Here's an interesting blurb on the mentality of the OMG member....copied and pasted
Don't even think about trying to challenge Angels, say those who attempted
By MICHAEL JAMISON of the Missoulian
Privacy protected to the point of violence
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. - A knot of burly bikers speeds across the television screen with a herky-jerky hyperactivity, like so many Keystone Kops scrambling across a grainy black and white backdrop.
"Here it is," J.D. Hays says, rewinding the videotape. "Here's where the pummeling begins."
It is, to be sure, one of the most vicious and efficient butt-kickings ever captured on film. The fellow on the receiving end is big - 6 feet, 4 inches, to be exact - and yet beneath the swarm of fists and boots he seems a pint-sized rag-doll.
Hays is police chief in Steamboat Springs, and he's reviewing one of the half-dozen bar fights that kept his department busy the weekend in 1996 when the Hells Angels came to town. This is the only one captured on a bar security camera.
The first punch is thrown, the big local guy drops, is set upon in a frenzy of violence. Fists and boots connect with his head, ribs and groin. Somebody rips a pay phone off the wall and crashes it into his skull. In seven swift seconds, he's reduced from brawny bartender to unconscious victim, thrown bodily out the back door. In another three seconds, the room goes back to normal, high-fives all around, tables turned upright, spilled beers salvaged.
Ten seconds. It's very, very fast and very, very effective. Somebody has been practicing.
"I tried to strike up a conversation," recalls J.J. Johnson, the bartender who found himself lying outside the bar. "But he didn't want to talk."
Johnson had asked a Hells Angel where he was from, but was waved away.
"Are you shooing me away?" he'd asked.
"Yeah, I don't want to talk to you," the Angel replied.
Later, Johnson was laughing with a friend when the same Hells Angel walked by.
"Are you laughing at me?"
Johnson couldn't help himself. He pulled the trigger.
"Yeah."
And the pummeling began.
"It was like going through a gantlet of blows," he remembers. "I figure I took at least 75 blows."
While he admits he baited the biker, he insists he didn't deserve the beating he took.
"I wouldn't say it was an unprovoked attack," he says, "but it was my town. I was in my bar, and I just couldn't swallow my pride. I couldn't let them just take over."
Looking back, he recommends a cooler head when the Angels are in town.
"Practice abstinence for a while," he says. "Stay out of the bars. Go on vacation."
Kent Morrison offers the same advice. He took his beating after infiltrating the Hells Angels' lair in the dead of night.
How to handle a visit from the Angels? "That's simple," Morrison says. "Go home and stay there until they leave town. ... Have a weekend in the country. Go visit your mother."
Morrison is a former member of the Army's special forces, trained in reconnaissance. After a few too many drinks, he decided to take a shot at penetrating the Hells Angels' "compound," a motel they'd surrounded with perimeter guards and rooftop sentries.
"Nobody even thought of going in," he says. "The cops were petrified. The place was a fortress, heavily patrolled, but I got in."
Perhaps he should've stayed out.
Dressed in camouflage, he slipped past the bikers, settled into a lawn chair next to a huge tattooed Angel, and struck up a conversation.
"The last words I remember saying were, 'Don't you want to know how I got in?' "
His advice, now that his jaw has healed: "Don't try to interact. These are guys who value their privacy to the point of violence."
Daniel Sowerby also learned that lesson the hard way. The transplant from New Zealand doesn't really know why he took his beating, but he admits he's a bit of a "smart ******," and that might have had something to do with it.
Like Morrison and Johnson before him, Sowerby had been tipping back a few drinks when he found trouble in the guise of a Angel.
"I'm not too sure what happened," he says. "I got kicked out of the bar because I was just being myself, I guess."
He had been trying to hold down his territory in the face of a biker invasion, and the bartender thought it better that he retreat.
Once outside, a Hells Angel stomped up and asked if he were the guy who had just been "86'd." Sowerby was talking to a friend, and didn't want to be interrupted.
Like Johnson, he came up with the wrong answer.
"Yes."
"Then five of them approached me and it was all over," Sowerby remembers. "I was on the ground in my own blood looking at my teeth."
He had been knocked cold before he knew what hit him and was bleeding from a knife wound to the butt. His friend, an innocent bystander who was pulled into the fray, eventually needed $5,000 in plastic surgery to rebuild his face.
"I'm notorious for being a smart mouth," Sowerby says. "They just took it upon themselves to be tough guys."
And, as with most encounters with the Hells Angels, there was little thought of pressing charges:
"Yeah, officer, it was four or five guys with huge leather jackets and beards. Right."
And anyway, he says, "The only difference between the cops and the Hells Angels is that one's legal and one's not."
Police Chief Hays believes there's more difference than Sowerby cares to acknowledge.
"If you just totally left them (the Hells Angels) alone, did not talk to them, there was no problem," Hays says. But if you engaged the bikers, came up with the wrong answer, he says, then "it was always five or six or eight Hells Angels pummeling some poor schmuck."
There is a difference between that and a run-in with police, Hays says: "Sure, some of the locals brought it on, but if somebody snickered at me, I wouldn't stomp him into the ground."
