No Angel: My undercover journey to the dark heart of the Hells Angels

by Nils Johnson-Shelton

  Regular citizens and small-time crooks were the main clientele, but it also attracted a fair number of outlaw bikers. Smitty came through two or three times a week.

  Varvil and I sat at the bar, talking about the Florence Prison Run. Everyone knew about the Florence Run. All the Arizona clubs saddled up and rode out to the Florence prisons to pay tribute to their incarcerated brothers. I said I’d never been, and Varvil said it was a sight to behold. I told him I thought I’d go, even if I had to go alone. It sounded too damn cool.

  Abraham emerged from the john, walked over to us, and climbed onto his stool. He wrapped his hands around his beer and stared at the TV, which showed a Colin Powell interview intercut with images of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Abraham said longingly, “Man, talk about a fucking market.” Neither Varvil nor I said anything. We weren’t sure what he meant. Abraham said, “Man, if I could, I’d build a fucking bridge from Afghanistan to the front door of my store . . .”

  Varvil was shocked. “Bob, what are you talking about?”

  “I’d sell those Arab boys some guns, is what I’m talking about!” He pointed the glistening top of his beer bottle at a group of bearded Taliban.

  Varvil nearly choked. “So they could kill Americans with them?!”

  “Hell, yeah! I don’t give a shit. Money is money, and if a motherfucker needs a gun, I want to be his guy.”

  I said, “Dude, you’re fucked up.”

  Varvil, the ex-Marine, looked at Abraham like he was a leper and went back to drinking.

  Abraham changed the subject. “Say, Bird, you doing anything tomorrow?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “I’m going shooting, out in the desert. Wanna come?”

  “What’s the occasion?”

  He took a long swig of beer and said, “It’s Nigger Monday. I know those lazy feds always take their holidays to drink beer and sit around, therefore I know I won’t get caught with any of my really fun toys out in the bush.” He tapped his temple, indicating his brains, which, had it been acceptable, I would have enjoyed bashing.

  I said I didn’t think I’d make it, finished my drink, and left.

  I didn’t take Martin Luther King Day off. I did paperwork, concentrating on Abraham, and visited Holt at the machine shop to pick up another batch of silencers. The whole time I thought, Abraham, you fat fuck, here is one fed who’s working the long weekend, and one day you are going to go to jail for just a little bit longer because I decided to work on “Nigger Monday,” 2002.

  4 HOEDOWN AT HARRAH’S

  JANUARY–APRIL 2002

  I WENT ON the Prison Run in late January.

  Florence, Arizona, is a small desert town whose main distinction is that it’s home to the state’s—and the nation’s—largest correctional facilities. Thousands of bikers stage up and slowly ride out to the prison complex in a massive pack of chrome, steel, leather, and denim to pay their respects to those unfortunate enough to be doing hard time. As the ragged column crawls past the yard, orange-jumpsuited inmates caged behind thousands of feet of curlicued razor wire stand at parade rest while the bikers file past, saluting, hooting and hollering. To establish some semblance of order, the law comes out in a show of force. Helicopters, antipersonnel vehicles, cruisers, motorcycles, SUVs, paddy wagons—the whole fleet.

  Varvil, who didn’t go, was right: It was a sight to behold.

  I rode with a confidential informant from another case out of Los Angeles. The CI’s name was Mike Kramer, aka Mesa Mike. He was one of the few Angels we ever got to flip, but at that time his case agent, ATF special agent John Ciccone, didn’t know exactly why he’d flipped. At the run, Mesa Mike intro’d me to some of his closest friends—Mesa Angels Cal Schaefer, Kevin Augustiniak, and Paul Eischeid. He pointed out others from a distance: the Mesa president, Bad Bob, and his vice president, Whale; Smitty from Bullhead, who I easily recognized; and a huge guy named Chico out of the Phoenix charter. Mesa Mike warned me never to tangle with Chico, that he’d kill anyone—cop, woman, child, dog, bunny rabbit, even a Hells Angels brother if he deserved it—without losing a wink of sleep.

  After the run I returned to the Bullhead UC house. It was in a culde-sac named Verano Circle. The house was decorated like a bomb shelter for motorheads. I’d boarded the windows with plywood. Every door but the front was barricaded with a two-by-four. The living room was a gym: full power rack, dumbbells, free weights, heavy bag, speed bag. There was a red pipe wrench hanging next to the front door, and a bulletproof vest hanging on the living room wall. I kept a machete and a shotgun in the closet. One corner of the house was stacked with sandbags. There was a pantry full of canned food, bottled water, three cases of Coors Light, and a large bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The purpose of all of this was to suggest that if the police came I was going to hunker down and shoot it out, Butch Cassidy style.

  I continued to go to Tucson twice a week to coach Jack’s games. I took a couple of days in late March to sit around the pool in my backyard and live the good life. In the evenings I played flashlight tag on the golf course with Jack, and then came inside and listened to my daughter, Dale, practice guitar. She was pretty good for a beginner. Gwen, stylish and forgiving, fawned over me in ways I didn’t deserve.

  April rolled around. I went back to Bullhead. Another motorcycle rally, the River Run in Laughlin, was gearing up. Since it was on my turf, I resolved to meet some of the local Hells Angels when it took place.

  At the time, ATF had some real interest in the Angels. In addition to Agent Ciccone’s investigation, a well-known rock star of a case agent named Joseph “Slats” Slatalla was conducting a historical case based in Phoenix. This kind of case is built around existing police reports, warrants, affidavits, arrests, convictions, financial documents, and public records. Slats sought to prove that the Angels were a criminal organization, indictable under RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

  Slats knew the Angels had been in Arizona for a little under five years. He’d learned that before them the state’s top One Percenters were the Dirty Dozen. The Dozen had been violent and well established. They’d extorted money and committed violent acts. They’d trafficked in weapons and drugs. Their members had included Chico and Bad Bob.

  The Angels came onto their turf when Ralph “Sonny” Barger, the iconic godfather of the Hells Angels, “retired” his forty-year presidency in Oakland, California. He’d served a prison term in the Phoenix area and had fallen in love with the climate and the state. Leaving Oakland, he relocated to Cave Creek, Arizona, a suburb north of Phoenix. With him came the Hells Angels, and with them came the intolerance for any club claiming to be their equal. The Dirty Dozen were in a hard spot. They were tough, but they lacked the resources—to say nothing of the international reputation—of the Hells Angels. The Dozen’s members were given a choice: Disappear or patch over to the Angels. Most enthusiastically chose the latter. Others hung up their cuts for good. Others sought Angels membership but were denied.

  These facts were significant. For a club to go from nonexistent to the main show in town in under five years proved to Slats that the Angels were wielding their influence ably and willfully. These are the types of bricks that RICO cases are built with.

  Historically, two main barriers have prevented law enforcement from wholeheartedly investigating the outlaw motorcycle gangs, or OMGs. On the high end, the bosses don’t give them much credit as criminals. It’s much more fashionable to go after volume dealers of drugs, arms, or explosives. If the bosses are more concerned with making a lot of cases, then it’s easier to move against small-timers like the Varvils and Abrahams of the world. Going after groups like the Hells Angels takes time, commitment, trust, risk, and money—a lethal recipe for a bureaucracy like ATF.

  On the low end is the fact that some biker investigators assimilate and sympathize with their adversaries. Some even form their own clubs. This has always been a mystery to me. Cops don’t mimic mafia dons or dress as Crips and Blo
ods and form up neighborhood sets, so why would some choose to create their own motorcycle clubs patterned after criminal syndicates? Maybe it’s because they’re bound by the bikes themselves—one thing that cuts across all of them is the “live to ride, ride to live” credo— but I wouldn’t know since I don’t really love bikes. Go figure.

  Regardless of the reasons, these forces—a disregard for their legitimacy from above, a wary respect and kinship from below—combined to give the bikers some semblance of a safe haven. Here’s what I thought. Yes, guns and drugs ruin people’s lives, but what truly ruins people’s lives is violence, and violence was and is the source of the Hells Angels’ power. In the coming months, as we’d meet to discuss the Angels, Slats expanded on this notion. He understood that outlaw bikers were easy to misconstrue as white, overweight, middle-aged illiterates who wore dirty bowling vests, drank beer, and sat around telling war stories about toothless hags they picked up on the side of the road. Not all of these guys were killers, rapists, or dopers. Slats knew that the majority of these guys had something in life—a job, a family—that restrained them. But he also knew that every outlaw who wore a threepiece patch had the potential for some serious ugliness. A small percentage of One Percenters was crazy, violent, and wired enough that all they did was dope, booze, and commit crimes. He also knew that, being brothers, this smaller group had a lot of influence over the larger, less volatile group. When you mixed these guys with alcohol, drugs, guns, hammers, knives, and honor, and added a violent leader, then violence became the probable—even the preferred—outcome of any conflict. They were like a Greek fraternity with guns. We all knew that when these guys felt comfortable they were capable of horrible things: rat-pack beatings, assaults, stabbings, shootings, rapes. When it got bad, outlaw bikers fed off each other for each other, because, in their minds, all they had was each other.

  My thinking as a street cop has always been that I don’t care who you are or what club you belong to, if you are being a violent asshole and engaging in illegal activity, then it’s my job to try to arrest you. My feeling is that the OMGs are tailor-made for ATF: guns, explosives, drugs, and violence—these are the cornerstones of our mandate.

  I also believe that OMGs are America’s only truly indigenous form of international organized crime. Mafias come from places like Italy, Russia, and Japan. Drug cartels issue from South America and Southeast Asia. Street gangs are local and not unique to this or any other country. But the bike gangs started here in the forties and fifties, with the Hells Angels at the forefront, and now they can be found on every continent in nearly half of the world’s countries. The Hells Angels themselves have charters in twenty-six countries on five continents—Germany alone has more members than the United States—and it all started with the visionary guidance of one Ralph “Sonny” Barger in Oakland, California.

  For those reasons, I’ve always believed that investigating biker gangs was a worthwhile endeavor.

  And on April 27, 2002, my less-than-convinced colleagues would come to believe this too.

  THE RIVER RUN didn’t commemorate anything like incarcerated felons. It was merely a large bike rally in a Nevada casino town. It had been going on since 1983. It attracted corporate sponsors and big-time music acts. It featured custom bike contests, Miss Laughlin contests, lots of strippers, shaving-cream-and-baby-oil fights between said strippers, gambling, and general partying. The vast majority of the attendees were law-abiding citizens. But no run would be complete without the presence of the OMGs. They were idolized and highly respected, and since everyone loves being idolized and respected, they showed up in force.

  The Hells Angels were the stars of these events. But there were other gangs there too. Not to be at the same event as your rivals was the most cowardly of retreats, and no club willingly got shown up in this way.

  So it was that a Hells Angels rival, Southern California’s Mongols, were in town too. These clubs had been in a violent feud for thirty years, but it had yet to explode into a full-blown war.

  In addition to the bikers, Laughlin was flush with cops. State and local guys were supplemented by feds like Ciccone and Slats. In support of them were Sugarbear and me, plus some of my oldest undercover friends and colleagues, guys like John “Babyface” Carr, Sean “Spiderman” Hoover, and Darren “Koz” Kozlowski. The support staff also included a young female recruit named Jenna “JJ” Maguire.

  Koz teamed up with me on the night of April 27. Koz was a crazy, improvisational UC who always looked scary. He was famous for joking, “If I die on this job, I sure as fuck don’t want it to be in a traffic accident or because I had a heart attack at my desk. I don’t want to get hit by a bus on my motorcycle. I want to be duct-taped to a chair and shotgunned in the face. I want those motherfuckers to cut my head off. I want the boys to say, ‘Did you hear? They cut Koz’s head off !’”

  We went to the Flamingo, which was where all of the Angels were staying. We went to a centrally located bar and took a couple of stools. Everyone eye-fucked us. There were Hells Angels coming and going all around. JJ, in an observational role, sat at the end of the bar and watched while fighting off offers for free drinks and motorcycle rides.

  The situation in the casino was palpably tense. The Angels knew the Mongols were around. They expected a fight, but they didn’t know when or where it would start. The Angels had sent spies to the Mongols’ hotel and were convinced that the Mongols had returned the favor. No one seemed approachable, and I hadn’t yet seen Smitty, the main guy I wanted to meet. After an hour of nursing beers, Koz and I concluded that maybe it wasn’t our night.

  That’s when Smitty stopped at the bar a few stools down. He was by himself. He ordered a Crown Royal and Coke.

  I knew I had to mind my p’s and q’s. If I screwed up the intro, then Koz and I would be at the bottom of a pile before we knew it, and any hope of establishing a rapport with the Angels would be nixed. I wasn’t exactly scared—we had a cover team and there were cops everywhere— but I still had to look tough while being respectful. As for Koz, he didn’t care. He’d shoot it out like in an old western—and love every minute of it.

  Koz and I approached Smitty. Before we got close enough to make him uncomfortable, I said, “Excuse me. You’re Smitty, right?” He turned to us.

  Something registered. He nodded owlishly and grinned. It was as though the line of his smile had been drawn on his face by a cartoonist. He said, “That’s right.”

  “My name’s Bird. This is my buddy Koz.”

  He nodded at Koz but talked to me. “Yeah, I know who you are.”

  “Really? That’s flattering.”

  He said, “Well, the BHC’s a small town,” referring to Bullhead City.

  “Maybe, but the way I see it, you’re like the mayor over there and I’m barely a citizen.” He didn’t say anything, but it was obvious by the way he turned up the corner of his mouth that he was flattered too. I continued, “Anyway, I just wanted to introduce myself and say that I think you’re doing a hell of a job hosting the party.”

  Smitty smiled some more and finished his drink. I got the feeling he thought I wasn’t much more than a groupie.

  He said, “Thanks. Nice to meet you too, Bird. Hope to see you around.” And then he walked back into the casino throng, civilians and Angels parting for his passing.

  Not long after he left, another Hells Angel with a Dago (San Diego) cut sat on the same stool, accompanied by some other Dago Angels. They all ordered beers. The guy who’d taken Smitty’s seat was stocky and looked like a young Kris Kringle—wavy hair, a long, wavy, fannedout beard, beady eyes, and rosy cheeks. I thrust my hand toward him and said, “Hey, I’m Bird from Bullhead City. Can I buy you a shot?”

  He shook my hand. “Hey, I’m Ramona Pete. No shot tonight, Bird, but thanks.” He was very congenial and we talked about the Run for a few minutes while he drank his beer. As he finished, he flashed us a toothy smile and said, “Whenever you’re in Dago come see me at Dumont’s Bar. Can’t
miss it. S’right down the street from our clubhouse.”

  “Cool, I’ll do that.”

  He left.

  We stayed at the bar well into the night. Smitty crossed the floor a couple more times, usually with other Angels. One stood out in my memory, not only because of the way he looked, but because he whispered with Smitty on two occasions.

  This man was thin and twitchy. His flash—the small cloth patches stitched onto his front of his cut—identified him as a Skull Valley member and as one of the “Filthy Few.” This meant he’d committed extreme violence on behalf of the club, most likely a murder. He had a mullet of swept-back, battleship-gray hair. He wore sunglasses and had buckteeth. He reminded me of the Nestlé’s Quik Rabbit.

  Smitty and the Rabbit disappeared from our radar for a while, but eventually they rejoined us next to a blackjack table not far from where we sat. Smitty looked nervous, and the Rabbit sweated visibly. His hands were shoved into his pants pockets, and his elbows were locked. They spoke intently for about five minutes and then broke, the Rabbit briskly walking away. Smitty didn’t look happy. He rejoined some Angels at another blackjack table and nodded to the dealer, who stopped slinging cards. Smitty spoke to them quietly but purposefully.

  We turned our attention back to our drinks, playing it cool, pretending the Angels weren’t there and didn’t matter to us.

  When we looked back to the blackjack table, the Angels were gone.

  We looked around. All of the Angels were gone. Koz said, “What the fuck?” I shrugged. Something was up, we just didn’t know what it was.

  We finished our drinks, paid the tab, and went outside. It was almost 2:00 a.m.

  As we walked to our bikes, police cruiser after police cruiser screamed down the Laughlin strip. Some people ran in the direction of the squad cars, but most ran against them. I could almost smell the craziness, as if trouble came with a hint of sulfur.

  Koz said, “Well, guess we know where the Angels went.”