The Angel and the Heiress : Biker in Dispute With Eunice Shriver Over $3,000 Olympic Fee

The Hells Angels may not, at first glance, seem to have any reason to tangle with Kennedy heiress Eunice Shriver.

But Shriver and George (Gus) Christie, the wildly tattooed president of the Angels’ Ventura chapter, have gotten into a little tiff.

It all started when Christie collected $3,000 from his biker buddies as an entry fee to run a kilometer in last summer’s historic Olympic Torch Relay.

Now, the squabble centers on what has happened to the $3,000.

Christie wanted to send the money to the Special Olympics, an international charity headed by Shriver that stages athletic competitions for the mentally retarded. Specifically, he earmarked the funds for a Special Olympics program in Pottstown, Pa.

The bikers’ $3,000 arrived at the Special Olympics headquarters in Washington more than six months ago, but it still has not been forwarded to the folks in Pottstown.

Patience is not the Hells Angels’ strong suit, but Christie has been waging a quiet battle on behalf of the Pottstown kids from a pay phone inside the Angels’ Ventura County clubhouse--a nondescript little building with a red steel door warning “No Bozos. No Wimps.”

Last month, Christie finally received a letter from Shriver, chairwoman of the board of Special Olympics Inc. She acknowledged the money had not been sent to Pottstown--and challenged Christie to prove that he intended it to go there.

The 38-year-old Hells Angel said he had no idea he would wind up in a debate with the late President John F. Kennedy’s sister as a result of running in the Torch Relay.

As an emotional prologue to the Summer Games, the sacred Olympic flame was carried by torch 15,000 miles across the country, arriving on July 20 in a remote pea field outside Point Mugu in Ventura County.

Christie, who is a jogger as well as a biker, stripped off his leather jacket and boots, exposing his skimpy Olympic relay uniform--as well as arms tattooed with winged skulls and roaring dragons. Grabbing the torch, he trotted proudly down the country road past hordes of cheering bikers--Hells Angels, Crucifiers and Heathens.

When the run was over, the real “runaround” began, Christie said.

The Torch Relay Foundation wrote a letter asking him to designate “which youth organization is to be the beneficiary of your funds (as well as the specific location of that youth organization).”

Without hesitation, Christie picked the Pottstown chapter of the Special Olympics in Pennsylvania. “There was no question where we wanted the money to go,” Christie said.

Christie has never been to Pottstown, an industrial town of about 25,000 outside Philadelphia, but folks there had begun writing to him last April when they first read that he would be running in the Torch Relay and was interested in helping retarded people. “May God bless you for your willingness to help others,” wrote Joan Carlson of the Pottstown Special Olympics.

“You’ve got a friend in Pennsylvania!!” wrote Rosemary Haflin, the mother of a retarded boy, who said she had never talked to a Hells Angel until Christie called to thank her for her letter.

Christie called again in August to say that the Angels would be giving their $3,000 contribution to Pottstown Special Olympics.

“Wow!” Haflin recalled. “We had never had $3,000 in our treasury . . . the most was maybe $300 after a real big bake sale! We’re a really poor local. We get very few people out to meets. It’s very sad.”

Haflin said everybody started thinking about how to spend it. The top priority was to buy uniform jackets for the kids.

“We were just thrilled,” Haflin said. “And then--we never got the money.”

Haflin said that she got the runaround from Special Olympics officials when she called to inquire. “I really didn’t want to give Special Olympics a bad name, but I’m very disenchanted and I’ve said so,” Haflin declared.

Meanwhile, Christie has tried to straighten out the problem, too. He has plugged a generous number of coins into the pay phone.

When Shriver learned of Christie’s complaint, she sent him a letter March 25 saying she was “distressed to learn that the $3,000 which you wished to go to Special Olympics in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, did not go there.”

Wasn’t Advised, She Says

She said officials at the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee Torch Relay Foundation had not advised her that Christie wanted the money to go to Pottstown.

So, Shriver said, half the money was sent to Special Olympics programs in California and the rest was kept by Special Olympics headquarters in Washington.

She said that if Christie could “document” his designation of Pottstown, she could try to arrange a transfer of the funds.

Since then, Christie said, he has tried unsuccessfully to reach Shriver by telephone. “I still would like to speak to Eunice,” he said. “I’d like to sit down and just talk.”

Shriver declined to be interviewed by The Times.

But Special Olympics press secretary Joann Stevens said she now believes Shriver’s letter was incorrect because it was “based on an erroneous assumption.”

After checking the records, she said, Torch Relay officials had advised that Christie’s donation should be credited, not to Pottstown specifically, but to the state of Pennsylvania. So, half of it was sent to the Pennsylvania Special Olympics and the rest was kept by Washington headquarters, Stevens said.

In Pennsylvania, the director of the state’s Special Olympics confirmed that he received a lump sum of money, but was given no instructions to pass any of it on to Pottstown.

“I’m going to sit tight on that money until somebody tells me I have to make a move,” said Frank Dean, director of the Pennsylvania Special Olympics.

Disgusted with the runaround and feeling bad that the Pottstown children had no jackets, Christie recently took up another collection from his biker pals and raised enough money to have jackets made specially for them.

Last month, Christie said, he packed up about 25 blue-and-white windbreakers, emblazoned with the Pottstown Special Olympics logo, and mailed them off.

When the jackets arrived, Haflin said, “it meant so much--that this rough, tough Hells Angel was soft enough to care about some mentally retarded kids!”

Said Christie: “I once saw a documentary on television showing mentally retarded people competing in sports and I was overwhelmed. I felt that retarded children is an area that people don’t want to deal with. It’s like the Hells Angels. They know we’re there. They don’t understand and they don’t want to deal with us.”