Magazine article

SUN DEVIL ANGEL

By Steve Eckert

Photos courtesy Sonny Barger Production

Photo courtesy Mark Owens

We stick up for our own, right or wrong. Think about it: If your brother is getting his ass kicked, do you give a damn whether he’s in the wrong or not? Fuck it if he’s wrong, Fuck it if he’s right.

You’re gonna jump in for him... That is the easiest way to relate to a Hells Angel.

42

Twisted South

R

alph (Sonny) Barger is emphatic about one thing before any discussion of his life and words moves forward: “My name is Sonny Barger. I am a Hells Angel, but I am NOT a spokesman for the club. Anything that I say that refers to the Hells Angels is my opinion and My Opinion Only, not the policy of the club. I've been in the club for over 50 years, so it's hard to interview me without the club coming up, but I won't talk about any of the politics of the club.” The man who may be the only individual Angel that any non-club member could identify by name or face is nonetheless steadfast that the days of his words shaping policy and direction for the world's most famous motorcycle club are as bygone as his days as an Oakland teenager faking his age to enlist in the Army.

Sonny Barger is a Hells Angel, a horseowner, a master bike mechanic, an ex-con, a high school graduate (by way of Folsom State Prison), a successful author, a brawler, a world traveler, an avid knife collector, an honorably discharged Army veteran, a cancer survivor, a husband and a patriot. He never lets a day at home begin without raising or end without lowering and meticulously folding the American flag that marks the property he owns with his fourth wife, Zorana, in the cactus-tipped northern Phoenix, Arizona outskirts known generally as Cave Creek, near New River.

Cave Creek just so happens to house a Hells Angels Chapter, as well as proximity very near the Phoenix Federal Correctional Institution—the last place that Sonny Barger ever spent prison time. The last stint of any significant duration where the Freedom of Sonny Barger was a matter for someone else to decide.

To meet Sonny Barger is to see an exceptionally fit man in his seventies who looks like the physical answer to the question: “What would Jack LaLanne look like if he led Jake LaMotta's life?” Oh, and instead of having a televised exercise program and inventing a juicer, he had done mountains of cocaine for much of a decade and got his exercise via occasional knife fights with friends and dealing unholy ass-kickings on rival motorcycle club members before having his cancerous larynx replaced with a plastic valve.

Among his many possessions which strike a perfect balance between art and violence, Barger has an exquisitely-crafted knife given him by Dennis Hocker of Union City, CA. There is quite possibly no other blade anywhere that so perfectly personifies its owner. A handhammered railroad spike of pure American steel, the distinctive large head of the spike serves as the pommel for the dark handle, with the grip a balanced twisting of the fire-forged material culminating in an arching, sleek

and chromed-reflective razor sharp blade. Add a throat valve somehow and one would have a reasonable description of the characteristics of the man himself. Sonny Barger: A razor sharp, hand-hammered railroad spike of pure American steel.

Sonny Barger's love for motorcycles began as a young boy watching the cops he despised sitting on Harleys and Indians in front of his family's house looking to nab drivers who casually rolled through the corner stop

signs. Regardless of his lifelong mistrust of police, the youthful Sonny would engage them in small talk simply to get up close to the gleaming, muscular motorcycles which filled him with awe. By his teenage years, school had become a distraction to riding his little Cushman scooter while yearning to harness a Harley or a Norton. It seemed preordained when he bolted high school early, following numerous physical confrontations with teachers and even more with

The story of the Hells Angel Motorcycle Club is the story of a very select brotherhood of men who’ll fight and die for each other no matter what the cause.

Photos courtesy Sonny Barger Production

www.twistedsouth.com

43

Photo courtesy Paul Hatton

We are a group of complete individuals and I mean individuals. Every one of us has a different reason for being who we are. The only thing we agree on is our love for the club. That and our love for motorcycles. fellow students. Once his older sister Shirley got married and moved out, his lifelong alcoholic father Ralph Sr. took to living in a downtown Oakland hotel“and Sonny took to the Army.

Despite early organization of a club deemed “The Earth Angels”, which mostly hung on street corners and sported the club name on jackets and nothing else, it was in the US Army that Barger got the first true taste of the camaraderie and regiment that has fueled the entirety of his life since that time. A rootless upbringing and an everchanging domestic scene placed Barger in an ideal mindset for Army enlistment at a less-thanideal time: he was two years shy of the minimum enlistment age requirement of eighteen.

So he did what thousands of like-minded eager recruits had done for decades and crafted a fake birth certificate and joined the military. The ruse lasted just long enough for the penalty for discovery of improper age to be 44

Twisted South

officially changed. “It was just a few months after they changed it from a Fraudulent Enlistment to an Honorable Discharge, could have been 5 months, it could have been one month, but it was a very lucky thing for me.”

Lucky would be an understatement. Fraudulent Enlistment carried with it a potential court martial, dishonorable discharge, and up to two years in a military jail, although such sentencing for what amounted to the over-enthusiasm for service was almost never applied. But the dishonorable discharge alone amounted to the loss of all future GI Benefits, and these would come in handy throughout Barger's life in a great many ways.

The first real bike was a 1934 Indian Scout before he bought a Harley Davidson knucklehead, which cost about $125 of the 18year old Sonny's money. That's called a modest downpayment on an American Dream. Some dream of fame and riches, some

dream of accomplishment in athletics and some just aspire to create something that is recognized as special. Sonny Barger dreamed of the freedom of the open road and a gas tank that was forever full. And an army of blood brothers in tow. The sound of a blitzkrieg of don'tgive-a-fuck-on-wheels. And he made it happen. Sonny Barger's American Dream, also known as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, Oakland Chapter.

Since at least WWI, there were squadrons and clubs using the name “Hell's Angels” in some capacity. Among the most wellknown were the air mercenaries The Flying Tigers, who had a sub group of flyers with nasty reputations who developed a logo that approximated what would later become redefined as the “death's head” patch that identifies the HAMC symbolically. In a straightforward way, the first sight of that patch—a skull with an aviator helmet inside a set of wings—on his rid-

ing buddy Don “Boots” Reeves' jacket began the history of The Hells Angels. The new club was named, it was soon discovered that other bike clubs claimed it as well, and Sonny and Boots determined that the meeting to set everything straight had to be convened. That meeting, between all groups claiming the name, began the Legend“.

The Hells Angels ride. The Hells Angels party. The Hells Angels fight. The Hells Angels raise, well, Hell. And at all times, the Hells Angels prioritize all things Hells Angels. Those early meetings to form a working model for what constitutes a club were pure Sonny Barger. “Boots” was made the first president of the Oakland chapter of the Angels before ceding his seat in a failed attempt to start a musical career as a country & western singer,

Photo courtesy Justice Howard

The greatest thing I’ve ever learned is probably the simplest thing any of us can ever learn: I am who I am. but the engine driving the club was running on Barger fuel. A chance meeting in late summer of 1957 in Gardena with an early Hells Angel named Vic Bettencourt filled in many of the pieces for Sonny regarding the hows and whys of a club. Bettencourt supplied some of the earliest history, as well as organizational discipline outlines. Barger filled in the rest.

Most of the earliest Angels, including the prototype San Bernandino (“Berdoo”) tribe were comprised of war veterans after WWII. 1948 was considered the debut year of some form of

a club calling itself Hells Angels, but everything that modern history knows of the HAMC formed its governing model—and aspirations of a national coalition— from the Oakland Chapter of the club, and that had everything to do with the adherence to code of conduct, paid dues, set meetings with parliamentary procedure, and structured hierarchy set up in 1957 with Barger's initiative.

Part of that initiative was the establishment of turf and the willingness to fight for it. The Gypsy Jokers were a prototype motorcycle club settled in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose,

www.twistedsouth.com

45

but after the Oakland chapter of the Angels was through with them, they were out of California entirely.

Says Barger of both the time then and now: “Our clubs and our bikes are what we live for and anything else is just that: Anything else. It goes without saying that we worked hard for our reps and will do anything in our power to maintain them.

I don't apologize for a damn thing.” Part of the lure that individuals as well as whole charters sought was the brotherhood and support of knowing that

once you were in the club, and sported the HAMC patch with whatever residential affiliation was emblazoned on the bottom, your ass was covered by every one of the club members who sported the patch as well. It may have started as just an idea, but the HAMC was a blood oath of total commitment to unity. “We stick up for our own, right or wrong. Think about it: If your brother is getting his ass kicked, do you give a damn whether he's in the wrong or not? Fuck it if he's wrong, Fuck it if he's right.

You're gonna jump in for him.

Our clubs and our bikes are what we live for and anything else is just that: Anything else...

I don’t apologize for a damn thing.

If he's kicking ass, Cool—but as soon as he gets hit, then fuck all, fair fight. That is the easiest way to relate to a Hells Angel.”

To see Sonny Barger these days is to be witness to a man who has walked through a life of fire in order to find a place where not even burned embers remain.

The horsepower he requires since moving to Arizona is the most elemental kind: A horse— three to be exact. Their care and feeding occupies his morning first and foremost. Watching him walk them, and ready their saddles in the morning is to see a man now at peace when once peace seemed like an illusion unattainable as he battled demons inside and out. The two were intertwined. The bulk of Barger's arrests starting in 1963 until 1973 were related to narcotics, and he was as enthusiastic a consumer as he was a supplier.

Photo Courtesy Paul Hatton

46

Twisted South

Photo Courtesy Justice Howard

We don’t pick guys,we recognize.

His cocaine habit was one he details in his seminal 2000 bestselling autobiography “Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club”. It was in county lockup prior to his first prison time, in Folsom, where Sonny kicked his cocaine habit cold turkey. For a man who named his most precious handbuilt Harley “Sweet Cocaine” because every single minute spent customizing, building and caring for the bike was performed with the icy vapor of cocaine up his nose, cold turkey evokes a particularly rough transition, especially just prior to an inaugural prison sentence for drug dealing and false imprisonment, with a chaser of weapons possession by an ex-felon.

Where public perception of the Hells Angels took an upward turn in the minds of a great many was during a Vietnam Day Committee anti-war demonstration on October 16, 1965

on the line separating Oakland and Berkeley. There, a Barger-led contingent of about eight Hells Angels broke up the protest as well as quite a few protesters.

Images of Barger fighting back under a deluge of Berkeley cops went national, and allowed the Angels support of the servicemen and disdain for the protesters to become nationally known as well. Suddenly, to the establishment and older Americans, the Angels looked less like anarchy on wheels and more like rowdy toughs with a red white and blue streak. Barger's personal animosity for the protesters was with the spitting upon returning vets and the calls of “baby killer!” that fell on the ears of fellow servicemen.

To this day, anti-war peaceniks make his blood boil, as does the seemingly lesson-resistant civilian leadership of the military as presently comprised.

“It's the same thing. Our leaders don't seem to learn. I believe in

war, I believe we have to fight, but the United States has never been geared to fight unlimited war. You have to go all-out, you have to walk right through it.

You can't fight like in Vietnam: fly in a bunch of paratroopers, send in a bunch of infantrymen, win a battle and then pull back.”

But neither does permanent occupation in places like Iraq and Afghanistan appeal to a man who has been all about defining one's turf and defending that turf to the end: “We don't need to be there, those people hate us. What do our “leaders' think the people of America would do if some other country came in here (like we do there) and said “We're gonna change your lifestyle, we don't like it. We don't like the way you treat women.

We don't like the way you treat homosexuals, we don't like the way you do this or that—you're gonna do it our way'? We're gonna go up in arms against them.”

“In America today, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are people who are against it, but you never see them at the airports throwing blood on the guys coming home.” But the actions of institutions like the Westboro Baptist Church evoke feelings similar to the rabid antiwar protesters he always clashed with. “What I don't like is the guys that go to the funerals and disrupt the funerals. There are not a lot of people who do that, but there is people who do that.

The Patriot Guard is pretty good, they're all bike riders, and they get involved to disrupt that shit.

If we (Angels) tried to do it these days, we'd be in prison for the rest of our lives.”

This is a man who values violence, still. When asked about his calcified and knotted left hand and wrist, the result of a teenage trip through a windshield in a car crash that broke the arm badly, he brushes off the www.twistedsouth.com

47

Photo courtesy Justice Howard

lack of mobility by indicating how the additional thickness has made that large mitt a naturally advantageous punching weapon. To see him efficiently scrape the built-up dirt from his horses' shoed feet with practiced cutting motions is to evoke the stories of the rampage Barger went on in 1968 when his prized “Sweet Cocaine” motorcycle was stolen while he was in a jewelry store by a couple prospects from a local bike club called The Unknowns. As the entire Unknowns club roster was “detained” until the guilty were identified, merciless beatings were dished out to them all. After the panicked thieves--who realized only after the fact that they were stripping out the bike of the Oakland Chapter president of the Hells Angels--dumped the ride in the Oakland Estuary, they were rounded up and eventually begged for death to stop the beatings they were enduring.

The Unknowns were disbanded by the end of the assault. They've never ridden as a club since.

It's difficult to consider who 48

Twisted South

was more shocked when Barger decided that his time in Northern California had played out and his time in the Cave Creek chapter was to begin: The Oakland Angels, or the Arizona Police Department. It took a stop or two along the wide open roads of Arizona at the urging of a policeman with his lights flashing before the local police knew that the most famous outlaw motorcyclist on earth had set up residence in the Valley of the Sun. Soon thereafter, a visit by a sheriff's department vehicle with an interest in photographing the exterior of Barger's entire residence was undertaken, although this was denied by the department. It all goes to continue to stoke a mistrust/hatred of police that has fueled Barger's life from childhood.

“If you want cops to leave you alone, you have to shake em up.

If we make the scene with less than 15 bikes, they'll always bust us, but if we show up with a hundred or two hundred they'll give us a goddamn escort. They'll show a little respect. Cops are

just like anybody else: They don't want any more trouble than they think they can handle.” Growing up in Oakland allowed Sonny to see a general change in policemen over the years: “When I was a kid, we had physically tough beat cops. Oakland was one of the best-paying police departments, so there'd be a lot of cops trying to get into it. When you had a problem with a cop, he'd take his badge off and he'd fistfight you. Now they shoot you.”

Also in those earlier days, hitting a policeman was a misdemeanor, a fact taken advantage of especially by early Oakland Angel Skip Workman, a gifted brawler.

“If you wanted to be a sergeant in the Oakland PD, you had to go up to Skip's house, knock on his door and tell him you were arresting him, and after you picked yourself up, maybe you'd get to be a sergeant.”

There was never recruitment with the Angels, there was only observation and acceptance of those who wanted in, and passed the test and vote. It is a mindset that remains with Barger in his mostly un-Angels endeavors to this day. He doesn't go out soliciting publicity, because he doesn't have to: He Is Sonny Barger. But the man knows how to play the game of self promotion like he knows how to tune a chopper, because it works for him. This spring, after many years of development, the man who used to get paid $5000 in the 60s and 70s

by Joe Soloman as a Consultant on every biker movie Soloman made, is having his life story made into a big budget motion picture with acclaimed director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide) and actor Mickey Rourke playing The Man Himself. “This movie, I believe, is going to cost over $100million. Tony and I get along well, we talk and him and I we've developed a pretty good friendship over the last ten

years. I've told Tony, “You know Tony, I don't care what you do with the movie. If people walk out of that movie and they don't say ‘I wanna be a Hells Angel' you didn't do your job.”

It was the success of the autobiography that had Fox pay for the movie rights, a purchase that allowed a great deal of financial independence to Barger after decades of legal fees drained a small fortune out of his coffers.

It also allowed him to follow up the autobiography with his

“tales of motorcycling” collection “Ridin' High, Livin' Free” in 2002, and the truly great “Freedom: Credos From The Road” in 2005, which reads like the Sonny Barger Manifesto, and last year's modern day how-to of all things bikes, “Let's Ride: Sonny Barger's Guide to Motorcycling”. In between, he has also authored two novels of fiction, “Dead In 5 Heartbeats” in 2003 and “6 Chambers, 1 Bullet” in 2006. Barger's book signings at a combination of bookstores and

Harley dealerships, are among some of the most successful and heavily-attended such gatherings in the celebrity circuit. Not bad for a guy who just loved motorcycles and wanted to forever ride the free and open road.

It was in 1982 that chronic sore throat pain that had Barger guzzling Chloraseptic bottles like they were beer led to the revelation that three packs of Camels a day had yielded cancer of the larynx. Quite a way to stop smoking—although the tumor

My most basic creado is: I never said Freedom was cheap, and it ain’t. Never will be. It’s been the highest-priced and the most precious commodity in my life.

Photo courtesy Justice Howard

www.twistedsouth.com

49

Photo courtesy Paul Hatton

in his throat was so advanced before he got it looked at that his doctors didn't urge him to stop, assuming he'd be dead so swiftly that a few more Camels couldn't do any additional harm. He was smoking one as he was wheeled into the operating room, where his life was saved, but not his vocal cords. None of this was enough to engender sympathy from the law enforcement groups lined up to take their own scalpel to Barger, and cases still got made and taken to trial against him, all while his cancertreatments continued, leading to one amusing recollection during 50

Twisted South

a federal case held in Louisville, KY involving interstate explosives: “I had to go to the hospital down in Kentucky for my throat, and they cleared the entire hospital except for one doctor left in the entire place, they rolled up with five cars and a helicopter, SWAT guys and all, they drove over sidewalks, through red lights, they weren't stopping.

They cleared that hospital floorby-floor, and when they brought me in the doc says, “Mr Barger, I don't know what you've done but this is the most exciting day in the history of this place!'”

It was while serving time for

the federal conviction in the case tried in Kentucky that Barger was first sent to Colorado. There the Bureau of Prisons refused to accept him due to his reputation as “the leader of the Hell's Angels” and he was re-routed to New River, Arizona, and the idea of Southwestern living grabbed him for the first time. After release, and upon the Cave Creek, AZ motorcycle club The Dirty Dozen getting accepted as a Hells Angels chapter after 1994, Sonny Barger applied for transfer. And being Sonny Barger, he got it. Naturally, his “complications” didn't end there,

as his wife at that time—his third—was not keeping his best interests at heart. “I moved here with a bad girl, but she had 8 horses. After she had me arrested three times, getting paid by the Feds twice, when I found that out in court, naturally she was 86'd from the club, from me and the divorce started, but“I ended up with the horses.”

Sonny, whose wife Zorana (“Z”) and he now care for the remaining three of those horses, also house two of the more beautiful bikes in their garage that one could find“and they are

no longer Harleys. Both are Victory Visions. “I've had that bike two years and put 65,000 miles on it, had one fluke fuel pump problem and got it repaired in half an hour while I waited. You put 40,000 miles on a Harley, they will not accept it as a tradein on a new bike. A guy like me if I wanted to trade my bike in every year, I couldn't trade it in. It's a piece of shit. The best bike that Harley Davidson ever made was an FXRT, and this Victory Vision handles better going crosscountry.” One thing remains the same, however: “I don't separate

riding from the club, because every time I get on my motorcycle, I have my badge on. I never ride my bike without it. Everything I've done has revolved around the club. It's been my life.”

When asked about that life spent chasing freedom both in the open road and from incarceration, the question is put, “What has Freedom cost you?”

Taking a few seconds before placing his fingers over his throat valve, he smiles and says, “Nothing that I wasn't willing to pay.” n

I belonged right where I was, with my club. I didn’t have millions of dollars and I wasn’t on the cover of Time Magazine either. What I did have was respect. Respect from those who counted on me. After all, I said to myself, I was Sonny Barger. I was a Hells Angel.

Photo courtesy Mark Owens www.twistedsouth.com

51