Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs and The Private Library

California, Labor Day weekend ... early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Frisco, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur ... The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches ... like Ghengis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and none given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know....

Hunter S. Thompson, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967)

Anyone who collects books about true crime and/or crime fiction must eventually encounter in their peregrinations a number of tomes devoted to the subject of outlaw motorcycle gangs (OMGs):

      

As defined by the U. S. Department of Justice, these are

organizations whose members use their motorcycle clubs as conduits for criminal enterprises. OMGs are highly structured criminal organizations whose members engage in criminal activities such as violent crime, weapons trafficking, and drug trafficking. There are more than 300 active OMGs within the United States, ranging in size from single chapters with five or six members to hundreds of chapters with thousands of members worldwide. The Hells Angels, Mongols, Bandidos, Outlaws, and Sons of Silence pose a serious national domestic threat and conduct the majority of criminal activity linked to OMGs, especially activity relating to drug-trafficking and, more specifically, to cross-border drug smuggling. Because of their transnational scope, these OMGs are able to coordinate drug smuggling operations in partnership with major international drug-trafficking organizations ....

     

These are the so-called 1%ers, that tiny minority of motorcyclists who reject mainstream norms and live outside of the law:

     

OMGs have a schizophrenic relationship with writers and other artists.  Many romanticize OMG members as misunderstood outsiders (think The Shangri-Las 1964 hit Leader of the Pack).  Others go overboard in the opposite direction, especially when it comes to movies:

  

The truth, as always, probably lies somewhere in between, as folks who have escaped from OMG culture sometimes suggest....