He says he didn't go to school much, especially after an expulsion for stabbing another student when he was about 13. In fact, he was basically illiterate until he went to jail decades later and taught himself how to read and write.
“Most of my friends were gang members in New Zealand.”
Like Australia, most of the gangs in New Zealand are motorcycle clubs, some local in scope and others — like the Hells Angels — with international reach.
Kelly was close to his single mother, who moved to Australia in the mid-'90s. He followed in 1998. He got a job shelling oysters and “tried to have a different life.”
By 2000, he was working as a bouncer in various Gold Coast nightclubs frequented by surfers and bikies.
Kelly doesn't want to name either of the clubs he eventually joined. He met a member of one of them during his bouncing days and “we actually got along really well. He's actually dead now. He got shot dead. So we started off just going out and having coffee and riding around Surfer's Paradise.”
He “ended up noming up with him” — meaning his bikie pal sponsored his membership into the club.
In Canada, those entering a biker gang are called prospects. In Australia, Kelly was a “nominee” for about a year.
FROM BIKER GANG TO JAIL CELL — TWO TIMES
His first big run-in with the law came in 2012 after a conflict with a full-patch member of another club who owed him thousands of dollars.
“We just done a lot of stuff that wasn't above board,” Kelly said.
When the guy wouldn't pay up, Kelly took his bike — prompting a dispute between the two clubs. Kelly's sergeant-at-arms summoned him to a meeting in a bar where the other gang was also present. It was a tense scene as the other club demanded to know where the motorcycle was.
Kelly blurted out that he knew the man with the debt had “been working for the cops for 12 months.”
The startling revelation surprised Kelly's gang-mate, who wasn't happy about being left in the dark.
“I think that was my first time of actually realizing that you're not actually free in a biker club. You are actually in an army,” Kelly said. “I ended up in jail and then when I came out of jail I actually left the club. I just realized that there was no brotherhood there at all. It was just everybody for themselves.”
For a while, he was gang-free. He got married and had kids. And then he “bumped into somebody from another old-school club that I thought still had old-school ways. And for some stupid reason I went back into it.”
“And I actually rose up the ranks in that club really quickly and became the president here on the Gold Coast,” he said. “I would pretty much go out and clean up what messes they couldn't clean up ... And that's how I ended up in jail in 2018.”
After he fell out with his club, he spiralled.
“I started using drugs pretty heavily because I just really didn't see a way out,” he said. “I just kind of went downhill mental-health wise. I got death threats. I cut my colours off and I burnt them. They stole my bike from a mate of mine.”
Being a marked man in prison was hard.
“I tried to commit suicide, nearly ramming my head into walls,” Kelly said.
He ended up in what is called a detention unit in isolation. Slowly, he began to turn things around.
“I kind of started talking to God. I started to pray. I asked for a chaplain ... They allowed me to have my reading glasses, so then I started learning to read properly. I felt like I was coming up good.”
He was moved to a unit with other inmates. Some urged him to apply for parole, which he didn't expect to get. Finally, in early 2021, he was released and reunited with his kids.
Kelly still struggled when he got out.
“You get used to being locked up and then you come out and there is so much and you kind of get panic attacks. Like right from the word go, I had night terrors and would sleep probably three, maybe four hours a night.”
His parole officer said that if Kelly was serious about leaving gang life behind him, he should consider the Exit program. He signed up.
“And since entering the program, they got me a psychiatrist ... we hit it off really well,” Kelly said. “He actually really strengthened everything I believed in ... he helped me be able to leave the house without having to take two days to be able to get out.”
FEWER CRIMES MEAN FEWER VICTIMS
Kelly's personal success is undeniable. But Queensland police have also had to determine what success for the whole program looks like.
Lowe, the acting assistant commissioner, said that compared with the social costs of gang life, paying for the Exit program “is a no-brainer.”
But they have had to consider the perspective of victims of gang-related crime who might have concerns about money invested in offenders.
“When they have pro-social assistance, through employment, through mentoring, through mental-health support, the reduction in their offending is quite significant,” Lowe said. “The reality is less offending, less recidivism, less victims of crime. It really is focused in on the victims of crime in that it is reducing the crime.”
On a rainy Gold Coast morning in late November, Kelly sat ringside in a local gym and chatted excitedly about upcoming speaking engagements with Boland and Det. Sgt. Mick Bolin — the two Queensland officers he credits with helping him rebuild his life.
The Exit program has “turned me into such a better person, a better father, a better student at church. It's not just one benefit,” he said. “It's benefited every part of my life.”
Both soft-spoken and larger than life, Kelly has been telling his cautionary tale to troubled youth every chance he gets. He said they seem to respond well to him because he's “the real deal.”
He now wants to start a youth ministry to help vulnerable kids. He knows how bikie gangs use young hangers-on to do their dirty work, including acts of violence.
They're often paid in methamphetamine — ice as it's known locally — until they're of no use to the club any more.
“At the end of the day, they just chew them up and spit them out when they're done with them,” Kelly said.
“Half these kids will end up jail.”
When I came out of jail I actually left the club. I just realized there was no brotherhood there at all. It was just everybody for themselves.”
This feature was made possible in part by support and funding from the Lieutenant Governor's B.C. Journalism Fellowship, in partnership with the Government House and the Jack Webster foundations. These groups exercised no creative control over the content. kbolan@postmedia.com