Alex Caine - Angel Dust: How the Outlaw Biker Gang Became a Criminal Empire

ANGEL DUST

ALSO BY ALEX CAINE

Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels,
Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

The Fat Mexican:
The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

Charlie and the Angels:
The Outlaws, the Hells Angels and the Sixty Years War

FOR JOHN AND JUDY,
THE NICEST PEOPLE IVE NEVER MET

CONTENTS

BEHIND THE BEARDS, THE PATCHES, AND THE IMAGE

W henever people ask me if the Hells Angels are as tough and nasty as they appear in movies, TV shows, and books like this one, I answer, Damn right. They started off bad, and they stayed bad. Some things mellow with time, but not the Angels. Not in the ways that count. If you believe that someday youll find a bunch of bearded and tattooed guyswho look like they havent had a bath in two months and smell like they havent had one in sixselling apples on a corner for some charity, forget it. The Angels have always been out for the only people who really matter to them: themselves. And they still are.

But time has a way of changing things and people, and its even changing the Angels. As much as they refuse to admit it, theyre getting old, fat, sloppy, and slow. No surprise there. Many of them were always fat and sloppy. Now most of them are also old, and old means you start slowing down. Besides, they may have stayed bad, but many of the guys they deal with or try to avoid are even worse.

The point is, theyre no longer a biker club. Theyre criminals and thugs whose primary interest is in making money, intimidating people, and using every means, including legal and political, to get what they want. The motorcycles? Theyre basically just a symbol.

WHEN YOURE IN YOUR TWENTIES and thirties, and if you dress for and practice the part, its easy to walk into a bar and stare at people until they start pissing their pants. But when you hit your fifties and sixties, you cant scare a baby squirrel with that kind of stuff, because you look too much like Santa Claus wearing dirty Levis that even the Goodwill store wouldnt accept.

And thats just the way you look. The way you do business changes, too. You dont buy anything today in the same way you or your parents did ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Companies you never heard of last year do business in the billions now. Who do you think they stole the business from? They stole it from people who sat on their butts too long, believing that business would always be good, that they could always be fat and lazy, that no one would ever challenge them. Just like the Angels. Now a lot of them are getting their butts whipped by Johnny-come-lately bikers who view the Angels as a bunch of guys who sometimes cut the lawn at their grandparents house.

Dont believe me? Let me paint you a picture.

Were in North Hollywood, at a place called Occidental Studios. The place has twelve different film and TV stages where you can shoot whatever you want if youve got the money, the equipment, the crew, the actors, the script, but especially the money. Stage 5 is the biggest of them all: thirty-three thousand square feet under one roof. Theyre shooting a cable TV series here called Sons of Anarchy, and it must be a success because its been running for six years now.

Everything you need for a big production is here in the studio. Dozens of people are busy doing things that you and I dont know about and couldnt understand if we did. You see this stuff in movie and TV credits if you look closely. I mean, whats a gaffer and whos a best boy? Doesnt matter. My point is, this is serious show business.

So its the summer of 2012 and theyre getting ready to shoot an important scene. Theyre waiting for one of the actors to come out of the makeup room, a guy wholl play Lenny The Pimp Janowitz. You can tell by his name that this is going to be some badass dude. The actor is in there reading over his lines, maybe listening to the director or the dialogue coach or someone else tell him how to say the words right.

The actors an old guy. Hes lost most of his hair and his skin is loose with his veins showing through it. He walks with a limp, is blind in one eye and reportedly deaf in one ear, and his voice is weird because he had his voice box removed years ago, the result of throat cancer. When he finally comes out of the makeup room and starts dragging his butt in front of the camera, some people elbow each other and nod in his direction. Other people just keep doing what they were doing, getting on with their job.

Finally the old guy is where the director wants him. He forces a smile, closes his eyes to remember his first lines, and the director says, Ready, Sonny?

Sonny Barger, the soul of the Hells Angels, the meanest mother of the meanest gang of toughs that ever came out of the home of the brave and the land of the free, is acting in a cable TV show. Hell, why not? Hes already the author of six books. Why not add some acting to his rsum? So who is this dudethe guy who set the tone for motorcycle rebels all over the world, or a geriatric Robert De Niro?

Thats how far the Angels have come. The ultimate Hells Angel, the only guy who almost any biker anywhere in the world would call Sir if he was told to, is playing a pimp and being told where to stand, what to say, how to say it, and when he can take a break and go to the john.

SONNY IS NOBODYS PATSY and never would be, of course. But seeing him looking like a street person who found some friends to clean him up for a day is a measure of how the Angels have changed. Theyre no longer who they were, or who they thought they were. Theyre what other people think they are or should be. So who are they being true to? Good question.

The Angels, and all the other motorcycle clubs (or MCs), started out with a fuzzy warm image. They were going to be brothers, knights of the open road, warriors of the highway and all that. Whether you liked or feared the Angels, you had to admire them for spitting in the eye of straight society, for not giving a damn what other people thought, and especially for riding hours on end just to be together, lost in the hum of their Harley-Davidsons.

You think thats the Angels today? Not the guys at the top. Not even close. A lot of the guys at the top of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC) are grandfathers, and they act like it. Will they ride for three days straight on a run so they can swill beer, sleep in a tent, and trade stories with other Angels? Like hell they will. Theyll get a prospecta Hells Angel wannabeto load their Harley on a trailer and drive it where they want to go. Then theyll fly to wherever the run is being held, check into a Hilton or a Marriott, slip on their club colors, roll their bikes off the trailers, and spend a couple of days looking like badasses before flying home again.

Heres my point: the Angels are no longer bikers who commit crimes. Theyre criminals who ride bikes.

SO IF THE ANGELS have changed so much, why do they still wear their colors in public? Isnt that like waving a red flag at every cop they pass, not to mention rival gangs? Why do they still show that deaths head on their backs and on clubhouse flags? Because it commands fear and respect. At least, thats what HAMC members think. The truth is, it creates less fear and respect than it did in the past. And all the stuff the Hells Angels did, or thought they did, was never as scary as the media and the cops claimed. Thats at least one thing the Angels and the Mafia have in commonthey built their image not just on reality but on perception.

The media love gangster stories. You want people to read a front-page story in a newspaper or jump their smartphones to a new website? Just use Mafia Massacre or Biker Bloodbath as a headline. Works every time. And every police department in the country knows that it can polish its image with Jack and Jill Middleclass by raiding the clubhouse of a local Hells Angels chapter and making sure the media take lots of pictures of the bikers sneering at the camera: your law enforcement tax dollars at work.