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.*
* Time’s circulation in its December 1964 report.
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.
— A. J. Liebling
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.