by Alex Caine
Despite having been wiped off the map in Arizona, Alabama and most of Louisiana, the gang still had a profile in Texas, especially in the Houston and Dallas regions. Considering Texas was the Bandidos’ home state, the surviving Banshees were a source of embarrassment and aggravation. So when, on May 1, 1983, a group of Bandidos ran into a group of Banshees at a drag strip in Porter, just north of Houston, violence was guaranteed. The conflict ended with two bikers dead—the president of the Banshees had his throat cut, and a Longview, Texas, Bandido was shot in the face—and a good handful more with stab wounds.
The clash prompted Bandidos president Ronnie Hodge to call a meeting of national officers to plan retaliatory action. That meeting, on May 6, led to the club sending out teams to gather intel on the Banshees—where they lived, where they hung out, who their associates were. Those teams reported back at another meeting on June 13, at which the club made further plans with their typical military precision. Various Bandidos across the state were to acquire the different components for bombs—timers, blasting caps, wire, explosives—so as not to arouse suspicion; the club would set up a safe house in Dallas with abundant emergency medical supplies in case they sustained any injuries.
They held a final meeting in Lubbock on June 20 and 21, which had just ended when Terry and I pulled into town. Being on a war footing, the Texas Bandidos didn’t need the distraction of visitors, and so ordered us and all other out-of-towners home. They moved into action two weeks later, on the Independence Day weekend, but the results were humiliating. Rather than wiping out the Texas Banshees, all the Bandidos succeeded in doing was blowing up a van and causing some structural damage to the Banshee clubhouse. Even worse, years later, long after my time with the club, the botched attack on the Banshees would end up being quantumly more devastating to the Bandidos after a member turned. Eventually, twenty-three were arrested for their involvement, many of them pulling stretches in prison as a result.
When Terry and I touched down at Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, I had no inkling, of course, of what was under way back in Texas. Up in the Northwest we were a world away. I even managed, shortly after our return, to get five days off and spend a bit of time in Vancouver getting to know Liz and the kids again.
After that, I settled back into a routine of buying drugs and weapons, accumulating evidence against my fellow Bandidos and our associates. One of my targets was a gun dealer from Bellingham named Rex Endicott. He sold to all the Bandidos in the area—and all the cops, which came to cause a problem. Some of his sales were legal but many were not, Washington State being relatively demanding as far as firearms permits were concerned. And even if his sales to cops were generally legal and those to Bandidos generally not, that wasn’t a hard and fast rule. Many cops bought their “throwaways”—the extra guns they all carried in case they needed to plant a piece on someone—from Rex.
Terry Jones had introduced me to Rex before our ride to Texas, and when we got back I called him up. I had a reputation for being interested in almost any kind of firearm, the nastier the better, and Rex accommodated that. Among other weapons, he offered me a heavy-duty, belt-fed Bren machine gun that came complete with bi-pod—the kind often featured in WWII movies, mounted in the back of a jeep.
Even if the price tag was two thousand dollars, Andy and Larry were eager for me to make the buy, especially Larry, who thought that Rex and his house were a public menace. The old house, right in downtown Bellingham, was wall-to-wall weaponry: guns, bullets, grenades, mortar shells, flares. Not only was it hugely attractive to thieves, the place would have taken out the whole block had it ever caught fire. But even if he was in violation of all sorts of zoning, storage and commercial regulations, Endicott’s close ties to local and state police had so far saved him from being investigated or charged.
After my verbal debrief with the DEA boys, I wrote up my notes and went home, expecting to get a green light to make the Bren buy. But the next day I got a call from Andy telling me to come in for a meeting. Something was up.
The atmosphere was tense when I got to the office, but no one would discuss anything until the FBI arrived. Eventually Corky came in with another agent, a man I’d met a couple of times but who was involved in the Bandidos investigation only in a supporting function. That afternoon, he stopped being a wallflower. Without so much as a greeting, he looked at me and said, “I think you’re lying, just to score points with this office!”
I looked at Andy and asked, “What the fuck is he talking about?”
The DEA at the time was still a relatively young agency—it had only been created in 1973—and the FBI frowned on it as bush league. I had the feeling the G-man was trying to intimidate not just me but also Andy and Larry.
“I know Rex,” he said. “He’s my neighbor. He and his wife were just over at my place for dinner a few nights ago. He’s not a crook! And I’m not alone—me and half the cops in this area would vouch for him. Rex is a good man, and you’re just trying to score points with the DEA by going after him.”
The Bandido in me quickly rose to the surface. I was up out of my chair and in his face.
“Put your money where your mouth is, asshole!” I shouted. “You give me two thousand dollars today and I’ll have that gun by tonight.”
Larry stood up to calm the situation and back me up. “Then it’s settled—I’ll call ATF and get an agent here to accept the evidence.”
I asked Andy to let me use the phone right now to set up the appointment with Rex. I wanted the jerk-off from the FBI to hear the tape for himself. Everybody sat quietly while I made arrangements to meet and purchase the Bren that night in a supermarket parking lot in Bellingham. After Andy replayed the tape, the FBI guy never said a word. I just looked at him and headed toward the door, telling Andy I’d call him later.
I arrived in a wired-up old van, and after carrying the machine gun from Rex’s pickup to it, he and I got down to talking. I questioned him about his relationship with the cops, asking if he was ever privy to information that might be useful to the gang. He said they talked around him and, yes, he would let us know if anything came up that was useful to the Bandidos. I had him count out the money on tape. He was in the bag.
The buy had gone off without a hitch and there turned out to be an unexpected bonus: we now had tape of Rex offering to sell out the cops who were so fond of him. Afterward, I went to a motel room Andy had rented for the occasion, turned the evidence over to the ATF and made my notes. The FBI guy wasn’t there. I wasn’t heartbroken to learn after the case wrapped up that he was under investigation by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility—the agency’s equivalent of an internal affairs department—for his friendship with Rex and several other bad guys.
I was in deep with the gang and had been for a while. No member had any lingering suspicions about me or my game. In fact, if anything, the police were the ones who were beginning to have doubts—I was still acting just a bit too much like a real biker for their liking. There was just one thing that made me stand out from my Bandidos brothers: they all had at least one woman on the go, usually several. I, on the other hand, was resolutely single.
It wasn’t a big issue, but I knew that some members found it odd: here was a reasonably handsome guy with a lot of cash and no interest in women? I hadn’t mentioned a wife or girlfriend in Canada—though that wouldn’t have carried any weight with them anyway; monogamy is for straight society, not for bikers. And availability certainly wasn’t an issue: bikers seem to attract groupies in the same way professional athletes and rock stars do. A couple of times, members had remarked on my apparent celibacy in my presence. No doubt it was discussed more extensively when I wasn’t around. On one or two occasions I’d hooked up with a woman while in the company of other Bandidos, more for deniability than anything else. In the end I’d just dropped them off at home. But in the summer of 1983, I’d been hanging with the Bandidos for almost two years and, after one too many raised eyebrows or wisecracks, I figured it w
as time to get an “old lady,” in biker-speak. Or at least a steady girlfriend. After all, when I’d been made a full member, I’d been given a patch that read Property of Bandido Alex. It was time to pull it out from deep inside my bottom drawer.
The companionship on runs and having someone to help me out with duties at home and at the campsites would be great, and from an intel point of view it would also be valuable to have someone who might feed me gossip she picked up from other girls. There would be, of course, an inherent danger in having someone so close to me. My dealing with the cops would have to be much tighter—Andy couldn’t just casually call me for an update like he did most mornings. And the monitoring equipment in the house would be a risk if my girlfriend became a regular visitor and, say, decided she wanted to have a peek around the attic.
Those were the potential professional problems; there were just as many on a personal level. Having a girlfriend would make disengaging from the Bandidos all that much harder when the time came, especially if I’d grown attached. And what kind of danger would I be leaving her in when the operation ended?
These were all serious questions. But after lengthy conversations with both Andy and Liz, we decided that the benefits outweighed the risks, especially insofar as it would make me seem less of an oddball in the gang. Liz was surprisingly amenable—we just agreed that it wasn’t me who would be getting a mistress, it was “Bandido Alex.” Andy was more skeptical. I found his reluctance strange and figured he was doubting that I could keep up my act with someone I went to bed with and woke up beside (what if I talked in my sleep?). Later, I realized he was more concerned about the degree to which I seemed to be embracing the Bandidos life. What if having an old lady pushed me over the edge? I guess he saw that the line between me and me—between Alex Caine and Bandido Alex—was getting thinner all the time.
One of George Weger’s many girlfriends had an attractive, single, older sister. One night that summer George invited me to his house when the sisters were both there, having a good time. George was drinking straight vodka, as was his custom in those days; the girls were drinking something brown—bourbon, rum, whatever. I hit the Pepsi. It was clear I was being set up with the older of the two even before George took off on some business and left me alone with the girls. We continued to party, but the sister didn’t really interest me, even if she was a looker. I knew that she had been Vinny’s second girlfriend for a short time and that the parting between them had not gone smoothly. Pursuing her might cause more problems than it would solve.
Instead, I decided to chase Vickie, a barmaid at the Pioneer. Although a lot of guys had chased her, none to my knowledge had succeeded. I moved on her like a tornado. Before too long she was a regular on the back of my bike and at my house in Blaine. (She lived with her mom in Ferndale, so we didn’t hang out there.)
Vickie’s good looks and her fun yet cool temperament gave me prestige with the other members. Having spent so much time in the company of the Bandidos at the Pioneer, she knew when she could be loud and rambunctious and when to keep quiet, or to simply leave the room because club business was being discussed. The fact that many had gone after her but none had scored also earned me points, and perhaps a bit of resentment. Vickie, meanwhile, was happy to have hooked up with someone not too offensive from the gang: it meant she was now off-limits and therefore safer at parties and gatherings, as well as at the Pioneer.
The women in the club played a major role in many ways. Some were breadwinners, others organized events, carried drugs and guns or otherwise acted as couriers. They had to be solid and above reproach to begin with, and even then they still went through a training period. Vickie was a bit of an exception; she already knew the Bandidos culture, the dos and don’ts. Most others, however, came in cold. They had their own mentor or sponsor and underwent a mild sort of prospecting. There were those who didn’t make it: some members were told to get a new primary girlfriend if it had been decided that the one on whom they wanted to bestow their property patch came up short. For Vickie, approval was just a formality.
There were a few basic rules that a woman who wore a patch had to subscribe to: don’t flirt or play around, and never challenge your old man in front of his brothers. In return they were accorded substantial respect. In all the time I was with the club, I never saw a member disrespect a patch-wearing old lady. Unless she was his old lady, that is. It was like a wolf pack in that way: everyone knew their place. Those old stories about old ladies pulling trains—sexually satisfying many members in one sitting—and being passed around were just that, stories. And as Vickie had learned, it was the girls without the patch who were in danger at campsites and parties.
Vickie came with me on several local runs that summer, but not to Sturgis, South Dakota, the mecca for American bikers and Harley-lovers thanks to the giant run—and week-long party—it hosts every August. Despite Vickie’s absence, Sturgis was memorable for me that year, largely because of one episode. I was sitting around a campfire with a dozen or so other Bandidos. Steve, a national VP who came from Washington but had moved to Texas, looked at me and said, “I hear you know something about the Alamo?”
“Yeah, I do,” I answered, without looking up from the fire. I was surprised that that night with Vinny from almost two years earlier was being brought up.
“Tell me,” said Steve. There was silence around the fire and everyone waited.
“Back in 1836, Houston said to Travis, ‘Get some volunteers together and go defend the Alamo,’ ” I began. And kept going for a least twenty minutes. Other than the rise and fall of my voice, all you could hear was the crackling of the fire, which I poked from time to time to add emphasis. I finished by saying I had to go check the guard roster, threw my stick in the fire and disappeared into the night. No one said anything. It was my best performance. My only real concern was the kinship I felt with those guys that night. I truly felt like one of them.
Sometime in the weeks after we returned from Sturgis, the officers of the chapter got together to choose a new road captain and a new secretary-treasurer. These were the only positions that had a term limit—the road captain because members worried that his contacts with police had the potential of compromising him if allowed to continue too long, the secretary-treasurer because he handled the club’s cash. At the next regular church meeting, the new nominees were put forward, pending ratification by all the club members. I was the choice for secretary-treasurer and, since no one opposed the idea, I got the job.
The next day, Gunk came over to the house and handed me the books, the bank account information and thousands in cash, as well as separate records of individual members and what they owed the club from loans, missed dues and the like. Gunk also outlined my responsibilities. Besides managing the club’s expenses, I had to collect the dues—a hundred dollars per month from each member—and meet with Vinny and George every two weeks. The chapter as a whole required a full report every month. Finally, it was my job to liaise with the national club on financial matters, which included cutting a check to Jersey Jerry once a month for chapter dues. I wasn’t tremendously surprised by the new role thrust upon me—someone had to do it, and better a member with half a brain—but neither was I particularly thrilled by all the extra work.
Andy and the boys, on the other hand, were ecstatic. This would be the cops’ first good look at the club’s finances. And even if the accounts I was overseeing were overwhelmingly local, the secretary-treasurers from across the country got together at least once a year to discuss the club’s larger finances. Those meetings were a source of excellent intel, but they were also nerve-racking: each secretary-treasurer was subjected to a polygraph test, administered by a member who had been with military intelligence in Vietnam.
When the time came, the questions mostly had to do with finding out if anyone was skimming cash, and I could answer those honestly. But we were also asked whether we’d shown the books to anyone outside the club. I had, of course. Still, I managed to pass.
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My sec-treas responsibilities gave the police a peek into the bureaucratic and administrative workings of the club, but didn’t lead to the legal bonanza my handlers had hoped for. Instead, my appointment produced a lot of what cops call “nice-to-know” information—interesting but not legally actionable. My time with the gang produced a lot of that. It all contributed to providing the cops with a solid sociological profile of life within the club. Some of this was pretty innocuous stuff, such as club rituals and the various quirks of character of some of the members.
For instance, Mongo’s fondness for repeatedly telling the same long joke. It was rude, crude and not all that funny to anyone else. That didn’t stop him wanting to tell it. So when he’d get the urge, George and Karate Bob would go out to the sidewalk and bring some poor passerby into the Pioneer to listen. They would sit the scared-stiff visitor down and stand behind him with arms crossed as Mongo launched into the joke, complete with gestures and falsetto voice. It involved a man, a woman, a dog, some perverted sex and a turd in a purse. The guy was usually so nervous that he’d laugh at the wrong places or just stare blankly at the end of it. Then Mongo would lean over him and ask, “Didn’t you think that was funny?”
I saw it happen at least three times and it was all in good fun. The visitor always left unharmed, if shaken.
The club members’ capacity for intimidation and casual violence wasn’t always so easy to stomach. George Wegers was the prime, psychopathic example. One night he was driving with Mongo and they passed a couple kissing on a corner. It threw him into such a rage that he pulled over, beat the guy to a pulp and hit the girl several times. Then he got back in the truck and continued on his way. And I once saw Steve, the VP who asked me to hold forth about the Alamo, pistol-whip a prospect because the guy answered a question too slowly.
As that incident suggests, members sometimes found themselves on the receiving end of their brothers’ violent wrath, despite the rule against members pounding on each other. Unfortunately for Gunk, there was also a rule against wearing your colors while in a car or truck—they were only for bikes. In four-wheeled vehicles, members were supposed to put their cut on the seat next to them or behind. On one occasion Gunk was observed having neglected to take his colors off. Vinny and Jersey Jerry spoke to him about it at the Pioneer, and Gunk, half drunk, was deemed not sufficiently remorseful about his transgression. Vinny and Jerry responded by hauling back in synchrony and belting him on either side of the head simultaneously. Gunk hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. If he had any brains before being hit, he sure didn’t afterward.