Romanian Hells Angels leader Marius Lazar has been convicted in Texas for a plot involving trafficking over 400kg of cocaine, arms dealing, money laundering, and using bitcoin to pay for the assassination of two rival gang leaders.

Lazar was brought into the conspiracy through a Hells Angels member from New Zealand, who ordered 400kg of cocaine from a supposedly powerful drug dealer in the US. The gang failed to realise that the dealer was an undercover agent of the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Lazar ordered the cocaine and paid for the assassination of two members of a rival motorcycle club in Romania. The gang also offered to supply the undercover agent with military-grade equipment in case the murders escalated into killing US police officers. Two New Zealanders arrested in the same DEA raid that caught Lazar are still on the run, with fugitives Murray Michael Matthews and Marc Patrick Johnson being granted bail by a Romanian court. They fled the country and remain missing.

International criminal motorcycle clubs are not as common in Eastern Europe as they are in Western Europe, yet some have established themselves in the East over the past decades.

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe during the late 20th century was the start of this process with the transition from communism to democracy brought about political and economic uncertainty.

The 1990s were a time of weak institutions, corruption, and limited law enforcement capabilities, which created a conducive environment for criminal organizations to thrive.

The dismantling of border controls and the opening up of previously closed societies allowed for easier movement of goods, including illicit ones. Motorcycle gangs capitalized on this newfound freedom of movement to expand their operations across borders. The rapid shift to market economies intially resulted in economic disparities and unemployment. This socio-economic instability provided a pool of disaffected individuals susceptible to joining criminal enterprises for financial gain.

The end of the Cold War also led to the proliferation of weapons, including military-grade arms. Criminal motorcycle gangs took advantage of the surplus weapons available on the black market to bolster their arsenals and to smuggle the weapons abroad for profit.