by Alex Caine
George had—and still has—a deeply ingrained hatred for the Hells Angels, the New York Yankees of the biker world. They’re either loved or hated—there’s nothing in between. But George didn’t just hate them: he loathed them, he despised them, he abhorred them, he couldn’t stand the thought of them. When the Satan’s Slaves of White Rock, B.C.—the Bellingham Bandidos’ close business partner in their smuggling activities—patched over to the Hells Angels, George refused to deal directly with any of them again. It hurt his bottom line, but he stood firm.
“Bunch of fucking pussies,” he’d say whenever their name came up.
On other subjects, George was more reasonable. He could go on at length about astronomy, physics and U.S. history as well as whatever happened to be in the news. After my evening conversations with George, I would have to write my notes for Andy and the boys. Initially, I would include the substance of our discussions, at least a summary of what we had talked about. But it bothered me to hear the handlers sit around and joke about these conversations. They behaved like children secretly reading someone’s diary and making lewd jokes about it. What Andy and Corky and Larry didn’t understand was that those moments—those chats with George, or with the equally intelligent but more erudite Dr. Jack—were for me like a ceasefire. Like Christmas Day at the Somme during World War I, when the Canadian and German soldiers crossed into no-man’s land to share holiday rations and cigarettes. After hearing the handlers on a couple of occasions mock the gang, their thoughts, feelings and ambitions as conveyed by my notes, I stopped including any details. I’d just write “general conversation” and leave it at that.
I was obviously getting too deep into my role, and actually becoming what I was only supposed to be playing at. Then something happened that brought me back into line.
In the spring or early summer of 1983, the Bremerton chapter hosted a week-long party. It was months in preparation by the Bremerton boys and something I awaited with a sense of excitement. The party would be my first exposure to Bandidos from elsewhere in the United States, especially those from Texas and Louisiana, who had a reputation for being the meanest, the most volatile, the plain baddest of the bunch. In their company, even your patch didn’t guarantee your safety, as I was to find out.
The Bandidos rarely traveled in huge packs. They usually set a destination and split up either by chapter or into small crews under the direction of a road captain. On a run, a road captain outranks even a chapter president. His job is to plan routes and rest stops and to reserve motels or campground space.
The war wagon is also his responsibility. It’s usually a van driven by two old ladies (not girlfriends, only patched old ladies), carrying all the guns, drugs, tents, tools and spare parts required on a ride. On longer runs, such as the one to Sturgis, there was also a pickup truck with a bike trailer, to carry any bikes that broke down and couldn’t be fixed en route.
A road captain also had to deal with police and warn them beforehand that we would be passing through, either without stopping or to spend the night. This was especially important in states such as Texas and New Mexico, where police tended to overreact at the sight of a group of bikers. The system worked very well. In some towns, police actually blocked traffic at the main intersections and just waved us through. When the police did decide to stop us, it was the road captain’s job to collect all the licenses and registrations to minimize direct contact between cops and bikers. Dr. Jack was our chapter’s road captain. Like all road captains, he could be identified by the small patch above the left pocket of his cut.
Of the Bandidos to make their way north and west across the country for the Bremerton party, the first crew to arrive were the South Texas Nomads. Among outlaw biker gangs, whether it was the Bandidos, Outlaws, Hells Angels or Pagans, nomad chapters were an elite group of enforcers, both within and outside the club. Their relationship to the rest of the gang was not unlike that of special forces commandos to a regular army. So if the Texas Bandidos were the hard cases, the Texas Nomads were the toughest of the tough. Led by Hammer (Thomas Lloyd Gerry), the national president of all Bandidos Nomads, they numbered about twenty and exuded authority. Ordinary members were nervous even talking to them. To a man, they were known to be capable of killing, and they didn’t play around. There was a saying back then: “If the Hammer comes down on you, it’s over.” To the Nomads, fear meant control, and forgiveness was an alien concept.
The South Texas Nomads headed straight to the designated campground for the run, a large property the Bremerton chapter owned across Puget Sound from Seattle. The biker equivalent of a cocktail reception awaited their arrival—and that of any other Bandidos who came in over the course of the day and evening. My job was to make sure there was enough booze and beer for the event. Not being a drinker, and not even knowing how many people to plan for, I had to guess how much I’d need. After Gunk, our secretary-treasurer, gave me money, I sent the prospects out to stock up. At the end of the first day, about a hundred Bandidos had arrived, well within my estimate. It made me a bit blasé when ordering the supplies for the second night of partying.
By the end of that day, over three hundred Bandidos had arrived and the party was in full swing. Until three in the morning, that is, when we ran out of booze. The party ended abruptly and I caught shit from some members for having let the taps go dry.
On the morning of day three, the president of the Bremerton chapter told me someone else was in charge of booze. Then he informed me that later that day I was to go before a Bandidos disciplinary board because of my miscalculation. It didn’t really surprise me—I knew the Washington State Bandidos were very nervous about impressing their hard-ass guests. And I knew I’d fucked up. I had no idea what to expect exactly, but I knew to expect something.
That afternoon, in a corner of the property away from both the party and the double-wide trailer where the Bremerton chapter president lived, I found myself standing before a three-man Bandidos court: the president (whom I only ever knew as Pog), Jersey Jerry and, I think, Milo, one of Bremerton’s charter members and one of the original Bandidos in Washington State. They sat on a small section of bleachers looking at me. Others gathered around.
The process was informal, beginning with a few simple questions everyone knew the answer to.
“You know why you’re here?” asked Pog.
“Yes.”
“When did you realize we were going to run out of booze?”
“As the evening progressed, I guess.”
“You had no contingency plan?”
“No.”
“You have anything to say for yourself?”
I could have pleaded teetotaler’s ignorance of how much a person could drink in an evening, but I decided that was lame.
“No,” I answered.
“Well then, you know we have to deal with that?”
“Yes.”
At that point two guys came at me from behind—Gunk and Dean from Bremerton—and began beating on me with both fists and boots. I put my hands to my sides and stood for as long as I could, which wasn’t too long. It was a “minor punchout” in the Bandidos scale of measurement, but still a good shit-kicking. Just no broken bones—those were for major punchouts. When I came to my senses, my cut was lying next to me with the bottom rocker cut off.
I was shocked when I looked at myself in the mirror that night. It looked as if I had been hit by a truck. One eye was totally shut and the blood from the punches covered my face. I cleaned up as best I could and stayed away from the bonfires. I thought everybody knew, but apparently the guests were never told. I was reluctant to call Andy and the boys. I didn’t want to be pulled.
On day four, about a hundred of us went on a ride through the Cascades and down to Wenatchee. En route we dropped into a bar, Three-Fingered Jack’s Saloon. As I walked across the porch toward the door, Hammer called me over. He was standing outside the door with Sir Spanky (Glen Alan Wilhelm), the national sergeant-at-arms. Spanky looked like To
m Berenger in Platoon. He always wore a three-point bandana on his head and just reeked of violence and mayhem. I never saw him smile. When he looked at you, it made your skin crawl. All in all, he was a bad motherfucker. Put him next to Hammer calling me over and it was less than reassuring.
“What happened to your bottom rocker?” Hammer asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said, not stopping.
“Then take the fucking time to tell me!”
I stopped and told him about being responsible for the booze shortage and the subsequent punishment. He just nodded and waved me into the bar, giving no indication whether he thought I deserved more pain or had got my due.
The next morning, the main camp broke up for the second phase of the partying. Groups would spread out and visit the local members’ homes. That’s where I scored my points.
Hammer and his girlfriend came to the house that afternoon with a group of Bandidos who were checking out Blaine and the Peace Arch Park, and they didn’t leave for two nights. My place was cleaner than most and I had the immigration officer’s nice leather furniture—I guess Hammer saw it as the best accommodation going. With Hammer there, my house soon filled up with a constant parade of guests, and I got to know as many influential out-of-state Bandidos as possible. I had two local patched old ladies working the stove and the barbecue, along with girlfriends of miscellaneous visiting Bandidos. There were steaks, hamburgers and hot dogs for everyone. And the fridge never got low on beer—I’d learned my lesson and filled the outside shed with dozens of cases.
That’s when I met Sly Willie (William Boring), a seriously nasty member of the Lubbock chapter who later unwittingly helped the investigation expand into Texas. Willie was one of the first recognized cases of Agent Orange poisoning among Vietnam vets. He was dying, and from what I could tell it only made him meaner. I also made the acquaintance of a pair of brothers from Louisiana. They were swamp-raised Cajun boys by the name of Lejeune. The older brother, Henry, known as Coon-Ass, was a Nomad; the younger, stupider brother, David, was a member of the Shreveport chapter. When they came over the first time, I recognized their accents and spoke to them in French. They were blown away.
Six months or a year later, Coon-Ass became famous in the club for beating himself silly. At a club gathering in Lubbock, he’d been admiring the new gun of his chapter president and managed to fire off a round that went through the president’s foot. At the disciplinary board later that day or the next, he was asked whether he had anything to say before his inevitable punishment. “I’ll take care of this myself,” he replied, and began punching himself and smashing his head against walls, tables, anything available. He beat himself to a pulp in front of a couple dozen of us until two guys had to pull Coon-Ass off himself.
By the second-last day of the get-together, my house had unquestionably become the party spot. That evening Vinny and a bunch of the local guys showed up and immediately announced to all assembled that he had a declaration to make.
“Bandido Alex has shown a lot of brotherhood in the last few days,” he declared. “We think he should get this back.”
And he pulled out my bottom rocker. It had clearly been organized in advance—Vinny’s wife had brought a needle and thread and within minutes she had sewn it back onto my cut. Gunk didn’t bother to hide his displeasure, but that didn’t make me any less happy. Later I learned that the idea had come from the Texas boys. Influence and pressure from guys like Hammer was not something to ignore.
During the party week, I hadn’t seen the handlers at all and had only talked on the phone to them briefly. They, however, had been keeping a close eye on the festivities—and me—thanks to the hidden cameras in the house and the assorted other wires. Andy had noted that I was bruised and battered and especially that my bottom rocker was gone. But he and the team reasoned that whatever had befallen me was in the past and that relations between me and the gang seemed again to be perfectly harmonious. What was important was that I was still alive and, judging from the members coming in and out of the house, seemed to be doing very well. Later, in court, the DEA would be criticized for not covering me properly at the party and for letting me go so long without contact. At the time I felt Andy made the right call; in retrospect, they should at least have followed me to Bremerton.
Whatever damage that decision may have done to the case was far outweighed by the evidence we caught on videotape. Many of the guests would step outside to talk business. Unfortunately for them, we had security cameras and audio covering both the front and back doors. Even if the bikers conversed sotto voce about their business, their discussions were usually picked up. Among other information gleaned from those conversations that would eventually prove devastating to the gang, police learned that Hammer was purported to have been involved in a murder in Arizona the year before.
Still, most important to the investigation were the friendship and business contacts I made with out-of-state Bandidos. These led to Terry Jones and me making our own cross-country trek just a few weeks later, in mid-June. My main goal was to buy some guns from Sly Willie—he had an Ingram MAC-11 and a converted AR-15 for sale. We’d discussed the purchase at my house in Blaine and I’d even given Willie a deposit on the weapons, though it was really a loan; he was broke and needed money to get back to Lubbock.
Before Terry and I could set off, safe passage through California had to be negotiated with the Hells Angels. Times were tense between the big biker gangs. The Outlaws, born in Chicago and strong across a wide swath of the country from Illinois to Florida, and the California-based Angels had been at each other’s throats for a decade. Through the early 1980s, the Outlaws had a “shoot-on-sight” policy regarding their western enemies. In fact, the Bandidos owed much of their remarkable growth in the mid-1970s to the enmity between the Outlaws and the Angels. The Bandidos had cunningly offered to serve as a buffer between the gangs and, out of Texas, expanded northward into Colorado, Montana, South Dakota and New Mexico.
But by the early 1980s, the Hells Angels were beginning to resent the space being taken up by the Bandidos—especially those in Washington State. Were it not for the boys from Bellingham and Bremerton, the Angels would have had a clear run from the Mexican border all the way to Alaska.
Making matters worse, another Texas-born gang, the Banshees, were on a rampage in the Southwest and had killed several Angels in Arizona and California. This wouldn’t have reflected badly on the Bandidos were it not for the fact that some Banshees—if only in Texas and Louisiana, as far as I understood—were renegade Bandidos.
Finally, the Angels were feeling especially put upon in those days because the Outlaws and Pagans, another major gang from back east, had recently brokered an alliance, and an upstart gang, the Mongols, was causing the Angels grief in L.A., their own backyard.
That, in short, was why Terry and I needed a safe-passage guarantee.
Off we went to Jersey Jerry’s house. As northwestern regional officer he would have to make the necessary phone calls to California on our behalf. He also handed us business cards with several coded phone numbers to be presented to anyone from the Hells Angels who challenged us. As far as Oregon was concerned, there was no negotiating with the Gypsy Jokers. While the Jokers were reluctant to do anything that would put them on the wrong side of the Hells Angels, they were a lot less diplomatic with the Bandidos, who had driven the Jokers out of Washington in the early 1970s. Jerry’s advice was simply to keep our heads down and hope that no Jokers took notice of us.
Andy, perhaps feeling a bit guilty for leaving me so exposed during the party week, wanted some reassurance that riding through Oregon wouldn’t get me killed. So, on the day we were to ride through Oregon, the DEA orchestrated a series of raids and searches on the Jokers to keep them occupied. All their bikes and vehicles were hauled in for safety inspections, and their dogs were dragged into the ASPCA to ensure they were up to date on their shots. The child protection and health departments went through their houses. It wa
s classic Andy, and not for naught—the raids recovered illegal firearms, drugs and stolen goods, justifying the police action. So Andy and his crew had a fun day and Terry Jones and I sailed through the state without seeing a single Joker.
We spent the first night at a motel in northern California and then blasted all the way to Phoenix. There we took a room at a motel on the outskirts of town. We drove our bikes into the rooms for security and then ordered pizza and kicked back. About an hour later, I heard the roar of Harleys coming into the motel court. I looked out the window and saw four nasty-looking bikers coming toward our room. In a flash I was into Terry’s room, gun in hand, telling him we might have a problem. He was unperturbed. “Don’t worry, they’re friends,” he reassured me.
The bikers turned out to be Banshees, and we spent the evening with them, partying as if we were brothers—which, in due course, I learned we were. They took us to a private house and I saw Bandidos paraphernalia everywhere. That initially confused me. This wasn’t stuff you could buy at a Harley concession or a flea market—biker gangs do their utmost to tightly control distribution of anything with their logo on it, whether it be belts or jackets or official T-shirts, even tattoos. Quitting the gang without returning this stuff, or wearing it without being a member, is a serious, serious transgression in the biker world.
Then one of the Banshees confided to me that he was anxious for “this gig” to be over so he could put the “fat Mexican”—an affectionate term for the Bandidos patch—back on. That’s when the penny dropped: the rampaging Banshees were really undercover Bandidos. Apparently, they were provoking the Hells Angels on their eastern flank to distract them from any expansionist plans elsewhere, particularly to the north. I later learned the backstory: a year or so previously a group of New Mexico Bandidos had wiped out the Arizona Banshees but kept their colors, which they then donned for activities that, for obvious reasons, the Bandidos couldn’t be associated with. It was all an eye-opener for me.