Then came the shocker: “Brazenly the four announced they had come to town to ‘shake up New York,’ and that 15 to 24 other Angels were also roaming around the city.”
No doubt the others went underground, for they were never mentioned again in the “Terror on Wheels” story or anywhere else. After placing The Terror in Manhattan, the News gave a dull summation of Time and Newsweek rumors, selections from the Lynch report and old newspaper clippings. The article made it clear, however, that fifteen to twenty-four Hell’s Angels were loose somewhere in Manhattan. And maybe they were. With a little luck they might have located one of the half dozen opium dens that specialize in cyst reduction. If the News had put two and two together they would have known who caused the great power blackout that autumn. It was a Hell’s Angels plot to take over the subway system and triple the fares. After weeks of intricate sabotage and recircuiting the power rails, the outlaws were attempting a final tie-off under the Yale Club when one of their number, afflicted with bad hives, was overcome by abulia and wired the main subway voltage to the root of the Empire State Building’s lightning rod. The resulting explosion killed them all, but their bones were carried off by water rats and there was no other evidence. As usual, the Angels beat the rap. And the News missed a hell of a story.
HELL’S ANGELS FACE PRISON FOR N. H. CYCLE RAMPAGE
—New York Post (June 1965)
The New York power failure was not the first time the Hell’s Angels have confounded the forces of decency and got off scot-free. They are incredibly devious. Law enforcement officers have compared their guile to that of the snipe, a wily beast that many have seen but few have ever trapped. This is because the snipe has the ability to transform himself, when facing capture, into something entirely different. The only other animals capable of this are the werewolf and the Hell’s Angel, which have many traits in common. The physical resemblance is obvious, but far more important is the transmogrification factor, the strange ability to alter their own physical structure, and hence “disappear.” The Hell’s Angels are very close-mouthed about this, but it is a well-known fact among public officials.
One of the best examples of how it can work showed up in the Laconia, New Hampshire, “motorcycle riot” in June of 1965, which got more publicity than any other single event in the history of motorcycling. It was front page from coast to coast. The New York Times headline said: CYCLISTS’ RIOT QUELLED, NEW HAMPSHIRE TOWN CLEANS UP. In San Francisco the Examiner put a little more zip to it: HELL’S ANGELS TERROR AT N. H. CYCLE RACES—COPS, GUARD SLUG RIOTERS. The number of terrorists ranged from five thousand in the New York Post to twenty-five thousand in the National Observer, but twenty thousand more or less didn’t seem to make much difference. Everybody agreed it was a wild and woolly bash. The mayor of the stricken hamlet, a thirty-five-year-old patriot named Peter Lessard, blamed the whole thing on the Hell’s Angels. He said they had “planned it in advance” and “trained in Mexico for the riot.” On Monday, two days after the melee, Laconia’s leading citizens gathered in the Tavern Hotel to hear their mayor explain what had happened. According to Lessard and Safety Commissioner Robert Rhodes, the Hell’s Angels threw a ring around the whole area. “They wouldn’t let anybody get away. The thing blew up in our faces in minutes. There was some marijuana around too. Are the Communists behind it?”
Reporters picked up the quote with thinly veiled amusement, but it was at least a month before the initial, wild-eyed accounts of the Laconia riot were deflated by first-hand testimony from those without instant access to print. Even the Life article, on careful reading, indicated that many of the “rioters” acted in self-defense when police and National Guardsmen launched an all-out, indiscriminate attack with tear gas, bayonets, nightsticks, and shotguns firing rock salt and Number 6 birdshot. Many of those arrested in the mop-up didn’t own or ride motorcycles, and a fellow named Samuel Sadowski was sentenced to a year in jail after being arrested in a parking lot where there was no sign of rioting. According to an eyewitness, Sadowski’s only offense was a hasty retreat from the line of fire.‡ The police used full-bore riot tactics, which they’d been practicing for more than two months. The local police chief, Harold Knowlton, had called up two hundred National Guardsmen, sixty State Troopers and ten Civil Defense volunteers, in addition to his own force of twenty-eight regulars. “We practiced for ten weeks in crowd control and riot tactics,” said the chief. “But we did it undercover. We didn’t want to challenge them.”
Shore nuff he didn’t. The small army he trained was only for symbolic purposes. Just like the Hell’s Angels—they don’t want to challenge people either, but they manage to get provoked pretty often. One report of the riot quoted a local as saying, “Luckily, there happened to be some National Guardsmen training nearby. If it hadn’t been for them, this town would have been a gutted ruin—and there’s no way of telling how many of our women would have been gang-raped, how many of our citizens might have been killed by those rotten bums on motorcycles. Thank God for the troops!”
The Lord was taking good care of Laconia that night; his troops came in and shot hell out of the place. One of the most critically injured was a photographer named Robert St. Louis, who was shot in the face while trying to take pictures. Of the seventy reported injuries, sixty-nine were on the “enemy” side.‡ Life quoted a seventeen-year-old boy as saying: “They yanked me out of a car and knocked me bow-legged … then one cop stood on my head while another put handcuffs on.” Even the featured victim of the riot, a barber named Armand Baron, whose car was burned by rioters, attributed his injuries to the forces of the Almighty. While trying to flee he was hit in the mouth by a police billy and slammed on the hip by a Guardsman’s rifle butt.
The Laconia riot was one of the most predictable outbursts in the history of civil chaos. The main event of that weekend was either the forty-fourth Annual New England Tour and Rally (as reported in Life) or the twenty-sixth running of the New England Motorcycle Races (according to the National Observer). Other promoters had different names for it: The AMA called it a “100-Mile National Championship Road Race.” But by any name it was a huge, traditional motorcycle gathering. Nonracing cyclists know it as the New England “Gypsy Tour,” and it is one of those scenes they all like to make. The idea is about the same as any Hell’s Angels run, but on a much bigger scale. Laconia, with a population of fifteen thousand in the winter and forty-five thousand in the summer, attracts anywhere from fifteen to thirty thousand motorcyclists for the race weekend.
They have been an annual event since 1939, a year after the Belknap Gunstock Recreation Area was built outside Laconia as a winter ski run and summer campground. William Sheitinger, from nearby Concord, is a founder of both the American Motorcycle Association and the Laconia races. The races were not held in 1964, because of a riot the previous year.
“Anybody who knew anything about the event could predict to the hour that a riot would take place [again],” said Warren Warner, manager of the county-owned Belknap area. “They rioted here before, but nobody saw it because it was away from town. We had seventy local and state police here, but they took a look at the mob and decided not to do anything at all. The cyclists threw cherry bombs, swung knives and chains, and threw beer cans at the police. We had fires started, buildings burned, the chair lift started in the middle of the night and wrecked, and picnic tables chopped up for kindling. The people in town who wanted those races weren’t around and didn’t want to be around. I tried to discuss the riots with them, but there was always the rebuttal that ‘nobody saw em, so what’s the difference …’ ”
In 1964 a new race track was built outside Laconia’s jurisdiction, and the event was on again for 1965. The Laconia Chamber of Commerce was enthusiastic enough to contribute $5,000 to the promotional fund … which was, after all, a pretty good investment, since the Chamber of Commerce estimates that motorcyclists spend between $250,000 and $500,000 in the area during the weekend of the races. This sounds like a lot, but considering
the number of cyclists, it is only $25 to $50 each—most of which goes to motels, souvenir shops, beer joints and hamburger stands.
Mayor Lessard says the event “has always been a good start to the tourist season,” and that the economy “suffered” in 1964, when the races were suspended. Former Mayor Gerald Morin, a beer distributor in Laconia, estimates that some fifteen thousand cases of beer were sold to cyclists during the 1965 weekend. “Obviously, the races are good for our economy,” he said in the wake of the riot. “We shouldn’t be making any decisions now that emotions are high. We should wait until they cool down.” At the same time, Mayor Lessard put it more bluntly: “Even the people who want [the races] may have had some doubts until they deposited their cash in the banks.”
Fritzi Baer, a publicist for the New England Motorcycle Dealers Association—which sponsors the races—threw the weight of his prestige on the side of the mayor and the beer distributor: “I believe when we get through this year the bad element won’t come back. I know in my heart the bad element won’t come back to the state of New Hampshire after they’ve seen how we deal with them.”
Mr. Baer did not define the “bad element,” but presumably it did not include anyone likely to purchase motorcycles in New England. In any case, some of them were dealt with rather harshly, under the provisions of a new riot law that United Press International reported was “rushed through the state legislator” only a week before the Laconia races. It provides for fines up to $1,000 and imprisonment up to three years for persons who lead a disturbance or cause personal property damage during a riot. Under the old law, the maximum fine was $25. Contrary to rumors at the time of its enactment, the new law contained no provisions for punishment by dunking stool.
Even as the law was being passed, telephone poles on highways near Laconia were festooned with signs saying: COME TO THE RIOT—SEE WEIRS BEACH BURN SATURDAY NIGHT. Weirs Beach is a lakeside strip outside the town, with water on one side, and taverns, penny arcades and bowling alleys on the other. By nine o’clock Saturday night Lakeside Avenue, the main street, was thronged with some four thousand beer-drinking tourists, about half riding motorcycles. Crowds began appearing on rooftops above the arcade area, and police heard the shout go up: “Let’s have a riot!”
It was about this time that Mr. Baron drove his car—for some excellent reason, no doubt—right down Lakeside and into the middle of the mob. He’d gone “out for a ride,” he explained later, taking his wife, his son, his son’s wife and the two grandchildren: Duane, two, and Brenda, eight months old. By the time Mr. Baron began creeping down the crowded street, the action was getting out of hand. People were throwing beer cans down from the rooftops. Police claimed somebody had chained the fire-call boxes and cut the phone lines to police headquarters, although this would hardly have seemed necessary. The police did not need telephones to hear five thousand people chanting, “Sieg Heil!” while somebody climbed up to hang a swastika on a beachfront flagpole. Then the mob began rocking cars back and forth—including Mr. Baron’s car, which was right in their midst. Baron got his family out, none of them injured, and watched his car roll over and begin burning when one of the rioters threw a match in the spilled gasoline.
The flames lit up the street just about the time the National Guard arrived on the scene with fixed bayonets and rifle butts swinging. With them came local gendarmes, firing shotguns. The mob scattered, many of them blinded by tear-gas bombs. The police were pelted with firecrackers, rocks and beer cans, but they were wearing helmets and their ten weeks of training served them well. According to Chief Knowlton, the riot area was cleared in fifteen minutes, “but it took another hour to get the sidestreets cleared out.” This secondary action involved the rounding up of suspects. There are photos of people being clubbed off motorcycles, prodded out of sleeping bags with bayonets, and according to the Associated Press, “police even rousted people registered in hotels …”
Anyone reading the next day’s headlines would have thought the whole Laconia area was an ash pile, with ragged survivors shooting at each other from behind the charred remains of automobiles. But this was not exactly the case. The state of martial law that had been declared on Saturday night was ended in time by Sunday’s final racing events, which proceeded without incident. Liquor and beer sales, which had been halted during the riot, were also renewed. On Sunday morning there were reports of a naked man picketing on Lakeside Avenue with a large sign saying: HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE.
Mayor Lessard spent most of Sunday investigating the riot, and by Monday he was able to report it had been Communist-inspired and of Mexican origin, with the Hell’s Angels doing the legwork. The mayor, the police chief and the local safety commissioner agreed that the Hell’s Angels had “caused all the trouble.” They had been plotting it for months.
“But they won’t come back,” vowed the safety commissioner. “And if they do, we’ll just have to be ready for them like we were this time.” After all, nobody was killed or maimed, and property damage amounted to only a few thousand dollars at most.
Other merchants agreed. “I think [the cyclist] will be invited back,” said the owner of the Winnepesaukee Gardens dance hall at Weirs Beach. The president of the Laconia National Bank said the riot had been caused by a “small minority” that had been taught a good lesson and wouldn’t try it again. One of the few dissenting voices in town was that of Warren Warner, who supervised the races for more than fifteen years, when they were at the old track in Belknap. “The apologists will wait about six months or so,” he predicted. “Then they’ll start planting the idea that the riots were caused by police brutality or the Hell’s Angels gang from California and that they can be controlled. But listen, in that crowd of twenty thousand cyclists there are two thousand who are no better than animals. There would have been a riot whether or not any one club decided to come or not.”
A local journalist not allied with the beer and hamburger industries put it more dramatically: “The cyclists could have burned down the Weirs if they’d really wanted to. Maybe next time they will. Laconia is like a town playing Russian roulette. Five times out of six it pulls the trigger and nothing much happens. The sixth time it blows its brains out.”‡
This did not jibe with the mayor’s theory of foul winds from faraway places. Everyone seemed to agree that something Russian had been in the air that night, but I was curious about the Mexican influence and the role of the Hell’s Angels. Actually, I couldn’t believe the mayor had said the things he was quoted as saying when he analyzed the riot. They were too absurd. So I decided to call him and check—not only his words, but random facts such as the number of arrests. For some reason it was impossible for the press to divine how many alleged rioters had been arrested. This is usually a factor in crime stories, and in most cases it is an easy thing to find out. There is nothing interpretive about it, no hues or shadings. It is simply a number that anybody can get from the desk sergeant—if not immediately, than at least within twenty-four hours after the action. Most reporters assume the desk sergeant’s figures are accurate, for he is the man who makes the entries in the big ledger.
Yet eight different articles on Laconia carried seven different versions of the arrest total. Here is a list I made a week after the riot:
The New York Times … “about 50”
Associated Press … “at least 75”
San Francisco Examiner (via UPI) … “at least 100, including five Hell’s Angels”
New York Herald Tribune … 29
Life … 34
National Observer … 34
New York Daily News … “more than 100”
New York Post … “at least 40”
No doubt there is an explanation for this disparity, but since it never emerged, it was not much consolation to anyone who had to make do with the public prints. I was not surprised that the eight articles gave eight different viewpoints on the riot, because no reporter can be on every scene and they get their information from different peo
ple. But it would have been reassuring to find a majority agreement on something as basic as the number of arrests; it would have made the rest of the information easier to live with.
Seven weeks after the riot, on August 11, the Associated Press finally put the correct figure on its wire, but by that time nobody gave a damn, and as far as I know it was never printed. Laconia District Court records show thirty-two arrests. There were no Hell’s Angels, no Californians and no person from west of the Adirondacks. The clerk of the court listed: “Eleven respondents from Massachusetts, ten from Connecticut, four from New York, three from Canada, three from New Jersey and one from New Hampshire.”
Of these, seven drew one-year sentences in the state House of Correction and one got six months. There were ten fines, ranging from $25 to $500. Charges against twelve of the accused were dropped, one was found innocent, and eleven of those found guilty made appeals.
Mayor Lessard was kind enough to have the court send me these figures. They came as a mild surprise, because during our telephone chat the mayor had said that “thirty-three rioters had been fined and sentenced” and that “the bad ones with previous records got thousand-dollar fines and a year in jail.”
He also sent me a packet of photographs taken during the riot, but none showed any sign of the Hell’s Angels. Most pictured teen-age boys wearing bright sweaters, chinos and loafers. They were faring badly at the hands of riot troopers. The mayor also included photos of himself and the police chief, taken with a Polaroid camera, but they quickly turned yellow and faded away.
We talked on the phone for about an hour one Thursday morning. I was so fascinated that I couldn’t hang up. The mayor spoke in a very exotic way. It was obvious that he was a man who marched through life to the rhythms of some drum I would never hear.