John Hall - Riding on the Edge: A Motorcycle Outlaws Tale

A MOTORCYCLE
OUTLAWS TALE

JOHN HALL

Christianityand this is its finest meritsubdued to a certain extent that Germanic lust for battle, but could not destroy it, and if some day that restraining talisman, the Cross, falls to pieces, then the savagery of the old warriors will explode again, and with it that mad berserker rage about which the Nordic poets have told so much. This talisman is decaying, and the day will come when it will crumble. Then the old stone gods will arise from the forgotten ruins and wipe the dust of centuries from their eyes, and Thor will at last leap up with his hammer and smash the Gothic Cathedrals.

Heinrich Heine

The first world to exist was Muspell. It is light and It is hot. It flames and It burns. Those who do not belong to It, and whose native land It is not, cannot endure It. The One who sits there at the Lands End to guard the gates is called Dark Surt. He has a flaming sword, and at the end of the world He will come, He will harry, and He will vanquish all the Gods and burn the whole world with fire.

Snorri Sturluson, The Norse Edda Thirteenth century Pagan Iceland

And there He sat.

Horned and cross-legged, and holding His flaming sword like a cross. The grim image of Dark Surt, embroidered under the name on the backs of the sleeveless blue denim vests that we wore over our well-worn black leather motorcycle jackets. Frank Friel, the head of the Philadelphia PoliceFBI Organized Crime Task Force, called us the most violence-prone motorcycle gang in America.

We called ourselves the Pagans, the baddest of the ass-kicking, beer-drinking, hell-raising, gang-banging, grease-covered, roadkill-eating, 1960s motorcycle clubs, chromed cavaliers and swastika-studded scooter jockeys. Spawned on the marshy flatlands of Southern Maryland, we were a band of motorized highwaymen who ruled the roads from the pine barrens of Long Island and New Jersey to the glistening moonlit peaks of the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains. Across the Dutch farmlands of Pennsylvania and down the Great Valley of Virginia, in the back alleys of the old steel, mining, railroad, and paper-mill towns of the Appalachian rustbelt, it was all Pagan country.

By the late 70s we had wormed our way from the wide-open roads and cornfields of the Dutch country clear down to the narrow streets and crowded stalls of the Italian Market in South Philly, where some of the brothers were getting caught up in the shadowlands of the Philadelphia underworld and popping up on the radar screens of Frank Friel and his FBI task force.

The shit finally hit the fan on a March morning in 1980, when someone put a gun to the head of Angelo Bruno, the man they called the Gentle Don, because he believed that he could run a criminal empire by peace and persuasion rather than violence and coercion. When the gunman squeezed the trigger, Brunos head burst into a river of blood, and so did the streets of Philadelphia. All peace and persuasion died with Bruno and the city was engulfed in the most violent crime war in American history.

When the bodies stopped falling and the river of blood dried to an occasional trickle, Nicodemo Little Nicky Scarfo emerged as the new head of Brunos criminal cartel, which has been called, among other things, the Society of Men of Honor. Physically, Nicky Scarfo was little more than a dwarf, but he had the ambition of a giant. He dreamed of becoming the biggest crime czar in America, ruling an empire that stretched from the sunny casino-studded boardwalk of Atlantic City to the dingy smoke-filled backroom betting parlors in the bars and clubs of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. Gambling, drugs, entertainment, extortion, labor unions, construction firms, trucking companies, vending machines; from tattoo parlors and pizza joints to pool halls and massage parlors, whatever the enterprise, legal or illegal, he wanted to run them all.

In building his empire Little Nicky did not have the patience of the Gentle Don. He believed that there were quicker and more efficient means of putting people in line than peace and persuasion. From his throne room in the back of a rundown warehouse on South Bancroft Street, Little Nicky issued an edict demanding that every drug monger, bookmaker, tattoo artist, titty-bar owner, pizza twirler, and chop-shop grease monkey in Philadelphia pay tribute for the privilege of doing business on the streets of his empire.

To collect this tax he dispatched a band of thugs, who determined the rate by how scared their victims looked and how much they thought they could squeeze out of them. Those who didnt pay were beaten senseless with baseball bats, usually on the open street, as a warning to Little Nickys other subjects who might prove recalcitrant. But when Nickys tax collectors paid a call on the Pagans, the bearded bikers did not look scared at all. In fact they laughed right in the faces of Scarfos clean-shaven Wops.

Little Nicky considered this an insult, and he ordered his enforcers to teach these rude cycle-bums a lesson they would not soon forget. But Scarfos stooges wanted no part of the chain-wielding Pagans. They told Scarfo that these guys were even crazier than the Mulignanes and that there was no telling how they might retaliate. So nothing was done; the dispute settled into a stalemate, with Little Nicky seething in his warehouse and the Pagans doing pretty much whatever they wanted all over Philadelphia.

Relations between the Pagans and the mob festered like a swollen abscess, which finally burst on a spring night in 1984, when Little Nickys hard-drinking underboss, Salvatore Chuckie Merlino, staggered out of a restaurant in South Philadelphia and saw a Pagan sitting on a motorcycle. Fortified with the kind of courage that comes out of a bottle, Scarfos drunken underboss rammed his car into the bike and sent the Pagan sprawling into the street.

While he was lying in a hospital bed, the Pagan was visited by his bike-riding brethren. One of them found an accident report lying on the table next to the bed where the police had left it. When he picked it up, the name Salvatore Merlino jumped up in his face. And underneath Merlinos name there was a South Philadelphia address.

Look at this, he said, as he began stabbing the paper with his finger right under the address. He then passed it around the room, and his bearded brethren all began grinning as they read it.

The next night a band of Pagans pulled up at that address and shot over two hundred rounds of ammunition through the walls, windows, and doors, while Merlinos terrified mother crouched on the floor, peeing herself under a shower of lead and glass.

As Detective Friel later put it: The incident went unavenged. This brazen insult to the majesty of the Men of Honor was never punished. The Mafia bullies had been bullied by the bike riding bullies and backed down. In fact, Scarfos people ultimately coughed up five grand for bike repairs and hospital bills.

Years later I met the Pagan who orchestrated the attack on Merlinos home.

It was a fluke encounter. I was working as a bartender. He walked in and ordered a drink. We recognized each others tattoos, and we both asked the same question: Who the hell are you? He was a leader of the Pagans during the Philadelphia mob wars in the early 80s. I went by the name Stoop and ran the New York club back in the late 60s.

He told me about the war with the Dwarf Don and about the attack on Merlinos home. Actually it wasnt really Merlinos home, the guy told me. It was his mothers. The guy had put her address on his drivers license to confuse the cops, but he had only confused the Pagans instead.