July 19, 2019 – In the name of the Pagan’s Motorcycle Club’s directive to push into North Jersey, Pagan’s enforcer Robert (Hellboy) DeRonde will do four years in state prison. The 55-year old DeRonde was sentenced this week after copping a plea in Essex County Superior Court, admitting to beating Newark Hells Angel Motorcycle Club member Jeff Shank with a baseball bat at an Elizabeth Avenue gas station in the spring of 2018. DeRonde and two other unidentified Pagan’s attacked Shank minutes after Shank left the Hells Angels Newark clubhouse and had stopped at an Exxon station to fill up his tank on April 24, 2018. The gas station’s security cameras caught DeRonde hitting Shank over the head with a metal baseball bat, punching and stomping him to the ground and the fleeing in his Ford F-1 pickup truck. In 2013, DeRonde was busted in a drug case involving Pagan’s operating out of New Jersey and New York. The Pagan’s are the most powerful biker gang on the east coast, and according to law enforcement, hoping to raise the ante on their grip on the region. Upon being named Pagan’s national president a few years ago, Keith (Conan the Barbarian) Richter made clear his intent to expand the Pagan’s brand and reach up and down the eastern seaboard, per informants. Richter headquarters out of Long Island, New York. He led a Pagan’s road rally into Philadelphia, a longtime club stronghold, during Memorial Day weekend in what federal agents are calling a “public show of strength.” The rival Hells Angels, based on the west coast, opened up a Newark chapter in the 2000s. According to informants, Richter specifically instructed his Jersey Pagan’s to “take the fight to Newark” and to challenge the Hells Angels on their home turf. As another measure of declaration that Richter’s Pagans’s want the whole east coast to themselves, the club has stopped wearing “rockers” that say what individual chapter each member belongs to and instead simply reads “East Coast.”
