It may seem like a stirring, raw, unfiltered account of motorcycle gangs and their members’ activities, but Yves Lavigne’s Hell’s Angels: Taking Care of Business is a smokescreen, deliberately put out there by the Hell’s Angels themselves to disguise their true operations.
(Given that there’s no evidence being presented here that isn’t circumstantial, please consider this post and the others like this an exercise in hypothesizing for entertainment purposes only, whether of not the accounts presented correspond to real, not-fictional events.)
It turns out that the Angels do not date back to 1947. They are something older. And it turns out that Hunter S. Thompson’s book, Hell’s Angels, is a similar work of fiction. Yves Lavigne’s books are the same tactic, updated for the 1980s. Thompson was one of them, and they are a group that knows how to present a contrived story for the public while keeping true operations secret.
Leon Redbone, the ragtime singer/guitarist who became famous in the 1970s, was a motorcycle gang leader, born to a family that was part of that world of satanists. (Note to those who need to hear this: don’t have sex with children.) They were already around in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1949. No way they only just started in California in 1947. Didn’t happen like that.
In Ontario, there’s a network of sorts, of power-broking families like the Fords (a Rock Machine-affiliated family which includes former Toronto mayor Rob and current Ontario premier Doug), who have histories dating back to Upper Canada, the pre-Confederation days. There’s a group they call John’s Men, a reference to Sir John A. MacDonald, and I don’t know, maybe back in those days, having sex with other dudes was considered an accomplishment or something.
The Takeaway
The Hell’s Angels did not originate in 1947 after World War II. The histories told by Hunter S. Thompson and Yves Lavigne are fakes.
It turns out that 60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer was a highest-ranking “captain” in the Satan’s Choice gang. Nowhere in Thompson’s or Lavigne’s book is it suggested that anyone famous, let alone a straight-news journalist like Morley Safer, would be involved. The most famous person that Lavigne mentions is Chuck Zito. That’s the nature of the smokescreen.
So, as I wrote when I reviewed Yves Lavigne’s books, my three-word review of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels is: bullshit smokescreen fiction.
Photo credit: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/hunter-thompson-fascism-nixon-freak-kingdom-politics-749623/
