Pagan's Motorcycle Club |
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Wikipedia: Pagan's Motorcycle Club
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History
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's Pagan's Motorcycle Club page on 1 May 2020, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Pagan's Motorcycle Club, or simply The Pagans, is an outlaw motorcycle club formed by Lou Dobkin in 1959 in Prince George's County, Maryland, United States. The club rapidly expanded and by 1959, the Pagans, originally clad in blue denim jackets and riding Triumphs, began to evolve along the lines of the stereotypical one-percenter motorcycle club.
The Pagans are categorized as an outlaw motorcycle gang by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). They are known to fight over territory with the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club (HAMC) and other motorcycle clubs. They are active on the East Coast of the U.S. states: Delaware, Florida, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Virginia, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Puerto Rico.
The Pagans were established in Prince George's County, Maryland, by then-president Lou Dobkin, beginning in 1957 and officially organized in 1958. The group started out wearing denim jackets with embroidered insignia instead of the more standard three-piece patches utilized by most OMGs, and riding both American and British motorcycles, Harley-Davidsons and Triumphs. Originally they were a "brotherhood of 13 motorcyclists. In the 1960s they adopted a formal constitution and formed a governing structure, choosing a national president whom was paid the same amount as the U.S. President, which worked out to a $100,000 salary per year. and calling the gesture "a show of class."
They were a fairly non-violent group until 1965. After gaining a swelling mass of new members which put the Pagans on the path to evolve into an outlaw motorcycle gang (OMG). It was largely a semantic gesture made after they gathered at a motorcycle race in Maryland; the ensuing incident found them branded as "The 1% of motorcyclists whom caused problems" in local newspapers. The Pagans then both invented and adopted the 1%er patch, referencing the newspaper articles of the time. This 1%er patch quickly adopted by most other OMGs.
With ties to other organized crime groups, the Pagans quickly became dominant in the Mid-Atlantic region. They were the only large OMG in that region as well as a large portion of the Northeast USA. Their growth under the leadership of John "Satan" Marron, saw the Pagans grow to nearly 5,000 members in the early 1970s. Their "Mother Club" is never in a fixed location, but it has been generally located in the northeast. The Pagans' top echelon of leadership must always number 13 members. There are also chapter presidents, with the largest chapter at times located in the Philadelphia area.
Though primarily concentrated in the northeast and mid-Atlantic, the Pagans began expanding into Florida in the 1990s and west, with chapters beyond the Mississippi River. The Pagans have grown slowly through a natural cycle of attrition in the smaller OMGs, the practice of patching over other chapters or entire clubs. The practice of incorporating smaller OMGs was prevalent from the 1970s to the early 1990s.
The Pagans MC patch depicts the Norse fire-giant Surtr sitting on the sun, wielding a sword, plus the word Pagan's [sic], in red, white and blue. The image of Surtr was taken from an illustration by Jack Kirby in issue 97 of the comic book Journey into Mystery.
Though historically not wearing a bottom rocker, a patch denoting the location of where a one-percenter bike club is based, the Pagan Motorcycle club has since started wearing an "East Coast" insignia on their vests.
Members wear blue denim vests called cuts or cutoffs with club patches, known as colors, on the front and back.
