The Animals were to be booted from the zoo.
After a police raid netted weapons and ammunition, the Animals outlaw motorcycle club was being evicted from its Willoughby clubhouse.
"We will be glad to be rid of them," Mayor Harold E. Brichford told The Cleveland PressMarch 5.
As many as 25 members crammed into the clubhouse on Euclid Avenue, its walls pocked with bullet holes.
"The police couldn't get anything on us so they hot-wired the landlord to force us out," a biker who went by Gabby told the Press. "We never did anything worse than use the clubhouse walls for target practice."
But as he posed atop a three-wheeled chopper, Gabby knew different. His clubmate Donald Griswold had been arrested one day before in connection with a shooting by members of Cleveland's fledgling Hells Angels chapter that left two dead.
"The Hells Angels were going to take care of me if the cops didn't do it first," Griswold later told a Plain Dealer reporter in a jailhouse interview. "Misery loves company."
He was convicted that October and sentenced to two consecutive life terms.
Although it seems the Animals fizzled, the Hells Angels motorcycle club still has a clubhouse in the St. Clair Superior neighborhood and opened an Akron club in North Hill last year.
