Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

by Hunter S. Thompson

  It seemed like the only people who hadn’t erupted on the Fourth of July were the Hell’s Angels. Both San Francisco papers took note of this. A Chronical headline said: HELL’S ANGELS FRONT ALL QUIET. But the Examiner gave the screw an extra turn: COPS CLIP WINGS OF ANGELS, MEEK CYCLISTS QUIT MADERA.

  The only motorcycle story was a United Press dispatch from Sioux City, Iowa. It was very brief:

  A 30-member motorcycle gang called the “Outlaw Club of the Midwest” left this city of 90,500 today after harassing its citizens over the holiday weekend. They blocked traffic, rode on sidewalks and played “hide-and-seek” with squad cars. A spokesman for the gang said they came to Sioux City to “give it a little class.”

  The Chronicle story on the Angels said police in Madera County were still undecided on what to do about the restraining order. Apparently something had gone haywire, for the order called for the Angels to appear in Madera County Superior Court on July 16 or be permanently barred from the county. “Police feared there might be trouble,” said the article, “because the gang threatened to remain in Bass Lake until July 16 or return on that date with reinforcements.” County officials were faced with a choice between dismissing the order entirely or hosting another run—and Barger said they had every intention of going back to argue their case. Needless to say, the order was done away with. It had been a bummer from the start, and not even the cops charged with enforcing it knew what it meant. The final press comment on the Bass Lake Saga appeared in the Examiner, under a small headline: A VICTORY FOR HELL’S ANGELS. It said the order had been dismissed at the request of the district attorney, the same man who’d hatched it two weeks earlier.

  In retrospect, there was unanimous agreement that both the press and the police had done a spectacular job. There was massive publicity, a massive police presence and massive beer-drinking to justify all their concern. In a galaxy of nationwide riots and civic upheaval, Bass Lake was a star of peace. There were various explanations, some with ominous overtones. One of these came from a police official who attributed the lack of violence to the fact that “there were almost as many officers as cyclists.” He estimated the Bass Lake task force at more than a hundred, all working overtime.‡

  The Angels had their own explanation. They belittled the idea that the cops had simply outmuscled them. Not at all. By the fact of sheer numbers they had forced both the cops and the citizens to leave them alone. Both sides claimed their own show of force had averted a crisis, and to a certain extent they were both right. But I think the real explanation was more complex.

  It was the strange ambivalence of the public sentiment that kept the Bass Lake confrontation so precariously balanced all weekend. It confused the Angels almost as badly as it did the police; they arrived to face a solid front of civic outrage … and then, for no reason they could hope to understand, they became the weekend’s featured act, the main show, wild and randy proof that Bass Lake still knew how to put on a real Fourth of July pageant. The threat of violence was converted to dramatic tension. It put a definite zang in the air. The mood of the crowd was euphoric, even erotic. There were incidents, but not many … and when it was all over, the most serious offense of the weekend was laid to a photographer from Los Angeles.

  If nothing else, the weekend was a monument to free enterprise. It is hard to say what might have happened if the outlaws hadn’t been able to buy beer, but the moon-faced man at the tourist market was the visionary who turned the tide. After the first purchase, the Angels were welcome or at least tolerated everywhere except at Williams’ store—which even the vigilantes abandoned when it became apparent that the action was across the lake. Poor Williams was left holding the civic bag; he had taken a gutty stand, his image was all moxie … and on Monday night, when the Angels were finally gone, he had earned the leisure that enabled him to go out to the lakefront and gaze off in a proud, wistful way, like Gatsby, at the green neon lights of the taverns across the water, where the others were counting their money.

  ‡ I was eventually given to understand that not all of them felt this way.

  ‡ Another interesting commentary on the Bass Lake spectacle came about a month after it was all over. In mid-August the Watts area of Los Angeles burst into massive rioting that lasted for four days. Thirty-four people were killed, hundreds wounded, and property damage amounted to more than $1,000,000. Yet Watts erupted without an inch of pre-riot press coverage, and the Los Angeles police were so unprepared that the National Guard had to be mobilized to bring things under control.

  The

  Dope Cabala

  and a Wall

  of Fire

  19

  They get to drinking and smoking pot and popping them pills in their mouths … hell, absolutely anything can happen. They get into a kind of frenzy, like animals, and they’ll tear you to bits, with chains, knives, beer-can openers, anything they can get their hands on.

  —Fontana detective

  Motorcycle outlaws have been accused of maintaining a dope network, a sinister web of sales and deliveries from one coast to the other. Federal narcotics agents say the Hell’s Angels shipped more than $1,000,000 worth of marijuana from southern California to New York City between 1962 and ’65, sending it by air freight in boxes labeled “motorcycle parts.” That is a lot of grass, even at street-corner retail prices. The “network” was exposed in late 1965, when, according to the Los Angeles Times, “eight persons who identified themselves as members [of the Hell’s Angels] pleaded guilty in a San Diego court to charges of smuggling 150 pounds of marijuana from Mexico into the United States at San Ysidro.”

  The convicted smugglers had little if anything to do with the Angels, despite their alleged claims to membership. Three of the eight were from New York, and of the five from Los Angeles two were girls. That left only three who could possibly have been Angels, but the outlaws I talked to said they’d never heard of them. Perhaps they lied, but I doubt it; normally they are proud to be connected with anything that makes headlines. Which is beside the point, really, because 150 pounds of pot is only a fraction of what crosses the Mexican border every week despite the sharp-eyed zeal of U.S. customs officials. These gentlemen hate dope like they hate sin; and when they’re after it they know who to grab: beatnik perverts and hairy sandal freaks. People with beards are shaken down thoroughly. I have crossed the border at Tijuana more than a dozen times, but the only time I was stopped and searched was after a week of skin-diving off the Baja California when three of us tried to get back into the States with a week’s growth of hair on our faces. At the border we were asked the standard questions, gave the standard replies and were instantly seized. The customs agents took our truck, full of camping and Scuba gear, into a special shed and picked over it for an hour and a half. They found several bottles of liquor but no dope. They couldn’t seem to believe it. They kept feeling the sleeping bags and groping under the chassis. Finally they let us go with a warning to “be more careful” in the future.

  Meanwhile, out on the highway, the big-volume dope runners were being waved through with a smile. They were wearing neckties and business suits, driving late-model rent-a-cars with electric-razor attachments. I didn’t notice any outlaw motorcyclists roaring up to the boarder, but if any had appeared they’d have been jerked into the shed for a thorough shake-down. People who make a living smuggling narcotics into the States operate on the same principle as bad-check artists, who do not as a rule wear beards, earrings and swastikas.

  Because of the headwaiter mentality that prevails among customs officials, no commercial shipper of marijuana or anything else illegal would make the mistake of using Hell’s Angels for runners. It would be like sending a car up to the border with “Opium Express” painted in red letters on both sides. If the God of the righteous could swoop down one night and char every Hell’s Angel to ashes, marijuana traffic on the Mexican border would hardly be fazed. In February 1966 three men in a stolen truck passed through customs with more than a half ton of
marijuana—1,050 pounds in one load. They got it all the way to Los Angeles, where they were arrested several days later on an anonymous tip—which netted the tipster close to $100,000 in reward money.

  The Angels are too obvious for serious drug traffic. They don’t even have enough capital to function as middlemen, so they end up buying most of their stuff in small lots at high prices. Three or four of them will nurse a joint until it is so short they have to hold it with alligator clips—which many outlaws carry for exactly this purpose. People with real access to marijuana can afford to smoke it in big pipes and hookahs … and if they have a serious commercial interest in the stuff they rarely smoke it at all except behind locked doors. A taste for pot is not part of the formula for success in a profit-oriented society. If Horatio Alger had been born near a field of locoweed his story might have been a lot different. He would have gone on unemployment and spent most of his time just standing around smiling at things, brushing off the protests of his friends and benefactors, saying, “Don’t bug me, baby—you’ll never know.”‡

  The Angels insist there are no dope addicts in the club, and by legal or medical definitions this is true. Addicts are focused; the physical need for whatever they’re hooked on forces them to be selective. But the Angels have no focus at all. They gobble drugs like victims of famine turned loose on a rare smörgasbord. They use anything available, and if the result is a screaming delirium then so be it.

  They smoke marijuana so openly that it’s hard to understand why they’re not all in jail for it. California’s marijuana laws are among the most primitive manifestations of American politics. Two convictions for possession of a single joint—or even a tenth of one—will send a person to prison for a minimum of two years. A third conviction for possession means a minimum five years. The sentences are fixed by law, regardless of any circumstances a judge might find to be mitigating.

  Except for the risk, the marijuana situation in California is a lot like the booze situation in the 1920’s. Pot is everywhere; thousands of people smoke it as often as they take aspirins. But the fact of illegality has bred a cultishness, a pot underground whose partisans are forced to skulk around like spies, convening in dark rooms to pass their criminal pleasure from hand to nervous hand. Many get high from the sheer risk. Few people can “turn on” without making a very spooky ordeal of it, but among those who do are the Hell’s Angels—who have done it for so long and so often that they no longer confuse the mystique with the real effects. Marijuana seems to relax them, but not much else. They refer to it as “weed” or “dope,” shunning such hipster terminology as “grass” and “pot.” Most just take it for granted, as they do beer and wine. If the stuff is available they’ll smoke it, but they rarely spend money for it. When they have to pay for kicks, they prefer something with more velocity.

  At Bass Lake it was pills. Soon after dark on Saturday, I was standing with a group of Angels by the bonfire, talking about the Laconia riot, when somebody appeared with a big plastic bag and began passing out handfuls of whatever it contained. When my turn came I held out my hand and received about thirty small white pills. For a moment the talk ceased, while the outlaws gulped down their rations, chasing the pills with beer. I asked what they were and somebody beside me said, “Cartwheels, man. Bennies. Eat some, they’ll keep you going.” I asked him what they were in milligrams, but he didn’t know. “Just take about ten,” he advised. “And if that don’t work, take more.”

  I nodded and ate two. They looked to be about five milligrams each, which is enough Benzedrine to keep most people awake and jabbering for several hours. Ten pills, or fifty milligrams, will send anybody but a pill freak to the hospital with symptoms of acute delirium tremens. Later several Angels assured me that their bennies were indeed “fives”—at least that’s what they were paying for. They never quoted their wholesale price, but they once offered to give me a break on as many as I wanted at the rate of $53 a thousand, or about twice what the same pills would cost me in a drugstore, with a prescription. It turned out that they were not even “fives,” but more like “ones.” When I realized that the first two were having no effect, I took several more, and then more. By dawn I had eaten twelve—which, if they’d been honest, would have caused me to gnaw down trees like a beaver. As it was, they only helped me to stay on my feet about four hours longer than I would have otherwise. The next day I told the outlaws they were being cheated, but they shrugged it off. “We got no choice,” said one. “If you buy stuff on the black market you gotta take whatever you get. Who gives a damn anyway? If they’re weak all you gotta do is take more. We’re not gonna run out.”

  Bennies (“cartwheels” or “whites”) are basic to the outlaw diet—like weed, beer and wine. But when they talk about “getting wasted,” the action moves onto another level. The next step up the scale is Seconal (“reds” or “red devils”), a barbiturate normally used as a sedative, or tranquilizer. They also take Amytal (“blue heaven”), Nembutal (“yellow jackets”) and Tuinal. But they prefer the reds—which they take along with beer and bennies “to keep from getting sleepy.” The combination brews up some hellish effects. Barbiturates and alcohol can be a fatal mixture, but the outlaws combine enough stimulants with their depressants to at least stay alive, if not rational.

  A righteous Angel loading up on a run will consume almost anything, and in any quantity combination or sequence. I recall a two-day party, many months after Bass Lake, at which Terry began the first day with beer, had a stick of the grass at noon, then more beer, and another joint before dinner, then to red wine and a handful of bennies to keep awake … more grass in the middle of the evening, along with a red for some odd feeling, then all through the night more beer, wine, bennies and another red to get some rest … before taking off again for another twenty hours, on the same diet, but this time with a pint of bourbon and five hundred micrograms of LSD to ward off any possibility of boredom setting in. This is a pretty extreme diet, and not all of the Angels can handle the whole spectrum of stimulation, depression, hallucinations, drunkenness and wiped-out fatigue for forty-eight hours at a time. Most try to stick with limited combinations—such as beer, pot and Seconal; or gin, beer and bennies; or wine and LSD. But a few will go the whole route and on top of everything else shoot some methydrine or DMT and turn into total zombies for hours at a time.

  ‡ The younger Angels—especially those who joined after the great publicity rash—are far more involved with the drug underground than the veterans. They are less cautious about the risks in selling and handling. The Angels have always been consumers, but in 1966 they were drifting more toward a more businesslike involvement—such as selling junk in large quantities.

  20

  The only way we can stop this is to arrest, arrest, arrest.

  —Los Angeles police chief, William Parker (since deceased), on the subject of Negro riots

  The possibility of a Hell’s Angels’ dope network brings up once again the old bugaboo of expansion. Are the Angels spreading East? According to the New York Daily News, the dirty buggers have already made the leap. One night when the mist was on the river they boomed through the toll gates on the George Washington Bridge, chain-whipping a gatekeeper who noticed that their saddlebags were full of dope and sex instruments. The News broke the story with a screaming headline: TERROR ON WHEELS.

  THEY’RE A MOTORCYCLE MOB CALLED HELL’S ANGELS, AND THEY GET THEIR KICKS FROM SEX AND VIOLENCE.

  Above the headline was a picture of Tiny, laughing in the grip of three Berkeley policemen. The caption beneath it said that bearded Tiny, “blood streaming from his wrist, was clubbed down during a brawl that erupted last week when free-swinging Angels took on Vietnam protest marchers. Towering Tiny and two others were jailed, and a cop suffered a broken leg in melee.” The caption must have got scrambled with one from a “Beauty Slashes Self, Dies” story on another page. There is no other explanation for the strange line about “blood streaming from wrist …” Whose wrist? The picture
shows three wrists, but none bleeding. And why is Tiny laughing? Is he hysterical after slashing his wrists at a Vietnam protest? If so, why was it necessary to club him? Which cop has the broken leg? And why are the others smiling?‡

  The photo was very unsettling, but the one below it was even more so—especially to the Angels. It showed four neatly dressed suspects being booked in Greenwich Village for stabbing an AWOL Marine. They look no different from anyone else who might be arrested in the Village for stabbing a Marine, except that all four are wearing jackets with “Hell’s Angels” lettered on the back. There is no emblem, no death’s-head, no class at all … and yet they claimed to be Hell’s Angels. The account of their arrest was a model of police-blotter journalism. Several hours after the crime the four had been arrested—“quite by coincidence,” said the News—at the same hospital where the victim Marine was being treated. They just wandered in, “jacketed, booted and wearing telltale gold earrings … to see about having a cyst removed from the neck of one of them.”

  This immediately established a motive and a prime suspect—the man with the cyst. It was pressing on the tail of his medulla, causing great pain. After enduring it as long as possible he lost control of himself and stabbed a passing Marine. Then the whole pack ran aimlessly through the Village for several hours, like a family of hyenas, until they found themselves in front of a hospital, which they decided to enter and have done with the fiendish cyst that had caused all the trouble in the first place.

  “Police quickly took them into custody,” said the News, “and found knives, they [the police] said, on all four. Two were identified as being involved in the stabbing, and all were held on weapons charges.” (None of the four had motorcycles, and except for the lettering on their backs they looked like a bowling team from the Bronx.)