A Wayward Angel: The Full-Story of the Hell's Angels by the Former Vice-President of the Oakland Chapter

A Wayward Angel: The Full-Story of the Hell's Angels by the Former Vice-President of the Oakland Chapter, by George Wethern and Vincent Colnett. We all know about the Hell's Angels: toughs on Harleys terrorizing the law-abiding; wild brawls and wild sex; drugs and cruelty, beatings, and even murder. Their barbarism, we think, is horrifying, but it's also perversely fascinating, for there's an alluring freedom in such nihilism. Still, nobody knows what it's like to be an Angel except an Angel - an Angel like George Wethern, for many years the vice president of the Oakland Chapter.

Until he found himself in reluctant service to the courts, Wethern was the quintessential Angel, tough as they come, one of the most important drug dealers on the West Coast - a man who loved bikes, fights, women, and drugs; a man who knew the deepest secrets of Angel life. Arrested, strung out, in despair, he bought a precarious freedom by testifying in several major trials against Angel's members - and then disappeared into the witness protection program.

A Wayward Angel is a powerful book, not for the squeamish, and a vivid portrait of the chaos of late twentieth-century California, the awful collision of the drug scene and the alienation of modern life – a story uniquely American, terrifying because it's real. We witness killings, million-dollar drug deals, "picnics" that are nothing short of orgies, and the sometimes bizarre inner workings of the biker club.