Return Of The Motor City Madman: Highwaymen MC Power ‘Mad Anthony’ Back In The D After Dime Piece In Prison

Detroit biker boss “Mad Anthony” Clark is back in Motown. The 59-year old one-time Highwaymen Motorcycle Club national president was recently released to a halfway house in the Motor City after a decade in prison. He’ll be free for good on May 16. According to court records and DEA documents, he’s a suspect in an unsolved murder from almost 20 years ago.

Clark was one of the featured defendants in a giant 2007 federal racketeering and drug indictment levied against Detroit’s only homegrown biker gang and convicted at a 2010 trial – he had his original sentence reduced on appeal. The Highwaymen’s national president from 2002-2005, Mad Anthony was busted in a previous racketeering case surrounding club activity in Michigan in the 1980s.

Even though Clark was the club’s national president for three years in the 2000s, he deferred to co-defendant and Highwaymen Godfather Leonard (Big Daddy) Moore for all major decisions. Moore, 69, always used a series of front bosses in an attempt to insulate himself from law enforcement scrutiny. After Clark’s presidency concluded, Mad Anthony stayed on as Moore’s top advisor.

One witness at the summer 2010 trial testified Moore told him, “I don’t need the title (presidency), I don’t need the heat, I have the power and that’s all that matters.” Big Daddy Moore isn’t scheduled for release from prison for another 11 years.

Clark and Moore were both implicated, but never charged, with the 1999 murder of an unnamed club member as part of the federal inquiry that landed them behind bars for racketeering and narcotics trafficking a decade ago. In his November 2007 debriefing with the feds, Clark’s protégé in the club and former vice president, Danny (Rocket) Sanchez, admitted that he, Clark and Moore killed a 20-year old man inside the Highwaymen’s Detroit clubhouse and then set the clubhouse ablaze in an arson to eliminate the evidence.

Rocket Sanchez and his brother and fellow turncoat-Highwaymen Nat (Bolo) Sanchez each testified against Clark and Moore at their trial. The murdered man’s mother disrupted the trial in the middle of Rocket Sanchez’s testimony by standing up in the back of the courtroom, pointing to Sanchez and screaming, “He killed my son, he killed my son.”

Clark and the Sanchez brothers ran a cocaine-distribution ring together. Per the 2007 indictment, Clark was involved in an attempted murder conspiracy in 2004 related to the Highwaymen’s rivalry with another local biker gang called the Black Pistons.

The state’s largest motorcycle club, the Highwaymen were founded in Detroit by Elburn (Big Max) Burns in 1954. The club maintains chapters in Indiana, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, New York and New Jersey. There are eight chapters in Michigan – Downtown Detroit, Eastside Detroit, Westside Detroit, Northwest Detroit, Downriver, Ann Arbor, Lansing and Monroe.

The Highwaymen are known to do business with other major organized crime groups in the area like the Italian mafia and local Mexican street gangs such as the Latin Counts. According to court filings in the 2007 case, the Highwaymen’s liaison to the Detroit mob was Gary (Junior) Ball and the club’s contact with the Latin Counts was its then-national president Joseph (Little Joe) Whiting. Ball, the club’s unofficial narcotics boss, and Whiting, Big Daddy Moore’s right-hand man, were both convicted and are currently guests of the federal corrections system.

Little Joe Whiting got nailed for operating a stolen motorcycle ring, transporting boosted bikes from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina up to Michigan to be sold on the black market or out of club-owned cycle shops. During a 2006 raid of Junior Ball’s headquarters, Pal’s Auto Parts & Repair, FBI agents discovered stolen bikes and forged Department of Transportation documents. Whiting was caught on a wire discussing murdering a Highwaymen he believed was an informant with Latin Counts leader and Southwest Detroit crime lord Anthony (Scarface Tony) Viramontez.