The convicted smugglers had little if anything to do with the Angels, despite their alleged claims to membership. Three of the eight were from New York, and of the five from Los Angeles two were girls. That left only three who could possibly have been Angels, but the outlaws I talked to said they’d never heard of them. Perhaps they lied, but I doubt it; normally they are proud to be connected with anything that makes headlines. Which is beside the point, really, because 150 pounds of pot is only a fraction of what crosses the Mexican border every week despite the sharp-eyed zeal of U.S. customs officials. These gentlemen hate dope like they hate sin; and when they’re after it they know who to grab: beatnik perverts and hairy sandal freaks. People with beards are shaken down thoroughly. I have crossed the border at Tijuana more than a dozen times, but the only time I was stopped and searched was after a week of skin-diving off the Baja California when three of us tried to get back into the States with a week’s growth of hair on our faces. At the border we were asked the standard questions, gave the standard replies and were instantly seized. The customs agents took our truck, full of camping and Scuba gear, into a special shed and picked over it for an hour and a half. They found several bottles of liquor but no dope. They couldn’t seem to believe it. They kept feeling the sleeping bags and groping under the chassis. Finally they let us go with a warning to be more careful in the future.
Meanwhile, out on the highway, the big-volume dope runners were being waved through with a smile. They were wearing neckties and business suits, driving late-model rent-a-cars with electric-razor attachments. I didn’t notice any outlaw motorcyclists roaring up to the boarder, but if any had appeared they’d have been jerked into the shed for a thorough shake-down. People who make a living smuggling narcotics into the States operate on the same principle as bad-check artists, who do not as a rule wear beards, earrings and swastikas.
Because of the headwaiter mentality that prevails among customs officials, no commercial shipper of marijuana or anything else illegal would make the mistake of using Hell’s Angels for runners. It would be like sending a car up to the border with Opium Express painted in red letters on both sides. If the God of the righteous could swoop down one night and char every Hell’s Angel to ashes, marijuana traffic on the Mexican border would hardly be fazed. In February 1966 three men in a stolen truck passed through customs with more than a half ton of marijuana — 1,050 pounds in one load. They got it all the way to Los Angeles, where they were arrested several days later on an anonymous tip — which netted the tipster close to $100,000 in reward money.
The Angels are too obvious for serious drug traffic. They don’t even have enough capital to function as middlemen, so they end up buying most of their stuff in small lots at high prices. Three or four of them will nurse a joint until it is so short they have to hold it with alligator clips — which many outlaws carry for exactly this purpose. People with real access to marijuana can afford to smoke it in big pipes and hookahs. . . and if they have a serious commercial interest in the stuff they rarely smoke it at all except behind locked doors. A taste for pot is not part of the formula for success in a profit-oriented society. If Horatio Alger had been born near a field of locoweed his story might have been a lot different. He would have gone on unemployment and spent most of his time just standing around smiling at things, brushing off the protests of his friends and benefactors, saying, Don’t bug me, baby — you’ll never know. *
* The younger Angels — especially those who joined after the great publicity rash — are far more involved with the drug underground than the veterans. They are less cautious about the risks in selling and handling. The Angels have always been consumers, but in 1966 they were drifting more toward a more businesslike involvement — such as selling junk in large quantities.