“They’re blackballing Sokol.”
“Maybe they don’t understand what a ‘support club’ does. After all, they don’t speak much English.…”
“I don’t give a fuck if they speak purple.” I summoned Legacy’s leader, Doc, and his eight minions to my office in the North Side clubhouse.
“You don’t get to make up your own rules.” Doc’s face and neck bloomed pink. He stood, arms crossed, neck craned so he could look me in the eye. I worried my large fan might blow him to the back of the room. The more I ranted, the more Doc quivered, the more his minions sweated. When I started to smash appliances, I knew I had driven home my point.
Doc’s shoulders shook; his eyes filled with tears. His reaction caught me off guard. No leader had ever cried before.
* * *
“He’s gone,” Bastardo reported to me a week later.
“What do you mean gone?”
“Doc returned to Poland.”
This news made me uneasy. No leader was ever “gone” gone. He regrouped, recalculated. I had emasculated Doc before his peers, and quite possibly committed a tactical error. After all, I couldn’t afford to alienate any club in Chicago.
I paid Legacy a visit. Its clubhouse was situated in a converted and mostly empty warehouse.
“He’s gone,” Doc’s replacement confirmed. And I noticed that his eight minions had disappeared with him.
“Is he coming back?”
The replacement shrugged and said, “No speak English.”
* * *
I called Angel. “They’re up to something. I need intel.”
“How many girls?”
“At least five. I need to find out what Legacy is up to.”
While the broads worked their way into Legacy’s inner circle as escorts, I fielded a bigger problem: “Shep, The Warrior, just got out of prison,” Bastardo advised. “He wants his old job back.”
He had been an Outlaw during the heyday, and part of the bombings. “He’s from Gary, Indiana, the boil on the armpit of Chicago,” I said.
“Well, he just gave the Rebel Knights1 permission to wear the one-percenter diamond patch on their vests.”
* * *
Technically, the COC boasted a zero discrimination policy, except that cops were not allowed. The Rebel Knights had two chapters in Chicago and a lone clubhouse in the middle of a cornfield in Indiana, close to Gary and The Warrior’s turf. They had four cops as members, including their Boss, a sergeant in charge of the organized crime division of the Chicago Police Department.
“Just because the Rebel Knights are grandfathered into the COC doesn’t give them the right to wear the diamond.”
“They asked me”—The Warrior wiped his hands on a greasy towel as he stepped back to admire his bike’s latest upgrades—“and I cleared it with Santa.”
That explained a lot.
“Isn’t that Mr. Happy’s bike?”
“I’m holding it for him.”
“He needs to sell it. He needs the money for his defense.” He really needed it for his appeal; no one ever won at trial.
“You can buy it from him.”
“How much does he want?”
“Eleven thousand dollars.”
The Warrior laughed. “I put a few thousand into the repairs. The bike’s only worth five thousand.”
“He wants eleven thousand.”
We compromised; The Warrior gave me $7,500 and promised to “make up the difference” by introducing me to his dealer Roy Boy.2
* * *
Roy Boy’s tattoo shop was located on a deserted, charred street in Gary that gave me an idea of what neighborhoods in Beirut must look like: dilapidated buildings, strewn debris in the streets, spiderwebbed glass on the windows from shotgun blasts.
Roy Boy shook my hand; his were completely sleeved, with an illustrated skull and tufts of blond hair that skimmed his shoulders. His eyes had a yellow tint. Four caged tigers prowled his brick workspace; the lone white tiger skulked on a leash in the corner and yawned. A chain-link fence surrounded several black Bentleys with flat tires, pricey bikes worth at least $50,000.
“I need to move eight thousand South African gold Krugerrands.”
It took me a minute to process the enormity of his request. Transporting seven hundred pounds of gold required a van, dollies, a forklift.
“Take a couple of days to put the operation together,” I said. Roy stroked his white tiger’s head, then replied, “Stay at one of my houses if you want.” He tossed me the keys.
And over the next few days I orchestrated the logistics and salivated over the prospect of collecting millions. But when I reconnected with Roy, he was moaning on his couch, with a bloated stomach.
“Your liver’s failing. You need to get to a hospital,” I said.
“It’s just constipation.” Roy struggled to sit up. “We do this tomorrow.”
I wasn’t too sure.
Still, I returned the next day.
Roy’s property had three padlocks and a dead bolt on the front door. His tigers, visible through the chipped windows, looked ravenous.
“He’s in a coma,” a nurse at the hospital advised.
Fuck! Not that I wanted to sound unsympathetic, but I had no idea where Roy hid the gold blocks.
“Guard his house,” I instructed The Warrior.
The minute anyone in that neighborhood knew Roy Boy might not return, the raiding would begin. And the gold would be looted.
The hospital released Roy a week later, barely conscious. His private “nurse” sponged his lips with Jack Daniel’s. Roy’s eyes followed her tits as they bulged out of the uniform. Meanwhile, I mixed Roy’s morphine with Sprite and gulped it down.
“It’s over,” I said to Debbie as I plopped into bed fully dressed in boots and vest. Millions gone.
Debbie left me a fresh banana on the nightstand, tip curled away from me just the way I liked.
* * *
Santa called me before the next COC meeting. “You’re agitating the Rebel Knights.”
“‘Agitating’?”
“They’ve offered to host the next National at their clubhouse in Gary. It’s rumored you’re being hostile.”
“‘Hostile’?”
“Their leader suggested to The Warrior that he relieve you.”
“Really?”
“Look, if we piss them off we’ll just push the Rebel Knights into the arms of the Hells Angels.”
“Their Boss is a fucking cop,” I exploded. “You want to host the National at their clubhouse? It’s a square in the middle of an empty field.”
Silence. Papers were shuffled. Santa cleared his throat and asked, “does National know about this?”
“Maybe you should bring it up,” I said. “Tell them The Warrior is proposing that the meeting be held at a cop’s house.”
Soon after, The Warrior was asked to “retire.”
“There’s a new Polish club,” Angel reported to me. “They call themselves the Road Runners.”
“Doc’s?”
“Yes.”
The revelation made me uneasy. How many more rogue clubs existed?
“Have you seen these Road Runners?” I asked when I reached out to the Boss of Legacy at his clubhouse. The place was dark inside; it looked like it had been condemned. A faint Clorox smell wafted through the vents in the floor. A dirty, soapy bucket was propped in the corner, the foam mop head sticking out of it missing chunks. The Boss lit a cigarette, shook his head. He dressed like a Green Beret: faux felt hat, military medals pinned to his lapels. Yellow, waxy fingers flicked ash near my boot.
“Have you heard of them maybe?” I asked.
The Boss narrowed his gaze, and I knew in that instant, as we squared off in the converted warehouse, that he would protect his own.
* * *
I recruited Bastardo and Kreeper, president of the Wicked Saints, telling them, “We’re going hunting.” We hit the bars in Polish Downtown and Polish Village, like Alex
and his Droogs embarking on “a bit of the old ultraviolence.”3
I didn’t expect answers. But I still had to try. I began simply, approaching each bar and restaurant owner, posing the question the way a detective might initiate a murder investigation, except that I had no mug shots, no suspects, and no cooperative witnesses.
“Have you seen or heard of the Road Runners?” I got a lot of blank stares, frowns, and cupped ears, as if my voice were the problem. I tried sign language. Bastardo even flapped his arms. Eventually, we just resorted to punching.
I lost track after I slammed the seventh bartender’s head into the counter. My rings were smeared with blood. Sweat stung my eyes. Bastardo swung a patron in circles, holding him by an arm and leg until the two blurred like a spinning teacup carnival ride. Bodies hit the floor. Strobe lights cast the scene in flashing black and white. Kreeper reminded me of a giant picking off small birds: “Take your shot, take your shot now before I eat you.”
After a while I couldn’t even feel my lower half. I stumbled over stools, sliced my hand on broken shot glasses, slipped in alcohol, tugged at random people’s ears, and yelled, “If you see the Road Runners, tell them Big Pete is looking for them.”
We moved like wrecking balls through bar after bar, leaving crushed ribs, broken teeth, clumps of hair on the wall. Bits of Polish flew at us; some patrons stuttered while others hid under tabletops, shielding their eyes from raining glass. Soon, we stopped even asking the question. What was the point? No one spoke English.
“We should split up.”
The next night I tried a different approach.
“Road Runners?” I smiled at the pretty waitress.
She lit up. “Harley-Davidson?”
“Yeah okay, Harley-Davidson.” I had downed at least three vodkas before she climbed on the back of my bike. As I maneuvered back alleys and deserted streets, repeating “Road Runners” and pointing to abandoned buildings, she giggled. This was going nowhere. As gorgeous as she was, I only wanted her for one thing: information. I pulled over.
She climbed off. “Harley-Davidson?”
I flashed my ring at her. “Married.”
She started to strip.
“No, no.” I dismounted, catching my foot on the brake and dragging the whole bike down. I landed in a mud puddle. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Harley-Davidson?”
“No Harley-Davidson tonight.” I snapped my fingers and pointed to the bike. “Get back on this thing.”
* * *
“I found a Road Runner,” Kreeper told me the next day, grinning. We were at a fashion show. As a stripper writhed behind him, he spilled the details. He’d fled Stanis’ bar just as the ambulance arrived. Several drunks had stumbled out, one with a broken jaw, the other with a small “nick” on his left arm.
“You stabbed him?”
“No, no, no, it was just a scratch,” Kreeper continued. While some patrons left on stretchers, a lone biker pulled back, watched from the shadows. Kreeper had followed him as he weaved in and out of traffic and slowed at the light.
“Just the one?” I asked.
“So far.”
“Where did he go?”
“Legacy’s warehouse. The Road Runners rent the building next door.”
“You knew about this, didn’t you?” I said when I confronted Green Beret at his clubhouse/warehouse. It smelled like wet cardboard. The Legacy Boss feigned surprise.
“I take care of this.”
“If you don’t, I will.”
He shut the door in my face.
The following week I called Green Beret for an update.
“Have you solved the problem?”
“I burned down their clubhouse,” he said, his English suddenly fine.
I cradled the phone to my ear. What did he take me for, a fool? “That must have been pretty incredible, considering the building is cinder block.”
“Bic.”
“As in lighter?”
“Bic.” He cleared his throat.
Now I knew the fucker was lying.
“Did you lose your thumb in the process?”
“What?”
“Bics don’t stay lit unless you keep your thumb on the button.”
Silence.
* * *
“We need to take them out,” I said at the emergency meeting I’d called in the chiropractor’s office. I’d drawn the vinyl blinds to shut out the street, and the room was nearly dark. The cushions squeaked under Bastardo’s weight. He stared at the fish in the acquarium.
Kreeper picked at his club sandwich, removing the lettuce, tomato, and onions from the bacon. He folded the vegetables into his napkin.
“What the fuck’s wrong with you two?” I threw up my hands.
Kreeper slurped his fountain drink. “We can’t.”
“Why not?”
“They’re supporting the Hells Angels.”
PART
II
21
SHELTER FROM THE STORM
Warm wind smacked my face, blew back my thick goatee, cut through my black jeans, combat boots, snub-nosed .38, and black vest. The roar of Harleys behind me shook the hand-painted signs along the road advertising fresh corn, apples, and tomatoes for sale at wooden stands. Around us were clumps of earth, rolling green hills, herds of bison, and a shock of blank sky near the Custer State Park in South Dakota’s Black Hills, seventy miles from the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the largest gathering of bikers in the world.
Spread out in various packs and all scheduled to arrive by dim evening to our campsite, we rode several hundred miles a day out of Chicago’s mean streets into a kind of blinding and unfamiliar calm.
Bob Dylan’s lyrics crooned in my head—“in a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm.” I imagined the safe place he described and the siren in his song, who seduced creatures (like me) and gave them “shelter from the storm.”
* * *
Rangers and local police found the broken-down white Ford pickup truck abandoned on an old logging road near Legion Lake Resort in Custer National Park. Inside were the remnants of a violent battle: blood spatter, spent bullet shells, an empty .40-caliber magazine, boxes of ammunition, hand grenades, Smith & Wesson pistols, high-powered rifles, a Häagen-Dazs ice cream wrapper, and a Hells Angels’ T-shirt.
The shooter1 later insisted The Outlaws ambushed him.2 “I was terrified. I wasn’t afraid. There was nine of them and two of us.”
“But you would agree,” the prosecutor reminded him, “that neither you, your partner,3 nor your truck was hit with gunfire?”
The Hells Angels’ lawyer answered for him, insisting it was “human nature” for his client to empty a gun into another human being.
* * *
“No one’s getting near Sturgis.” South Dakota state troopers and several federal marshals pulled over our pack. Their radios chattered crazily about the bloodshed of a sleepy resort town caused by an army of rival motorcycle thugs.
Suddenly we were the good guys, meriting a police escort into our makeshift campsite, situated in a primitive canyon bottom surrounded by woods (perfect for Hells Angels snipers). The rocky ground was littered with sharp twigs and blackened branches from the latest lightning storm. We had no phone service, no shelter, no port-o-potties, and only five showers.
“That’s terrific—we’re target practice.”
Santa, the person responsible for the reservation, said, “Maybe we should call someone?”
I handed him my Nextel phone and suggested sarcastically that he dial 911.
“This is what happens when no one scouts the place first,” I said directly into the phone’s lens cap. Intel, intel, intel.
And while police combed the wooded hills with shotguns, searching for rogue bands of Hells Angels, Mr. Happy unloaded my golf cart from one of the chase vehicles and off I buzzed to the caretaker’s cabin to pay the camping fees. I was, after all, the regional treasurer and the man in charge of the money.
>
Dick grinned as he took my final deposit—$101,000 for five days, not including “extras” like beer, Crown Royal, and Jack Daniel’s (or picnic tables he offered to build us for $75 apiece) or the “anticipated damages” contract Santa willingly signed in advance. Dick’s banter blasted noise in my head. We were sitting at his plastic drop-down table inside his kitchen. Crusted plates of mac and cheese littered the stove. A stuck bee buzzed on the screen, my monstrous shadow looming behind him as the sun set. As Dick prattled on, I focused on his mouth, the whoosh of air blowing in and out like an animal’s pant.
He had already talked too long. Five minutes was my maximum for people unless they had some utility. It seemed somehow fitting that he kept a pen of six mangy wolves roped to a ponderosa pine near the entrance.
“Bring me a pistol,” I said, and off Mr. Happy trotted. He knew the score—Just don’t kill anyone (unless they’re Hells Angels). I never traveled without heat. I stashed an arsenal in our mobile home—a MAC 10, .357 Magnum, .40-caliber Glock, and hunting knives—and for a fleeting moment calm replaced the flashes of General George Custer4 that replayed in my head.
But the sensation was short–lived, as Mr. Happy slapped a derringer in the palm of my hand and reported, “The cops found several Hells Angels’ outposts in the woods.”
As darkness fell, real pandemonium set in. Outlaws positioned their RVs and trailers along the perimeter of the bowl, forming a wall against potential snipers. Our police escort rode into the hills, their taillights slashing across the handlebars of the many Harleys parked on the edge of the pit.
Outlaws slumped against pines, slept in tents on patches of dirt, sucked cigarettes, huddled around an unlit fire pit, and swallowed can after can of Miller Lite in what eerily resembled a ready-made grave. I watched as our leader, Joker, disappeared into the woods to stay in his girlfriend’s condo, leaving his loyal minions poised for an ambush. “What do you expect?” I groused to Mr. Happy. “He’s a trucker. What else can he do but piss and drive?”
By day two Joker’s name ended most sentences like punctuation.
We remained captive in a wooded prison, mostly drunk and stumbling over logs and discarded beer cans. Some members had already depleted the private stash of Jack Daniel’s they had brought with them in their saddlebags.
The Last Chicago Boss Page 15