THIS BOOK ISN’T AN EXPOSÉ; it’s an education. It’s an education that gives the devil—and his death’s head—his due. It gives respect and recognition to the righteous god who placed the tattooed flesh and the crossed bones into the body of modern biker culture.

This “encyclopedia” is a look into that creator. It’s an examination of the origins, histories, legends, and current keepers of the “one percenter” lineage; the powerful brotherhoods that are the outlaw motorcycle clubs.

The truth is that the clubs—especially the one percenters (a term with a colorful and subjective patchwork of definitions)—have carved a deep and open legacy into the entirety of this lifestyle and beyond; from the machines to the mystique to mainstream entertainment.

The influence on the machines is more than apparent as each new model year’s factory bikes are rolled out. The showroom bobbers, choppers, and retro-rods are assembly-line mirrors of what club brothers were hammering together in beer- and oil-slick garages in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s.

The mystique is the image. Whether that means tattoos needled into non-members with deliberate familiar club-style letterings and images; or embossed dealer club-like leathers and “cuts”; or generic skull back patches with perfectly placed rockers that read everything from “Independent” to “Old School” to “John 3:16”—they are all essentially fast facsimiles and bolt-on forgeries of the hard patch “signatures” of the MCs.

And how much pop culture deals with the clubs? Sons of Anarchy and Gangland and all the other “daring documentaries” don’t sell their high-dollar commercials and attract millions of viewers because they deal with riding clubs or H.O.G. chapters.

But along with all of this seductive love and interest, there is the fear. It’s one thing to look at the big cats in the zoo; it’s quite another to open the cage doors.

And the locks on those doors are getting stronger.

The signs are increasing: “NO COLORS ALLOWED”—in towns from Daytona, Florida; to Prescott, Arizona; to Alberta, Canada, at event after event, even in the once-holy sanctity of Sturgis.

But just as the real patches are being shut out more and more, their influence is being enjoyed and displayed more and more—but at an increasingly safe level. Establishments, venues, and runs openly expose some particularly icy consciences as they hawk their “officially licensed” garb that’s designed to emulate the very three-piece patches they exclude and ban.

Get your thrills looking at those beasts but, damn it, keep those cages closed!

But in the real world—in the wild, natural environment where the clawing, fanged creatures are born and habitate among their own—there are no cages.

And that’s where we’re going to travel.

This book faces down confinement and chains, ripping away those NO COLORS ALLOWED decrees to allow a genuine look inside.

Along with this book’s encyclopedic “introductions” to the worldwide population of one percenter clubs, we include sit-downs and face-to-face talks with members and associates who help make these MCs tick—and roar.

The clubs on the list are not only the clubs that wear the diamond 1% patch. And they’re not necessarily the clubs that embrace either the one percenter file heading or the outlaw persona. But they are indeed a part of it.

There are truly legendary clubs like the Hessians with their “100% Hessians” patch.

There are the “pioneer” clubs that never considered themselves to be one percenters in the modern—especially in law enforcement’s—sense of the word. But they were the ones who rutted those trails into the promised land of MCs that now cover the globe and color the daydreams and fast-fantasies of millions.

There are the three-piece-patch, hard-riding, non-AMA, non-H.O.G. clubs that just may be on that thick-skinned bubble—that bubble of public recognition that has any three-piece-patch-wearing (or any “outlaw-looking”) club doing what the media says they all do. Maybe an “introduction” will educate.

There are the extinct clubs and the slightly extreme.

There are the Big Five and the ones close in line.

All these clubs have a place in the one percenter outlaw world, through their individual shades of the colors in this entire lifestyle.

There are no law enforcement clubs on The List, nor Christian clubs, clean and sober clubs, nor any other clubs formed for any specific group-help “along life’s sometimes difficult paths.” These clubs certainly serve a purpose in many lives, of course. But they are not for this list.

Of all the stretching that has been done to the one percenter definition, we have at least tried to be purists in looking at what drove the pioneers to do what they did—ride motorcycles and raise a bit of good-natured hell. That was their group-help. From all the “old guys” that I’ve sat and talked and drank with down through the years, that was pretty much it—and damn that other 99% who just don’t get it!

And, as has been mentioned, not every club is here on The List. Just as not every warm body is counted in the census, some holes are bound to be left here as well—though none on purpose.

No one with a clipboard and a plastic ID-on-a-lanyard went door-to-door to get this information. Most of these stats and details came from the streets—from people involved in this lifestyle all over the world. Knowing things, remembering things, knowing someone who knows so-and-so who remembers this and that. This kind of straight-up, five-card no-draw info, coupled with newspaper reports; Internet investigations; your basic forty-five years of personal on-the-road osmosis; and a lot more in-the-trenches research has gone into this List—the essentials in the one percenter encyclopedia—and well beyond.