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

The report was a combination of truth and absurdity, com­pounded by the fact that the Times’ Los Angeles correspondent had by this time developed a serious aversion to anything con­nected with the Hell’s Angels. His reasons were excellent; they had threatened him with a beating if he attempted to get a story on the Angels without first contributing to the club’s coffers. No journalist likes to be held up for cash payoffs in the line of duty, and the normal reaction — or at least the mythical reaction — is a quick decision to clamp down on the story like a bulldog and write it at all costs.

The Times’ reaction was more subtle. They tried to de-emphasize the Angels, hoping they would go away. Which is exactly the opposite of what happened. The story was already snowballing, and the monsters which the Times had helped to create came back, with a press agent, to haunt them. Here was a handful of hoodlums, without status even in San Bernardino, demanding $1,000 from any journalist who wanted to hang around them for a single weekend. Most of the Angels saw the humor in it, but even at that stage of the game, there were a few who felt they were asking a fair price for their act. . . and their faith was justi­fied when one magazine came through with either $1,000 (according to the Times) or $1,200 (according to the Angels). The question of this contribution is very touchy, for even if the editors would admit such a payoff, the writer and/or photogra­pher who required it would do everything possible to avoid being labeled as one who has to buy his stories. The Angels talked freely about the money at first, but later denied it, after Sonny Barger passed the word that such talk could get them in tax trouble. It is a fact, however, that a Life-assigned photogra­pher spent quite a bit of time with the Angels, working on a photo feature that was never published.

An interesting sidelight on the demand for protection money is that the Angels got the idea from a man who makes more than $100,000 a year by capitalizing on various fads. This is the public relations man referred to by the Times. His involvement with the Angels began in Berdoo with the dragster set, but he was never their public relations man — only a noisy contact, a phone number and an unhired hustler with a penchant for bugging the press. (By the summer of 1965 he was marketing Hell’s Angels Fan Club T-shirts, which sold fairly well until the Angels announced they would burn every one they saw, even if they had to rip them off people’s backs.)

In the long run he queered the Berdoo Angels’ whole stance by demanding big money from anybody who wanted to see them. And because nobody (except one magazine ) was willing to pay, and also because nobody called his bluff, he was able to pass for almost half a year as the well-connected front man for a thing that had long since gone down the tube. The Berdoo Angels made the classic Dick Nixon mistake of peaking too early. Publicity from the Monterey rape and two subsequent local brawls had brought such relentless heat that those few who insisted on wearing the colors were forced to act more like refugees than out­laws, and the chapter’s reputation withered accordingly. By the middle of August 1965 — while the action in Oakland was booming — the Los Angeles Times assayed the Berdoo situation: HELL’S ANGELS FADE IN VALLEY, POLICE PRESSURE TAMES OUTLAW CLUBS. The lead paragraph said, Whatever outlaw motorcyclists there are in the [San Fernando] Valley have filtered underground, police say. They are lying low and causing very little trouble and no uproar.

If a couple of them stick their heads up and appear on the streets now, said a police sergeant, the first patrol car that sees them stops them for questioning. If we can’t find anything else, we can almost always learn that they have traffic warrants out­standing against them. That’s enough to get them off the street, and it really bugs them.*

* This tactic quickly became popular with police in other parts of the state and in situa­tions having nothing to do with the Hell’s Angels. It is an especially effective means of crowd control and by the middle of 1966 was standard procedure for dealing with peace marchers in Berkeley. Police began seizing people at random and running radio checks on their driving records. Moments later the word would come back from headquarters, and if the person being detained had even one unpaid traffic or parking citation he would be taken off the street — a police euphemism meaning put in jail.