Hells Angels leader Sonny Barger dead at 83
The Hells Angels’ head hell-raiser has taken the last ride.
Sonny Barger, the hard-living leader of the infamous Hells motorcycle club whose exploits helped cultivate the image of the outlaw biker, died Wednesday night in his Livermore, Calif., home. He was 83.
True to his independent nature, Barger announced his own death on Facebook with a message posted posthumously.
“If you are reading this message, you’ll know that I’m gone,” he wrote. “I’ve asked that this note be posted immediately after my passing.”
Sonny Barger, founder of the Oakland, Calif., charter of the Hells Angels motorcycle club, in 2003. (Scott Olson/)
Barger said in his farewell message that he’d’ lived “a long and good life filled with adventure.”
The famed biker’s message said that he died “peacefully” and surrounded by loved ones following a battle with liver cancer.
“Keep your head up high, stay loyal, remain free, and always value honor,” he wrote.
While he may have died peacefully, that isn’t always how he lived. Barger was born Ralph Hubert Barger in Modesto, Calif. Using a doctored birth certificate, he joined the Army at 16. Once the forgery was discovered, he was dishonorably discharged.
Barger helped form the Hells Angels in 1957 in Oakland. Upon discovering other California biker clubs were riding under that same name, he worked to unite those groups. The high school dropout later trademarked the club’s name and logo, which was used for commercial ventures. A line of Hellfire sauces and salsas sells online.
Hells Angeles chieftain Ralph "Sonny" Barger and his wife Sharon are shown after his release $100,000 bond in San Francisco on Aug. 1, 1980. (Robert H Houston/)
Despite numerous run-ins with the law throughout the three decades that followed, Barger also enjoyed a life of celebrity, thanks in part to Hunter S. Thompson’s 1966 book “Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gang.” He wrote an autobiography of his own in 2000.
Barger was also among the Hells Angels working security at a 1969 Rolling Stones concert where a member of his biker club fatally stabbed a man. That incident was featured in the 1970 documentary “Gimme Shelter.”
From 2010-2012 he acted in three episodes of “Sons of Anarchy,” a TV series about a biker club. He reportedly spent a total of more than a dozen years in prison, including a four-year stretch for conspiracy to violate federal firearms and explosives laws.
He’d previously been treated for throat and prostate cancer. He underwent a laryngectomy in the early 1980s and had to breathe through a plastic valve in his neck, covering it to speak.
In April Barger posted an excerpt from his 2005 book “Freedom: Credos from the Road” indicating he was aware that he would be remembered after his death.
“As much as I’m looking out at the road ahead, I’m tempted to look over my shoulder, back at the legacy I am leaving behind, a legacy of brotherhood, loyalty, fun times, and hell raising,” Barger wrote. “But I can’t and don’t look back. I always look ahead, to the side, but never back.”
With News Wire Services
