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

Reno is in a different category. For many years the Angels made their July Fourth Run to Reno, but after a dozen Angels destroyed a tavern in 1960, the Biggest Little City in the World passed a law making it illegal for more than two motorcyclists to ride together inside the city limits. There are no signs proclaiming this along the many approaches to town, and the law would surely be knocked down in court if a trio of touring cyclists from the East was ever clapped in jail for simply riding together through the city, but that isn’t likely. The law was designed to give Reno police a legal weapon against the Hell’s Angels. And even the Angels could probably beat it in court if any one of them were willing to (1) spend a holiday weekend in jail, (2) post a mini­mum of $100 in bail money, (3) return to Reno several weeks later, with a lawyer, to plead not guilty and be advised of a trial date, (4) make another trip to Reno, again with a lawyer, to argue the case in court, and (5) in all likelihood return for a third appearance in either Reno or nearby Carson City to appeal the conviction in a higher court, and (6) come up with enough money to pay a lawyer for the time and effort it would take to prepare a brief with enough impact to convince a Nevada state court that one of Reno’s local statutes is unconstitutional, irrational and discriminatory.*

* The Angels understand the popular bias against them well enough to avoid court appear­ances whenever possible. An outlaw faced with a jury trial knows he will have to chop off his hair, shave his beard and borrow a necktie somewhere. Experience has taught them to play it straight in court. A Frisco Angel once beat an assault charge because the arresting officer couldn’t identify him at the trial. Without his hair and his colors, he looked like ten thousand other people.

Justice is not cheap in this country, and people who insist on it are usually either desperate or possessed by some private deter­mination bordering on monomania. The Hell’s Angels are not of this persuasion — not even when it means giving up the pleasures of Reno. They try to avoid places where the odds are stacked against them, legally or otherwise. . . and they are usually pretty shrewd about knowing what the odds really are. Runs are pri­marily parties, not war games, and small-town jails are dull.

Consider the alternatives available to a chief of police in a remote town of twenty thousand — with a police force of twenty-five men — when he gets word that anywhere from three hundred to five hundred motorcycle outlaws are due to converge on him in a matter of hours. The worst thing he’s had to contend with in nine years was a bank holdup involving an exchange of a dozen shots with two hoods from Los Angeles. But that was a long time ago, and since then his job has been placid. . . highway accidents, teen-age rowdies and weekend drunk fights in some of the local bars. Nothing in his experience has prepared him to face an army of half-human hoodlums, a modern-day James gang. . . infamous thugs who would just as soon stomp on a cop as they would on a toad, and once they get out of hand, the only way to handle them is with brute force.

Even if he has emergency legal powers and a jail big enough to hold them all, there is still the problem of forcing them into sub­mission. Two of his men are sick, two are on vacation, so that leaves twenty-one. He jots down some figures on a desk pad: twenty-one men, each with a pump-action shotgun (five shots) and a revolver (six shots), gives him an outside chance, in a care­fully staged ambush, of taking out two hundred of the enemy — leaving hundreds more suddenly gone wild with fear and rage. They could do incredible damage, and an ambush is out of the question anyway because of the nightmarish publicity. What would the Governor of the nation’s most progressive state have to say about the deliberate massacre of two hundred citizens by a backwoods police force on Independence Day?