Life. . . 34
National Observer. . . 34
New York Daily News. . . more than 100
New York Post. . . at least 40
No doubt there is an explanation for this disparity, but since it never emerged, it was not much consolation to anyone who had to make do with the public prints. I was not surprised that the eight articles gave eight different viewpoints on the riot, because no reporter can be on every scene and they get their information from different people. But it would have been reassuring to find a majority agreement on something as basic as the number of arrests; it would have made the rest of the information easier to live with.
Seven weeks after the riot, on August 11, the Associated Press finally put the correct figure on its wire, but by that time nobody gave a damn, and as far as I know it was never printed. Laconia District Court records show thirty-two arrests. There were no Hell’s Angels, no Californians and no person from west of the Adirondacks. The clerk of the court listed: Eleven respondents from Massachusetts, ten from Connecticut, four from New York, three from Canada, three from New Jersey and one from New Hampshire.
Of these, seven drew one-year sentences in the state House of Correction and one got six months. There were ten fines, ranging from $25 to $500. Charges against twelve of the accused were dropped, one was found innocent, and eleven of those found guilty made appeals.
Mayor Lessard was kind enough to have the court send me these figures. They came as a mild surprise, because during our telephone chat the mayor had said that thirty-three rioters had been fined and sentenced and that the bad ones with previous records got thousand-dollar fines and a year in jail.
He also sent me a packet of photographs taken during the riot, but none showed any sign of the Hell’s Angels. Most pictured teen-age boys wearing bright sweaters, chinos and loafers. They were faring badly at the hands of riot troopers. The mayor also included photos of himself and the police chief, taken with a Polaroid camera, but they quickly turned yellow and faded away.
We talked on the phone for about an hour one Thursday morning. I was so fascinated that I couldn’t hang up. The mayor spoke in a very exotic way. It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.
I expected a denial of the strange intelligence attributed to him by The New York Times. . . but no, he was proud of his insights and eager to be quoted further. I had no sooner mentioned the Hell’s Angels than he began to ramble about ringleaders, Communists and narcotics. He was privy to information that four Hell’s Angels had been arrested in Connecticut, en route to Laconia with a carload of drugs, hand weapons and a sawed-off shotgun. He was not sure whether these four had trained south of the border. I’d rather not say where we got the information that they trained in Mexico, he said. It was confidential. It came in the mail. But I turned it over to the FBI right away. They’re following up on the Communist angle. We got some pictures of them wearing swastikas. *
* No swastikas were visible in any of the photos he sent me, which presumably were the most convincing he could round up.
When I asked him how many Hell’s Angels had been arrested he said none, or none that admitted it anyway. Not even those four bums in Connecticut would admit to being Angels. At one point somebody in Laconia had seen a car with California plates, but it too had disappeared.
About halfway through our talk I got a strong whiff of the transmogrification factor, but I was hardly prepared for the mayor’s special fillip on it. There were plenty of Hell’s Angels at the riot, but they escaped, he explained, behind a wall of fire. While he elaborated on this I checked my calender to make sure I hadn’t lost track of the days. If it was Sunday, perhaps he had just come back from church in a high, biblical state of mind. At any moment I expected to hear that the Angels had driven their motorcycles straight into the sea, which had rolled back to let them pass. But no, it wasn’t like that. The mayor was not loath to give details of the escape; he wanted law enforcement agencies everywhere to be warned of the Angels’ methods. Knowledge is power, he opined.
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