American outlaw biker and gangster
James Thomas Nolan (born c. 1943), also known as "Big Jim", is an American outlaw biker and gangster who founded and served as president of the South Florida chapter of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. In 1989, Nolan was convicted for numerous violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, including ordering several murders, extortion, and narcotics and prostituting offenses, and sentenced to fifty years in federal prison.
Early life.
Nolan was born in New Jersey and moved to Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1955. He attended South Broward High School in Hollywood, Florida and completed two years of college.
Outlaws.
Nolan founded the Iron Cross motorcycle gang in West Palm Beach in the early 1960s and was president of the gang when the Chicago-based Outlaws dispatched a representative, Donald "Deke" Tanner, to Florida in the spring of 1967 with the assignment of founding a chapter in the state. Nolan began an association with Tanner and assisted him in merging various Florida biker gangs — including the Iron Cross, the Cossacks, the Half-Breeds, and the Outcasts — to form the Outlaws' South Florida chapter, with the "patch over" ceremony taking place at Kitty's Saloon, a roadside bar on State Road A1A in Juno Beach, in July 1967. The South Florida chapter initially used Kitty's Saloon as a clubhouse, and its members resided in a dozen cabins behind the saloon, which they rented from the saloon's owner, Bertha "Kitty" Randall.
Nolan was described by the "Sun Sentinel" as "an intelligent and charismatic leader" who sported "long, wavy brown hair well below his shoulders and a full beard". He originally served as vice president of the South Florida Outlaws, with Tanner leading the chapter as president. The Outlaws were quickly implicated in prostitution, narcotics, car theft, stolen credit cards, grand larceny, assaults and other crimes, but it was an incident on November 14, 1967, in which five Outlaws members crucified an 18-year-old woman, Christine Deese, by nailing her to a tree in Jupiter after she failed to turn over $10 demanded by the bikers, that gained the chapter most of its notoriety and resulted in Florida Governor Claude R. Kirk Jr. vowing to drive the club out of the state. In an interview with George Nobbe of the "Sunday News" in December 1967, Nolan dismissed allegations against the Outlaws as "hogwash", and said: "So we have long hair and beards. Well, so did Jesus Christ and he's been around a lot longer that Governor Kirk. He's a lot of mouth."
The South Florida Outlaws chapter relocated to Fort Lauderdale after a campaign of police harassment forced them out of Palm Beach County. The chapter was headquartered from a clubhouse located in an unincorporated neighborhood southwest of Fort Lauderdale and had approximately 200 members and associates at its peak. Nolan served as president of the Fort Lauderdale chapter and as regional president of the Outlaws in Florida for over ten years. Biker historians have credited Nolan with convincing the Outlaws leadership the Midwest of the importance of taking control of the Southern United States and the state of Florida specifically. The crime reporter Scott Burnstein described him as "the Outlaws overall patriarch in the Sunshine State and the South Florida chapter's revered Godfather". Nolan was instrumental in the Outlaws' rapid expansion throughout the state during the 1970s, as the club amalgamated various smaller motorcycle gangs, such as the Regents in Jacksonville and the Iron Cross in Orlando. Due to the aggressive membership drive in the early 1970s, Florida eventually had the largest concentration of Outlaws in the United States. During Nolan's presidency, Outlaws members were forbidden from retiring the club under threat of violence.
The South Florida Outlaws initially derived the majority of their income from sex trafficking, prostituting women known as "old ladies" who were deemed to be property of Outlaws members. The women were supplied to topless bars along Florida's Gold Coast to work as dancers and prostitutes. The bikers maintained control over these women using various methods, including gathering information on and threatening the lives of their families, and would occasionally buy and sell their old ladies amongst themselves. Under Nolan's leadership, the Outlaws shifted their focus in the mid-1970s from sex rackets, due to a decline in prostitution income, to illegal gambling and narcotics trafficking at a time when the demand for party drugs was at an all-time high at the peak of the disco era. Describing the bikers' motivations behind switching primarily from pimping to drug dealing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Kehoe said: "There are problems with old ladies. And drugs don’t talk back". The Florida faction of the Outlaws gained power and influence within the club by forging links with Colombian and Cuban drug suppliers, sourcing cocaine being imported into the state from Colombia, which they then distributed to chapters in the Midwest and on the East Coast. In addition to cocaine, the Outlaws also sold wholesale quantities of methamphetamine and heroin in Broward County.
Hells Angels murders.
A feud between the Outlaws and the Hells Angels began when two members of the Aliens biker gang in New York City — Sandy Alexander and Peter "Greased Lightning" Rogers — went separate ways, with Alexander joining the New York Hells Angels and Rogers leaving to become a member of the Chicago Outlaws. When Rogers returned to New York to attend a New Year's Eve party in Manhattan in 1973, he was severely beaten by Alexander after allegedly raping the Hells Angel's wife. To save face, Rogers told his fellow Outlaws that he had been attacked by a dozen Hells Angels. In the spring of 1974, Nolan learned that three members of the Hells Angels' Lowell, Massachusetts chapter were traveling to South Florida. Two of the bikers — "Whiskey" George Hartman and Edwin "Riverboat" Riley — were visiting the state to supervise the covering up of gang tattoos belonging to Albert "Oskie" Simmons, who had relocated to Orlando to operate a motorcycle shop after leaving the Lowell Hells Angels a year or two earlier. Police believe Hartman and Riley were also in Florida to source narcotics. Nolan called a club meeting to discuss what course of action the Outlaws should take regarding the presence in their territory of the "maggots" who had beaten their "brother" Peter Rogers.
After receiving information that Hartman, Riley and Simmons would be at the Pastime Bar, a Fort Lauderdale tavern, on April 30, 1974, Nolan and other members of the South Florida Outlaws went to the bar and began discussing their differences with the Hells Angels before suggesting they take the discussion "off the street". The Outlaws then lured the three bikers to their clubhouse under the guise of a drug deal, promising no harm would come to the Hells Angels. When the Hells Angels arrived at the Outlaws' clubhouse, however, Nolan ordered several fellow club members to take the rival bikers to a deserted area and "make sure they don't come back"․ Four Outlaws — Henry "Funky Tim" Amis, William "Gatemouth Willie" Edson, Norman "Spider" Risinger, and Ralph "Lucifer" Yannotta — then forced the Hells Angels into the back of a van at gunpoint, bound them with pink clothesline and drove them to a quarry in the Everglades of southwest Broward County near Andytown, where Risinger killed each of them execution-style with a 12-gauge shotgun. The bodies of the trio were weighed down with eight concrete cinder blocks and submerged in a flooded, twenty-feet-deep rock pit. The murders were discovered on May 1, 1974, after one of the corpses dislodged and floated to the surface, where it was seen by Stanley McElroy, a passing motorist. The other two were found by police divers. Hartman, Riley and Simmons were identified by their fingerprints and tattoos.
Edson was arrested in Canada for an unrelated crime in 1976 and subsequently turned state's evidence when he was extradited back to the United States, naming himself, Amis, Risinger and Yannotta as those who committed the triple homicide on the orders of Nolan. In 1977, the Hells Angels attempted to resolve the feud between the clubs by sending Sandy Alexander, along with Oakland, California chapter members Sergey Walton and Gary Popkin, to meet with Nolan and other Outlaws leaders in Durham, North Carolina. Nolan and his contingent did not show at the "sit-down", however. Along with Amis, Edson, Risinger and Yannotta, Nolan was indicted by a grand jury in connection with the killings in April 1978, charged with three counts of first-degree murder. At the time of his indictment, Nolan was being held in county jail while he appealed a five-year prison sentence he had received earlier that year on state drug charges and for threatening the life of a Hollywood, Florida policeman by threatening to sick his dog, a 150-pound Great Dane, on the officer.
State prosecutor Thomas Kern characterized Nolan as "the undisputed leader of the Outlaws in South Florida" and asserted that he was responsible for ordering the three murders. Edson and Yannotta, along with two other Outlaws, John "Egor" Loose and Dale "Brackett" Webb, testified against Nolan in exchange for lesser sentences. At the time of their testimony, Edson was serving a twenty-year prison sentence for torturing a woman; Loose was serving a twenty-year sentence for beating a woman with a table leg; Webb, a former president of the Orlando Outlaws chapter, was serving life for kidnapping; and Yannotta was serving four concurrent life sentences for murder. Nolan's defense attorney, Ray Sandstrom, maintained that the state's case against his client was "not such a neat package of sudden cooperation by public-spirited citizens as the prosecution would have you believe", noting that each the four state witnesses who had implicated Nolan had benefited by agreeing to testify. Nolan's first trial for the murders ended in a hung jury on December 22, 1978, when the 12-person jury was split 10-to-2 for conviction. A retrial, in March 1979, also ended in a mistrial. Nolan was ultimately acquitted in a third trial, later in 1979, after presenting what the state's witnesses testified was a fabricated defense.
Naomi Sonoqub murder.
In August 1974, a woman named Joyce Karleen was invited, on the offer of finding a job, from Daytona Beach to stay at a trailer home in Hollywood, Florida, which she later discovered was the Outlaws clubhouse. On the first day of her stay at the trailer, Nolan hit Karleen after she refused to bring him a beer. On the second day, he raped her at gunpoint, informed her that, as an Outlaw's "old lady", she would be expected to work and give her earnings to the club, and then allowed eight other Outlaws to gang rape her. The following day, Karleen was put to work as a topless dancer at a local tavern, along with other Outlaw old ladies. Later that week, on August 22, 1974, she was abducted as she left the lounge after work by several Outlaws, who believed that Karleen had stolen clothing bearing a "property patch", an indicator of a woman's status as an old lady of the club, from one of their "patched" women. The Outlaws tied Karleen to a chair at the clubhouse and stripped her of her blouse before each took turns punching and kicking her and then using a hot spoon to sear her repeatedly on her arms and breasts. After they had finished torturing Karleen, the bikers escorted other Outlaws old ladies into the room while she remained tied to a chair, and warned the other women that they would receive the same treatment if they misbehaved. Karleen was then dumped in a remote field. Several Outlaws were later convicted of the beating after she reported the incident to the police.
Shortly after the incident, Naomi Sinoqub, the old lady of Outlaws member Donald "Gangrene" Sears and one of the women who was with Karleen the night she was beaten and tortured, ran away from the club. Concerned that Sinoqub may implicate the Outlaws in Karleen's beating, Nolan contacted some of his fellow Outlaws and told them to locate her. After Sears tracked her down, Nolan first had Sinoqub hidden in Miami before ordering Sears to kill her. Sears and another Outlaw, Richard "Dirty Dick" Brainard, took Sinoqub out on Brainard's fishing boat and shot her twice in the head. Sinoqub's body was then allegedly disposed of in one of