The defence was successful and the rape suspects were acquitted, but the Angels saw no reason to stop their money-making ventures. Chapters were added in Zurich, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Montreal. George Wethern, a leading American Hells Angel, said at the time, ‘The additions were designed to contribute to our image and business concerns, by providing a drug-route link, manufacturing a drug, supplying chemicals or distributing drugs to an untapped area.’
Infamy bred notoriety, and in the mid-1960s
The Nation
magazine sent a young Hunter S. Thompson to write about the Hells Angels. Thompson returned to the bikers after completing the article, riding with the Hells Angels for a year while researching his book,
Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.
Soon afterwards Hollywood came calling again and Barger starred next to Jack Nicholson in the 1967 release
Hell’s Angels on Wheels.
Rock stars such as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead struck up friendships with the bikers, which Garcia admitted was a bit scary because the Hells Angels were, as he put it, ‘good in all the violent spaces’.
That was proved beyond doubt on 6 December 1969, when the Hells Angels were hired – for $500 worth of free beer – to act as security guards for a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Speedway outside San Francisco. Armed with pool cues, they attempted to keep order while drinking, smoking marijuana and dropping acid.
At one point a black, eighteen-year-old Stones fan named Meredith Hunter rushed the stage, just as the band finished playing ‘Under My Thumb’ and was beaten back. He rushed again, was pushed back, pulled a gun, and shot a Hells Angel in the arm. Barger later laid all the blame for what happened next firmly at Hunter’s feet: ‘When he fired, people started stabbing him. The guy killed himself by pulling the gun and shooting it into a crowd. And, to me, that’s just part of everyday life in the Hells Angels – somebody shoots you, you stab him.’
But the idea that Hunter provoked the attack is only one version of the event. One eyewitness, Tony Sanchez, described the scene thus: ‘A great six-foot-four grizzly bear of a Hells Angel had stalked across to Meredith [Hunter] to pull his hair hard in an effort to provoke a fight . . . A fight broke out, five more Angels came crashing to the aid of their buddy, while Meredith tried to run off through the packed crowd. An Angel caught him by the arm and brought down a sheath knife hard in the black man’s back. The knife failed to penetrate deeply, but Meredith knew then that he was fighting for his life. He ripped a gun out of his pocket and pointed it straight at the Angel’s chest . . . And then the Angels were upon him like a pack of wolves. One tore the gun from his hand, another stabbed him in the face and still another stabbed him repeatedly, insanely, in the back until his knees buckled.’
When the Angels finished with Hunter, several people tried to come to his aid, but an Angel stood guard over the motionless body. ‘Don’t touch him,’ he said menacingly. ‘He’s going to die anyway, so just let him die.’ It was never proven that Meredith actually had a gun. Later, arrests were made but the Angel concerned was acquitted. Although hundreds of people had witnessed the event – including the band, who had seen it from their stage – and although the whole grisly affair had been captured on film hired to document the gig for the band, no witnesses were willing to come forward.
Now, with their bad-boy reputation squarely in place and undeniably earned, the Hells Angels began to emerge as a more sophisticated outfit. They formed a corporation to protect their legitimate business interests, trademarked the infamous death’s head logo and opened more chapters around the world.
The first British chapter of the Angels was formed in London in mid-1969 and it took only three years for the gang to achieve the same kind of status as their American brothers. In late 1972 eighteen-year-old Ian Everest, along with two others, abducted a fourteen-year-old Girl Guide off the streets of Winchester and dragged her along to an Angels party where he raped her in front of cheering clubmates. At the subsequent court case the girl told a horrified jury that Everest had laughed throughout the assault.
Sentencing him to nine years, Mr Justice Waller launched a thousand tabloid shock-horror headlines telling Everest: ‘We have heard of Hells Angels as an utterly evil organisation, evil and corrosive of young people. I do not sentence you for being a Hells Angel, but no doubt the evil nature of that organisation has led you into this situation.’
Every few years something new happened to keep the image alive, often helped by the media’s inability to tell the Hells Angels apart from other biker gangs. In 1980 a group of Angels ambushed members of the ‘bootleg’ Windsor chapters and shot its leader, Richard Sharman, in the head three times. Miraculously, he survived.
The attack had come about because, despite dressing themselves in close copies of the official Hells Angels colours, the Windsor chapter had never applied for an official charter. Started up by local rockers they were only accepted into the official fold in 1985 shortly after one of the members, John Mikklesen, died in police custody. The fact that Mikklesen was black – an official Angels taboo – had played a significant part in the club failing to be sanctioned earlier.
In 1983 a Hells Angels party in Cookham ended in violence after a fight broke out in a queue where bikers were lining up to gang-rape a woman who had been staked out in a corner of the tent. The ensuing battle, chiefly between six members of the south London gang the Road Rats and some twenty-four members of the Manchester-based Satan’s Slaves, involved axes, knives, shotguns and chains. Two Rats were killed but the remaining four fought on, stabbing and beating the Slaves and eventually herding around twenty into an old barn. They had just managed to set the building alight when the Angels intervened, wanting to know what was being done for the dead and injured.
Two years later the Angels made headlines again after terrorising a family living next door to the Windsor clubhouse. The bikers famously held axe-throwing competitions and, after complaints, first offered to buy the family out, then changed their minds. ‘They had a meeting and we could hear them deciding it would be easier to kill us. They were shouting, “Kill them, kill them,”’ said then neighbour Pat McSorley. The family decided to move.
It soon occurs to me that if I want to find out more about the dark side of the world of biking, I’m going to have to go to rallies, runs, biker pubs and do my best to blend in, something I won’t be able to manage in my fifteen-year-old Vauxhall Astra. I briefly toy with the idea of buying a helmet and a set of leathers but quickly come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to get myself a bike.
I spend four days on a Direct Access course in north London, which allows you to go from novice to Easy Rider in a matter of days. I spend the first day on a Honda CG125 before moving on to a 500cc Kawasaki ER-5, driving around for hours on end practising my turns, manoeuvres and road craft in readiness for my test. Almost as soon as I begin the training I’m hooked. The sense of freedom, the element of danger and the whole Steve McQueen thing are there right from the start. Even at such a rudimentary level the appeal of the biker lifestyle is clear.
The day of the test comes all too soon and, though convinced I had messed it up, I’m surprised to find the examiner passing me (my first words when he told me were ‘Good grief,’ and I only just managed to stop myself adding, ‘Are you mad? Have you lost your mind?’) But although I am now legally able to ride a bike of any size, I’m still a long way from becoming a Hells Angel.
Joining the gang is out of the question. Even the God’s Squad Motorcycle Club say that gaining membership to their organisation, which does nothing more sinister than extol the virtues of Christianity to bikers the length and breadth of the UK, takes on average around three years.
But there is no difficulty in obtaining a ticket to the Angels’ most celebrated annual event: the Bulldog Bash.
From its humble beginnings in the mid-1980s when a couple of thousand bikers gathered in a field to drink and show off their customised machines, the Bulldog Bash has grown into Europe’s premier biking event, attracting around forty thousand bikers from all over the world for a non-stop, four-day party. It all takes place at the Shakespeare County Raceway, one of Britain’s premier drag-racing tracks, just south of Stratford-upon-Avon. Inside the grounds there is a massive beer tent, open twenty-four hours a day, of course, hundreds of food stalls, a shopping village, bungee-jumping, mini-motorbike tracks and tattoo parlours.
For those who find the heat too much one way to cool down is to submit to the topless bike wash where four young women, cropped T-shirts pushed up over their breasts, use sponges, buckets of soapy water and their bodies to put a smile on the face of the lads who have paid five pounds for five minutes of mammary delight.
In the evening there is a giant musical stage with top rock and heavy-metal bands – the Fun Lovin’ Criminals were the headline act – as well as an all-night trance and dance tent. Up on stage the grinning death’s head skull is replaced by a far more family-friendly image – a cute bulldog sitting astride a Harley, its little paws up on the handlebars.
After midnight that is the first of the Bulldog’s famous ‘novelty acts’, which are suitable only for those with strong stomachs. Bands like the Impotent Sea Snakes and Kamakazi, who practise self mutilation and blood-letting on stage, push back the boundaries in keeping with the Angels traditions. By the time one of the women is threading syringes through her breast and upper thigh and attaching yet another clothes peg to her labia the tent is almost empty.
But one of the biggest attractions is the ‘Run What Ya Brung’ event, where bikers can run their machines on the quarter-mile-long drag strip. With some road-legal bikes achieving times of less than ten seconds on the mile strip, reaching speeds close to 160 m.p.h., you quickly understand why the RWYB is so popular. It provides the only opportunity for bikers to find out just how fast their machinery really is. Eager participants will line up for hours waiting for their chance to race while hundreds of spectators sit on the grass banks overlooking the track and enthusiastically cheer them on. More than once I saw racers complete their run and simply rejoin the queue.
The event is policed by the Angels themselves and, despite the vast numbers attending, in all the years it has taken place there has not been a single reported crime. The event is now recognised by Warwickshire Police as their least troublesome public event. Teams of Angels make regular ‘security’ patrols in customised black Ford Escorts that have had all the glass removed and large white swastikas painted on the sides. It’s a menacing sight at the best of times so it’s little wonder that there are dozens of tales of people losing wallets or purses full of money and finding them in the lost-property office with all their cash intact.
It was at the Bulldog Bash that I first met Colin, an associate member of a leading back-patch gang – he has asked me not to say which one – who later agreed to be my guide to the inner workers of the biker world. I was parking my hired Honda VT750 Shadow, essentially a Japanese copy of a Harley, while Colin glided in on a heavily customised kit bike based on the genuine article. Colin’s bike had been ‘chopped’ – fitted with extra long front forks – and the brightly painted Dayglo green and orange surfaces reflected around the gleaming chrome-covered engine. It was a remarkable machine, and he was clearly enormously proud of it. He soon lost me in a blur of technical detail as he explained how he had taken a 1984 Harley-Davidson FXRS 1340 V2 Evo and transformed it with a new swinging-arm section, ported cylinder heads, yokes, drive sprockets and hypercharger filters.
Although I had not initially told him that I was a writer researching a book about the Angels and other biker gangs, our conversation slowly moved on to the topic as we sat in the corner of the beer tent and heard someone complain about the price of the tickets for the Bash – thirty-five pounds in advance and forty-five on the gate. ‘That’s the trouble with this lot,’ said Colin, nodding towards two patrolling Angels on the other side of the marquee. ‘They’re all about the money, these days. A couple of years ago I was leaving the bash and I saw some of the Angels collecting up some of the takings. There must have been at least ten bin liners, all of them stuffed with cash that they were putting in the back of this van. God knows what they do with all the money. They’re making stacks of it from this place.’
The best estimates suggest the Angels earn at least £1.5 million from the bash, and they’re not the only ones making money. Later in the afternoon I spoke to a hot-dog stall owner, told him I was thinking of getting into the business and ask him how much the Angels charge for a pitch. He smiled and whispered, ‘Eight hundred quid a day.’ I whistled and asked if it was worth his while. ‘I’m still here, ain’t I? And I keep on coming back, so something must be going right.’
Away from the bike shows, Colin and I meet up for a few drinks. At first he is shocked when I reveal my true motives for wanting to talk to him but, after being assured that his true identity will never be revealed, he agrees to fill me in on what he knows about the current back-patch gang scene.
He has never been a member of the Hells Angels but was once a prospect for a different biker gang and got to know several Angels as a result. He decided not to continue with the recruitment process after realising that he simply didn’t have the time or the energy to commit fully to the lifestyle. He laughs at the idea of me thinking I could join any of the clubs, let alone the Angels. ‘You’re talking about a long, long process,’ he says. ‘You start out as a hang-around. That’s a chance to get to know the club and for them to get to know you. That’s before you can become a prospect, and that stage can last for at least a couple of years.