Hell’s Angels on Trial: Tales of Drugs & Death
Whispering Bill Pifer is dying. The cancer growing in his throat has now all but choked off his raspy voice. A lip reader stood beside him and interpreted his words to the courtroom. They came slow and measured, the damning silent words of a dying Hell’s Angel. “
I understand I would have complete immunity,” Pifer’s lips said. “I won’t testify without it. The time I have left, I want to spend on the street.”
Sonny Barger, 33-year-old president of the Hell’s Angels, supposedly talked too much to Whispering Bill while they were both in the Alameda County Jail in Oakland, California. The cold-eyed Barger has a reputation as a braggart, and this time, according to police, something he and Whispering Bill talked about led them to the hilly grasslands near Ukiah in far northern California, where police found three bodies stuffed into abandoned wells on a 153-acre ranch owned by the Angels. Big Tom Shull, 24, and Charles Baker, 30, had both been strangled. Their bodies had been in the wells for about a year. A young woman who is still unidentified was found in the other well. About six months ago, somebody shot her in the head.
If it had been a year ago, or only a few months, Pifer would have kept it quiet according to the code that binds all Angels. Or if it had been out on the streets, in some beer-stale bar in Oakland or around some trash-cluttered campsite at the end of a late summer run. But Whispering Bill knew he was dying. He didn’t want it to be there in the antiseptic stink of the Alameda County Jail. So, according to police, he offered his information on the Angels’ burial ground in return for some last days of freedom.
When the cops went to the ranch, they found George “Baby Huey” Wethern, bearded, 260-pound resident and, with his wife Helen, ostensible owner of the ranch. From what Pifer had told them, the police knew enough already. The cocaine and weapons they would find on the ranch would be enough to end for years Wethern’s retreat into the placid countryside, and the bodies could make Baby Huey liable for a murder charge. He looked tired, whipped by it, and he agreed to tell everything he knew in return for immunity from prosecution.
The code of silence was cracking. Significantly, it was coming apart within a week after the release of the state attorney general’s report that concluded the Hell’s Angels are a key element in organized crime in California. Among other things, the report said that U.S. Customs agents estimate the Angels have shipped more than $31 million in narcotics from the West Coast to the East Coast alone in the last three years.
“This is the beginning of the end of the Hell’s Angels,” Mendocino County District Attorney Duncan James said after winning immunity for Baby Huey.
Ralph Hubert Barger has been president of the Oakland Hell’s Angels since 1957 and undisputed chieftain of the club’s chapters in California and elsewhere nearly as long. He has a sense of power like woven, twisted strands of steel cable. His hair falls back in a peak off his high forehead and breaks over in light piles of curls to his shoulders, joining around his ears to the full, neatly trimmed beard, so that he looks the part of some ancient helmeted horseman — or perhaps the image of Buffalo Bill, which he once said he preferred.
Barger and his people are a throbbing horde, half vulgar barbarians, half fascinating visages of wild, unshackled glory. People are afraid of them, but they are lured to watch them, to come as close as they dare to the thrill of unpredictable violence which waits like the evil, choking sound of an idling Harley 74.
It was probably something like that for Big Tom Shull and Charley Baker as they loaded up in Charley’s beat-up ’57 pickup in the fall of 1971 and rambled west out of Georgia headed for California, where the legends of Free Wheelin’ Frank and Frenchy from Berdoo were born and nourished while Big Tom and Charley were still learning to ride a two-wheeler.
Big Tom had a tangle of red beard and hair that sharpened up and slightly aged his handsome boyish face. He was a filled-out six-foot dude with 200 pounds resting easy in a dangerous-looking build. He had a swastika earring and a knife slung from his chain belt and he liked his action mean. And for all of that, he looked as green as bespectacled, short-haired and skinny Charley Baker as they pulled into dusty farm-fed Stockton.
Back in Augusta, Charley had been a mechanic for police department motorcycles. Big Tom had a wife he divorced to make the move, and they both had accents thick enough to single them out as strangers anywhere north of Louisville. But sooner or later, people who love bikes find each other no matter where they are. Shull and Baker were soon hanging out with the French Camp Boys, a motorcycle club in the Stockton area that, like countless others in California, is on the far periphery of notorious “outlaw” groups like the Angels and the Hessians and the Gypsy Jokers. It might have been enough for good-natured Charley Baker. The French Camp Boys were joining their bikes in races and meets all over northern California, sometimes just blasting off on their own, punching down that white line full back and blazing around cars at up to 120 miles an hour on the straights. After a time, Charley moved on down to Rodeo on San Pablo Bay, found himself a woman and took a job in a custom motorcycle shop. He kept up his interest in the French Camp Boys, but he was settling in a lot faster than his restless partner from Augusta.
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