Highwaymen Motorcycle Club – Highwaymen MC
After a long absence, I have returned to blogging. I believe that this article is probably not what regular visitors to this site would expect to find, but it is a story I wished to have told. You can double-click on any of the images to see the full size version.
I recently surfed the Internet and decided to look up a Jersey Shore motorcycle club called the “Highwaymen”. The reason for this, was that I was a member of that club during the late 60’s and early 70’s and I just wanted to see what posterity would have to say about this organization. I also want to add at this time, that the Highwaymen from the Jersey Shore were not affiliated with other clubs with the Highwaymen name across the nation.
To my dismay, after spending much time searching, there was absolutely nothing about them anywhere on the Internet. It was as if this group, which at that time was such an important part of my life had never existed. While the “footprint” of the group was local, and not as wide as the larger clubs, I feel that to have this memory erased from history would be a loss. Since this group was not written about, there was no record, it stood to reason that this memory would therefore be lost to time. I am sure that there are many people from the shore area that would remember The Highwaymen from many Long Branch and other shore area bars, the social scene, the protests, and from the Windmill on Ocean Ave where we would often assemble before our rides. So I am writing this one article just so the memory is preserved and so that some our interactions with the people of the shore area as well as the other motorcycle clubs of that time are documented.
The Highwaymen started sometime around 1967 with a group of motorcycle riders mostly based in the shore town of Long Branch, New Jersey. I joined the club in mid 1968. Our numbers varied from a low of 6 members to a high of 23. We were a club that liked to ride a lot and we often had runs (rides) to some beautiful sites in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and other surrounding areas where we would often party and camp overnight. (Yes, New Jersey does have some great sites as well as plenty of wonderful camp grounds.) Our parties were always a good time and since we often stayed overnight on our runs, we did not have to worry about getting too wasted. Of course, the cops at that time were much more relaxed about these sort of things than they are now.
This is one of oldest pictures I have of a Highwayman party. This was when our patch was a crown, not the highwayman in flames that replaced it. The older members of the club later placed these patches on the front of their colors and were known as ‘crown members”.
You may notice the amplifier being used for the music is a vacuum tube amplifier (old). We had rented this house out as a temporary club house in Allenhurst, but I guess the landlord didn’t like parties as much as we did and we ultimately had to leave. However, it did serve its purpose for one very cold winter.
One of our favorite locations of the runs we used to take was to visit the Delaware Water Gap on the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border in the northern part of NJ. We found a a farmer’s field right next to small river that during certain times of the year was basically unattended. Here we could camp out, party, and go swimming during hot days. (OK, I admit we were probably trespassing, but I can write about it now because the statute of limitations has probably kicked in almost 4 decades later).
This wonderful location was within easy driving distance to the most scenic areas, best bars and good food places. The main reason I am mentioning this area is because we did not take many group shots or even photos of our activities, and the best pictures I have are from these runs. The image to the left was the very first ride we took to this location when a small group of us were exploring the area. From left to right: Patty, Crash, Rudy, Momo, Spider, Joline, Gypsy, Patty, and kneeling Spike, Mary. The spot was so perfect we resolved to bring others the next time we came.
We had 3 presidents during the life of the club, Gypsy, Bear, and Zee. The picture to the left is Bear, just before he was shipped off by the army. He left for his home in North Carolina before he was finally shipped off to Europe. He was sadly missed and unfortunately never returned after leaving. I actually ended up buying his bike which he is riding in this picture. The military draft played a large role in the changing membership of the club. We lost people to the draft, many returned after serving, and we also had several members in the club from the military who were based in Fort Monmouth. Some of the Ft. Monmouth members I recall included Bitch from Iowa, TC from Missouri, and Satch from Pennsylvania. When Satch left the military and returned to Pennsylvania, he briefly started a chapter of the Highwaymen in West PA.
The next ride we took to “our spot” by the Delaware Water Gap took place about 1 year later. It was a fantastic ride and with a great time swimming, drinking, and just carrying on. In the picture on the left, from left to right: Momo, Rudy, Rasa, Stiff, Crush (with helmet), Spook, Gypsy, Skrinky, Babo, Evil, Muskie and Yank. Yank was drying his underpants on his head so he did not have to wear wet underwear. The picture to the right from left to right: Stiff, Spook, Gypsy, Muskie, Skrinky (with hat), Yank (lying down), Evil, Zee, and Rudy.
As a club we had contact with other clubs in the area including Branded MC, Breed MC, and Pagans MC. We considered Branded MC to be our “sister club” and we had many great parties with them and great meetups at some bars in Atlantic Highlands. The picture to the left is the only picture we have of them and we were meeting to go on a joint run to the Cape May area. We also attended many parties with the Breed MC in Jackson Township, and once in Staten Island. The Highwaymen MC also partied with the South Jersey chapter of the Pagans MC.
We had many of our own great parties and the picture on the right is from one of them. I believe that this was a New Years Eve party. The house location of this was practically right on the beach and the site of other good parties. We had a live band playing that night. We actually had a college fraternity party going on next door, and many of its attendees left that party and ended up at our party. From left to right: Spike, Fast Eddie, Gypsy, Rudy.
In order to maintain good relations with the locals, as a club we decided that it would be good public relations if we helped the township with its new efforts at recycling. This was one of the first recycling efforts in NJ and our efforts provided the labor needed to keep it running. Once a week we would help in the effort and it was successful at reducing any animosity the local police had towards us.
Upon reflection, I take pleasure in the fact that we helped to launch the recycling movement that would eventually be adopted by most municipalities across the country. Our efforts were recognized by 2 local newspapers, and we were guests of honor at a symposium held at Monmouth College.
After approximately 4-1/2 years in existence, in December 1971 the club decided to disband. We met on a cold night on a deserted beach in Long Branch, and all records, secretary’s notes, logs, rockers, and patches were burned in a bonfire and we had a few final drinks together as a club. Those who were current members in the club kept their colors. It was sad, but it was the right thing to do and it was the right time to do it. I did find it ironic that the police showed up to this final “meeting” and actually wrote down our information for their records, — on the same night that we were disbanding. Over time, many of the former members stayed in the Jersey Shore area, but most left for other areas or states.
As a final postscript: in Spring 2012, several of the members had an informal reunion 4 decades after the club had disbanded. We met at the Brighton Bar in Long Branch, one of our old hangouts which is still is business. It was nice to get together with the brothers we once rode and partied with. From left to right: Yank, Zee, Spook, Skrinky, Woody, and Rudy.
You can click on any image to see it full size.
So there it is. This small group of fun loving riders from the Jersey Shore now have a written record so they will not be forgotten forever, and can be a footnote for the Long Branch Historical Society.
I am personally still riding. I have a Harley Shovelhead along with my wife who also has her own Shovelhead. You can still find us patronizing some of the finest watering holes in South Jersey.
If anyone has additional photos or stories they want to share, please contact me by filling out the form below, your email will never be shared with any outside people or groups:
You Know A Politician or Talking Head is Clueless When…
Often you watch TV and some politician or talking head starts spouting on some subject as if they are an expert in that field. It is easy to be taken in unless you are knowledgeable in that subject. This video is on a subject that affects everyone and after watching it, you will be able to spot a clueless politician or talking head.
Prosperity for Main Street, not Wall Street
The key reason that communities are struggling is the huge burden of interest payments that are flowing to the big banks. Think about this, if you buy a home for say $100,000 dollars, typically you will have paid $250,000 once the loan is paid off. This means the typical loan will incur $150,000 in interest charges.
The same concept applies when a community builds an infrastructure project such as school, road, bridge, sewer or other project. That $1 million dollar school could end up costing taxpayers in the community $2.5 million after interest charges.
So taxpayers are paying more to the financiers of the project than to those who supplied the materials and actually did the labor to build it. Are you OK with them acting as a middleman sucking prosperity from our communities? Any good business model dictates the efficiency of eliminating middlemen.
If we look at cities like Detroit and Philadelphia, hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments and fees are leaving the city and flowing into the coffers of Wall St. This lost money impoverishes your community while Wall St gets bigger and richer than ever. The video below describes a solution to this problem.
Money Is Not Safe In The Big Banks
People think that money is safe in the big banks because the FDIC will protect the deposits. This assumption is not based on the facts. This video will show official government documents that describe the plans for confiscating deposits when, (not if) a big bank fails. Individual, as well as public funds from municipal, university, county deposits are at serious risk. YOUR taxpayer money will disappear in the next crisis! Public officials in charge of taxpayer funds need to be aware of the dangers here. The loss of taxpayer funds and the inability to meet payrolls and obligations will certainly prompt a response that will both immediate and forceful.
This video will show how Cyprus was not a one-time event and how the Cyprus confiscation was planned well in advance and how M.F. Global was the blueprint for future confiscations and how a legal precedent was created when these losses were upheld by the legal system.
Ask your public official in charge of finance where they keep YOUR taxpayer money!
Ask them if they have researched the public banking option! Do not accept no for an answer, ask them why. If they say that you do not understand these things, tell them to explain it to you.
After all, this is your money that you worked so hard for, so don’t let the big gamblers from Wall Street use YOUR personal or taxpayer money to cover THEIR losses. These big bankers are money addicts, they have no appreciation of how much work went into making that money. They do not care about you or your money, all they care about is their addiction. Don’t let public officials continue to put your taxpayer money at risk with these gamblers, just because this is how it has been done in the past.
How Many Warnings Do You Need?
How Many Warnings Do You Need?
If you knew someone with a gambling problem, you probably would not give them your money to hold. If you knew that they had placed bets that were 30 to 70 times more than the amount of money they had, you would certainly consider them totally reckless. If you knew that the money they were holding and betting with was with borrowed money, other peoples’ money not their own, you would probably conclude that they are hopelessly addicted to money. Remember these thoughts as you continue to read this article.
Picture these scenarios:
1. You go to buy groceries and when you use your credit or debit card the transaction is denied despite the fact you have money in your account.
2. You are a public official, such as a school business administrator, county treasurer, municipal finance manager, pension fund administrator, or anyone who has responsibility for protecting public money. You try to access the money and the transaction is denied.
Under either scenario, you investigate why you cannot access money you know is in your account and you find out that the bank has failed and has been closed until further notice by the authorities. You also discover that the government will be confiscating part of your savings in order to “stabilize” the bank.
So you think that “cannot happen here”? You think you are safe because the FDIC “protects” your money? You placed your money into one of the big banks and believe it is safe because it has large vaults and is insured by the government. Perhaps you placed the public monies you are charged with into a large bank because they are properly “collateralized” and therefore you believe these funds are safe. If you truly believe any these previous statements, you really need to read the rest of this article because your money is at serious risk.
So you think your money is safe? Let’s examine why that assumption could cost you all or part of your savings. Would you be surprised to learn that money sitting in everyday peoples’ savings accounts in Cyprus was confiscated in order to “stabilize” the banks? If you are surprised by this news, hopefully this article will provide you with an incentive to do some research. This article is filled with links to more information, and I encourage you to follow them. If you are aware of this bank confiscation, do not make the mistake of believing that it is an isolated event that “cannot happen here”.
In a nutshell, what actually happened in Cyprus was that the banks were overleveraged and the size of the liabilities of the banks exceeded the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the entire country of Cyprus. Given the fact that the “bail outs” of the large banks in 2008 were so politically unpopular, the European “troika” imposed a “bail in”, where customers with savings accounts were to have some of their savings seized (read: stolen) in order to stabilize the banks. The losses to some accounts were as high as 60%. The banks were closed for 12 days, so people had no access to their money and once the banks reopened, they had only limited access to their money in order to protect the banks.
Was this plan by the “troika”, just a one-time event or was this something more? It turns out that this eventuality had actually been planned in advance in 2012 at the G20 Financial Stability Board in Basel Switzerland where the US FDIC and the Bank of England created a joint paper outlining a confiscation scheme. Under the FDIC/BOE joint paper, accounts of $250,000 or less could be seized by the failing bank and converted to stock equity as part of a “bail in” scheme. The stock would of course be essentially worthless because the bank has already failed.
There is also a plan to confiscate savings in New Zealand if necessary to save the banks. Canada also has a confiscation plan in the wings should their banks falter. The European Union has just reached an agreement where shareholders and depositors will be tapped to “bail in” any bank in trouble.
So you still think that this “cannot happen here” because the FDIC will protect your money? Consider that our largest banks have derivative contracts with a notional value of more than $700 trillion (think $700,000 BILLION!). The entire world GDP is only $70 trillion, therefore the liabilities of the big banks could not be covered by the entire GDP of the United States. Does this sound similar to what happened in Cyprus? Does this sound similar to the gambler at the beginning of this article? What is very important to keep in mind is that Cyprus is a small country and that much larger outside forces came in to “stabilize” the banks. If one (or more) of the large U.S. banks experiences a derivative failure, there is not enough money on the planet to “stabilize” them.
These derivatives are really nothing more than “bets” placed by the banks, and when (not if) these “bets” start going bad, the banks will be on the hook for their value. You need to know that these derivative “bets” have been given super-priority status in case of a bank bankruptcy. What this means is that the holders of these derivative contracts will have first priority for payment and that you either as an individual or government entity will be placed at the back of line – as a bank creditor should a large bank fail. This means that you will probably get little or nothing back. Most people do not understand that once you give a bank your money, the money legally is no longer yours. Under the law, you are an unsecured creditor to the bank and are treated as such in any bankruptcy proceeding. As an individual or as a public official, if you have money in one of the big banks, you have essentially given your money to that gambler and now you are a creditor to the gambler.
This sort of loss has already happened with the MF Global collapse. While this was a futures trading company and not a bank, the blueprint for confiscations was tested here and with the Sentinel case the legal system upheld the customer losses. These trading accounts were supposed to be “segregated” accounts that belonged to the account holders, not MF Global. As an analogy, think of a “segregated” account as a safe deposit box at a bank, the contents belong to you, not the bank. Yet in the MF Global collapse, in this analogy it essentially gambled with the assets in the customers’ safe deposit boxes, and the legal system placed the creditors of the bank above the safe deposit box holders.
Still think the FDIC will protect the derivative and account holders? JP Morgan Chase has $1.1 trillion ($1,100 Billion!) in deposits and Bank of America also has over $1 trillion ($1000 Billion!). Again, remember that gambler, JP Morgan Chase has about $70 TRILLION in bets out there, but is holding only about $1 Trillion in deposits and another Trillion in assets. It has made bets with a value approximately 35 times all the money it has access to. Again, this is YOUR money they are betting with, not their money. Bank of America also has about 30 times its assets in derivative bets. Citigroup and Wells Fargo each have over $900 billion each in deposits and also have many times their assets in derivative bets. Once these bets start going bad, there is no way the banks can cover them. The FDIC has only $33 billion available to insure deposits. That means that once any one of these banks fails, the FDIC has less than 3% of the money needed to cover the depositors. If any one of these big banks fails, these banks are so interconnected that it is also likely to bring down the other large banks. In fact both Bank of America and JP Morgan Chase have moved their riskiest derivatives from their uninsured trading houses to the FDIC insured subsidiaries, which are their retail banks, putting the funds in those accounts at a significantly increased risk. Once even one of these biggest banks experiences a derivative meltdown, there is not enough money in the FDIC or probably even the U.S. Treasury to cover the losses. Still think Cyprus cannot happen to you?
If you are a public official who has responsibility for protecting public money, you probably have that money deposited into an account with one of the largest banks. Do you still believe that money is safe? Are you doing your fiduciary duty to protect that money in the public interest? So as a government official in charge of finances, what are your options?
One option is to start a public bank such as the Bank of North Dakota. First public banks do not gamble with derivatives and the Bank of North Dakota thrived during the crisis of 2008. Not only will you get the safety of the money for which you have responsibility for, but other advantages to this approach include: the ability to provide interest free or low interest loans for public infrastructure projects, the ability to create jobs, generate revenue, and build up the local community. This article clearly explains some of the huge advantages of financing your projects using a public bank.
Consider this – if you buy a home for $100,000, by the time you have paid the mortgage in full, the total cost will have been close to $300,000. Consider the absurdity of paying those who build the home and provide the raw materials $100,000, and paying the financiers $200,000 for money that was not even theirs. This makes little sense. The same principle applies if a state, county, or municipality wants to build a road, school, bridge, or other infrastructure. They need to go to Wall Street for financing at high interest rates. However they could form their own bank and finance the project at zero or near zero interest. The projects would cost less than half and the finance costs would not be siphoned out of the community, impoverishing it, and ending up on Wall Street or in Cayman Island tax shelters. The finance costs would stay in the community.
Think of the things that could be accomplished if you could eliminate debt service as a line item in your budget! The money deposited in the public bank would be safe and would serve the local community. You could use the public bank to refinance existing debt at zero or near zero percent interest. You could lower tax rates! This idea has such appeal that currently there are initiatives in 20 states to start public banks.
If you are a public official with a fiduciary responsibility to protect public funds and one of these large banks fails and you lose the public money, think of the consequences that will arise once the public becomes aware that you did not heed the warnings that Cyprus provided. Think of the consequences that will arise when the public becomes aware that you did not consider alternatives to the big vulnerable banks. It is time to bring home the money from Wall Street where it is at risk. If there is a derivative crash, try meeting your payroll with stock equity (in a failed bank). The impact of not meeting a payroll will be both immediate and forceful. It is vital to get that money out of Wall Street BEFORE the next meltdown.
To those public officials who are truly interested in serving their communities, this is your moment. This is your time to step up to the plate. Be bold, be innovative, and empower your communities. You owe this to your fellow citizens, your children and your future. Visit this website to learn more about the possibilities that public banking offers, to learn how to get started, and where to find help in implementation. You are not alone of you wish to make this happen.
If you are an individual saver who wants to protect your money, you need to move your money out of the big banks because that is where it is most vulnerable. Move your money into local community banks or Credit Unions. This will help your local banks as well as your community by keeping the money local. It is also important to MOVE YOUR DEBT to these local banks as well. The way bank accounting works, a deposit is actually considered a liability to the bank, while a loan is an asset on its accounting ledger. (I know this sounds convoluted, but this is the way it is). By moving your debt to the local banks, you create assets for them as well as helping your local community. While there are no guarantees that a smaller bank could survive the crash of one or more of the bigger banks, very few of the small banks have gambled with the super-priority derivatives. This is huge advantage that at provides insulation from the large banks.
So, consider yourself warned, money is not safe in the big banks. The MF Global losses, the Cyprus confiscations, the Sentinel case, the FDIC/BOE Joint Paper, the plans in the European Union, Canada, New Zealand, and Spain to raid private accounts, and finally the information in this article should be raising all sorts of red flags. HOW MANY WARNINGS DO YOU NEED? Personal accounts, as well as any school, municipal, county, and state funds that are deposited in any of the big banks are not safe. The plans for confiscation have already been developed, they have been approved, they are awaiting the next crisis.
Ask your public official in charge of finance where they keep YOUR taxpayer money!
Ask them if they have researched the public banking option! Do not accept no for an answer, ask them why. If they say that you do not understand these things, tell them to explain it to you.
After all, this is your money that you worked so hard for, so don’t let the big gamblers from Wall Street use YOUR personal or taxpayer money to cover THEIR losses. These big bankers are money addicts, they have no appreciation of how much work went into making that money. They do not care about you or your money, all they care about is their addiction. Don’t let public officials continue to put your taxpayer money at risk with these gamblers, just because this is how it has been done in the past.
Additional articles, videos & interviews
End The Illusion Films
Rudy Avizius
Rome crumbles while the nation numbs its mind with NFL gladiator games, propaganda and opinion masquerading as news, celebrity worship, and corporate drivel such as: reality shows, Dancing with the Stars, and American Idol.
