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

The Satan’s Slaves are still a power in outlaw circles, but they have lost their slashing style of the early 1960’s* Other outlaws say the Slaves have never recovered from the loss of Smackey Jack, their legendary president, who had so much class that even the Angels held him slightly in awe. Smackey Jack stories still circulate whenever the clan gets together. I first heard about him from an easygoing Sacramento Angel named Norbet:

* The Slaves returned to prominence with a vengeance in the summer of 1966, when thirty of them ransacked an apartment house in Van Nuys, a suburb of Los Angeles. On the morning of Saturday, August 6, three Slaves were served with eviction notices and forced to leave an apartment they had occupied for only a week. On Saturday night the three evictees returned to the building with a noisy raiding party and wreaked havoc for several hours. The terrified occupants locked their doors while the outlaws smashed sixteen win­dows and threw thirty pieces of furniture into the swimming pool. The Slaves threatened their ex-neighbors with further attacks if anyone called the police — which somebody finally did, but not until the motorcyclists had roared off into the night, seeking new nadirs, etc.

Man, that Jack was outta sight. Sometimes he’d run wild for three or four days on pills and wine. He carried a pair of rusty pliers around with him and we’d sic him on strange broads. Man, he’d jerk em down on the ground and start pullin their teeth out with those goddamn pliers. I was with him in a place one time when the waitress wouldn’t give us any coffee. Jack climbed right over the counter and took out three of her front teeth with his pliers. Some of the things he did would turn your stomach. Once he pulled out one of his own teeth in a bar. People couldn’t believe it. A lot of em ran out when they saw he was serious. When he finally got the thing out, he laid it down on the bar and asked if he could trade it for a drink. He was spittin blood on the floor, but the bartender was too shook up to say anything.

Smackey Jack’s turbulent three-year reign came to an end in 1964. Few of the outlaws seem to know what happened to him. I heard he took a real bad fall, said one. He pushed his luck about as hard as a guy could. Motorcycle outlaws are reluctant to talk seriously about former buddies who came to a bad end; the impli­cations are too depressing. Smackey Jack, with his penchant for free-lance dentistry, was not the type to retire peacefully. What­ever happened — whether he was jailed, killed or forced to flee anonymously — he exists in outlaw legend as a rollicking, unpre­dictable monster who always prevailed. His loss was a demoral­izing blow to the Satan’s Slaves, whose spirit was already faltering under continued police pressure. By the end of 1964 the club was on the verge of disbanding.

The Slaves, along with several of the Hell’s Angels chapters, were saved from extinction by the Lynch report and the nation­wide infamy that followed. It gave the outlaws something to live up to, but they could never make it big unless they stopped fighting among themselves. Barger was among the first to realize this, and the other clubs were not far behind. Their long struggle for equality was suddenly rendered futile. The publicity break­through gave the Angels such prestige that the other clubs had no choice but to get on the bandwagon or perish. The process of consolidation took most of 1965, and it was only in the first stages at the time of the Bass Lake Run. Of the dozen or so func­tioning outlaw clubs in the state, only the Jokers and the Slaves felt confident enough to show up at Bass Lake in significant strength. Individual Angel chapters might have lost their supremacy, but when all of them got together, there was no ques­tion about who had the action. All things considered, it was a ner­vous time for the Slaves to show up with their women, who tend toward a wispy, blondish prettiness — a tempting sight for any Hell’s Angel brooding drunkenly on the whys and wherefores of an unjust sex ratio.