CONCORD — The Hells Angels of New Hampshire won their court battle yesterday to run vending booths at a busy crossroads during Motorcycle Week in Laconia.
The annual event that begins today draws 350,000 to a lakeside festival centered at Weirs Beach. It features beer tents, live entertainment and motorcycle races and runs through Father’s Day.
The state Supreme Court ruled that a Laconia licensing board wrongly denied the Hells Angels a license to operate 11 booths at Weirs Beach. A Superior Court judge had sided with the city.
A breakdown in a long-standing truce between the Hells Angels and other motorcycle gangs has safety officials nervous. Just last week in Maryland, two Hells Angels and a bystander were hit in a drive-by shooting by a rival club. Similar incidents have occurred in Nevada and New York.
Concerns prompted Gov. Jeanne Shaheen to activate the New Hampshire National Guard this weekend.
The court ordered the city to issue the group vending permits right away, but allowed it to suspend them if it finds “additional credible and specific information that a strong likelihood of violence will result” if the booths stay open.
Justices said they could not conclude at this point that simply denying the permits protects the public because Hells Angels members will be at the event anyway.
As three Hells Angels in gang colors, two wearing dress shirts and neckties, listened yesterday morning, lawyers painted the case as a battle between public safety and free speech.
Laconia’s attorney Walter Mitchell told the court the Hells Angels asked for booths in a Weirs location “at the epicenter of this event . . . most difficult to police.” The city gave permits for two booths in a more open spot.
No one alleged that Hells Angels would start any trouble. But Mitchell said if the group were attacked, “it will most certainly retaliate.”
Hells Angels attorney P. Scott Bratton said the license board infringed on the group’s First Amendment rights to free speech and their right to raise funds to support the club.
The court said that closing a few vending booths is not the answer to safety concerns, the court said.
“We do not agree that relocating vending booths will reduce significantly the potential danger to the public,” the court wrote.
It added, “despite the claimed risk to public safety, the City of Laconia has made no effort to cancel New Hampshire’s motorcycle week. ‘If the First Amendment means anything , it means that regulating speech must be a last — not first — resort,’” it said, citing case law.
Bratton of Lowell, Mass., and Nashua, said the court “upheld the rights of my clients and the citizens of the state of New Hampshire. We appreciate that the court decided this case so expeditiously.”
Bratton had a sample T-shirt to show the court. It had the words “Big Red Machine” and the number 81 on the front and “Strength and Honor,” on the back.
Bratton said both the number 81 and Big Red Machine saying are known in the motorcycle subculture to symbolize the Hells Angels.
“Like the Wildcats are to UNH?” Justice Linda Dalianis asked.
Exactly, Bratton said.
Justice James Duggan said the issued sounded more like commercial rights than free speech rights.
“Why isn’t this just like any other advertisement?” he asked.
“You have to see this as a First Amendment issue in its entirety,” Bratton answered. “It’s protected speech.”
He drew parallels to parades by unpopular groups and to draft card burning as protected forms of speech that government must accommodate.
Justice Joseph Nadeau raised the concern over violence at the booths.
“There’s more at stake than the public’s rights to buy merchandise. There’s also the issue of public safety,” he said.
Bratton said the city denied the permit based on what he characterized as “abstract fear of potential violence.”
Bratton said after court, “The message of Hells Angels is that people have a right to live their lives freely the way they want, free of government or political interference.”
