Sonny Barger, who as a charismatic face of the Hells Angels grew the motorcycle club from its roots in the San Francisco area to becoming a global phenomenon, making it an emblem of rebellion from the west coast and, according to federal authorities, criminal enterprise: he died Wednesday at his home outside Oakland, California. He was 83 years old.
His former lawyer and business director, Fritz Clapp, said the cause was liver cancer.
The Hells Angels were both a defining part of the post-war counterculture and a strong deviation from it. While beats, hippies, yippies, diggers, and other groups deviated far to the left and generally avoided violence, the Angels reveled in attacking protesters against the war, fighting rival clubs, and aiming. to enemies for revenge killings.
When Mr. Barger (the name is pronounced with a “G”) hard consolidated his position as the de facto leader of the various chapters of the club, in the mid-60s, that idiosyncrasy had already made them a kind of legend, he helped. along with a long list of writers who found their story — and the appeal of Mr. Barger— irresistible.
“At any Hell’s Angels meeting,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his book “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga” (1967), “there’s no doubt who directs the show: Ralph ‘Sonny Barger, the top leader, a six-foot, 170-pound warehouse in East Oakland, the coolest head on the lot and a tough, fast trader when any action begins. , a shrewd compromise and a final referee “.
Mr. Barger always took care to distance himself from much of the club’s most extreme adventures in crime, cultivating an image that was both unconditional and media savvy.
He was not there, for example, in 1965, when a group of Hell Angels in Berkeley, California, attacked protesters protesting the Vietnam War, even though he verbally attacked the anti-war movement at a conference. of press shortly after, and volunteered. a team of cyclists behind the North Vietnamese lines.
Nor was he involved in the violence that erupted between the 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 the Hells Angels to provide security, but several angels ended up hitting members of the audience with pool stains and stabbing one person, Meredith Hunter, to death.
A few days later, Mr. Barger called a radio station to offer his version of the story. He said he had been sitting on the edge of the stage drinking beer during the Stones assembly and had not taken part in the fight, but defended the action of his club mates as a self-defense against what he characterized as intended for drug hippies. by smashing their bikes. (However, he later admitted to throwing a gun at Keith Richards when the band started late.)
A Hells Angel, Alan Passaro, was charged with murder in the death of Mr. Hunter. He was acquitted on self-defense grounds.
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 fundraising. And he insisted that the club – erected when people called the Hells Angels gang – did not deserve the worst impressions of the people, who he said had been cultivated by law enforcement.
“There was never a crime planned by the Hells Angels,” he told The Phoenix New Times in 1992, shortly after he finished his second prison sentence. “It was devised by the FBI, it was paid for by the FBI and I went to jail for it. That’s how it goes.”
In fact, by the time of Altamont, the organization was already delving deeper into crime, especially drug trafficking. The FBI estimates that in the 1980s, biker gangs controlled a quarter of the heroin business in the United States.
From 1963, Mr. Barger was arrested almost annually, usually for assault, weapons or drugs. And, at least for a while, it always went down. In 1972 he was charged with the murder of a drug dealer, Servio Winston Agero, but was acquitted when a key witness proved unreliable.
Finally, in 1973, he was sentenced to 10 years in life imprisonment for possession of narcotics and weapons. He went to Folsom State Prison, where he continued to direct the Hells Angels. He was released in 1977.
He returned to prison in 1988, convicted of conspiring to attack members of a rival motorcycle group, the Law Holes.
When he was released from prison in 1992, he was a great statesman in the motorcyclist 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 then only with a hoarse whisper. People had to crouch down to listen to him, reinforcing his image as a godfather dressed in leather.
And while he had less of a role in the Hells Angels, he continued to offer ample fodder for magazine profiles, this time as an avuncular and time-hardened sage.
“I think making time is just part of growing up,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “There are certain things you have to do in your life. You have to go to school, you have to go to the army, you have to go to jail. All this helps you to have a full life. “
Ralph Hubert Barger Jr. was born in Modesto, California, on October 8, 1938. When he was 4 months old, his mother, Kathryn (Ritch) Barger, fled with a Trailways bus driver, leaving him in charge of a nanny. His father moved with Sonny and his sister, Shirley, to Oakland, where he worked as a stevedore.
At night, Sonny’s father took him while he spent his income in the taverns in front of the city sea. Sonny learned to swear by a parrot at a bar, Jungle Jim’s.
The first wife of Mr. Barger, Elsie Mae (George) Barger, died of a self-induced abortion. Her marriages with Sharon Gruhlke and Noel Black ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Zorana (Katzakian) Barger, and his sister, Shirley Rogers.
By his own admission, he was a shy student, struggling daily 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 forged his birth certificate.
Back in Oakland, he moved from one job to another, living for a time with his father and again with his sister and family.
Over time he became associated with a group of party army veterans and problems who shared a passion for motorcycles. They decided to form their own club and on April 1, 1957 the Hells Angels were born, without the possessive apostrophe, because it did not fit a patch.
They soon learned that there were at least two more clubs with the same name. Mr. Barger moved quickly to consolidate the groups, then moved his headquarters to Oakland, making his first peer-to-peer chapter effective, with himself as the de facto leader.
At first he arrived at the end of the month as a machine operator. But he soon realized that the notoriety of the Angels had benefits. By the late 1960s he was earning most of his income as a biker gang film consultant.
It incorporated the Hells Angels, disbursing 500 shares of the company, which was headed by a board of directors provided with leaders from the various chapters. He also tagged the name, then sued anyone who uses it without their permission, including Marvel Comics and director Roger Corman.
He also made money under his own name, giving him a license to use it on T-shirts, wine labels, and beer bottles. He bought the Cajun-style sauce from Sonny Barger. And he began writing books, six in all, including two novels and an autobiography, “Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club” (2001), a New York Times bestseller. .
He left his leadership role at the Hells Angels in 1998 and moved to Arizona, where he lived outside of Phoenix and cared for a horse stable. (He returned to the Bay Area in 2016.) He started doing yoga, stopped using drugs, and encouraged children to stay away from cigarettes.
He even toured Hollywood, appearing in several seasons of “Sons of Anarchy,” a television series about a gang of bikers.
But he never regretted his life choices.
“One of the things that has always amazed me about journalists all my life,” he told The Los Angeles Times, “99 percent of them will say,‘ Wow, after talking to you I find you’re half smart. You could have been anything you wanted to be! ‘ They don’t realize, I am what I want to be. “
Daniel Victor contributed to the report.