Author of the week: Sonny Barger

last updated 8 January 2015

The most famous member of America’s most famous outlaw biker gang has become an advocate for highway safety, said Susan Carpenter in the Los Angeles Times. Sonny Barger, who helped found the Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels in 1957, still rides his own bike 25,000 miles a year, but the ex-con sees so many wannabes out there that it worries him. Nationwide, he notes, motorcycle fatalities have risen for 11 consecutive years. “Everybody wants to be a motorcycle rider today, and they’re getting killed,” he says. So though the Angels have never been known as law-abiders themselves, Barger’s new book, Let’s Ride, is a how-to guide loaded with road rules. Among them: Don’t ever ride when angry, don’t ever ride drunk, and don’t ever believe another driver’s turn signals.

Barger isn’t so naïve as to think that his good safety record is due entirely to following such rules. “No matter how good you are,” he says, “you can be sitting at a stoplight when a truck comes up behind you and runs you over. It’s all luck.” As careful as he is in some areas, he also takes risks that wannabes would want no part of. On a typical weekend ride, he expects everybody else in his pack to ride behind him in tight formation, and to follow his lead when he veers across a double yellow line to pass a car in the face of oncoming traffic. At 71, Barger still regularly cruises right atop the roadway’s center line—“as if to say, ‘I own this.’”