Hell's Angels 4, Breed 1

There's truthfulness in our life. We're all tied by a bond of friendship. A friend is the most important thing in life. We're wealthy and we don't have a dime. Just friendship.

THAT Salvation Army-style sentiment is the unlikely canon of a muscular, bearded band of "hog" riders known as Hell's Angels. A hog, of course, is a motorcycle, and the Angels have long been first among riders of the open road. Born in California in the late 1940s, the black-clad, swastikaed Angels and their roaring bikes became the terrors of Highway 101. Guzzling beer and shaking the countryside with obscene laughter, they broke up legitimate motorcycle rallies and often sacked small coastal towns. Perversely, pop music (Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots) and film (The Wild One) romanticized such outlaw riders as tragic, misunderstood loners, giving the Angels a place that they scarcely deserve in American folklore.

As the bike culture burgeoned, the Angels' legend became as grimy as their beards, Levi's and leather vests. In 1965 they tore up an Oakland peace rally. Four years later came Altamont. Commissioned to protect Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones at a rock concert held at the California speedway, the Angels waded into the crowd with pool cues, leaving an 18-year-old black, Meredith Hunter, dead in their wake. (The Angel who killed him was acquitted on the ground of self-defense.) It all bolstered the legend that the Angels were the toughest, meanest cyclists around.

Last week an upstart band of East Coast rivals called the Breed decided to challenge the Angels' preeminence. The arena they chose was a Cleveland motorcycle show. The results, after only 60 sanguinary seconds: four members of the Breed either stabbed to death or dying, including one of two Breed castrated; one Angel, Jeffrey Coffey, 22, of Hartford, Conn., dead. A total of 21 others from both gangs were injured, and 57 were charged with first-degree murder. It was the deadliest rumble in the history of maverick motorcycle gangs.

Charity Event. The fight had been brewing for months. The Breed are a band of newcomers, created about two years ago and concentrated mainly along the Eastern Seaboard. They grew quickly by the simple expedient of accepting virtually anyone who wanted to ride with them. They are generally younger than the Angels (many of whom claim to be Viet Nam veterans) and are eager to make names for themselves. Recently they began bragging that they were tougher than the Angels. According to one biker, a local Breed member entered a sleazy Cleveland bar three months ago with a spray can and wrote: BREED--H. A. STOMPERS in 2-ft.-high letters behind the bar. At Christmas in the Golden Nugget, another Cleveland hangout, a dozen Breed members took on--and whipped--an equal number of local Angels in a fistfight. The Breed were ready for a full-scale rumble.

They selected as their battleground the Fourth Annual Motorcycle Custom and Trade Show sponsored by the Cleveland Competition Club, an organization that unlike Hell's Angels, the Breed and sundry other outfits, is chartered by the American Motorcycle Association. Staged in a three-story brick hall in the heart of Cleveland's predominantly Polish Southeast side, the annual show is designed to brighten motorcycling's image, and has never witnessed as much trouble as a fistfight. The proceeds were to go to a crippled children's fund.

No Old Ladies. On the afternoon of the battle some 150 Breed members assembled at a ramshackle barn they had rented as a "repair shop for cycles" in Brunswick, a farming community about 15 miles south of Cleveland. Next door the Rev. Robert C. Hilkert watched with understandable alarm as male members of the gang piled into their jalopies, pickup trucks and a gray hearse. He asked two of the Breed's "old ladies" why they were not going to the show. "Father," one replied, "we don't ask our men questions." Explained a local gang leader: "When you go to a hassle, you don't take your old ladies with you."

Within an hour, the Breed battalion trundled into a parking lot near the building, quietly paid their entrance fees, and checked their walking sticks and canes (no check was made for concealed weapons). Marching two by two, military fashion, they surrounded the 60-by-90-ft. walled auditorium. Among those within their ring were about a dozen Angels watching over the gaudy bikes they had brought to display. As hints of a hassle spread, the floor began to clear. Soon another dozen or so Angels barged into the auditorium. As the band played Knock on Wood, a member of the Competition Club heard someone cry: "It's on!"

It was--with dreadful swiftness. Most spectators hardly knew what had happened until they saw blood spilling across the hall floor. One eyewitness, Leslie Morgan, thinks he saw the spark that touched off the battle. "I saw two Hell's Angels come up to a Breed and try to take his colors [jacket and club emblem] off. The Breed started yelling for help. They got his jacket down to his elbows; then one of the Angels pulled a knife from his belt and stabbed the Breed two or three times in the stomach. He fell screaming to the floor."

Dave Corwin, head of the three-man private guard force, later admitted: "We expected trouble, but nothing like that." As soon as he heard the scuffling, Corwin dashed into the auditorium. "The only knife I saw was the one coming at me," he recalled. "I nailed the guy with my nightstick and that was the last I saw of him. Anyone who put up a fight, we'd knock against the wall, throw down the stairs and out the door. That would take the fight out of them." Added off-duty Patrolman Thomas Burton: "I tried to break it up, but I was knocked down once and once I slipped on the blood. It was all over the place."

Most witnesses felt that the Angels had drawn first blood; the tortured ethic of the hassle dictates that the man who goes for his hardware last loses face. Most present also believed that the Angels were not expecting a ruckus, or they would not have been outnumbered 6 to 1. If that is true, the Angels showed much better reactions than the cops, who had been forewarned by a federal narcotics agent. When the Breed rolled up to the hall, an off-duty patrolman immediately notified police headquarters, and two dozen wagons and cars full of police were dispatched. But the police lieutenant in charge was told inside the hall that there was no trouble, so he dispersed his men outside. When the brawl broke out, only five policemen and three private guards were inside the auditorium.

Like Elephants. With ten of their band held in Cleveland without bail on charges of first-degree murder and another lying in state (in full Angel regalia with his cycle by the coffin) in a Lower East Side Manhattan funeral parlor, the Angels might have been expected to lie low for a while. Yet even as dozens of the clan gathered to pay tribute to "Groover" Coffey, some 15 to 30 Angels pushed their way into a nearby leather goods shop and began to rough up the owner. When his 17-year-old girl friend appeared, one Angel reportedly said: "We're here for a funeral, but this looks like a party." Then eight of the group allegedly dragged the girl to a loft above the shop and tortured and raped her repeatedly for six hysterical hours. The Angels were arrested and booked on charges of rape, sodomy, assault, criminal trespass and unlawful imprisonment.

There is likely to be more purposeful violence between the Breed and the Angels. Said one biker: "Angels are like elephants--they never forget." Does the prospect of another round of bloodletting worry the Angels? No, says New York Angel President Sandy Alexander: "Who has fear in the fraternity of the doomed?"

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