Part 2: A Biker Sold His Harley to Bail His Brother Out of Prison — 3 Years Later, His Brother Opened a Garage Door
Let me tell you about July of 2021, because that’s where this started, and Ray never would.
I’d been arrested in May on a charge I am not going to detail — a bar fight, a hospital stay for a man who had not started it, a prior on my record from 2008, and a Kern County DA running for re-election on “We will prosecute bikers to the fullest extent of the law.” Aggravated assault with enhancements. My public defender told me quietly I was looking at twelve years.
Lena came to visit me on the second Saturday. She’d been up thirty-six hours, eight months pregnant with our son. The bond was $185,000 — meaning $18,500 for a bondsman plus a property lien, or the full amount in cash or equity.
We didn’t have it. Not close.
She told me the brothers were “doing what they could” — small Venmo amounts, promises on the bondsman fee. But the property lien was the killer. Nobody in the club had the equity.
Lena cried in the visiting room. I told her I could do twelve years if I had to. I told her to name the boy Walter the Third anyway.
Four days later, I was released on bail.
I didn’t know how.
My public defender said he’d received a call from a private criminal defense attorney out of Los Angeles — David Ruiz, $650 an hour, usually mafia and cartel cases — who had filed a notice of appearance as my new counsel. Ruiz met with me for two hours. He expected four to six years at trial. My client fund had $95,000 in it. He refused to name who’d retained him.
I went home on bail the next morning. Our son was born three weeks later. Walt III. I held him in the hospital room and told Lena I’d find out who’d bailed me out.
She said: “Walt. If they’d wanted you to know, they’d have told you.”
I didn’t listen. When I asked the brothers, they shrugged. When I pushed, they said “Brother, the club took care of it.” When I pressed Coop — a guy who couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it — he said “I promised I wouldn’t say.”
Somebody had made them all promise.
At trial in November, I was convicted of the lesser charge and sentenced to four years. Ruiz had gotten my twelve down to four. With credits I’d do about half. I served thirty-seven months. Released three months ago.
And on the third week I was out — when I could finally start piecing together what the club had done for me while I was away — a brother named Tonto (real name Frank Montoya, our sergeant-at-arms) pulled me aside at the clubhouse and handed me a folded receipt.
“Thought you should have this, Walt. Don’t tell Ray I gave it to you.”
It was a sales receipt. Dated July 19, 2021. From a vintage motorcycle broker in Fresno.
For the sale of one 1977 Harley-Davidson FLH Electra Glide. Birch White. VIN number ending in 3971.
Seller: Raymond L. Stapleton.
Sale price: $62,400.
Below the sale line, in the payment notes section, handwritten: “Wire transfer to David Ruiz, attorney at law, re: Crane defense fund.”
I knew that motorcycle. Every brother in the Central Valley Brotherhood knew that motorcycle.
Ray Stapleton had built it with his father, Ray Stapleton Sr., in the gravel driveway of their house in Oildale in 1989. Ray was twenty-seven. His father was sixty-one — the same age Ray is now. They’d bought the bike as a basket case for $800 from a widow whose husband had died before finishing his own restoration. The Shovelhead had come in boxes. Engine cases on one shelf. Frame in the corner. Tank wrapped in newspaper.
Ray and his father spent the entire summer of 1989 building it.
Ray’s father died of a heart attack on December 3rd of that year. Two months after they finished the bike.
The Shovelhead was Ray’s only inheritance. Not the house — that had a mortgage. Not money — there wasn’t any. Just the motorcycle. And the memory of building it beside a man Ray would say, years later at the clubhouse when he was drunk enough to talk honest, was the only person who had ever fully looked at him.
Ray had ridden that Shovelhead for thirty-two years. He’d turned down offers — one collector from San Diego had walked up to him at a rally in 2015 and offered $80,000 cash. Ray had said “No sir,” and ridden away.
He’d told his wife Sharon, on her hospital bed the week before she died in 2016 of the same breast cancer that had taken his mother in 1984, that he would never sell it.
Sharon had said “Yes you will, if you ever need to. Don’t be stupid for the sake of being stubborn.”
Ray had said “I will not sell that bike, Sharon.”
She’d said “Fine. You stubborn man.” Two days later she was gone.
On July 19, 2021, Ray Stapleton sold his 1977 Shovelhead.
For me.
For a man who was not his blood. Who was not even his closest brother in the club. Who had been arrested for a bar fight. Who had a pregnant wife and a public defender and twelve years hanging over his head and no way to pay for a real lawyer.
Ray sold the only thing he owned that mattered to save a brother’s four years.
And then he had told every other brother in the club not to tell me. Because he knew — he knew better than I knew myself — that if I ever found out, I would not be able to live with it.
I sat in my truck in the parking lot of the Central Valley Brotherhood clubhouse in Bakersfield on that Tuesday afternoon holding a sales receipt from July 2021 and I cried.
Not quiet crying. The other kind. The kind that rips the hinges off the door and doesn’t close the door again afterward.
When I was done, I drove to Ray’s house. I was going to confront him. I was going to say I knew. I was going to demand he let me pay him back, somehow, across whatever number of years it took.
But I didn’t go to his door.
I went to his garage.
I stood in the side yard and looked at the closed overhead door, and I knew — I knew without opening it — that the space inside was empty. That Ray Stapleton had been living for thirty-seven months in a house with an empty garage where his father’s motorcycle used to sit.
And I made a decision standing in that side yard that I spent the next three years, two days, and one Saturday morning keeping.
I was going to find that Shovelhead.
And I was going to give it back.
What I didn’t know when I made that decision — what I wouldn’t fully understand until about six months into the search — was that Ray hadn’t just sold the bike. He’d sold it to a broker who had flipped it to a private collector in Reno, who had stripped it for parts and sold the components across three continents.
The engine cases — the original 1977 Shovelhead cases, numbers-matching to the frame — had gone to a restorer in Germany. The frame had been sold to a chopper builder in Tokyo. The tank and fenders had been bought by a nostalgia collector in Australia who wanted Birch White parts for his own project. The heads had gone to a Harley museum in Milwaukee.
The bike had been atomized.
The broker in Fresno — a man named Kenny Walsh — was not happy to see me when I walked into his showroom in March of 2022 asking about a Shovelhead he’d bought from Ray Stapleton the previous summer. He assumed I was family, angry about the sale. I told him I was a brother of the seller and I needed the buyer’s contact information so I could try to reverse the sale.
He gave it to me. Not kindly. But he gave it.
I spent the next thirty-three months — raising an infant, holding down a refrigeration-shop job in Bakersfield, reporting to a federal probation officer — tracking every piece of that 1977 Shovelhead across eight countries and fourteen sellers.
I found the engine cases in Munich. Klaus, the restorer, sold them back for $14,000 after I wrote him what the motorcycle was. He replied in careful English: “For a brother — this is right.”
I found the frame in Tokyo. Six weeks of translated negotiation. $9,200 and shipping.
I found the tank and fenders in Brisbane. Graeme, a retired mining engineer, sold them back at cost after photos of Ray and his father in 1989. He wrote: “I’m a father. Send me the parts list when it’s done.”
I found the heads in the Harley-Davidson Museum archive in Milwaukee. The curator released them at the museum’s cost.
I rebuilt the engine myself. Second bedroom of my house. Walt III — three by then — handed me wrenches he couldn’t lift and asked every Saturday: “Daddy, is the bike for Mr. Ray today?”
“Not today, buddy. Soon.”
1,102 days. Every bolt torqued to 1977 spec. Paint mixed in Sacramento from the factory formula. The seat re-covered by Harold — Ray’s late father’s best friend, the only upholstery shop that still had the tan pattern on file, a man who cried when he understood what he was stitching.
On the night before I delivered it, I slept in my garage on a cot beside the bike.
At 6:58 a.m. Saturday morning, I fired it up, idled it for four minutes to warm the oil, and shut it off.
Loaded it onto a trailer.
I drove to Ray’s house.
Here’s what I didn’t know, and wouldn’t know until I opened Ray’s garage door that morning.
Ray had spent the same 1,102 days trying to build his own version of my apology.
While I was searching for pieces of his Shovelhead across the world, Ray was in his garage every night, rebuilding a different motorcycle for me.
He’d noticed something about me, years before my arrest, that even my wife hadn’t noticed. I had a dream bike — a 1971 FX Super Glide, the first year of the factory custom line, the bike I’d saved photographs of on my phone since I was twenty-two years old. I’d never been able to afford one. I’d mentioned it to Ray exactly once, at a bonfire in 2018, after three beers.
He’d remembered.
In the same July that he sold his Shovelhead, Ray took $18,000 of the remaining proceeds — after the $62,400 went to my defense fund — and bought a 1971 FX Super Glide basket case from a barn in Arkansas.
He spent the thirty-seven months I was in prison rebuilding it.
When I opened his garage door on that Saturday morning, I expected to see an empty space. A workbench. Tools.
What I saw was a 1971 FX Super Glide. Red, white, and blue factory paint. Chrome polished. Idling.
With a bow on the tank.
Idling.
He’d started it that morning when he heard my truck pull into the driveway.
Ray was standing next to it in a clean work shirt, and he said — before he looked at me, before he looked at what was on the trailer behind my truck — “Welcome home, Walt. Figured you needed something to ride.”
Then he looked past me.
At the trailer.
At what I’d been trying to deliver.
At his 1977 Shovelhead. Birch White. Idling.
And Ray Stapleton — the quietest brother in the Central Valley Brotherhood, the one whose hands shook when he spoke in front of more than four people — sat down on his garage floor in the doorway between his rebuilt 1971 Super Glide and his returned 1977 Shovelhead, and he put his face in his hands, and he cried the way men like Ray cry, which is almost silently, which is into their own palms, which is the sound of a generator running far away at night.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “You son of a bitch. I spent three years.”
“So did I,” I said.
And then I sat down on the concrete beside him, and we both stayed there for a long time, neither of us speaking, the engines of two 1970s-era Harley-Davidsons idling on either side of us, both of us having spent 1,102 days trying to do the thing the other one would have done.
We sat on the concrete for about thirty minutes.
Neither of us tried to talk about money. Neither of us tried to balance the ledger. I did not say I’ve paid you back. He did not say I shouldn’t have let you. The math of what we’d done for each other — his inheritance for my freedom, thirty-seven months of my life for thirty-seven months of his restoration — did not zero out, and would never zero out, and we both knew it.
Money was the vocabulary of the thing. It wasn’t the thing.
The thing was that Ray had believed I was worth his father’s motorcycle. And I had believed Ray was worth 1,102 nights in a second bedroom rebuilding what I’d cost him.
We both turned out to be right.
Ray rides the Shovelhead every Sunday morning at 6:30. Same route he used to — past his father’s grave, past the elementary school where his mother taught for twenty-nine years, past the house where he and Sharon raised their daughter. Three hours. Home. He parks it in the garage and covers it with the same canvas tarp his father used in 1989.
I ride the FX Super Glide. We ride together a couple times a month. We don’t talk on the bikes. Ray up front where a senior brother belongs, me on his right flank.
The bikes don’t belong to the men who built them anymore. We are riding each other’s thirty-seven months.
Walt III is five now. He’s started asking about motorcycles.
Last Sunday, he sat on the tank of the Shovelhead in Ray’s garage. Ray let him. Ray let him grip the bars with his small hands and make engine noises with his mouth.
Afterward, Walt III asked me: “Daddy, whose bike is that one?”
I looked at Ray. Ray looked at me.
“Both of ours,” we said.
At the same time.
Walt III accepted the answer the way five-year-olds do — filing it away, not interrogating.
Somewhere in California, a seller will never know what happened to a crate of Shovelhead engine cases he sold to a German restorer in 2021.
Ray covers the bike every Sunday afternoon with his father’s tarp.
I ride home on a Super Glide that belongs to both of us.
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