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

We maintain a checkpoint at Gorman on the Ridge Route to stop and discourage them when groups from northern Cali­fornia — where they are more active — try to move into Los Angeles. We have other checkpoints along the Pacific Coast Highway, especially near Malibu.

They have become a very fluid bunch. We have a list of twenty-five hundred [sic] names of members in the various clubs, but we don’t even bother to try to keep addresses. They move constantly. They change their addresses, they change their names, they even change the color of their hair.

In Fontana, heartland of the Berdoo chapter’s turf, the Angels don’t raise much hell in public and they are not often rousted. Four or five of them together, that’s all right, said Police Inspector Larry Wallace. A whole bunch of em, ten or twelve or more, and we bust it up.

In his private office Wallace keeps a souvenir to remind him­self of what the Angels mean to him. It’s a two-by-four framed reproduction of a Modigliani woman he confiscated out of an Angel pad. The lady is sleepy-looking, long-necked, with a prim little mouth. An Iron Cross has been scrawled over her head, and the word help is entwined in her hair. Around her neck hangs a Star of David with a swastika stamped into it, and there’s a bullet hole in her throat, with a drawing of the bullet emerging from the back of her head. Scattered here and there are Angel maxims of the day:

Dope Forever

Forever Loaded

Honest officer, had I known my

. . .health stood in jeprody I

. . .would never had lit one.

The Angels survived in Berdoo, but they never regained their status of the late fifties and early sixties. When fame finally beck­oned, they had little to offer but a hideous reputation and a shrewd press agent. Otto, president of the chapter, couldn’t get a handle anywhere. Sal Mineo was talking about a $3,000 fee to cover outlaw participation in a movie, but the Angels couldn’t muster a quorum: some were in jail, others had quit and many of the best specimens had gone north to Oakland — or God’s Country, as some of them called it — where Sonny Barger called the shots and there was no talk at all of the Hell’s Angels fading away. But Otto wanted some of the action too, and he still had a handful of loyalists to back him up. Between them they managed to pull off one last coup — a full-dress show for a writer from the Saturday Evening Post.

The Post article appeared in November 1965, and although the view it expressed was critical, the Angels were far more impressed with the quantity of such coverage than the quality. Its total effect on them was considerable. They had, after all, made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post — in color and along with Princess Margaret. They were bona-fide celebrities, with no worlds left to conquer. Their only gripe was that they weren’t get­ting rich. ( All these mothers are using us and making a scene, Barger told the Post reporter, and we ain’t getting a damn cent out of it. ) It was true that the Oakland Angels had been cut out of the Los Angeles bargaining, but they eventually got nearly $500 for the photos they sold to the Post, so it was difficult to view them as a wholly exploited minority.

We’re a gallant bunch of heroes,

We’ve been organized ten years,

We’re known about the city

As the Bowery Grenadiers. . .

We’re good old stock

With a Cobble rock,

And a length of gaspipe too.

We can lick the Brooklyn Guards

If they only show their cards,

We can run like the devil

When the ground is level

For about four hundred yards.

And the girls, the little dears,

They’re in love up to their ears,

When they see the style

And smell the hair oil

Of the Bowery Grenadiers.

— From The Bowery Grenadiers, words and music by John Allison*

* © Copyright 1957, Hollis Music, Inc., New York. Used by permission

My dealings with the Angels lasted about a year, and never really ended. I came to know some of them well and most of them well enough to relax with. But at first — due to numerous warn­ings — I was nervous about even drinking. I met a half dozen Frisco Angels one afternoon in the bar of a sleazy dive called the DePau Hotel, located in the south industrial section of the San Francisco waterfront and on the fringe of the Hunger’s Point ghetto. My contact was Frenchy* one of the smallest and shrewdest of the outlaws, who was then part owner of a transmission-repair garage called the Box Shop, across Evans Avenue from the degraded premises of the DePau. Frenchy is twenty-nine, a skilled mechanic and an ex-submariner in the Navy. He is five foot five and weighs 135 pounds, but the Angels say he is absolutely fearless and will fight anybody. His wife is a willowy, quiet young blonde whose taste runs more to folk music than to brawls and wild parties. Frenchy plays the guitar, the banjo and the tiple.