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Dead Man Running
By Ross Coulthart, Duncan McNab Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2008 Ross Coulthart and Duncan McNab
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74175-463-6
CHAPTER 1
ENTER THE ONE-PERCENTERS
The trouble was caused by the one percent deviant that tarnished the public image of both motorcycles and motorcyclists.
American Motorcyclist Association
The two wheels hit the road in 1885 in Stuttgart, Germany, when Gottlieb Daimler fired up the world's first petrol-engined motorcycle. Just like the four-wheel car designed by fellow German Karl Benz, the concept took off. Motorcycles were the natural successor to the horse, offering low-cost transport, freedom and mobility.
In 1903, the year the Wright Brothers took to the sky in North Carolina's Kill Devil Hills, the Ford Motor Company was incorporated, and William Harley and brothers Arthur and Walter Davidson formed the Harley-Davidson Motor Cycle Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the Federation of American Cyclists was born. The club first met in Brooklyn, New York. The club lasted only until 1924, when it was replaced by the American Motorcyclist Association (AMA). From its earliest days the association was committed to fostering what these days we'd call a 'positive image' of motorcyclists.
One feature of the federation that made its way into the activities of the American Motorcycle Association was the 'gypsy' tours. In its issue of 19 March 1925, Motorcycle & Bicycle reported on the rapidly growing popularity of the tours. It said, 'the Gypsy Tour idea originated eight or nine years ago, the object being to set a certain date for an outing where riders, dealers and everyone interested in motorcycles would tour to some convenient spot for a day's sport and a real old fashioned good time.'
On the fourth of July weekend of 1947, the second fourth of July America celebrated in the peace following World War II, around four thousand bike enthusiasts and gypsy tourists gathered in Hollister, California. The positive public image of motorcyclists got a terrible battering that weekend. The 'real old fashioned good time' was reminiscent not of a picnic, but of a saloon brawl from a B-grade Hollywood western. Lots of boozing, reckless driving and brawling put the quiet seat of San Benito County on the national map. Chief instigators of the problem came from a group of bikers known as the 'Boozefighters', who found their entertainment by hurling empty liquor bottles at anyone within range. They were joined in the mayhem by the equally stylishly named 'Pissed Off Bastards'. Thanks to Life magazine, the town that was previously best known for straddling a branch of the notorious San Andreas Fault was now known around the United States as the scene of the 'Hollister Riot'.
By the end of that weekend the toll was three people seriously hurt, sixty suffering various scrapes, bruises and breaks, and fifty arrested. One local sheriff described it as simply 'a hell of a mess'. On the cover of Life was a member of the Boozefighters. The gentleman was seated astride his bike, which was mounted on a pile of shattered bottles. A bottle of booze was in each of his outflung fists. The good public relations of the American Motorcyclist Association was in tatters.
They were horrified, and quickly held a press conference. Their spokesman tried to quell the story, noting, 'The trouble was caused by the one percent deviant that tarnished the public image of both motorcycles and motorcyclists'. Many years later, the AMA would try again, saying, 'We condemn them. They'd be condemned if they rode horses, mules, surfboards, bicycles or skateboards. Regretfully, they picked motorcycles.' The bike gangs that were soon to make their impact on the scene rather liked the notion of being a 'one-percenter' and clutched it to their leather-clad bosoms. Marlon Brando's swaggering, leather-jacketed, Triumph Thunderbird-riding bikie in the 1953 classic The Wild One, based on the riot, added to the mystique of the one-percenters.
The picture in Life magazine, and Mr Brando's starring role as a free spirit, caught the mood of many young Americans. Most had lived through the Depression only to find themselves drawn into the brutality of World War II. Many had come back to America only to be saddled with mundane jobs. The adrenalin rush found in war was gone. The rush to conformity in the vacuum that followed war, and the looming Cold War, became oppressive. A little touch of freedom was what they wanted. The timing was perfect because war surplus motorbikes were both cheap and plentiful. The iron horse replaced the horse and it was time for a more modern reprise of the old West.
One of the first major bike gangs to emerge in the Hollister aftermath, and still the dominant gang in the world today, was the Hells Angels. There are a few tales of how the name came about. Various Hells Angels members have disagreed with the origins over the years; however, all the tales offer a glimpse of adventure and life on the edge. Some reckon it hails from the US army's elite World War II troops of the 11th Airborne Division. These men were paratroopers who parachuted themselves behind enemy lines in France, apparently with twenty pounds of TNT strapped to each leg, and bent on mayhem. They took the nickname 'Hells Angels' from their descent.
Others prefer the story that the name was borrowed from the 'Hells Angels', the US Air Force 303rd Bombardment Group that bombed occupied Europe from their base in Molesworth, England. The lads from the 303rd had in turn borrowed the name from the 1930 Howard Hughes film Hell's Angels about pilots from World War I. There's a fair chance that the fighting men of either group weren't deeply impressed at having their war exploits associated with a bike gang.
The Hells Angels club began in 1948 in a town called Fontana, California. Fontana is in San Bernardino County and lies on the outer edge of modern Los Angeles. It rose quickly from obscurity in the 1940s thanks to the arrival of the San Bernardino Freeway and the Kaiser steel mill, which supplied steel to build World War II's famous Liberty ships. For men coming back from the war it was a place where they could find work and live cheaply. It was also, in 1948, the site of first McDonald's fast food restaurant.
The formation of the gang was the outcome of ongoing tensions between the Boozefighters and the Pissed Off Bastards. It all got too much for old Bastard Otto Friedl. He formed a splinter group and created the Hells Angels. Over the next decade the irreverent or just plain antisocial behaviour of the Angels saw their fellow southern Californians grow less tolerant.
By 1956 the more tolerant locals of the San Francisco area saw the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels become the club's de facto US head-quarters. Among the Oakland ranks was one Ralph 'Sonny' Barger, who had just come out of a hitch in the US army. Barger reckoned he had a choice of either becoming a beatnik or a motorcycle rider, and chose the latter. Despite his lack of imagination at the time, he would eventually become the public face and spinmeister of the gang. He'd also end up as an author and media tart, and be self-described as 'An American Legend'.
Like many of those who followed, Barger was the product of a lousy childhood. Born in 1938 in California, his mother left him with his alcoholic father and an older sister when he was only four months old. While at school he found a taste and talent for fighting, but unfortunately had a habit of assaulting his teachers. Suspensions from school were not infrequent.
It was Barger who was the driving force behind the gang's codes of conduct, laws, colours and the like. Thanks to his skill with public relations, the myth of the Hells Angels grew. This gang became the model for the gangs that would follow. Birney Jarvis, an early member of the Hells Angels who later became a police reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, captured the true nature of the bike gangs when he commented, 'Some of the guys are pure animals. They'd be animals in any society. These guys are outlaw types who should have been born 100 years ago — then they would have been gunfighters.' Barger took a somewhat softer line, describing his organisation as 'definitely a men's club. It's a group of motorcyclists who like to ride around the country. Having fun and doing it with their friends.'
Things were moving along quite nicely in the myth department until the Labor Day weekend in 1964 when the bikers once again found themselves the focus of the nation. Some of their friends didn't like the idea of 'doing it' with them it seemed. The scene was a weekend run to Monterey, California, until that stage better known for its glorious ocean-front location and John Steinbeck. It was a weekend that the 'pure animal' of some members came to the fore. Of that weekend, True, The Man's Magazine, noted in August 1965 with remarkable accuracy, 'They call themselves the Hell's Angels. They ride, they rape and raid like marauding cavalry — and they boast no police force can break up their criminal motorcycle fraternity.'
Bikers converged on the coast around Monterey. The motivation for the gathering was, local police believed, to collect funds to send the remains of Hells Angels San Bernardino chapter vice president, Kenneth Beamer, back to his mother in North Carolina. Beamer's demise had been caused on the road near San Diego when he found that bike versus truck is an unfair match. Hunter S. Thompson, who would later make his name chronicling the Angels, noted that Beamer 'had died in the best outlaw tradition: homeless, stone broke, and owning nothing in this world but the clothes on his back and a big bright Harley'.
The lads gathered at a bar called Nick's that Saturday night, and as the night and the booze wore on, moved down to a bonfire on the beach. That's when things got completely out of control. A deputy sheriff summoned to the scene stated he 'arrived at the beach and saw a huge bonfire surrounded by cyclists of both sexes. Then two sobbing, near-hysterical girls staggered out of the darkness, begging for help. One was completely nude and the other had on only a torn sweater.' The two teenage girls were both locals, and had come with some friends to gawk at the gathering both at Nick's and later on the beach. As Hunter S. Thompson commented:
Not even Senator Murphy [a former tap dancer turned senator] could expect them to gather together in a drunken mass for any such elevated pastimes as ping pong, shuffleboard and whist. Their picnics have long been noted for certain beastly forms of entertainment, and any young girl who shows up at a Hell's Angels bonfire camp at two o'clock in the morning is presumed, by the outlaws, to be in a condition of heat. So it was only natural that the two girls attracted more attention when they arrived at the beach than they had earlier in the convivial bedlam at Nick's.
The local police didn't share the same caring view of the lads. They promptly arrested four Hells Angels and charged them with rape. One of the arrested was a guy who could readily be described as the definitive bikie. His name was Terry the Tramp. Six feet two inches tall, two hundred and ten pounds, massive arms, full beard, shoulder-length black hair and, as Thompson described, with 'a wild jabbering demeanour not calculated to soothe the soul of any personnel specialist. Beyond that, in his twenty-seven years he had piled up a tall and ugly police record: a multitude of arrests from petty theft and battery to rape, narcotics offenses and public cunnilingus.' The poster boy for bike gangs.
Though Hunter S. Thompson made his name thanks to hissympathetic writings on the gangs, his relationship came to a somewhat ironic end when his subjects turned on him, delivering a very significant kicking. Sonny Barger was no fan of Thompson. Something of a cultural clash, it seemed. He commented:
I don't like Hunter S. Thompson as a person. He's probably the greatest writer in the world. When he was with us on a run, we was going to fight the cops one day and he locked himself in the trunk of his car. That guy ain't my friend. He's not going to help me; he's going to run and leave me there when he's supposed to help us. He also didn't take care of what he was supposed to do. All we told him was buy us a keg of beer and he didn't do it. He's offered to do it later but we don't want it now. He didn't do it when he was supposed to. He got beat up by us, but he set that up. After the book was all done he come around us and said can I go on a run with ya. He got in an argument with a guy, he caused a fight, he got beat up and the cover of the book said 'I met, I lived with and I was almost killed by ...' what a guy.
One of the intriguing quirks of the criminal justice system of most western countries is that a major source of a lawyer's revenue is directly derived from the proceeds of the crimes committed by the people they're defending. A twist on money laundering perhaps, and rather like the US military policy of 'don't ask, don't tell'. It was the need to secure decent legal representation for alleged rapist Terry the Tramp and his three alleged cohorts that, as historians now believe, turned the Hells Angels on to crime as their primary source of cash flow. The crime they turned to was a perfect fit for the mood of California at the birth of the flower power era. Drugs, and in particular marijuana and the community's rapidly developing taste for amphetamines. Risks were low, profits high and police either weren't overly interested or just a bit slow to catch on to the trade. Bikies, of course, were none too talkative about their exploits either, so information was tightly held. One quaint gang motto of the time was 'three can keep a secret if two are dead'. The code of silence was firmly embraced.
The case against the four was very high profile. Thompson wrote, 'their blood, booze and semen-flecked image would be familiar to readers of the New York Times, Newsweek, The Nation, Time, Esquire and the Saturday Evening Post.' The light-footed Senator Murphy didn't miss the chance to up the ante, telling the media, 'they're built low to the ground so it's easier for them to stoop'. In an interesting defence to the bad publicity, one Angel told Newsweek: 'We're bastards to the world and they're bastards to us. When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible. We're complete social outcasts — outsiders against society.' The media loved it.
Despite their national notoriety, all four were freed when a grand jury found insufficient evidence to proceed. There were some serious reservations about the stories of the two girls.
While their defence may have been costly, it was obviously money well spent. However, the success didn't bring an end to the criminal activities. With cash pouring in hand over fist, the gang just kept on marketing their wares. Why give up a good thing? And it was certainly better than working nine to five. As Barger said, summarising the Hells Angels' history for the Los Angeles Times (17 May 2001): 'In the '60s, we started gettin' in trouble. The '70s, we got into a little bit of crime and stuff. And by the '80s, we were all in prison.'
Barger made it to California's notorious Folsom Prison near Sacramento following his arrest in 1973 for selling thirty-seven grams of heroin. He commented that his breaking of the law may have had something to do with his exuberant use of cocaine. The judge wasn't that sympathetic and gaoled him for ten years to life. He joined the alumni that included Charles Manson, not Johnny Cash (despite the songs) and Timothy 'turn on, tune in and drop out' Leary, the pop-king of the acid counterculture. Leary and Barger were there at the same time, with Barger commenting that Leary was an informant. 'I don't like informants any more than I like policemen', he later said. Barger was released in 1977.
The mystique and notoriety of the Hells Angels for that 'little bit of crime and stuff' continued to grow, and by the late 1970s the US government was gravely concerned about their criminal activities. To try and come to grips with the gang, they dusted off some racketeering legislation originally developed for use against the mafia. Unfortunately for the hapless government prosecutors, the case failed dismally. The prosecution cost around $15 million. Prosecutors screamed it was a miscarriage of justice, and Sonny Barger, by then head honcho of the gang, was reported to have thrown a party for the jurors. Angels 1, Government 0.
Federal prosecutors did have a brief stroke of luck in the mid 1980s when Barger and others were arrested for conspiring to violate federal law to commit murder. The murder in question involved plans to bomb the Chicago clubhouse of the Outlaws motorcycle gang. The Hells Angels had been asked to assist and had agreed. What they didn't know was that the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) had a highly placed informant in the gangs, Anthony Tait, who had set up the plot as a type of 'sting' operation and who later gave key evidence. After a lengthy trial, Barger was again behind bars, this time in Arizona. He was released in 1992.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dead Man Running by Ross Coulthart, Duncan McNab. Copyright © 2008 Ross Coulthart and Duncan McNab. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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