Street Criminals or Road Warriors?
Omni: The average Harley rider, according to factory statistics, is 36.6 years old. What happens to older outlaw bikers? Is it really, as they say, AFFA? Angels Forever, Forever Angels?
Wolf: No, you just can’t maintain the lifestyle. You leave the club in good standing, and that’s fine. You become a friend of the club, attend certain functions, and so on.
Omni: Are “outlaw bikers” criminals by definition?
Wolf: They’re not professional criminals, but this is far from saying they do not commit crimes. A lot of the Rebels’ activities involved crimes. Just the way they present themselves in bars gets them into fights. It would be hard to find long-time bikers without some arrest for assault or public disturbance. But if their primary purpose was to commit crimes, they wouldn’t maintain this kind of profile. I’ve joked about this with cops: “Wouldn’t it be neat if the Mafia rode bikes, and they all went to Chicago with ‘Mafia/NYC’ or ‘Mafia/Chicago’ on their backs and maybe some lasagne in the backpack?” We had about eleven different clubs here in Charlottetown on July first, including the Angels. The police go there, take photographs of the bikes and bikers. That’s not the best situation for maintaining a low profile. If they were just professional criminals and biking was a sideline, they wouldn’t do it. On the other hand, the Angels are lowering their profile.
Omni: How so?
Wolf: They always tell the clubs, “Keep a low profile in your community,” so as not to raise surveillance techniques on the part of the local police. On the west coast of Canada you had three hard-core clubs that came together into the Hells Angels. When they got into a high-profile ruckus with another Vancouver outlaw club called the Bounty Hunters, the Hells Angels shut them down. They said, “We don’t want this. You’re no longer on the street.”
Omni: How did they shut them down?
Wolf: You take whatever action is necessary. It can be as symbolic as taking their colors, which is an insult; members will die for colors sometimes. Or it can go to the extreme of eliminating them, which can involve fights or accelerate to bombings or shootings.
Omni: Is drug-taking part and parcel of the outlaw life?
Wolf: It’s not what you’d think. Outlaw bikers tend to use hallucinogens such as LSD, amphetamines, and to a lesser extent cocaine, but even these drugs are the exception rather than the rule. Patch holders use mostly marijuana, alcohol, and cigarettes. Actually, among the Rebels or the Hells Angels, continued drug abuse, especially of heroin, is a patch-pulling offense. You lose your membership. When a member of the Rebels began to drink too heavily, his colors were confiscated and his brothers put him on probation. When a member is incapacitated in public, it exposes the other members and the club’s reputation to outside threats, whether from the police or roadside vigilantes.
Omni: Are you saying the Rebels represent a sane response to society rather than a pathology?
Wolf: There was very little pathology about it. If they were a pathological organization, I don’t think they’d beat the odds and survive, because there are many elements working against them. This decade will celebrate fifty years of outlaw bikers, and they will be around another fifty years.