outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2011 - Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagan Motorcycle Club

Prodigal Father, Pagan Son: Growing Up Inside the Dangerous World of the Pagan Motorcycle Club

Anthony “LT” Menginie and Kerrie Droban

Thomas Dunne Books

2011

267 pages

Kerrie Droban, who previously wrote Running With the Devil about former ATF agent Jay Dobyns and his infiltration of Arizona Hells Angels in Operation Black Biscuit, teamed up with Pagans MC scion Anthony “LT” Menginie to produce another motorcycle gang book, Prodigal Father, Pagan Son. In essence it’s another biker memoir, one of many published over the last decade. It seems as though every club wants to be represented in print in some form, and this book puts the Pagans MC into library stacks. Prodigal Father does have a crucial difference from most other biker memoirs though, LT was never a full patch Pagan but was rather a club prospect and the son of a powerful but unpopular Pagans chapter president, Anthony “Mangy” Menginie.

So LT grew from birth within the Pagans subculture and lifestyle. His father was in prison for much of his life/the book’s narrative arc and is therefore largely an absent referent throughout the book. LT’s growing up in a lifestyle and social scene where his gone father reigns as a king lends itself to lots of fun amature psychoanalyzing. Ultimately LTs father joined the Hells Angels, the enemy of all other biker clubs, and, in a expectedly classic Freudian turn, LT talks of killing his father. This memoir has most of the elements of many biker books, the discussions of crime and sex and brotherhood are consistently present in all of these books.

Prodigal Father doesn’t really have a lot of motorcycling in it, which is fine from my perspective. What it does have is a particular focus on the disgusting details of every event. LT describes the traumas of his early life, including an overdosing mother and being raped by a prostitute, and in all of these stories, straight through to later tales of direct criminal involvement, LT emphasizes the armpit stains of every characters, the piss stench of every room he enters, the minutia of disgust is laced through every description. So many of these memoirs do the ideological work of constructing the biker as a modern American individualist anti-hero while the true crime biker books counter the memoirs by emphasizing criminality. LT and Droban portray a subculture of the degraded social abject. People whose lives are composed, materially and metaphorically, of filth.

As I read this I wondered if there was such a thing as an outlaw biker without club affiliations. Thus far there doesn’t seem to be a concept of such a subject, and all the biker memoirs that I’ve read are the story of an individual biker and the story of their club.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - 2004 - Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Out in Bad Standing: Inside the Bandidos Motorcycle Club The Making of a Worldwide Dynasty

Edward Winterhalder

Blockhead City Press

2005

432 pages

Edward Winterhalder is another biker who has leveraged his outlaw experience into a career as a media personality. Once a national officer of the Bandidos MC and El Presidente of the Oklahoma Bandidos chapter, he is now an author, television producer, and professional interview subject. Out in Bad Standing is Winterhalder’s first book and his coming out as a pundit on biker topics, it gives the details of Winterhalder’s life as a biker, as a family man, as a musician, and as a businessman.

Blockhead City Press is Out in Bad Standing’s publisher, and from what I can tell, it’s Winterhalder’s own publishing company. In essence, Winterhalder published his own autobiography. The length of this book, at 432 pages, communicates a lack of editing, and to compare, Sonny Barger’s own bio, Hell’s Angel, recalling the career of the man who essentially formed the model of the outlaw motorcycle club in the 1950s, is only 288 pages. Winterhalder’s book is long, and somewhat tedious, but its good to have one out there by a Bandido since all the other major clubs are represented in the bio literature. Still, Winterhalder’s book tells the same stories of riding around, rocking out, getting into trouble, having friends die or jail or succumb to drug addiction, as the other books and its hard not to feel like, as a reader, one outlaw biker autobiography is enough to read to have the lifestyle figured out.

What intrigues me about these biker bios are the balance they try to maintain between presenting themselves as model outlaw bikers and as model citizens, and I’m always left wondering if these bios are for other bikers to read or for cultural outsiders? Outlaw bikers have such a tough time convincing everyday citizens that they’re not criminals, or at least, they’re not criminal organizations, that these books often heavily emphasize both the duller aspects of outlaw biker life, or the ways in which the subject is not a biker. Winterhalder is a good father, he owns a successful construction business, and he’s a musician. Presumably his band plays that beer-belly blues rock with harmonicas blaring that you hear whenever a biker appears on television. He was also a chapter president and a national officer with many duties, and he writes at length of the administrative side, with its numerous headaches, of managing a motorcycle club. So by reading his book he convinced me that he’s not a career criminal, but his book goes down these textual roads where, when he’s talking about problems occurring behind the scenes of the Bandidos, it feels as though he’s not trying to convince me that he’s legit, but rather he’s telling his social scene a side to a story that’s best known to other Bandidos.

The book has a strange structure to it, it begins with his trip to Canada to patch over the Rock Machine in the midst of the Montreal biker war, before it goes into his life story. He tells the story that the Bandidos were only willing to patch them over if the war was over, and its tough to be fully convinced that Bandidos are crime free as an organization, when they’re willing to take on men engaged in such a conflict, especially when hostilities continued for a time after the transition, and Bandidos died. A year after the book’s publication, the Shedden Massacre occurred in Southwestern Ontario, where 8 Ontario Bandidos were murdered. The Bandidos may generally be a large group of guys who are ready for a fight but really just want to have fun riding motorcycles and partying, but even if you believe that that’s what they are as a group they’re obviously accommodating to people with very violent inclinations. Winterhalder comes off as smart and tough but also fun and friendly, in his book, but he’s also a part of an outlaw subcultural group that has been involved with events termed ‘riots’, ‘wars’, and ‘massacres’. I may be wrong but even with their fearsome reputation, the Hells Angels don’t have any ‘massacres’ in their history, the Bandidos have two, Milperra and Shedden.

outlaw bikers - 1971 - Buttons: The Making of a President

Buttons: The Making of a President
Jamie Mandelkau
Sphere Books Limited
1971
157 pages

Buttons was, briefly, the president of the Hells Angels England chapter, and the man who obtained an official charter from the California chapter for the England Hells Angels. Not long after he officially became an Hells Angel, he wrote and published his memoir of his experiences as a biker. Some time after the publication of this book he must of lost his president status as a 1974 BBC documentary of the England Hells Angels shows Mad John as their president and the only mention of Buttons featured in the documentary is a flash of the cover of this book.

I don't know who author Jamie Mandelkau is/was but I suspect that his book was rushed to market to cash in on a late-60s/early-70s craze for biker stuff, and more specifically, Hells Angels stuff. This craze was due in part to the 1967 publication of Hunter S. Thompson's bestselling book Hell's Angels, as well as some high profile criminal incidents stemming from club activity, most notably the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert in late 1969. The content of the book shows that there's not a lot of history to Buttons' life and very little to his life as an Angel, at least by the time of publication. The book seems to break down into two large parts: his life as a Rocker fighting the Mods in the mid-60s, and his trip to California to hang out with the Hells Angels and rape teenage girls. His lurid anecdotes of pointless violence and sexual abuse are the stuff of fantasies for impotent men and the sort of deranged losers who also admire serial killers. Wilhelm Reich describes this books target audience in his Mass Psychology of Fascism.

Mandelkau's transcription of Buttons' dimwitted life story is a dull view into the world of dying masculinity and white supremacism. Getting it on with a bird, doing a blokes head in, etc, in repetition with slight variations, occasional violence and plenty of sexual violence, that's the content of this book. Pornography for people who felt that Hitler's definition of freedom suits them just fine. The book does include a couple of interesting bits about the biker culture in England circa 1971, though: in England bikers all over were wearing Hells Angels patches, and it almost sounds as though bikers who wanted to declare themselves outlaws would do it by putting on their patch. One of Buttons tasks was dealing with unofficial Hells Angels chapters in England. Also, Buttons wore a small deaths head patch, which apparently had some link to the origins of the Hells Angels MC, and only the first four chapters wore that patch until Buttons put it on for England.

The last interesting aspect of the book are with Buttons stories of being a Rocker and fighting Mods in the sixties. I don't know much about these subcultures although I think Dick Hebdige might discuss them to some extent in his Subculture and the Meaning of Style. Rockers are apparently greaser guys into leather jackets and motorcycles and sixties rock. Mods are different although their difference isn't discussed in the book. Still, as far as I know, this is a significant source of information about the Rockers of mid-60s England.

outlaw bikers - 1984 - Streets of Fire

Streets of Fire
Walter Hill
1984
Universal Pictures
93 minutes

Streets of Fire is a pretty okay movie by the director of the greatest street gang film of all time, The Warriors. Many of this film's features are similar its predecessor: the urban setting dominated by criminals, the emphasis on nighttime, travel by subway, dirty buildings, empty concrete spaces, large congregations of gang members. Streets of Fire is fun to watch but it lacks the constant pressure and intensity of The Warriors. Instead the film has this mix of punk and faux-50s noir asthetic of gritty streets and 'Nighthawk' type diners and Marlon Brando style bikers.

Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (1942)

The film is about a nearly famous nightclub singer and her ex-boyfriend returning to the city from somewhere where he got really good at fighting people. They become entangled with an outlaw biker gang called The Bombers, based on the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club from The Wild One. They go back and forth until a big fight scene with sledgehammers at the end of the movie between the boyfriend and Raven, the leader of The Bombers, who dresses like a Nazi officer.

Probably the best feature of the movie is a minor element, the small role played by Lee Fing, frontman of Fear. He does the cheerleading in support of Raven during the final fight scene, shouting out words of encouragement in his Fear voice.

Oh, also the film ends with a soul group performing called The Sorels, who I suspect are named after Georges Sorel.

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.

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

The Aging Rebel: Dispatches From the Motorcycle Outlaw Frontier

Donald Charles Davis

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.

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

Angels of Death: Inside the Biker’s 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.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2004 - The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs

The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs
Arthur Veno
Allen & Unwin
2004
300 pages

Arthur Veno is, along with Rebels author Daniel R. Wolf (whom Veno refers to as “the late”), one of the only sociologists to look at the outlaw biker phenomenon. Wolf has looked at the clubs in the Canadian context and Veno worked primarily in the Australian. As of March 2013 no one has published research, in book form, on outlaw bikers in the American context.  

Veno is currently either an adjunct professor of social sciences and psychology at Victoria University in Melbourne Australia, or he is an adjunct professor of criminology at Monash University in Melbourne, I don’t know which although he has held a number of other academic appointments in the past. Outlaw bikers appear to be his major research interest and all of his recent publications, according to his CV, are biker related, including a now out of print book about the women of the outlaw biker subculture.  

The book covers much of the same sociological ground as Daniel Wolf’s The Rebels, and Veno positions himself to his object of study in a similar manner as Wolf had, that is, as a cool outsider that the bikers can hang out with and talk to. In The Rebels, Wolf presented himself as a dedicated researcher who loves riding his bike enough that he was accepted by the club he researched. The Rebels ends with Wolf stating that he was ultimately rejected by new group of Rebels who he never rode with or made any agreements with regarding his research. Veno presents himself as someone who is, and will continue to be, an intermediary between the outlaw bikers of Australia, and agents from other social spheres, including law enforcement and media. The Brotherhoods is, at times, Veno’s personal account of life as someone who studies bikies (that’s the Australian term for bikers, by the way). Mostly, however, Veno’s book is a proper, albeit readable, sociological overview of the bikie subculture.

One aspect of the subculture I was hoping to read more about in The Brotherhoods were the self-mythologizing of the bikies. In the US and Canada, biker gangs emerged at the intersecting point between thrillseeking ex-air force returning from war, and delinquent youth gangs - but the myth bikers tell themselves and try to project into the world is that they’re the last living remnant of America’s wild west frontier. I hoped that the Australian bikies would claim to be living out Road Warrior fantasies but instead Veno’s book begins with a quotation from an Australian Hells Angel who claims lineage with Ned Kelly, an Australian bandit and folk hero of the late 19th century.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2011 - Patch Holder

Patch Holder
Doug Ford
2011
72 pages

Patch Holder is a short autobiography by outlaw biker who shows a definite knowledge of the subculture although he never states his club affiliation. The book is self-published via CreateSpace (Amazon’s self-publishing service) by the author, Doug Ford, and as it details the life of a man who is, as far as I know, not known outside of his own social circle. I highly doubt that this book was ever intended to be read by people, like me, who don’t personally know its author.

While Ford does discuss being a biker towards the end, much of the book covers the details of his life outside the outlaw biker subculture - his childhood, his career (as a sign painter for film studios, and later as a tattoo artist) his struggles with alcohol, and his later family life. The fact that this book is titled Patch Holder, a phrase that pretty explicitly identifies Ford as a member of a motorcycle club, while the discussions of living as a biker are so minimal, leads me to think that he had written his memories down to be read by people who know him, and already take his status as a bike for granted.

Anyways the book is pleasant and sometimes tragic, and it ends with Ford listing in brief all of his little thoughts about contemporary society - a very personal form of writing. The cover of the book is great - a display of a whole bunch of the little introductory cards that bikers hand out to each other and to citizens from members of a variety of different gangs including the Booze Fighters and the Vagos (one of the “big four” outlaw clubs). The book points to the potential for people who are not underground celebrities or leaders to write their experiences and publish them via an outlet like CreateSpace without regard for publishing conventions.

outlaw motorcycle clubs, east bay dragons - book - 2003 - Soul on Bikes: The East Bay Dragons and the Black Biker Set

Soul on Bikes: The East Bay Dragons MC and the Black Biker Set
Tobie Gene Levingston, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman
MBI Publishing
2003
263 pages

Tobie Gene Levingston is the president for life of the East Bay Dragons Motorcycle Club, a one chapter, three patch (well.. in some photos their cuts have three patches) club based in Oakland California.  The East Bay Dragons are also a blacks-only club that co-exist peacefully with the Oakland Hells Angels even though the HA are fiercely territorial with other clubs that claim the same space as them.  Levingston professes a long-lasting friendship with Hells Angels patriarch Sonny Barger, who has written a brief foreword for his friend’s memoir, and furthermore the writing here is assisted by the same two Zimmerman brothers who helped Barger write Hells Angel.  

The East Bay Dragons are the first outlaw black club in the Bay area of Northern California, at least that is the impression I get from Levingston’s memoir.  The author discusses his life, beginning as one child of a large family formed by sharecropper parents in Louisiana, progressing to his family’s move to California where he started a car club with friends and some of his brother in the 1950s.  The car club evolved into a motorcycle club, and a club that formed as outlaws in opposition to some of the already existing straight-laced and neatly dressed black-only motorcycle clubs.  Over time, the Dragons developed their own style for chopping bikes that was heavily influenced by the Hells Angels but also by an aesthetic sensibility that had them riding brightly coloured motorcycles, as seen in some of book’s colour photographs.

Soul on Bikes includes many of the kinds of anecdotes that are standard fare of biker memoirs.  Brawls, arrests and close-calls with police, the sometimes congenial and sometimes hostile relationships with other bike clubs, and the dangers and thrills of motorcycle riding, are all remembered fondly by Levingston.  Tobie Gene’s memoir also includes numerous accounts of interactions with the Hells Angels, and the book features a middle-aged Levingston giving a big smile while standing with Barger and his wife at some function.  

The book’s major point of interest is that it sheds some light on what its author says is a much larger phenomenon than what is represented in existing culture, that is the world of black motorcycle clubs.  While the East Bay Dragons are one club in Oakland, Levingston says that there are possibly a hundred such clubs in the Los Angeles area alone, indicating that there is much more potential literature on this subject as the “black biker set” is not mentioned in books like Daniel Wolf’s The Rebels, or Aurther Veno’s The Brotherhoods which provide a more academic view on the biker subculture.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 1991 - The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers

The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers
Daniel R. Wolf
University of Toronto Press
1991
372 pages


Hi there friendly fellows, I bought my copy of The Rebels from Willow Books, near the St George University of Toronto campus at the corner of St. George and Bloor St. West.
The Rebels were an Alberta based outlaw motorcycle club with a few chapters scattered across western Canada during the 1970s, 80s and 90s.  In 1998 the club (alongside a couple of other western Canadian outlaw biker clubs) were absorbed into the multi-national corporation known as the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to become that organization’s presence in Canada’s western provinces.  In the mid/late 1980s, a doctoral student of anthropology, and biker, named Daniel R. Wolf, befriended members of the Rebels Edmonton chapter and collected much of the information that made up his doctoral dissertation which was published as The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers.

The book contains a statement about the permission Wolf received from The Rebels Motorcycle Club to publish this text.  The statement ends with Wolf noting that a newer generation of Rebels wanted him to NOT publish this book, but because they were not the same Rebels he rode and fought with (and Wolf did ride and fight with the Rebels, otherwise he would not have been permitted to hand around them, according to himself) he chose to proceed with publication.  Now, carrying out field research with outlaw bikers is an impressive achievement, and because of this work, The Rebels is probably one of the best books out on the biker subculture.  I’ve tried to expecting to find Wolf ensconced in a faculty position in a sociology or criminology department somewhere, and the book jacket on my copy states that Wolf works at the University of Prince Edward Island.  Unfortunately I cannot find any information about Wolf’s current status, and its tempting to believe that the publication of this book has something to do with that.  In The Brotherhoods by Arthur Veno, an Australian biker researcher, Wolf is referred to as “the late,” so he has passed at some point between 1991 and The Brotherhoods publication in 2002.

The Rebels covers virtually every aspect of Motorcycle Club operations, from the maintenance of their clubhouse, to their attitudes towards women and outsiders, to their methods for balancing work, family, and a commitment to a biker club.  Everything about a club is closely examined by Wolf, who presents a detailed and comprehensive report on the unique social and cultural formation that is the outlaw biker group.  Wolf’s primary point of contact was the Edmonton Alberta Rebels chapter, and when he uses direct quotations from bikers, they usually come from members of this specific group.  He does, however, discuss anecdotes pertaining to outlaw clubs from elsewhere in Canada including the King’s Crew of Ontario, the Grim Reapers (another Alberta club that was absorbed into the Hells Angels) and the Vagabonds MC of Toronto.  It is important for the reader to recognize that Wolf is dealing in outlaw bikers in the Canadian context, and primarily with a focus on western Canada.  It is my understanding, for example, that the term ‘striker’, used to describe potential incoming club members, is a specifically Canadian biker expression.  It is also important to take note of the time frame, that through the 1990s, as have already been discussed in this post, many of the clubs Wolf writes about were absorbed into larger American clubs and therefore no longer exist.

Wolf’s contribution to the literature is unique as it’s one of two anthropological studies of this particular social phenomena (the other is Arthur Veno’s The Brotherhoods - which investigates the outlaw biker in the Austrailian context).  These texts are a counterweight to the sixteen tons of true crime books and undercover agent and/or biker memoirs, where the author claims some kind of distance to their subject matter.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - film - 1992 - Beyond the Law

Beyond the Law

directed by Larry Ferguson
written by Larry Ferguson

Capitol Films
1992
108 minutes

Beyond the Law is a made for TV crime movie first broadcast on HBO in 1992.  The film depicts a small-town Arizona police officer named Dan Saxon (played by Charlie Sheen), who goes undercover into the world of outlaw bikers.  Saxon, whose biker alias is Sid, consistently topped the bikers of the Jackals MC in terms of outrageous behavior and became such a trusted ally to the club that Jackals president, Blood, made repeated requests to sponsor Sid for membership.  

Saxon/Sid enters the biker underworld after his dismissal from the police force of his small town. The scene that leads to his firing also demonstrates his suitability for assuming the pose of a biker outlaw, as he gets into a fight with his commanding officer after an episode of insubordination.  Saxon also struggles with repressed memories relating to abuse he experienced as a child.  His stepfather was a motorcycle cop who handcuffed him to a chair in the basement and beat him.  This abuse ended when the young Saxon somehow got a hold of his stepfather’s service weapon and shot his assailant to death.  While Saxon cannot remember these scenes of childhood violence, the director cut short bursts of these episodes into scenes of his current life to suggest that the abuse he experienced is channeled towards making him a convincing biker whose anti-authority/anti-cop pathos was born in these events.
 

Saxon is tutored on the ways of the outlaw biker by a Jackals hang-around named Virgil, a mechanic who, with Saxon, builds a motorcycle out of spare parts.  He also creates a patch for the fake club Saxon will claim membership to, the Pythons, out of Cleveland.  Virgin creates situations for Saxon that force him to behave violently and without fear, although Saxon quickly exceeds the limits of what his tutor can teach him on this front.  Saxon proceeds to meet with bikers and earn their respect by out-crazying them at every turn (lighting a stick of dynamite and holding on to it until the last second, spitting on a federal agent) and he does it all without changing his facial expression (frozen as a crazy-eyed scowl for most of the movie).  

The film is pretty much a character study of Saxon, who unleashes his id as he enters the biker world.  The thing that you would expect to be the creator of tension in a film about an undercover biker, the potential revelation of his cop status, is not really an issue that comes up.  Instead the film is more about Saxon’s identification with the outlaw lifestyle, which allows him to indulge his subterranean anti-authoritarian urges.  Additionally, the film has a romantic subplot, wherein Saxon meets a woman named Renee Jason, a photographer who is working on a story about outlaw bikers.  Together, the couple represents the dual forces of law enforcement and journalism who seek to expose deviant and criminal activity.

The bikers who make up The Jackals are stereotypically hairy, weird, and crude, aside from the Jackals leader, Blood (played by Michael Masden who, in 2008, played The Gent, another atypical biker outlaw in the film, Hell Ride) who is clean cut and coldly violent.  The Jackals are explicitly a criminal enterprise engaged in drug production and trafficking, as well as weapons trafficking.  They also occasionally commit other crimes like murder and armed robbery just for the hell of it.  Saxon’s life is saved by Blood in one scene, and in the next he witnesses Blood kill a grocery store cashier.  Blood’s character is intended as the epitome of the cruel criminal mind, and the senselessness of the violence that is so often associated with outlaw biker culture.  

An intrepid Youtube user has uploaded the film in a series of segments.  Click here for part 1, and the other parts will follow.

And as a final note, the film is apparently based on a true story as told in an article titled Undercover Angels that appeared in Playboy magazine during the early 1980s.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2002 - Ridin' High, Livin' Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free: Hell-Raising Motorcycle Stories
Ralph “Sonny” Barger with Keith and Kent Zimmerman
Harper
2002
277 pages

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is a collection of fourty-one motorcycle related stories collected by Sonny Barger, the former national president of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, and Keith and Kent Zimmerman, the twin brothers who collaborated with Barger on his 2000 autobiography, Hells Angel and also worked with John Lydon (also known as Johnny Rotten, the frontman for seminal punk group, The Sex Pistols) on his autobiography, Rotten.  Barger and the Zimmerman brothers present the reader with biker tales from a number of different aspects of motorcycle culture (many of them about 1% bikers) and demonstrate just how varied the subculture of motorcycle enthusiasts can be.

The book begins with the story 'The Wandering Gypsy and The Silver Satin Kid', with photos of the ‘kid’ showing a young Sonny Barger.  The story tells how Barger became the leader of the Oakland Hells Angels and thus transitioned motorcycling from a practice to a subculture in the popular imagination.  From this story of outlaw genesis, Barger and associates tell a number of stories that shine a light onto a number of lesser-known aspects of the motorcycling subculture, both outlaw and lawful.  

Many of the stories contained in Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free are stories of outlaws, some are tales of interaction with celebrities such as actor Steve McQueen, singer David Crosby, and outlaw country musician, Kinky Friedman.  Many of them are stories of kindness, done by or for outlaw motorcyclists, in an effort to oppose the stereotype of the maniac biker, however others are stories that detail the outrageous biker behavior we all expect from such a book.  ‘Blake’s World Record Whore-House Jump’ for example, describes a biker jumping a motorcycle into a brothel bedroom that was already in use by a fellow brother.  ‘On the Lam’ is a story of running from law enforcement personnel.  The most interesting stories, however, are those that highlight some aspect of biker culture that is seldom made visible by other media coverage.  One of the first stories describes a long running black biker club called the East Bay Dragons, a club that the Zimmermans have recently devoted a full book to, distorting the concept of the 1%ers as a purely white (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) phenomena. Other stories discuss the experiences of women bikers, and another story, 'The Ballad of Rocky's Green Gables,' discusses the conversion of an old biker bar into a Christian ministry and church....for bikers.  These stories illustrate how people of all kinds gravitate towards the technology of the motorcycle and make it mean more than a mode of transportation.

Ridin’ High, Livin’ Free is also interesting because it points towards something that simply must exist although its almost completely absent in literature.  That is, it points towards a folklore of counterculture.  In one sentence in A Secret History of the IRA, Ed Moloney makes a passing reference to IRA folklore, but presents no examples of it.  Barger et. al. have created a volume of biker stories that has many similarities to folklore.  The authors even using the folklorist term of ‘capturing’ stories, to refer to their transcription of the tails included.  The stories of Ridin' High, Livin' Free are all told in what is presumably a outlaw vernacular of rough speech, and while many of the stories are probably based on a kernel of truth (with accompanying photographs of the people who populate them) they also often have a fantastic edge to their tellings that suggests the embellishments that build with repeated oral transmissions.  

The book also presents a fuller range of biker activities than other biker books and not the simply criminal that are represented by true crime authors and former undercover infiltrators, not is it bogged down by the rhetoric of a victim of social misconception.  Finally, Ridin' High, Livin' Free conveys the appeal of the activity of riding to the reader, an aspect of the subculture that should often be foregrounded but is actually often absent from too many biker books that instead focus on the wild lives of the people who join 1% clubs.