Sonny Barger – founder and leader of the Hells Angels motorcycle club

Sonny Barger in a Hells Angels vest, profile view

On June 29, 2022, not only the Hells Angels motorcycle community, but the entire biker movement as a whole suffered a heavy loss. 83-year-old Hells Angels leader Sonny Barger has died of terminal liver cancer. Until the very end, he remained committed to the main ideas of the biker community. Even Barger’s posthumous Facebook address, which is essentially his moral testament, calls on all bikers to remain true to themselves and the spirit of freedom, never betray freedom or become discouraged by the vicissitudes of the biker’s path.

Sonny was the visible embodiment of the principles he mentioned in his will. People who knew him well claimed that he inspired the Hells Angels with surprising ease to fight and overcome the blows of fate that fell on them at regular intervals. The bikers who were part of the Hells Angels respected Barger for his equanimity, inner strength and composure in any situation, for his fanatical devotion to the biker movement to the last drop of blood.

At the same time, the problems that Sonny had to deal with when he was little formed serious contradictions in his character. He strove for a despotic, rigid order, which he learned about in military service, on the one hand, and, at the same time, he could not restrain his violent destructive temper, constantly getting into various criminal situations, and even spent a couple of times in prison .

Barger before biker

The life of little Sonny was not sweet, he acutely felt abandoned and betrayed by his family. By the way, the need to find another family, when biological relatives did not give a damn about him, became the root cause of Barger’s intention to open his own bike club. To make it clearer to you what was the disregard for relatives, you need to mention:

  1. A mother who refused to raise and see Sonny from the age of 4 months.

  2. A grandmother who was not interested in worldly affairs and, moreover, in her grandson, because in the first place she had religious affairs in the church.

  3. A father who drank black and went to day work in Barger’s hometown of Oakland, California, just to earn another bottle of alcohol.

Most in such conditions would simply give up, give up on everything and would have remained at the bottom at best. At worst, as Sonny remarked as an adult, he would have been hanging around like the vast majority of his Oakland classmates and acquaintances.

However, how our hero differed from the people around him was the rejection of his place in life, the desire to escape from the social bottom and the tough upholding of his convictions. Barger was not even stopped by the fear of a school teacher, inherent in many children. He just beat him because the teacher dared to tell him what to do. Of course, after this, he was not left at school.

Not knowing exactly what to do, Barger decided to join the army. Since he was too young to be accepted into the army, he credited himself with a few more years on his fake birth certificate.

The American army sunk into Sonny’s soul so much that he later:

  • He built the Hells Angels according to military patterns with strict subordination and discipline.

  • He wrote a letter to American President Johnson, in which he asked him to send with the “Hell’s Angels” to defend the country in Vietnam. However, due to Barger’s specific reputation, President Johnson did not even bother to answer him.

Of course, a false certificate was discovered, however, this happened only after 14 months. Sonny was not punished, but simply returned to Oakland, to his hated relatives.

That period was especially difficult for him. Barger supported himself by odd jobs, like his father, and lived with relatives. A spark of genuine interest in him was ignited by the cult film of the 50s – “The Savage”. Sonny had a burning desire to join the biker movement, found an old motorcycle and joined the Oakland Panthers in 1956.

Better to be a king in hell than a servant in heaven

Apparently, the future Hells Angels motto Barger sometimes thought about when he watched the Oakland Panthers for a year, the members of the club gathering on the weekends and their subsequent return to normal life. And Sonny couldn’t normally, he just couldn’t be an office clerk, a sales agent or a big businessman. He needed a “second family” and bike fanatics like him.

Therefore, he took the news of the dissolution of the Auckland Panthers in early 1957 without much regret in order to organize his own Hells Angels motorcycle club on April 1, 1957.

Sonny Barger posing in front of the Hells Angels logo

Sonny Barger posing in front of the Hells Angels logo

But even his own little bike club in Oakland was not enough for Sonny. After all, he wanted to be king in hell. So he found out that there were other motorcycle communities in California using the Hells Angels in their name, and agreed with them to merge.

Having gained numerous supporters at his disposal and soldered them with army discipline, Barger realized that he was able to challenge other “one percent” biker clubs. His calculation turned out to be correct, since the biker wars, which lasted several decades, ended by the beginning of the 21st century with a convincing victory for the Hells Angels and the organizational genius of Barger. Now no one was able to challenge the right of the Hells Angels to be called the number 1 biker club in the world.

Barger’s other activities besides leading the Hells Angels

Sonny fought not only with the Bandidos and Outlaws clubs . He became famous for his uncompromising struggle with motorcycle factories that churned out bikes with absolutely no concern for the safety of motorcyclists, and achieved impressive success. In Let ‘s Ride : Sonny Barger ‘s Guide to Motorcycling , Bargertalks about his perspective on motorcycle safety .

In addition, Sonny is known as a media personality. He did not refuse to shoot in films about bikers. The most famous film works with his participation include the film “Hell’s Angels 69” and the series “Sons of Anarchy”, where you can see him in the final episodes of seasons 4 and 5.

Source: cryptomoto.org

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