anderswolleck

Sonny Barger is best known as the founder and President of the Hells Angels Motorcycle club. But now that hes published four books with the latest being, Freedom: Credos from the Road, you will have to add author to that.

Freedom is quite different from his previous books, Hell's Angel a history of the club, Ridin' High, Livin' Free a collection of true stories, modern myths, and biker tales and his first novel Dead in 5 Heartbeats.

Freedom is presented in the form of 50 credos in which Sonny articulates many of the principles he employs in his own life.

Buy Freedom: Credos from the Road

Daniel Robert Epstein: The book really reminded me of Sun Tzu's The Art of War. Was that an inspiration at all?

Sonny Barger: I never read The Art of War. But Freedom is basically my thoughts.

DRE: So it's your thoughts and philosophies?

SB: I guess you could call it philosophies. It's just my thoughts on how you have to live your life and to improve yourself.

DRE: When you were writing the book, did you discover things about your outlook on life that you didn't realize?

SB: I don't think so. I've been living everything in the book all my life and it just boils down to, if you treat people the way you want to be treated and you do everything the way you want things done to you, this is how life will come out.

DRE: Obviously youve been involved with violence in your life and it doesn't seem like you advocate violence but that you sometimes feel that its necessary.

SB: It's definitely necessary if somebody doesn't respect your rights. I don't believe anybody should just go out and be violent and do violent things but I've always believed, that as a last resort, violence has to be used. I'm not the kind of guy that turns the other cheek or let somebody slap me and get away with it.

DRE: Is it a last resort for the rest of the people in the club as well?

SB: How can I talk for them? I don't know how much somebody's going to take before they react. I don't think any of us want violence. When it is forced upon us we react.

DRE: Do you think your book would help someone in, lets say, a small business in Kansas?

SB: I hope it would help everybody.

DRE: A big part of your book is the fact that people are so much ruder now, it seems like Im just discovering just how thoughtless and rude people are.

SB: I think Americans are the rudest now than they've ever been. It's totally ridiculous how they are but when you get back to the bottom line, I personally believe that it's the lack of violence that did it. Parents, for years now, have not been allowed to spank or discipline their children and their children have grown up to be complete jerks.

DRE: So maybe having them slapped around might have helped them out?

SB: I don't think you need to beat a kid and make him black and blue but I think a child growing up needs to be disciplined. It's so bad today if you just look at your child like you're going to discipline them, they say "touch me and I'm calling the cops." Then when they're 16 years old, they grab a gun and murder somebody, who do they want to put in jail for it? The parents. I was spanked when I was a kid. I didn't take a machine gun to school and kill my enemies. When I had an enemy at school I took him out back and tried to beat him up.

DRE: That's certainly better than what a lot of kids are doing

SB: Exactly and if I came home crying about it then my dad spanked me.

They think they can do anything and get away with it. It's like I've always said about when I was in prison in California, the recidivism rate of a guy in prison is very polite and honorable. If you walk up on two people talking you stop and make your presence known before you walk into the conversation. You have to wait to see if you're invited. If you step between two people talking, you excuse yourself. You live five or ten years like that in prison and you come out and the first thing you do is you go to a bar to have a drink and some guy walks up to you, spills a beer on you, pushes you out of the way, steps on your toe walking by and then says "F-you!" and you stab him so theres your recidivism rate.

DRE: I thought it was interesting what you said about how prison helped your discipline. Is it different for someone who wouldn't have the protection in a prison the way you did?

SB: Because of who I am and my friends in there you can't say whether it made it easier or harder. A guy in prison who ain't bothering anybody is not going to get bothered. People are not really preyed upon in prison. Everybody's doing their own time basically and if you start getting involved in drug deals and doing things like that, then it becomes a whole different game. But if you're in there doing your time, trying to get out then nobody really wants to bother you. Other people want to get out and do their time also.

It makes me laugh because this guy, whose name I can't even remember, killed this guy in Modesto and they found him guilty of first degree murder and sent him to death row. The newscasters here in Arizona were talking about what a tough time he's going to have in prison. That newscaster has no idea what he's talking about. That guy's on death row. You know what they call that? Dead man walkin'. Whenever he's out of his cell, he's under armed guard escort. There isn't anybody in the world that could get to him if they wanted to.

DRE: People just seem to have no clue.

SB: Especially the newscasters. They just want to say something smart, like they're in the know about what's going on.

DRE: Is the world any ruder in the age of George W. Bush?

SB: I don't think it's because Bush is president. I think it's because of the way the American people are. The American people have given up so many of their rights and freedoms for what they believe is protection from the police. It's totally ridiculous. I don't think it has a thing to do with the president. Even if it did, Bush hasn't been in office long enough to make a difference as far as people being rude.

DRE: Do you believe in the idea of police at all?

SB: Oh yeah! We are probably more law-oriented than the average citizen. We believe in law and order. We know that you can't function without law and order but the law has to be applied evenly to everybody. Today the police, not all of them but enough to make it a problem, decide in their mind whether the person is guilty or innocent. When they do that they are no longer police officers, they become vigilantes which we dont have to accept.

DRE: Since writing all these books, have you garnered more respect from people who may not have respected you before?

SB: I dont care whether they respect me or not. They just better treat me like I want to be treated or stay away from me.

DRE: With the Freedom book, did you work with an editor to help streamline it or anything like that?

SB: You have to remember, I'm really not a writer. I have two guys Keith and Kent Zimmerman who are two twin brothers that have been my co-writers on all of my books. Basically what I do is talk it into a tape recorder and then we sit down and try to put it in some kind of order. Then we correct it. Then they rewrite it. Then I correct it. Then we can send it to the publisher. Everybody gets a share of the money. I get a very small amount.

DRE: How did writing your first novel, Dead in 5 Heartbeats change your perspective on writing?

SB: After Hell Angels I was lucky enough that it was an international best seller and that Fox bought the movie rights and are making a movie out of it. That opened the door for the publishing companies to buy more books from me; although they haven't been the phenomenon the first book was. But they're keeping me alive. I was able to close my motorcycle store so for the last few years I've just made a living writing books which is really nice because I get to travel around. Now I'm getting paid to ride my motorcycle and have fun.

DRE: How is the movie of Hell Angels book going?

SB: When I talked to Tony Scott, the director, about a month or so ago, he felt that they would start production of it in early spring of '06. My novel, Dead in 5 Heartbeats, is in the works right now for a movie also.

DRE: Do you know who's directing that?

SB: No but there's people who will write the script on spec.

DRE: How involved do you want to be with the Tony Scott film?

SB: I'm not a movie person. I know absolutely nothing about movies. If you want a good movie I think you need to leave it up to Hollywood.

DRE: Are you a Tony Scott fan?

SB: I like some of the things he's done but the thing I like best about him is that he's ridden motorcycles since he was 14 years old.

DRE: He and his brother are real mans men.

DRE: Do they know who's going to play you in the Tony Scott movie yet?

SB: No, I don't know that.

DRE: Do you have any preference?

SB: I have no preference because again that's a Hollywood choice. I don't know who the draw is on the money side. I don't know who the most popular actor is. They're playing me from a young to an older age and they can make a younger guy look old but they can't make an older guy look young. So it has a lot to do with all of that stuff and thats the directors job and that's what he gets paid for.

DRE: Do you travel much outside of America?

SB: I've been to Japan four times. I've been to Europe I don't know how many times. I love to travel. I'm always happy to get home but I like to get out there.

DRE: Do you take the bike out in Europe?

SB: I borrow one while Im there.

DRE: How much different is it to ride there?
SB: The places where you ride on the wrong side of the street are quite a bit different. One thing I learned is you always put somebody in front of you. When you're trying to make a right turn from a left lane into oncoming traffic, you don't want to make a mistake.

DRE: I read that on your 2000 book tour you still had police following you around.

SB: Yeah, but their job is to protect me. I'm a citizen of America. They need to protect me.

DRE: You don't feel like they're trying to persecute you?

SB: They're not persecuting me. In Oregon they went into a bookstore there and told the people that they shouldn't have me because we killed a guy at the last bookstore. That was totally false. But thats just individual jerks within police departments. Their policy is to follow me around, take pictures of everybody Im with and see who's doing what. If they got the money to do that and if the taxpayers want to spend their dollars doing that then I guess that's fine with me.

DRE: You said you only fight when you're provoked. Why is it that you're treated in that fashion?

SB: They have a whole different outlook on life than I do. They write things down and they believe the things they write down. When the new shift comes on and gets what's been written down, they believe that too.

DRE: Whats your next book about?

SB: Its a novel called Six Chambers, One Bullet with the same hero from my first novel, Patch Kinkade. We're going to try to write a novel a year for the rest of my life. Hopefully if its good enough they'll make a movie of it every year. Louis L'Amour wrote I don't know how many westerns and I think John Wayne made about 60 of them into movies. Wouldn't it be nice if Sonny Barger could do that with Patch Kinkade?

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck