Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (7 page)

While they may not be the best known outlaw biker gang, the Outlaws have a long and storied history.

The well-documented and generally agreed-upon backstory of Hells Angels recounts that the club was one of many formed in Southern California in the years just after the Second World War. The consensus opinion among experts is that it started when a group of disaffected combat soldiers, looking for the kind of adrenaline rushes they experienced in war, banded together, rode customized motorcycles and held rowdy parties. The local youth — alienated by the homogenization of postwar culture — idolized, joined and later replaced those veterans, and eventually ramped up the violence and money-making operations. Due to some sage leadership and an easily marketable name and logo, Hells Angels quickly rose to unparalleled prominence.

But they weren't the first outlaw motorcycle gang. Not even close. That honor almost certainly belongs to the Outlaws. They were formed in 1935 — six years before official American involvement in World War II, in Chicago, during the Great Depression.

While historians and sociologists will tell you that the California bikers were collectively trying to recreate the thrill of battle, the guys who founded the Outlaws were just out for a good time in an era when good times were few and far between.

It all started at the now defunct Matilda's Bar on Route 66, in a small suburb of Chicago called McCook. Even now, McCook, Illinois, is small, working class and overwhelmingly white. It's a pretty boring piece of the Midwest. But back in 1935, it was actually a pretty enviable place to be. While industry was foundering pretty well everywhere else, General Motors had just invested millions and millions in a manufacturing plant for its newly acquired locomotive subsidiary, the Electro-Motive Company, in McCook.

For the next two generations, EMC's LaGrange Plant (it was named after a neighboring city because McCook was then too small to even have a post office) made the most railway engines for the biggest locomotive manufacturer in the world.

It was a haven of relative affluence at a time when any kind of work was scarce. But it was hard, boring work. And the men who worked there drank and partied hard. Some rode motorcycles and hung out at Matilda's. They started as drinking buddies and then emerged as a distinct group who rode, worked and partied together. As they became a cohesive unit, they named themselves the McCook Outlaws Motorcycle Club. It may not have the same satisfying psychological and sociological rationale as the Hells Angels semi-official history, but it's closer to the truth. Members identified themselves with a patch sewn or embroidered onto their shirts. On a black background, it featured a head-on view of a motorcycle in a winged circle.

In a city synonymous with organized crime, which had just a few years earlier seen the likes of Al Capone, the McCook Outlaws made little impression on Chicagoland. They were just a bunch of rowdy hooligans on loud bikes. Despite the name “Outlaws,” whatever they did to break the law wasn't serious enough to be written about in the newspapers of the day.

Of course, the war changed things. With much of the McCook Outlaws' membership overseas or working double shifts, the club almost ceased to exist. But it survived and, after the war, the same phenomenal set of circumstances that established motorcycle gangs in places like California, Massachusetts, Quebec and Southwestern Ontario also arose in Chicago.

So when the American Motorcycle Association held an event at Chicago's famed Soldier Field stadium in May 1946, the McCook Outlaws came out in force. It was a watershed moment for the club, which had already gained a number of recruits from outside McCook.

In fact, the club became so popular and widespread that its name was changed from the McCook Outlaws to the Chicago Outlaws after the clubhouse was moved from the suburbs to the south side of the big city. The patch was changed, too; made a little tougher. In place of the winged motorcycle was a crude skull. Later named “Charlie,” the skull is still basically the Outlaws' symbol today. Back then, though, it was hand-painted on the backs of members' jackets. Frequently, the skull was embroidered with white thread on the Chicago Outlaws standard uniform of a black western-style shirt with white piping.

Not long afterwards came an event that changed the outlaw biker world. In 1953, Hollywood released
The Wild One
, starring Marlon Brando. The movie was based on a short story that itself was based on a motorcycle event where the partying got out of hand and the small town of Hollister, California, was terrorized. Each telling of the tale — from media accounts to short story to movie — exaggerated the incident. If you watch it today, the movie is actually pretty hokey, but it was a huge hit back then. Among its biggest fans were the bikers themselves.

In a classic example of real life imitating fiction imitating real life, the look and behavior of the bikers in the movie were quickly adopted by real-life bikers all over the world. In homage to the look of the movie, the Chicago Outlaws changed their logo again, updating and refining Charlie's portrait and putting a pair of crossed pistons behind him. It looked almost exactly like the logo Brando wore on the back of his jacket in
The Wild One.

The club prospered. At a Fourth of July rally in 1964, the Outlaws expanded by patching over two gangs: The Cult (a small gang from the upstate New York town of Voorheesville) and the Gypsy Outlaws of Milwaukee. The following month at the nearby Springfield Motor Races, the Outlaws accepted another chapter — the Gipsy Outlaws (not previously related to the similarly named Milwaukee club) of Louisville, Kentucky.

They had become the biggest American biker gang east of the Mississippi, with only the California-based Hells Angels any larger. On New Year's Day 1965, the clubs now aligned with the Outlaws incorporated as the American Outlaws Association. Their official logo is a parody of the American Motorcycle Association's own, featuring a rounded triangle with an upstretched middle finger (and sometimes a swastika). But the bikers never wore it on their backs. Instead they still had the same old Charlie with crossed pistons on the backs of their jackets. They dropped “Chicago” from their name, and were commonly referred to as the Outlaws.

In July 1967, the club's brass rode down to West Palm Beach, Florida, and patched over a gang the local media and police called The Iron Cross.

Soon thereafter, the Outlaws adopted the motto “God forgives, Outlaws don't” and members were expected to have the acronym GFOD tattooed somewhere on their bodies.

Unlike the flamboyant Hells Angels on the other side of the country, the Outlaws generally flew under the public's radar. They didn't attract national media attention until December 1967.

There was something suspicious about Christine Deese when she was admitted to St. Mary's Hospital in West Palm Beach after walking into the emergency room. The pretty 18-year-old redhead with freckles had identical puncture marks and exit wounds through both of her palms.

Her story was that she was walking down a country path, had tripped and been impaled by nails that were protruding from a discarded board when she extended her hands to break her fall. Veteran hospital staff didn't believe her story and called police.

Under interrogation, Deese revealed that members of the Outlaws nailed her to a tree because she had violated a club rule. She had withheld $10 from her boyfriend, 25-year-old Norman “Spider” Risinger of Tampa, and Outlaw club rules, she said, commanded that a member's “old lady” was required to surrender all of her money to her man. Since she had hidden the $10 from Risinger, the club decided to crucify her.

News of her torture ignited tempers in South Florida. Risinger and another Outlaw who took part in the incident, Frank “Fat Frank” Link, were quickly arrested. Governor Claude Kirk — an old-school law-and-order Republican — assembled a group of state police to track down and arrest the other perpetrators no matter how far they had fled.

Then he personally led a group of Florida Hotel and Restaurant Commission inspectors to the Outlaws' West Palm Beach hangout — Kitty's Saloon. They shut it down for being unclean, and Kirk's men arrested the owner, 39-year-old Kitty Randall, for maintaining a brothel. She denied the charges, but admitted that the Outlaws frequented her bar and that some of them lived in the spartan cottages behind Kitty's Place that she also owned. As far as prostitution was concerned, she allowed that it may have happened, but that she wasn't involved. “I introduced some of the girls to some of the guys,” she said. “But what they did after that, I don't know.”

Under questioning, she told police everything she knew about the crucifixion. She wasn't there, she said, but the Outlaws involved told her all about it at the bar afterward. They told her that Risinger and the others drove Deese to a wooded area near Juno Beach, about 10 miles away from Kitty's Saloon. They then forced her to stand on tiptoes in front of a large melaleuca tree and spread her arms wide. When her hands were in place, the Outlaws drove four-inch nails into each of them, fastening her to the tree and forcing her to hang from them when she could not maintain the tiptoe pose. They sat around her in a semicircle, forbidding her to scream, for about 15 minutes before prying the nails loose and driving her back to Kitty's Saloon.

When asked if this kind of behavior was usual for the Outlaws, Randall said it was and that she was aware that they had beaten Deese on many occasions. But, she asserted, the blows were “never on the face, always on the body.”

Soon after, Kirk's posse, having searched Chicago and the surrounding area, found the remaining fugitive Outlaws holed up in the clubhouse of an allied Detroit gang called the Renegades. Sheriff William Heidtman, leader of the detachment, called it “the filthiest place you ever saw.”

When Heidtman brought Donald “Mangy” Graves Jr., Joe “Super Squirrel” Sorsby Jr. and John “Crazy John” Wables back to Florida, Kirk met them at the airport. Just before they were led into waiting police cars, Sorsby and Wables began to kiss each other in a way contemporary media called “passionate.”

And the Outlaws made enemies well beyond the governor of Florida and his police force.

In the '60s, there was no gang tougher than the Aliens. None.

Based in Manhattan's then notorious East Village, the Aliens were well known to be violent and to have close ties to the Mafia. In the summer of 1969, a former member of the Aliens is said to have raped the wife of another member. Although women are not generally held in any sort of high regard by many bikers, they are considered property and the insult was too much for the club to bear. Fearing for his life, the alleged rapist got out of New York and settled in the Midwest. Before long, he joined the Outlaws.

That following December, after some tense negotiations on both sides, the Aliens became the Hells Angels New York City. It did nothing to quell their violent tendencies. It may actually have intensified them.

In the spring of 1974, two members of Satan's Soldiers (a Bronx-based club friendly with Hells Angels) spotted the alleged rapist in Outlaws colors riding his way into New York City. They told the Hells Angels, who sent mammoth sergeant-at-arms Vincent “Big Vinny” Girolamo out to get him. It didn't take long. Girolamo — whose famous quote “When in doubt, knock 'em out” still hangs above the entrance to the East 3
^rd
Street clubhouse — apprehended the man at a friend's house and forced him back to the clubhouse. When the insulted husband showed up, he took the Outlaw outside and beat him until he was sure he was dead.

He wasn't. He recovered and eventually made his way back to Chicago. Enraged, the Outlaws swore revenge.

In April 1974, James Nolan — president of the Outlaws' reinforced South Florida Chapter, which had relocated to Fort Lauderdale — heard from an informant that a pair of Hells Angels from Lowell, Massachusetts, had ridden into their territory. Nolan and four other full-patch members met them at a bar.

The Hells Angels — Edward “Riverboat” Riley and George “Whiskey George” Hartman — told Nolan and his men that they were only passing through their territory to find Albert “Oskie” Simmons, a former Lowell full-patch who had stolen from the club and fled to the area. They didn't want any trouble.

Nolan told them he understood, that he had been in the same situation, and invited them to come back to the clubhouse for some drinks. At first, Riley and Hartman were reluctant, but Nolan told him that he and his club could one day find themselves in similar circumstances and that he would personally guarantee no harm would come to them.

As soon as they arrived at the clubhouse, Riley and Hartman were bound with a pink clothesline and gagged. They were held there until the Outlaws tracked down Simmons and dragged him to the clubhouse. Under Nolan's orders, four Outlaws drove them to a flooded quarry in the countryside. Each had a cinderblock tied to his feet, then was shot in the back of the head by a shotgun at close range. Their bodies were then dumped into the water. Three days later, the bodies floated to the surface.