Jarrod Gilbert: How American bikers influenced NZ street gangs

A Hells Angels member in New Zealand in 1969. The gang's first chapter to be established outside the United States was in Auckland. Photo / NZ Herald

Opinion

OPINION

Last week, on the Fourth of July, the United States celebrated its Independence Day. It was one such celebration over a long weekend back in 1947 that would fundamentally change New Zealand’s gang scene.

Gangs have existed in New Zealand since at least colonial times. A review of old newspaper articles reveals a number of tales, including one from the early 1900s of young gang members who had an initiation ceremony involving putting urine – both horse and human – in new members’ hats. Each to their own.

But gangs as we know them today stem directly from events during the Fourth of July celebrations in the small US town of Hollister, California, where a motorcycle event had been planned. Along with the scores of serious competitors, groups of rebellious motorcyclists – made up largely of ex-servicemen out of World War II – attended too. They had aggressive names like the Booze Fighters, Satan’s Sinners and, my personal favourite, the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington.

These raucous elements leered up and created significant community concern but, more importantly, they created headlines all across America and, largely via Life magazine, around the world, too. It’s widely accepted now that the media reports were overblown, one of the photos used in Life was staged, but regardless the hype around rebellious bikers was pivotal.

Alarmed by the bad publicity, the American Motorcycle Association is said to have decried the young bikers as “outlaws”, saying that just 1 per cent of motorcycle riders were making the other 99 per cent look bad. The bikers loved the sound of that. They began calling themselves outlaw motorcycle clubs and stitching diamond-shaped 1% badges on the front of their vests. On the back were large patches with their names, their territory and a logo. They formalised an internal hierarchy: a president, a vice-president, a sergeant-at-arms, and a secretary and/or treasurer.

Inspired by the events at Hollister, The Wild One, a Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin movie, was released at the end of 1953. The rebellious biker was suddenly cool.

Black Power members in 1979. The outlaw motorcycle gang has its origins in a Fourth of July parade in California in 1947. Photo / Roger Gilchrist

With a remarkable degree of uniformity – in physical appearance and organisational structure – these outlaw clubs spread throughout California, around America and then the world.

That they came to New Zealand is not remarkable – they eventually arrived everywhere – but they arrived strangely early. For example, the Hells Angels, one of the oldest outlaw clubs in America, formed a chapter in Auckland in 1960. It was the first chapter outside California. It was an early example of US globalisation. We would see the Hells Angels “death head” backpatch logo in our suburbs long before we could see the golden arches of McDonald’s.

While the Angels’ establishment in New Zealand fundamentally changed the motorcycle gang scene, it was a subsequent development that had the biggest impact and made this country’s gang scene unique.

The early outlaw clubs that copied the Hells Angels set up in the major cities and larger towns, raised hell and rival groups fought one another. But the common enemy of the outlaw clubs was the growing number of street gangs. This is where it gets interesting.

In the late 1960s, a young street gang called the Stormtroopers put on backpatches and adopted the same structure as the outlaw clubs. Other gangs – notably the “Mongrels” – were appalled. The bikers were the enemy and to look like them was heresy.

But the younger members disagreed, and the Mongrel Mob backpatch was born. Black Power formed around this time, and they too adopted the look and structure of the outlaw clubs. And boom, just like that, street gangs in New Zealand were uniformed and organised. That didn’t happen anywhere else in the world.

While outlaw motorcycle clubs populate swaths of countries around the world, only in New Zealand are the street gangs wearing backpatches. As is the case internationally, street gangs are far and away more numerous than the bikers, but the street gangs are far better disguised within communities.

The upshot of this, of course, is that New Zealand’s gang scene is highly visible.

This visibility creates community concern because we can readily see our gangs. It also creates a number of benefits, because we can readily see our gangs. This raises curious issues in relation to past attempts – and current suggestions – to ban gang patches. I will write about that in a future column.

For now, it’s enough to know that New Zealand’s gang scene is distinct from others around the world, but the very genesis of it can be traced to the strange goings-on in a tiny Californian town decades ago.

· Dr Jarrod Gilbert is the director of Independent Research Solutions and a sociologist at the University of Canterbury.