California: The Wilder Ones

The 1954 movie The Wild One was a slice-of-seedy-life picture about a pack of vicious, swaggering motorcycle hoods called the Black Rebels. The characters were too overdrawn and the violence they wrought was too unrelieved to en gage the credulity of its audience, so the film passed quickly into oblivion.

Last week it was back — in real life. The story was told by California Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch, in a shocking report on a motorcycle gang called Hell’s Angels.

It was a rape case that ignited Lynch’s investigation. Last fall, two teen-age girls were taken forcibly from their dates and raped by several members of the gang. From 104 California sheriffs, district attorneys and chiefs of police, Lynch amassed a mountain of evidence about Hell’s Angels, the thrust of which shows that the group has more than lived up to its sinister moniker.

Chopped Hogs. Founded in 1950 at Fontana, a steel town 50 miles east of Los Angeles, the club now numbers about 450 in California. Their logbook of kicks runs from sexual perversion and drug addiction to simple assault and thievery. Among them, they boast 874 felony arrests, 300 felony convictions, 1,682 misdemeanor arrests, and 1,023 misdemeanor convictions. Of 151 An gels involved in the 300 felony convictions, only 85 have ever served time in prisons or reform schools.

No act is too degrading for the pack.

Their initiation rite, for example, 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. But their favorite activity seems to be terrorizing whole towns. Once, roaring along on their “chopped hogs” (customized Harley-Davidson machines), they swept with their girl friends into the town of Porterville (pop. 7,991). With them were members of several other outlaw motorcycle gangs, the Stray Satans. Galloping Gooses, Comancheros and Cavaliers. Reports Lynch:

“By Saturday evening they had assembled in the center of the city. Most started to drink in local bars, becoming obnoxious and vulgar. They stood in the middle of the street, where they stopped vehicles, opened car doors and attempted to pet and paw female passengers in the automobiles. The women who accompanied the group lay in the middle of the street, where they went through suggestive motions. At about this time, some half-dozen motorcyclists invaded a bar and brutally beat an old man and attempted to abduct the barmaid. Shortly thereafter some dozen motorcyclists went to the local hospital, where they pushed in every door of the hospital looking for the victim of the beating.”

Dossiers. When they are not thus engaged, the Angels—sometimes accompanied by the young children of a member and by the unmarried females who hang out with the club—often rent a dilapidated house on the edge of a town, where they swap girls, drugs and stolen motorcycle parts with equal abandon. In between drug-induced stupors, the Angels go on motorcycle-stealing forays, even have a panel truck with a special ramp for loading the stolen machines. Afterward, they may ride off again to seek some new nadir in sordid behavior.

Armed with all this information, Attorney General Lynch last week announced that all local law enforcement agencies have now been supplied with dossiers on each member of Hell’s Angels and on similar gangs, and set up a coordinated intelligence service that will try to track down the hoods wherever they appear. “They will no longer be allowed to threaten the lives, peace and security of honest citizens of our state,” said he. To that, thousands of Californians shuddered a grateful amen.