Speed Demons

Angels wheel and deal

Call it "speed," "crank" or "poor man's coke," the powder produces a cocaine-like high at half the price. Methamphetamine, at $60 a gram, is the discount drug of choice on the West Coast and a multimillion-dollar-a-year business for a new form of organized crime, a California-style Cosa Nostra on wheels. "We've got contract murders, interstate narcotics transactions, shipments of stolen property, cars and weapons," asserts U.S. Marshal Budd Johnson, member of a San Diego drug task force, the Organized Special Investigation Team (O.S.I.T.). "The Hell's Angels today are the new Mafia."

The legendary Hell's Angels spent the past decade in limbo. According to the O.S.I.T., the grungy motorcycle gang cleaned house, kicking out heroin-addicted deadweights, streamlining its chapters and sprucing up its psycho-fascist image. The tattoos, beards and beer bellies are still there, but the bikers have softened their death's-head emblem and dropped kinky regalia like decorative wings denoting various sexual feats. Says Johnson: "The Angels are 25 years ahead of other gangs. They went from a loose-knit bunch of guys to an organized crime family."

Today's Hell's Angels number more than 500 members in 32 chapters, and, according to the O.S.I.T., they control 75% of California's methamphetamine market. They have built up a highly sophisticated crime network, amassing tax shelters, high-priced lawyers and an arsenal of antitank rockets, Claymore mines and M-60 machine guns.

A special report to be released this week by the California attorney general's office details the growth of clandestine labs. Though the report does not specifically link Hell's Angels to methamphetamine stashes, FBI officials suspect the club is behind the bulk of them. "They have their own operation and distribution network," says Floyd Clarke, deputy assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division. "The entire organization is involved in the operation."

The scope of the gang's drug operation began to be revealed only last fall. The O.S.I.T., investigating two 1977 mobster-style murders, persuaded four Angels to "roll over" and inform on the club in court. According to one informant, former Angel Hitman James ("Brett") Eaton, now a protected federal witness living under a new identity, the Angels cornered the methamphetamine market by cornering the chemists. In taped interviews with the O.S.I.T., made available to TIME, Eaton stated, "They find someone already making speed and say, 'O.K., now you make it for us.' " Typically, a Hell's Angel would pay a drug maker $25,000 for five pounds and advance him another $25,000 for the next five. "Now the guy owes the club," Eaton explained. The profits are handled illicitly. Said Eaton: "You try to sidestep the IRS, you get yourself money managers. Money is power. It buys policemen, judges."

For all its new-found finesse, the bikers' club did not abandon tradition, notably gang warfare. The 1977 murders that led to five convictions were one round of a raging dispute with a rival biker gang, the Mongols. Eaton and four other Angels ambushed two Mongol bikers on a San Diego freeway and machine-gunned them down. At the slain Mongols' funeral, a bouquet of red-and-white carnations (the Angel colors) and a dynamite-loaded Rambler were dropped off. The car exploded, injuring three mourners. The Mongols retaliated by gunning down Hell's Angel "Godfather" Raymond Piltz in 1982 at a biker bar in Lemon Grove, Calif.

Sonny Barger, 45, the famed former national president of the Hell's Angels, dismisses the FBI's charge that his club has become a wheeling and dealing version of the Mafia. "The Government is waging a smear campaign against us," says the biker turned bourgeois. "It is a Hollywood image and a Government image, but it is not the truth." Barger insists the gang cannot control what each member does. "A lot of Hell's Angels have gone to prison for individual things," he says, "just like policemen."