THE roar of Harley-Davidsons and stench of petrol was all it took to announce the Hells Angels were in town.
And leading the pack of leather-clad outlaws for decades was hardman Sonny Barger, whose name struck fear into the hearts of even the toughest of bikers.
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As California became gripped with drug-fuelled mania and political instability, Sonny was the man at the head of a group that left a trail of violence everywhere they went.
From leading deadly riots, running drugs, and even threatening Keith Richards with a gun, it’s little surprise that Sonny and his crew were dubbed “vikings on acid”.
Many now romanticise him as a legend – but the truth is that he presided over a group that carried out gang rapes of teenagers and that committed twisted acts of cruelty without blinking an eye.
And ex-wife Noel Black, who says Barger was an “old school charmer” when they met, soon saw his violent side.
“After the first ass kicking, I should have left,” she says. “He didn’t kill me, but I should have just ran.”
Now, the life and times of Sonny Barger is told by those who knew him in the documentary Secrets of the Hells Angels, airing tonight on Channel 4.
Four months after he was born in 1938, his mother ran off with a bus driver and he was raised by his alcoholic father and sister in the rough port district of Oakland, California.
School was attended just to pick fights with his fellow classmates, and at 16 he was expelled for hitting a teacher with a baseball bat.
Then he tried the army – but after forging his birth certificate so he could join without parental permission, he was given an honourable discharge just 18 months later.
Instead he joined a bike club, popular with other ex-military men, named the Oakland Panthers.
“I needed a second family,” Sonny wrote in his autobiography about this time.
“I wanted a group less interested in a wife and 2 ½ kids…and more interested in riding, drag-racing, and raising hell.”
But the Panthers were only weekend riders – and Sonny wanted more.
Throughout the 50s, the Hells Angels consisted of loosely organized chapters throughout California, with members often unaware that other chapters existed.
Forming his own group, the Oakland Hells Angels, in 1957, he made contact with other Hells Angels groups, and when the overall president was sent to prison in 1958, a 20-year old Sonny took the lead.
Brutal beatings
By the 1960s and Sonny and his now-worldwide gang of outlaw bikers had developed a serious reputation for violence – for good reason.
First gaining a criminal record in 1963 for cannabis possession, he was then arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in 1965, when he forced a pistol into a man’s mouth after he criticised the Hells Angels.
An unrepentant Sonny later wrote: “Since the motherf*cker was already shot in the head, I bent him over the pool table and shot him again.”
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Though much of his legal income was made from consulting on Hollywood films about bikers, they also took part in robberies, drug running, and harboured white supremacists.
In January 1963, the Oakland Hells Angels headquarters was raided by police, with seven members charged with the alleged gang rape of a 29-year-old woman.
During the raid, police also found a swastika flag and a picture of Adolph Hitler with the inscription “Hitler is alive, our buddy.”
“The way we were depicted, we were like Vikings on acid, raping our way across sunny California on motorcycles forged in the furnaces of hell”, he wrote.
One of the most infamous nights of mayhem happened at a Rolling Stones concert at the Altamont Speedway in 1969.
Offered free beer in exchange for providing security, the crowd got restless as the Stones failed to appear on stage.
Fights broke out, the bikers beat the crowd with pool cues, and one frightened fan – Meredith Hunter – was knifed to death with the assailant, Alan Passaro, getting away with it on grounds of self-defence.
“[They] were out of it on bad acid and cheap wine, and they were just looking for trouble,” remembered Keith Richards.
“Somebody knocked their bikes over and the next minute this black kid got scared, pulls a gun, and they did him”.
I stood next to him and stuck my pistol into his side and told him to start playing his guitar, or he was dead
Sonny
To many, it was the day that the peace of love of the 1960s died.
Sonny and his bikers for their part blamed the Stones for coming on late
And not even being a member of one of the biggest bands in the world would keep you safe from Sonny’s wrath.
“I stood next to him and stuck my pistol into his side and told him to start playing his guitar, or he was dead”, Sonny remembered.
“Altamont may have been some big catastrophe to the hippies, but it was just another Hells Angels event to me.”
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Misogynistic violence
Though the Angels were a lawless rabble, they maintained a strict code of honour within themselves.
Disloyalty meant death – as Paul “German” Ingalls found out in 1968.
After being found guilty of stealing Sonny’s valuable coin collection by an internal Hells Angels “court”, Ingalls was forced to consume barbiturates until he suffered an overdose.
Equally brutal were the Hells Angels’ sexual crimes, with wives and girlfriends seen as the “property” of the men.
Sonny’s first wife, Elsie Mae, had died of an embolism in 1967 after a (then illegal) abortion, and he split with his second wife, Sharon, in 1996.
Three years later he married Beth Noel Black, but this came to an end in 2003 after Sonny attacked her so ferociously she found herself hospitalised.
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“I loved Sonny so much, but marriages sometimes are bad, and sometimes if you hang around tough people things happen to you,” she said.
“He would get aggressive with it. After the first ass kicking, I should have left.”
During one outburst, Sonny kicked her in the back, causing it to break in three places and leaving her with a lacerated spleen.
…[he] offered to deliver the bagged body of a leftist for every Angel released from jail
Ted Hilliard
He called 911, and can be heard admitting that he had beaten his wife her so badly she was “paralysed and cannot move”.
He claimed she had pulled a gun on him, in a row over a mistress, but despite being convicted for aggravated assault he spent only eight days in jail for this crime.
Justice served
Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, Sonny and his Hells Angels had a complicated relationship with the police as they expanded the club into an international organisation.
In 1972, Oakland sergeant Ted Hilliard testified that he had accepted guns, dynamite and grenades from Sonny in return for the release of Hells Angels members from prison, as the police wished to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Black Panthers and Marxist groups.
Sonny was keen to go further – offering “to deliver the bagged body of a leftist for every Angel released from jail” – but this was refused.
By now, Sonny had developed a serious cocaine addiction and funded this by selling heroin, and Hells Angels chapters around the country practically controlled the entire market for meth.
When police raided his home in December 1972, they found eight guns throughout his house and even a human skull on his dresser that to this day remains unidentified.
He was finally convicted in 1973 for possession of heroin and firearms.
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Sentenced to ten years, he served only four and a half, running the Hells Angels from his cell and marrying his second wife, Sharon, there.
Thanks to his habit of smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, Sonny contracted throat cancer in 1983.
This led him to become a public anti-smoking advocate, even saying: “Want to be a rebel? Don’t smoke as the rest of the world.”
Having his vocal cords removed didn’t stop him from being convicted in 1988 for conspiring to blow up the clubhouse of rival club the Outlaws, though he insisted he was merely the victim of entrapment by the FBI.
In total, Sonny spent 13 years in prison throughout his life.
By the 2000s, he had stepped away from his public leadership of the gang, though in 2002 he tried to organise a peace conference when warfare between the Hells Angels and Mongols gang exploded.
However, this conference was cancelled after a mass riot in Laughlin, Nevada, between bitter rivals left three dead and dozens injured.
Hells Angels members swarmed a casino, with CCTV capturing the moment bullets whizzed around slot machines.
One Mongol member was stabbed to death and two Hells Angels members died from gunshots.
He married his fourth wife, Zorana, in 2005, and spent the final portion of his life contributing to books about biker life, as well as appearing on the TV drama Sons of Anarchy.
Following a short battle with liver cancer, Sonny passed away in 2022 at the age of 83 – but left a legacy that will be forever part of the story of 20th century America.
Secrets of the Hells Angels airs tonight on Channel 4 at 11pm
