Hell's Angels, Page 4

  A city fire engine was placed in position at the Penney Store; the police with night sticks and shotguns moved out, there were no sirens, just flashing red lights. The motorcycle clan massed in the middle of the street, some of them laid down. Torigian led the officers, talking through a bull horn. “You have five minutes to get out of town. Move.” Defiance faded. Motorcycles started. There was some resistance, a half dozen were arrested. City firemen wet down the street and moved the hose in on the clan. One rider tried to go north; he was knocked off his motorcycle with the firehose water.

  Many of the riders headed south and kept going. Some stopped at the Sports Center. Police were sent to clean out Murry Park. Night spots were checked by police.

  Leaders of the three major clubs represented were taken to police headquarters for questioning, while remaining riders were held at the Sports Center. There were threats from the Hell’s Angels that if their arrested members were not released they would come and get them.

  Torigian said the only way to get them was to bail them out. Officers with riot guns were ready if a jail break was attempted.

  Around 2:30 A.M. some of the riders headed back toward Porterville. Torigian stopped them at the Main Street bridge. He told them to turn around and get out or they would be arrested and their motorcycles impounded, chained together six at a time, and drug off.

  By daylight a few scattered riders were still in the area. But the threat of violence and damage had been met and broken.

  A man that should call everything by its right name would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a Common Enemy.

  —Lord Halifax

  A less glaring example of the way police reports tend to over-dramatize the Angels is this account of a July Fourth 1964 run to Willits, a lumbering town of about thirty-five hundred in northern California. The official version follows an account from a San Francisco housewife, Mrs. Terry Whitright, whose husband is a native of Willits. The two versions are not contradictory, but the difference in point of view suggests that the Hell’s Angels reality often depends on who describes it.

  Here is what Mrs. Whitright said in a letter dated March 29, 1965:

  Dear Hunter,

  The first time I had ever seen the Hell’s Angels was on the 4th of July celebration in Willits, Calif. Willits is a very small town approximately 100 miles North of S.F. Every 4th of July they have a Frontier’s Day Celebration, which includes a carnival, parade, dances, etc. We went up for it, and on Willits’ Main Street, the Hell’s Angels were lined up for a block and a half, coming in and out of a very populated bar. We (Lori, Barbie, Terry & I), were walking down the street and one man, wearing a black leather jacket, boots, dirty black Tee-shirt, etc., grabbed Lori by the hand, and talked to her for awhile, asking her name, & all the time being very gentle and very nice. This was around 2:30 in the afternoon. Later that evening we went to an elderly woman’s house where we were staying while we were in town. She has a nephew by the name of Larry Jordon. He is a Wilackey Indian about 27 or 28. He is also a brother to Phil Jordon, a professional basketball player who played for New York Knickerbockers and also the Detroit Pistons. Well, anyhow, to get back to Larry Jordon; about 7:30 that evening a girl came to the door crying and shouting, “Eileen, Eileen, help me.” I came to the door, and there stood Larry, blood pouring down the side of his neck, and from his temple. Eileen, his aunt, completely fell apart, so I had to take him to the bathroom and clean him up. He had been cut severely with either a razor blade or a knife by the Hell’s Angels. Now, the reason never was established, why he was jumped by 6 or 7 Hell’s Angels, but he’s the type of guy who looks like he thinks he’s better than anyone. But this isn’t the way he is, he holds himself very aloof, never looks for trouble, but never backs away from trouble either. It’s rather hard to explain, you’d have to know him, I think. If you know any Indians well, maybe you understand.

  Terry came back (he had been to the store) and after some talking and persuading he got Larry into the car and to the hospital. Of course everyone was drinking and they all wanted to get a bunch together and run the Hell’s Angels out of town, but they didn’t.

  One other acquaintance of ours by the name of Fritz Bacchie also got beat up by them. He went home to get a gun, and the local police threw him in jail for the nite.

  All in all, there wasn’t too much damage done, but an air of uneasiness hung over the town, no one knew what would happen next, and no one could really relax and have any fun or enjoy themselves as they usually do on these celebrations on the 4th of July.

  The Attorney General told it this way:

  On July Fourth 1965, at the invitation of the same bartender who had previously worked at a Hell’s Angels hangout in Rodeo, the Oakland Hell’s Angels made a “run” to Willits. An advance group of 30 entered the city the previous day and by the afternoon of the Fourth there were some 120 motorcyclists and their female companions congregating at a local bar. In addition to those from Oakland, there were Angels from Vallejo and Richmond, as well as the “Mofo” club from San Francisco. Periodic fighting between the motorcyclists and local citizens broke out with beer bottles, belts made from motorcycle drive chains, and metal beer can openers being used as weapons. It was noted that some members apparently designated as sergeants at arms did not drink, but spent their time watching the group. When police were called, these people would pick up broken bottles, pour beer on any blood remaining on the floor, and move groups in and out of the bar to make police interrogation more difficult. When one local citizen took it upon himself to obtain a shotgun and returned to the bar where the group was congregated, he was arrested. Assistance was obtained from the California Highway Patrol and the Mendocino County Sheriff’s office. The group was then instructed by the chief of police to move out of town to the city limits. After the move, some fights between Angels themselves occurred, but no local citizenry were involved.

  The Lynch-Newsweek account of the Porterville incident was hazy in detail, but brutally clear with its image of Hell’s Angels swarming over the town and wreaking havoc on the terrified citizenry. By comparison, the eyewitness version was pale and slow … like Mrs. Whitright’s tale of the Willits incident, which lacked all the zap and tension of the colorful police version. There is not much argument about basic facts, but the disparities in emphasis and context are the difference between a headline and a filler in most big-city newspapers. Do the Hell’s Angels actually “take over a town”—as they’re often accused of doing—or merely clog a main street and a few local taverns with drunken noise, thus flaying the sensibilities of various locals?

  In a larger context, how much of a menace are the Hell’s Angels? And how seriously do they threaten the lives and limbs of people in California … or in Idaho, Arizona, Michigan, New York, Indiana, Colorado, New Hampshire, Maryland, Florida, Nevada, Canada and all the other places where rumors of their arrival put the populace in an uproar?

  ‡ Time’s circulation in its December 1964 report.

  ‡ See this page.

  3

  Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

  —Thomas Jefferson

  According to Attorney General Lynch’s own figures, California’s overall crime picture makes the Angels look like a gang of petty jack-rollers. The police counted 463 Hell’s Angels: 205 around Los Angeles, 233 in the San Francisco-Oakland area, and the rest scattered widely around the state. These woeful departures from reality made it hard to accept their other statistics. The dubious package cited Hell’s Angel convictions on 1,023 misdemeanor counts and 151 felonies—primarily vehicle theft, burglary and assault. This was for all years and all alleged members, including many long since retired.

  California’s overall figures for 1963 showed 1,116 homicides, 12,448 aggravated assaults, 6,257 sex offenses and 24,532 burglaries. In 1962 the state listed 4,121 traffic deaths, up from 3,839 in 1961. Drug-arrest figures for 1964 showed a 101 percent increase in juvenile marijuana
arrests over 1963, and a 1965 back-page story in the San Francisco Examiner said, “The venereal disease rate among [the city’s] teen-agers from 15 to 19 has more than doubled in the past four years.” Even allowing for the annual population jump, juvenile arrests in all categories are rising by 10 percent or more each year. Late in 1965 Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, a Democrat, was berated by Republicans in the Legislature for “remaining aloof” to the threat of the rising crime rate, which they said had jumped 70 percent during his seven years in office.

  Against this background, it is hard to see how it would make any difference to the safety and peace of mind of the average Californian if every motorcycle outlaw in the state (all 901, according to the police) were garroted within twenty-four hours.

  If the “Hell’s Angels Saga” proved any one thing, it was the awesome power of the New York press establishment. The Hell’s Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek and The New York Times. The Times is the heavyweight champion of American journalism. On nine stories out of ten the paper lives up to its reputation. Yet the editors make no claims to infallibility, and now and then they will blow the whole duke. It would be senseless to try to list these failures, and besides that the purpose of this harangue is not to nail any one newspaper or magazine—but to point out the potentially massive effect of any story whose basic structure is endorsed and disseminated not only by Time and Newsweek, but by the hyper-prestigious New York Times. The Times took the Lynch report at face value and simply reprinted it in very condensed form. The headline said: CALIFORNIA TAKES STEPS TO CURB TERRORISM OF RUFFIAN CYCLISTS. The bulk of the article was straight enough, but the lead was pure fiction: “A hinterland tavern is invaded by a group of motorcycle hoodlums. They seize a female patron and rape her. Departing, they brandish weapons and threaten bystanders with dire reprisals if they tell what they saw. Authorities have trouble finding a communicative witness, let alone arresting and prosecuting the offenders.”

  This incident never occurred. It was created, as a sort of journalistic montage, by the correspondent who distilled the report. But the Times is neither written nor edited by fools, and anyone who has worked on a newspaper for more than two months knows how technical safeguards can be built into even the wildest story, without fear of losing reader impact. What they amount to, basically, is the art of printing a story without taking legal responsibility for it. The word “alleged” is a key to this art. Other keys are “so-and-so said” (or “claimed”), “it was reported” and “according to.” In fourteen short newspaper paragraphs, the Times story contained nine of these qualifiers. The two most crucial had to do with the Hollywood lead and the “ ‘alleged gang rape’ last Labor Day of two girls, 14 and 15 years old, by five to ten members of the Hell’s Angels gang on the beach at Monterey” (my italics). Nowhere in the story was it either reported or implied that the Monterey charges had long since been dropped—according to page one of the report being quoted. The result was a piece of slothful, emotionally biased journalism, a bad hack job that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow or stirred a ripple had it appeared in most American newspapers … but the Times is a heavyweight even when it’s wrong, and the effect of this article was to put the seal of respectability on a story that was, in fact, a hysterical, politically motivated accident.

  Had Time and Newsweek never touched the story, the New York-based mass media would have jumped on it anyway. A social cancer had been uncovered by the nation’s leading newspaper. And then … one week later came the Time-Newsweek double-barreled blast that really put the Angels over the top. What followed was an orgy of publicity. The long-dormant Hell’s Angels got eighteen years’ worth of exposure in six months, and it naturally went to their heads.

  Until the Monterey rape they were bush-league hoods known only to California cops and a few thousand cycle buffs. For whatever it was worth, they were the state’s biggest and most notorious motorcycle gang. Among outlaws their primacy was undisputed—and nobody else cared.

  Then, as a result of the Monterey incident, they made the front page of every daily in California, including the Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco papers—which are scanned and clipped each day by researchers for Time and Newsweek. Some of the stories said the victims had been roasting weenies on the beach with their two dates—who fought like tigers to save them—when an advance party of some four thousand Hell’s Angels suddenly surrounded the campfire and said things like: “Don’t worry, kid, we’re just going to break the girls in for you.” (And then, according to one account: “The bearded one pressed his hairy lips to hers. She screamed and struggled. He and another Angel picked her up and hauled her, screaming, into the darkness. A piercing scream was followed by a deep-throated curse …”)

  HELL’S ANGELS RAPE TEEN-AGERS

  4,000 CYCLISTS INVADE MONTEREY

  Yet only two of the eighteen specific outrages cited in the Lynch report occurred after Labor Day of 1964, and both of these were bar brawls. So the story was just as available to the press on the day after the Monterey rape as it was six months later, when the Attorney General called a press conference and handed it out in a neat white package, one to each news hawk. Until then nobody had shown much interest … or they hadn’t had time, for in the fall of 1964 the press was putting every available talent on the national-election story. It was, after all, a real humdinger. All manner of crucial issues were said to be hanging in the balance, and somebody had to keep tabs on the national pulse.

  Not even Senator Goldwater seized on the Hell’s Angels issue. “Crime in the streets” was a winner for him; millions of people felt threatened by gangs of punks, roaming, on foot, through streets in the immediate vicinity of their homes in urban slums. Democrats called this a racist slur … but what would they have said if Goldwater had warned the voters about an army of vicious, doped-up Caucasian hoodlums numbering in the thousands … based in California but with chapters proliferating all over the nation and even the globe far faster than a man could keep track of them … and so highly mobile with their awesome machines that huge numbers of them might appear almost anywhere, at any moment, to sack and destroy a community?

  Filthy Huns Breeding like rats in California and spreading east. Listen for the roar of the Harleys. You will hear it in the distance like thunder. And then, wafting in on the breeze, will come the scent of dried blood, semen and human grease … the noise will grow louder and then they will appear, on the west horizon, eyes bugged and bloodshot, foam on the lips, chewing some rooty essence smuggled in from a foreign jungle … they will ravish your women, loot your liquor stores and humiliate your mayor on a bench on the village square …

  Now there was an issue. The mumbo jumbo about “crime in the streets” was too vague. What Goldwater needed was an up-to-date concept like “crime on the highways,” motorized crime, with nobody safe from it. And the first time the Democrats challenged him, he could have produced photos of the dirtiest Hell’s Angels and read from newspaper accounts of the Monterey rape and other stories: “… they hauled her, screaming, into the darkness”; “… the bartender, barely conscious, crawled toward the bar while the Angels beat a tattoo on his ribs with their feet …”

  Unfortunately, neither candidate picked up the Monterey story, and with no other takers, it quickly slipped from sight. From September 1964 to March of the next year the Hell’s Angels fought a quiet, unpublicized series of skirmishes with police in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area. The massive publicity of the Monterey rape had made them so notorious in California that it was no longer any fun to be part of the act. Every minute on the streets was a calculated risk for any man wearing a Hell’s Angels jacket. The odds were worse than even—except in Oakland‡—and the penalty for getting caught was likely to be expensive. At the peak of the heat a former Frisco Angel told me: “If I was fired from my job tomorrow and went back to riding with the Angels, I’d lose my driver’s license within a month, be in and out of jail, go way in debt to bondsmen and
be hounded by the cops until I left the area.” At the time I pegged him as a hopeless paranoid. Then I bought a big motorcycle and began riding around San Francisco and the East Bay. The bike was a sleek factory-style BSA, bearing no aesthetic resemblance to an outlaw Harley, and my primary road garb was a tan sheepherder’s jacket, the last thing a Hell’s Angel might wear. Yet within three weeks after buying the bike, I was arrested three times and accumulated enough points to lose my California driver’s license—which I retained on a more or less day-to-day basis, only because of a fanatic insistence on posting large amounts of bail money and what seemed like a never-ending involvement with judges, bailiffs, cops and lawyers, who kept telling me the cause was lost. Before buying the motorcycle, I had driven cars for twelve years, in all but four states of the nation, and been tagged for only two running violations, both the result of speed traps—one in Pikeville, Kentucky, and the other somewhere near Omaha. So it was a bit of a shock to suddenly face loss of my license for violations incurred in a period of three weeks.

  The heat was so obvious that even respectable motorcyclists were complaining of undue police harassment. The cops denied it officially, but shortly before Christmas of that year a San Francisco policeman told a reporter, “We’re going to get these guys. It’s war.”

  “Who do you mean?” asked the reporter.

  “You know who I mean,” the policeman said. “The Hell’s Angels, those motorcycle hoods.”

  “You mean everybody on a motorcycle?” said the reporter.

  “The innocent will have to suffer along with the guilty,” the policeman replied.

  “When I finished the story,” the reporter recalls, “I showed it to a cop I ran into on the street outside the Hall of Justice. He laughed and called another cop over. ‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘——stepped on his prick again.’ ”