The Outlaws Motorcycle Club in Chicago has moved hitching posts. Back in the winter, the Outlaws infamous North Side chapter left its longtime stomping grounds on Division Street in Humboldt Park and relocated to a new clubhouse on the city’s far west end in an industrial warehouse district. The property the North Side chapter’s former clubhouse sits on was sold in February for just under $100,000, according to an article in the Chicago Sun-Times. The Outlaws’ North Side chapter was opened in 1994. The entire club itself was founded in the Windy City in the mid-1930s, the oldest of the nation’s one-percenter biker gangs. Before the Outlaws moved in almost two dozen years ago, the Humboldt Park property had been occupied by the Wheelman Motorcycle Club. Per court records, the Outlaws absorbed the Wheelman in a region wide upping of the ranks in the 1990s in response to the west coast-based Hells Angels starting to push into the Midwest, focusing on Illinois and Wisconsin as key hubs in their expansion effort. The North Side clubhouse was raided by the FBI in 2008, part of an investigation into the chapter’s links to the Chicago mafia. The Northsider’s liaison to the Italians, Mark (Pork Chop) Polchan would go down in a racketeering and extortion bust the following year alongside then-Outfit acting boss Michael (Fat Mike) Sarno. Polchan owned a pawn shop in notoriously mob-infested Cicero, Illinois which was a frequent hangout and fencing spot for Sarno’s Cicero crew. Embattled Outlaws boss Peter (Big Pete) James, the North Side chapter president for more than a decade, resigned under pressure from his biker gang brethren in summer of 2015, leaving the club and retiring to focus solely on his fight with cancer. James and Polchan reportedly tried intimidating a future witness against Polchan and Sarno in a bar altercation in Berwyn, Illinois in 2010. Polchan was the North Side chapter’s treasurer – he bombed a Berwyn vending company Sarno was feuding with over video poker distribution routes and is currently doing 60 years in prison. Fat Mike Sarno got sentenced to 25-to-50 years in the joint. Jason (Babyface Jay) Halvorson replaced James as the Outlaws’ North Side president.
