When I first read about this, I had to sit down and have a stiff drink. Okay, I had a Mike’s Hard Lemonade, which is pretty stiff for me.

The Amish have a gang of . . . gangsters. What is the world coming to when the words Amish and gangster are together in one sentence? And they end up in the news for perpetrating acts of gangster-ism? Is nothing sacred?

Finding out there’s an Amish gangster is like discovering there’s an Amish Commando Unit. “Yes, Oprah. Don’t let the long beard and bad haircut fool you, I am, an Amish Commando.” We’re talking Amish folk here! The original “make love, not war” people, the folks who put the “organic” into organic farming, the founding fathers and mothers of the “buy local” movement, the quilt and furniture folks. The no electricity, no cell phone or satellite TV people, with their own no-colors-allowed dress code. Their cultural motto could be, “In humility, calmness, composure and placidity we trust,” and somehow they grew their own thugs.

It first happened in Ohio in September. Amish renegades assaulted (yep, there are some more words you don’t expect to see together) an Amish couple with scissors and battery-operated clippers. I don’t know much about the Amish but “battery-operated” figures prominently in this story, which must mean they are perilously close to having used electricity.

The gang strikes at night, politely knocking on their neighbors’ front doors. This makes me seriously wonder about their gangster-smarts. I am not now nor have I ever been a gangster-ette or whatever lady gangsters are called. But this technique of theirs has major flaws. Let’s think this through. Who’s the person most likely to be able to identify you if you attack them, especially if you’re related to them, you’re not wearing a mask and you use your real names during the crime? Oh, that would be your neighbors.

When the front door opens, the gang mob-attacks, scissoring off the men’s beards, and buzzing patches of hair (here’s where the clippers come in) off the heads of the women. The perpetrators have hit at least four couples, who are easy to spot in an Amish crowd as the men have only a tiny two-inch beard. The motive appears to be revenge, because when the leader of this splinter group went weird, a lot of the families in town moved out.

The gang struck hard and fast on their last raid; mostly because they hired . . . yeah, get ready for it . . . a driver pulling a trailer to haul them between crime scenes.

They’d been at a horse auction and got the brilliantly stupid idea that if they had motorized wheels they could increase their gang efficiency. So they paid an “English” (aka. someone like us) driver to drive them. This was their downfall. Wandering across endless rural counties, bump, bump, bumping along in the horse trailer behind the Ford F10 pickup, they stopped at different homes to assault their neighbors.

Now I must digress. What are we “English” coming to driving Amish gangsters around in a horse trailer? The upside (for the gangsters) it’s a lot faster than a buggy.

Most of the gang landed in jail and are charged with kidnapping, assault and felony haircutting. The FBI is considering charging them with hate crimes since their escapades were aimed exclusively at the Amish. Good thing too, because if they’d picked on me, those boys would be in the emergency room instead of the jail.

Cohea, a freelance writer, can be reached by e-mailing  a37_tao@hotmail.com.