This immediately established a motive and a prime suspect — the man with the cyst. It was pressing on the tail of his medulla, causing great pain. After enduring it as long as possible he lost control of himself and stabbed a passing Marine. Then the whole pack ran aimlessly through the Village for several hours, like a family of hyenas, until they found themselves in front of a hospital, which they decided to enter and have done with the fiendish cyst that had caused all the trouble in the first place.
Police quickly took them into custody, said the News, and found knives, they [the police] said, on all four. Two were identified as being involved in the stabbing, and all were held on weapons charges. (None of the four had motorcycles, and except for the lettering on their backs they looked like a bowling team from the Bronx.)
Then came the shocker: Brazenly the four announced they had come to town to ‘shake up New York,’ and that 15 to 24 other Angels were also roaming around the city.
No doubt the others went underground, for they were never mentioned again in the Terror on Wheels story or anywhere else. After placing The Terror in Manhattan, the News gave a dull summation of Time and Newsweek rumors, selections from the Lynch report and old newspaper clippings. The article made it clear, however, that fifteen to twenty-four Hell’s Angels were loose somewhere in Manhattan. And maybe they were. With a little luck they might have located one of the half dozen opium dens that specialize in cyst reduction. If the News had put two and two together they would have known who caused the great power blackout that autumn. It was a Hell’s Angels plot to take over the subway system and triple the fares. After weeks of intricate sabotage and recircuiting the power rails, the outlaws were attempting a final tie-off under the Yale Club when one of their number, afflicted with bad hives, was overcome by abulia and wired the main subway voltage to the root of the Empire State Building’s lightning rod. The resulting explosion killed them all, but their bones were carried off by water rats and there was no other evidence. As usual, the Angels beat the rap. And the News missed a hell of a story.
HELL’S ANGELS FACE PRISON FOR
N.H. CYCLE RAMPAGE
— New York Post (June 1965)
The New York power failure was not the first time the Hell’s Angels have confounded the forces of decency and got off scot-free. They are incredibly devious. Law enforcement officers have compared their guile to that of the snipe, a wily beast that many have seen but few have ever trapped. This is because the snipe has the ability to transform himself, when facing capture, into something entirely different. The only other animals capable of this are the werewolf and the Hell’s Angel, which have many traits in common. The physical resemblance is obvious, but far more important is the transmogrification factor, the strange ability to alter their own physical structure, and hence disappear. The Hell’s Angels are very close-mouthed about this, but it is a well-known fact among public officials.
One of the best examples of how it can work showed up in the Laconia, New Hampshire, motorcycle riot in June of 1965, which got more publicity than any other single event in the history of motorcycling. It was front page from coast to coast. The New York Times headline said: CYCLIST’ RIOT QUELLED, NEW HAMPSHIRE TOWN CLEANS UP. In San Francisco the Examiner put a little more zip to it: HELL’S ANGELS TERROR AT N.H. CYCLE RACES — COPS, GUARD SLUG RIOTERS. The number of terrorists ranged from five thousand in the New York Post to twenty-five thousand in the National Observer, but twenty thousand more or less didn’t seem to make much difference. Everybody agreed it was a wild and woolly bash. The mayor of the stricken hamlet, a thirty-five-year-old patriot named Peter Lessard, blamed the whole thing on the Hell’s Angels. He said they had planned it in advance and trained in Mexico for the riot. On Monday, two days after the melee, Laconia’s leading citizens gathered in the Tavern Hotel to hear their mayor explain what had happened. According to Lessard and Safety Commissioner Robert Rhodes, the Hell’s Angels threw a ring around the whole area. They wouldn’t let anybody get away. The thing blew up in our faces in minutes. There was some marijuana around too. Are the Communists behind it?