The Motorcycle Gangs II (Hunter S Thompson "The Nation" 1965)

This is a public thing, and not at all true among themselves. In a meeting, their conversation is totally frank and open. They speak to and about one another with an honesty that more civilized people couldn’t bear. At the meeting I attended (and before they realized I was a journalist) one Angel was being publicly evaluated; some members wanted him out of the club and others wanted to keep him in. It sounded like a group-therapy clinic in progress–not exactly what I expected to find when just before midnight I walked into the bar of the De Pau in one of the bleakest neighborhoods in San Francisco, near Hunters Point. By the time I parted company with them–at 6:30 the next morning after an all-night drinking bout in my apartment–I had been impressed by a lot of things, but no one thing about them was as consistently obvious as their group loyalty. This is an admirable quality, but it is also one of the things that gets them in trouble: a fellow Angel is always right when dealing with outsiders. And this sort of reasoning makes a group of “offended” Hell’s Angels nearly impossible to deal with. Here is another incident from the Attorney General’s report:

On September 19, 1964, a large group of Hell’s Angels and “Satan’s Slaves” converged on a bar in the South Gate (Los Angeles County), parking their motorcycles and cars in the street in such a fashion as to block one-half of the roadway. They told officers that three members of the club had been recently asked to stay out of the bar and that they had come to tear it down. Upon their approach the bar owner locked the doors and turned off the lights and no entrance was made, but the group did demolish a cement block fence. On arrival of the police, members of the club were lying on the sidewalk and in the street. They were asked to leave the city, which they did reluctantly. As they left, several were heard to say that they would be back and tear down the bar.

Here again is the ethic of total retaliation. If you’re “asked to stay out” of a bar, you don’t just punch the owner–you come back with your army and destroy the whole edifice. Similar incidents–along with a number of vague rape complaints–make up the bulk of the report. Eighteen incidents in four years, and none except the rape charges are more serious than cases of assaults on citizens who, for their own reasons, had become involved with the Hell’s Angels prior to the violence. I could find no cases of unwarranted attacks on wholly innocent victims. There are a few borderline cases, wherein victims of physical attacks seemed innocent, according to police and press reports, but later refused to testify for fear of “retaliation.” The report asserts very strongly that Hell’s Angels are difficult to prosecute and convict because they make a habit of threatening and intimidating witnesses. That is probably true to a certain extent, but in many cases victims have refused to testify because they were engaged in some legally dubious activity at the time of the attack.

In two of the most widely publicized incidents the prosecution would have fared better if their witnesses and victims had been intimidated into silence. One of these was the Monterey “gang rape,” and the other a “rape” in Clovis, near Fresno in the Central Valley. In the latter, a 36-year-old widow and mother of five children claimed she’d been yanked out of a bar where she was having a quiet beer with another woman, then carried to an abandoned shack behind the bar and raped repeatedly for two and a half hours by fifteen or twenty Hell’s Angels and finally robbed of $150. That’s how the story appeared in the San Francisco newspapers the next day, and it was kept alive for a few more days by the woman’s claims that she was getting phone calls threatening her life if she testified against her assailants.

Then, four days after the crime, the victim was arrested on charges of “sexual perversion.” The true story emerged, said the Clovis chief of police, when the woman was “confronted by witnesses. Our investigation shows she was not raped,” said the chief. “She participated in lewd acts in the tavern with at least three other Hell’s Angels before the owners ordered them out. She encouraged their advances in the tavern, then led them to an abandoned house in the rear… She was not robbed but, according to a woman who accompanied her, had left her house early in the evening with $5 to go bar-hopping.” That incident did not appear in the Attorney General’s report.

But it was impossible not the mention the Monterey “gang rape,” because it was the reason for the whole subject to become official. Page one of the report–which Time‘s editors apparently skipped–says that the Monterey case was dropped because “… further investigation raised questions as to whether forcible rape had been committed or if the identifications made by victims were valid.” Charges were dismissed on September 25, with the concurrence of a grand jury. The deputy District Attorney said “a doctor examined the girls and found no evidence” to support the charges. “Besides that, one girl refused to testify,” he explained, “and the other was given a lie-detector test and found to be wholly unreliable.”

This, in effect, was what the Hell’s Angels had been saying all along. Here is their version of what happened, as told by several who were there:

One girl was white and pregnant, the other was colored, and they were with five colored studs. They hung around our bar–Nick’s Place on Del Monte Avenue–for about three hours Saturday night, drinking and talking with our riders, then they came out to the beach with us–them and their five boyfriends. Everybody was standing around the fire, drinking wine, and some of the guys were talking to them–hustling ’em, naturally–and soon somebody asked the two chicks if they wanted to be turned on–you know, did they want to smoke some pot? They said yeah, and then they walked off with some of the guys to the dunes. The spade went with a few guys and then she wanted to quit, but the pregnant one was really hot to trot; the first four or five guys she was really dragging into her arms, but after that she cooled off, too. By this time, though, one of their boy friends had got scared and gone for the cops–and that’s all it was.

But not quite all. After that there were Senator Farr and Tom Lynch and a hundred cops and dozens of newspaper stories and articles in the national news magazine–and even this article, which is a direct result of the Monterey “gang rape.”

When the much-quoted report was released, the local press–primarily the San Francisco Chronicle, which had earlier done a long and fairly objective series on the Hell’s Angels–made a point of saying that the Monterey charges against the Hell’s Angels had been dropped for lack of evidence. Newsweek was careful not to mention Monterey at all, but the New York Times referred to it as “the alleged gang rape” which, however, left no doubt in a reader’s mind that something savage had occurred. It remained for Time, though, to flatly ignore the fact that the Monterey rape charges had been dismissed. Its article leaned heavily on the hairiest and least factual sections of the report, and ignored the rest. It said, for instance, that the Hell’s Angels initiation rite “demands that any new member bring a woman or girl [called a ‘sheep’] who is willing to submit to sexual intercourse with each member of the club.” That is untrue, although, as one Angel explained, “Now and then you get a woman who likes to cover the crowd, and hell, I’m no prude. People don’t like to think women go for that stuff, but a lot of them do.”

We were talking across a pool table about the rash of publicity and how it had affected the Angel’s activities. I was trying to explain to him that the bulk of the press in this country has such a vested interest in the status quo that it can’t afford to do much honest probing at the roots, for fear of what they might find.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Of course I don’t like to read all this bullshit because it brings the heat down on us, but since we got famous we’ve had more rich fags and sex-hungry women come looking for us that we ever had before. Hell, these days we have more action than we can handle.”