The outlaws are very comfortable with their inaccessibility. It saves them a lot of trouble with bill collectors, revenge seekers and routine police harassment. They are as insulated from society as they want to be, but they have no trouble locating each other. When Sonny flies down to Los Angeles, Otto meets him at the airport. When Terry goes to Fresno, he quickly locates the chapter president, Ray — who exists in some kind of mysterious limbo and can only be found by means of a secret phone number, which changes constantly. The Oakland Angels find it convenient to use Barger’s number, checking now and then for messages. Some use various saloons where they are well known. An Angel who wants to be reached will make an appointment either to meet somewhere or to be at a certain phone at a designated time.
One night I tried to arrange a contact with a young Angel named Rodger, a one-time disk jockey. It proved to be impossible. He had no idea where he might be from one day to the next. They don’t call me Rodger the Lodger for nothing, he said. I just make it wherever I can. It’s all the same. Once you start worrying about it, you get hung up — and that’s the end, man, you’re finished. If he’d been killed that night he’d have left no footprints in life, no evidence and no personal effects but his bike — which the others would have raffled off immediately. Hell’s Angels don’t find it necessary to leave wills, and their deaths don’t require much paperwork. . . A driver’s license expires, a police record goes into the dead file, a motorcycle changes hands and usually a few personal cards will be taken out of wallets and dropped into wastebaskets.
Because of their gypsy style of life, their network has to be functional. A lost message can lead to serious trouble: an Angel who might have fled will be arrested; a freshly stolen bike will never reach the buyer; a pound of marijuana might miss a crucial connection; or at the very least, a whole chapter will never get word of a run or a big party.
The destination of a run is kept secret as long as possible — hopefully, to keep the cops guessing. The chapter presidents will figure it out by long-distance telephone, then each will tell his people the night before the run, either at a meeting or by putting the word with a handful of bartenders, waitresses and plugged-in chicks who are known contacts. The system is highly efficient, but it has never been leakproof, and by 1966 the Angels had decided that the only hope was to keep the destination a secret until the run was actually under way. Barger tried it once, but the police were able to track the outlaws by radioing ahead from one point to another. Radio tracking is only a device to give the cops an edge, a sense of confidence and control. Which it does, as long as no lapses occur. . . but it is safe to predict that on one of these crowded holidays a convoy of Angels is going to disappear like a blip shooting off the edge of a radar screen. All it will take is one of those rare gigs the outlaws are forever seeking: a ranch or big farm with a friendly owner, a piece of rural turf beyond the reach of the fuzz, where they can all get drunk and naked and fall on each other like goats in the rut, until they all pass out from exhaustion.
It would be worth buying a police radio, just to hear the panic:
Group of eighty just passed through Sacramento, going north on U.S. Fifty, no violence, thought to be headed for Lake Tahoe area. . . Fifty miles north, in Placerville, the police chief gives his men a pep talk and deploys them with shotguns on both sides of the highway, south of the city limits. Two hours later they are still waiting and the dispatcher in Sacramento relays an impatient demand for a report on Placerville’s handling of the crisis. The chief nervously reports no contact and asks if his restless troops can go home and enjoy the holiday.