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

The group seeks to exploit the so-called gangsters’ code of group loyalty and threats to persons who might appear in court against them. There have been instances of Hell’s Angels pun­ishing witnesses by physical assault. In the event the witness or victim is female, the women associates of the Angels seem willing to participate in threats to discourage testimony. A practical problem seen in various cases is that both victims and witnesses generally exist in the same environment as do the Hell’s Angels. While gang rapes and forced sex perversions may have occurred, the victims and witnesses frequently are not of the higher social strata and thus are vulnerable to the mores of saloon society. It is believed that the only feasible approach to the solution of this problem is for investigating officers to recognize it and take all steps possible to protect witnesses both before and after trial.

Not many members of saloon society will find consolation in these words. The Angels and their allies bear grudges much longer than police feel it’s necessary to protect witnesses, and cops have a tendency to lose interest in a prosecution witness about five minutes after the jury comes in with a verdict. No bar­tender who has caused the arrest of an Angel will ever feel any­thing but panic at the sound of motorcycle engines in the street and the clumping of leather boot heels coming toward his door. The Angels don’t willfully trace their enemies from one place to another, but they spend so much of their time in bars that they are likely to turn up thirsty almost anywhere. And once an enemy is located, the word goes out fast on the network. It takes only two or three Angels, and no more than five minutes, to wreck a bar and put a man in the hospital. Chances are, they won’t be arrested. . . but even if they are, the damage is already done.

An intended victim — such as the bar owner in South Gate, who suffered only the loss of a fence in the first attack — will always know that his place has a certain distinction: it is marked, and as long as the Hell’s Angels or Satan’s Slaves exist, there is a chance that some of them will come back to finish the job.

The outlaw hierarchy is always in flux, but the spirit is no dif­ferent now than in 1950, when the first Angel chapter was formed in the long shadow of the Booze Fighters. The root definition remains the same: a dangerous hoodlum on a big, fast motor­cycle. And California has been breeding them for years. Many are independents, indistinguishable from any Hell’s Angel except for the lettering on their backs — No Club or Lone Wolf or some­times just Fuck You. Perhaps five hundred or so, definitely less than a thousand, belong to clubs like the Gypsy Jokers, Nightriders, Comancheros, Presidents and Satan’s Slaves. About a hundred and fifty — as of 1966 — form the outlaw elite, the Hell’s Angels.

The only consistent difference between the Hell’s Angels and the other outlaw clubs is that the Angels are more extreme. Most of the others are part-time outlaws, but the Angels play the role seven days a week: they wear their colors at home, on the street and sometimes even to work; they ride their bikes to the neighborhood grocery for a quart of milk. An Angel without his colors feels naked and vulnerable — like a knight without his armor.

A Sacramento cop once asked a five-foot-five, 135-pound Angel, What’s the big attraction?

Nobody bugs me as long as I’m flying the colors, he replied.

The dividing line between outlaws and the square majority is subject to change at any moment, and many respectable clubs have queered their image overnight. All it takes is a noisy fracas, a police report and a little publicity. . . and suddenly they’re out­laws. In most cases this leads to the breakup of the club, with a majority of the members feeling hurt and scandalized that such a thing could have happened. But those few responsible for the trouble will no longer be welcome in respectable circles. Techni­cally, they become independents, but that term is a misnomer because any rider who applies it to himself is already an outlaw anyway. All he lacks is a club to join, and he will sooner or later find one. The motorcycle fraternity is very tight — on both sides of the law — and the most extreme viewpoints are represented by the American Motorcycle Association and the Hell’s Angels. There is no status in the middle, and people who are serious enough about motorcycles to join an AMA club will not take rejection lightly. Like converts to Communism or Catholicism, Hell’s Angels who were once AMA members take their outlaw role more seriously than the others.

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