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HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
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Chapter 14
Basically they're just like Negroes. By themselves they're no
more trouble than anybody else -- but the minute they get in a
group they go all to pieces, they
really do. Just before dusk on the first afternoon a sudden scrambling tension swept over the camp. People had been coming and going for several hours, but with no sense of urgency. The odd welcome at the beer market had undermined the sheriff's edict about keeping away from the tourists, and many of the outlaws rode over to sample the hospitality. The atmosphere at Willow Cove was festive. New arrivals were greeted with shouts, kisses, flying tackles and sprays of beer. The deputies were taking pictures. At first I thought it was for evidence, but after watching them urge the Angels to strike colorful poses and dive into the lake with their clothes on, I realized that the cops were as fascinated as any first-time visitor at the Bronx Zoo. One told me later: "Hell, I wish I had a movie camera, this is the damnedest thing I ever saw. People wouldn't believe it unless they saw pictures. Wait'll I show these to my kids!" Just before lunch, for no obvious reason, the tempo changed abruptly. Barger and several others went into a huddle with two deputies, then jumped on their bikes and disappeared down the trail. About ten of the outlaws left the camp in a group, all looking grim. Moments later two police cars left. Most of the outlaws seemed content to let Barger handle whatever was happening, but about twenty gathered around Tiny, in the middle of camp, and muttered darkly at the news, on the police radio, of "an attack on a motorcyclist." They didn't know who it was, or even if it was one of their own. (A motorcycle hill-climb-and-scrambles event was scheduled the next day near Yosemite, and there were many respectable bikes in the area. Somebody said a group wearing Seventh Sons colors had been seen near Mariposa, but none of the Angels had ever heard of that outfit, or knew if they were outlaws.) When a gathering of Angels and their allies get word that "a motorcyclist" has been attacked, it comes as an ominous signal that some enemy is on the move. Barger and his escort were gone for almost an hour, and many of the others would have gone out to look for them if Tiny hadn't insisted on waiting for further word. I recall somebody cursing the untenable position: "Jesus, look where we are! The bastards got us trapped out here! There's no way out except that one path!" Willow Cove was a natural Dunkirk. I watched the two remaining deputies; the moment they left, I was leaving too ... their departure could only mean that things had gotten out of hand somewhere else and that the Angel campsite would be next. I didn't want to be there when the vigilantes came whooping through the trees. But the deputies didn't leave, and just before dark Barger's patrol came back in good spirits. Dirty Ed, it seemed, had been riding peacefully beside the lake when five friendly-looking youths, on foot, had flagged him down. Always conscious of public relations, he had stopped to chat. What followed, according to one version, was an unconscionable bushwhacking: "Are you going to compete in the scrambles tomorrow," one of them asked. Just as Ed was about to answer no, the sixth man snuck up behind him. "He knocked me clean off my bike," cringed Ed. "Hit me with an eight-foot length of two-inch pipe. My head exploded. I thought I'd been hit by a locomotive! "The six young men had been drinking. The only reason I can figure for them doing it was to make a name for themselves," complains Ed. "They were 'joe citizens,' and had been drinking for about five days. The other 'citizens' in the campground were afraid we would come back and stomp them. Some of them were so scared they started folding their tents and moving out. 'Rather Switch Than Fight,' they said." This absurd and fraudulent account appeared in what is known in the trade as a "newsstand quickie," titled "The Real Story Behind the Hell's Angels and Other 'Outlaw' Motorcycle Groups." It was whipped up by the photographer who was arrested later that weekend for "obstructing justice," and although it contained some excellent photos, the text was apparently put together by somebody like Whittaker Chambers. Yet Dirty Ed now insists -- for public consumption -- that the "Real Story" version is pretty close to the truth, although he chuckles indulgently at lines like "The six young men had been drinking ... Rather Switch Than Fight" ... and the lunatic assertion that he somehow sensed, without ever seeing it, the exact length and width of the pipe that laid his scalp open. Twenty years on the outlaw circuit have not done much to mellow his view of the press and the world of devious squares he thinks it represents. He would no more trust a reporter than he would a cop or a judge. To him they are all the same -- the running dogs of whatever fiendish conspiracy has plagued him all these years. He knows that somewhere behind that moat, the Main Cop has scrawled his name on a blackboard in the Big Briefing Room -- with a notation beside it: "Get this boy, give him no peace, he's incorrigible, like an egg-sucking dog. " Dirty Ed has been a motorcycle outlaw for an of his adult life. He works as a bike or auto mechanic around the East Bay cities, but he is not professionally ambitious. At six foot one and weighing 225, he looks like a beer-bellied wrestler. His hair is balding on top and gray at the temples. If he shaved off his stringy oriental beard he could look almost distinguished. As it is, he just looks mean. Later that night, standing by the bonfire with a beer, he talked briefly about the encounter. The eight stitches in his head had cost a dollar each, and he'd had to pay cash. That was the worst part of it -- having to pay. Hell, eight dollars was a case of beer and gas back to Oakland. Unlike the younger Angels, Ed has to underplay his action and keep his image at least double tough. He has been around longer than almost anybody, which is plenty long enough to know he won't get any sympathy when he starts showing signs of old age. Few of the younger Angels would have made a screeching U-turn on the road and roared back to confront five punks who'd yelled an insult. But Dirty Ed did. He would ride his bike into a river to fight a bull moose if he thought the beast had it in for him. Probably it was lucky for everybody that the kids poleaxed him off his bike before he hurt one of them. They told the police they'd panicked when he swung around and came at them, for what they considered no reason at all. The fact that they just happened to have a lead pipe on hand didn't seem to surprise anybody. The teen-age assailants were arrested -- "to make sure we didn't kill em," Barger explained -- and then driven to their homes, where they were released with a warning to avoid any contact with the outlaws for the rest of the weekend. The fact of their arrest gave Barger the excuse he needed to let the incident pass. Had the bushwhackers not been taken into custody, the Angels would have insisted on revenge -- perhaps not instantly, but the threat would have changed the whole tone of the weekend. As it turned out, the formality of arrest satisfied everybody. Barger wasn't pleased, but after weighing the alternatives and talking with Baxter, he decided to give the jury-rigged truce another chance. His legionnaires agreed, which they would have in any case -- even if he'd called for a frontal assault on the sheriff's home. But when he opted for prudence, peace and more beer the others seemed genuinely relieved. They had saved face without having to fight, and they still had two days to party. The outlaws don't mind a fight, even if it means a good chance of getting hurt, but getting arrested can be a very expensive proposition. Once jailed, they have to post bond to get out, and unlike the solid citizen who is a jobholder or property owner or at least has friends who can sign for the amount, the Angels have no recourse but their friendly bondsman. Each chapter has one, who is always on call. If necessary he will drive two hundred miles in the dead of night to get an Angel out of jail. His fee for this service is ten percent of whatever he signs for; and in rural situations, where tensions are running high, a Hell's Angel who winds up in jail will invariably be socked with a maximum bond, which can run as high as $5,000 for drunkenness and assault, or $2,500 for indecent exposure ... netting the bondsman $500 and $250 respectively. These fees are not refundable; they are interest on a short-term loan. But the Angels are such good customers that some bondsmen will give them a group rate, scaling down the fees to fit the circumstances. The outlaws appreciate their bondsmen and rarely welsh, although many are so far in debt that they have to pay off in installments $10 or $15 a week. The Frisco chapter's bondsman once had a windfall of forty-six arrests in one night, at $100 to $242 each. [1] The clubhouse was raided, and those captured -- including eighteen girls -- were charged across the board with "suspicion of (1) robbery, (2) assault with deadly weapons, (3) possession of marijuana, (4) harboring fugitives, (5) conspiracy to harbor fugitives and (6) contributing to the delinquency of minors." It was a spectacular bust, causing huge headlines in the press, but all charges were dropped when the Angels mounted a countersuit for false arrest. Not one of the forty-six was ever tried, much less convicted ... yet all those caught in the raid had to sign for 10 percent of his bond to get out of jail. There was no alternative. They have no friends either willing or wealthy enough to put up $2,500 in cash or property in the middle of the night, or the next day either. A check won't make it, and no court has ever released a Hell's Angel on his own recognizance. The only way out of the slammer is to pay the bondsman, and he only answers the call for those with good credit. An outlaw who has welshed in the past will sit in jail indefinitely. The Oakland chapter's "bondsman" is a handsome middle-aged woman with platinum-blond hair named Dorothy Condors. She has a pine-paneled office, drives a white Cadillac and treats the Angels gently, like wayward children. "These boys are the backbone of the bail-bond business," she says. "Ordinary customers come and go, but just like clockwork, the Angels come down to my office each week to make their payments. They really pay the overhead." At Bass Lake the situation was further complicated by the restraining order, which, according to the police, ruled out any possibility of bail, even at 10 percent. Despite this, the sunset mood at Willow Cove was loose and happy. There was a feeling that the crises were all past and that now the serious drinking could begin. In accordance with their ethic of excess in all things, the Angels booze with a zeal that seems hardly human. As drinkers, they are binge-oriented. Around home they seldom get drunk, but at parties they go completely out of their heads -- screaming gibberish and running headlong at each other like crazed bats in a cave. The bonfire is always a hazard. On one run Terry fell into the fire and was burned so badly that he had to be rushed to a hospital. Those who avoid the fire and refrain from shoving their fists through car windshields might, at any moment, go roaring off on their bikes to seek out some populated area where they can put on a show. In 1957 several hundred outlaws made a disastrous run to Angels Camp, where the American Motorcycle Association was staging a big race in conjunction with the annual frog-jumping contest. Many of the top riders in the country were on hand, along with some three thousand cyclists of every description. The Angels were not invited, but they went anyway -- knowing that their presence would cause violence. The AMA includes all kinds of motorcyclists -- from those on 50-cubic-centimeter Hondas to devotees-of full- dress Harley 74s -- but it centers on competition riders, either professional or amateur, who take their bikes very seriously, spend a lot of money on them and ride all year round. Their idea of a good party is an argument about gear ratios or the merits of overhead cams. Unlike the outlaws, they frequently take long trips either alone or in groups of two or three ... and often into areas where anybody on a motorcycle is automatically treated like a Hell's Angel, a raping brute unfit to eat or drink among civilized people. This has made them bitter, and most can't even discuss the Angels without getting angry. The relationship of the two groups is not quite as venomous as that of owls and crows -- who will attack each other onsight -- but the basic attitudes are not much different. Unlike the general public, many competition riders have had painful experience with the outlaws, for they move in the same small world. Their paths cross at bike-repair shops, races or late-night hamburger stands. According to respectable cyclists, the Angels are responsible for the motorcycle's sinister image. They blame the outlaws for many of the unpleasant realities of being a bike-owner -- from police harassment to public opprobrium to high insurance rates. The "respectability" of AMA people is entirely relative. Many are as mean and dishonest as any Hell's Angel, and there is a hard core -- mainly race riders and mechanics -- who will go out of their way to tangle with outlaws. AMA officials deny this, for obvious reasons, but in almost the same breath they denounce the Angels as criminal scum. I've heard cops call motorcycle outlaws "the lowest of the low" and "the scum of the earth," but they do it with a certain amount of self-control. Most cops were bitterly amused at the Hell's Angels' publicity boom. By contrast, the AMA people were outraged; it was like a bunch of owls reacting to the news that a crow warlord had won the Nobel Peace Prize. In Sacramento in the fall of 1965 a handful of Hell's Angels attended a national championship race and afterward got in a brief scuffle, in the parking lot, with two men who said something to offend them. Nobody was hurt, and the Angels, five of them, drove off in a car toward San Francisco. They had not gone far when they were forced off the road by two cars full of respectable riders and mechanics ... who jerked the outlaws out of their car, and as one said later, "We beat the bastards bloody; they couldn't stand up; they were crying." On the disastrous run to Angels Camp in 1957 the outlaws were outnumbered about ten to one, but the opposition couldn't have mustered enough strong-arms to meet them head on. The Angels arrived early and bought up the entire beer supply of four bars, which they drank in a pasture several miles from the site of the races. By nightfall most of the outlaws were raving drunk, and when somebody suggested they go over and check out the AMA camp the reaction was automatic. Their howling frightened the townspeople and sent the sheriff running for his car. The outlaw pack filled both lanes of the narrow road ... gunning their engines and sending the beams of their headlights into trees and bedroom windows as they weaved and jockeyed for running room. They were only going for a party, they said later, but the party never got started. The lead bikes took the crest of a hill at over a hundred miles an hour and crashed blindly into a group of cyclists beside the road. Two outlaws died in the bloody pile-up, which immediately drew a large crowd. There were not enough police to keep the scene under control, and fights broke out as cyclists shoved and shouted among the wreckage. Flashing lights and sirens added to the confusion, which grew worse as the fighting spread. It continued all night and most of the next day -- not a full-scale riot, but a series of clashes that kept local police racing from one spot to another. The casualty list showed two dead, a dozen serious injuries and the final demise of the old notion that rural communities are geographically insulated from "city trouble." Angels Camp was a major goad to the development of the mutual-assistance concept, a police version of mobile warfare, which meant that any town or hamlet in California, no matter how isolated, could summon help from nearby police jurisdictions in case of emergency. There is no official list of these emergencies, but if there were, any rumor of a Hell's Angels visitation would be right at the top. _______________ Notes: 1. Not all of this was paid, and the Frisco Angels were forced to change bondsmen. Their new man charges them a firm 10 percent.
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