Phil Cross: Gypsy Joker to a Hells Angel, page 5
I also took up martial arts around that time. I studied (along with Mark and Theo) with a guy named Bob Babich in San Jose. It was at Bob’s place that I met another future Hells Angel, Ted DeMello. The four of us studied with Bob for quite a few years. I also met Armond Bletcher there. He’d heard that I was a pretty good street fighter and that I worked out there. So one night he came in to watch me, which I wasn’t too sure I liked. He hung around for about ten minutes and left. I guess he figured I wasn’t a big threat. No one was really a big physical threat to Armond; he was gigantic and incredibly strong. Later on, we got to know each other and became really good friends.
After karate we’d go to the restaurant across the street to have a few beers. The place always put appetizers out, and we’d load up on them so we didn’t have to buy dinner—more money for beer.
One night a guy came in and robbed the place at gunpoint. The owner’s wife was working the register and just pulled out the drawer and handed it to him. When the owner saw what was going on, he made this funny squeak sound (Eep!), ran through the restaurant, grabbed the drawer, and kept running. The robber was so stunned he didn’t know what to do, so he left. It was pretty damn funny.
As I said, Armond and I were good friends. There are a lot of Armond Bletcher stories, but the one I always think of from my Joker days is the time Armond went with me to visit a guy I knew. Armond and I had been hanging out, and I told him I needed to stop by this house for a minute. It was going to be quick; I just needed to ask the guy a question. I got out of the car and went to the door, and Armond came with me. When the guy opened the door and saw Armond, he went as white as a ghost and his eyes literally bulged out. The dude slammed the door, and Armond busted through it. I could hear shit flying all over inside that house, so I didn’t bother going in. I figured screw it, he’s on his own. That guy must have really screwed up. A few minutes later, Armond and I were back in the car and heading off. I never did ask him what the fuck it was all about.
Bob Babich at his home at cocktail time.
Armond was a strong guy. The Jokers were riding down the street one afternoon, and we saw Armond coming the other way. We all stopped and he asked us where we were going. When we told him, he decided to join us and without getting off his bike, he just lifted it off the ground and spun it around right underneath of him. He was six foot three inches tall and pushing about 400 pounds. He could make a Harley look awful small.
I met Bill Thompson when I was a Gypsy Joker in 1968. Bill was a private investigator. I was in jail, charged with rape, and my attorney, Paul Mansfield, had called and asked Bill if he would do a background check on the girl I supposedly raped. I had an alibi, but the cops didn’t give a shit; they just figured that anyone I was with would lie for me. Bill hadn’t even had time to get to the jail to meet me yet when he got a call from a friend whose daughter, Mary, had been raped. Mary told Bill that she met a guy at a bar; he bought her a bunch of drinks, took her back to his place, raped her, and then took her back to the bar. She told Bill that the guy’s name was Phil Cross. Bill said, “Well, we a problem here because Phil Cross is in jail.” Mary agreed to show Bill where the rapist lived. After dropping Mary at home, Bill staked out fake Phil’s house. When he got back there, fake Phil was home and he wasn’t alone. Bill got set up in some low trees and waited. He still hadn’t met me, but he had a photo of me. After a few hours, a guy and girl came out of the apartment. Bill said the guy looked remarkably like the photo of me. They both got into the guy’s red 1949 Ford convertible and drove off, and, of course, Bill followed them.
My friends Bill and Donna Thompson.
Once she was alone, Bill talked to the girl, Sandra, and she told him that she had just been with Phil Cross and that he had taken her back to his apartment and raped her. Bill told her that she was wrong, that I was in police custody and had been for quite a while (it seemed like I lived in their custody in those days).
He and Sandra went to meet Mary, and he showed both of them the photos. They both agreed that I absolutely was not the rapist, and that the dude in the other photo was.
Next, Bill met with Paul and explained everything to him. Then Paul and Bill went to the district attorney’s office for a sit down with the prosecutor who had my case and the police department’s lead investigator on the case. After they had been looped in, they sent an investigator out to pick up both girls who were questioned extensively. Both of them said that I didn’t rape them, but that the other guy did.
Then they put both of the girls into a squad car, and they all drove to the dude’s apartment. When he opened his door, both girls were standing there and immediately identified him as the guy raped them and the apartment as the place where it happened. The authorities said OK and started to leave. Bill asked, “Aren’t you going to arrest the son of a bitch?” The prosecutor replied, “No, not until we get everything straightened out.” Paul told them that they had to cut me loose immediately, but I still had to go before a judge before I was released.
Fake Phil, the rapist, was in the courtroom when I walked in. I know the cops and the prosecutor didn’t haul his ass in there, so it had to be Bill and Paul who got him there. When the facts were presented to the judge, he banged his gavel and I was released. You should have seen the look on the prosecutor’s face. He was pissed. When the prosecutor turned and walked past fake Phil, who looked so scared you almost felt sorry for him (almost), he asked the prosecutor, “Are you going to arrest me?” The prosecutor said, “Nah, we don’t want you; we wanted him.” What an asshole!
I finally met Bill for the first time after I was released. We were both pissed that the real rapist was never arrested and that the authorities didn’t really care about those girls. So we paid that asshole a visit. I wanted him to be really clear on two things. He was never, ever to use my name again, and he was never to rape another girl. If I found out that he did either, he would live to regret it … but just barely.
Bill has joked over the years that working on my defense was darn near a full-time job.
Shortly after the whole mess with the rape charge, I went to lunch with Paul. We met at his office and took his new Cadillac to the restaurant. During the ride, Paul kept asking me how I liked all the details of his car. “How do you like the color? What do you think of the radio? Do you like the seats? Is the ride good?” After I answered yes about six times, I finally said, “Paul, it’s a great car; I like it.” Paul laughed and said, “That’s good because you paid for it.”
I rented a house in Redwood Estates for a while, and I had a party one night with a few other Jokers and my karate instructor, Bob Babich. It was really late, and there were only about five or six of us left, but everybody was really drunk. I had a .41 magnum and decided to pull it out and shoot a picture of the Zig-Zag man off the wall. So I threw off a couple of rounds, and this must have unnerved Bob Babich because a couple of minutes later he got up and graciously excused himself and hightailed it out of there. The party (meaning the drinking) went on until we all passed out. The next morning I woke up to knocking at the door. When I answered it, there was a young girl standing there. She had two black eyes and was holding a bullet in her hand. She stepped in and threw the spent bullet on the kitchen table and said, “I know you guys party hard, but you got to cool it.” I picked up the bullet and gave it back to her and told her, “You better keep this as a good luck charm.” Without a word, she took it and left.
My place was on a hillside and hers was below it. Apparently when I fired off those two rounds, one of them went into her attic, rattled around in there, and then went down into her bedroom and landed right between her sleeping eyes. I never heard from her or saw her again. Of course, after our first meeting, I couldn’t blame her for not wanting to get acquainted.
From the time that I started driving I started getting in trouble and I just kept getting in trouble. Finally my license got taken away for good. Once my friend Walt loaned me his license for the night. We looked similar and he didn’t have any warrants, so I thought it was a good deal until a traffic cop stopped me for speeding. When he ran the license, he arrested me. It turned out that there was a guy in Daly City who had exactly the same name as Walt, only he had a bunch of warrants. When I got to booking in San Jose, I had a serious problem.
Walt in the foreground and Snoopy Doug.
The cop who came in to do the fingerprinting and pat down knew me. “Hey Phil, you ready?” Oh hell yes (I was acting like John Q. Citizen, arms up, legs apart. See how cooperative I am for the pat down? Here’s my right hand; you can take my prints now).
The cop filling out the paperwork so that I could pay all the fines for asshole Walt from Daly City was about ten feet away and said, “Walt, you got the money for these fines?” Damn straight (John Q. again; I can’t wait to give it to you; it’s burning a hole in my pocket).
Larry, Jimmy, and Dave.
I was moving from cop to cop trying to keep them from talking to each other and trying to get things wrapped up fast. I needed to get out of there before one of them heard the other call me by the wrong name. That one was a little bit touchy.
It wasn’t until I got out of prison, almost eighteen years later, that I could drive legally.
At one of the concerts at San Jose State College, we were raising funds by charging money for giving rides to people. They were short rides, basically just a big circle. My friend Dave decided that he wanted to contribute to the cause. He hopped on the back of my bike but I started off too quick, he fell off the bike, and his leg got caught up in it. Back in those days my personality was such that I just had to drag him around a little bit. I thought it was hilarious. Dave, not so much, but he wasn’t hurt and got over it quickly.
I had a second incident where I dragged someone in Los Banos. There was a raised sidewalk in front of the bar we were at and the bar had swinging doors, like in the old west. I met this guy from Mexico who was a professional bullfighter. He wanted a ride on the bike and I said, “Hang on. I’ll bring one on in.” I rode my bike up over the sidewalk, through the open doors, and spun a doughnut on the dance floor. The bullfighter got on the back and I took off fast. I thought I was really going to impress this guy. Unfortunately, one of the guys who was supposed to be holding the doors open panicked and he let go. The damn door hit my hand, the bike did a wheelstand, the bullfighter fell partially off, and I dragged him out those doors, over the sidewalk and into the street. The guy wasn’t mad, but I don’t think he was the same for a few days. I doubt I contributed much to international relations.
The Red Barn was a bar on South Monterey Road. It was a big joint with a long, long bar. About twenty of us pulled in there one Friday night. The place was loaded, wall-to-wall people. When we walked in, right off the bat a bouncer came up to me and said he didn’t want us in there. He had some backup from other bouncers and patrons. I could see that this was going develop into something pretty nasty. This bouncer was really big, about 235 pounds, so I figured I needed to get the first shot in. I palmed him under his nose. The shock from it took him right off his feet, and he landed on a table, out cold. Then the fight broke out in earnest. All hell broke loose. Everybody in the joint was fighting, and shit was flying everywhere. I even saw one of the barstools fly the length of that bar, from one end to the other.
Then the bouncer came to, and he woke up really pissed and swinging hard. He was looking for any Gypsy Joker he could find. The fight moved into the parking lot, and when it had slowed down, my guys started firing up their bikes to go. Just as we all started to pull out, that bouncer came out with a barstool in his hand and swung it hard, hitting Apache square in the chest. Apache flew backwards off his bike, and the bike kept going without him. We all stopped, and a couple of guys took care of the bouncer while Apache got his shit together. I’ll bet that bouncer didn’t wake up so quickly the second time around. It would have been better if he had just served us a drink.
I WAS GOING INTO the Three Star Bar one night when one of my guys came and told me that he and a couple of the other guys had seen a Hells Angel walking down the street alone, so they grabbed him. We decided that we might be able to get some information from him that we could use to our benefit in the war, so we held him in a house for three days and just talked to him. We never beat him up or anything, just asked him questions. We figured that maybe he’d been out of state or something because he seemed so clueless, like he really didn’t know much about the war that was going on. We cut Gino loose on the third day and sent him on home. To this day, I don’t know if Gino was really that clueless or if he was just a good actor. Either way, we got nothing.
Bones using his dog Athena as a pillow.
I met Gino again ten or twelve years later when I was visiting my old friend Bones in Hawaii. It turned out that Gino was a friend of Bones and a good guy.
Speaking of Bones, he and I loved to ride the hell out of the streets of San Francisco, and I did it on a rigid.
We would go down a steep hill so fast that hitting the cross street would cause us to get airborne (up to thirty or forty feet) for the start of the next downhill run. We thought this was a blast and did it all the time when we were there. Once when we were doing this, a cop was pulling out of an alley when Bones and I sailed right over the hood of his car. I looked down and saw his neck craned so that he could look up at us through his windshield. He didn’t even bother to take chase. I really did like doing that kind of shit.
I had another interesting ride there, when I was racing one of the Frisco members. We crested a hill and I thought there would be another one. I looked over at my friend and he was slowing down; I figured he was quitting. Well, there was another hill all right, except the road didn’t go up; it went down, a long ways down. That was the longest jump I ever took, and I had a girl on the back of the bike. Her ass came so high off the bike that it was up at my shoulders. She had a death grip on my collar; it was the only thing that connected her to that motorcycle. We landed hard and the bike skipped left and right, and that old gal stayed on. It was a good thing that it was a long road; a short one and we would have been dead for sure. Luck was on our side that time; we decided not to go again.
Mount Hamilton was another ride we all liked a lot. We’d go about two thirds of the way up and spend the night. We went up there at least twice a month. The road going up there tested your riding skills; it’s treacherous, just sheer cliffs. The speed limit is like fifteen miles per hour, and they mean it. We’d go up there and camp (no tents), build a fire, guys would shoot off their guns, and we’d drink. We always went after the bars closed, but nobody ever got hurt. The area where we stayed is all fenced off now. They did that to keep us from going back there. It worked.
Money was a rare commodity for all of us in those days, and we didn’t take anyone backing out on a debt lightly. Buzz was owed some money, and the dude had been putting off paying him for way too long; it was time to collect. This dude was known as something of a bad ass, and also known to carry, so Gypsy Jack and I went along with Buzz as backup.
We headed over to the dude’s house only to find that he was throwing a party. When we went in, the party wasn’t in full swing yet, and the guy wasn’t even there. One of the guests told us he was out getting something (ice or booze or drugs, who knew) and that he was expected soon. Buzz was pissed because he figured it was his money paying for the party. We decided to wait, and so we rounded everyone up and herded them into an empty bedroom (it was about twelve-by-twelve feet). As more people showed up, Buzz opened the door and let them in, and I escorted them to the bedroom.
Gypsy Jack was responsible for keeping an eye on the partygoers in the bedroom, so he decided if he had to babysit, he was going to have some fun. He was in there with his thumbs stuck in the front of his belt, and he was pacing around the room with his chest all puffed out. He looked like a rooster strutting around the hen house. He had a great old time putting on the performance of a lifetime. At least the partygoers were getting some entertainment. We could hear Jack’s instructions in the other room. Shit, it sounded like something from a Jimmy Cagney movie: “ Nobody fucking moves, see? Everybody does what they’re told and nobody gets hurt, see? Anybody who doesn’t listen to me, well, you … do … not want to make that mistake!” It went on and on like that. Honest to God, I don’t know how he did it without laughing because Buzz and I thought it was the funniest damn thing we ever heard.
Buzz was always dapper, even without the derby.
Classic Gypsy Jack Nye.
Finally the little asshole that owed Buzz the money decided to show up to his own party (about damn time). When he walked in the door, we grabbed him. He had a sawed off double-barrel shotgun in his coat. After Buzz and I had relieved him of his weapon, Buzz got his money. Then we told everybody they could come out, it was party time, but not for us. We left.
The going rate for a babysitter in those days was about one dollar an hour, but that night Gypsy Jack was priceless.
During the war with the Hells Angels, we were going down to Monterey and stopped at a bar on Highway 1. We pulled up to a bar, parked our bikes, and went inside. There was pool table just inside the door, on the right. The first thing we saw was a lone Oakland Hells Angel playing pool.
There was a lull in the war at that time, but some of the guys were still pretty hot under the collar and wanted to go over and beat him up. I had heard that Boomer was a pretty good guy, and I didn’t think it was the right thing to do. I took the small group of instigators aside and told them to leave him alone. They listened to me. I knew I needed to keep an eye on things, so even though I wasn’t much of a pool player, I went over and shot a game with Boomer. He won and left. I found out just how right I was about Boomer after I became a Hells Angel and got to know him.
