Former lawyer and director of his business, Fritz Clapp, said the cause was liver cancer. The Hells Angels were both a defining part of the post-war counterculture and a sharp departure from it. While beats, hippies, yippies, diggers, and other groups swerved far to the left and generally avoided violence, Angels enjoyed attacking anti-war protesters, fighting with rival clubs and targeting enemies for revenge killings. By the time Mr. Burger (the name is pronounced with a hard “G”) established himself as the de facto leader of the club’s various chapters in the mid-1960s, their temperaments had already become something of a legend. , helped along with a long list of writers who found their story – and Mr. Burger’s charm – irresistible. “At every gathering of the Angels of Hell,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his book Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (1967), “there is no doubt who is directing the show: Ralph ‘Sonny’ Barger, the Maximum a leader, a six-legged, 170-pound storekeeper from East Oakland, the coolest leader of the batch and a tough, quick agent when it comes to any action. “In turn he is a fanatic, a philosopher, a quarrel, a shrewd compromiser and a final referee.” Mr. Burger has always sought to distance himself from many of the club’s most extreme crimes in crime, cultivating an image that was both hardline and media savvy. He was not there, for example, in 1965 when a group of Hells Angels in Berkeley, California, attacked protesters protesting the Vietnam War, although they verbally attacked the anti-war movement at a press conference shortly afterwards – and offered to take a Group of cyclists behind the lines of North Vietnam. He was also not involved in the violence that erupted between the Hells Angels and members of the public at a free concert at Altamont Speedway, near San Francisco, on December 6, 1969. The pioneering Rolling Stones had hired Mr. Burger and the Hells Angels to provide security, but several angels ended up hitting members of the public with pool slogans and stabbing one person, Meredith Hunter, to death. A few days later, Mr. Burger called a radio station to give his side of the story. He said he was sitting on the edge of the stage drinking beer during the Stones set and had not taken part in the fighting, but defended his colleagues’ action as self-defense against what he described as a drug-infested hippie intent. destroying their bikes. (However, he later admitted to shooting a gun at Keith Richards when the band was late.) The Angel of Hell, Alan Pasaro, has been charged with murder in Mr. Hunter’s death. He was acquitted for reasons of self-defense. Especially after Altamont, Mr. Burger tried to clear the image of the Angels by hiring a public relations firm and engaging the group in charitable men. And he insisted that the club – which struck when people called the Hells Angels gang – did not deserve the worst impressions people, he said, had been nurtured by law enforcement. “It was never a crime the Hells Angels thought of,” he told The Phoenix New Times in 1992, shortly after serving his second prison sentence. “The FBI thought about it, the FBI paid for it and I went to jail for it. That’s how it goes”. In fact, by the time of Altamont, the organization had already delved deeper into crime, especially drug trafficking. The FBI estimates that by the 1980s, cyclist gangs controlled a quarter of the heroin business in the United States. Beginning in 1963, Mr. Burger was arrested almost every year, usually for assault, weapons, or drugs. And, for a while at least, it always came down. In 1972 he was charged with the murder of a drug dealer, Servio Winston Agero, but was acquitted when a key witness proved unreliable. Finally, in 1973, he was sentenced to 10 years to life in prison for possession of drugs and weapons. He went to Folsom State Prison, where he continued to run the Hells Angels. He was released in 1977. He went to prison again in 1988, was convicted of conspiracy to attack members of a rival motorcycle group, the Outlaws. When he was released from prison in 1992, he was a major politician on the cyclist scene. A period of throat cancer in 1982 forced doctors to remove his vocal cords, leaving a hole in his throat that he had to close to speak, and then only with a hoarse whisper. People had to bend over to hear him, enhancing his image as a Godfather dressed in leather. And although he played less of a role in the Hells Angels, he continued to offer plenty of food for magazine profiles, this time as a wise, hard-nosed time. “I think making time is just part of growing up,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “There are just some things you need to do in your life. You have to go to school, you have to go to the army, you have to go to prison. Everything helps you to have a complete life “. Ralph Hubert Barger Jr. He was born in Modesto, California, on October 8, 1938. When he was 4 months old, his mother, Kathryn (Ritch) Barger, ran away with a Trailways bus driver, leaving him in the care of a babysitter. His father moved with Sonny and his sister, Shirley, to Auckland, where he worked as a stevedore. In the evening, Sonny’s father took him along as he spent his earnings at the city’s seaside taverns. Sonny learned to swear from a parrot at a bar in Jim Jungle. Mr Burger’s first wife, Elsie May (George) Burger, has died of a miscarriage. His marriages to Sharon Gruhlke and Noel Black both ended in divorce. He is survived by his fourth wife, Zorana (Katzakian) Barger, and his sister, Shirley Rogers. According to his own admission, he was a hesitant student, who got into fights every day and left them after the 10th grade. He enlisted in the army in 1955, but was honorably discharged 14 months later when his superiors learned that he had forged his birth certificate. Back in Auckland, he went from job to job, living for a time with his father and for another time with his sister and her family. Over time he fell into a group of army veterans who had tough parties, who created problems, who shared their passion for motorcycles. They decided to set up their own club and on April 1, 1957 the Hells Angels were born – without the possessive apostrophe, because it did not fit into a patch. They soon learned that there were at least two other clubs with the same name. Mr Burger moved quickly to consolidate the teams and then moved their headquarters to Auckland – essentially making his chapter first among equals, with him being the de facto leader. At first he made a living as a machine operator. But he soon realized that there was a gain in the Angels’ reputation. In the late 1960s he made most of his income as a consultant on gang cyclist films. He incorporated the Hells Angels, disbursing 500 shares of the company, which was governed by a board of directors with the leaders of the various chapters. He also patented the name and then sued anyone who used it without his permission, including Marvel Comics and director Roger Corman. He also made money from his name, giving permission to use t-shirts, wine labels and beer bottles. He released Sonny Barger’s Cajun-Style Salsa. And he began writing books – six in all, including two novels and an autobiography, Hell’s Angel: The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club (2001), a New York Times bestseller. He left his leadership role in the Hells Angels in 1998 and moved to Arizona, where he lived outside Phoenix and cared for a horse stable. (He returned to the Bay Area in 2016.) He practiced yoga, stopped using drugs, and encouraged children to stay away from cigarettes. He even made a turn in Hollywood, appearing in several seasons of “Sons of Anarchy”, a TV series about a gang of cyclists. But he never regretted the choices of his life. “One of the things that always surprises me about being a journalist all my life,” he told the Los Angeles Times. smart. You could be whatever you wanted! ” They do not realize, I am what I want to be “. Daniel Victor contributed to the report.
