Organizations: Requiem for an Angel

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Greeks burned their dead heroes on great funeral pyres; Vikings launched their mourned leaders seaward in great ships. What funeral rites should assist a leather-jacketed motorcycle chieftain of California's hell-raising Hell's Angels to his grave? The problem arose last week after James T. Miles, 30, died in a head-on collision between his motor cycle and a truck in Oakland, Calif.

Not that Miles had been a very great chief. He was only the former leader of

Sacramento's Hell's Angels, a branch of the Los Angeles organization. When the state attorney general cracked down on their rampaging rallies, Miles protested. "The stories spread about our wild sex and marijuana parties," he said, "are exaggerated. If we even tried, the cops might swoop down and bust it up. They harass us, they spread lies and call us bad seeds." Then last May he hauled down the Sacramento Angels' emblem—a death's-head wearing a helmet and wings—and departed for Oakland to seek "a better life," free from "police harassment."

Briefly he surfaced this fall when he was arrested, along with three other Angels, and accused of raping two teen-age girls—charges that were later dropped. The newspaper announcement after his fatal accident said simply, "Friends are respectfully invited to attend the funeral services," but it became a rallying cry. Into Sacramento roared nearly 300 motorcyclists, including such normally dissident groups as the Hangmen, Grossmen, Gladiators, Falcons, Thunderbirds, Mofos and Marauders. In homage, all wore their club insignia; many sported earrings, German Iron Crosses and Nazi swastikas.

But for all the turnout of cops, the mourners were a somber, sober lot. "We called him 'Mother,' " explained a fellow cyclist. "He was so righteous. Any time there was a party, he was the first one there and the last to leave." When the "chicks" in leather boots and dark tights, usually proud of their toughness, saw the open casket with Miles's "colors," a sleeveless jacket bearing the Hell's Angels' emblem, they sobbed. Only after the funeral oration, when the coffin was placed in the hearse, did the sound that Miles lived and died by suddenly deafen the bystanders as the cortege gunned its way to the cemetery. "We wanted to see he got a proper burial," explained one sorrowing Angel. "Mother would have wanted it this way."