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In this clip, Mr. Hunt, also known as "Nutt," explains how the CONVICTS motorcycle club was named, the acronymn meaning and overview of membership community activities.
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Courtney Hunt oral history interview, 2013 October 02. OH-00911. [Audio recording] Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Neva
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The acronym actually means Conquerors of Negative Vicious Intent Concentrating Towards Succeeding. Pretty much how we came up with that...the founder, he was really stuck on the name Convicts. He wanted this name Convicts. And we went back and forth, back and forth because most of our members are professionals. We have bankers. We have military. We have retired military. So they were kind of like—we want to be a part of this family because we all knew each other, but we don't want that name on that back. And it became a challenge to see if we could overturn the name, if we could put the name in the community and make it mean something good. That's how we came up with the acronym. And so most of our members are either retired military, bankers, Realtors®. Myself, I'm the executive director of Comfort Hands, which is an elderly PCA company, personal care. So we have everything in here. And we actually have a handful of felons, also. So how did the group get together? How did you get together with the bankers, yourself, Realtors®? What we were doing—most of the members, not all, but most of the members are from Las Vegas, Nevada, and so we knew each other growing up and we communicated and so forth. We just brought to them that we want to start a bike club and we want to do this on bikes. Myself, I was already riding bikes. Riding is a beautiful thing. You have to ride one day. Riding is such a beautiful thing. We just projected that out into the community and we also let them know that our primary goal was to give back to 89030/89106 [zip codes]. So we started the club to make sure that kids had back-to-school backpacks, school supplies, shoes. In the wintertime we have coat drives. We want them to have coats to go to school. We know that it's difficult to go to school when you're hungry and when you're cold and when you don't look like the rest of the kids. See, it's very difficult to learn. And we have Christmas drives and at Thanksgiving we (give) turkeys to families and we feed the homeless. We have another division of ourselves called the Convicted Angels; they're a social club. They're like our little sisters. So we kind of depend on them to set up the things with the homeless and the things down at the Shade Tree and with Salvation Army and Opportunity Village. One of our members, I don't know exactly what she does, but she works for Opportunity Village. I mean there's a lot for us to do. As much as we want to help we can. Why do you keep this a secret? We don't. Why don't I know about it? I have no idea. I believe that because of our name—the people that know us, they know us; but the people that don't know us, they don't even want to get to know us. But once you get to know us, we're infectious; you can't help but to come around; you can't help but to involve yourself in what we're doing because the only thing that we do is give back to the community. And we ride our bikes for fun. So we take trips. Where do you go? Well, we have three mandatory trips a year, which the first one we go to Arizona; we go visit with another bike club. They have an annual every year and it's always at the same time every year. So we'll schedule three different ones every year. This year we went to Arizona first and then California and then Arizona again, I believe. Next year we'll vote on where the club wants to go because we want to support different clubs that are doing positive things. We don't support outlaw clubs. That is nowhere near anything that we do. Our name kind of puts us in the same bubble as an outlaw club. But we've had meetings with the chief of police, we've had meetings with the captains, we've had meetings with the commissioners, and they know what we do. We have their direct numbers, so we can call them, because in the beginning we were being harassed because of our names. Now, once they pull us over and they do a field investigation and they see, hey, these are the good guys, they pretty much let us go about our business. But we wanted to get rid of even that. Let us break the law and then we'll answer accordingly. But we don't break the law. We're all adults. I think the youngest person in our club—the youngest person was myself and I'm 39. But I believe we have one or two that are around 35, 36. When was the club organized? 2007. July of 2007 was our inception. By February of 2008 we had maybe 25, 30 members. In the beginning you have the growing pains. So we were growing and we were learning how serious this was, this game that we were playing. We thought it was a game, but it was a little more serious. It kind of took over our lives. It enveloped us and we became motorcyclists.