Most Popular
- The ballad of bar owner Dennis Hess started as a love song and ended with his suicide
- When it comes to KC's black history, Professor Pellom McDaniels says it's time to get beyond Negro Leagues and jazz
- 63rd Street is ready for its close-up
- After keeping an eye on victims of the Hyatt disaster, KC shrinks have bad news for the grief-counseling industry
- Ra Sushi is saucily seductive
Recent Blog Posts
Comment of the Week
Fri Nov 6, 4:00 PM
This week's Pitch and 9 things we learned this week
Fri Nov 6, 3:00 PM
Anti-nuke activists turn PIEA board meeting into impromptu talent show
Fri Nov 6, 2:10 PM
Go See This: Tom Stoppard's Arcadia at UMKC
Fri Nov 6, 1:00 PM
Friday Freebies
Fri Nov 6, 4:00 PM
Video: CoCoComa, "It Won't Be Long" (live on Chic-A-Go-Go)
Fri Nov 6, 2:00 PM
Tonight & Tomorrow: Apocalypse Meow 2
Fri Nov 6, 12:44 PM
This week's "Best of Fat City"
Fri Nov 6, 4:30 PM
Now you have plans for the weekend
Fri Nov 6, 3:00 PM
7-Eleven makes its own wine
Fri Nov 6, 2:00 PM
National Features >
Village Voice
The Great Walls of Chinatown
With the exception of the electric rice cookers, this Bowery tenement could have come straight from the Nineteenth Century.
By Elizabeth Dwoskin
Houston Press
Getting Off
DUI attorney Tyler Flood wins 80 percent of his trials--even if his clients were 100 percent drunk.
By Mike Giglio
Miami New Times
Park or Die Tryin'
From the homeless parking mafia to the meter fairy, finding a spot in Miami has taken a turn toward the surreal.
By Gus Garcia-Roberts
City Pages
The Baddest Men on the Planet
Straight from the Sam's Club tire shop, Brett Rogers prepares to meet Fedor Emelianenko in mortal combat.
By Bradley Campbell
Live Free & Die
After Kansas City's first generation of outlaw bikers rides off into the sunset, who will replace them?
Share
By Bryan Noonan
Published on June 30, 2005
-
Luke Echterling
-
Luke Echterling
Moose's ride hasn't been easy.
The legend of the patch dates back to the late 1940s, when a pack of motorcycle riders terrorized a California town by getting drunk and drag racing down its main streets. Then, in 1960, another pack was said to have burned down a town in Mexico. The publicity that followed hurt motorcycle sales, so the American Motorcycle Association ran an advertisement claiming that 99 percent of all riders were clean-cut, upstanding citizens and that it was the 1 percent out looking for trouble that gave them all a bad name.
Proud of their new infamy, the outlaw bikers started adding "one-percenter" patches to their jackets.
A man called Tiny wore the diamond-shaped piece of cloth on the back of his denim jacket when he arrived in the sleepy town of Sioux City, Iowa, in 1962. A gift from his brothers in California, the Satan's Slaves patch was a license to assemble his own fellowship of degenerates, a secret society that would have all of middle America in which to toss around its muscle.
Tiny would give the Midwest the mark of El Forasteros, an outlaw motorcycle club that started its engines in Kansas City 40 years ago this summer.
About a dozen true one-percenter clubs remain, including the Hell's Angels, the Bandidos, the Outlaws and, in Kansas City, El Forasteros and the Galloping Gooses.
In the early days, the Kansas City club members would party for three solid days in the "caves" under an Interstate 435 overpass, recalls Jim "Moose" Foley, a 61-year-old original member of the Des Moines, Iowa, chapter who frequently rides through Kansas City.
"They were all good times, just getting crazy and drinking and having fun with each other.... If somebody fell asleep, you messed with them -- anything from pissing on them to lighting them on fire."
Long ago, the leader of the Kansas City El Forasteros chapter, John Sheaffer -- everyone calls him Shifty -- earned his reputation as one of the most feared and respected men among the country's one-percenter clubs. Shifty has worn the patch since 1967, when he was 20.
He bears other marks of the Forastero life as well: a partly chewed-off ear and the layer of skin shaved off his upper chest to repair it. He was in Minneapolis visiting the Forasteros in 1968 when a member of a street gang bumped into him at a bar. The men in this gang were known for filing their teeth into points. Shifty's Forasteros drinking companion threatened to beat the man when he didn't apologize. "The guy said, 'Oh, yeah?' Then he bent over and bit my ear off," Shifty recalls.
Shifty's girlfriend ran to the car and grabbed a .22-caliber handgun. "We fought for a long time, and I finally ended up shooting him four times," Shifty says. The man caught slugs in one hip, one shoulder and his throat. "I didn't have much choice. He said he was going to kill me, and he'd already bit my ear off. The cops said it was my lucky day, because he didn't press charges."
Later, though, Shifty would spend seven and a half years in prison for possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine. ("Actually, I was transporting it," he says.)
A sharp tooth earring dangles from Shifty's good ear when he arrives at Antoinette's Restaurant & Lounge on a quiet stretch of residential homes off North Brighton Avenue one cloudy evening in early May.
Drinking Budweisers at a table, El Forasteros member John Monk and Galloping Goose John Angell stand to greet him.
Shifty, who is now 58, dismounts and hobbles bowlegged, his weight swaying from foot to foot as he walks through the front door into the bar.
He embraces Monk and Angell. Shifty sits in a chair at the head of the table and orders a Diet Coke. Because most of the club members are slowing down with age, Shifty is looking for the right kind of future leaders. He says 40 years of partying, brawling and riding choppers will all have been for nothing if he can't teach the next generation of El Forasteros how to carry on the brotherhood of the patch.
"If I don't keep the club going, then my life has been a failure. That's how I look at it," he says. "This is the only thing I've ever done, and I've spent my life doing it. So I've got to make it work."
At 31, John Monk is in his prime, with a blond beard and a braided ponytail. His thick arms are covered in tattoos depicting death, monsters and his allegiance to the one-percenters. He shares the brotherhood with Shifty and the city's 12 other El Forasteros and 14 Galloping Gooses. (The Forasteros gave the Gooses the one-percenter patch, making them brother clubs.) The two clubs share territory and a clubhouse on Guinotte Avenue, surrounded by smokestacks and rail yards in the East Bottoms. The clubhouse walls are covered with photographs, insignia and memorabilia.
There's a photograph of Shifty in his mid-20s, with long brown hair, standing beside a couple of dozen other young Forasteros and Gooses. Now Shifty is a diabetic and has to keep his insulin refrigerated when he gets on his bike for a run.
Now Click This
