Post-traumatic stress—it floated through my subconscious. I thought I could control the visions. I thought I could drift effortlessly between worlds. But I couldn’t. Instead, I escaped into the company of the other agents. We formed our own brotherhood bound by common trauma. And though I was nothing like them, I shared the same tension, the same isolation, the same goal. All of us prepared each day to sacrifice our lives for a greater cause. Over pizza, beer, and sports we unwound in the undercover house. The agents were witness to my life. My wife could not compete with my exhaustion. She understood that her “normal” had a different definition. And stress had degrees. Like the other agents, I lived my life “on duty.”
Following my second surgery, I convalesced at home for a month. I had lost the use of my right arm. My days morphed into a monotonous stream of pain, pill popping, and half sleep. In an uncomfortable role reversal, my wife took care of me. We had a son I couldn’t hold, diapers I couldn’t change. Of all the roles I’d played, I hated this one. But I had no choice. I had to heal. I had left the program, and for now I didn’t exist outside the Outlaws.
I had no salary, no sick leave. If I didn’t get better, I wouldn’t know how to live.
28
Gone Hunting
I wasn’t better after my month off, but I still had to work. I drove Gringo’s undercover car to the Easy Rider Bike Expo in Charlotte, North Carolina, to hunt the Enemy. An Outlaw named Tomcat, a former enforcer turned treasurer for the Maine chapter, rode with me. A transplant from the West Coast, we had much in common. As a former Marine and “hard-core drug dealer,” a “coyote” who once smuggled human cargo across the border from Mexico, I actually understood Tomcat. We spoke the same language, knew the same places. He corroborated my backstory. And maybe that instilled his trust in me.
When we arrived at the expo, we parked in a back alley, on the lookout for wayward Hells Angels. M & M had conferred with the Outlaws’ national boss, and leaders ordered members from Boston, Maine, and Virginia to “be prepared” for war. All of us were ordered to “shoot Hells Angels on sight.”
But I knew that no Hells Angels would appear. The Outlaws ruled Charlotte; Easy Rider was their event. Hells Angels steered clear of ambush. Still, the ATF, eager to capture recorded conversations of Outlaws plotting murder against their rival, concocted a ruse. An agent stationed in Charlotte contacted M & M, the Outlaws’ enforcer, on the phone and alerted him to possible trouble: “Our sources say the Hells Angels plan to make an appearance at the Easy Rider show.… You can’t stop them, it’s a public venue. There’d better not be a brawl.” Of course there would be. But the government hoped for reaction, outrage from the Outlaws, and the club’s promise to shoot Hells Angels on sight if provoked. The Outlaws played right into the agents’ hands as they set up human blockades and prepared to execute strays.
After six hours of nothing, I relaxed somewhat. Tomcat, maybe bored or restless, revealed that he had “done something really bad,” that necessitated his having to change all his truck tires. My heartbeat increased. My hand shook as I reached inside my front pocket for my recorder and pushed the On switch. But the button snapped. Tomcat’s dark eyes flashed in the dull afternoon sky. He stroked his small-caliber handgun in his lap and reflected that he enjoyed “maggot hunting,” our name for Hells Angels. It was something that came “naturally” to him. I said nothing, afraid to move, to shift, worried that he might suddenly stop talking.
“I need to take a piss,” he said and opened the door.
Meanwhile, I quietly snapped pictures of the gun he left on the seat with my cell phone and texted the images to the cover team. His need to urinate had disrupted the flow of conversation. Tomcat never elaborated on his really bad thing, and I had no way of reengaging him without arousing his suspicion. A lost confession, a broken recorder, words drifting in the space. Eventually I learned that he and Madman, the enforcer for the Maine chapter, had gunned down a Hells Angel in Maine on Milwaukee Jack’s orders.
He “wanted revenge,” Madman testified later in federal court. Weeks earlier, Hells Angels had beaten with ball-peen hammers two Outlaws at a gas station in Connecticut. “Milwaukee Jack told us to get two vests, however you have to get them. Or kill a Hells Angel.” He told Madman to “take care of business.” Madman and Tomcat had simply followed his orders.
They began hunting in Maine. Chilled, they stopped first for coffee at a café near a Hells Angels clubhouse. Madman, formerly a member of the Exiles, a Hells Angels support club, spotted an old “friend” driving by in his pickup truck. Madman and Tomcat followed the Hells Angel to his clubhouse, waited for him to open his door, and opened fire. Bullets shattered the Hells Angel’s windshield, lodged in the side of his truck, and riddled the right side of his body.
Days later, Madman called JD. “I need a place to stay.” He sounded frantic, breathless. With “all the attention in Maine,” he needed to “leave town in a hurry.” He and Tomcat arrived at our clubhouse close to midnight. JD ushered them inside. They sported new patches on their cuts: SS bolts. Madman paced our living room, skittish and pale, agitated by any sudden noise. Tomcat sat there coolly, staring straight ahead in stunned silence.
He lifted his shirt, traced fresh lightning bolts tattooed on his belly, and flashed me his new SS pin. “That Hells Angel wasn’t the target,” he whispered. We sat in the dark. Occasional headlights flashed over his face. “He was a crime of opportunity.” Tomcat’s pat explanation chilled me. I thought about the number of times I had idled my engine in our clubhouse driveway, afraid to open the car door. The Hells Angel’s shooting had been so random, so quick. I worried about ambush, too, about being someone else’s “opportunity.”
“At least he didn’t die.” Tomcat shrugged as if that made the shooting okay. No, but the Hells Angel would be on a ventilator for life. Tomcat bunched up his face, looking like a child who had just cut the tail off a cat—not so bad, the animal still had legs and a head.
“Let’s suppose that Maine thing was done by an Outlaw,” he continued. “I’ll tell you how it happened.” I couldn’t believe it. He was actually going to confess. “The HA looked at him funny.”
“What do you mean?”
“Looked at him like, ‘What the fuck you looking at, bro?’ and then bam.” Tomcat mimicked the Hells Angel’s surprise and then the Outlaw’s reaction as if he were staring at himself in the mirror trying on different expressions.
“I’m not afraid of the Hells Angels.” He hugged his arms around his chest. “I’m afraid of the cops.” He displayed the hilt of his gun tucked into his waistband.
“Shit, I’m afraid to mow my lawn. I take my gun with me when I take a piss.”
I swallowed and pretended to be sympathetic. “They’re not coming for you, bro.”
“They’re coming.” Tomcat’s eyes watered. “I can feel them.” He described them like ghosts. “Ever try to shoot a ghost?”
* * *
“My gun jammed,” Madman explained later in his federal trial. “Tomcat wanted to finish him off.” He emptied his gun into the Hells Angel’s truck and reloaded. But Madman objected, “I wanted my gun to jam. I pulled lightly on the trigger.” Madman demonstrated for the jury. “Tomcat … he’s the madman.” Following the shooting, Madman tossed their guns over a bridge into a raging river. He gazed at the panel with large sleepy eyes, his head pronounced and unframed by a skullcap. In bold black ink across his throat he had tattooed MOM.
“You feel let down?” the prosecutor asked. For all of Madman’s bravado, none of the Outlaws had visited him in prison.
“A little.” Madman shrugged. Once a former wrestler, he shriveled on the stand.
“You feel used?”
“I followed orders.”
“[Milwaukee Jack] told you to sell drugs?”
“He said times are tough. Brothers need to do what they need to do to get by.”
“Even kill?”
Madman didn’t respond, didn’t disclose that
Milwaukee Jack’s orders to kill had been revised, that he was supposed to “just fuck [him] up.”
* * *
Murder was expensive. The Outlaws devised a scheme to increase club profits. L’il Dave, the Copper Region vice president, suggested we install illegal gambling machines in our Petersburg clubhouse; after all, the Lexington chapter had successfully recouped nearly $24,000 in profits over the last eight months. The Outlaws used the funds to pay club dues and outstanding bills. If we owned such machines, L’il Dave coaxed, we, too, could earn revenue for our chapter. It sounded like a good idea, but not for the reasons L’il Dave recited. We figured, with a gambling machine in our clubhouse, we could entice Outlaws to play right into our hands. That was the fascination of undercover work: Improvisation sometimes led to chance revelations, to exactly the criminal enterprise we hoped to label and ultimately convict the Outlaws.
The machines arrived the next day. They resembled video arcade games, but a simple switch converted the screens to poker and blackjack. The owners, stone-faced Mafia thugs, reviewed with us the operating rules: They expected to receive 40 percent of our profits. One wore diamond studs in his right lobe, a garish ring on his pinkie, and a thick gold necklace that surrounded his throat like rope. The other looked half formed, as if he had spurted from a tube into a fleshy blob and forgot to stretch. Smashed in and undefined, he had a lazy eye that made it impossible to look at him when he spoke. I added gambling to my job description and regularly fed the machines with government funds, mindful of entrapment. Soon, other Outlaws who visited our clubhouse took my cue.
And once a month the Mafia men returned to collect.
Meanwhile, M & M grumbled that he needed help with background investigations. He complained at a recent Church meeting about being “short staffed” and the paperwork was “mountainous.” Hearing M & M’s whines, I proposed to Gringo that he volunteer me for the position at the next bosses’ meeting. Why not? It was a way in, a way to manipulate the game and make M & M think it was his idea. Gringo insisted to M & M that I would be “great, since I had paralegal experience.” I slid into the opportunity and soon met with M & M regularly to review the club’s records. I checked references on prospective members, identified addresses on applications, alerted M & M of fictitious or incomplete criminal histories. I made copies, one for the feds and the other for M &M. I provided synopses of my findings. M & M seemed pleased.
And with his paperwork in order, he could now turn to more pressing issues: killing Hells Angels. At first, he proposed that we randomly “burn houses around the Charlotte and North Carolina clubhouses” and smoke them out. The Hells Angels might plan to use them as fronts to launch attacks against the Outlaws. Snuff suggested we start with the Hells Angel’s tattoo shop in Richmond, adding that killing the owner would be a good way for us to “earn our SS bolts.” This was war, not crime. Snuff suggested we start with a high-powered rifle from the bed of a pickup truck and “blow the Hells Angel away while he smoked on his back porch.”
He was tickled by his ingenuity, then he frowned. If the rifle was “too cumbersome,” he could teach us how to make bombs. Mostly he wanted our commitment. “The murder should happen next week,” he said, after he had a chance to obtain “professional-grade explosives.” Snuff seemed winded by the conversation, and I realized then that I was looking at an old man. In his midfifties, Snuff aged like a dog, seven years at a stretch. He had been a criminal a long time, had already served twelve years in prison for initiating violent acts as a member of another motorcycle gang. Killing was breakfast conversation, as significant to him as discussing coffee brands.
“He expects us to kill him next week.” I frowned.
M & M discussed a possible alibi with Gringo “just in case” things got shitty.
But a month later, M & M was “still working on the explosives issue.”
* * *
Meanwhile, Les shared how he’d assaulted a Hells Angel the week before in Rock Hill, South Carolina. The rival had “strayed too close” to the Outlaws’ clubhouse; “no more free travel,” he declared. No rival club had permission to “pass through” Outlaws territory without risking attack. Then he suggested any number of ways the agents and I could retaliate if we ever saw a stray: beatings, burnings, “even grenades.”
Impatient with our lack of progress, Snuff suggested we conduct surveillance “to facilitate the assaults,” find the enemy, and at the next regional bosses’ meeting in Lexington, members produced maps that highlighted the Hells Angels clubhouses and homes. The marks resembled yellow blood spatter.
Murder, of course, was out of the question. We all knew that. We just needed a clever way to extricate ourselves from the plot without arousing suspicion, without blowing the investigation, without revealing our cover. We had to finesse the ending, position our players for the takedown, and thwart an all-out war.
29
Road’s End
As I drove through neighborhoods in North Carolina searching for Hells Angels, I felt an impending sense of dread. What would I do if I saw one? I had orders to shoot on sight. And if anyone learned I didn’t, I could be killed or stripped of my patch. I replayed what-if scenarios in my head, always prepared just in case. If the Outlaws attacked, I planned to participate, but with my fists, never a weapon. If an Outlaw offered me a gun, I would accept it but never shoot. If I saw a Hells Angel and I was alone, I would pretend I didn’t see him.
* * *
A boy pedaled furiously across his lawn to me on a plastic big wheel, oblivious of the threat of violence. In any war there comes a point when the battle is over, when the soldiers are too weary to go on. We’d been working the gang for nearly two years; we’d patched in. We were Outlaws. We were done. We had gathered enough intelligence on the gang to put them away for years. We had confessions to attempted murders, to brutal assaults, to conspiracies to kill. But we could always hunt more. The more people who trusted us, the more intelligence we could gather. War was an addiction, but the barbed-wire fence surrounding my family was beginning to rust. It was time to go home.
I felt constantly sick and eerily lucky. All of us had dodged bullets, but exhaustion led to mistakes, and as tired and dragged down as we all felt, we knew it was only a matter of time before we slipped. Hunting was no longer something the Outlaws discussed; it was something they planned to do. We borrowed time. M & M would soon produce the “professional-grade” explosives. The Hells Angel who owned the tattoo shop would smoke one night on his back porch and notice fireflies flickering in the dark like sparks.
Snuff’s proposed rifle loomed in my thoughts. We could stall him for only so long.
* * *
Three weeks before the government raids happened, I relocated my family. Like the Halloween town the Outlaws had rented, I quickly dissolved my makeshift set and chose another backdrop, a place where I could live steady. Steady was nice. Steady had its own heartbeat. I loaded our few possessions into the bed of a U-Haul and began the journey home. I told the Outlaws I was visiting my sick mother. Relief coursed through me. I was almost there.
Then Johnny died.
He crashed his motorcycle. His death tugged at me like a vibration. All Outlaws had to attend the funerals of members. If I didn’t attend Johnny’s, the whole investigation, everything we had worked so hard to achieve, might unravel prematurely. My wife seethed at the news. “There’s a death every week,” she observed. With all the talk of war and hunting, death by bike was the biggest threat to the Outlaws, to any motorcycle club. The highway stretched before me, dark and inviting. And I let her go one more time.
Gringo met me at the airport in his undercover Cadillac and we drove to the South Carolina clubhouse where the Outlaws had preserved Johnny’s body for viewing. His smashed face was pieced together like a rubber mask. We gathered in the stuffy warehouse. Portable air-conditioning units cooled Johnny’s body, but the sweet stench of rot permeated the large room like a cloying perfume. It seemed oddly fitting that he s
hould wind up in a box. Members saluted Johnny with beer; some openly wept. He still wore his massive rings.
Tension rippled over the body as news of a Hells Angel sniping spread.
“The fucker shot Ho Jo in broad daylight.” M & M frowned, looking pissed, not sad. “The bullet pierced his oxygen tank. He died.” His words knocked around the space, sobering all who listened. They thought it criminal to target a walking dead, an Outlaw already physically weak, his life reduced to a tank and a motorized scooter. But debate heated over “who shot first,” as if that were the catalyst.
“We’re in a war,” one Outlaw explained to reporters later. “We’re not a gang. People always slap that thing on us. We’re about brotherhood and riding bikes.”
One actually blamed the police for the long-standing gang feud. “They want the Hells Angels and Outlaws to be at war, because if [we] get along, they lose their intelligence.”
“We’re really private people,” another Outlaw insisted. “No one in the media is interested in the positive things done by the club, the fund-raisers for burned children and toy stocking runs for the Salvation Army.… We used to be renegades.… Now we’re just normal.”
* * *
As the night wore on, members snored next to Johnny’s body, oblivious of the rot. The atmosphere morphed into a ghoulish tableau as the living drank to be unconscious and the dead wished for the choice. All around me, mirrors reflected lines of coke, bottles and cans spilled, pizza cartons and half-eaten wings scattered on tables and carpet. I thought about Ho Jo. He had been a decorated Vietnam veteran. He owned a tattoo shop, minded his own business. Just like the Hells Angel down the street from us, the one Snuff ordered us to “smoke.”
Vagos, Mongols, and Outlaws: My Infiltration of America's Deadliest Biker Gangs Page 21