by Alex Caine
But not for Terry. He passed out from too much fun, so I told the guys to keep him there; I’d go back to the motel and pick him up in the morning. They drew a map for me to find my way back. En route, I pulled over and called Andy. We met behind a Denny’s and I gave him the scoop and the map for the house location.
By four a.m., I was fast asleep. Before dozing off, I’d thought of calling home, but Liz and the kids would be asleep—I’d call tomorrow. Earlier that day Andy had called Liz, telling her he was doing it at my request, to say that I was in a deep situation and couldn’t call myself. He also sent her five hundred dollars in my name. Of course, I hadn’t asked him to make the call or to send the money; I was too involved in the operation to think of calling or of being that considerate. Things would get worse before they got better. Not only could I not take time off—I didn’t want to, I was too wrapped up in the case. But I wasn’t just chasing the Bandidos in order to bring them down; I was fascinated by them. As much as I loved Liz and the children, the Bandidos allowed me to be a version of myself that I really enjoyed.
Our first home turf stop—at least officially—was Albuquerque, New Mexico. Like most Bandidos coming through, we bunked at the home of Chuck, real name Charles David Gillies but known as Ha-Ha for his twisted sense of humor. When we got to his house, the front door was open with just a screen door closed to keep the bugs out. We found Chuck on his hands and knees looking under the living room couch with a flashlight. The room was filled with about a dozen large aquariums, each containing one or several exotic snakes, some of them disconcertingly large. Ha-Ha waved us in and gestured at us to take a seat in a couple of straight-backed kitchen chairs in the room. He continued his hunt. After a couple of minutes I finally asked, “What are you looking for?”
“My fucking one-step got loose and I want to catch it before my ferret does,” he answered calmly.
Before Ha-Ha had finished his sentence, Terry’s and my feet were a foot off the ground—we both knew one-steps from Nam. They are short, very thin and extremely venomous jungle snakes. They liked climbing into boots, and if you were stupid enough to put such a boot on without shaking the snake out first, you’d likely last only a step or two before collapsing in a toxin-induced shock. Death would arrive in about twenty minutes if the antivenin was not available.
Ha-Ha finally gave up his search.
Terry knew Chuck well, but it was my first time in his, uh, fun-loving company. We exchanged a few pleasantries and then he said to me: “You’re a small guy—you must be pretty fast?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He leaned forward and asked again in a louder voice, “Are you fast?”
“Yeah, I’m fast enough!” I shouted back.
“Get him, Thor!” he yelled.
At that, a large Doberman came bounding out of the kitchen at a dead run toward me.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccckk,” I said as I flew out of my chair and out the screen door, cutting my hand on the latch in the process.
Behind me, Ha-Ha (who had mercifully called off Thor) and Terry were slapping their knees in hysterical laughter. “He is fast!” sputtered Ha-Ha.
The next day, Chilly Willie (James T. Chilton), president of the Denver chapter, and one of his members dropped by and our stay turned festive. After the drugs came out, I pulled Ha-Ha aside and told him I was impressed by the quality of his shit. Did he have a couple ounces of speed I could score for the trip? He said sure, we could do the deal later that day.
I managed to sneak away, rendezvous with Andy and the team behind a nearby restaurant, and get wired and cashed up. Back at Ha-Ha’s, we went out to his shed and he lifted up a small rug, removed a couple of floorboards and took out two ounces of speed. There were maybe thirty or forty bags still in there. I asked him to keep the deal private, it was no one else’s business. Chuck agreed. Then I begged off and met up with Andy again. I gave him the drugs and took off the wire. We had our first out-of-state drug buy. The case had officially gone national.
When I got back to the house, I found Terry and Chilly out in the shed taking a bike engine apart. I reminded Terry that we should get going soon to Texas. He agreed and went back to the house with Ha-Ha for some business of their own.
As soon as I was alone with Chilly, he asked me out of the blue if I wanted to buy a gun. It was a semi-auto .380. Seems Chilly thought it was too small for him but figured it might work for me. I said sure and gave him four hundred dollars. The gun itself was legal and a sale like that, without the required paperwork, would have been a very minor infraction in New Mexico, except that Chilly, thanks to a recent conviction, had a court order not to buy and sell firearms. I figured that brought it up to a felony charge.
There was no time to bring the gun in—Terry was ready to get going. Still, when he and I stopped to gas up, I managed to make a call to Andy. He deemed it a non-prosecutable buy. Useful to establish credibility with Chilly for another time, but not much else.
“You just bought yourself a gun,” he said, before adding that he would work expenses to make sure I got the money back. I could live with that.
Before leaving Albuquerque, we stopped to get something to eat. That’s when Terry told me we wouldn’t be riding to Texas alone. We had to do a favor for Chilly, he explained. On our way out of town we were to stop by a house on the edge of Albuquerque to pick up a couple of strippers. The girls had been brought to New Mexico by Chilly and were to be delivered to a Lubbock Bandido known as Frio (William Jerry Pruett) as a gift from Colorado.
Frio was VP of the Texas Nomads and definitely on the most-dangerous-men-in-the-club list. According to a story circulating in Bandidos circles, once, on a run, Frio had arrived at a campsite so drunk that he fell off his bike. The Kid, a Bandido from Montgomery, Alabama, thought it was funny. Frio, however, didn’t appreciate the Kid laughing, so when he got up he pulled his gun and shot him in the forehead. They buried the Kid at the site. I don’t know if the story was true, but the Kid was never seen again.
The girls were waiting for us when we arrived. They were quite thrilled about the trip. They’d sent their stuff ahead by bus the day before and only carried small packs. They were wearing hip-hugger jeans with rips in the right places and tank tops. I pointed to the shorter one, with waist-length jet-black hair, and said, “You’re with me.”
In retrospect, it wasn’t a good position to be in. It could be argued we were committing a felony under the Mann Act by “engaging in the interstate transport of females for immoral purposes.” It would probably come out in court and perhaps hurt my credibility. But at that moment it didn’t even cross my mind.
Jasmine, the one who was to ride with me, reached in her bag and took out a wad of bills. “Chilly said to give this to you guys for the ride.”
I counted out the cash—there was two thousand dollars—and gave half to Terry. My mind was reeling. That was way too much money for gas and food. Terry wasn’t the least bit concerned. He just asked the girls if they had their bottles—a requirement for riding in the desert: the passenger sprays a mist of water in front of the driver to prevent sunburn and heatstroke. They nodded and Terry gave them the signal to climb on. We were off.
We had the kind of day on which biker fantasies are built, riding helmetless and side by side in our jeans and colors on a desert highway. The chrome of our Harleys shining under a cloudless blue sky. And the two scantily clad beauties on the back. I’d found many aspects of Bandidos culture seductive, but this trumped them all.
I wasn’t the only one smitten with the image that day. Families in station wagons took our picture as they passed. Likewise, single men and old couples. At one point, even Andy snapped away as he flew past in an unmarked car with a female cop driving. I was just glad for the spray: Jasmine liked to ride with her hands on my thighs, and by the time we pulled into a truck stop for supper I didn’t need to be misted so much as hosed down.
We parked in some shade and gave the girls money to get us
something to eat. Terry and I kicked back on the grass and relaxed. About fifteen minutes later, Terry’s girl came back by herself.
“I thought you guys should know, there’s a couple at the store and the guy is wearing colors.” That sure got our immediate attention.
“What club?” Terry asked.
She didn’t know. I asked if the guy’s patch had a separate bottom rocker. “Yes, it said Texas.”
Terry told her to go back and invite them over, without telling them we were Bandidos. She went off and Terry asked me if I had a gun. I patted my pocket. I actually had two—the new .380 and a small .22 derringer I always kept in the back of my belt. Our idyllic mood was replaced by apprehension. It never ceased to amaze me how, in the biker world, things could go from one extreme to another in seconds.
Soon we could see our girls making their way back to us carrying bags of food and pop. With them walked two strangers. The guy looked about forty and his companion ten years younger. Her step was slower than his and seemed to be faltering as they approached, but he didn’t look nervous at all. He was about six feet tall with long hair and a beard. His tattooed arms were burned brown by the sun. I made a note of the large knife tied to his belt. As they neared us, Terry said, “Aces and Eights.”
Aces and eights was the hand Wild Bill Hickok was holding when he was shot in the back while playing poker in a Deadwood saloon. It became known as the dead man’s hand. It had also been adopted as the name of an independent biker club in Levelland, Texas. There were only about forty members and I surmised that they had to be pretty tough just to survive so deep in Bandidos territory. I wasn’t up on the policy concerning these guys, but Terry was. Although he wasn’t the sharpest tack, he was knowledgeable about (and hung up on) certain details, including the protocols between his club and all others.
The man introduced himself as Ratchet and shook hands before sitting down on the grass. His companion sat closer to the girls, who were smart enough to recognize the diceyness of the situation and move well out of harm’s way. Terry got right to the point.
“Well, Ratchet, you must be aware that you can’t be flying colors outside of your territory unless it’s under Bandidos invitation. Do you have an invitation?”
Ratchet said he knew the rules and no, he didn’t have permission. It was like being pulled over by a cop and not having proof of insurance. Ratchet, in fact, had been part of the negotiations that ensured the survival of his club two years earlier. He knew he had fucked up and seemed resigned to it.
“This is a clear violation of that agreement,” said Terry.
“We’re not going far, so I didn’t think it was a major deal.”
“Well, you were wrong,” said Terry in a more serious tone.
Ratchet was still surprisingly calm. “I can see that now. So what do we do?”
“One thing is sure, we can’t let you ride out wearing them.”
Ratchet looked straight at Terry. “You know I can’t let you just take them.”
Terry sighed. “I know.”
It was an absurd situation. Neither Terry nor Ratchet wanted a confrontation or fight, but both seemed resigned to the fact one was inevitable.
That’s when I joined in. “Let’s look at this from a different angle. Suppose you took off and forgot to leave your shit”—slang for colors—“at home. Meeting us here becomes a good thing: you could ask us to bring your colors back home for you. I’m sure we would be willing to do that.”
Ratchet looked at me and I could see his mind working. Just to make things entirely clear, Terry said, “Hey man, he’s giving you a way out. Take it.”
Ratchet slowly started to nod and everyone was relieved. He took his vest off and handed it over to Terry, who folded it with exaggerated respect. “Don’t worry, we’ll take good care of your colors and leave them in Lubbock for you to pick up.”
Ratchet got up and nodded to his old lady. They both walked off and the crisis was over. The girls brought the food closer and we relaxed again. Terry threw the colors to his girl, telling her to put them in her bag.
“He’ll never get those back,” he said to me.
That turned out to be a prophetic statement. Six months later, the Aces and Eights had become a Bandidos support club, those same colors were hanging upside down in our Lubbock clubhouse, and Ratchet was lying face down in a hole in the ground, according to a fellow Bandido.
Jasmine asked if we were going to spend the night at the truck stop. I liked the idea. Driving in the desert at night was cold and dangerous because of all the snakes and lizards sleeping on the asphalt. No fun at all. So we told the girls to go get a couple of rooms. By sending them, we’d given Jasmine and her friend the option of getting separate rooms if they wanted to. It wasn’t that we’d suddenly become gentlemen: the girls were Frio’s property. We were just deliverymen—deliverymen with Bandidos patches, but deliverymen all the same. The girls came back with one key each; I guess they had decided.
“We’re in room fourteen,” Jasmine said, taking me by the arm. I didn’t put up any resistance at all—and of course I rationalized it expertly afterward. Not taking advantage of a beautiful and available woman would have gone against the biker norm and raised suspicions.
We dawdled even more the next day. Still, the trip ended much too soon. By late afternoon we were in Lubbock. The town is famous for three things: it’s the birthplace of Buddy Holly; it was the largest and longest-lasting “dry” city in the U.S. (until 1972, when it finally allowed liquor to be sold within city limits); and, even if the club was born five hundred miles across the state on the coast, it’s the spiritual home for the Bandidos. Why exactly, I’ve never known.
By the early 1980s the Bandidos had acquired almost every house on one of the streets in the Mexican part of town. Police and townsfolk called it Felony Flats. No members actually lived there; rather, the homes were more like frat houses used for parties and as crash pads for visitors.
Upon our arrival, the first stop for Terry and me wasn’t Felony Flats but Frio’s house. We dropped the girls off and visited for a while. Frio was hospitable and friendly and it was all very pleasant—until Frio’s hospitality took a perverse turn. As thanks for delivering the strippers, he offered Terry one of his daughters, a young girl about fourteen, maybe younger. Terry passed, saying we had other business to attend to. He told me later that he had been afraid Frio would take it as an insult, which could have turned nasty for both of us. But all Frio said was, “It’s your loss, she’s really good. I trained her myself.”
We left there as soon as we could after that. Even Terry was disgusted.
Then we headed for the Felony Flats home of the Gimp chapter. Every member of that group was missing an arm or leg, some thanks to traffic accidents, some from the war. Individually they belonged to different chapters, but they were allowed a secondary group of their own. They even had their own small patch on the lower left side of their cut that said Cripple Crew.
There we found a party in full swing. The occasion was an odd one: everyone was under orders to return to their home chapter, and quick. Us included, we learned—even if we had just arrived. So it was something of a goodbye party. There was no explanation offered, and we knew better than to ask for one. Instead of relaxing or hanging out, we took care of business. We turned in the Aces and Eights colors to Sir Spanky, the national sergeant-at-arms. Then Terry took off to arrange a flight home for us and organize prospects to trailer our bikes back to Washington.
I, meanwhile, went out and called the number Andy had given me. After I told him we’d be heading back to Washington the next day, he said we should meet up immediately. When we did, he wired me up and gave me a pile of money—seven thousand dollars cash—instructing me to try to get a deal or two before I left town.
First I dropped by Frio’s place again. I was sure he would have something to sell me. His place was more warehouse than home. Among other things, there were electronics, still in their boxes, littered arou
nd the living room. Frio was in a merry mood, not drunk but getting there, along with a Bandido known as Killer Kelly.
Kelly was a psychopath of the first order and known in the club to be an eager killer. I wasn’t interested in lingering in his company. So, soon after I arrived, I asked Frio if he knew anyone local who could sell me shit to take home. He said I wouldn’t have to go any further—he happened to have half a pound of speed right in his house. I bought it for five thousand dollars. And thanks to the wire, I got good conversation on tape from both Frio and Kelly. They were both done, nailed in a direct sale, and I left there happy. These guys were real assholes—a vice-president of the Nomads and a known killer—and taking them down was a pleasure for me and a major coup for the cops.
Then I went by Sly Willie’s, but not without calling first. Willie was famous among the Bandidos for having planted Claymore mines around his house and having wired his whole place with explosives. According to our original plans, I was supposed to pick up the machine guns I had agreed to buy. I told him I still wanted the guns but couldn’t take them back right now, since I had to fly home the next day and didn’t want to carry them on an airplane. We agreed to complete the transaction on my next visit. But while I was there, he urged me to at least try out the Ingram MAC-11, which I did. With the briefest squeeze of the trigger, I fired about two dozen rounds into a pie plate nailed to a wall inside his closet.
CHAPTER SIX
Bringing the Bandidos Down
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It would be years before I found out why we had been ordered to leave Lubbock so soon, so unceremoniously, after our arrival. It all had to do with the Banshees—the leftover real ones, not the Bandidos in disguise.