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

After being around the Angels for a while I became so accus­tomed to seeing casts, bandages, slings and lumpy faces that I took them for granted and stopped asking what happened. The good bust-up stories were always common topics anyway, and the bad ones were as dull and predictable as the punchouts on any Late Show. Most of their fights are with outsiders who don’t realize what they’re getting into. People who know them are keenly aware of the all on one ethic, which is not covered by any statute of limitations. An Angel on his own turf is as secure as a Mafia runner in a tough Italian neighborhood.

In spite of this sinister immunity, they occasionally overextend themselves and get badly worked over by people who either don’t know the score or choose to disregard it. Even Barger, now in his eighth year as president of the Oakland chapter, admits to having had his nose broken, his jaw busted and his teeth punched out.

But a single bike accident can break a man worse than a dozen disastrous fights. Funny Sonny from Berdoo has a steel plate in his head, a steel rod in one arm, a plastic ankle and a deep scar on his face — all from crackups. He got his nickname when the other Angels decided the steel plate was having a strange effect on his brain. When the Berdoo Angels made a run to Santa Ana in October 1964, Funny Sonny was a big hit with the citizens. Large crowds gathered to hear his street-corner diatribes against cops, courts and the social structure in general. He was later jailed for a large number of outstanding traffic citations.

The Hoodlum Circus

and

The Statutory Rape of Bass Lake

9

How did the Angels grow to be such dis­liked hell-raisers? The answer is that it wasn’t easy. They worked overtime at being crafty, cruel and cowardly.

— True Detective magazine (August 1965)

I went through all that school and family jazz. It’s all crap. Boy, am I glad the Angels took me in! I don’t ever want to be anything but an Angel and that’s it!

— Reply to a question

By midsummer of 1965 the Hell’s Angels were already the subject of at least two scholarly theses, and no doubt there were others in the works. Yet all over California there were people whose real or imagined dealings with outlaw motorcyclists had been much too personal to allow for any abstract, sociological perspective on the menace. For every one who’d ever seen a Hell’s Angel in the flesh, there were half a thousand more who’d been frightened silly by the whooping of the news media. So it came as no surprise when a certain amount of public tension built up as the Fourth of July approached.

On the Friday night before the Fourth, I called the Box Shop. I’d never been on a holiday run, and since this one had the mak­ings of a real boomer, I decided to go along. Frenchy wanted to make sure I wasn’t planning to bring anyone with me before he confirmed the site: Yeah, it’s Bass Lake, he said. About two hundred miles east from here. I’m a little worried about going. There might be trouble. We’re hoping we can just get together and have a good time, but with all this publicity I’m afraid every cop in the state will be there.

There was good reason to expect a police presence: the press had been sounding the alarm for weeks.

On June 25 a United Press International bulletin out of Los Angeles said: COPS WORRY ABOUT HELL’S ANGELS JULY 4 BREAKOUT. It quoted Attorney General Lynch to the effect that his office had received various reports on what the Hell’s Angels had in mind for their annual midsummer picnic. (One of these reports stemmed from the futile attempt to sell coverage of a July Fourth rumble to The New York Times and other interested parties. The rumble rumor spread quickly and even got a plug on NBC’s Monitor newscasts from New York.)

Then, in late June, a motorcycle riot in Laconia, New Hamp­shire, made front-page news all over the nation. The California press gave it prominent play because the mayor of Laconia blamed the whole thing on the Hell’s Angels. The July 2 issue of Life carried a big Laconia story, with pictures of a burning car, National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets, and a collection of confiscated weapons including hatchets, crowbars, machetes, brass knuckles, chains and bullwhips. Some fifteen thousand motorcyclists were said to have run wild in the little New En­gland resort, battling police and setting fire to various buildings while the Hell’s Angels egged them on. The warning to Cali­fornia was clear. If a handful of Hell’s Angels could cause that much trouble three thousand miles from home, it was dreadful to contemplate what the whole clan might do in their own West Coast backyard.