Original subtitles

Gangs rule their territories through ruthless enterprises, fear, and a strict code.

Deviate from this code, or challenge their power, and retribution soon follows.

Especially in the most dangerous biker gang in America, the Hells Angels.

Ruled by a ruthless president,

Sonny Barger's Hells Angels creates the bloodstained

blueprint for all outlaw biker clubs that follow.

Here are three stories that cement the criminal legacy of this vicious gang.

First, one member pays the ultimate price for stealing from his chapter president.

I can't even begin to imagine what he's feeling.

Abject terror, abject fear.

Next, the Hell's Angels kill a man in front of thousands at a rock concert.

The Angel stabs him three times in the neck and takes him down to the ground.

And finally, the feds attempt to take down the Oakland chapter.

One of the prosecutors says, we want to prove they're the mafia on wheels.

These are the stories from the sunny barger years of the Hell's Angels.

This is Gangland Chronicles. 1957.

Oakland, California.

A new and menacing sight appears on the streets of this hard-working port city.

It's the outlaw motorcycle gang called the Hell's Angels.

A lot of these biker gangs are made up of these

ex-servicemen who've just come back home.

They find that it's difficult to readjust to civilian life.

The Hells Angels founded their first chapter in San Bernardino in 1948.

By 1958, the gang has added chapters in San Francisco and Oakland.

Early Hells Angels members embrace a freewheeling

lifestyle of partying and violence.

But they lack organization.

That would change when a new leader would emerge in Oakland, California.

His name is Sonny Barger.

When he assumes control of the Oakland Hells Angels,

he sees an opportunity to bring order and strength to the club.

He created a structure within this organization,

so he borrowed the rank-and-file structure from the military.

Sonny Barger had genuine leadership capabilities.

He was also probably the toughest son of a bitch in the bunch, too.

Under Sonny's leadership,

the Oakland Hells Angels go from organized recreation to organized crime.

They start by building a fearsome reputation through brutal gang violence.

The Hells Angels are fighting with rival gangs.

They have confrontations with police.

They openly declare themselves as outlaws.

In the 1960s, Barger and his lieutenants turned

the gang's muscle into serious money,

seizing control of the area's booming LSD market and crushing any competition.

They were hands-on involved in a massive organized drug trade.

The vice president of the chapter alone is making

as much as $200,000 a year dealing drugs. $1.8 million today.

They're not just poor ragtag bikers.

There's a lot of money involved,

which will lead to territorial turf wars and a lot of murder.

The Oakland chapter's rise from rags to riches

inspires a fanatical loyalty to Sonny Barger.

They'll make anyone who crosses him pay the ultimate price,

even if the culprit is one of their own.

Like 21-year-old Oakland member Paul Ingalls.

Oakland, California.

A group of Hells Angels interrogates Ingalls for allegedly

breaking a cardinal rule of the gang's code of conduct.

He had been accused of stealing Sonny Barger's rare coin collection.

The Hells Angels demand that Ingalls admit his guilt.

So they start to go to work on him.

And then starting using things like a cattle prod.

And they're using it on things like his groin.

On his face.

The amount of pain that Ingalls is in.

Not only pain, but I'm sure shock and terror and just abject fear for his life.

Time is rapidly running out for Paul Ingalls.

February 1st, 1968.

The Oakland Hells Angels are trying to beat a confession out of Paul Ingalls,

a young member they think stole from club president Sonny Barger.

Ingalls insists he's innocent.

But the bikers don't believe him.

And they take the torture to the next level.

At one point, one of the angels goes, hang on, boys, don't mark him up.

Can't make this look like a murder, can we? No, we gotta keep things above board.

So they decide to take another route.

They opened his mouth, they pried open his mouth, and they shoved a bunch of reds,

which were barbiturates, down his throat, and they tried to make him swallow it.

And it gets to a point that Ingalls has ingested so many

of these pills that eventually his body just gives up,

goes limp, and he falls into a coma.

The Oakland Hells Angels dump Ingles at his house in the middle of the night,

where he's later discovered by his wife and rushed to the ER.

Paul Ingles is pronounced dead on arrival.

Members of the Inner Sanctum were actually killing one of their own,

and they did that to set an example for the other members.

If you mess with Sonny Barger, if you steal

from the president, you will be executed.

No one is ever charged with Ingle's death.

Across Hell's Angels chapters,

the message of intimidation has been received and understood.

But the rest of the world has yet to see the Hell's Angels for who they really are.

And it all comes to a head on one fateful weekend when

the Hell's Angels are caught in the national spotlight.

The Altamont Free Concert.

December 6, 1969.

The Rolling Stones are set to play a free concert at the Altamont Speedway,

about 50 miles east of Oakland.

Rolling Stones was one of them. But they had the Grateful Dead,

they had Jefferson Airplane,

and the manager of the Grateful Dead had this wonderful idea, hey,

let's get the Hells Angels to be our security.

At first, the gang tells organizers they aren't interested.

But the Stones' manager sweetens the deal.

So we're at $500 in beer, the Hells Angels were there.

It's sort of the muscle for the event.

An estimated 300,000 fans descend on Altamont.

They immediately put their bikes parked right along the front of the stage.

It created a natural barrier between the stage and the audience.

Stoned kids squeeze past the bikes and begin climbing up onto the stage,

only to be roughed up and thrown off by the Hell's Angels.

But the crowd, strung out on drugs, just keeps coming.

Hell's Angels in front of the stage came bearing pool cues.

And they beat the hell out of people in the front rows.

As evening falls and the Rolling Stones hit the stage...

Sonny Barger and his Hells Angels are running low on patience.

Somewhere during that time,

a young black guy named Meredith Hunter tries to climb up on the stage,

gets knocked back down by one of the Hells Angels.

In a fit of rage, Meredith Hunter draws a gun from

his jacket and points it towards the stage.

Alan Pissarro sees him pull out a gun, reaches into his ankle where he has a knife,

The Hell's Angels are about to take the violence

at Altamont to a terrifying new level.

December 6th, 1969, Altamont Speedway.

A rock concert headlined by the Rolling Stones has descended into

brutal violence between the audience and the Hells Angels.

Gang member Alan Passaro pulls a knife on 18-year-old Meredith Hunter

after he draws a gun and points it at the stage.

Alan Passaro jumps on Hunter's back, stabs him three times in the neck,

and takes him down to the ground.

Where Hell's Angels swarm over his body, kick him, stand on him,

and Barger's sitting there watching.

Someone in the crowd convinces them to pick up Meredith Hunter's body.

He is taken backstage, where medical staff pronounce him dead.

Alan Passaro is the only member of the Hells Angels

tried for the killing of Meredith Hunter.

But he is found not guilty.

They were able to verify that Meredith Hunter actually did lunge

at the stage and look like he was going to shoot Mick Jagger.

And so the Hells Angel gets off.

From this point on, the Hells Angels are known nationally.

The spotlight doesn't slow down the gang,

but it does get the attention of the feds. 1970s.

The Hells Angels enter into a new criminal era.

Sonny Barger will say, in the 1970s, we were all gangsters.

The group pivots their trafficking operation from

LSD to a highly addictive and lucrative drug, meth.

It was easy to mass produce, manufacture, distribute, sell,

and you could make it domestically.

The Department of Justice estimates that by the late 1970s,

the Oakland meth operation is raking in $160,000 a day in street sales,

$245 million a year today.

And this puts them on the Fed's radar.

So police and law enforcement feel that they have to

go after the Hells Angels in a more systematic way.

And they start cracking down, investigating the meth network.

Local law enforcement pursues the Oakland chapter relentlessly.

The gang hits back at the cops with a new level of violence.

Their first victim, San Jose Police Sergeant John Kroc,

Has recently busted several Oakland Hells Angels on meth trafficking charges.

So the Hells Angels decide that, okay,

these police officers are becoming a bit of a nuisance,

so it's time for us to take care of them by sending them a little bit of a message.

February 19th, 1977.

Sergeant Crocht approaches his car.

He doesn't see what is coming next.

The bomb badly injures Crocht, but he survives.

Their next target is Solano County Detective William Zerbe.

Neither of them will die in these explosions,

but it is these bombings that make it so that the feds

are fed up with this chapter of the Hells Angels.

They said, you know, how are we going to go after them?

So they started to go after them with the RICO Act.

The RICO Act will later bring down New York Italian mafia families.

But its first real test is actually the Hells Angels.

Essentially, the idea was, how can we go after

the head of the snake, which was Sonny Barger?

If we take off the head of the snake,

then we're going to topple the whole organization.

But they are going to need to prove that Sonny Barger is calling

the shots in order to nail him and the Hell's Angels to the wall.

One of the prosecutors says, we want to prove they're the Mafia on wheels.

After a year of interviewing eyewitnesses and reviewing

prior convictions of Oakland chapter members,

the feds believe they have enough evidence to indict

Sonny Barger and his fellow Hells Angels.

Will they bring Barger and his Hells Angels chapter down?

June 13th, 1979.

Oakland, California.

200 agents from the FBI and ATF raid the Hells Angels.

Thirty-two gang members and associates are arrested,

including Sonny Barger and his wife.

The Department of Justice announces a total of 64 indictments connected

to the Oakland Chapter's meth operation under the 1970 RICO Act.

They go after them for drug trafficking, arms smuggling, attempted murder,

conspiracy to commit murder.

One of the things that Sonny Barger is worried about early on

during this RICO trial is that there's a lot of members here,

and that they'll start flipping on each other.

Barger knows that if the prosecution can convince just

one defendant to flip and testify against the gang,

it could mean the end of the Oakland Hells Angels

and a 20-year stint in prison for him.

But Barger has a plan.

He says, nobody's taking a deal, nobody's cooperating.

We're going to be a united force, and this is how we're going to win this.

The RICO case against the Oakland Hells Angels goes

to trial in San Francisco's federal building.

And the feds try to make their case.

And they have a lot of convincing, powerful evidence.

They'll reveal the weapons that have been found in Hells Angels hangouts.

They'll allege that Sonny Barger has boasted

that he has committed eight to ten murders.

On the stand, Barger's testimony is convincing,

poking significant holes in the prosecution's racketeering case.

Sonny's defense?

Yes, he's the figurehead.

But technically, legally, by Hells Angels rules,

he really couldn't command his fellow members and what they could do.

Any criminal activity a member does, does as an individual,

not as part of the Hells Angels.

Things go from bad to worse for the feds when they fail to convince

a single defendant to rat on the Oakland Hells Angels.

As a Hells Angel, you do not snitch on your own, especially, you know,

Sonny Barger's chapter, you don't do it.

As the trial goes on, the defense gains the upper hand.

And that was really due in large part to the brilliance of Sonny Barger.

They were not a criminal organization.

They were an organization that had some criminals in it.

On July 2nd, 1980, the conspiracy and racketeering charges against

Sonny Barger and most of his Oakland brothers are dropped.

It's a huge victory for the Oakland Hells Angels.

And they waste no time getting back to business

and expanding the gang's criminal reach.

There's like 23 new chapters by the end of the 70s,

33 new chapters in the States by the end of the 1980s,

and a huge expansion globally.

This is a massive criminal enterprise known for their brutality,

and so they continue to be and pose a threat.

Sonny Barger didn't found the Hells Angels, but he constructed the myth.

And I think the Hells Angels are here to stay for a long, long time.