Hell’s Angels. A Strange and Terrible. Saga by Hunter S. Thompson

All in all, there wasn’t too much damage done, but an air of uneasiness hung over the town, no one knew what would happen next, and no one could really relax and have any fun or enjoy them­selves as they usually do on these celebrations on the 4th of July.

The Attorney General told it this way:

On July Fourth 1965, at the invitation of the same bartender who had previously worked at a Hell’s Angels hangout in Rodeo, the Oakland Hell’s Angels made a run to Willits. An advance group of 30 entered the city the previous day and by the afternoon of the Fourth there were some 120 motorcyclists and their female com­panions congregating at a local bar. In addition to those from Oak­land, there were Angels from Vallejo and Richmond, as well as the Mofo club from San Francisco. Periodic fighting between the motorcyclists and local citizens broke out with beer bottles, belts made from motorcycle drive chains, and metal beer can openers being used as weapons. It was noted that some members apparently designated as sergeants at arms did not drink, but spent their time watching the group. When police were called, these people would pick up broken bottles, pour beer on any blood remaining on the floor, and move groups in and out of the bar to make police interro­gation more difficult. When one local citizen took it upon himself to obtain a shotgun and returned to the bar where the group was congregated, he was arrested. Assistance was obtained from the California Highway Patrol and the Mendocino County Sheriffs office. The group was then instructed by the chief of police to move out of town to the city limits. After the move, some fights between Angels themselves occurred, but no local citizenry were involved.

The Lynch-Newsweek account of the Porterville incident was hazy in detail, but brutally clear with its image of Hell’s Angels swarming over the town and wreaking havoc on the terrified citi­zenry. By comparison, the eyewitness version was pale and slow. .. like Mrs. Whitright’s tale of the Willits incident, which lacked all the zap and tension of the colorful police version. There is not much argument about basic facts, but the disparities in emphasis and context are the difference between a headline and a filler in most big-city newspapers. Do the Hell’s Angels actually take over a town — as they’re often accused of doing — or merely clog a main street and a few local taverns with drunken noise, thus flaying the sensibilities of various locals?

In a larger context, how much of a menace are the Hell’s Angels? And how seriously do they threaten the lives and limbs of people in California. . . or in Idaho, Arizona, Michigan, New York, Indiana, Colorado, New Hampshire, Maryland, Florida, Nevada, Canada and all the other places where rumors of their arrival put the populace in an uproar?

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Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

— Thomas Jefferson

According to Attorney General Lynch’s own figures, Cali­fornia’s overall crime picture makes the Angels look like a gang of petty jack-rollers. The police counted 463 Hell’s Angels: 205 around Los Angeles, 233 in the San Francisco-Oakland area, and the rest scattered widely around the state. These woeful departures from reality made it hard to accept their other statistics. The dubious package cited Hell’s Angel convictions on 1,023 misde­meanor counts and 151 felonies — primarily vehicle theft, bur­glary and assault. This was for all years and all alleged members, including many long since retired.

California’s overall figures for 1963 showed 1,116 homicides, 12,448 aggravated assaults, 6,257 sex offenses and 24,532 bur­glaries. In 1962 the state listed 4,121 traffic deaths, up from 3,839 in 1961. Drug-arrest figures for 1964 showed a 101 percent increase in juvenile marijuana arrests over 1963, and a 1965 back-page story in the San Francisco Examiner said, The vene­real disease rate among [the city’s] teenagers from 15 to 19 has more than doubled in the past four years. Even allowing for the annual population jump, juvenile arrests in all categories are rising by 10 percent or more each year. Late in 1965 Governor Edmund Pat Brown, a Democrat, was berated by Republicans in the Legislature for remaining aloof to the threat of the rising crime rate, which they said had jumped 70 percent during his seven years in office.