Ralph “Sonny” Barger, best known as a founding member and longtime leader of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, died last week at 83 of cancer. The club’s organized crime wasn’t particularly organized until Barger took the helm.
Barger, who founded the club’s Oakland, California, chapter, took over as the head of Hells Angels after a territorial dispute and made it, arguably, one of the most successful outlaw motorcycle gangs in the country. He presided over not just the gang itself but its foray into legitimate moneymaking industries — and deserves the lion’s share of credit for the club’s enduring cultural status.
“If you are reading this message, you’ll know that I’m gone. I’ve asked that this note be posted immediately after my passing. I’ve lived a long and good life filled with adventure,” read a message posted to Barger’s social media profiles. “And I’ve had the privilege to be part of an amazing club. Although I’ve had a public persona for decades, I’ve mostly enjoyed special time with my club brothers, my family, and close friends.”
“Please know that I passed peacefully after a brief battle with cancer,” the message continued. “But also know that in the end, I was surrounded by what really matters: My wife, Zorana, as well as my loved ones.”
Barger was born in 1938. His mother left when he was 4 months old, and his father worked heavy-labor jobs around the clock. Barger struggled in school and fell into criminal enterprise early, often alongside men with the same passion for motorcycles that they had for hard partying.
That club, which eventually became Hells Angels, rose to prominence in the 1960s, largely in the Bay Area and parallel to the “hippie” movement, with motorcycle gangs often providing a measure of protection to some of the era’s most notable bands. (On its website, the club dismisses the absent apostrophe: “Yes, we know there is an apostrophe missing but it is you who miss it. We don’t.”)
Barger, Hunter S. Thompson once wrote in his seminal account of the rise of Hells Angels, was clearly in charge: “a six-foot, 170-pound warehouseman from East Oakland, the coolest head in the lot,” and more than a mere criminal. In fact, Barger was a genius at media and branding, creating an image that defined Hells Angels in the public eye as terrifyingly tough but principled and, at its core, effortlessly cool.
In addition to being media savvy, Barger was business savvy. Taking the reins of Hells Angels when the de facto leader was jailed after a confrontation with Bay Area police, he organized the clubs under a single banner, demanded they ally despite remaining a loose collection of local outlaw motorcycle clubs, trademarked the Hells Angels name, transitioned the club to a closely held corporation, and sold shares.
He did have a habit of being present, but not involved, in some of the club’s most notorious antics. When Hells Angels attacked an anti-war protest, Barger delivered a personal plea to then-President Lyndon B. Johnson, offering members of his club as defenders of the military’s front line in Vietnam and pledging outlaw muscle to police anti-war protests — though Barger’s motivation wasn’t entirely altruistic. His club reportedly traded captured leftists to police in return for shorter sentences for outlaw motorcycle club members.
Barger’s involvement in the most notorious Hells Angels confrontation, at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Raceway Park, was similarly tangential. As chaos overtook the free performance, leaving one concertgoer dead at the hands of a club member, Barger claimed he had been drinking beer with the Rolling Stones at the edge of the stage and suggested the only violence he’d witnessed was his own. He said he pulled a gun on Keith Richards when the band failed to take the stage on time.
After Altamont, Barger brought in public relations firms and tried to team up with community service organizations, but the mystique surrounding the Hells Angels had been broken, and while Barger maintained, for decades, that he was never involved in alleged criminal behavior, the FBI claimed the Hells Angels was closely involved with the drug trade, and Barger spent much of the 1970s and 1980s in prison.
When he got out in 1992, he’d traded violence for venture, at least according to profiles written about him at the time, and began a career in entertainment, authored a memoir and several novels, took up yoga, developed his own line of hot sauces and salsas, and provided authenticity, as well as recurring appearances, to the FX series Sons of Anarchy, which follows a fictional motorcycle club, based in part on Barger’s own Hells Angels.
While perhaps not virtuous, Barger’s life was legendary. He is survived by his sister and his third wife, Zorana, but, he said in interviews late in his life, not regret.
Emily Zanotti is a writer and editor living in Nashville, Tennessee.
