In retrospect, there was unanimous agreement that both the press and the police had done a spectacular job. There was massive publicity, a massive police presence and massive beer-drinking to justify all their concern. In a galaxy of nationwide riots and civic upheaval, Bass Lake was a star of peace. There were various explanations, some with ominous overtones. One of these came from a police official who attributed the lack of violence to the fact that there were almost as many officers as cyclists. He estimated the Bass Lake task force at more than a hundred, all working overtime.*
* Another interesting commentary on the Bass Lake spectacle came about a month after it was all over. In mid-August the Watts area of Los Angeles burst into massive rioting that lasted for four days. Thirty-four people were killed, hundreds wounded, and property damage amounted to more than $1,000,000. Yet Watts erupted without an inch of pre-riot press coverage, and the Los Angeles police were so unprepared that the National Guard had to be mobilized to bring things under control.
The Angels had their own explanation. They belittled the idea that the cops had simply outmuscled them. Not at all. By the fact of sheer numbers they had forced both the cops and the citizens to leave them alone. Both sides claimed their own show of force had averted a crisis, and to a certain extent they were both right. But I think the real explanation was more complex.
It was the strange ambivalence of the public sentiment that kept the Bass Lake confrontation so precariously balanced all weekend. It confused the Angels almost as badly as it did the police; they arrived to face a solid front of civic outrage. . . and then, for no reason they could hope to understand, they became the weekend’s featured act, the main show, wild and randy proof that Bass Lake still knew how to put on a real Fourth of July pageant. The threat of violence was converted to dramatic tension. It put a definite zang in the air. The mood of the crowd was euphoric, even erotic. There were incidents, but not many. . . and when it was all over, the most serious offense of the weekend was laid to a photographer from Los Angeles.
If nothing else, the weekend was a monument to free enterprise. It is hard to say what might have happened if the outlaws hadn’t been able to buy beer, but the moon-faced man at the tourist market was the visionary who turned the tide. After the first purchase, the Angels were welcome or at least tolerated everywhere except at Williams’ store — which even the vigilantes abandoned when it became apparent that the action was across the lake. Poor Williams was left holding the civic bag; he had taken a gutty stand, his image was all moxie. . . and on Monday night, when the Angels were finally gone, he had earned the leisure that enabled him to go out to the lakefront and gaze off in a proud, wistful way, like Gatsby, at the green neon lights of the taverns across the water, where the others were counting their money.
The Dope Cabala
and a Wall of Fire
19
They get to drinking and smoking pot and popping them pills in their mouths. . . hell, absolutely anything can happen. They get into a kind of frenzy, like animals, and they’ll tear you to bits, with chains, knives, beer-can openers, anything they can get their hands on.
— Fontana detective
Motorcycle outlaws have been accused of maintaining a dope network, a sinister web of sales and deliveries from one coast to the other. Federal narcotics agents say the Hell’s Angels shipped more than $1,000,000 worth of marijuana from southern California to New York City between 1962 and ’65, sending it by air freight in boxes labeled motorcycle parts. That is a lot of grass, even at street-corner retail prices. The network was exposed in late 1965, when, according to the Los Angeles Times, eight persons who identified themselves as members [of the Hell’s Angels] pleaded guilty in a San Diego court to charges of smuggling 150 pounds of marijuana from Mexico into the United States at San Ysidro.