“Exterminate all of the brutes!” With these phrases, borrowed from Joseph Conrad’s Coronary heart of Darkness, Hunter S. Thompson concluded his violent, macabre 1967 e-book Hell’s Angels: A Unusual and Horrible Saga. Thompson had spent months with the outlaw biker gang and in the end paid for his persistence when members gave him a brutal beatdown (which, Thompson being Thompson, he appeared to get pleasure from just a bit). The king of Gonzo had gotten nearer to the Angels’ inside sanctum than simply about anybody else had, a feat that the brand new A&E docuseries Secrets and techniques of the Hells Angels (premiering Sunday) tries to duplicate in a smaller, safer, and slicker method.
The Angels, based in 1948 in San Bernardino County in a local weather of postwar disillusion and riot, have typically offered two very completely different public faces. We’re only a fun-loving motorbike membership, says one. The opposite is extra sincere. Homicide, rape, and drug-running have lengthy been extensively acknowledged as a part of the Angels M.O. That is the stuff with which the brand new sequence is worried, no less than the premiere episode made out there to journalists. As Thompson found greater than 50 years in the past, you trifle with these individuals at your individual grave threat.
Episode one, “Hell’s Agent,” tells the story of Jay Dobyns, an enormous, burly ATF agent who infiltrated the Angels in Arizona and got here near dropping his thoughts and soul. Dobyns, together with fellow agent Jenna Maguire (taking part in the a part of Dobyns’ outdated girl), receives his task within the wake of an all-out brawl and shootout between Angels and the rival Mongol gang in the course of a Laughlin, Nevada on line casino that left three lifeless in 2002. (Surveillance video of the throwdown depicts a struggle zone of leather-based, fists and bullets; this was not day to be making an attempt your luck on the slots). Dobyns describes the byzantine course of by which one positive aspects his official Angels patch — as he says with deadpan wryness, “For a corporation that doesn’t wanna stay by guidelines, they’ve received a number of guidelines” — earlier than detailing the caper that in the end earned the gang’s belief: With the assistance of fellow ATF brokers and a few leftovers from a neighborhood butcher store, Dobyns faked the homicide of a Mongol and took credit score for the kill. That is the form of initiative the Angels recognize.
The Dobyns story has the makings of a taut characteristic movie, replete with psychological rigidity (Dobyns digs into how laborious it’s to stay life as a ruthless biker with out beginning to suppose and really feel like one) and many motion. Suppose Donnie Brasco on a Harley. As-is, the episode boasts a reasonably commonplace A&E aesthetic, with speaking heads (together with former members and chapter presidents), reenactments and a steadily constructing narrative. The large boon right here is the ATF footage, which exhibits every part from Dobyns’ interactions with the Angels he’s making an attempt to impress to behind-the-scenes preparation for the pretend Mongol homicide, which performs out like a Hollywood stunt (drag the physique over right here! Spurt the blood over there!).
Future episodes, every one hour lengthy, will sort out topics together with an Angels plot to assassinate Mick Jagger (the Angels had been answerable for the stabbing loss of life of concertgoer Meredith Hunter on the notorious 1969 Rolling Stones live performance at Altamont Speedway, after which Jagger was vital of the Angels and vowed to by no means once more use them as safety), and the trials of Noel Barger, the ex-wife of Angels kingpin Sonny Barger. With a historical past stretching again 76 years, and chroniclers like Thompson who’ve each burnished and punctured their mythology, the Angels would appear to have no scarcity of tales, if not secrets and techniques, to fill the small display. Regardless of the well-known crucial, their legend has but to be exterminated.
