* There was a basic difference between the kind of pressure the Angels got in Oakland and the kind they felt elsewhere. In Oakland it was not political, not the result of any high-level pressure or policy decision — but more of a personal thing, like arm-wrestling. Barger and his people get along pretty well with the cops. In most cases, and with a few subtle differences, they operate on the same motional frequency. Both the cops and the Angels deny this. The very suggestion of a psychic compatibility will be denounced — by both groups — as a form of Communist slander. But the fact of the thing is obvious to anyone who has ever seen a routine confrontation or sat in on a friendly police check at one of the Angel bars. Apart, they curse each other savagely, and the brittle truce is often jangled by high-speed chases and brief, violent clashes that rarely make the papers. Yet behind the sound and fury, they are both playing the same game, and usually by the same rules.
The heat was so obvious that even respectable motorcyclists were complaining of undue police harassment. The cops denied it officially, but shortly before Christmas of that year a San Francisco policeman told a reporter, We’re going to get these guys. It’s war.
Who do you mean? asked the reporter.
You know who I mean, the policeman said. The Hell’s Angels, those motorcycle hoods.
You mean everybody on a motorcycle? said the reporter.
The innocent will have to suffer along with the guilty, the policeman replied.
When I finished the story, the reporter recalls, I showed it to a cop I ran into on the street outside the Hall of Justice. He laughed and called another cop over. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘—— stepped on his prick again.’
The only significant press breakthrough during this crackdown winter of 1964-65 was a tongue-in-cheek series in the San Francisco Chronicle, based on some Angel parties at the Frisco chapter’s new clubhouse — which was raided and closed down almost immediately after the series appeared. Meanwhile, the Oakland Angels fattened steadily on the tide of refugees. From Berdoo, Hayward, Sacramento, the Angels were moving into the few remaining sanctuaries. By December, Barger’s chapter was so swollen and starved for enemies that they began crossing the bridge and attacking the Frisco Angels. Barger felt that Frisco, by allowing the membership to shrink to eleven, had so dishonored the Hell’s Angels’ tradition that they should forfeit their colors. Accordingly, he declared the Frisco charter void and sent his people over to collect the jackets. The Frisco Angels refused, but they were badly unnerved by the mad-dog raids from Oakland. Man, we’d be sitting over there in the bar, said one, just coolin it around the pool table with a few beers — and all of a goddamn sudden the door would bust open and there they’d be, chains and all.
We finally got back at em, though. We went over to their hangout and set fire to one of their bikes. You should of seen it — we burned it right in the middle of the street, man, then we went into their pad and wiped em out. What a blast! Man, I tell you we had some real beefs.
That was in December. Two more quiet months followed .. . and then came the Attorney General’s report, coast-to-coast infamy and a raft of new possibilities. The whole scene changed in a flash. One day they were a gang of bums, scratching for any hard dollar. . . and twenty-four hours later they were dealing with reporters, photographers, free-lance writers and all kinds of showbiz hustlers talking big money. By the middle of 1965 they were firmly established as all-American bogeymen.
Besides appearing in hundreds of wire-serviced newspapers and a half dozen magazines, they posed for television cameramen and answered questions on radio call-in shows. They issued statements to the press, appeared at various rallies and bargained with Hollywood narks and magazine editors. They were sought out by mystics and poets, cheered on by student rebels and invited to parties given by liberals and intellectuals. The whole thing was very weird, and it had a profound effect in the handful of Angels still wearing the colors. They developed a prima-donna complex, demanding cash contributions (to confound the Internal Revenue Service) in return for photos and interviews. The New York Times was hard hit by these developments, and a dispatch from Los Angeles on July 2, 1965, said: A man representing himself as a ‘public relations man’ for. . . [the Hell’s Angels] has approached news media offering to sell photographic coverage of this weekend’s ‘rumble’ for sums ranging from $500 to $1,000. He also offered to arrange interviews with club members for $100 apiece, or more if pictures were taken. The representative told reporters it would be ‘dangerous’ to go to the San Bernardino bar where the group regularly congregates without paying the money for ‘protection.’ One magazine, he said, paid $1,000 for permission to have a photographer accompany the group this weekend.