Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

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 girl friends 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: