by Alex Caine
But the response I got from the handlers the next day wasn’t standard at all. Everyone had read my report by the time we got together for a meeting, and their reactions were all over the map. Corky was pissed, convinced that I had needlessly jeopardized the case with the confrontation. In my defense I argued that once Chuck had opened his mouth he had taken away my options—I had to act like a bad guy would act. Anything else would have been wimpy, I said. Andy, on the other hand, thought it was not only hilarious but likely the breakthrough we needed. It was in his rough-and-tumble character to appreciate that sort of rashness.
“I would give anything to have seen the look on their faces,” he kept saying, laughing.
The confrontation did end up being an icebreaker. The next time I went to the Pioneer, I got a little conversation from Vinny. Once he acknowledged me, the others followed suit.
I inadvertently scored a second major coup with Vinny not long afterward. One night we were at the bar as closing time approached and he told me that I had to give him a ride home. His wife had his truck and their house wasn’t far from the trailer park where I was living. There was a Marty Robbins tape in the Firebird’s deck and the song that came on as we drove away from the Pioneer was “Ballad of the Alamo.” It was a favorite of mine. The story of fewer than two hundred men holding off a force more than twenty times as strong was a special inspiration to me. I knew most every detail about it. What I didn’t know at the time was that the Alamo was a very, very special inspiration to the Bandidos. Vinny was surprised to hear the song but said nothing. I sang along and then went on about how, if the Alamo happened today, we would be those guys, standing tall until the end, whatever the odds.
I laid it on thick and Vinny’s reaction was hard to read. He just looked at me in a perplexed but not hostile way. I suppose he was trying to figure me out. The song couldn’t be a setup because there was no way I could have known he would be in the car. He never said a word about it that I knew of, and when we arrived at his place he just got out of the car and closed the door, barely mumbling a thank you. But the story got around, as I would learn two years later in Sturgis, South Dakota.
The first thirty days were up and there had been no word on the Thailand gig, so we all decided to give the Bandidos job another thirty days. I was getting into my role and the agency was starting to get a view of the local chapter they didn’t have before. They gave me a $500-per-month raise and upgraded my Norton, which I’d been riding around more and more, to a Sportster, the smallest of the Harley family.
Shortly thereafter, I went home for a week of R & R. While in Vancouver, Scott phoned and congratulated me on how things were going. He also gave me an inside perspective on the conversations inside the DEA. It seemed an FBI agent, not Corky, thought the whole case was futile and was convinced there was no way I could get in. This second thirty-day stab had to produce, beyond any doubt, a sense of advancement and actual progress. It was time to approach one of the Bandidos for a business venture.
I picked Karate Bob—I’d learned that he was a state heavyweight champion—thinking that our common interest in martial arts would make us natural partners. Back in Ferndale, I waited until I saw him alone in the bar and made my move. Sitting down, I laid out a plan whereby I would bankroll him to open a high-end martial arts club in nearby Bellingham for which he would be the public face, while I would handle the business end. Without putting any money down, he could have the use of a top-notch facility and make a good chunk of cash from lessons and the like. Money wasn’t really an issue for me, I let on; I was interested in the club primarily as a money-laundering vehicle.
Karate Bob heard me out, but to my surprise he didn’t bite. He turned out to be a purist and felt martial arts should not be a for-profit business. I was taken aback and, to tell the truth, felt shamed. In some ways it was a setback, insofar as I had lost respect in the eyes of a prominent member. Still, it opened Bob up to further conversation.
My next target was a Bandido named George Sherman, known to all as Gunk. The name suited him well—he was a grease monkey, although he hadn’t found any steady work as a mechanic since leaving Florida and coming to Washington a few years previously. He and I had become friendly over a pinball game in the Pioneer called the Black Knight, to which he was addicted. He told me that he was living at the home of another Bandido, Jersey Jerry, but hoping to get his own place once he got some cash.
One evening at the Pioneer I took him aside and asked if he wanted to make a little quick money. He was all ears. I explained that I had a deal happening and I wanted to make sure everything went right. If he would accompany me as protection, I would give him two hundred dollars. He agreed in a second.
A few days later, he and I were in my car in a rest area off Highway 5 between Ferndale and Blaine. I had arranged for an unmarked DEA car to arrive from one direction and an unmarked RCMP car from the other. They showed up right on cue, and a woman got out of the Canadian car and into the DEA vehicle.
I had told Gunk that if she was in there for more than two minutes, it would mean we had a problem and would have to pull her out of the car. He would be paid more if that happened, I’d added. Gunk took the prospect of extracting the woman very seriously, pulling a gun from inside his coat and looking very tense. “Holy fuck, this guy is whacked out,” I thought.
It was a very long two minutes and the Mountie used almost all of it. With five seconds remaining, the DEA car’s door opened and she stepped out. She walked to her car and pulled out a large package that she then placed in the American’s trunk. Both cars pulled out and were gone. It was the easiest two hundred bucks Gunk had ever made and I knew he would soon want more.
It didn’t take long for Gunk to come to me with a business proposal of his own. Chuck was closing his bike shop, ostensibly for lack of business. In fact, the gang had decided they wanted complete control over it, so had boycotted it and also warned other bike owners in the area not to patronize the place. Eventually, Chuck just read the writing on the wall, locked the door and left town. Enter Gunk. He had been telling his fellow Bandidos about the job he did with me and saying that I was a big-time crook. So Jerry suggested to Gunk that he hit me up to finance the shop. He did, and I agreed.
It cost the DEA five grand, but it was money well spent. Within a week the store was filling up with stolen parts and Gunk had his own garage and all the work he could handle as a mechanic. The gang’s business strategy was at times almost comical: Gunk would hire punks to steal parts off bikes in the area, parts he would then sell over the counter back to their rightful owners.
I played the silent partner and stayed at arm’s length. Soon enough, other members started to hover around me, vultures around a cash cow. This led to closer socializing, and before too long gang members began inviting me on small runs—group rides to predetermined locations. These were mostly local affairs—barbecues, parties, bar crawls—but it was clearly a big step into the gang’s good graces. Not more than two or three people at a time were invited to join the gang on these runs, and they were usually guys the gang was thinking of recruiting.
More often than not, the other potential recruits would fall out of favor after pissing off a member of the gang somehow or other, usually over a ridiculously minor infraction. For instance, one guy wore a helmet while riding his bike. After a lot of drinking at a campsite we had ridden to, Dr. Jack, a Bandido so named because he worked as a blood separator in a medical lab and was relatively refined and intelligent, asked the poor sap to pass him the helmet. When he handed it over, Jack promptly puked in it. Then he passed it back to the guy with the instruction, “Put it on now if you like your helmet so much.”
The guy laughed awkwardly, thinking, praying, that Jack was joking. He wasn’t.
“Put it on,” Jack repeated. “Now!”
The guy eventually did. And never came on another ride.
One of my most valuable skills on runs and at other gatherings was being able to anticipate when
the festivities might turn ugly so that I could slip away unnoticed. Early on I learned that when Vinny began to dance in the campfire with a gun in one hand and a bottle of peach schnapps in the other, it was time to find a hole to hide in. Members weren’t allowed to hit other members, and that meant non-members often ended up as punching bags. Since I had no status, I figured “out of sight, out of mind” was the best approach, and it worked.
Not being a drinker helped keep me alert to changes in the atmosphere. It also allowed me to do a lot of observing, even if from a distance. I was especially interested in the treatment of “prospects”—the recruits going through an extended hazing period to see if they had the stuff for full membership—not so much because I was hoping to become one but because they were often my best source of information. Still, once I started getting invited on rides, becoming a prospect myself became an enticing possibility. It wasn’t something Andy, Corky and Co. had really dared hope for when I was first hired; just becoming a friend of the gang was a tall-enough order already. But when my being invited to prospect for the club became a realistic consideration, my handlers were seized by the idea.
This occurred about two and a half or three months into the investigation, in the fall of 1981. Thailand, Scott said, was still hung up in paperwork. Meanwhile, Andy was telling me our investigation in Ferndale needed a longer commitment from me to get the funding we required to continue. So, I signed on with the DEA for another three months. In retrospect, I think the funding excuse was a ruse to force my hand and make me forget about Thailand.
Truth be told, even if I’d been given the option of packing my bags and heading off to Bangkok at that point, it would have been hard to do. The more I got to know the Bandidos, the more fascinated I became with them and, by extension, the case. Like me—and like Andy, Corky and Larry—they had almost all served in Vietnam. In fact, like the Hells Angels, their rivals (and occasional business partners), the Bandidos had been formed by disenchanted, recently discharged vets. But whereas the Hells Angels came out of WWII and got started in California, the Bandidos were conceived in the disaster of Vietnam and born on the docks of San Leon, Texas. In this way, I discovered, I had just as much of a bond with most of the Bandidos as I did with the cops. More, in fact, if you took into account my delinquent youth.
All that said, I didn’t know if I could put up with the treatment meted out to prospects. It was not only demanding and humiliating—whether it was standing watch all night at clubs and parties, or fetching beers for full-patch members—but also downright dangerous. So I began to study which members to avoid and which ones to stay close to. There was hope: Ronnie Hodge, the Bandidos’ national president, had recently ordered all chapters to minimize the brutality on prospects, saying it was deterring a lot of good people from joining. Still, many old-timers saw the old approach as the only way to test the mettle of a man. Nonetheless, beatings were generally kept at a level of punches, no boots allowed. Jobs such as cleaning members’ basements and running errands for them had increasingly become the order of the day.
As I drew closer to the gang, I drifted further from my life in Vancouver. My trips became less frequent; rather than visiting a couple of times a week, I would go once every couple of weeks. I didn’t have the time, I told Liz—but that was only partly true. A more important reason was that I found going from one life to another just too difficult to keep track of. With the Bandidos, even the slightest slip-up could cost me my life.
Liz wasn’t the type to complain or nag, but it was obvious she wasn’t very happy with my lengthier absences. Around the time the investigation had got under way, we’d found out she was pregnant again, which only made matters worse. And just before Christmas 1981, when the Mounties finally scrapped any remaining idea of sending me to Thailand—I was obviously no longer available—the strain on our relationship became that much greater. Even if she’d never been keen on moving to Bangkok—and despite the fact that Ferndale was a hell of a lot closer to Vancouver than Thailand—she thought I should have taken the job with the Mounties. Bikers scared her.
Still, we talked on the phone most nights, especially after the DEA moved me from the trailer into a house in Blaine. The house was quite literally a stone’s throw from the border, right next to Peace Arch Park—perfect, almost too perfect, for an ostensible smuggler. Liz also appreciated the fact that, if nothing else, I had become a very steady supply of money. The DEA paid me in cash—big piles of cash, about US$4,000 per month—and all my expenses were covered, so I didn’t have much use for the money. That meant it all went to Liz. At one point we figured out that the money we were making on the exchange rate alone was enough to cover our household bills.
Once I began going on rides with the gang and socializing with them more closely, the door to actually building a case against them opened up: I started buying drugs from them. Not much in terms of either volume or frequency, at least not to begin with. Rather, a small purchase one day, then, a couple of months later perhaps, another from a different member.
The first Bandido I bought from was Craig, a longtime but low-profile member who worked unloading fishing boats at Blaine’s small port. He was always at the Pioneer and was always selling—not small quantities, but not big either, anything from an eighth to a full ounce of coke. He barely bothered to hide it, which was my main reason for picking him. Seeing him at the bar one day, I approached as if I’d been hunting high and low for him.
“Hey, I’ve been looking for you,” I said. “I need an eight ball. Or how much would it be for a quarter?”
My strategy was not to ask him if he would sell to me but rather how much he would sell, thereby making it that much harder for him to say no. Not that “no” even seemed a consideration for him. He simply reached into his pocket, pulled out a quarter ounce and said “Four-fifty” or some figure like that.
A month or two later, I walked into another biker bar in Blaine and saw Bobby Lund, a member of the Bremerton Bandidos, along with a few of the Bellingham gang members. Even if he belonged to the other Washington State chapter, he seemed to like our company more and spent most of his time in the Ferndale area. He was known as a dealer of relatively small quantities. I cornered him and asked, “Is Craig with you guys?”
I already knew the answer: no.
“Have you seen him?” I asked.
Again, no.
“I’m looking for him because I need to pick up,” I continued. “Can you do it?”
I ended up buying half an ounce from him then and there.
The next Bandido I bought from was Terry Jones—the only member of the Bellingham chapter to actually reside in Bellingham. The rest lived in Ferndale, Blaine, the tiny town of Custer, halfway between the two, or scattered around the countryside of Whatcom County.
Early one summer evening, I dropped by Terry’s house. After a bit of small talk and some playing with his sweet-tempered pit bull, Binky, I said, “I dropped by to see if you had anything.”
He didn’t blink. By then I was quite sure he was beyond having any suspicions about me. I had been moving very slowly and in a deliberately aloof manner. Had I been full of questions and always trying to buy drugs from any and all, it would have been a dead giveaway. But I kept my business to myself and avoided anything that might have been construed as nosiness. So Terry just asked, “How much were you looking for?” It led to my buying an ounce of coke.
Over the summer I bought again from Craig, Bobby and Terry, each time while wearing a wire. The police always wanted at least two buys in case one was ruled legally inadmissible on some technicality and, more importantly, to prove that the target sold drugs repeatedly and as a business, not just to help out a friend who wanted to score.
I also continued to get closer to the gang, in my non-ingratiating, non-pushy way. I’d go on most of the smaller, local runs but wasn’t invited on the mandatory, Bandidos-organized runs—the Four Corners Run, any of the regular summer trips to Texas or to visit other club cha
pters; they were for members and prospects only. Many I wasn’t even aware of: the guys would simply tell me, “We’ll be out of town for the next week or so.”
That would give me a chance to go back up north and visit Liz and the kids—my son had been born at the end of March. I hadn’t been around for the birth; Liz wasn’t able to get word to me when she went into labor. Instead, Frank had had to come to Blaine and get me.
“Come on, Twinkletoes—time to dance,” he said, and off we headed to the hospital in North Vancouver, where Liz was recovering.
I did go on one major run that summer, to Sturgis, South Dakota. It’s an annual gathering that attracts tens of thousands of bikers—all the major gangs but also any number of independents, including such groups as Bikers for Christ and the Blue Knights, which is made up exclusively of active and retired cops. I rode with different packs of Bandidos all the way but wasn’t invited to stay with them at the gang’s exclusive—and isolated—campground. Which was fine by me, even if it would have pleased my handlers no end. Hanging out with the Bellingham and Bremerton Bandidos was one thing—they all knew me and generally thought well of me. But to be patchless, not even a prospect, amid hundreds of hard-partying, unpredictable, possibly psychopathic outlaw bikers was a risk I wasn’t about to take.
Even if I wasn’t staying in the Bandidos campground, thus reducing the likelihood of any useful intelligence coming out of the ride, it didn’t stop Andy, Corky and three or four other backroom cops from coming along for the fun. Cops are always happy to take a free trip.
As summer progressed, it was clear to everyone in the gang that I was edging toward prospect status, though never, ever was it explicitly acknowledged. I never brought it up—that would have undermined my chances almost as quickly as pulling out a police badge or admitting a fondness for young boys. If you were cool enough to be a Bandido, you had to be cool enough not to be in a hurry, and certainly not whine or nag.