Sonny Barger, who as the charismatic face of Hells Angels has grown the fast-growing motorcycle club from its San Francisco roots to a global phenomenon, in the process that made it an emblem of the West Coast riot – and, federal officials said, a criminal enterprise – died Wednesday at his home near Oakland, California. He was 83 years old.
His former lawyer and business manager, Fritz Klap, said the cause was liver cancer.
The angels of hell were both a defining part of the postwar counterculture and a sharp departure from it. While the beaten, hippies, yippies, diggers, and other groups leaned far to the left and generally avoided violence, the angels enjoyed the onslaught of antiwar protesters, fighting rival clubs and targeting enemies for revenge killings.
By the time Mr. Barger (pronounced firmly in “G”) solidified his position as the de facto leader of the various heads of the club, in the mid-1960s, these idiosyncrasies had already turned them into something of a legend. , helped along with a long list of writers who find their story – and Mr Barger’s appeal – irresistible.
“At Every Gathering of the Angels of Hell,” writes Hunter C. Thompson in “Angels of Hell: A Strange and Terrible Saga” (1967), “No doubt who runs the show: Ralph” Sony “Barger, Maximum Leader, 6 feet , A 170-pound warehouseman from East Auckland, the coolest head in the lot, and a tough, quick-thinking dealer when he takes any action. In turn, he is a fanatic, a philosopher, a brawler, a cunning compromiser and the last arbiter.
Mr. Barger has always been careful to distance himself from much of the club’s more extreme criminal endeavors, cultivating an image that is both hardcore and understandable in the media.
He was not there, for example, in 1965, when a group of angels of hell in Berkeley, California, attacked protesters protesting the Vietnam War, although he verbally attacked the antiwar movement at a press conference shortly thereafter – and volunteered. motorcyclists behind the North Vietnamese lines.
He was also not involved in the violence that erupted between Hells Angels and members of the public at a free concert at Altamont Speedway, near San Francisco, on December 6, 1969. The Rolling Stones, who were headliners, had hired Mr. Barger and Hells Angels to provide security, but several angels eventually beat the audience with billiards and stabbed one man, Meredith Hunter, to death.
A few days later, Mr. Barger called a radio station to give his side of the story. He said he sat on the edge of the stage and drank beer during the Stones set and did not take part in the fights, but defended the actions of his club colleagues as self-defense against what he described as drug-addicted hippies. when breaking their bikes. (However, he later admitted that he pulled a gun against Keith Richards when the group was late to begin.)
One Hells Angel, Alan Pasaro, was charged with murder in Mr. Hunter’s death. He was acquitted of self-defense.
Especially after Altamont, Mr. Barger tried to clean up the image of the Angels by hiring a public relations firm and getting the group involved in charitable foundations. And he insisted that the club – he bristled when people called the Hells Angels a gang – did not deserve the worst impressions of people he thought were cultivated by law enforcement.
“There has never been a crime invented by the Angels of Hell,” he told The Phoenix New Times in 1992, shortly after the end of his second prison sentence. “It was invented by the FBI. It was paid for by the FBI and I went to jail for it. That’s the way it goes. “
In fact, by the time of Altamont, the organization was already delving deeper into crime, especially the drug trade. The FBI estimates that by the 1980s, motorcycle gangs controlled a quarter of the heroin business in the United States.
Since 1963, Mr. Barger has been arrested almost every year, usually on charges of assault, weapons or drugs. And at least for a while he always went down. In 1972, he was charged with the murder of drug dealer Servio Winston Agero, but was acquitted when a key witness proved unreliable.
Finally, in 1973, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for possession of drugs and weapons. He went to Folsom State Prison, where he continued to rule the Angels of Hell. He was released in 1977.
He was re-imprisoned in 1988, convicted of plotting to attack members of a rival motorcycle group, the Outlaws.
At the time he left prison, in 1992, he was an older statesman on the motorcycle scene. An attack of throat cancer in 1982 forced doctors to remove his vocal cords, leaving him with a hole in his throat that he had to close to speak, and only in a hoarse whisper. People had to bend down to hear him, reinforcing his image of a fur-clad godfather.
And although he played fewer roles in Hells Angels, he continued to offer enough food for magazine profiles, this time as an avant-garde, time-hardened sage.
“I think spending time is just part of growing up,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “There are just a few things you need to do in your life. You have to go to school, you have to go to the army, you have to go to prison. All this helps you to have a full life. ”
Ralph Hubert Barger Jr. was born in Modesto, California, on October 8, 1938. At the age of four months, his mother, Catherine (Rich) Barger, escaped with a bus driver from Trailways, leaving him in the care of a babysitter. His father moved with Sonny and his sister Shirley to Auckland, where he worked as a stevedore.
At night, Sonny’s father took him with him as he spent his profits in the city’s coastal taverns. Sonny learned to swear from a parrot at a bar, Jungle Jim’s.
Mr Barger’s first wife, Elsie May (George) Barger, died of a miscarriage. His marriage to Sharon Grulke and Noel Black ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Zoran (Katsakian) Barger, and his sister, Shirley Rodgers.
By his own admission, he was an insecure student, fighting every day and dropping out after 10th grade. He enlisted in the army in 1955, but 14 months later received an honorary dismissal when his superiors learned that he had falsified his birth certificate.
Back in Auckland, he took a break from work, living for a while with his father and another section with his sister and her family.
Over time, he contacted a group of stubborn party-creating party veterans who shared a passion for motorcycles. They decided to start their own club and on April 1, 1957, the Hells Angels were born – without the possessive apostrophe, because it did not fit into a patch.
They soon learned that there were at least two other clubs with the same name. Mr. Barger moved quickly to consolidate the groups, then moved their headquarters to Auckland – effectively making his head first among equals, with himself as the de facto leader.
Initially, it connects the two ends as a machine operator. But he soon realized that the fame of the angels could be gained. By the end of the 1960s, he was making most of his income as a film consultant for biker gangs.
He involved Hells Angels, paying 500 shares in the company, which was run by a board of directors made up of the leaders of the various chapters. He also defended the name, then sued anyone who used it without his permission, including Marvel Comics and director Roger Corman.
He also makes money on his own behalf by licensing it for use on T-shirts, wine labels and beer bottles. He sells Cajun-style salsa to Sonny Barger. And he began writing a total of six books, including two novels and an autobiography, The Angel of Hell: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Motorcycle Club of Hell’s Angels (2001), a New York Times bestseller.
He retired from his leadership role at Hells Angels in 1998 and moved to Arizona, where he lives outside Phoenix and cares for a stable. (He returned to the Gulf region in 2016) He took up yoga, stopped using drugs and encouraged children to stay away from cigarettes.
He even made a detour through Hollywood, appearing in several seasons of Sons of Anarchy, a television series for a gang of motorcyclists.
But he never regretted his life choice.
“One of the things that has always amazed me about reporters all my life,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “99 percent of them will say, ‘Oh, after talking to you, I find that you’re half intelligent. You could be anything you wanted to be! They don’t realize, I’m what I want to be. “
Daniel Victor contributed to the report.
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