Pagan’s MC
The most powerful of the regional clubs — and a deliberate exception to the globalizing trend. The Pagan’s never went international; for decades they simply owned the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, and warred to keep it.
◆ Back to all clubs ◆Origins
The Pagan’s Motorcycle Club was founded in 1959 by Lou Dobkin in suburban Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Their emblem is Surt (Surtr), the Norse fire-giant, brandishing a flaming sword. From that Maryland start the club grew into the dominant outlaw force of the U.S. East Coast — and, unusually, stopped there: where the Hells Angels and Bandidos became multinationals, the Pagan’s chose to remain fiercely, exclusively regional.
The Regional Power
Famously decentralized and volatile, the Pagan’s concentrated their strength from New York down through the Carolinas — a corridor they defended against all comers. The club is one of the U.S. federal “Big Four,” and the only one of them without an international footprint. Its ground-level world is opened from the inside in Anthony Menginie’s memoir and, a generation earlier, in John Hall’s account of the late-1960s New York chapter.
War With the Angels
As the Hells Angels pushed east, the Pagan’s fought them for decades — a long, grinding rivalry along the Eastern corridor that never produced a decisive winner. The Pagan’s also feuded with rivals up and down their territory, a volatility documented across Tony Thompson’s Outlaws and the Menginie memoir.
The Pagans & the Mob
Unusually among the outlaw clubs, the Pagan’s collided directly with the Italian-American Mafia. John Hall’s Riding on the Edge recounts the club’s early-1980s war with the Philadelphia mob (the Scarfo organization and underboss “Chuckie” Merlino) — including Pagans shooting up a home tied to Merlino — a friction not found in the other clubs’ stories.