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They selected as their battleground the Fourth Annual Motorcycle Custom and Trade Show sponsored by the Cleveland Competition Club, an organization that unlike Hell's Angels, the Breed and sundry other outfits, is chartered by the American Motorcycle Association. Staged in a three-story brick hall in the heart of Cleveland's predominantly Polish Southeast side, the annual show is designed to brighten motorcycling's image, and has never witnessed as much trouble as a fistfight. The proceeds were to go to a crippled children's fund.
No Old Ladies. On the afternoon of the battle some 150 Breed members assembled at a ramshackle barn they had rented as a "repair shop for cycles" in Brunswick, a farming community about 15 miles south of Cleveland. Next door the Rev. Robert C. Hilkert watched with understandable alarm as male members of the gang piled into their jalopies, pickup trucks and a gray hearse. He asked two of the Breed's "old ladies" why they were not going to the show. "Father," one replied, "we don't ask our men questions." Explained a local gang leader: "When you go to a hassle, you don't take your old ladies with you."
Within an hour, the Breed battalion trundled into a parking lot near the building, quietly paid their entrance fees, and checked their walking sticks and canes (no check was made for concealed weapons). Marching two by two, military fashion, they surrounded the 60-by-90-ft. walled auditorium. Among those within their ring were about a dozen Angels watching over the gaudy bikes they had brought to display. As hints of a hassle spread, the floor began to clear. Soon another dozen or so Angels barged into the auditorium. As the band played Knock on Wood, a member of the Competition Club heard someone cry: "It's on!"
It was—with dreadful swiftness. Most spectators hardly knew what had happened until they saw blood spilling across the hall floor. One eyewitness, Leslie Morgan, thinks he saw the spark that touched off the battle. "I saw two Hell's Angels come up to a Breed and try to take his colors [jacket and club emblem] off. The Breed started yelling for help. They got his jacket down to his elbows; then one of the Angels pulled a knife from his belt and stabbed the Breed two or three times in the stomach. He fell screaming to the floor."
Dave Corwin, head of the three-man private guard force, later admitted: "We expected trouble, but nothing like that." As soon as he heard the scuffling, Corwin dashed into the auditorium. "The only knife I saw was the one coming at me," he recalled. "I nailed the guy with my nightstick and that was the last I saw of him. Anyone who put up a fight, we'd knock against the wall, throw down the stairs and out the door. That would take the fight out of them." Added off-duty Patrolman Thomas Burton: "I tried to break it up, but I was knocked down once and once I slipped on the blood. It was all over the place."