Sonny Barger
Ralph Hubert "Sonny" Barger Jr. was an American outlaw biker who was a founding member of the Oakland, California charter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club in 1957. After forming the Oakland charter, Barger was instrumental in unifying various disparate Hells Angels charters and had the club incorporated in 1966. He emerged as the Hells Angels' most prominent member during the counterculture era and was reputed by law enforcement and media to be the club's international president, an allegation he repeatedly denied. The author Hunter S. Thompson called Barger "the Maximum Leader" of the Hells Angels, and Philip Martin of the Phoenix New Times described him as "the archetypical Hells Angel", saying he "didn't found the motorcycle club... but he constructed the myth". Barger authored five books, and appeared on television and in film.
Barger served a total of 13 years in prison, following a conviction for heroin trafficking in 1974, and a 1988 conviction for conspiracy to bomb the clubhouse of a rival motorcycle club, the Outlaws. He was also acquitted of murder in 1972, and of racketeering in 1980. Barger rejected accusations from law enforcement characterizing the Hells Angels as an organized crime syndicate, and maintained that the club should not be held accountable for crimes committed by individual members.
Early life
Ralph Hubert Barger Jr. was born in Modesto, California, on October 8, 1938, the son of Kathryn Carmella and Ralph Hubert Barger. His father had German and Dutch ancestry, and his mother was of Italian descent. His mother left the family when Barger was four months old, leaving him and his older sister Shirley to be raised by their Pentecostal grandmother and alcoholic father, a day laborer on the Oakland docks. Barger grew up in Oakland in the post-war era, during which time the city's shipbuilding and automobile industries went into decline, leading to a significant rise in unemployment.Growing up, Barger was suspended from school several times for assaulting teachers, and he often fought with other boys. He dropped out of school in the tenth grade. Although many of his school friends became drug addicts, Barger worked at a grocery store and enlisted in the U.S. Army, aged sixteen in 1955. He was given an honorable discharge fourteen months later when it was discovered that he had forged his birth certificate in order to be able to join. Barger had liked the discipline, masculine camaraderie, and learning how to disassemble weapons. After his return from the Army, Barger drifted between menial jobs and lived with his father in a single residence at a hotel, later moving in with his sister and her children.
Hells Angels
In 1956, Barger joined his first motorcycle club, the Oakland Panthers, which he founded with a group of fellow military veterans. After that club disbanded, he started riding with another group of bikers, one of whom, Don "Boots" Reeves, wore a patch that belonged to a defunct Nomads chapter of the Hells Angels in North Sacramento. Founding their own Hells Angels club on April 1, 1957, each member wore the patch – a small skull wearing an aviator cap set within a set of wings, later copyrighted as the Hells Angels' "Death's Head" logo – after having replicas made at a trophy store in Hayward.Barger was not the founder of the Hells Angels as is often claimed – the group was founded in 1948 – but he became its best known member to such an extent that he is often misidentified as the club's founder. He and the Oakland Hells Angels were initially unaware that there were several other, loosely affiliated clubs using the same name throughout California. The founding members of the Oakland Hells Angels were "basically honest blue-collar or unskilled workers looking for excitement", according to George "Baby Huey" Wethern, who became the chapter vice president in 1960. Unlike the World War II veterans who formed the early Hells Angels chapters, many of the founding members of the Oakland chapter were former servicemen with disreputable military records. Barger described his chapter as a "wild bunch".
After a chance encounter with a member of a pre-existing Hells Angels chapter, Barger learned of the club's history, rules, regulations and procedures. He was appointed president of the Oakland chapter in 1958 following a series of meetings with Hells Angels from Southern California. With Barger as president, the Oakland Hells Angels traveled around California and amalgamated with the other Hells Angels chapters, dividing territory and forming club bylaws. While infighting did occur between the chapters, conflicts predominantly arose with other clubs such as the Gypsy Jokers.
When Otto Friedli, the founder of the original San Bernardino Hells Angels chapter, was imprisoned in 1958, Barger was proclaimed de facto national president. One of his first actions was to relocate the club's "mother chapter" – the national headquarters – from San Bernardino to Oakland. Later that year, Barger suffered a fractured skull during a fight with Oakland police. Although the basic organization was in place when Barger assumed leadership of the club, he introduced additional rules pertaining to new members, club officers, and the establishment of new chapters. Under Barger's leadership, the club's membership began to increase. By 1960, the Oakland Hells Angels had established an extensive narcotics network within the club. Some of Barger's rules included "no using dope during a meeting" and "no drug burns". The Hells Angels worked as "part-time distributors" of drugs in the 1950s and early 1960s.
According to George Wethern – who left the Hells Angels in 1972 and went on to testify against the club before entering the Federal Witness Protection Program – in his 1978 book A Wayward Angel, Barger convened a meeting of the leaders of the Hells Angels and other California motorcycle clubs in 1960 in which the various clubs parleyed over the mutual problem of police harassment. The clubs voted to ally under a "1%" patch to be worn on their respective "colors". The term refers to a comment allegedly made by the American Motorcyclist Association that 99% of motorcyclists were law-abiding citizens, implying the last one percent were outlaws. In 1961, Barger opened the first Hells Angels chapter abroad in New Zealand.
The Oakland chapter, with Barger serving as its president, assumed an informal position of authority within the Hells Angels that began following a confrontation with local police and the California Highway Patrol in the aftermath of an outlaw motorcycle meeting in Porterville in September 1963. Although always a predominantly male organization, the Hells Angels had female members until 1964 when Barger imposed a rule making the club male only. He justified the male-only rule on the grounds that female Hells Angels were less able to defend themselves against rival bikers seeking to steal their patches. Barger was employed as a machine operator from 1960 to 1965, when he was dismissed due to extended absences. His criminal record began in 1963 after he was arrested for possession of marijuana. He was arrested again on the same charge the following year, and for assault with a deadly weapon in 1965 and 1966. In the 1965 incident, he forced his pistol into a bar patron's mouth after the man had made disparaging remarks about the Hells Angels. Barger claims the gun fired by accident, but wrote in his 2000 autobiography Hell's Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club: "since the motherfucker was already shot in the head, I bent him over the pool table and shot him again". Barger was convicted of assault with the intent to murder. When a rival club of bikers stole Barger's motorcycle, he and his members assaulted them with spiked dog collars, whipped them with bullwhips, and then used ballpeen hammers to break their fingers.
The Oakland Hells Angels maintained a prominent position as "first among equals" by having the largest membership of any U.S. chapter and because of Barger's esteem among club members internationally. The author and journalist Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his 1967 book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs that "in any gathering of Hell's Angels, there is no doubt who is running the show", describing Barger as "a 6-foot, 170-pound warehouseman from East Oakland, the coolest head in the lot, and a tough, quick-thinking dealer when any action starts", and saying of him: "By turns he is a fanatic, a philosopher, a brawler, a shrewd compromiser and a final arbitrator." Barger continually denied that he was the Hells Angels' leader or that Oakland was the club's headquarters, however, saying: "There’s no charter that's the boss. That's all cops and newspapers."
Counterculture era
Barger and the Hells Angels, many of whom were military veterans, considered themselves anti-communist and anti-subversive patriots. In 1964, Barger and another Hells Angel, Michael "Tiny" Walters, told an Oakland Tribune columnist: "Our oath is allegiance to the United States of America. If there should be trouble we would jump to enlist and fight. More than 90 per cent of our members are veterans. We don't want no slackers." When students at the University of California, Berkeley announced an anti-Vietnam War rally, the Oakland Hells Angels denounced the rally as "a despicable un-American activity". On October 16, 1965, Barger led a group of Hells Angels in an attack on anti-war demonstrators marching from Berkeley to the Army Terminal in Oakland to protest against munitions shipments. The Oakland police reportedly stood aside and let the attack commence, whereas the Berkeley police intervened to stop the bikers from assaulting the protesters. Six Hells Angels members were arrested and a Berkeley police sergeant suffered a broken leg in the brawl. The Angels maintained that the attack was done "in the interest of public safety and the protection of the good name of Oakland, California."The incident led to a collection of students, left-wing political organizations, and labor unions led by Allen Ginsberg and Jerry Rubin meeting with motorcycle club representatives, headed by the president of the Sacramento Hells Angels chapter, in a cafeteria at San Jose State University. Ginsberg and Rubin sought assurance that a planned Vietnam Day Committee protest march in Oakland on November 20, 1965, would not be disturbed. Ginsberg invited Barger and the Oakland Hells Angels to a party where he provided the bikers with free alcohol, drugs, and sex in exchange for their guarantee that the rally would not be attacked. On November 19, 1965, five Hells Angels led by Barger held a press conference at their bail bondsman's office, announcing that the club would not attend the protest the following day as "Any physical encounter would only produce sympathy for this mob of traitors", according to Barger. He went on to read aloud a telegram sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson, stating: "I volunteer a group of loyal Americans for duty behind the line in Vietnam. We feel that a crack group of trained guerillas could demoralize the Viet Cong and advance the cause of freedom." President Johnson did not reply to the letter.
After the spate of publicity the Hells Angels received in 1965, Barger had the club's name copyrighted. The Hells Angels were incorporated as a nonprofit organization in 1966. Barger and the Hells Angels became associated with the counterculture phenomenon of the 1960s. Between 1966 and 1973, the majority of his legitimate personal income was derived from consulting various film projects. He acted as a technical advisor on a series of outlaw biker films beginning with Roger Corman's The Wild Angels. Onscreen, Barger was identified but did not speak in Hells Angels on Wheels and was one of several members of the Angels who had speaking parts playing themselves in Hell's Angels '69 ; he appeared in several additional films. Barger features prominently in Hunter S. Thompson's book, Hell's Angels. He was unimpressed with Thompson, and said of the writer: "When he tried to act tough with us, no matter what happened, Hunter Thompson got scared. I ended up not liking him at all, a tall skinny, typical hillbilly from Kentucky. He was a total fake." Barger and the Hells Angels are also depicted in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, during Ken Kesey's La Honda encampment. Using his fame, Barger opened a chapter in Omaha, Nebraska in 1966, which, besides the chapter in New Zealand, was the first Hells Angel chapter outside of California. In 1967, Barger opened a Hells Angel chapter in Lowell, Massachusetts, which was the first Hells Angel chapter on the East Coast.
During the "Summer of Love" in San Francisco in 1967, the Hells Angels began to sell PCP, which came to be known as "Dust of the Angels" or DOA for short. PCP came to be popular with the hippies during the "Summer of Love," owing to its ability to cause hallucinations, and the Angels came to dominate the market for PCP in the Bay Area. Barger later admitted that besides selling PCP, his chapter "used to move most of the LSD" in the San Francisco area. Selling PCP made the Hells Angels wealthy for the first time, and according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Tim McKinley, who often investigated Hells Angels-related cases, it was in 1967 that the Hells Angels become a major criminal organization in their own right. Prior to 1967, the Angels had been used as subcontractors for other criminal organizations who used them to distribute cocaine and marijuana. With PCP, the Angels created a vertical monopoly.
As PCP lost popularity, the Hells Angels switched to selling methamphetamine, a market that they have dominated ever since. Barger recruited Kenny Maxwell, a former chemist for the Royal Dutch Shell oil company, who taught the Hells Angels how to make methamphetamine. In 1967, Barger enlisted Clarence "Butch" Crouch, a biker from Shreveport, Louisiana, and utilized him to form a Hells Angels chapter in Cleveland. In December 1967, Barger visited Ohio to oversee the merger of two Cleveland motorcycle gangs to form a local Hells Angels chapter. Barger ordered Crouch to eliminate the city's remaining biker gangs in order to conquer the methamphetamine market in the Cleveland area.
For at least five years beginning in 1967, Barger and the Hells Angels surrendered hundreds of guns and hundreds of pounds of explosives, as well as the locations of caches of weapons and narcotics, to the Oakland Police Department in exchange for the release of jailed Hells Angels members and other considerations from authorities. Oakland and Berkeley suffered a spate of approximately 80 bombings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and police made the arrangement with the Hells Angels in order to acquire black market weapons which could otherwise be used by "subversives" such as Black Panther Party and Weather Underground radicals. The Angels were dealing in weapons which were stolen from armories and gun stores, or smuggled from abroad. Oakland police sergeant Edward "Ted" Hilliard testified in 1972 that he accepted guns, dynamite, and grenades from Barger personally in return for deals on arrests during at least fifteen separate meetings, the most recent of which occurred in the spring of 1971. Hilliard also testified that Barger had offered "to deliver the bagged body of a leftist for every Angel released from jail", an offer Hilliard refused as it "was absolutely out of the question". Barger denied ever making such an offer. Hilliard insisted, however, that authorities had not permitted crimes committed by the Hells Angels.
The first internal murder of a Hells Angels member sanctioned by the club was allegedly carried out when Paul "German" Ingalls, a member of the Oakland chapter who had previously transferred from the Omaha charter, was found guilty of burglarizing Barger's valuable coin collection by a six-man kangaroo court at the home of a Hells Angel on February 1, 1968. Ingalls was forced to ingest a large quantity of barbiturates until he suffered a fatal overdose.
In the late 1960s, Barger began selling heroin and also developed an addiction to cocaine. He was described as being "totally crazed on cocaine" for a time. Barger was allegedly the main distributor of cocaine and heroin in the East Bay area. He was among 33 members of the Oakland chapter arrested on drug charges after police raided a bar and a duplex apartment in the city on August 30, 1968. $7,000 worth of heroin and $2,500 worth of other narcotics were confiscated, as were firearms — including an M16 rifle, two shotguns, and an M1 carbine – and a large cache of ammunition, knives, chains, and suspected stolen merchandise. On July 30, 1969, Barger opened up the first Hells Angel chapter in Europe with a chapter being founded in London, followed by another in Zürich in 1970. In 1969, he opened up Hells Angels chapters in New York, Salem and Rochester, giving the Angels a strong presence in the Northeast.