By Arlyn Tobias Gajilan
 

James eventually left bodyguarding much the same way he did football--by accident. During a concert in Detroit, James fell from the stage and dislocated his elbow. While on the mend at home, he decided to return to bike building, something he'd done between bodyguard stints. So he showed up on the doorstep of the industry's leading metalworkers and bike builders, including fabricator Fay Butler, custom-wheel designer Boyd Coddington, and Ron Simms, owner of Simms Custom Cycles. "He came here and said, 'I wanna be just like you guys,'" remembers Simms, happy to show James the ropes and throw a few fender orders his way.

From the start, Jesse James the entrepreneur was eager, ambitious, and very optimistic. Even before he'd set up a real shop, he had a batch of West Coast Choppers T-shirts made and began passing them out. James thought it was a cool marketing idea, but his buddies thought otherwise. "All my friends were like, 'What the f--- is this? You ain't gonna have no shop,' " recalls Jesse. "I didn't think I'd ever have a shop like I have now. But I had dreams."

In the beginning he also had a lot of headaches. While James is an artist with steel and a savvy marketer, he is by his own reckoning a "piss-poor accountant." Unwilling to take out a loan from either an investor or a bank, James operated pretty much from hand-built bike to mouth. "I'd finish a bike and use the money to buy more tools to build more bikes," says James. Since just one of his motorcycles can take anywhere from 500 to 800 man-hours, profits didn't come easy. Complicating the books was the fact that West Coast Choppers constantly owed money, largely because its customers owed it money. "We were running a revolving cash register," says James. "It blew."

It was a period that left an indelible mark. "It seems like money, it controls everything," says James, who has a big fat Benjamin tattooed across the width of his back. "At the time it seemed like there was, like, a half-million dollars floating around out there, but none of it was coming in." When the usual collection letters didn't work, he had the words pay up sucker! tattooed onto his palm.

Keeping track of the company's red ink was James's first wife, Carla. "That was a big mistake," says James, who shares custody of their young son and daughter. "I'm a gambler, and I'll bet the farm to do new things. She wasn't into it." The couple's breakup was difficult not only personally but also professionally, since Carla largely ran West Coast Choppers' back office until early 2001. (For more on this topic, see Is Your Business Ruining Your Marriage?.) An outside management company was quickly hired to handle the company's growing financials.

It was a smart move, because business was about to amp up. In 2001 the Discovery Channel aired Motorcycle Mania I and II, and both programs centered on James and West Coast Choppers. "He was our top pick," says Beers, who produced those films before casting James as host of Monster Garage, a truly odd automotive show in which select mechanics can transform perfectly fine Porsches into golf-ball retrievers, or Chevys into Zambonis. Beers had considered other bike builders to profile and act as lead Frankenstein for Monster Garage's fraternity of gearheads. But they were history the moment he walked into James's shop. "It was like I'd died and gone to boy heaven," says Beers.

Indeed, the place is a shrine to machines and machismo. There are, of course, the requisite cars and bikes that look fast even while parked. Placed strategically on each is a not-so-customer-friendly message: Please Do Not Sit On or Touch, A------. Minding the shop are a pair of pit bulls (Cisco and Noodles) and a couple of pet sharks swimming ceaselessly in the gift shop's 700-gallon tank. "And then there was Jesse. He was handsome and articulate, and already had a small cult following," says Beers.

That following grew by 7 feet and 1 inch after the Lakers' Shaquille O'Neal caught Motorcycle Mania I on TV. Impressed by what he saw, he called James and asked him to build a chopper customized to his somewhat mind-boggling measurements. Fitting and engineering something strong enough and cool enough for a client weighing in at 338 pounds, with an inseam of 49 inches, was a challenge. The result is an 11 1/2-foot-long purple-and-gold aircraft carrier of a bike outfitted with custom footpegs designed to fit Shaq's size-24 feet and brake levers to fit his enormous hands. The bike earned James about $150,000 and priceless publicity.

For those who can ill afford a Jesse James bike, take heart. Buying into his club and into James's elite brand of cool is possible. If you're a biker, you can get a piece of Jesse by ordering a set of his Hell Bent exhaust pipes, his Gunslinger fender, or an Iron Cross-shaped air cleaner. If you're not a biker but just want to look like one, a growing line of West Coast Choppers clothing can help you suit up. While his garage can grind out only a limited number of bikes each year, partnerships with select parts fabricators and apparel distributors are helping create new business. "Teaming up with partners is helping us grow faster than we could normally," says Renay Palome, James's office manager and consigliere. The key is making sure they adhere to her boss's strict standards. If vendors can't hack it, she says, "he'll cut them off, neat and clean."

At the moment West Coast Choppers' clothing line is the company's hottest seller. The sale of T-shirts, belt buckles, sneakers, and kids' clothes now represents 60% of the company's revenues. What's fueling that? In a word, television. Monster Garage, which launched last summer, is the Discovery Channel's top-rated new series. The show, combined with regular re-broadcasts of Motorcycle Mania I and II, is earning James legions of new fans and customers.

Not everyone's an admirer. In the bike-building biz there are as many petty jealousies, cliques, and rivalries as there are in a high school cafeteria. The hottest dish du jour is Jesse James. "Television made him," says Simms, who describes himself as a former friend and mentor. "And it's changed him too." Simms, like a few of the other bike builders and trade experts we spoke to, think James's marketing skills are better than his mechanical aptitude. James's response: Whatever.

For now, he says, there are better things to pay attention to. He's busy growing his business and living his life. He's filming Motorcycle Mania III and shooting new episodes of his TV show. There's also his new marriage to Janine Lindemulder, a former adult-film star with credits like Blonde Justice and Where the Boys Aren't 13.

What happens if the buzz dies down? Or if cameras and TV fans turn away? What then? Says James: "I'll go back to building bikes. Remember, I'm just a glorified welder."

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