Thursday, April 25, 2013

outlaw motorcycle clubs, Mongols Motorcycle Club - book - 2011 - Out Bad


Out Bad
Donald Charles Davis
2011
247 pages

Out Bad is the other self-published (via CreateSpace) book by The Aging Rebel blogger and journalist Donald Charles Davis. The book The Aging Rebel was a collection of Davis’ better blogposts, each one a brief critique of something gnawing at the biker world. Out Bad is an in depth critique of the media discourse surrounding Operation Black Rain, a major ATF undercover operation that ultimately dismantled what was then theleadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club.

Davis' blog is great for its sharply intelligent analysis of the issues that press against a subculture widely viewed as dumb, but Out Bad is his great contribution thus far, a book which I consider to be a major addition to the literature on outlaw bikers. It responds to media accounts of outlaw biker affairs, often taking journalists to task for simply repeating law enforcement statements on MC-related crime scenes.  Also Davis’ critique expands the picture of those scenes, giving the fuller perspective on biker issues that he suggests are absent from media representations of the subculture. Furthermore, Davis is an interesting commentary on these issues because he A) writes from an insider’s perspective, the cover of this book features a photo of him riding with the Mongols and B) he writes at an intellectual level that equals that of the academics of biker culture, Daniel R. Wolf and Arthur Veno. Davis’ prose shows his talents as a seasoned journalist who can make information engaging, but his writing is also laced with literary and philosophical references as well. Out Bad is certainly a retort to every true crime text that paints the biker scene as an engine for lurid crime-scene imagery and brute stupidity.

Out Bad is not simply a reply to journalist accounts of bike-gang warfare and meth cookery, and the base repetition of police press releases.  It also criticizes many of the books published by biker-world figures over the last ten years such as Under and Alone by Mongols ATF infiltrator William Queen, No Angel by Hells Angels ATF infiltrator Jay Dobyns, and especially, Honor Few Fear None, the memoir by short-term Mongols national president, Ruben Cavazos. In his criticism of Cavazos book, Davis presents a much different view of the club, which is more racially mixed (while Cavazos constructed it as a means for retired LA street gang members) with many members disappointed with Cavazos leadership and the changes he instituted. As a sustained work of argument against another book, Davis produced for the biker world the kind of book-length works of criticism that readers find in the more traditionally intellectual fields of political theory, philosophy, and literature.

Out Bad's relevance is three-fold: it is an intelligent piece of media criticism aimed against those lazy journalists for whom newswriting is transcribing a brief and trite witness statement into a cut and pasted law enforcement press-release, it is a work of criticism against Ruben "Doc" Cavazos book and other appearance in mass media as well as his leadership of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, and it is in itself a work of journalism that investigates and examines the events of the ATF's Operation Black Rain from the perspectives of participants in the subculture.


Wednesday, April 10, 2013

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2011 - The Aging Rebel: Dispatches from the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier


2011
270 pages

Donald Charles Davis is a freelance journalist who currently writes and maintains The Aging Rebel, a blog about outlaw biker issues. This book is an anthology of posts from that blog although much of the blog material focusing on The Mongols Motorcycle Club is absent (and presumably rewritten into another of Davis’ self-published books, Out Bad) and rather focuses, for the most part, on peripheral subject matter to the outlaw biker lifestyle and image.

The items that appear in The Aging Rebel carry a few key themes. Many of the posts relate to motorcycling such as helmet laws, or for greater safety awareness among car-drivers. Many other items are obituaries for bikers who died on the road. Other items are relevant to the world of outlaw bikers, including pieces on a Hells Angels trademark lawsuit and criticism of other reporter’s handling of biker news.

Davis’ book is interesting because its good writing about bikers from someone who knows about the subculture. It’s also old fashioned reporting like what you imagine reporters on tv shows and movies about newswriting churn out. So much of what appears in the news, on all topics and in all sources, are institutional press releases with a reporter’s name added because they tacked on an introduction. Davis investigates his stories, and adds insight drawn from his immense knowledge of his subject matter. His work is exemplary of what journalism can be in an age of ubiquitous self-publishing possibilities, where mainstream journalism arises out of an industrial process and older professional values are taken up by individuals who have a vested interest in exploring a particular subject.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

outlaw bikers - book - 2006 - Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Global Crime Empire


Julian Sher and William Marsden
Alfred A. Knopf
2006
464 pages

Angels of Death is a survey of recent, to the time of publication, violent crimes committed by various bikers around the world. The title is a dramatic misnomer, as the inclusion of the word ‘angels’ strongly suggests that the book is exclusively about the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, which it isn’t.  Furthermore, the authors, two Montreal journalists turned true-crime writers, claim that there’s a worldwide biker syndicate but they never ground that assertion in facts. What they do, instead, is show that the outlaw biker subculture is global and that everywhere bikers live bad things, sometimes truly atrocious things, happen. Angels of Death is primarily a series of lurid true-crime murder stories connected by the mode of transportation the killers chose.

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