Its creepy black-and-white patch featuring a pair of dice with the sixes facing out and cobwebs trailing off the sides was loathed by law enforcement and known to panic ordinary bar patrons, should bikers wearing it roll up to a watering hole en masse. Unkempt and wild, with a fearsome reputation backed by criminality, the Dirty Dozen was Arizona’s preeminent motorcycle club and would not allow other clubs to operate in the Grand Canyon State without its permission. Visitors have left stones, coins, and other little oddities of remembrance on Mora’s marker, including a small, red plastic dragon, a reminder of Mora’s onetime ride, a 1951 Harley-Davidson “pan shovel” converted into a custom-designed chopper that Mora and everyone who knew him called the “Red Dragon.”Īccording to Green and artist Michael Star, who helped build the bike long ago, Mora had a vision of the Red Dragon, which Star and others helped make a reality when Mora was president of the Tucson chapter of the Dirty Dozen, an infamous club of Cain-raisin’ hooligans who ruled Arizona’s highways for nearly three decades. Green, a pixie-ish blonde better known to the biker community by her handle “Robin-eddy,” says the artist who made Boomer’s squat, beige tombstone is working on one just like it for Mora. That’s fellow Angel Raymond “Boomer” Baker, who passed in 2011 and whose custom-made headstone easily is the most handsome of those populating this hardscrabble patch of dirt. “It’s kind of out here in the middle of the rubble, but Chico wanted to be buried next to Boomer.” “I wish there was some shade,” she tells New Times, her eyebrows scrunched in a look of worry. Robin Green, the last of Mora’s official “ol’ ladies,” as a principal girlfriend is called in the biker world, looks down at Chico’s grave and weeps. Mora, who died January 1, 2014, at age 58 of complications from diabetes, has a flat stone marker engraved with two fearsome winged skulls facing each other: a double image of the outlaw biker group’s trademarked emblem.Īt the bottom of the headstone are the letters “AFFA,” short for the motto, “Angels Forever, Forever Angels.” In death, he resides in what seems to be the cemetery’s cheap seats, an area up against the butte where no grass grows and where many of the graves are marked with little more than white wooden crosses. One section of the 17-acre property near 48th Street and Broadway Road is lush and green, lined with trees beneath which visitors might spy local fauna, rabbits, or an indigenous kit fox on the prowl.īut no shade shields the desert grave of Hells Angel Robert “Chico” Mora. Tempe’s historic Double Butte Cemetery is one of the area’s oldest, dating back to the 1890s, before Arizona was a state.
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