Just a Shot Away

by Saul Austerlitz

  Goodwin saw Gimme Shelter as a critique directed at his own generation: “There’s no way to escape the image on the screen, nor any way to deny its truth. We blew it at Altamont.… Gimme Shelter lets us watch ourselves blowing it, and makes us understand how and why.” This was, for Goodwin, more than a metaphysical statement; it was the author’s take on the violence at Altamont. The Angels’ violence was met with a rhetorical shrug, while the audience’s violence was decried: “There’s been a lot of weight put on the Angels for the Altamont debacle, and while there’s no question that the Angels were beating on people, the film clearly shows that the flower children were putting out their own psychic violence. Everybody, Hells Angels and hippies, were striking out that day, and nobody gets any brownie points. The Angels were more overt about it, of course, but that’s the way Angels are.”

  Contrary to the eyewitness testimony in the Rolling Stone Altamont issue, Goodwin was convinced that Hunter had pointed his gun at the stage, and understood the day’s events accordingly: “We’ll never know for certain what was going to happen, but under the circumstances the Angels who brought him down seem rather more like heroes than villains.” Even the possibility that the Hells Angels had overreacted was dismissed. Hunter had sought death by bringing out his gun, and he had found it: “If you’re going to bring down a cat with a gun, you’d better do it right the first time, because if you don’t you won’t get a second chance. That’s a hard thing to say, but it’s a true thing.” Even Rolling Stone, which had presented eyewitness testimony (soon to be contested) that Hunter had been stabbed before brandishing his weapon, was now upending the narrative and suggesting that the Angels had served as protectors of an unruly and defiant crowd.

  For Goodwin, Gimme Shelter was a first stage in the process of accepting the traumas of the recent past, and moving past them. “No purpose will be served by pretending Altamont didn’t happen—the only way to salvage it is to work it through, encompass it, and transform it. That’s what Gimme Shelter is for, and that’s why you should see it. It’s not easy, but the important things never are.” Goodwin understood that Gimme Shelter’s depiction of Altamont posed a mortal threat to the counterculture’s understanding of itself, and asked its viewers—his friends and compatriots—to accept the critique, internalize it, and overcome it with love and humility.

  Goodwin’s endorsement of Gimme Shelter was simultaneously a call to contemplation and a partial defense of Meredith Hunter’s killers. The fraught question of what to make of the Hells Angels—friends or foes? Killers or protectors?—would hang over the other Altamont-themed colloquium of late 1970, in which the subject of Meredith Hunter’s death would at last be addressed in a court of law.

  13. Spontaneous Declaration

  “Don’t say ‘nigger’ in my office.” Bob Roberts, president of the San Francisco chapter of the Hells Angels, had come to visit George Walker at his office on Battery Street, only a few short blocks from the Embarcadero. The defense attorney, reclining in his black padded-leather desk chair, already quietly fumed at the unmitigated gall of his putative clients. Roberts and a handful of bikers had lumbered into his office, jostling the file boxes and leather briefcase in one corner and clumsily approaching his enormous glass-and-marble desk, kitted out with a chair large enough to accommodate his basketball-star legs. Walker, lanky and circumspect, was a former star at Cal—a key player on their 1946 Final Four team—turned successful attorney, and Roberts was here, surrounded by framed newspaper clippings of Walker’s past successes and a plaque commemorating his being selected by Harvard as one of the nation’s top defense lawyers, to ask him to represent the accused killer of Meredith Hunter for his forthcoming trial.

  “Get out if you want to talk like that,” the mixed-race Walker told the Hells Angels gathered in his office, and the bikers instantly grew polite, and almost deferential. Walker might be, by virtue of the color of his skin, a subject of scorn for the Angels, but he was also the best protection they could find to keep one of their own from the gas chamber.

  The case against Walker’s new client seemed relatively open-and-shut. Alan Passaro had been arrested in San Jose three days after Altamont, a bloodstained knife found in the backseat of his car. Worse yet, film footage of Hunter’s death was said to show Passaro repeatedly stabbing the eighteen-year-old concertgoer. It would require some ingenuity to even mount a credible defense against such daunting accusations.

  Perhaps in laying down the law with the Angels in such decisive fashion, Walker was preparing the groundwork for his case, which similarly revolved around the challenge of racial prejudice. If the case were to be summarized by a casual, modestly informed observer, it would be “Hells Angel kills black man at rock concert.” The optics of the case were entirely against Passaro, which made it all the more important that Walker reorient the case in a different direction. If the jury believed that the Angels were racists, and that Hunter was killed because of the color of his skin, the prosecution would have a motive, not just a mass of disembodied evidence. The jury would have to see the case anew, to see a fresh explanation for the deadly encounter between Passaro and Hunter.

  * * *

  Walker was himself the product of a Norwegian mother from Minnesota and a half-Cherokee, half-African-American father. He had followed his glittering athletic career with a law degree from the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Walker had cut his teeth as a civil rights lawyer, representing the likes of Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi. He still remembered being given the bedroom in a house on the black side of town just outside Tula, Mississippi, sharing a bed with two colleagues and darkly pondering the threats that might be lurking just beyond the door.

  Work in Mississippi had been followed by a stint as a lawyer in none other than Melvin Belli’s office. Belli, a fixture in the San Francisco legal world as well as a social butterfly, was known as “the king of torts,” and Walker saw his boss as a great teacher, providing a daily education in what it meant to be a superlative attorney. Personal-injury work made for solid business, but Walker was assigned a one-off criminal case that came through Belli’s shop, representing an accused hit-and-run driver in a criminal case. The tightrope walk of criminal defense was unexpectedly exhilarating. George Walker became a defense lawyer.

  Defense attorneys did not, as a rule, have to take out advertisements in the newspaper. You built a reputation as dependable, or even better, as creative, and clients would know how to find you when they needed you. Representing clients as a defense lawyer meant putting one’s faith in the system, providing all clients with the best possible defense regardless of their own moral flaws or failings.

  For Walker, the Angels were more like medieval brigands than out-and-out racist zealots. They were outlaws, societal outcasts who were still capable of surprising acts of kindness. They were incorrigibly, preternaturally violent, and yet they could often be found by the side of the road, jump-starting stalled cars and rescuing stranded drivers.

  Walker’s client, moreover, was not an outsized presence like Roberts or Sonny Barger. Alan Passaro was unlikely to spout racial epithets in a lawyer’s office, not one to assert his authority in an unfamiliar situation. Walker, some two decades his senior, saw Passaro, who had had to sell his beloved Harley-Davidson to pay Walker’s attorney fees, as fundamentally a rule-follower. He was respectful, quiet. Above all, he was malleable. He had become a Hells Angel to be part of a group, and now it would be Walker’s responsibility to remake his client in the fashion necessary to elicit an acquittal.

  Walker saw that his case required that Passaro be seen as defending himself from Hunter’s potentially murderous assault—or better yet, protecting others from Hunter’s gun. It was not enough to say that Hunter had pulled a gun on Alan Passaro and the other Hells Angels, because that would inevitably raise questions: just why had an eighteen-year-old African-American teenager felt the need to wield a weapon when in the presence of Altamont’s security staff? A violent showdown between t
he Angels and Hunter at least raised the possibility that the bikers had done something that spooked him enough to remove his gun from his jacket pocket.

  But if Hunter were attacking someone else, the case would be simpler. Walker could argue that Meredith Hunter was on the verge of murder when Alan Passaro, unassuming security guard, heroically intervened to save the lives of others.

  Passaro’s defense ultimately relied on a little-known argument known as “self-defense of others,” which had no precedent in California trial law. There had been unconfirmed reports that someone—perhaps another Angel—had seen Hunter take out his gun and called out “he’s going to kill Jagger!” In most circumstances, such a statement would be entirely inadmissible as hearsay. Walker daringly planned to push for its introduction in court, arguing that it fell under the hearsay exception known as the spontaneous declaration.

  The exception applied to circumstances in which a statement that would otherwise be classified as hearsay could safely be assumed to be true, such as a robbery victim shouting that an assailant was stealing his wallet, or a woman’s phone call to the police after her husband’s shooting. Walker planned to argue that the spontaneous declaration proved that Meredith Hunter had been planning to murder Mick Jagger, and only Passaro’s intervention had prevented the assassination of the lead singer of the Rolling Stones. Walker cast the dead Hunter as a failed aspirant to the pantheon of American assassins, alongside the likes of Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Sirhan Sirhan.

  Without the exclamation being submitted by the defense, there was no evidence of Hunter’s desire to kill Jagger. Hunter had shown no interest in Jagger or the Rolling Stones before the concert. He had told no one of his murderous intent, nor had he exhibited any notably suspicious behavior before the encounter with Passaro, other than his having fetched his gun from his car during the chaos of the concert itself. The anonymous witness shouting that Hunter was aiming at Jagger would be the fulcrum on which the case turned.

  * * *

  Given that Meredith Hunter had been stabbed to death in a crowd of three hundred thousand people, surprisingly few people could be considered witnesses to the killing. Besides Hunter himself, who did not live to identify his attackers, or explain his actions, and the defendant, there was Hunter’s girlfriend Patti Bredehoft and Paul Cox, along with a small handful of others who had caught a partial glimpse of the events in question. Each would be heard from over the course of the six-week trial, their recollections of those frantic minutes differing from each other in both subtle and essential ways. The prosecution and defense would each seek to stack the testimony in a fashion befitting their own theories of the case, but neither could quite corral the facts into an immediately recognizable array. Was Hunter a victim or a menace? Was Passaro a hero or a villain?

  Time and again, the defense and prosecution would turn to the footage from Gimme Shelter, shot by cinematographer Baird Bryant, as the source of their authority, and the wellspring of their doubts. Walker knew that the prosecutor, John Burke, would be leaning heavily on Bryant’s footage to prove his case. The footage, when Walker considered it closely, was damning and exculpatory, all at once. It clearly showed Passaro stabbing Hunter twice—or at least lunging at him with the knife. But it opened the door to an argument that Passaro had only stabbed Hunter twice, and no more.

  For the prosecution, the Gimme Shelter footage would likely be the most powerful evidence they would wield. The defense’s best protection was in turning the footage against them, finding ways to take that very same evidence and render it inoperative. If Walker could argue that Passaro had not been responsible for Hunter’s four other stab wounds, and that the ones he had unquestionably caused were not life-threatening, Walker could point to the possibility that some unnamed other assailant had been responsible for Hunter’s death.

  Walker’s trial strategy changed the significance of the film footage for Passaro and the Hells Angels, transformed from highly incriminating evidence of their culpability in the death of an African-American concertgoer to, they now hoped, proof of their innocence. The Angels’ initial response to learning of the existence of the Maysleses’ footage indicated, at the very least, a discomfort with the idea of a recording of their actions on the evening of December 6. Would people who saw themselves as defending others from a threatening stranger wielding a gun have been so intent on stifling footage of their handiwork from seeing the light of day?

  The Hells Angels initially feared the existence of documentary proof of their interaction with Meredith Hunter. Now, though, the brief glimpse of Hunter’s gun, flashing against the white crocheted dress of Patti Bredehoft, had turned the situation upside-down. The Angels could now plausibly define themselves as acting in self-defense in a volatile, potentially life-threatening situation.

  The prosecution would call on a number of witnesses, including Alameda County sheriff’s sergeant Robert J. Donovan, who had been among the detectives on the Hunter case, but the bulk of its case rested on Bryant’s film footage, and on eyewitness testimony. Much would ride on the portrait of the fatal scuffle they would paint.

  During the second week of the trial, after the jury selection and opening statements, Judge William J. Hayes and the jury, accompanied by the accused and the defense and prosecution attorneys, adjourned to the auditorium of the nearby Oakland Museum for a screening of Bryant’s footage. (The judge had been unable to darken the courtroom enough to allow for proper viewing.) The museum screening was immediately followed by an encore presentation, this time in slow motion, in the grand-jury room.

  Bryant’s footage, which would be shown about twenty times over the course of the trial, captured a few seconds of a fluid, shifting scene, hard to see and harder to interpret. The footage thrust viewers into a wildly chaotic scene in medias res. It captured an event that had clearly already begun, in a manner and fashion we could not see. While careful study revealed the two weapons on display here, and even allowed for the hazarding of a guess about who was attacking and who defending here, events also took place outside of the camera’s frame, both physically and temporally, that were likely decisive.

  We could see Hunter and Passaro’s fatal dance, but in the critical matter of who had summoned the other to the floor, the film footage remained decidedly silent. Likewise, it failed to capture the chaotic moments after those seen in the footage, in which Passaro and the Angels had, according to eyewitness testimony, stomped and beaten Hunter, hit him with a metal-rimmed garbage can lid, and stabbed him as many as four more times. The film footage was simultaneously definitive and, in its definitiveness, utterly misleading.

  Walker would attempt to transform the prosecution’s proof of Passaro’s guilt into a demonstration of everything that the film footage did not show. Walker’s son Dany, then a teenage film buff, suggested running the footage backward as well as forward, thereby allowing the jury to see the action more clearly. The flurries of activity at the very beginning of the film clip, with Hells Angels moving to the left and the crowd seeming to back up before Hunter emerged, pointed, Walker argued, to the possibility that he had already been stabbed before we first saw Passaro lunging at him. The twinned arguments—that Passaro had not been the killer, and that he had been acting in self-defense of others—were logically inconsistent but overlapping, with each stripping him of responsibility for the crime.

  Having seen the footage for themselves, the jury now prepared to hear from the prosecution’s key witness. Paul Cox had been closest to Hunter and Passaro during those crucial moments before the killing, and would likely be the voice the jury would trust most implicitly on the fundamental question of culpability. His testimony would serve, along with Bryant’s footage, as the centerpiece of the prosecution’s case. Cox had testified to the grand jury, and then disappeared from sight, fearful of the Angels’ wrath, with the prosecution only able to track him down a week before the start of the trial. Cox had seen firsthand what the Hells Angels were capable of, and only agreed to t
estify on two conditions: that he be allowed to testify under an assumed name (“Paul Cox” was a pseudonym), and that he not be required to disclose his home address, as most witnesses at a jury trial would.

  Walker moved to exclude Cox’s testimony, considering it the most potentially damaging to his client’s case. Before Cox took the stand, Walker argued that the Alameda County sheriffs’ showing mug shots to potential witnesses violated due process. The sheriffs, Walker claimed, placed a thumb on the scales of justice by portraying Alan Passaro as a criminal before a witness had even identified him in a lineup. And who was to say that the police had not given Cox a friendly nudge before reaching Passaro’s mug shot? The judge rejected Walker’s motion, ruling that there was “no impermissible emphasis” in the showing of the mug shots.

  Walker also pressed the witness to give his real name and address. Cox balked, insisting that doing so would put him in danger of reprisal from the Hells Angels. Walker argued that it was prejudicial to his client to have a key prosecution witness testify under an assumed name, thereby denying Passaro the right to fully confront his accuser. Looking to drive a point home about the danger the Hells Angels represented, prosecutor John Burke asked Cox why he preferred to keep his identity secret: “Because I don’t want to get killed … I watched someone killed.”

  The prosecution called a fleet of witnesses to attest to the Hells Angels’ propensity for violence, and for violent retaliation against those who testified against other Angels in particular. And so the courtroom was filled with references to men named Dirty Bob, Big Tiny, and Pretty Terry, and stories told of men forced to dig their own graves before being shot and killed, and other horrors. Keeping in mind Hunter S. Thompson’s warnings about the overblown law-enforcement response to the Hells Angels, the collected weight of the testimony nonetheless spoke to a certain ruthlessness and efficiency in the dispatch of violence that could not help but be reminiscent of the events at Altamont. Cox would be allowed to testify. But the wily Walker, having fought so hard to keep Cox out of the witness stand, had other plans to discredit his testimony.