Angels in Court: The Strange Tale of Baby Huey
SAN FRANCISCO—Sonny Barger seemed to be wiping tears from his eyes. He looked over at his attorney, blinking, and started to grin. The two men shook hands.
Penny Cooper, another lawyer, was moving to each of the four men in turn, giving each a congratulatory peck on the cheek. After seven weeks, it was over in a rush; Sonny Barger and three of his key lieutenants in the Hell’s Angels were found by a jury to be innocent of murdering Severo Agero, a fumbling Brownsville, Texas, dope dealer whose body was found in the bathtub of a burning Hayward, California, house last May. Barger and the others would remain in jail under heavy bail, awaiting trial on other charges related to drug dealing, but whatever hopes State Attorney General Evelle Younger had of this case decapitating what he claims is a key criminal syndicate in California appeared to be being dismissed along with the jury. Prosecutor Donald Whyte sat grimly at the opposite side of the courtroom. His case had collapsed when the jury refused to believe the state’s two key witnesses, both of them admitted petty dope dealers and cheap criminals.
In the end, it had been Barger himself who rescued the Angels. He took the stand calmly near the beginning of the defense case. To the charges that he put a .32 bullet in Agero’s head, he replied simply that he was home in bed with his girlfriend at the time of the murder. So much for that, but Barger went on in three days of defense and prosecution questioning to reveal the most candid explanation of the Hell’s Angels that anyone had heard—at least in the past three years.
Sonny lives in a bland-looking frame house in an upper middle-class section of the Oakland Hills. A mean-looking Doberman pinscher trots around inside the fence and signs hung randomly read: FREE SONNY.
But before he was busted, Sonny told the court, the security was even more necessary. “I sleep with an automatic under my pillow and an extra clip under the mattress,” he said matter-of-factly. He also said his house has 11 telephones to “conduct club business.” In a rear darkroom, he said, he makes phony drivers’ licenses.
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But the bombshell came when Barger testified that over the past few years, he has frequently dealt with the Oakland police to turn over weapons or the locations of weapons to them in return for the release of jailed Angels. It was simple as that; the Angels paid off the police in guns they themselves had peddled to radicals or revolutionaries and in return the police let the Angels operate.
The claim might have been ignored as a bluff had not Inspector Edward Hilliard of the Alameda County District Attorney’s office taken the stand and admitted that he accepted guns, dynamite, grenades and even heavy machine guns from the Angels in return for deals on arrests. The deals covered hundreds of weapons in at least 15 different meetings between 1968 and the spring of last year.
In one case in particular, Hilliard made a deal to help Sergey Walton, a Barger lieutenant and co-defendant in the murder trial.
As Walton looked on from the defense table, Hilliard, a brusque, greying man, quietly told the court, “I told Mr. Barger and Mr. Walton that in the event they turned weapons and explosives over to me and Mr. Walton was found guilty I would make the information about weapons and explosives known to the judge for him to use as he saw fit.” Twenty of the 23 counts against Walton were dismissed.
Hilliard said the longstanding pact was arranged because he feared the weapons might fall into the hands of “subversives.”
In mid-1971, Hilliard elaborated, Barger called and asked to meet him behind a liquor store near Barger’s home.
“Mr. Barger got in the back seat,” the inspector testified. “He said he had read an article in a newspaper that had given him an idea. He said he knew that buildings were being bombed by the Weathermen and that we were not apprehending anyone.
“He said if we could have Hell’s Angels released from state prison he would have one body of a Weatherman delivered to us for every Hell’s Angel released.”
“And what did you say to that,” prosecutor Whyte asked.
“That it was absolutely out of the question.”
Despite all that, or maybe because of it, the jury found Sonny and the three other Angels not guilty. Even though Barger admitted on the stand that he made money off “narcotics deals,” the jury refused to buy the line of the state’s two informants that Sonny killed a cheap dope peddler from Texas. The Angel leader is still in jail in lieu of more than $100,000 bail awaiting trial on narcotics charges.
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