By: Jojo Zhan
Founder of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, Sonny Barger, 83, died on June 29 at his home in Livermore California.
A post on his Facebook page read: “If you are reading this message, you’ll know that I’m gone. I’ve asked that this note be posted immediately after my passing.” His death was confirmed by his former lawyer, Fritz Clapp, and said the cause was liver cancer.
Ralph Hubert Barger Jr. was born on Oct. 8, 1938 in Modesto, Calif. When Sonny was only four months old, his mother ran off with a Trailways bus driver. His father spent his nights and much of his money at waterfront bars, Sonny often with him. According to his autobiography, at the waterfront bars, Sonny often snatched pretzels and hard-boiled eggs, learning his first cuss words from the smut-squawking parrot.
Barger dropped out of high school at age 16 and joined the army with a forged birth certificate. A year and two months later, Barger was expelled after the authorities discovered the fraud. In 1956, Barger joined his first biker group, the Oakland Panthers, and formed the Hells Motorcycle Club in Oakland the next year. “I needed a close-knit club of men who could jump on their bikes, ride cross-country if they wanted to, and not abide by rules or clocks,” he said.
The Hells Angels history had a tradition of crime and violence – much of it involving Barger, a fact he boasted frequently. He once described himself as belonging to a band of “card-carrying felons.” In 1988, Branger had been convicted of plotting to kill members of a rival club in Kentucky and blow up their headquarters and served five years in prison. He sold heroin in the 1960s and 1970s as a confessed cocaine addict and served eight years in prison for assorted drugs and firearm charges.
The Hells Angels had faced constant federal investigation on criminal enterprises and racketeering offenses. 16 members and hangers-on in South Carolina were obtained by authorities in 2013 for a scheme involving drug dealing, gunrunning, money laundering, and arson. “In 1979, Mr. Barger and other leaders beat a similar conspiracy rap in which they were accused of running a mammoth methamphetamine (“biker’s coffee”) operation out of Oakland.” Said Paul W. Valentine, a reporter for The Washington Post.
The most infamous in Hells Angels stories was their role in the haywire 1969 Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Calif., where 18-year-old concertgoer and pistol-holding Meredith Hunter, was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel. The whole scene was captured on film in the 1970 documentary “Gimme Shelter.” Barger wrote in his autobiography “Hell’s Angel — The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club,” accusing Keith Richards, Stones guitarist, of detaining the band’s performance to work up the crowd. He claimed he shoved a pistol to Richards’s chest and ordered him to start playing at once.
Richards obliged but according to Barger, the crowd, including Hunter, continued swarming the stage. Barger then said that Hunter then fired a single shot, shooting a Hells Angel. Hunter was soon overcome with other Angels, punching and kicking him. One Angel was initially charged with fatally stabbing him but was released after claiming self-defense.
He was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1982 and had his vocal cords removed.
What did he learn from his dissenter life? “To become a real man,” he counseled in his autobiography, “you need to join the army first and then do some time in jail.”
Sources: