In California: A Trial of Angels

By Jane O'Reilly

They were the scourge of the '60s, members of a minor, mean-spirited motorcycle club, raised through their own viciousness and the fascination of the press to the status of ravening Huns. For the past seven months a clutch of Hell's Angels has been on trial in San Francisco's Federal Building, accused of having spent the '70s conspiring to be racketeers. The proceedings are known officially as The United States of America vs. Ralph Barger Jr., et al.

The case began last June, with brightly televised mass arrests and dark allusions in the press to Swiss bank accounts and the Mafia. It has now ground down into a weary, grimy courtroom proceeding, livened occasionally by mention of drugs and guns. The press has pretty much lost interest. The public had little sympathy to lose. The Angels, it is widely agreed, are fairly nasty people.

Whether they are also guilty as charged is something the jury will decide, perhaps by next month. The charge is almost as long as the trial. Its most important question: Have the defendants violated Title 18 of the U.S. Code, a complicated provision known as R.I.C.O. (for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations)?

There are some collateral questions too. Did the Hell's Angels Motorcycle Club constitute a racketeering "enterprise"? Did some or all of the 18 standing trial, by virtue of their membership or association with the "enterprise," conspire to manufacture and distribute drugs? Did they conspire to boost business through murder, intimidation, use of false names and identification, killing or injuring police officers, and acquiring amazing numbers of guns?

All the defendants have previously been accused or suspected of crimes. Some have state charges pending. Some have been convicted and have served time. No one, least of all the Angels, denies that they have dealt in drugs and illegally owned guns. But is this record of "bad acts" proof of conspiracy? Or does it mean, as the defense maintains, that they are individual criminals so pathetically disorganized as to be an easy mark for gung-ho U.S. attorneys intent on controlling the defiant Hell's Angels to the public's satisfaction?

To attend the trial in the windowless 17th-floor courtroom, all witnesses, police, lawyers and spectators pass through two security checkpoints where they may be frisked and are electronically scanned like airline passengers. The judge has had a bulletproof Plexiglas partition erected between the audience and participants in the trial. Because belt buckles can be used as weapons, a sign outside reads: NO BELT BUCKLES OVER TWO INCHES; NO EXCEPTIONS.

The cast is unmanageably large. Some 60 people have to be present for the trial to proceed. Customarily present are Judge Samuel Conti, 58, born and educated in California, reputed to be hard on drug-law violators. He has tried attempted Presidential Assassin Sara Jane Moore and Black Panther David Hilliard. Last February, 4 1/2 months into the Hell's Angels affair, the judge collapsed from exhaustion. Court was recessed as he rested up for two weeks. The prosecution's "Hell's Angels Task Force" sits at a center table: four lawyers and a shifting group of federal agents. Their manner suggests they are not always of one mind. The jury includes 16 citizens of varied colors, classes, sexes and ages, each clinging to a black binder notebook containing identifying pictures of the 18 defendants. Facing them sit the defendants with their lawyers in three tiers of bolted-down seats. The lawyers, some retained and some public defenders, are mostly in their 30s, all exhausted, all affronted by what they feel is excessive judicial hostility to their clients. The word among lawyers in San Francisco is "Don't stroll by the courthouse. You may be tagged as a public defender." In California good criminal lawyers make up to $250 an hour. Public defenders get $20 an hour on court days.

Of the 34 people indicted last June, two submitted their cases on stipulated facts and were found guilty by Judge Conti. Some were "turned" into witnesses, some disappeared, and some are to be tried separately. Of the 18 defendants in this popularly named "Hell's Angels trial" only ten are Angels, or former Angels. Eight never joined the club, including the three women defendants who are wives of various defendants.

Michael Overstreet, 31, never a member, is on the stand. He is heavy, with a wistful, drooping mustache, and he wears a western shirt over a clean T shirt. Overstreet is a fourth-generation Californian with an eleventh-grade education and a year at Heald Engineering College in San Francisco. In his testimony, Overstreet reveals that he has had a somewhat hazy "employment" record: delivering rental cars, work at a packing plant, stretches of unemployment, some "wheeling and dealing" in things like drugs, guns, appliances and cars.

His biggest mistake seems to have been a friendship with a certain Thomas ("Red") Bryant, a Hell's Angel connected with the San Rafael auto body shop that according to the prosecution was a center of drug dealing, mayhem and murder. Bryant appears to be just the type the public thinks of when it thinks of Hell's Angels. In 1975 Bryant, Overstreet, Rick Robles and another Angel were accused in the beating and shooting death of a man called "Hippie Richard." Bryant's testimony helped convict Robles, and the rest went free. Bryant was considered so valuable a witness that he is still enjoying a new life "on the program"--the Witness Protection Program. That has provided him, at taxpayer expense, with immunity, a new name, a credit rating, about $200 a month and a Government recommendation for a small-business loan.

Defense Attorney Clark Summers asks Overstreet, his client, if he saw any changes in Red Bryant's behavior around the year 1975.

A. There was a drastic change in his behavior.

Q. And tell us what that change was.

A. It got to where . . . when somebody came to his house, he would open the door with a gun pointed on them. He got really paranoid and spooky . . . shooting spiders off the wall.

In the evening, defendants out on bail resume normal routines as best they can. Anita Musick, 38, drives back to the East Bay to the El Portal Motel. "This is the way racketeers live," she says of the shab by two rooms with kitchen and bath unit. Clothes for court hang on the shower rod. Her biggest mistake seems to have been falling in love with a succession of heavy-duty Hell's Angels and being the kind of woman who will help anyone, any time, no matter what he has done. "The night of the arrest," she says, "I was vacuuming and trying to get a splinter out of my toe. I thought it was a bad joke, people out side shouting, 'Open up! Federal agents.' This big crowd rushed in. They took my wedding pictures and they thought the rice was dope. They threatened I would never see my daughter again unless I turned state's witness. Would you like to see the cellar, where they claim there was a silencer factory?"

In Oakland, on the flatland side of Golf Links Road, Sharon Barger, 30, genuinely beautiful, a former Miss Livermore, looks pained when someone remarks on her new front door. "They broke down all our doors," she says. The Barger house, described by the press as "an armed camp," is a five-room bungalow. Sharon's biggest mistake seems to have been an abiding loyalty to her husband, the legendary Sonny Barger. Sonny, now 41, led the Angels through the glory days of the '60s: fighting in bars, terrorizing small towns, dropping acid with Ken Kesey, assaulting antiwar demonstrators. He was their leader during the Altamont rock concert killing. Sonny spent four years of the '70s in prison on a drug conviction and is the star defendant of the current case. "My Sonny has been a member 23 years this month," says Sharon.

These days Barger's context is the courtroom and the San Francisco County Jail where he is held in lieu of $1 million cash bail. Both he and the prosecutors trace the roots of the present case to "the Zerby bombing." William Zerby is a former drug agent who was obsessed with nailing the Angels and was deafened in 1978 by a planted bomb. The newer, younger Hell's Angels turned meaner while Sonny was in jail. "Things changed. The whole world's meaner," he says. Sonny Barger has no regrets -- except maybe about the antiwar demonstrators. "I done exactly what I wanted to do, but I haven't done racketeering and murder," he says. "There's been Hell's Angels convicted of murder, but that was on a one-to-one basis, not club policy." -- Jane O'Reilly

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