Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  Along with a dozen other Bellingham members, I was assigned to man the front gate, perhaps fifty or seventy-five yards from the trailer. The gate itself was about a quarter or half a mile down a dirt road off a secondary highway. When we were at Sturgis, the cops were often spread out all along the paved road, peering through binoculars, but they couldn’t come down the dirt road since it was Bandidos private property. The police also went out in boats on the little lake in behind, snapping away with long-lens cameras. On days when guys were bored, they would go to the water’s edge and throw rocks at the boats. This was not a day for such sport, however; things were tense.

  I heard them before I saw them. Their arrival sounded like rolling thunder and sent a chill down my spine. I looked around and saw the tension I felt reflected on everybody else’s face. Eventually they came into sight, an endless line of Hells Angels and associates slowly making their way across the horizon on the secondary highway. They were in no hurry, riding two abreast at maybe fifteen miles per hour. When they turned down the dirt road, they slowed even more and a cloud of dust started to rise and soon engulfed even the lead bikes. It was quite a sight—and sound, getting louder every minute. As they drew closer, the front bike reappeared through the dust. The riders of the second pair of bikes were each holding a flag; one was the Hells Angels’ death’s head, the other the flag of California. The rider all alone at the front of the parade was riding a full dresser—windshield, saddlebags, the whole shebang—and wore no head cover except a pair of goggles. As he drew closer, he looked larger than life, and for good reason: it was Sonny Barger.

  About thirty feet from the gate, Barger raised his hand and slowed to a stop. As if choreographed, the whole line stopped with him, everyone turning off their engines simultaneously. Then—nothing. No one moved, there was no sound except those of summer bugs and birds. The Hells Angels just sat on their bikes, looking at us looking at them. The moment was suspended in time. I was impressed, I’ll admit. As much as I disliked the Hells Angels, they sure knew how to put on a show.

  Then I noticed Spanky standing behind us. He had brought up fifty or sixty reserve Nomads to beef up the line. We all watched together as Barger got off his bike and started the long walk to the front gate. The twenty or so lead guys followed. The other Angels dismounted but stayed with their bikes.

  Spanky ordered the gate opened. The Angels, Barger included, were patted down by the Bandidos Nomads as they entered the camp one by one. Once they were all inside, Spanky yelled, “Shut the gate,” and told Barger to follow him. We all moved aside to let them by. The group headed toward the Airstream, the Nomads escorting them.

  Barger’s companions didn’t seem too brave as they walked through the camp. They kept looking from side to side—I suppose they were as suspicious of us as we were of them. But the die was cast; whatever was to happen was going to happen. We took our positions back at the gate.

  Five Angels and five Outlaws, along with a Bandido or two, went into the trailer for preliminary talks lasting between a half-hour and forty-five minutes. Then the meeting moved outside and the other executives from the two clubs joined in. There were no altercations—well, at least no physical altercations—except for a brief scrap between an Outlaw escort and an Angel. The Angel had strayed a little too far from his group and a little too close to the Outlaws. The two went nose to nose and bumped each other with their puffed-out chests. It was stopped within seconds by Bandidos security. Still, the incident served to raise the tension several notches.

  By that time we’d been relieved at the gate by the Amarillo chapter and ordered to our section of the camp at the top of the hill. We sat in twos and threes in front of our tents, talking about what might be going on below. Even from a distance we could see nervous fidgeting and fists being clenched around the trailer. But we could only speculate for so long about what was being said, and things began to get a bit boring—a state of affairs not improved by the fact that all the women had been sent to town for the day.

  I knew that that night would be a rowdy one, so, after telling Terry to make sure he came for me if something happened, I crawled into my tent for a snooze. I was soon dead to the world. The next thing I knew, Terry was kicking my boot.

  Anyone who’s ever fallen asleep in a tent in the sun knows what it’s like to wake up parched, covered in sweat and not in the best of moods. My little pup tent didn’t offer much protection against anything—I had bought it at a surplus store, used. (As I would tell my Bandidos brothers that summer, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the summer of my discount tent.” Dr. Jack was hugely amused; most others stared blankly. Terry Jones just said, “Oh, you should have told me. I have a spare tent in my garage. I could have lent it to you.”)

  After a few moments I got my bearings. It was about four p.m. and, sure enough, the Hells Angels were heading back to the gate and the Outlaws to their camp. From our tents on the crest of the hill we watched as the Angels mounted their bikes after being let out through the gate. Sonny gave the signal to everyone to start their bikes. Then he raised his hand once again and brought it down. The roar was deafening. He pulled a U-turn and rode past the line in the opposite direction. All the others followed, driving up to the gate and turning at the last minute to go the other way. It was like a precision drill on a parade ground.

  When they turned on the paved road, the cops, who had beefed up their numbers, pulled them over and held them there for an hour, checking papers and taking names. Shortly after the road had cleared, the Outlaws, who had set about striking their camp immediately after the meeting, mounted up and headed out too. The cops stopped them and put them through the same routine. I saw a few Outlaws wandering around Sturgis and Deadwood in the following days, but only in twos and threes. The main group had left for Florida—there was no partying for them.

  After the summit ended, there were no announcements or declarations—that isn’t the biker way. Instead, there was just the sense that the goal of the meeting—a truce between the Outlaws and the Hells Angels—had been accomplished. The Bandidos had come out of it well. Order had been maintained, no one had been killed, the encounter had gone smoothly. That made us all feel good and, after the tensions of the summit, put us in even more of a mood to party than was usually the case in Sturgis.

  If the words “Sturgis” and “party” appear in the same sentence, you almost invariably have to add “Buffalo Chip Campground”—certainly anyone who has been there on that August weekend would agree. It’s ground zero of the action and fun. Beer flows in rivers. Rock ’n’ roll blares from outdoor speakers only to be lost in the din of roaring, rattling exhaust pipes. Tough-looking men dressed like pirates in black leather drink, laugh and drink some more. Hard-looking women, in leather chaps and little else, straddle the saddles of Harleys or walk around, among the miles of parked choppers, looking hot.

  It could be argued that it’s at Sturgis where the great American fixation with breasts reaches its zenith. After “Nice bike” the most common phrase heard is “Show us your tits.” Not that most biker chicks have to be told to lift up their fringed leather bra. Even with their clothing in place, they show more cleavage than a convention of crouching plumbers.

  Being a Bandido in Sturgis is good any year—you’re biker royalty. That year, it was even better. We had come there with a challenging and delicate job to do, got it done, and now we could party. We gave it our uninhibited best for three or four days and then, having had our fill, packed our things and headed home. I rode with Dr. Jack and a few others and we took our time along the way, visiting friends and seeing the sights. It was on the trip home, and more particularly sitting around the campfire chatting with Jack, that I began to get an idea of the scope of the summit discussions.

  The Angels–Outlaws peace treaty was actually a relatively small part of the proceedings, Jack said. The really significant development was the partitioning of the entire United States between those two clubs and, of cou
rse, us and the absent fourth player, the Pagans.

  Whatever their differences, the four major gangs had a common concern: the independent one-percenter clubs, most of them regional, some with a presence in several states. These indies, it was now felt, were taking up too much space. It wasn’t that they were growing; rather, the larger clubs were expanding and, in so doing, bumping up against the smaller ones. And not liking it much. There was a long list of these independents: the Dirty Dozen, the Chosen Few, the Hessians, the Iron Horsemen, the Coffin Cheaters, the Mad Hatters, the Ching-a-lings, the Vargas, the Mongols, the Rebels, the Henchmen and the Booze Fighters, as well as our old friends (and enemies) the Gypsy Jokers, the Ghost Riders, the Banshees and the Aces and Eights.

  Under the agreement, the strongholds of the major clubs were enshrined as their exclusive domain: California, Alaska and Hawaii for the Hells Angels; Texas, New Mexico, South Dakota and Washington for the Bandidos; Florida and Illinois for the Outlaws; Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and Connecticut for the Pagans. In these states, the major clubs would not just be given the green light to get rid of any independents, they would actually be required to do so.

  Then there would be states such as Oregon, Arizona, Louisiana and a few others where the indies were traditionally dominant and which served as useful buffers between the big boys. These states would be reserved for the indies—but they had to get rid of their three-piece patches and change them to one-piece. Similarly, they’d be required to remove any one-percenter designations. And while no major club would be allowed to set up shop openly in these states, adopting an indie as a “support club” would be tolerated. In practice this meant any indies that were big enough to be noticed, like the Gypsy Jokers in Oregon, were required to affiliate or face extermination. Still, there was no turning a support club into a probationary chapter in buffer states.

  The rest of the country was basically up for grabs. This led to frenzied expansionist drives by the four big gangs and a dash for cover by dozens of independents. Some took the easy way out and affiliated with one of the big four clubs immediately, becoming probationary chapters and eventually patching over. Other indies stayed put and resisted. Several disbanded. A few decided that their future lay outside the country and moved offshore—the Coffin Cheaters to South Africa and Australia, the Rebels also to Oz and, eventually, the Gyspy Joker diehards to England, Ireland and, again, Oz.

  Two exception states were Idaho and Montana. Even if they didn’t serve as a buffer between antagonistic gangs, they were given that designation. It was a Hells Angels demand: if the Angels weren’t going to get Washington State to complete their north–south axis of influence, then the Bandidos had to be denied an east–west chain stretching from South Dakota to Seattle. Of course, that was fine by us in Bellingham. After all, we had been sitting on the endangered list just weeks earlier, half expecting to be traded away by the Bandidos national executive.

  In this way the Sturgis summit was similar to the famous 1957 mob summit in Apalachin, New York. Except in that case organized crime was only divvying up New York City; at Sturgis, it was the whole United States that was parceled out.

  Some aspects of the agreement were easier to implement than others. For instance, the Banshees were still causing the Angels grief in southern California. So the Bandidos selflessly undertook to solve the problem—without, of course, fessing up to the fact that the Banshees were really their own members operating undercover. Other aspects of the agreement resulted in years of hostility and gallons of blood being spilled, especially in the free-for-all states. Sometimes the ugliness broke out between members of the big four and holdouts from the independents; sometimes it was the big four dueling for dominance among themselves.

  Then there was the spinoff skulduggery. The Bandidos may have assented to California becoming the exclusive playground of the Angels, but that didn’t mean they were keen on making it easy for them. So the Bandidos secretly began making nice with the L.A.-based Mongols and doing everything they could to quietly help them resist the Angels’ eradication plan.

  For their part, the Outlaws set up a gang called the Black Pistons in Florida and then, pretending to be dutifully cleaning out their backyard, pushed them north—where, of course, the Black Pistons were the vanguard of the Outlaws’ expansion drive.

  Big surprise: the “buffer treaty,” as we came to call it, began disintegrating the moment everyone left Sturgis, and well and truly collapsed within two years. But by then it had resulted in a complete shakeout in the biker world, one that led to a consolidation of power for the big four, extinction for many indies and a great deal of confusion for cops around the country.

  By then, of course, I’d made like many of the independents and got away while the going was good.

  Back in Washington after the Sturgis summit, I was increasingly faced with a problem that had presented itself months earlier. Since we had the goods over and over again on everyone in Bellingham and Bremerton, I was no longer doing deals with them. Initially, it had been easy enough to come up with an excuse for not buying a few pounds of coke here or a stolen car there. After a while it became more difficult. It became downright uncomfortable when, over the course of a week, Vince or Gunk would call me repeatedly, pitching deals to which I would have to say no.

  A solution arose six or eight weeks after Sturgis when Steve, the national VP from Lubbock, called me up from Texas, out of the blue.

  “Hey, you remember my trailer?” he asked. I did. “Well, you think you might know somebody across the line”—up in Canada, he meant—“who might be interested in buying it?”

  It sounded ridiculous to me. Even if the trailer was stolen, there was no reason to drive it across the country just to unload it. It wasn’t as if Texas didn’t have its share of trailer dwellers.

  “I suppose I could find someone, depending on how much you want for it. But why go to all the trouble?” The last thing I wanted to do was buy a crappy trailer; at the same time, I didn’t want to say no flat out. “You know, if it’s money you need, I could make some arrangements,” I added.

  “No, it’s no big deal. And I’m okay for cash,” he said, and then got onto the real reason for calling. “There’s a bar we’re opening up down here and we wanted to know if you’re interested in investing.”

  “Now that sounds more interesting. Let me check things out and I’ll get back to you.”

  I didn’t ask for any details. In the biker world, like that of many crooks, things are done backward: you don’t ask for specifics until you say yes. There’s a simple reason for this: if you’re given the details and then say no, then you know too much. Knowing too much, and then saying no, was what got me into the infiltration game with Hobo.

  If it had been up to me alone, I would have said yes on the spot to Steve. This was a golden opportunity to expand the investigation while also getting out of Washington with my rep intact. Still, my investment would obviously need to be approved by my handlers and their bosses. There was no saying yes and then changing your mind with the Bandidos, especially the hard-asses from Texas.

  As soon as I hung up, I called the office and gave them an outline of the situation. “I need to know really quickly if this is a go or not,” I said, suggesting we meet immediately. They put me off to the next day, however, saying they’d have to verify “jurisdictional control” and look into other questions.

  When we finally met, we all agreed that the Texas invite was a gift from on high. It meant that I’d likely be able to transfer my patch to the Dallas or San Antonio chapter (Lubbock didn’t have its own chapter despite being the center of Bandidos-dom—go figure) and be in a position to go not just national but National—nailing the top leadership.

  “We’re on, but it’s going to take a little time for us to get everything together,” said Larry Brant.

  “So long as I know it’s going to happen, then I’ll say yes. But I want to be sure,” I said.

  At that, Brant hedged a bit. “Well
, you can definitely say yes because either it’s going to happen or else we’ll bring the case down. It’s one or the other.”

  It made sense to me. Little did I know, however, that behind the scenes Larry, Andy, Corky and the rest of the crew had major misgivings about a central part of the investigation: me.

  Two or three months earlier, we had been sitting around the office discussing the case of an FBI undercover agent who had spent two years infiltrating the Hells Angels. He’d got relatively close to the gang but was never made a member. Still, it had been a successful case, one that led to a bunch of arrests and prosecutions. The undercover should have been happy and gone home. He did for a spell, but he couldn’t leave his undercover persona behind; he was happier in that skin than his real one, it seemed. We were talking about him because he had just been arrested for shoplifting food. According to his wife, he hadn’t been home in weeks and was broke. Still, he was unable or unwilling to go back to his real life. When he was busted, he’d used his old undercover identification, even though flashing his badge might have got him off.

  I’d taken the guy’s side somewhat, saying the Feebs should have made sure he had psychological help. I even asked point-blank if the DEA had any such help available. That had prompted Andy to make a scene.

  “Come on!” he said. “An agent worth his salt doesn’t need that kind of shit. The guy’s a wuss!”

  That silenced me on the subject, but Larry, it seemed, had filed my concern away. There had been other red flags: the Bren machine gun outburst with the G-man, the cowboy beating, my increasingly sporadic contact with my family back home, the fact that I’d taken to wearing my colors into the office as often as not. But Larry’s reluctance to commit to a move to Texas was my first real indication that he and the others thought I might be getting in too deep.