OFF THE WIRE
You have probably already heard about Alexian Lien, the New York man who
was pulled out of his car and beaten in front of his family after
incurring the wrath of a group of motorcyclists on the Henry Hudson
Parkway last weekend. If you haven’t, though, get up to speed by
watching the following video:
Based
on this video footage at least, it seems that Lien is not without blame
in this situation; he did, after all, zoom his Range Rover through a
crowd of stopped motorcyclists, allegedly paralyzing at least one of
them in the process. But the public’s wrath has fallen squarely on the
bikers, who had gathered under the aegis of a group called Hollywood
Stuntz, which apparently organizes massive road rallies in which
motorcyclists congregate en masse, effectively taking over public
roadways so that they can do stunts. (Or, I guess, “stuntz.”) The Stuntz
crew has been repeatedly referred to as a motorcycle gang, a term that
conjures images of leather-clad skeezeballs causing mayhem on the backs
of their American-made bikes. It’s a term that has nothing to do with
the reality of this situation. Whatever the Stuntz riders were, they
weren’t a motorcycle gang.
The “motorcycle gang” as we know
it—formally organized groups of hell-raising hog-riders who live on the
edge of the law—first appeared in the 1940s, as part of the big
post-World War II club-forming craze in America. They existed in
opposition to legacy motorcycle clubs, groups of good citizens who cut
their hair and followed the rules of the road. According to a 1991
report from the California Department of Justice, the first schism in
Motorcycle Nation happened in 1947, when a rowdy group called the Pissed
Off Bastards of Bloomington “turned the American Motorcycle
Association- (AMA) sponsored Hill Climb into a week-long brawl.” The
next year, after a motorcycle riot in Riverside, Calif., the local
police chief pinned the violence on out-of-town “outlaws.” The name
stuck.
The most notorious outlaw motorcycle gang is, of course,
the Hells Angels—itself a spinoff of the Pissed Off Bastards of
Bloomington—the roughnecks perhaps best known for doing a very bad job
providing security at the Altamont Free Concert. Other prominent gangs
include the Outlaws, the Bandidos, the Pagans, the Mongols, and the
Vagos Motorcycle Club. Though they may have all begun as groups of
motorcycle enthusiasts who consolidated to protect their rights to wear
scraggly beards and drive like jerks, authorities believe they
eventually diversified into more serious criminal activity.
The
California Department of Justice report noted that “outlaw motorcycle
gangs are sophisticated organizations who utilize their affiliation with
a motorcycle club as a conduit for criminal activity. The nature of
their activity is generally conspiratorial, and their goals are attained
through use of violence and intimidation.” More recently, the FBI’s
2011 National Gang Threat Assessment accused various outlaw motorcycle
gangs (or, in their unintentionally hilarious acronym, OMGs) of dabbling
in prostitution, drug trafficking, extortion, money laundering, and
“routine and systematic exploitation and infiltration of law enforcement
and government infrastructures to protect and perpetrate their criminal
activities.” The groups themselves commonly claim that they are merely
social organizations—and charitable ones, at that—and that crimes
committed by their individual members should not be held against the
collective. That said, their members do tend to commit a lot of crimes,
at least when compared against other social and charitable
organizations, like the Elks, or the Kiwanis Club.
Now, back to
Hollywood Stuntz, a crew that hardly qualifies as an outlaw motorcycle
gang—or any sort of gang at all, for that matter. The riders seemed to
have had no formal affiliation; rather, “Hollywood Stuntz” was just the
name given to the rally that brought them all to New York last weekend.
Metro reports that the Hollywood Stuntz rally may have been the
brainchild of one man, a stunt rider known as Jamie “Hollywood” Lao;
according to Metro, the since-dismantled website hollywoodstuntz.net
notes that Lao belongs to “a team of motorcycle stunt riders that hold
annual events as a forum for themselves and other stunt riders in the
New York area (and sometimes riders from out of state) to show off the
most insane stunts the thousands of bystanders have ever seen.”
It’s
clear that the bikers on the Henry Hudson Parkway acted aggressively in
hogging the road, violating traffic laws, and pulling a man out of his
car and beating him so badly that he had to go to the hospital. But
calling them a motorcycle gang is just not accurate. Though the
difference might seem minor to those of us who prefer four-wheeled
transit, a gang of motorcyclists is not necessarily the same thing as an
outlaw motorcycle gang.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/10/02/alexian_lien_hollywood_stuntz_yes_motorcycle_gangs_still_exist_no_they_didn.html
