The informant arrived fifteen minutes late for our date at Cheers. Tall and skinny, he had a deformed arm that flapped at his side like a wing, an alcoholic bloom, and sweaty cheeks. A gold skull necklace swung from his neck. Baggy pants hugged his hips, exposing red boxers. We were already in trouble. He extended his deformed arm in greeting, and the appendage reminded me of half-kneaded dough. This was Norfolk’s finest?
“Electrical wire accident,” he volunteered and slid onto the stool beside me. Reeking of alcohol, he ordered more shots and recounted in slurry detail several versions of his life story. I didn’t believe a single word, but we had limited time to pull together a chapter of misfits.
“How did he seem?” Gringo asked me later.
“Confused.”
“But will he work?”
“We’re desperate,” I said.
“Can he ride?”
“Only a street bike.”
We decided to test the informant—we named him Claw—to make sure his backstory contained no holes, no missing details that might incite suspicion and compromise the entire investigation. The Outlaws always tested newcomers, wary of police informants and undercover operatives. They had protections in place—brutal initiation rites, interminably long prospecting periods, and verbal jousts. We were actors, method actors; we couldn’t pretend on the surface we were other people. We had to be our identities through and through, and if we didn’t rehearse, didn’t challenge the fake histories we created for ourselves, the Outlaws would sense our deception and reject us like a foul odor. The details had to be perfect, flawless. Claw had to give the performance of his life and remember his lines. He made me nervous; I had always relied on my intuition when I infiltrated the Vagos. Now, for the first time, my fate rested with my team’s deliverance.
“Tell him you’re the ATF agent and we’re the Outlaws,” JD suggested. “Make up a backstory about how the two of you met. We’ll grill him.”
Claw climbed into my car: His hands shook and he wore the same disheveled baggy clothes as the day before. Not a good sign.
“You ready for this?” I asked.
He nodded, stared into the street. “Pumped. Let’s do it.” His enthusiasm telegraphed his inexperience. No one I knew had ever been “pumped” to infiltrate a violent biker gang.
“How do we know each other?” I quizzed him.
“We met in a bar?”
“What bar? Where? We have to be specific.”
“Bailey’s?”
“No good. That’s in Richmond. How long have we known each other?”
“A few months?”
“At least a year. We met in Portsmouth, at the Foggy Point.”
I took him there the next day so he could memorize the smells, the menu, the neighborhood—just in case the Outlaws demanded more detail. After several days I asked him, “Think you got it?”
“Let’s do it.”
* * *
I took him to our undercover house to meet the “bad guys.” Gringo and JD, dressed in prospect cuts, lounged on pink couches. Claw walked beside me, half my weight, looking like a cutout from a cardboard poster. The agents suppressed a smirk, careful to stay in character. They spent the next few hours interrogating him, role-playing, asking him how he and I knew each other, until Claw looked like he might expire from the pressure.
“How did he do?” I asked Gringo later.
“He passed.”
Claw became #4.
But we still needed a fifth member, and time was running out. Days before our deadline, the ATF relented and supplied us with Bobby, a qualified federal agent, medic, and experienced Green Beret with two completed tours in Afghanistan. Well-groomed and soft-spoken, he disarmed us with his calm demeanor and relaxed style. Hardly the profile of a trained gentleman killer, Bobby oddly blended well into the biker culture. With our fifth member firmly recruited, it was time for the club of misfits to find our clubhouse.
The Outlaws had several in black neighborhoods, convinced that police were less likely to “harass” them if they remained hidden in plain view. I searched dilapidated rental properties but settled on an abandoned tire warehouse in an industrial area of Petersburg. The building, tucked between boarded-up businesses and gutted streets, provided perfect seclusion for drug deals, clandestine conversations, and unexpected night visitors. Situated one mile from the only Hells Angel living in the area, the ATF promptly wired our warehouse for sound and video. With one flip of a switch we could record every conversation and transaction. Video streamed twenty-four/seven as a safety precaution. Attorneys could never accuse us later of selective editing.
* * *
Members gave us a housewarming gift: a pair of Nazi and Southern Confederate flags. We draped them above our bar and over the picture of Adolf Hitler. Inside a wall, the agents hid their government credentials. With our cast selected, we rehearsed. As vice president of our chapter, I developed plausible histories, reviewing the details of when, where, and how I met each of the agents. Our chapter boss, Gringo, and I pretended we were longtime dope traffickers who, for ten years, smuggled shipments of marijuana from the West to East Coast; in those pre-9/11 days, airport security rarely checked luggage. Eventually, I met Gringo’s “partner,” JD. My adopted name, Chef, solidified my role as a former methamphetamine cook. The best lie was closest to the truth. I knew a lot about drugs, too much, and sometimes that knowledge backfired.
Later, a hefty Italian Outlaw from Florida would call my bluff after an impromptu visit to our clubhouse. He spilled over our barstool, snorted lines of coke in front of us, and announced matter-of-factly that he had “close connections” to the Gambino crime family and we’d be wise not to “fuck with him.”
“I know what you’re playing at.” He wagged his pudgy finger in my face. His icy tone chipped at my resolve. Still, I shrugged, wiped down the counter with a wet rag, and quietly imploded. “You’re the informant.” His finger traveled over the rest of us as one by one he picked us off. “You fuckers are the federal agents.”
He meant to jar us, to gauge our reaction. If we bristled, registered alarm, even blanched, we would give away our identities. I didn’t look at the other agents, didn’t flinch, didn’t want to give them any opportunity to struggle. The Outlaw laughed and tapped his fingers on the bar to an invisible drumbeat.
I played along. “How come I’m the informant?”
He shrugged, his cheeks peppered red. “You know too much.” He qualified after reflection, “definitely too much about drugs.”
* * *
Bobby joined our mix as a mock Mongol hang-around. We pretended he’d supervised me for three years when I worked in his tree-trimming business. Claw played himself, a deformed, drug-addicted criminal. He blended well as our prospect.
* * *
In addition to our government-issued motorcycles, I purchased a van. My experience in the Vagos prepared me well for grit, sleep deprivation, hard concrete flooring, and open fields with rocks for pillows. The van at least provided shelter and thin carpet that wasn’t stained with cat piss. I took comfort in the knowledge that if I closed my eyes, no one would step on my head or dribble beer in my ear.
21
War Games
The Outlaws’ main objective was to hunt and kill Hells Angels. As predators, the club strategized regularly about impending turf wars with their rival. They baited Hells Angels’ support clubs (the Richmond area had only two) like the Desperados, hoping to lure them onto foreign turf and entice them to battle. They feared that the Hells Angels might absorb the support clubs and become an amorphous powerful mass on the East Coast. To thwart that effort, the Outlaws staged assaults. One, at the Cockade City Grill in downtown Petersburg, erupted into a full riot. The Outlaws’ plan: Dispatch three small-boned Outlaws, dressed in full regalia and colors, to enter the bar and initiate a confrontation with members of the Desperados. The expectation: The Hells Angels would join their comrades inside and unwittingly submit to be ambushed. The strate
gy: Outlaws, those not wearing colors, armed with assault rifles, brass knuckles, and revolvers, would man the perimeter, trapping the rivals inside. The players: the agents, Les, the Outlaws’ Copper Region North Carolina vice president, and Alibi served outside as human barricades. The orders: Shoot to kill.
The night of the big “showdown,” I contracted food poisoning and spent hours vomiting up spoiled mayonnaise in a nearby hospital. But Gringo recounted the details. As Desperados filtered through the large double doors of the bar, a blizzard of violence hit them. Fists dented faces and tabletops, brass knuckles slashed flesh, beer bottles shattered glassware and countertops and slammed into walls. The Cockade City Grill dissolved into a blur of bodies. Desperados fled. One took a bottle to Gringo’s head; a jagged glass edge left an angry red gash above his left eye. Gringo struck his assailant with his baton. Fighting spilled into the street. One Desperado, cornered by Outlaws, brandished a Bowie knife, the blade glittering in the darkness. Les drew his revolver; his finger flirted on the trigger as he prepared to drop the gangster like a rag doll. Bobby and JD firmly gripped their guns. It was kill or be killed. Then a siren wailed in the distance. Bikers instantly dispersed; violence rippled like stones over the scene.
“You think you’ll make it to the next one?” Gringo teased me.
I smiled weakly. “The poison’s almost out of my system.”
Gringo laughed. “It’ll never be out of your system.”
Nurses gave Gringo fourteen stitches.
* * *
Apart from impromptu fights, bartending proved to be our biggest challenge as prospects. I didn’t know the first thing about mixing drinks, and I didn’t want to learn at three o’clock in the morning surrounded by bored Outlaws amped up with coke. Probates gave us “on-the-job training” for two weeks in our regional clubhouses until we became proficient at combining Crown and Coke, Jack and Coke, screwdrivers, and Bacardis. The rehearsals helped, but I wasn’t ready for long shifts behind the bar: After just two weeks of training, we received word that a Florida Outlaw had crashed his motorcycle into a guardrail. We were summoned to his funeral and expected to bartend.
The Outlaws commandeered the state of Florida, home to more than half the chapters in the country. I dreaded the twenty-hour trek to Ft. Lauderdale. The agents and I rode for two days in tremendous heat, humidity, and patches of rain, passing through the Carolinas and Georgia, grabbing cheap motel rooms when we could, until we arrived at an impressive property spread over acres of immaculate lawn. The Outlaws’ clubhouse in Ft. Lauderdale flaunted an inside and outside bar covered with a gorgeous canopy. A lake shimmered in the background and reflected rows of chrome. A boat docked near the shore looked like a promising place to sleep. But the pristine scenery hid a sinister undercurrent: alligators. Some creatures lounged on logs in banks of sand. Others slept with their mouths open. Tents pitched along the grass blew dangerously close to the waters. They, too, made inviting bait. I made it a goal to stay awake for the next two days.
“Keep busy and keep your head down,” one probate warned us. Then he told us about “batting practice.” Calmly, he recounted how a handful of Outlaws, bored and drugged one night, messed with two probates behind the bar. They ordered one to stand in front while they balanced an ashtray on his head.
“They took turns with the bat,” the probate said, and all I heard was whoosh whoosh whoosh as I imagined them swatting close to the victim’s head.
“The other guy just watched as his partner bled, and when it was his turn, he ran.”
The story horrified me. The agents and I just looked at the probate, dumbfounded. No one was going to whack anything off my head.
That night we hustled behind the bar, mixing drinks, stocking ice, filling glasses, until our legs burned with exhaustion and our hands shook from the repetition. We slept only two hours, curled in our tents by the lake, wind howling around us. The next morning we mounted our bikes and rode to the funeral home in large packs, in pairs, twenty-five across, three feet deep, muscling over lanes of traffic, blowing through red lights, cutting off other motorists. I never felt more stressed, more exhausted in my life. I hugged the rear; the noise was deafening. In front of me, a sea of black-and-white vests; to the side of me, bodies; to the rear, more bodies.
We rode in tight formation, so close my knees practically bumped the next bike.
And still a large civilian roared close by, pissed that my tires straddled a piece of his lane. He didn’t get it—the seriousness of a motorcycle gang. He didn’t get that the Outlaws didn’t play fair, didn’t care, would have bumped him off his bike and run him over like roadkill. I waved the motorist away, hoping he would take his exit cue, but he persisted, coasted next to me, shouted into the wind, “Move the fuck over.” He managed to squeeze between me and another Outlaw. Spit flew from the corners of his mouth. The fool was going to get himself killed. Desperation took over and I kicked his bike’s gas tank, the force propelling him into the next lane. The motorist struggled to control his bike, glanced at me stunned, and then slowly pulled back.
He didn’t know it, maybe never would, but I had just saved his life.
In the biker world, no one expected to survive. The funeral ended two days later like punctuation, ellipsis at the end of a sentence, continuation after pause. Attendees forgot the reason they traveled all those miles to pay their respects to the body in the box who looked oddly unreal, a waxy replica of themselves. With just two hours of sleep the whole weekend, the highway home stretched before us like a dark mouth ready to swallow us whole. The agents and I, exhausted and worn, nodded off, barely able to steady our bikes. We pulled into a motel to nap. I didn’t think I would make it. None of us did. Sleep enveloped me like a heavy fog and at first I thought I dreamed the call.
“There’s been another death,” Gringo mumbled over the phone.
It took me a minute to process his words.
“An Outlaw crashed his bike leaving the funeral.”
Our attendance at any memorial service was mandatory. But the thought of repeating another biker funeral on the heels of the one we had just left nearly finished me. I was done. My body couldn’t do it. Mentally, I protested, “I’m not going.” Investigation over. I didn’t care.
I hung up, fell asleep. The phone shrilled again.
“We don’t have to go,” Gringo breathed. Relief shuddered over the line.
* * *
Three weeks later, we attended the national Daytona Run, an annual three-day event held in Florida. Hundreds of Outlaws from surrounding areas attended. My wife, pregnant with our first child, was expected to deliver in less than three weeks, and the last thing I needed was to ride to the hospital dressed in colors and on a motorcycle. Instead, I drove my van and towed our bikes to Atlanta. Rain pelted the streets. But weather was no deterrence. In Atlanta, the others mounted their bikes and fishtailed the rest of the way to Daytona in heat and wet. By the time they arrived at the clubhouse, they looked like the others, bedraggled, weary, and coated in sweat.
Sun poked through the clouds just in time for our first task: guarding the Outlaws’ bikes. As Snuff had so delicately explained, “Why the fuck would we entrust amateurs with our lives?” The real posts—protecting the clubhouse and scouting for Hells Angels—were reserved for members only, since they could carry a gun and “shoot on sight.” Hot tar seared through my boots. Clothes clung to my body like a second skin. We had “volunteered” for twenty-hour shifts, alternating between guard duty and bartending. Periodically we slept, sometimes for a whole three hours.
Heat beat my face. Occasionally, members threw us bottled water. But after the first few hours, fever raged inside me. Fire burned in JD’s cheeks; a red band circled his throat. Neither of us had sunscreen. My throat was parched, but I dreaded the long path through the clubhouse to replenish water. The gauntlet made me easy prey for members. And instinctively I knew that if I ventured past their roving gaze, I would never quench my thirst. They would find other
, far worse tasks for me to perform. I stayed thirsty.
Snuff added to our tension. He hobbled toward us, his cane clicking on the concrete. Despite the tremendous heat, he wore a leather trench coat. His beret shielded the sun from his eyes. He circled us, whacked us in the shins with his cane, then, for “fun,” whispered in the shell of JD’s ear, “I’m hunting Hells Angels.” Then, without provocation, he whipped out his Buck knife, pressed the blade to JD’s throat, and chuckled. “Seen any yet?” JD flinched.
We were both unarmed and surrounded by gangsters with weapons clipped to their hips like accessories. Snuff slid the blade into JD’s throat, pressed his thumb into the wound, and licked off the blood. But before JD could react, Snuff turned his attention to me. He slapped the knife against his trench coat, moved closer to me, and pressed the long blade to my throat. It nicked my skin and a hot trickle of blood stained my vest.
“How about you?” he sneered, and I thought he might be crazy enough to drop me right there, “just for fun.” Snuff had no filters, no limits, no feeling. If he could beat a stranger senseless in a bar in front of a crowd, he could certainly cut me.
I swallowed, my nerves shot. Buzzing sounded in my ears. My world suddenly shrank: every detail amplified, Snuff’s foul breath, the prick of cold metal on my skin, burning in my eyes. This was not how I imagined my end, slit for slaughter. Rage mixed with fear as my mind raced with exit strategies. Snuff enjoyed watching my light extinguish. As a skilled sociopath, he controlled when and how and whom he would blame for my end. I was certain JD was scared, too. Somehow we had to extricate ourselves from this scene, scream “Cut,” fire the crazy actor from the set. Snuff had deviated from the script. Where was the fucking director? Then, as if reason suddenly returned to Snuff, he removed the blade from my throat and disappeared through the crowd, his black trench flapping like crows’ wings.
Vagos, Mongols, and Outlaws: My Infiltration of America's Deadliest Biker Gangs Page 15