"Thompson, Hunter S - Hell's Angels v3.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thompson Hunter S)
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 Sepнtember 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 violaнtions, 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.
* There was a basic difference between the kind of pressure the Angels got in Oakland and the kind they felt elsewhere. In Oakland it was not political, not the result of any high-level pressure or policy decision -- but more of a personal thing, like arm-wrestling. Barger and his people get along pretty well with the cops. In most cases, and with a few subtle differences, they operate on the same motional frequency. Both the cops and the Angels deny this. The very suggestion of a psychic compatibility will be denounced -- by both groups -- as a form of Communist slander. But the fact of the thing is obvious to anyone who has ever seen a routine confrontation or sat in on a friendly police check at one of the Angel bars. Apart, they curse each other savagely, and the brittle truce is often jangled by high-speed chases and brief, violent clashes that rarely make the papers. Yet behind the sound and fury, they are both playing the same game, and usually by the same rules.
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 Franнcisco 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.' "
The only significant press breakthrough during this crackdown winter of 1964-65 was a tongue-in-cheek series in the San Franнcisco Chronicle, based on some Angel parties at the Frisco chapter's new clubhouse -- which was raided and closed down almost immediately after the series appeared. Meanwhile, the Oakland Angels fattened steadily on the tide of refugees. From Berdoo, Hayward, Sacramento, the Angels were moving into the few remaining sanctuaries. By December, Barger's chapter was so swollen and starved for enemies that they began crossing the bridge and attacking the Frisco Angels. Barger felt that Frisco, by allowing the membership to shrink to eleven, had so dishonored the Hell's Angels' tradition that they should forfeit their colors. Accordingly, he declared the Frisco charter void and sent his people over to collect the jackets. The Frisco Angels refused, but they were badly unnerved by the mad-dog raids from Oakland. "Man, we'd be sitting over there in the bar," said one, "just coolin it around the pool table with a few beers -- and all of a goddamn sudden the door would bust open and there they'd be, chains and all.
"We finally got back at em, though. We went over to their hangout and set fire to one of their bikes. You should of seen it -- we burned it right in the middle of the street, man, then we went into their pad and wiped em out. What a blast! Man, I tell you we had some real beefs."
That was in December. Two more quiet months followed .. . and then came the Attorney General's report, coast-to-coast infamy and a raft of new possibilities. The whole scene changed in a flash. One day they were a gang of bums, scratching for any hard dollar. . . and twenty-four hours later they were dealing with reporters, photographers, free-lance writers and all kinds of showbiz hustlers talking big money. By the middle of 1965 they were firmly established as all-American bogeymen.
Besides appearing in hundreds of wire-serviced newspapers and a half dozen magazines, they posed for television cameramen and answered questions on radio call-in shows. They issued stateнments to the press, appeared at various rallies and bargained with Hollywood narks and magazine editors. They were sought out by mystics and poets, cheered on by student rebels and invited to parties given by liberals and intellectuals. The whole thing was very weird, and it had a profound effect in the handful of Angels still wearing the colors. They developed a prima-donna complex, demanding cash contributions (to confound the Internal Revenue Service) in return for photos and interviews. The New York Times was hard hit by these developments, and a dispatch from Los Angeles on July 2, 1965, said: "A man representing himself as a 'public relations man' for. . . [the Hell's Angels] has approached news media offering to sell photographic coverage of this weekend's 'rumble' for sums ranging from $500 to $1,000. He also offered to arrange interviews with club members for $100 apiece, or more if pictures were taken. The representative told reporters it would be 'dangerous' to go to the San Bernardino bar where the group regularly congregates without paying the money for 'protection.' One magazine, he said, paid $1,000 for permisнsion to have a photographer accompany the group this weekend."
The report was a combination of truth and absurdity, comнpounded by the fact that the Times' Los Angeles correspondent had by this time developed a serious aversion to anything conнnected with the Hell's Angels. His reasons were excellent; they had threatened him with a beating if he attempted to get a story on the Angels without first contributing to the club's coffers. No journalist likes to be held up for cash payoffs in the line of duty, and the normal reaction -- or at least the mythical reaction -- is a quick decision to clamp down on the story like a bulldog and write it at all costs.
The Times' reaction was more subtle. They tried to de-emphasize the Angels, hoping they would go away. Which is exactly the opposite of what happened. The story was already snowballing, and the monsters which the Times had helped to create came back, with a press agent, to haunt them. Here was a handful of hoodlums, without status even in San Bernardino, demanding $1,000 from any journalist who wanted to hang around them for a single weekend. Most of the Angels saw the humor in it, but even at that stage of the game, there were a few who felt they were asking a fair price for their act. . . and their faith was justiнfied when "one magazine" came through with either $1,000 (according to the Times) or $1,200 (according to the Angels). The question of this contribution is very touchy, for even if the editors would admit such a payoff, the writer and/or photograнpher who required it would do everything possible to avoid being labeled as one who has to buy his stories. The Angels talked freely about the money at first, but later denied it, after Sonny Barger passed the word that such talk could get them in tax trouble. It is a fact, however, that a Life-assigned photograнpher spent quite a bit of time with the Angels, working on a photo feature that was never published.
In the long run he queered the Berdoo Angels' whole stance by demanding big money from anybody who wanted to see them. And because nobody (except "one magazine") was willing to pay, and also because nobody called his bluff, he was able to pass for almost half a year as the well-connected front man for a thing that had long since gone down the tube. The Berdoo Angels made the classic Dick Nixon mistake of "peaking" too early. Publicity from the Monterey rape and two subsequent local brawls had brought such relentless heat that those few who insisted on wearing the colors were forced to act more like refugees than outнlaws, and the chapter's reputation withered accordingly. By the middle of August 1965 -- while the action in Oakland was booming -- the Los Angeles Times assayed the Berdoo situation: HELL'S ANGELS FADE IN VALLEY, POLICE PRESSURE TAMES OUTLAW CLUBS. The lead paragraph said, "Whatever outlaw motorcyclists there are in the [San Fernando] Valley have filtered underground, police say. They are lying low and causing very little trouble and no uproar."
"If a couple of them stick their heads up and appear on the streets now," said a police sergeant, "the first patrol car that sees them stops them for questioning. If we can't find anything else, we can almost always learn that they have traffic warrants outнstanding against them. That's enough to get them off the street, and it really bugs them.*
* This tactic quickly became popular with police in other parts of the state and in situaнtions having nothing to do with the Hell's Angels. It is an especially effective means of crowd control and by the middle of 1966 was standard procedure for dealing with peace marchers in Berkeley. Police began seizing people at random and running radio checks on their driving records. Moments later the word would come back from headquarters, and if the person being detained had even one unpaid traffic or parking citation he would be "taken off the street" -- a police euphemism meaning "put in jail."
"We maintain a checkpoint at Gorman on the Ridge Route to stop and discourage them when groups from northern Caliнfornia -- where they are more active -- try to move into Los Angeles. We have other checkpoints along the Pacific Coast Highway, especially near Malibu.
"They have become a very fluid bunch. We have a list of twenty-five hundred [sic] names of members in the various clubs, but we don't even bother to try to keep addresses. They move constantly. They change their addresses, they change their names, they even change the color of their hair."
In Fontana, heartland of the Berdoo chapter's turf, the Angels don't raise much hell in public and they are not often rousted. "Four or five of them together, that's all right," said Police Inspector Larry Wallace. "A whole bunch of em, ten or twelve or more, and we bust it up."
In his private office Wallace keeps a souvenir to remind himнself of what the Angels mean to him. It's a two-by-four framed reproduction of a Modigliani woman he confiscated out of an Angel pad. The lady is sleepy-looking, long-necked, with a prim little mouth. An Iron Cross has been scrawled over her head, and the word "help" is entwined in her hair. Around her neck hangs a Star of David with a swastika stamped into it, and there's a bullet hole in her throat, with a drawing of the bullet emerging from the back of her head. Scattered here and there are Angel maxims of the day:
Dope Forever
Forever Loaded
Honest officer, had I known my
. . .health stood in jeprody I
. . .would never had lit one.
The Angels survived in Berdoo, but they never regained their status of the late fifties and early sixties. When fame finally beckнoned, they had little to offer but a hideous reputation and a shrewd press agent. Otto, president of the chapter, couldn't get a handle anywhere. Sal Mineo was talking about a $3,000 fee to cover outlaw participation in a movie, but the Angels couldn't muster a quorum: some were in jail, others had quit and many of the best specimens had gone north to Oakland -- or "God's Country," as some of them called it -- where Sonny Barger called the shots and there was no talk at all of the Hell's Angels fading away. But Otto wanted some of the action too, and he still had a handful of loyalists to back him up. Between them they managed to pull off one last coup -- a full-dress show for a writer from the Saturday Evening Post.
The Post article appeared in November 1965, and although the view it expressed was critical, the Angels were far more impressed with the quantity of such coverage than the quality. Its total effect on them was considerable. They had, after all, made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post -- in color and along with Princess Margaret. They were bona-fide celebrities, with no worlds left to conquer. Their only gripe was that they weren't getнting rich. ("All these mothers are using us and making a scene," Barger told the Post reporter, "and we ain't getting a damn cent out of it.") It was true that the Oakland Angels had been cut out of the Los Angeles bargaining, but they eventually got nearly $500 for the photos they sold to the Post, so it was difficult to view them as a wholly exploited minority.
We're a gallant bunch of heroes,
We've been organized ten years,
We're known about the city
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