Chapter 11 – Wheels of Rage by Kurt Saxon

You read about the rising crime rate and how many people are arrested and how few convictions and so forth. Well, to get on the unconvicted list, the first thing you learn is when you get busted, man, just keep your mouth shut. Because it’s not going to do you one bit of good to tell ’em anything. It does you no good to talk even if you’re innocent, which is unlikely. No matter what you tell ’em you don’t have a prayer, see? So the general procedure is to keep your big yap shut.

That’s one of the problems Muskrat had; he couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

After that shootout with Fuzzy and Whodat, the Sheriff’s deposition showed that Ten-gun kept his mouth shut and I kept my mouth shut but Muskrat raved on for about fifteen minutes.

Mostly he told the truth so we didn’t get crossed up later. And since the other two of us hadn’t said anything when we were in captivity, when we got out we could get our stories straight.

Like I say, first thing is you keep your mouth shut. If the Man’s going to bust you and you don’t give him any cooperation, well that’s just too bad because that’s your constitutional right. You’re not on trial.

As soon as you get in you’re allowed one phone call. In a club, you either make that to the treasurer or to the president. And when you do, they’ll decide the next move. Usually the next move is to get the guy out immediately and the bail money comes out of the club treasury.

Let’s take the steps in what happens when a guy gets busted. Let’s say it’s felony bail twelve hundred and fifty dollars. So it’s going to cost a hundred and a half to spring him. All he does when he gets busted is he keeps his mouth shut and stays cool. We’ll get him out right away.

If it’s really astronomical bail like twenty-two grand, he still has to keep his cool. The club may have to leave him in there for three or four days or longer. He may wait several days before his arraignment when they set up his trial date, at which time they will most likely lower his bail.
Usually, if a guy’s sitting around in the pound for awhile, unless it’s a federal case like counterfeiting or something like that, they’ll lower the bail just to relieve the crowded conditions. When they busted the three of us awhile back, bail was twenty-two thousand apiece. Okay, that’s what the D.A. tried to set it at. So we just kind of laughed at him, you know.

So it went to the judge and our bail bondsman called the judge and said, “Look, this is just shooting into an inhabited dwelling. That’s twelve-fifty felony bail.”

So we’re out on twelve-fifty apiece felony bail, meaning it cost us four hundred and fifty to get out. But let’s say we’re going to be in there for a while; say one guy got busted on a murder rap.

The first thing that’s going to happen is they fingerprint and charge you. They’ve got to charge you with something. A lot of time they charge you with the wrong thing. If you’re smart, you can just look at the rap sheet and see what they’re charging you with and figure, hell, they haven’t got a case and they’re going to dismiss it anyway.

You know you’re guilty of something and you know what it was you were guilty of. But if it wasn’t what they charged you with, you’ve just hung ’em out to dry because there’s nothing they can do.

Anyway, what a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that you’ve got a whole bunch of chances to weasel out of it. First, at the scene of the crime they may decide, well, they don’t have enough evidence, so they take you to the pound and book you on something.

Now, once they book you they are stuck with what they booked you for. Like, they booked me on a two forty-six, shooting into an inhabited dwelling, so they couldn’t up the charge to attempted murder. Certainly not unless they come in with a pile of new evidence and that’s not too likely.

Your first chance is that the arresting officer will screw up and put down a minor charge or one that doesn’t even apply. Your second chance is with the D.A. He’ll look at the arresting officer’s report and he’ll throw it out, see, and he might even know you’re guilty as hell.

The reason for this is that they’re starting to look at how much this is going to cost. The crime rate has gone up so fantastically, their dockets are crowded and their money doesn’t stretch. It’s got to the point where they throw out most cases unless the accused has incriminated himself with a loose mouth or has pled guilty or has little or no defense.

If you really want to hang the Man out to dry and you get a misdemeanor bust, demand a jury trial. I’ve done this a couple of times. It’s your constitutional right. Immediately they start back peddling and looking for a way out.

Because, if you’ve got any kind of defense, they’ll throw the case out. Say some officer wrote you up a ticket for making a left turn on a gravel road at ninety miles an hour in a forty-nine Hudson. All you’ve got to do is take a few photographs of the road, the car and get a couple of statements, relevant or not, from a mechanic. You start showing this stuff to the judge and all he can think of is, “My God, this is going to tie up the court for a week.”

A guy I know did this about five years ago. He got busted on a misdemeanor and the trial went on for like three weeks. It was the most expensive misdemeanor trial the city of Glendale ever had. After that they left him alone.

We could do that if we had to. But in Glendale, the Iron Cross has received two tickets and only two. The Man here has never bothered us because it’s our home stomping grounds and there’s a lot of mutual respect.

And maybe they’re afraid of retaliation for simple harassment.

The only tickets we did get were on Pigpen and Samson for drag racing on their bikes up Canada Boulevard at about eighty or ninety miles an hour. The cop wrote ’em up for going fifteen miles over the speed limit.

He had to do something and I had told those jerks not to crap on our own home turf. So when they came sniveling to me about the tickets, I just said, “That’s too bad. You asked for it. I told you to behave in Glendale.”

Now if it had been a bum rap, like if they’d gotten stopped and screwed over with “fixit” tickets, it would have been different. They’ll write you up for mufflers too loud and this, that and the other.

If it was that kind of shit, we could fight it. But, hell, they’re going ninety miles an hour up a populated street. There’s little kids around there. I know how that would look in front of a jury. See, you’ve got to keep this in mind.

Now, back to how you behave in the pound. Let’s take you, for example. Let’s say you get busted for malicious destruction of property with dynamite, okay? Well, you get one phone call and you make it to me. Then I go look in the club treasury to see what the money situation is.

I can truthfully say I’ve never left any of my own boys in jail for even twenty-four hours. One way or another, by burning credit cards or putting stuff in the pawn shop, we’ve gotten the money.

You can get pretty paranoid in jail. Once you’re out, you can get things back in perspective but when you’re in, you tend to think people have forgotten you. Say, you call me and then you don’t hear from me for four or five days and you think, “Those finks! They’ve screwed me.” So about this time, if somebody was in on it with you, you may start thinking, “I’ll turn state’s evidence to get out of here.”

That’s primarily what the authorities prey on these days; fear. But if you just stop and think about it, you’re not going to get anywhere by turning state’s evidence. That guy I told you about robbing this cathouse, one of his buddies turned state’s evidence on him for another job. Well this kid got out in a year but his buddy, who squealed, is doing ten years in San Quentin. You see, the big mouth admitted everything so there was no doubt in the minds of the jury about the extent of his crime. The guy who kept quiet left that doubt in their minds. The prosecutor is always going to tell a sucker that they’ll go easy on him if he squeals. But their motto has always been, “Promise him anything but give him the shaft.” So keep quiet.

But a lot of these jerks just don’t know the system. They panic and start looking for any way out just as soon as possible.

So, okay, let’s say it’s about the fifth or sixth day and you’re thinking, “Good grief, Mike’s forgotten me.” Even so, you keep your mouth shut, see?

Then you go up for arraignment. Maybe the bail was twenty-two thousand dollars and the judge says, “Well, shit, this guy doesn’t have twenty-two thousand dollars. Drop the bail down to two thousand dollars.”

So here’s two thousand dollars bail. Now we’re dealing with a figure that it’s worth it to get you out. If it stayed at twenty-two thousand dollars, that means we’d have to put up twenty-two hundred with the bondsman, plus furnish the security for the twenty-two thousand, okay?

Now what that means is it would cost the club twenty-two hundred bucks, cash, to spring you. Whereas, if you just sit on your duff a week or two, it’s only going to cost the club about two hundred on two thousand dollars bail.

Another thing a lot of these clowns don’t know is about continuances. Sometimes, because of a crowded docket, a judge will change your original trial date and set it up for months later. Sometimes he’ll do it on your request so you can gather more material for your case or because you’re just hoping for some kind of miracle.

If you’re out on bail, a continuance is a groovy thing. Muskrat and Ten-gun and I had our case continued five times. By the time we went up for trial, all the witnesses had disappeared and the arresting officers, I think half of them had quit the force. It was just a real bad scene as far as the prosecution was concerned.

If you’re on the inside, though, a continuance is a drag. But just remember, according to law, they have to give you a trial within forty-five days after they pick you up, if you insist.

Generally, if you’re out, it’s a good thing if you can request and get a continuance. But if they ask you to take a continuance it probably means they are hurting in some way and it would be better to demand your trial as soon as possible.

We had a guy at work who got busted on some kind of traffic goody. His trial was near and they tried to get him to accept a continuance and he said, “Hell no, I’m not going to take a continuance. It’s my right. I want my trial in the forty-five days.”

What had happened was that they’d scheduled his trial and the officer who was a witness against him had fallen off his motorcycle and broken both his legs or something. He was hung in a cast and couldn’t possibly be wheeled around to testify against this character.

So here the prosecuting attorney and the judge were trying to sucker this guy into a continuance. He says, “Hell no I want my trial right now.” Well, what kind of a trial can you have now when there’s no witness for the prosecution?

It’s just a waste of time. Plus, he was screaming, “Jury trial,” so they figured, well, the hell with it.

Anyway, if you’re in on a rap for, say, twenty thousand dollars bail and they’re not going to cut it down and the club can’t afford to bail you out then you just sit there and do your time for forty-five days. Because then your case comes up for trial.

In forty-five days you’d be amazed at the witnesses that can be “talked to” and the friendly witnesses that can be dredged up from every bar in town and all this sort of thing. A lot of times people will unknowingly become witnesses simply because they thought you were some place you weren’t.

Fuzzy and Whodat, they had a case where there was a witness against their girl friend and they wanted me to go lean on the guy. And this was just after I’d tried to kill them! I just kind of laughed at them and said, “You people must really be sick, thinking I’m going to lean on some guy for you. You creeps are in to me for six hundred bucks.”

But that’s the way it’s done. As far as the law goes, the only place that we’ve really gotten hung up is with lawyers. Because a lawyer is a greedy son-of-a-bitch. And I think any motorcycle club will tell you this.

Every single time, they want like five hundred bucks out front and they’ll double-cross you the first chance they get. And they won’t do the work.

What they want is some middle class citizen who is scared to death of doing six months or a year in the pound. But, for example, say you do get ten years. Well, most people only do a year and a half.

It’s not too bad because you get a chance to learn a trade and all. Besides, most of these guys in motorcycle clubs just don’t get that excited about jail. That’s why you see ’em with such tremendous arrest records and so few convictions. They’re cool when threatened with a jail sentence so they usually get out of it.

In fact, if you look at the Mafia, they always have records that say, “Thirty-one arrests, two convictions,” that sort of thing. It’s simply because those guys know the ins and outs and how to behave themselves and keep their mouths shut.

So, the only thing you really have to sweat is getting caught red-handed cramming an ice pick down somebody’s throat or something like that and with a whole bunch of witnesses. That’s pretty rare.

Usually, the stuff you get involved in is something that just isn’t that important, like taking a pot shot at somebody. Big deal. First they’ve got to catch you. Then they’ve got to prove that you had a reason for doing it. And witnesses aren’t much of a problem. A witness isn’t all that interested in getting a biker off the street that he’ll take a chance on getting a chain wrapped around his head later.

I’ve found that if you really want to screw somebody up in the courtroom, you just go over the the law section in any public library and look up exactly what they charged you with. Say you’re charged with a statute, like a 12031, which is carrying a loaded weapon or a 472, which is counterfeiting, like that. You’d be amazed at the solutions that come to mind and the ways to wiggle out of it.

Muskrat put out a book on arrest and he told how you shouldn’t let cops in when they come to your door. If they want in and you start pulling the little stunts Muskrat wants you to pull, a lot of times you’ll find yourself in a lot more trouble than you started with.

Of course, Muskrat has very seldom had the problem of being arrested. The one time I got busted with him, he sang like a canary. That was a super big mistake. I guess he thought he could outsmart ’em.

As far as biker’s rights go, you have all kinds of rights on your own turf. The trouble comes when you get out on the open road or in another town.

Say you’re going down to San Diego or Las Vegas. Most of the cops have the same opinion of bikers that they have car clubbers. You know, they’re a lot a punks.

Now there’s small rinky-dink, rumpkin clubs that are trying to live up to the standards of the Hell’s Angels. The only thing is that they’ll live up to their standards until they get into the clutches of John Law, or until the shit comes down and they actually have to slug it out or take a shot at somebody. Then these little clubs fold up.

Their main thing seems to be just to see how many little old ladies they can scare and how many little kids they can chase off the sidewalk. And that’s why the cops are so down on bikers and you know, in a way you can’t really blame ’em.

In Glendale, there was just us and the Knightriders. We’re both pretty with it clubs and can hold our mud and back up what we say and so the cops leave us alone. We don’t go looking for trouble.

In fact, anyone comes into our territory starting up a club, well we didn’t ever have to bother. The Knightriders just put ’em out of business.

There was a little club called the Sadists tried to spring up in Glendale. I had mentioned something about them to Bob, head of the Knightriders and he said, “Oh yeah, is this what their colors looked like?” He showed me about seven sets of ’em they’d pulled off those characters. Because if you can’t hold your mud, man, you don’t have any business flapping the colors.

If there’s a big club around you, join it and add to its strength and yours. Don’t try to be a big frog in a small pond by being one of a half dozen jerks or even the leader. You’ll just get screwed over by cops or another club who doesn’t want rumpkins making the whole bike set look stupid.

The last time we got harassed unmercifully on the freeway coming back from the beach, well those cops didn’t know us. They thought we were the usual run-of-the-mill jerks like these little creep clubs.

You can get back at cops for harassment if you want to. If you get, say, a “fixit” ticket and you really want to get snotty, and a lot of bikers have been doing this lately, is to go to court and start screaming, “Jury trial.” That gets the cop drug off duty or maybe off his free time, to testify. It also pisses the judges off because it’s so chickenshit and he has important cases waiting. And the fine is the same as if you went and paid at the traffic window.

This is cutting down on a lot of harassment.

If you want to be elaborate about it, demand a jury trial even if the judge wants to dismiss the charge. Talk about a screwed-over cop when the judge gets around to him!

A guy I knew in Hawaii had a service like this. He’d sell bumper stickers to subscribers so if a cop saw one of them he wouldn’t stop the guy unless he was really doing something horrible.

What would happen if the driver was busted is the lawyer with this service would go to court and demand a jury trial. He’d do it even for misdemeanor parking tickets. He’d demand a jury trial if a guy was overtime on a parking meter and even if the judge wanted to dismiss the case. He was something else. He had the court calendar backed up until about the twenty-first century. Out of sight!

One of the reasons you don’t hassle cops much on the road is because a lot of times you’re flapping around with a number job. Like, say, if you get a bike out of Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, a lot of places down South or back East. Those people there, man, I don’t know how they do it.

Like, out here, if you don’t have straight tail nines and your numbers aren’t super copacetic, well, the Man’ll run your scooter in and if it’s a number job, he’ll just rip it off. Then they’ll restamp a state number on it and sell it at auction.

But down in the South, say someone sells you a bike and the numbers don’t match those on the title. All you do is get out your handy grinding tool and grind off the old numbers and stamp you some new numbers in.

Man, I’ve seem some weird numbers. I’ve seen numbers like an inch high and numbers about one sixteenth of an inch high and nothing that ever came out of the Harley-Davidson factory. You start running that stuff around California, even the better number jobs, and they’ll bag your scoot. So it’s to your advantage to be cool around cops unless you’re totally clean.

Anyway, most of the harassment is brought on us by all the rumpkin clubs around the state. For every decent club like the Slaves, the Knightriders, the Iron Cross, the Hell’s Angels or some other club that’s bad and knows it and can back up what they say, there are ten rumpkin clubs. Some of these slobs are the Devil’s Disciples, the Hessians, the Vulcans, the Sadists and then there’s the Stillborn, a Burbank club.

Paranoid George, Samson and Pigpen were going to start a club of their own a while back. Bob, of the Knightriders, went over and had a talk with Paranoid and told him he couldn’t start another club here in Glendale. They were pissed off at me for something, I forget what, anyway they came back to our club then. They would have been a rumpkin club because they didn’t have any bail set up or anything.

A lot of times you can have a good club and maybe the guys have a lot of class. But if they don’t have any legal knowledge and they don’t know what to do if they get busted, the first time the Man comes down on top of ’em they just panic and blow apart. And some of those guys might have been good people.

Maybe such a club can’t even get a bail bondsman. Our bondsman also goes the bail for the San Bernardino Angels. Some rumpkin club comes in there and he’s not going to do business with them. He has to know they’re righteous and won’t skip. And if a member does skip, he has to know the rest of the club will make good on the whole bail no matter what. He wouldn’t do business with the Devil’s Disciples or any of those other jerks.

A lot of times you’ll find that clubs collapse simply because of that. They want to play a role but the reverse side of the coin is having to pay the consequences when the shit comes down and everybody gets busted.

The worst time we ever had, we were in Hessian territory. There are some super rumpkin clubs down there, like them and the Vulcans and that’s why the Man was so hard on us.

They stopped us three times in less than a thousand yards. Our whole formation; bikes, crash trucks and the whole schmeer. They kept hasseling us and writing us up. We’d get about three or four hundred yards and a fresh herd of cops would come in.

We finally pulled off the freeway and by the time we got to Glendale we figured out what the problem was. We’d just been over at the Vulcan’s clubhouse and they were a bunch of super punks.

They had a kid who was fifteen years old wearing their colors. Their president was all of five feet tall and a hundred pounds. He must have been sixty years old. And you know, the Man gets fed up with that sort of thing and you can’t really blame him.

Sometimes a cop is particularly nasty and he’ll harass you and bug you at every turn because he just doesn’t like bikers. You just take down his name from the little plaque on his shirt front or from the ticket he gives you.

Maybe he’s in the phone book and that makes things easy because you want to find out where he sleeps. If you have to, you can be in a car and watch for him to leave the station when he gets off duty. You’ve got to make sure which door off-duty cops come out from. Then you see him get into his car and you follow him home.

If this is too involved what you can do is run a retail credit check on him. It costs about three bucks from most agencies and wouldn’t pay if you want a file on every cop on the force. But it’s not too much to track down your own private cop you hate. Or maybe, instead of a cop, it’s a newspaper reporter who wrote a lot of lies about you.

What you do is you look up “Credit Reporting Agencies” in the business section of the phone book. If your cop, or anyone else you want to get, is paying on a house or car or whatever, he is in a big file and these agencies subscribe to that file. They charge usually about three bucks for their service. Aside from the address, they give you the record on how much money he makes and how much he owes and to whom and what insurance he has and how much he has in the bank.

Okay, so you call up and say you are a small car shop, for instance. They don’t check on you. So you tell them something like you trusted this cop for some work and he doesn’t come around and you want to send a bill to his home. Now, they may also be a collection agency and want to collect the nonexistent bill themselves. If they give you any static just shine them on and call another agency. There’s a hundred in the book, man.

So they look it up and say sure, they got him on file. Then you send them their fee and your name and mailing address. You don’t need a letterhead because you are pretending to be a small shop or maybe a private party who just works on odd cars spare time.

Naturally, you give your right name. These agencies have no reason to send their clients’ names to the Man. Even so, big deal, you tracked him down. So what? If he’s a real bastard, chances are a lot of other people tracked him down.

So you really want to hang him out to dry and blow his mind. You don’t have to go running amuck through his house or harming his family. Actually, this kind of stuff he can combat. And it shows no class anyway.

What you do is harass him. All you do is call the fire department and say, “My house is on fire. Send some trucks,” and give his address. You start sending fire engines, cops, the pizza man, ambulances, Sparkletts trucks, TV repairmen. Especially, if you start sending them like at four o’clock in the morning or if you know the guy’s on a shift and he has to keep getting up and new people keep coming in.

A good one is to call a locksmith at night and tell him you’re this policeman and you locked yourself out of your house and you want him in a couple of hours. So the cop wakes up and here’s a guy who has his front door opened and is standing there with a bunch of tools. That kind of blows the cop’s mind. He might even shoot the poor bastard and then he’d have to fill out a form on it and all.

There’s a million ways you can do it and all it takes is a little thought and determination. If you’re harassed, harass back. If you’re busted, be cool and learn your rights. That’s the only way they’ll respect you and leave you alone.