COVER STORY

How the Pagans Bested the Mob

A former member of the Pagans tells how an attack against the South Philly mob helped create a biker legend.

by John Hall

And there He sat.

Horned and cross-legged, and holding His flaming sword like a cross. The grim image of Dark Surt, embroidered under the name on the backs of the sleeveless blue denim vests that we wore over our well-worn black leather motorcycle jackets.

Frank Friel, the head of the Philadelphia Police-FBI Organized Crime Task Force, called us the most “violence prone motorcycle gang in America.”

We called ourselves “the Pagans,” the baddest of the ass-kicking, beer-drinking, hell-raising, gang-banging, grease-covered, roadkill-eating, 1960s motorcycle clubs, chromed cavaliers and swastika- studded scooter jockeys.

Spawned on the marshy flatlands of Southern Maryland, we were a band of motorized highwaymen who ruled the roads from the Pine Barrens of Long Island and New Jersey to the glistening moonlit peaks of the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains. Across the Dutch farmlands of Pennsylvania and down the Great Valley of Virginia, in the back alleys of the old steel, mining, railroad and paper-mill towns of the Appalachian rustbelt, it was all Pagan country.

By the late ’70s we had wormed our way from the wide-open roads and cornfields of Dutch country clear down to the narrow streets and crowded stalls of the Italian Market in South Philly, where some of the brothers were getting caught up in the shadowlands of the Philadelphia underworld and popping up on the radar screens of Frank Friel and his FBI task force.

The shit finally hit the fan on a March morning in 1980, when someone put a gun to the head of Angelo Bruno, the man they called the Gentle Don because he believed he could run a criminal empire by peace and persuasion rather than violence and coercion. When the gunman squeezed the trigger, Bruno’s head burst into a river of blood, and so did the streets of Philadelphia. All peace and persuasion died with Bruno and the city was engulfed in the most violent crime war in American history.

Physically, Scarfo was little more than a dwarf, but he had the ambition of a giant. He dreamed of becoming the biggest crime czar in America, ruling an empire that stretched from the sunny casino-studded boardwalk of Atlantic City to the dingy smoke-filled backroom betting parlors in the bars and clubs of Scranton and Wilkes-Barre.

Gambling, drugs, entertainment, extortion, labor unions, construction firms, trucking companies, vending machines: from tattoo parlors and pizza joints to pool halls and massage parlors, whatever the enterprise, legal or illegal, he wanted to run them all.

In building his empire Little Nicky did not have the patience of the Gentle Don. He believed that there were quicker and more efficient means of putting people in line than peace and persuasion. From his throne room in the back of a rundown warehouse on South Bancroft Street, Little Nicky issued an edict demanding that every drug monger, bookmaker, tattoo artist, titty-bar owner, pizza twirler and chop-shop grease monkey in Philadelphia pay tribute for the privilege of doing business on the streets of his empire.

To collect this tax he dispatched a band of thugs, who determined the rate by how scared their victims looked and how much they thought they could squeeze out of them. Those who didn’t pay were beaten senseless with baseball bats, usually on the open street, as a warning to Little Nicky’s other subjects who might prove recalcitrant. But when Nicky’s tax collectors paid a call on the Pagans, the bearded bikers did not look scared at all. In fact, they laughed right in the faces of Scarfo’s clean-shaven wops.

Little Nicky considered this an insult, and he ordered his enforcers to teach these rude cycle-bums a lesson they would not soon forget. But Scarfo’s stooges wanted no part of the chain-wielding Pagans.

They told Scarfo that these guys were even crazier than the Mulignanes and that there was no telling how they might retaliate. So nothing was done; the dispute settled into a stalemate, with Little Nicky seething in his warehouse and the Pagans doing pretty much whatever they wanted all over Philadelphia.

Fortified with the kind of courage that comes out of a bottle, Scarfo’s drunken underboss rammed his car into the bike and sent the Pagan sprawling into the street. While he was lying in a hospital bed, the Pagan was visited by his bike-riding brethren. One of them found an accident report lying on the table next to the bed where the police had left it. When he picked it up, the name Salvatore Merlino jumped up in his face. Underneath Merlino’s name was a South Philadelphia address.

“Look at this,” he said, as he began stabbing the paper with his finger right under the address. He then passed it around the room, and his bearded brethren all began grinning as they read it.

The next night a band of Pagans pulled up at the address of the house on the accident report and shot more than 200 rounds of ammunition through the walls, windows and doors, while Merlino’s terrified mother crouched on the floor, peeing herself under a shower of lead and glass.

As Detective Friel later put it: “The incident went unavenged. This brazen insult to the majesty of the Men of Honor was never punished. The Mafia bullies had been bullied by the bike-riding bullies and backed down.”

In fact, Scarfo’s people ultimately coughed up $5,000 for bike repairs and hospital bills.

Years later I met the Pagan who orchestrated the attack on Merlino’s home. It was a fluke encounter. I was working as a bartender. He walked in and ordered a drink. We recognized each other’s tattoos, and we both asked the same question: “Who the hell are you?”

He was a leader of the Pagans during the Philadelphia mob wars in the early ’80s. I went by the name “Stoop” and ran the New York club back in the late ’60s.

He told me about the war with the Dwarf Don and about the attack on Merlino’s home. Actually it wasn’t really Merlino’s home, the guy told me. It was his mother’s. The guy had put her address on his driver’s license to confuse the cops, but he had confused the Pagans instead.

“‘Who’s a-dare? Who’s a-dare!’ we heard her screaming right before we started firing.” We both laughed.

Then I told him that I had been the leader of the New York Pagans from 1967 to 1969. He was as interested in my story as I was in his.

“I always really regretted that I wasn’t a member back in those days,” he said. “You guys back in the ’60s were crazy. I missed all that. But those were the days when you guys did the shit that the Legend was hatched from. In fact, it was the shit you guys did back then that helped guys like me scare the shit out of those greaseballs later on.”

We talked some more about gang wars and about the ’60s. Then the place closed. He left, and I began to clean up. I thought about what he said.

“Crazy?”

Sure, we got into some shootings and serious shit. But most of it was just good clean fun, like drinking beer all night and standing up on the seat of your motorcycle, drunk and without a helmet, at 3 in the morning, while you blew every red light in sight.

Dawn coming up over a line of motorcycles on the front lawn of the clubhouse, and a bunch of brothers covered with stale beer, blood, barroom dust and road grease, all curled up with their old ladies on damp and dirty mattresses on the floor of the clubhouse basement.

Beating a bar full of citizens unconscious with chains and rendering the place to splinters in a matter of minutes—and for what? Because somebody said the wrong thing to a brother who couldn’t even remember what was said the next morning. Walking into a courtroom with black leather jackets, knee-high boots, earrings, chrome chains and swastikas, then sneering through your beard at a jury of straight citizens and defying them to convict you.

And all of you getting handcuffed together and carted off to jail in the end, howling and laughing about it like all hell, but not having put a dime in your pocket. Then getting out and scraping together gas and beer money so you could do it all over again.

Crazy?

Maybe he had a point.

But it wasn’t Harley-Davidson that made the Legend; it was the people who rode them during a time when Harley-Davidson was working hard to disassociate itself from the people who were building the Legend that later saved the company from bankruptcy.

The Legend that transformed country music singers from crooning cowboys into longhaired rednecks. The Legend that transformed the fashion industry so that middle-aged professionals no longer went to country clubs dressed like Johnny Carson on weekends but instead dressed up like ’60s outlaw bikers, with bandannas, denim vests and knee-high leather boots as they putted around the block on $40,000 machines.

And the Legend that enabled outlaw bikers to displace Nazis as the No. 1 bad guys popping up in the neurotic nightmares of suburban middle-class Americans.

Crazy?

I thought about all of this as I washed the beer glasses, wiped the bar, pulled up the rubber mats and began mopping the floor. Soon I forgot what I was doing and started thinking about a lost time when things were different.

A time before helmet and drunk-driving laws. A time when America was still half-free. A time when the Jersey Meadowlands wasn’t a sports complex but a real meadowlands with grass and flowers that we roared past on the way to Pennsylvania. A time when Reading wasn’t the world’s largest factory outlet, but a real hard-ass Pennsylvania Dutch working town with mills and breweries and railroad yards.

A time when my buddy Blackie wasn’t dead and decomposing under a black granite tombstone behind a factory, but riding past that same cemetery with the sun in his face, the wind in his hair, and a black pointed beard like a Persian caliph. A time when Jane wasn’t yet a grandmother, but when her own kids were just out of diapers and she herself was still an auburn-haired little Pennsylvania Dutch teen angel with soft green eyes and the sweetest little Dutch futz that ever warmed the passenger seat-pad on a chopped hog.

I was thinking about all this, and suddenly everything was changed. Changed utterly. The place no longer smelled like stale beer and it wasn’t dark and late on a winter’s night. No. Now the sun was shining brightly in the late morning sky, and everything smelled like fresh spring grass as a pack of custom choppers roared through Jersey and Pennsylvania in a blur of chrome, polished candy apple lacquer, black leather, blue denim, grease, sweat, exhaust fumes, long hair, beards and swastikas.

The sun was shining in our faces, Dark Surt was grinning on our backs and the Pagans were on the run.

I was back in 1967. The year the Legend of the Pagans was born.