Metal Moments

The 25 Greatest Moments in Metal History in Maxim.

When Rick Allen lost his left arm after a car accident on New Year’s Eve in 1984, many believed he’d never pound skin again. A few years later he proved them wrong, helping his band crank out Hysteria. Then the people said, “Sure, he can drum, but can he still beat his wife?” In ’95 Allen answered the naysayers by gallantly assaulting his missus in an LAX airport bathroom. His example remains a beacon to crippled assholes everywhere.

Also in Maxim, an article on how a gang was run from California's prison and the investigation that dismantled it.

Meanwhile, 450 miles to the north, near the Oregon border, business chugged along as usual inside Nuestra Familia headquarters, also known as Pelican Bay State Prison. Built in the late 1980s exclusively to control the state’s 2,500 most violent inmates, half of the high–tech compound is reserved for the brightly lit Security Housing Unit, or SHU. Inside the SHU, “the worst of the worst”—including the three generals of Nuestra Familia—spend 23 hours a day triple–locked inside neat pods of bone–white antiseptic cells.

Law enforcement agents say that from inside these spartan confines a handful of Nuestra Familia generals and captains miraculously orchestrated a criminal network over an area the size of Wyoming. According to government agents, 10 years after the Bay’s opening in 1989, the NF had surged from a few hundred members into a supergang topping 1,000, a growth so astonishing that guards nicknamed it the Blooming Flower.