"According to Vic Bettencourt, the first Hell's Angles motorcycle club was formed around 1948 in Berdoo, an offshoot from a renegade group called the Pissed Off Bastards out of Fontana, California. It was right after the Hollister incident. WWII vets from Berdoo -- who belonged to the Pissed Off Bastards -- used to roar by on their bikes. People would look up and say, "There goes one of those Hell's Angles."

There have been many books and movies about the Hell's Angles Motorcycle Club (HAMC) but no inside definitive source of information about this well known but mysterious club has surfaced until now with the release of Sonny Barger's book. Sonny was not the founder of the Hell's Angles but was instrumental in providing the leadership that allowed the club to expand to over 100 chapters worldwide with only a third of those in the United States.

Sonny always saw himself as similar to the character Chino, played by Lee Marvin in the movie The Wild One.

This book was written from Sonny's viewpoint and uses his colorful and explicit language to drive home the importance of the brotherhood that he led. In another quote Sonny says:

"The story of the Hell's Angles Motorcycle Club is the story of a very select brotherhood of man who will fight and die for each other, no matter what the cause."

In the beginning Sonny just wanted to find a group of guys who liked to ride motorcycles who would come together in a club to be like a family to him. Finding men strong enough to become a true brotherhood was a slow process. New recruits had to undergo a period of evaluation to prove they would never let down their brothers and always support the club, no matter what.

Along the way, the club found itself in direct opposition to law enforcement for a variety of infractions. Should any Hell's Angel member have a run-in with the law, all the other Hell's Angles members were expected to support that member even if it meant putting up bail money or hiring a legal team to fight the charges. Sonny's concept of a strong club was not to be found in other organizations where at the first sign of trouble the members abandon each other. His club was more like an angry swarm of bees intent solely on protecting the hive from any external force.

The symbol of the Hell's Angles is an Air Force-like patch containing a skull wearing an aviator's cap set inside a set of wings. This patch is sacred to the Hell's Angles. It can only be worn by a member and the patch itself belongs to the club, not the individual.

Sonny credits the club members for having a heavy influence on the development of Choppers and custom motorcycles.

The most well known incident involving the Hell's Angles was the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont Raceway in November of 1969. The Stones had asked the club to provide security for the event. Through a series of incidents during the concert, a man rushed the stage waving a gun and was killed by a knife after he shot a Hell's Angles member. Sonny does not say who had the knife. He does say that it was lucky that more people including the Stones hadn't been shot by this guy and that he felt the Hell's Angles had done their job.

Over the years Sonny had quite a few run-ins with the law. By his own account he had 21 arrests with few convictions the longest being a stint of 59 months for conspiracy.

He gives stories of the most well known members of the club, how they got their reputations, and how most of them died. Violence and death seem to be part of being a Hell's Angel. Sonny speaks of the long motorcycle corteges that the club participated in to honor fallen brothers. The Police Department used to laugh when they saw a mile-long parade of motorcycles. Sonny says now even the cops do the same thing when a cop dies.

Sonny has been a technical advisor on many motorcycle films depicting the Hell's Angles. He expects to see his new book made into a movie as well.

Sonny has since moved from California to just outside Phoenix, Arizona where he now runs a motorcycle repair shop. He belongs to the Cove Creek chapter of the Hell's Angles.

This book contains 51 black and white pictures depicting Sonny's life over the past 40 years. If you want to learn first-hand just what the Hell's Angles Motorcycle Club stands for you'll want to read this book. I have to warn you that the language is strong and you may be shocked at some of the events described. Viewed from within the club these events were just another day in the life of a Hell's Angel. Only Sonny can assist you to understand why these events occurred and why they often were beyond anyone's control.

There are many motorcycle clubs today but only one Hell's Angles. Read the book to find out why.

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VENTURA, Calif. - The hard-drinking, hard-riding, hard-fisted phenomenon of the Hells Angles Motorcycle Club was kick-started not on America's highways, but in the world's deadly and bleeding fields of war.

The Angles have grown, in the past 50 years, to include three dozen chapters in the United States, a presence in 15 countries and a worldwide membership estimated in the thousands.

But before all that, before roving bands of unwashed malcontents began riding the wild West astride iron horses like so many gun-slinging outlaws, before they tore open America's fabric and sewed themselves into the tapestry of mainstream culture, before they bathed and broke out as businessmen, before all that, their name belonged to other Angles.

"Hells Angles" was a name long favored by mercenaries and soldiers, warriors and troops who risked all for principle, belief, freedom and individual rights - including the right to ride big Harley-Davidson hogs. The history of today's Hells Angles is obscured by the hazy exhaust of half a century of Harleys, and no one can see through quite to the beginning.

But many believe the original Angles were members of the U.S. Army's 11th Airborne Division, an elite group of paratroopers trained to rain death on the enemy from above, drifting in behind the lines of battle.

They called themselves the Hells Angles because they flew on silk wings into hell itself, bringing a brutal hope for peace with 20 pounds of TNT strapped to each leg. The nickname was a badge of honor, a mark of invincibility, a wartime emblem indicating the toughest of the tough. It was a totem to ward off the worst.

Not surprisingly, a handful of those original Hells Angles - along with many other returning soldiers who had awakened to the nightmare of war - found it difficult to settle into the half-sleep of the American Dream. After living on the edge so long, they found only a depressing fatalism and monotony in jobs, family, mortgages, college, suburbia and cookie-cutter houses with white-picket fences.

And so they rode. Motorcycles were cheap in the mid-1940s, sold as military surplus, and they offered a certain wild peacetime freedom not unlike the wartime skies of Europe. Soon, individuals gathered into groups, sharing weekends when they rode hard and partied harder.

But when Monday came, not everyone went home. Some stayed, turning the weekend motorcycle club into a surrogate family of full-time brothers.

Two of the first such fraternities were the Pissed Off Bastards and the Booze Fighters, groups that established early the notoriety of the outlaw biker image. In 1947, at an American Motorcycle Association convention in the drowsy town of Hollister, Calif., the Pissed Off Bastards rode in drunk, wild and destructive, landing as if behind enemy lines with a belly full of TNT. The local sheriff later described the scene as "just one hell of a mess."

Quick to control the public relations' damage, the AMA denounced the Bastards, saying it was unfortunate that 1 percent of motorcyclists should ruin it for the law-abiding 99 percent. To this day, the 1 percent insignia remains a badge of honor, worn with pride by those who define themselves as not part of that milquetoast 99 percent majority who ride whining Hondas back and forth to the office.

But in the months following Hollister, internal tension among the Bastards and Booze Fighters was mounting, and in 1948 Bastard Otto Friedli broke from the club, splintering the group to create the Hells Angles Motorcycle Club in Fontana, Calif.

Through the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Hells Angles continued to ride with the other 99 percent, but already their reputation roared out in front.

That reputation crashed into the public consciousness in 1954 when Marlon Brando starred in "The Wild One," a Hollywood sensation inspired by the rumble at Hollister.

That same year, the original Hells Angles chapter merged with San Francisco's Market Street Commandos to spawn the club's second chapter, whose president crafted the intimidating winged death's head that remains the Hells Angles calling card to this day.

Chapters quickly popped up along the California coastline, but there was no organization among the groups, no single vision. All that changed, however, when Ralph "Sonny" Barger helped establish the Oakland Chapter.

Although Barger insists he is not the leader of today's international Hells Angles, he is widely considered so by law enforcement, and undoubtedly wears an unofficial crown. Today, Barger lives in Arizona. George Christie, longtime president of the Ventura, Calif., chapter, is considered Barger's second-in-command and likely successor.

Under Barger's guidance, the Hells Angles chapters came together, hammering out bylaws, codes of conduct, patches, colors, tattoos and club houses. And the myth of the outlaw biker grew. There were tales of mayhem, violence, destruction and, in the early 1960s, accusations of rape in the oceanside town of Monterey.

That high-profile rape case, historians believe, marked the beginnings of what law enforcement now calls an international drug trafficking syndicate. In order to pay legal bills, the legend goes, the Hells Angles made a few drug deals, selling methamphetamines and entering for the first time the world of big-money narcotics.

Whether that version is true, few know for certain and none will admit - proof, perhaps, of the motto "three can keep a secret if two are dead." What is known is that the Hells Angles' defense, however financed, was successful and the rape suspects were acquitted.

It was the first in a long string of high-profile accusations, arrests and acquittals - suggesting either the Angles are slippery or that police like to arrest them despite flimsy evidence. Many believe the truth involves a bit of both.

Regardless, in winning the Monterey rape case the club also won over popular culture, which set the Hells Angles on a pedestal as icons of freedom and resistance to "the system."

The rape acquittals also caught the attention of the California attorney general, who began what would in just a few years become one of the longest running cat-and-mouse games ever played between law enforcement agencies and an established and easily identifiable group.

Infamy bred notoriety, and in the mid-1960s "The Nation" magazine sent a young Hunter S. Thompson off to write about the Hells Angles. Thompson returned to the bikers after completing the article, riding with the Hells Angles for a year while researching his book, "Hell's Angles: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang."

At the same time, Hollywood had discovered the bikers. Barger starred next to Jack Nicholson in "Hell's Angles on Wheels." Rock stars such as Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead struck up friendships with the bikers, which Garcia admitted was a bit scary, because the Hells Angles were, as he put it, "good in all the violent spaces."

That was proved beyond doubt on