Sonny Barger

Sonny Barger, the founder of Hells Angels, has died. The news broke on his own Facebook page Wednesday night, with a post that read, “If you are reading ...

Sonny was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1983 due to excessive smoking, forcing him to get his vocal cords removed. There were stories of racism within the Hells Angels over the year. Sonny moved the headquarters to Oakland. He got suspended from school multiple times for fighting, and ultimately dropped out in 10th grade. I’ve asked that this note be posted immediately after my passing." Hells Angels Founder Sonny Barger Dead at 83

Sonny Barger, the notorious founding member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, author, ex-convict, occasional Sons of Anarchy actor and one of the bikers ...

Barger also took part in a number of documentaries about the bikers. Barger was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1983 and, in 2010, prostate cancer. Barger said in his book that he forced Richards, at gunpoint, to begin the concert. But also know that in the end, I was surrounded by what really matters: My wife, Zorana, as well as my loved ones. 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.

The founder of the Hells Angels Sonny Barger has died at 83 after a battle with cancer, according to a social media statement and his former attorney.

In it, he shed light on the history and evolution of the Hells Angels and included stories about their run-ins with the law. Although I’ve had a public persona for decades, i’ve mostly enjoyed special time with my club brothers, my family, and close friends. “I’ve lived a long and good life filled with adventure.

Mr. Barger cultivated the motorcycle club's outlaw image and was a pivotal figure in its rise from obscurity into a countercultural phenomenon in the 1960s.

But the group’s rise came in spite of law enforcement’s efforts to tame it, with the authorities seeing it as a dangerous menace. In 2013, at 75, he described in a sworn deposition what he would do if he saw someone wearing an unofficial shirt bearing Hells Angels trademarks. Ralph Barger was born in Modesto, Calif., on Oct. 8, 1938. Soon after, he took over as the club’s national president when Otto Friedli, the founder of the original chapter, went to prison. Chased by the law for decades, he spent time in prison on drug charges but beat several other charges. He was 83.

Barger, who founded the Hells Angels' original chapter in 1957, was jailed with another Angel after they were convicted of conspiracy to kill rival gang ...

Please know that I passed peacefully after a brief battle with cancer." Barger and O'Farrell served five years in prison. He befriended many of the members. Barger was previously diagnosed with throat cancer in 1982 for which he had his vocal chords removed, and in 2012 he had his prostate removed to combat prostate cancer. In 1988, during his time in the biker gang, Barger and fellow Hells Angel Michael Vincent O'Farrell were convicted of conspiracy to kill rival gang members from a club in Kentucky as well as conspiracy to blow up their headquarters. The Hells Angels have been labeled as an "outlaw motorcycle gang" by the Department of Justice and Barger was the public face of the group.

Barger founded the Oakland chapter in 1957 and became the group's US president, bringing them to international notoriety.

Barger also appeared as an actor, including in the biker series Sons of Anarchy and film Angels from Hell. The latter depicted “a destructive ex-motorcycle gang leader [returning] home from Vietnam to resume his life. The next decade, Hells Angels evolved into a gang organization, spurring widespread condemnation. Over the following decades, the Hells Angels became known as a violent outlaw gang with outposts spanning the globe. In the 1950s, they came together to ride motorcycles and party. When Barger helmed the Hells Angels, he got into scrapes, took drugs, and raced his Harley-Davidson, Sweet Cocaine, along California’s expansive freeways. And I’ve had the privilege to be part of an amazing club.

Sonny Barger, founder of Hells Angels, has died at 83. The iconic outlaw biker had a brief batte with cancer, according to statement Thursday morning.

“I’ve lived a long and good life filled with adventure. Sonny Barger, founder of Hells Angels, has died at 83. Sonny Barger, leader of Hells Angels, dies at 83.

Barger was heavily featured in Hunter S. Thompson's book Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs.

Barger may have cultivated a counterculture, criminal mystique for the media, but make no mistake, he and his fellow Angels were often the purveyors of violence, sexual assault and other criminal misdeeds, and innocent people suffered for it. Barger, to put it mildly, was about as nice a guy as his fellow “card-carrying felons.” He was there for one of the events commonly cited as one of the defining moments that the free-love era was over: The day a member of his Hell’s Angels chapter stabbed a pistol-wielding teenager Meredith Hunter to death at a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, Calif in 1969. He also published two books of fiction centered around biker life and spent years turning the Hell’s Angel into a brand, as the Post points out: Barger remained an Angel until the end, though he stepped down from leadership in 1998. For nearly a year I had witnessed a blizzard of stompings and chain whippings, the grunts and screams of drunken gangrapes, the warp of mind-bending drugs, the shattering rumble of straight pipes. I was worried a rib had been broken and that my eye was destroyed. I had been allowed on The Inside. Sonny Barger — the King, the Pontiff of their Perpetual Pestilence — had given me the OK. Mr. Barger accused Stones guitarist Keith Richards of delaying the band’s performance to work up the crowd. Whatever it was, I protested, and it was exactly the excuse they needed…. While not the founder of the original gang at large (the Hell’s Angels were founded in 1948 in Fontana, California) Barger was known for turning the Hell’s Angels lifestyle into an iconic piece of America’s counterculture. A single article turned into a year spent embedded with the Angels. Thinking he had been totally accepted and under Barger’s protection, Thompson couldn’t predict the severe stomping that would end his time following the Hell’s Angels. From the book: How many fights and whippings and other rotten dystopian craziness had I seen since I started covering the Angels for The Nation last year?

Ralph "Sonny" Barger, the Hells Angels motorcycle club leader who became the rough-hewn face of America's outlaw biker culture and the restlessness, ...

In 2010 Barger appeared on the television series "Sons of Anarchy" as a murderous biker known as Lenny the Pimp. "The way we were depicted, we were Vikings on acid, raping our way across sunny California on motorcycles forged in the furnaces of hell," he wrote in a 2001 autobiography. Barger was diagnosed with throat cancer at age 44 and smoked one last cigarette on the way to the operating room to have his vocal cords removed. "In any gathering of Hell's Angels ... there is no doubt who is running the show: Ralph 'Sonny' Barger, the Maximum Leader ... the coolest head in the lot, and a tough, quick-thinking dealer when any action starts," Thompson wrote. The Angels were brought in to keep spectators from climbing onstage and brawls frequently broke out. Barger emerged as their chief in part thanks to Hunter S. Thompson's 1966 book "Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs." He later sent a telegram to President Lyndon Johnson volunteering to take Angels to fight in Vietnam. Barger was born Oct. 8, 1938, in Modesto, California, and raised by his hard-drinking father and grandmother after his mother abandoned the family. The club would become a long-running target of law enforcement, which considered it a crime syndicate deeply involved in multi-million-dollar drug-dealing operations, gun running, witness intimidation and murder. Then he found kindred spirits under the Hells Angels umbrella. Much of that 99 percent was genuinely fearful of the Angels with their menacing appearance, rumbling Harley Davidson motorcycles, violent no-limits lifestyle and black leather wardrobe adorned with the club's sacred winged skull patch. Barger asked that the announcement be published, "immediately after my passing."

Sonny Barger, the leather-clad figurehead of the notorious Hells Angels motorcycle club, has died. He was 83. Barger's death was announced on his Facebook ...

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LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP) — Sonny Barger, the leather-clad figurehead of the notorious Hells Angels motorcycle club, has died. He was 83.

Thereafter, he breathed through a plastic valve in his neck, and covered the vent to speak. Of the Altamont killing, Barger argued that the Hells Angels acted in self-defense. He was sentenced to a six-year term at the Phoenix Federal Correctional Institution and was released in 1992. He was kicked out with an honorable discharge after the forgery was discovered. “We’re a little drop in the bucket. And I’ve had the privilege to be part of an amazing club.”