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Book Review: Federal agent's undercover look misses the mark
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Published: October 25, 2009
NO ANGEL: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hell's Angels. By Jay Dobyns and Nils Johnson-Shelton. Random House. 352 pages. $25.95.
Bob Dylan said, "To live outside the law you must be honest." Mick Jagger said, "Every cop is a criminal and all the sinners, saints." Both quotes are poetry, not gospel, but this book indicates that there is much truth in each. I don't want to dismiss this book, even though it is not well written and suffers from a fundamental dishonesty. After 308 pages of "Hells Angels; threat or menace?" we get a five-page epilogue disclosing that the author's 21-month undercover investigation led to no convictions.
This book is interesting, at least as sociology, but one would have preferred a little more history and a lot less histrionics. There was a ghost writer, Nils Johnson-Shelton, and I suppose he did as well as could be expected. According to Dobyns, he did not go rogue, did not indulge in illicit drugs, but was so cranked up on over-the-counter pep pills and alcohol that, by his own admission, his sanity was shaken and his marriage destroyed. There is quite an amount of wordage concerning Dobyns' tattoo collection, seemingly a counter-productive obsession for a federal agent for the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau.
The lure of the outlaw life has a strong pull for most people; perhaps Americans are more susceptible to that siren song than those of other nations. From the Long Hunters to the Outlaw Bikers, significant portions of the American people have lived outside the law, by choice, not by necessity. In other lands, whole nations have found themselves forced outside the law, such as Kurds, Cossacks, Gypsies and Jews at some times and so on. And every country has drug addicts and bandits, but only in a tolerant, rich culture can thousands of people adopt uniforms and behaviors designed to offend the masses of people.
Industries rise up to support these outlaws; motorcycle chopper builders, dope-pipe makers, purveyors of offensive music, tattoo artists; no one could categorize them all. Within recent memory, the most vital school of country music was called "Outlaw Country." People lived and died for that label.
People every night live and die for their love of motorcycles, for some inarticulate vision of freedom. Other people live and die in their determination to force the outlaws back within the realms of law and convention. It's a fascinating struggle, and one that Dobyns seems to not have grasped, even when that struggle was raging within his stressed-out mind.
In many ways, this book is a more or less real manifestation of Philip K. Dick's masterpiece, A Scanner Darkly. That book, a classic, should be required reading. This book? Not so much. Worth reading, but with several grains of salt. It does contain a sympathetic portrait of Ralph "Sonny" Barger, the president of the Hells Angels, who, against all the odds, may well die of old age. And who will write his obituary?
Steve Wishnevsky is a writer who lives in Winston-Salem.
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