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HELL'S ANGELS -- A STRANGE AND TERRIBLE SAGA OF THE OUTLAW MOTORCYCLE GANGS |
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The Making of the Menace, 1965 Chapter 2
The daily press is the evil principle of the modern
world, and time will only serve to disclose this fact with greater and
greater clearness. The capacity of the newspaper for degeneration is
sophistically without limit, since it can always sink lower and lower in
its choice of readers. At last it will stir up all those dregs of
humanity which no state or government can control.
The best thing about the Angels is that we don't lie to
each other. Of course that don't go for outsiders because we have to
fight fire with fire. Hell, most people you meet won't tell you the
truth about anything.
It was part of the cover story. Politicians, like editors and cops, are very keen on outrage stories, and State Senator Fred Farr of Monterey County is no exception. He is a leading light of the Carmel-Pebble Beach set and no friend of hoodlums anywhere, especially gang rapists who invade his constituency. His reaction to the Monterey headlines was quick and loud. Farr demanded an immediate investigation of the Hell's Angels and all others of that breed, whose lack of status caused them to be lumped together as "other disreputables." In the cut-off world of big bikes, long runs and classy rumbles, this new, state-sanctioned stratification made the Hell's Angels very big. They were, after all, Number One -- like John Dillinger. Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch, then new in his job, moved quickly to mount an investigation of sorts. He sent questionnaires to more than a hundred sheriffs, district attorneys and police chiefs, asking for information on the Hell's Angels and "other disreputables." He also asked for suggestions as to how the law might deal with them. Six months went by before all the replies were condensed into a fifteen-page report that read like a plot synopsis of Mickey Spillane's worst dreams. But in the matter of solutions it was vague. The state was going to centralize information on these thugs, urge more vigorous prosecution, put them all under surveillance whenever possible, etc. A careful reader got the impression that even if the Angels were the monsters they seemed to be, there was not much the cops could do -- and that indeed Mr. Lynch was well aware he'd been put, for political reasons, on a pretty weak scent. The report was colorful, interesting, heavily biased and consistently alarming -- just the sort of thing to make a clanging good item for the national press. There was plenty of mad action, senseless destruction, orgies, brawls, perversions and a strange parade of innocent victims that, even on paper and in careful police language, was enough to tax the credulity of the dullest police reporter. The demand was so heavy in newspaper and magazine circles that the Attorney General's office had to order a second printing. Even the Hell's Angels got a copy; one of them stole mine. The heart of the report was a section titled "Hoodlum Activities," a brief account of outlaw activities dating back for almost a decade. To wit: On April 2, 1964, a group of eight Hell's Angels invaded the home of an Oakland woman, forcing her male friend out of the house at gunpoint and raping the woman in the presence of her three children. Later that same morning, female companions of the Hell's Angels threatened the victim that if she cooperated with the police, she would be cut on the face with a razor ... Early on the morning of June 2, 1962, it was reported that three Hell's Angels had seized a 19-year-old woman in a small bar in the northern part of Sacramento and while two of them held her down on the barroom floor, the third removed her outer clothing. The victim was menstruating at the time, her sanitary napkin was removed and the third individual committed cunnilingus upon her ... Early on the morning of October 25, 1964, nine Hell's Angels and two of their female companions were arrested by Gardena police and sheriff's officers after a riot call had been received from a Gardena bar. Police reported the group "started ripping up the whole place" after someone had splashed a mug of beer over one of the group. The bar was left in shambles, and pool tables covered with beer and urine ... The Lynch report chronicled eighteen such outrages and left hundreds more implied. Newspapers all over the state carried highlights, along with the Attorney General's assurance that police pressure would soon put an end to the problem. Most California editors gave the story prominent play for a day or so, then let it drop. The Hell's Angels had made headlines before, and the Lynch report -- based on a survey of old police files -- contained little that was new or startling. The Angels seemed headed for obscurity once again, but the tide was turned by a New York Times correspondent in Los Angeles, who filed a lengthy and lurid commentary on the Lynch report. It appeared in the Times, dated March 16, under a two-column headline -- which was all the impetus the story needed: the rumble was on. Time followed with a left hook titled "The Wilder Ones." Newsweek crossed with a right, titled "The Wild Ones." And by the time the dust had settled, the national news media had a guaranteed grabber on their hands. It was sex, violence, crime, craziness and filth -- all in one package. Here is Newsweek's 1965 description of a Labor Day Run to Porterville a year and a half earlier: A roaring swarm of 200 black-jacketed motorcyclists converged on the small, sleepy southern California town of Porterville. They rampaged through local bars, shouting obscenities. They halted cars, opening their doors, trying to paw female passengers. Some of their booted girlfriends lay down in the middle of the streets and undulated suggestively. In one bar, half a dozen of them brutally beat a 65-year-old man and tried to abduct the barmaid. Only after 71 policemen from neighboring cities and the Highway Patrol, police dogs and water hoses were brought into action did the cyclists jump on their Harley-Davidsons and roar out of town. Both Newsweek and Time compared the 1963 "invasion" of Porterville with a film called The Wild One, based on a similar incident at Hollister, California, in 1947, and starring Marlon Brando ... which Time called a "slice-of-seedy-life picture about a pack of vicious, swaggering motorcycle hoods called the Black Rebels." But The Wild One passed quickly into oblivion, said Time, because "the characters were too overdrawn and the violence they wrought was too unrelieved to engage the credulity of its audience." Who, after all, could believe that a gang of two-wheeled Huns might invade and terrify a whole California town? Not Time. At least not in 1947, when the first such incident occurred; and not in 1953, when the film was released; and not even ten years later, when the same thing supposedly happened again, in a different town. But March 26, 1965, eighteen years after the first so-called motorcycle riot in America, Time finally came to grips with the story, and the editors of that journal were alarmed. The Huns were real! They'd been holed up somewhere for eighteen years, polishing their motorcycles and greasing their chain whips until California's Attorney General decided to introduce them to the press. Time's West Coast legman lost no time in forwarding the terrible news to the Luce fortress, where it was immediately transformed into two columns of supercharged hokum for the National Affairs section: "Last week it [The Wild One] was back -- and in real life!" "Lynch amassed a mountain of evidence about Hell's Angels," said Time, "... the thrust of which shows that the group has more than lived up to its sinister moniker ... It was a rape case that ignited Lynch's investigation. Last fall, two teen-age girls were taken forcibly from their dates and raped by several members of the gang." This was a flagrant libel, for in fact all charges against Terry, Marvin, Mother Miles and Crazy Cross were dropped less than a month after their arrest. In their eagerness to get at the hair and meat of the story, Time's interpreters apparently skipped page one of the Lynch report, which clearly stated that "further investigation raised questions as to whether forcible rape had been committed or if the identifications made by the victims were valid. By letter dated September 25, 1964, the District Attorney of Monterey County requested dismissal of charges in the Monterey-Carmel Municipal Court, which request was with the concurrence of the Grand Jury." Not quoted in the report were the comments of a deputy district attorney for the county: "A doctor examined the girls and found no evidence to support charges of forcible rape," he said. "And besides, one girl refused to testify and the other was given a lie-detector test and found to be wholly unreliable." This was pretty dull stuff, however, and Time couldn't find room for it. The article continued instead in a high-pitched, chattering whine, with a list of phony statistics: Founded in 1950 at Fontana, a steel town 50 miles east of Los Angeles, the club now numbers about 450 in California. Their logbook of kicks runs from sexual perversion and drug addiction to simple assault and thievery. Among them they boast 874 felony arrests, 300 felony convictions, 1,682 misdemeanor arrests and 1,023 misdemeanor convictions, only 85 have ever served time in prisons or reform schools. No act is too degrading for the pack. Their initiation rite, for example, demands that any new member bring a woman or girl (called a "sheep") who is willing to submit to sexual intercourse with each member of the club. But their favorite activity seems to be terrorizing whole towns ... Time then told the same Porterville invasion story that appeared simultaneously in Newsweek. The article continued: When they are not thus engaged, the Angels -- sometimes accompanied by the young children of a member or by the unmarried females who hang out with the club -- often rent a dilapidated house on the edge of a town, where they swap girls, drugs and motorcycles with equal abandon. In between drug-induced stupors, the Angels go on motorcycle-stealing forays, even have a panel truck with a special ramp for loading the stolen machines. Afterward, they may ride off again to seek some new nadir in sordid behavior. There was clearly no room for this sort of thing in the Great Society, and Time was emphatic in saying it was about to be brought to a halt. These ruffians were going to be taught a lesson by hard and ready minions of the Establishment. The article ended on a note of triumph: ... all local law enforcement agencies have now been supplied with dossiers on each member of the Hell's Angels and on similar gangs, and set up a coordinated intelligence service that will try to track down the hoods wherever they appear. "They will no longer be allowed to threaten the lives, peace and security of honest citizens of our state," said he [Lynch.] To that, thousands of Californians shuddered a grateful amen. No doubt there was some shuddering done in California that week, but not all of it was rooted in feelings of gratitude. The Hell's Angels shuddered with perverse laughter at the swill that had been written about them. Other outlaws shuddered with envy at the Angels' sudden fame. Cops all over California shuddered with nervous glee at the prospect of their next well-publicized run-in with any group of motorcyclists. And some people shuddered at the realization that Time had 3,042,902 readers. [1] The significant thing about Time's view of the Angels was not its crabwise approach to reality, but its impact. At the beginning of March 1965 the Hell's Angels were virtually nonexistent. The club's own head count listed roughly eighty-five, all in California. Routine police harassment had made it impossible for the outlaws to even wear their colors in any city except Oakland. Membership in the San Francisco chapter had dwindled from a one-time high of seventy-five to a mere eleven, with one facing expulsion. The original Berdoo (including Fontana) chapter was reduced to a handful of diehards determined to go down with the ship. In Sacramento a two-man vendetta in the form of Sheriff John Miserly and a patrolman named Leonard Chatoian had made life so difficult that the Angels were already planning the big move to Oakland ... and even there the heat was on for real. "Shit, we never knew when they was gonna bust into the El Adobe and line us up against the bar with shotguns," Sonny Barger recalls. "We even started drinking at the Sinners Club because it had a back door and a window we could get out of. I mean the heat was on, man. We were hurtin."
A good reporter, if he chooses the right approach, can
understand a cat or an Arab. The choice is the problem, and if he
chooses wrong he will come away scratched or baffled. At the time of the report the State of California had admittedly been dealing for fifteen years with a criminal conspiracy of the most vicious kind -- yet in the five single-spaced pages devoted to the Hell's Angels' hoodlum activities -- most involving anywhere from a dozen to a hundred outlaws -- the report mentioned only sixteen specific arrests and two convictions. What was a man to think? Another part of the report stated that of 463 identified Hell's Angels, 151 had felony convictions. This is the kind of statistic that gives taxpayers faith in their law enforcement agencies ... and it would have been doubly edifying if the 463 Hell's Angels had actually existed when the statistic was committed to print. Unfortunately, there were less than 100. Since 1960 the number of active members has never been over 200, and easily a third of these are Hell's Angels in name only ... old grads, gone over the hump to marriage and middle age, but donning the colors once or twice each year for some major event like the Labor Day Run. The Lynch report mentioned several of these annual affairs, but the descriptions were not entirely objective. For obvious reasons, policemen rarely witness a crime in progress, so they have to rely on others to tell them what happened. Newsweek's version of the Porterville raid [2] was lifted almost verbatim from the Lynch report. Another version of that affair had appeared on September 5, 1963, in the Porterville Farm Tribune. It was an eyewitness account, written within hours of the action by a Tribune reporter named Bill Rodgers, who was also Porterville's mayor. The headline said: THEY CAME, THEY SAW, THEY DID NOT CONQUER. Porterville police knew by Saturday morning that the motorcycle clan of California might hit Porterville during the weekend. ... By late afternoon there were riders beginning to congregate at Main and Olive, with the Eagle Club as their drinking center. A few riders were in Murry Park. No one that we saw was out of line. By early evening great numbers had begun to arrive and there was a build-up at Main and Olive. Our phone got hot as people wanted to know what the city was doing about the situation. We were urged to call out the National Guard, to order wholesale arrests, to deputize citizens and arm them with axe handles and shotguns. Around 6: 30 p.m. we checked Main Street. The show was starting. Perhaps 200 of the motorcycle clan, including some women and children, were becoming boisterous; some were crowding out into the street molesting motorists and pedestrians; a hundred or more motorcycles were parked on the east side of Main. We returned to the police station. Torigian and Searle were handling things there, Porrazzo joined them. There was still no violence, or no real reason to make arrests. It was a case of waiting as the situation developed. Decision was made to close Murry Park. About 8:00 P.M. radio word came that the motorcycle group was pulling out, heading east. It was possible they would stay out of town. But a few minutes later a fight and accident was reported in a club at the city line in Doyle Colony and an ambulance was requested. It was also reported that the clan was moving back into town. Decision was made at this point to force the motorcycle group out of town ... Throughout the evening the city police switchboard was cluttered by calls, some of them legitimate, but many of them from anonymous people announcing they were citizens, demanding protection, insulting the police. Traffic was bumper to bumper on Main Street; 1,500 local people stood around at Main and Olive to see what would happen. The motorcycle clan, perhaps 300 strong at this point, was living it up drinking, tying up traffic, breaking bottles in the street, using profane and insulting language, putting on what they considered a show. Police were hampered by the heavy traffic and the mass of spectators. We moved through the area in a loud-speaker-equipped police car asking Porterville people to move out of the area. Result -- no one moved, others came in to see what was happening, the motorcycle clan booed. The Main Street block from Garden to Olive, then from Oak, was closed to traffic; Highway Patrolmen were on the south, city police on the north. The area rapidly cleared of traffic; the clan group figured they had it made, that police were turning a block of Main Street over to them. By 9:30 P.M. officers of the mutual aid group were assembled at the city police station. Torigian briefed them on plan of action -- move south down Main Street in cars; walk the final half block; head the motorcycles south; no one goes north. Highway Patrol units would remain south of Olive and Main. Take no lip or no abuse; either they move out or they go to jail. A city fire engine was placed in position at the Penney Store; the police with night sticks and shotguns moved out, there were no sirens, just flashing red lights. The motorcycle clan massed in the middle of the street, some of them laid down. Torigian led the officers, talking through a bull horn. "You have five minutes to get out of town. Move." Defiance faded. Motorcycles started. There was some resistance, a half dozen were arrested. City firemen wet down the street and moved the hose in on the clan. One rider tried to go north; he was knocked off his motorcycle with the firehose water. Many of the riders headed south and kept going. Some stopped at the Sports Center. Police were sent to clean out Murry Park. Night spots were checked by police. Leaders of the three major clubs represented were taken to police headquarters for questioning, while remaining riders were held at the Sports Center. There were threats from the Hell's Angels that if their arrested members were not released they would come and get them. Torigian said the only way to get them was to bail them out. Officers with riot guns were ready if a jail break was attempted. Around 2: 30 A.M. some of the riders headed back toward Porterville. Torigian stopped them at the Main Street bridge. He told them to turn around and get out or they would be arrested and their motorcycles impounded, chained together six at a time, and drug off. By daylight a few scattered riders were still in the area. But the threat of violence and damage had been met and broken. A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a Common Enemy. -- Lord Halifax A less glaring example of the way police reports tend to over-dramatize the Angels is this account of a July Fourth 1964 run to Willits, a lumbering town of about thirty-five hundred in northern California. The official version follows an account from a San Francisco housewife, Mrs. Terry Whitright, whose husband is a native of Willits. The two versions are not contradictory, but the difference in point of view suggests that the Hell's Angels reality often depends on who describes it. Here is what Mrs. Whitright said in a letter dated March 29, 1965: Dear Hunter, The first time I had ever seen the Hell's Angels was on the 4th of July celebration in Willits, Calif. Willits is a very small town approximately 100 miles North of S.F. Every 4th of July they have a Frontier's Day Celebration, which includes a carnival, parade, dances, etc. We went up for it, and on Willits' Main Street, the Hell's Angels were lined up for a block and a half, coming in and out of a very populated bar. We (Lori, Barbie, Terry & I), were walking down the street and one man, wearing a black leather jacket, boots, dirty black Tee-shirt, etc., grabbed Lori by the hand, and talked to her for awhile, asking her name, & all the time being very gentle and very nice. This was around 2:30 in the afternoon. Later that evening we went to a elderly woman's house where we were staying while we were in town. She has a nephew by the name of Larry Jordon. He is a Wilackey Indian about 27 or 28. He is also a brother to Phil Jordon, a professional basketball player who played for New York Knickerbockers and also the Detroit Pistons. Well, anyhow, to get back to Larry Jordon; about 7:30 that evening a girl came to the door crying and shouting, "Eileen, Eileen, help me." I came to the door, and there stood Larry, blood pouring down the side of his neck, and from his temple. Eileen, his aunt, completely fell apart, so I had to take him to the bathroom and clean him up. He had been cut severely with either a razor blade or a knife by the Hell's Angels. Now, the reason never was established, why he was jumped by 6 or 7 Hell's Angels, but he's the type of guy who looks like he thinks he's better than anyone. But this isn't the way he is, he holds himself very aloof, never looks for trouble, but never backs away from trouble either. It's rather hard to explain, you'd have to know him, I think. If you know any Indians well, maybe you understand. Terry came back (he had been to the store) and after some talking and persuading he got Larry into the car and to the hospital. Of course everyone was drinking and they all wanted to get a bunch together and run the Hell's Angels out of town, but they didn't. One other acquaintance of ours by the name of Fritz Bacchie also got beat up by them. He went home to get a gun, and the local police threw him in jail for the nite. All in all, there wasn't too much damage done, but an air of uneasiness hung over the town, no one knew what would happen next, and no one could really relax and have any fun or enjoy themselves as they usually do on these celebrations on the 4th of July. The Attorney General told it this way: On July Fourth 1965, at the invitation of the same bartender who had previously worked at a Hell's Angels hangout in Rodeo, the Oakland Hell's Angels made a "run" to Willits. An advance group of 30 entered the city the previous day and by the afternoon of the Fourth there were some 120 motorcyclists and their female companions congregating at a local bar. In addition to those from Oakland, there were Angels from Vallejo and Richmond, as well as the "Mofo" club from San Francisco. Periodic fighting between the motorcyclists and local citizens broke out with beer bottles, belts made from motorcycle drive chains, and metal beer can openers being used as weapons. It was noted that some members apparently designated as sergeants at arms did not drink, but spent their time watching the group. When police were called, these people would pick up broken bottles, pour beer on any blood remaining on the floor, and move groups in and out of the bar to make police interrogation more difficult. When one local citizen took it upon himself to obtain a shotgun and returned to the bar where the group was congregated, he was arrested. Assistance was obtained from the California Highway Patrol and the Mendocino County Sheriff's office. The group was then instructed by the chief of police to move out of town to the city limits. After the move, some fights between Angels themselves occurred, but no local citizenry were involved. The Lynch-Newsweek account of the Porterville incident was hazy in detail, but brutally clear with its image of Hell's Angels swarming over the town and wreaking havoc on the terrified citizenry. By comparison, the eye-witness version was pale and slow ... like Mrs. Whitright's tale of the Willits incident, which lacked all the zap and tension of the colorful police version. There is not much argument about basic facts, but the disparities in emphasis and context are the difference between a headline and a filler in most big-city newspapers. Do the Hell's Angels actually "take over a town" -- as they're often accused of doing -- or merely clog a main street and a few local taverns with drunken noise, thus flaying the sensibilities of various locals? In a larger context, how much of a menace are the Hell's Angels? And how seriously do they threaten the lives and limbs of people in California ... or In Idaho, Arizona, Michigan, New York, Indiana, Colorado, New Hampshire, Maryland, Florida, Nevada, Canada and all the other places where rumors of their arrival put the populace in an uproar? _______________ Notes: 1. Time's circulation in its December 1964 report. 2. See page 38.
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