Vagos, Mongols, and Outlaws: My Infiltration of America's Deadliest Biker Gangs

by Charles Falco

  Psycho swallowed his taco. He bunched a napkin in his hands and said, “It’s cool. She told us about your schooling.”

  My body deflated. I wanted to slide under the table, into the floorboards, down an invisible dark hole. Relief shuddered through me, then doubt, then panic. Did they really believe the paralegal thing? Was Psycho just messing with me? No way to tell. Then again, maybe Joanna had bought my story. Maybe she had successfully convinced Psycho’s ex-wife that I was a student and not a cop. Maybe her disinformation campaign had worked after all. But while I stressed over my loose end, conversation turned to more pressing issues: rumors that the newly formed Arizona chapter of the Solo Angeles Motorcycle Club possibly contained an informant or, worse, an undercover agent. (In fact, the rumors were correct. The mock Solo Angeles included an undercover ATF operative, a Phoenix police detective, and two confidential informants.)

  Psycho planned an officers’ meeting at Lake Havasu to review possible solutions.

  “We have to be smarter than the others,” he cautioned and recounted the ATF’s two other infiltrations involving the Mongols and the Hells Angels. He waved a fork at me and smirked. “For two years those fuckers never saw it coming.”

  15

  Disappearing Acts

  By early August 2005 I had established enough of a rapport with Vinny and members of his Death Valley chapter to propose buys of large quantities of cocaine. We flopped on his filthy couch in Hesperia. Bubba, a recent defector and the chapter’s new sergeant at arms, hovered in the doorway and inhaled a joint. Cold emanated from him, like an open refrigerator door. He exhaled in my face and passed the joint to Vinny. My eyes smarted.

  “Come back tomorrow.” Vinny coughed. “I’ll have the cocaine for you.” He waved the joint at me. “If you give me a twenty now, I’ll get some of this for you too.”

  I nodded and reached into my wallet for the cash and handed him a bill.

  “Remember Hammer?” Vinny’s words shot through me like a bullet. “Who knew that motherfucker would turn out to be a government snitch.” He shook his head, and the room suddenly grew darker. A chill coursed through me. I remembered Hammer, a “hard-core” Vago imposter whom, according to Vinny, “everyone trusted.” Vinny described the Vagos’ payback plan, their failed attempt to hurl grenades inside a hotel room they thought Hammer occupied. A group of them had staked out the place after dark, ready to unplug the pins that would “blow the motherfucker up.” But minutes before the explosion, a “completely random” citizen opened the hotel door and scooped up his newspaper from the hallway, not Hammer at all.

  They were about to murder the wrong man.

  I put the joint to my lips, feeling sick inside.

  “Sometimes people get lucky,” Vinny said, “and sometimes they don’t. Know what I mean?”

  And as I drove away from Vinny’s, the near miss replayed in my mind. Hammer was like me, like George, like any one of us who risked everything for intelligence, for the chance to stop a terrorist organization. Vinny was not my friend. He would exact revenge on a traitor.

  “We should probably think about protection,” George advised me later in private.

  “What kind of protection?”

  “Witness protection.” His words floated between us, and for the first time I considered the notion that I might be in danger for the rest of my life.

  * * *

  But I still had to do the drug deal with Vinny. If I backed out, I would invite suspicion. If I continued, I risked getting caught. The next morning, I contacted Vinny as planned, hoping to collect the cocaine and marijuana he’d promised and be done. But Vinny blew me off, mumbled something about being sick from partying the night before. He postponed our meeting. I wasn’t expecting that curve. When I contacted him again a few hours later and got the same brushoff, I panicked.

  “Back off,” Koz warned, uneasy about Vinny’s sudden change of plans. “If you pursue it, you’ll appear too eager. He’ll just get suspicious.”

  I listened. I backed off. Maybe Koz was right. Maybe Vinny had set me up. But several days later Vinny pursued me, offering to sell me several pounds of marijuana, and I stalled him, “Wait until payday.”

  “Good idea.” Vinny nodded. “I wouldn’t want to get stiffed.” He flashed a knowing look at his girlfriend, Lara, who hugged the edge of the sofa. She averted her gaze, picked at a thumbnail, and stared at the floor. When she looked up, fear watered slightly behind her pale blue eyes. I couldn’t believe she was still with him, still taking his bullshit.

  “Her girlfriend owes me money, six hundred dollars from a deposit on a rental property.” Vinny filled in the gaps. He shrugged, slapped the pistol tucked into his waistband, and said, “I think I’ll just kill her.” His tone, all business, stoic and cold, was no idle threat.

  “She’s pregnant,” Lara pleaded, her lower lip trembling. Vinny laughed, looked at me, and said, “Two for one.”

  * * *

  I dialed Koz at my first opportunity. “What do we have to do?”

  A trim, pretty female agent from the U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) agreed to answer preliminary questions about the federal Witness Security Program (WSP). George and I met her one rainy afternoon in a dimly lit warehouse that could have easily passed for a storage unit in a commercial construction zone. She shook our hands, smiled warmly at us, and briefly reviewed how her agency helped people disappear.

  “We’ve successfully relocated more than eighteen thousand witnesses since the program’s inception in 1970. No one who has followed our system has ever been harmed,” she assured us. The space swallowed her. Concrete walls boxed us in.

  She folded her arms across her chest and warned, “It does require some sacrifices.”

  “What kind of sacrifices?” George hedged.

  “New identities, Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, names. We’ll help with vocational training and employment opportunities.” She flashed her smile again. “Think of it as a chance to reinvent yourselves.” No past. It sounded attractive, a reset button for my life. Living in the Now like an amnesia patient, only worse. I would know what I’d lost and be forced to forget. No trace deposits of my life. Complete isolation until it was “safe” to put on my new mask. Theoretically it sounded possible, but I knew that “three may keep a secret if two of them are dead.”

  What would that feel like to never trust again?

  “I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression.” The deputy marshal hesitated. “It can be … challenging to create a new identity.” But she convinced us the sacrifice would be worth the risk. Through our testimony we would likely join the ranks of other “brave and noble” men who paid the price to crush Al-Qaeda terrorists or chill further mob violence.

  We still had to be admitted into the program. The government worried about liability. No deputy marshal wanted to be responsible for relocating a homicidal sociopath addicted to violence into sleepy suburbia and risk a murderous encounter with a neighbor. Mostly, my sessions with the government psychiatrist confirmed that I could handle isolation and invisibility.

  “How do you feel about that?” The psychiatrist removed her readers. She searched my face for cracks in the foundation.

  “I know I’ll never be a criminal again,” I said with conviction.

  She smirked, twirled her glasses. “Now I know you’re lying.”

  I didn’t like psychiatrists much, and I didn’t like this one. But she could determine my fate. It didn’t matter how I answered her questions; if she didn’t like me, she would find a reason to reject me. She stood, smoothed her wrinkled navy slacks, and poured herself a mug of black coffee.

  “Are you telling me what you think I want to hear?”

  “No, ma’am.” I’m telling you what I want to hear.

  16

  Endgame

  In the last three months of the investigation, I occupied Rust’s one-bedroom house behind his home in Lucerne Valley, an isolated plot of land situated on a hill su
rrounded by desert tumbleweed. By now I had left Joanna and needed a temporary place to crash. Rust, a member of Death Valley, welcomed the company, though most evenings he alternated between firing random buckshot from his back porch into purple sage and twirling his pistol in the air while he watched his favorite television show, The Sopranos. We sat in the dark, drank cheap beer from sweaty cans, and watched James Gandolfini’s face flicker against blue tint. His character preached about respect and rats, and Rust leaned forward, elbows on his knees, face flushed from alcohol, and said, “If I ever found out we had a snitch, he’d be gone.” Rust cocked his pistol for emphasis, pointed the barrel at the wall, and dry fired.

  Note taken. Rust had an arsenal of weapons that included an AR-15, an SKS, a Sig Sauer, a .40 caliber pistol, a shotgun, and two Golden Bear bolt action rifles. He stashed a long rifle he camouflaged with duct tape in an attic crawl space because he feared it might be stolen.

  One morning I noticed it missing.

  “I took it to have a scope fitted,” Rust explained and offered to give me his .12 gauge shotgun. He had duped a relative who worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department into checking the serial number on the weapon and confirmed it was “hot.”

  “I don’t want it in my house,” Rust said.

  Meanwhile, Koz worried that I had become too soft, “too nice, too much of a gentleman” gangster. He didn’t want me to be like “fucking James Bond,” but he urged me to “stand up to the Vagos, be more aggressive.” So far, I had never initiated fights. I had reacted to beatings. I had defended Psycho as any good minion would. But for all of my caution, I had telegraphed my difference. I needed to blend, deflect the “cop talk,” be a “badass.”

  I could do that. At the next Church meeting, in Lizard’s garage, Psycho complained that I was “spending too much time with Death Valley members.” Maybe I needed a loyalty check. Head Butt agreed, said I was being “disrespectful.” He smacked his fist into a cracked leather motorcycle seat. “We should pull your colors.”

  I glared at him. “Pull my colors?” I was living in Rust’s house. “I’ll pull them off right now, put them on the ground. If you can take them, you can have them. But I’ll kill you first. I’ll kill you, motherfucker.”

  Head Butt irritated me so much I almost convinced myself that I would kill him. Rhino put a warning hand on my shoulder as Head Butt snorted and shook like an injured bull. His breathing was labored. He balled his hands into fists. Spoon, the chapter’s designated sergeant at arms, suddenly lunged at me and tackled me to the dirt. I pinned him down and shoved my knee into his face. Psycho joined in the scuffle, attempting to break us apart. Spoon clumsily deflected and accidentally tore Psycho’s stitches from his recent surgery.

  “You’re a pussy,” I accused, mindful that I needed to act more like an asshole. Psycho fined Spoon $100.

  Days later, Vinny, having heard the story, yanked Spoon’s goatee for fun. Spoon winced but otherwise didn’t react.

  “You’re embarrassing.” I shook my head. Maybe I was overdoing it?

  “He’s the president,” Spoon defended. “I can’t punch a president.”

  “I need someone I can trust.” Psycho offered to make me cosergeant at arms.

  * * *

  Occasionally Rust had houseguests. Vinny slept on his couch until his “domestic problems” resolved. And while I pretended to care about Vinny’s sordid relationships, Koz sought indictments of key Vagos players before a federal grand jury. I supplied him intelligence for his search warrants, snapped photographs of weapons and drugs stashed inside members’ homes, and confirmed addresses and identities of gangsters who moved frequently, drifted between trailer parks, used monikers, initials, and fake first names. The location of Rust’s house posed a logistical issue; it was difficult, if not impossible, to conduct surveillance on a hill. We had to wait for Rust to leave before helicopters fanned above the rocky terrain noting the possible exits. Search warrants had to contain specifics, but when facts changed in the span of several minutes, details, too, had to be revised. I performed as one of several conductors in a giant orchestra; each instrument had to be tuned to the others, each note brilliant and solid. With the musicians set and the audience prepared to listen to perfect harmony, Koz stopped the show. “Can you find me Twist?”

  I hated the idea; it would be like looking for an electric eel in a deep ocean cave. After a few false leads, I finally tracked Twist down at a seedy meth house. When he answered the door, his eyes resembled cracked glass. Tiny red veins streamed from his pupils like spokes. A Nazi swastika flag fluttered above him. Terrible waved me inside. He was smoking speed and offered me a taste.

  “You know I don’t do that, bro.” I reminded him again that I was a stoner. My eyes smarted in the haze. I sat on the edge of the couch as Twist paced, cupped a phone to his ear, and crackled to life like a spitfire. Meanwhile, Terrible refilled his bowl with speed. The scene played like a stop-action clip building to the big climax.

  Twist clicked his phone shut. Determination blazed in his eyes. He retrieved black leather gloves from a box in his room and meticulously pulled on the fingers. Then he reached beneath his bed and retrieved a steel pipe.

  “Some dude is talking shit about me.” Twist planned to take care of business.

  “You coming?” He looked at me. Terrible took his last puff and sprang to attention.

  I felt sick inside, my whole body tense. “Right behind you.” I had no easy exit. I might have been a Vagos imposter, but I was not about to be an accomplice to murder.

  “We should drive separately,” I managed. “In case you need to leave quickly.”

  Inside my car, my hands shook on the steering wheel. I dialed Koz and told him, “If Twist beats this guy with a pipe, I’m going to smash his head in.” It would mean the abrupt end to the investigation. But Koz agreed. “You can’t be a witness to murder.” I considered that it might take forty blows to collapse a man’s skull with a steel pipe. I had little time to find a suitable weapon. Car doors slammed. Twist and Terrible marched across gravel to the victim’s front entrance. I lagged a few paces behind, assessing my options. Twist banged on the door. A wiry man with a smashed nose and greasy ponytail answered. Maybe it would only take twenty blows. His eyes widened to saucers. Twist stood sideways, one hand skimmed his pipe.

  “Why you talking shit about me?” Twist was the bully on the playground accusing his classmate of stealing his ball, only he was armed and not at all interested in fair play.

  The man cowered, his knees visibly buckled. He dissolved into tears, deep rasping sobs. “Please,” he begged, “please. I didn’t say nothing.”

  I spotted a brick on the ground. Their voices sounded like snapping dogs. Terrible turned his back to the victim, folded his arms, and balanced against the house.

  “Please.” The victim pissed himself.

  I grabbed the brick, my heart racing. This was it.

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” Twist said suddenly, apparently satisfied that the victim had not disrespected him. The brick slipped out of my hand. It hit the pavement with a soft thud. The next day authorities picked Twist up. He never knew I had betrayed him. He blamed the arrest on his girlfriend, whose car he had “borrowed” and never returned.

  * * *

  Vinny proposed that I officially switch chapters, renounce Victorville and transfer to Death Valley. While the proposition was flattering, I already had the main players of Death Valley on criminal violations. I didn’t need to work them. In fact, I would rather have infiltrated the Hollywood or San Fernando Valley Vagos, since those members had yet to be targeted. But I had run out of time; government raids were scheduled to occur in a matter of days.

  Still, I needed Psycho’s permission to formally leave the Victorville chapter. Predictably, he was less than eager to help me out; in fact, he threatened Terry the Tramp that if he ever “saw that motherfucker [meaning me] on the streets, he would take [my] colors.” Tramp accepted
Psycho’s warning as sufficient permission to allow me to switch chapters.

  “Bring four hundred dollars cash tomorrow and meet me at Terry the Tramp’s house,” Vinny advised.

  I didn’t have that kind of money, so I borrowed it from Rust. “I’ll pay you back tomorrow,” I lied, knowing that the next day more than eight hundred law enforcement personnel planned to execute search warrants in five counties, including his.

  Until then, I stayed in character. As promised, the next day I arrived at Terry the Tramp’s house in the middle of the afternoon. Vinny hugged me warmly, vouched to Tramp that he had “known me for years” and wanted me in Death Valley. Tramp approved me instantly and allowed me to switch over as soon as possible. I handed Vinny my four-hundred-dollar transfer fee and left Tramp’s house, bright sun burning my cheeks, my heart pounding.

  That was the last exchange I ever did with the Vagos.

  * * *

  At dawn the next day, March 9, 2006, twenty-five Vagos members and associates (including Psycho and Twist, seven chapter presidents, one vice president, one secretary, one treasurer, and seven sergeants at arms) were arrested on firearms, drug, assault, and murder charges following one of the largest and most ambitious coordinated law enforcement probes ever conducted in Southern California. The three-year investigation, Operation 22 Green, involved over eight hundred personnel from the ATF and local police and sheriff’s departments, and spanned five counties, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and Ventura. Law enforcement seized 134 firearms (including Beretta and Mossberg 12 gauge shotguns, SKS assault rifles, and TEC-9 assault weapons), 305 grams of methamphetamine, 46 grams of cocaine, $15,000 in currency, explosives, four stolen motorcycles, and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

  Of the twenty-five, all served time pursuant to plea bargains: Terrible received fifteen years concurrent in federal and state prison. Psycho, who had no prior criminal convictions, received one year for the assault in Mickey McGees bar and one strike.5 Vinny accepted a strike and one year for selling me marijuana. Rust served concurrent one-year prison terms and one strike for the assault and the stolen weapon he sold to me. Powder, who had sold me the stolen shotgun, accepted five years’ probation and two strikes. Bandit took one year and one strike for the Mickey McGees assault. Bubba accepted two years and a strike for selling me cocaine. Rhino, too, struck a deal.