Posted: Wednesday, 18 March 2009 12:25PM
Ride The Edge As An Outlaw
Steve Corbett Reporting
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Get your motor running.
Head out on that highway looking for adventure and whatever comes our way.
Like maybe a few million dollars in cocaine?
Although details are sketchy, Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett – no relation to me – announced today at a Luzerne County press conference that some members of the local Outlaws Motorcycle Club are responsible for selling $3.6 million in coke.
As many as 22 suspects are implicated in the ring that focuses on one of America’s most notorious motorcycle clubs.
Outlaw bikers comprise one percent of bikers and belong to clubs such as the Pagans, the Hells Angels and the Outlaws.
Outlaw bikers dislike the term “gang” and make a point of correcting people who use the term. Since it’s not against the law to be an Outlaw, Pagan or Angel, I will respect the brothers by calling them whatever they please.
As of now, though, we can agree on calling some of them “suspects” and “defendants.”
Police say the central focus of the drug ring was a clubhouse on North Main Street in Ashley, where Outlaws partied and undertook club business, whatever that business might have been.
The Wilkes-Barre chapter has been based in Ashley for some time, according to callers to “Corbett” who weighed in with their observations after police raided the clubhouse and other Luzerne County properties on March 6.
Back then I was surprised when I went to the Outlaws’ website and found not only a Wilkes-Barre chapter but a Scranton chapter as well. A knowledgeable police source told me that the Outlaws established a Scranton presence and clubhouse off Keyser Avenue about three years ago.
Scranton club members have not drawn attention to themselves, the police source said, and have been on their best public behavior. No arrests have occurred and police have never been called to the clubhouse, the source said.
I don’t know if any members of the Scranton chapter figure into this morning’s announcement. I do know that the Outlaws are well known nationally and even have international chapters.
I also know that police consider the club to be an organized gang that’s engaged in some serious drug trafficking.
Club defenders say that outlaw bikers are harassed regularly by police and stress that the law protects all bikers, even outlaws who fly swastikas, spit sometimes literally on propriety, and defend themselves against all insults both real and imagined.
I first ran into the Outlaws in 1973 in Florida, where they still maintain a strong presence. Countless people feared the club back then. Many people partied with them as well.
The Outlaws do not talk club business with the press, according to a member with whom I spoke on the telephone after the raid in Ashley that brought a SWAT team to the Ashley home. I located the member by a newspaper story about his leather shop in Daytona Beach, where he works after spending 13 years in a federal prison on club-related crimes.
I once stopped by a California Hells Angels’ picnic and asked to talk with the Ventura chapter president, who also served as the club’s national spokesman, but he sent word to me that he was too busy to talk.
I also have written extensively about Christian Tate, a Hells Angel martyr, who was assassinated on his way home from Laughlin, Nevada, back in 2002.
On the day police raided the Outlaws’ clubhouse in Ashley, I spoke on “Corbett” with my longtime friend, John Hall, the author of “Riding On The Edge, A Motorcycle Outlaw’s Tale,” who once served as the New York City chapter president of the Pagans Motorcycle Club.
Hall believes that most outlaws ride the rebel trail for a variety of reasons, the least of which is crime. Most are free-wheeling road warriors who scorn mainstream society with its rules, its authoritarian cops and its inhibitions, according to Hall, who believes that outlaw bikers are the last of a breed of pioneer Americans who take freedom literally.
Working-class neighborhoods like those in Ashley are natural breeding grounds for outlaw bikers who ride despite a crumbling economy, job loss, public corruption scandals and a general disappearance of the American Way.
For one percenters including Outlaws, Pagans, Angels and others who, for the most part hate each others’ guts, society is a lost cause. The club is the righteous mission and club members often live and sometimes die together.
One of the suspects busted today is not only a member of the Outlaws but a Luzerne County Correctional Facility guard as well. So much for background checks and taxpayer funded prison employee gang training.
Guess he was just born to be wild.
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