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Q. And tell us what that change was.
A. It got to where . . . when somebody came to his house, he would open the door with a gun pointed on them. He got really paranoid and spooky . . . shooting spiders off the wall.
In the evening, defendants out on bail resume normal routines as best they can. Anita Musick, 38, drives back to the East Bay to the El Portal Motel. "This is the way racketeers live," she says of the shab by two rooms with kitchen and bath unit. Clothes for court hang on the shower rod. Her biggest mistake seems to have been falling in love with a succession of heavy-duty Hell's Angels and being the kind of woman who will help anyone, any time, no matter what he has done. "The night of the arrest," she says, "I was vacuuming and trying to get a splinter out of my toe. I thought it was a bad joke, people out side shouting, 'Open up! Federal agents.' This big crowd rushed in. They took my wedding pictures and they thought the rice was dope. They threatened I would never see my daughter again unless I turned state's witness. Would you like to see the cellar, where they claim there was a silencer factory?"
In Oakland, on the flatland side of Golf Links Road, Sharon Barger, 30, genuinely beautiful, a former Miss Livermore, looks pained when someone remarks on her new front door. "They broke down all our doors," she says. The Barger house, described by the press as "an armed camp," is a five-room bungalow. Sharon's biggest mistake seems to have been an abiding loyalty to her husband, the legendary Sonny Barger. Sonny, now 41, led the Angels through the glory days of the '60s: fighting in bars, terrorizing small towns, dropping acid with Ken Kesey, assaulting antiwar demonstrators. He was their leader during the Altamont rock concert killing. Sonny spent four years of the '70s in prison on a drug conviction and is the star defendant of the current case. "My Sonny has been a member 23 years this month," says Sharon.
These days Barger's context is the courtroom and the San Francisco County Jail where he is held in lieu of $1 million cash bail. Both he and the prosecutors trace the roots of the present case to "the Zerby bombing." William Zerby is a former drug agent who was obsessed with nailing the Angels and was deafened in 1978 by a planted bomb. The newer, younger Hell's Angels turned meaner while Sonny was in jail. "Things changed. The whole world's meaner," he says. Sonny Barger has no regrets — except maybe about the antiwar demonstrators. "I done exactly what I wanted to do, but I haven't done racketeering and murder," he says. "There's been Hell's Angels convicted of murder, but that was on a one-to-one basis, not club policy." — Jane O'Reilly