The Rock Machine is back on Canada's motorcycle club scene. The club, which gained huge notoriety in the '90s thanks to a bloody war with the Hells Angels, has resurfaced hoping to distance itself from its troubled past and its ties to the Bandidos in the United States. "We're going back to our roots," a member of the re-formed Rock Machine said yesterday, speaking for the club. "It's the most logical choice." The club apparently already has about 72 members. Some of the bikers were with the club when it patched over to the Bandidos in 2000, some absorbed from another Ontario-based club, and many who are "completely new to the bike scene." The source said the Rock Machine hopes to spread across the country in time. But for now it will open two chapters in the east -- Toronto and Kingston -- and two chapters in the west, in Edmonton and Winnipeg. Ron Burling, 37, who is serving eight years in a maximum security prison, will head the chapters out west upon his release, the source said. And while the club has supporters in Quebec, it has no plans to return to its birthplace, where the long and deadly battle between the previous incarnation of the Rock Machine and rival Hells Angels gang was centred. "The days of old-style wars and fighting among bikers are long gone," the source said, explaining the bike scene has changed greatly since then. "We realize that if we keep fighting the way we were, we will ultimately be outlawed out of existence, " he added. The source said the new Rock Machine aims to be more like clubs of 50 years ago, when it was about "bikes and brotherhood." "We want to live a little wild but not be criminals," he said. The Rock Machine was born in 1986 from an alliance of Quebec drug dealers fending off the Hells, which was vying for a monopoly of the province's drug trade.
In the mid-1990s, a violent turf war erupted that left hundreds dead and wounded