(Page 2 of 3)

Fox has signed a production deal with Barger. Director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide, Beverly Hills Cop 2) has been connected with the project for more than a year.

Debunking Hunter Thompson

Sonny does a bit of myth-busting in his book. Yeah, some bad stuff went down at the Rolling Stones’ free concert at Altamont Speedway in California’s Bay Area in 1969, when the rockers hired the Angels to work security for the show. A man was stabbed to death.

But the Angels shouldn’t have been held responsible, Barger says. And they never put a contract out for Mick’s life. “Don’t you think Jagger would be dead by now if we did?” he says.

Barger also claims his conviction on charges of planning to blow up a rival gang’s headquarters in Kentucky was all bunk. He ended up serving four years in a federal prison. Among the hundreds supporting his early release in 1992 was Colorado Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell.

The lawmaker, a motorcycle aficionado, told a local newspaper. “These clubs are much different now. They’re very respectable.”

That’s a far cry from the description of the Angels in Hunter S. Thompson’s landmark book, Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga (Ballantine Books):

“The Menace is loose again, the Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud … low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe … like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus.”

Thompson claims he was beaten when the Angels found out he was writing his book, and that’s documented in the postscript. Barger says Thompson exaggerates.

“He tells a good story. But he doesn’t stick to the facts.”

Case in point: Thompson describes Barger as “a six-foot, 170-pound warehouseman from East Oakland, the coolest head in the lot, and a tough, quick-thinking dealer.”