HIGHWAY TO HELL

THERE ARE MANY SHELVES OF BOOKS about the Hell’s Angels, the country’s largest and best-known motorcycle gang, but few about its second most influential, the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, based down a dead-end street in Milwaukee (where a protruding middle finger is painted on the building’s outside wall, pointed directly Downtown). You Gotta Be Dirty, by Michael Grogan, traces the club from its origins in the 1960s to the long-running federal racketeering investigation that laid the club low in the early 2000s. While in full operation, the “OMC” engaged in frequent violence against women, the book claims, and relied upon a playbook of robberies, killings and, in latter years, bombings that police labeled domestic terrorism. Grogan’s account is well-sourced, if a bit cluttered at times, and invaluable as a history of the

Outlaws and some of the cops who fought them.