by Alex Caine
Bob McGuigan said not to worry when I phoned him—there were barbecues at San Diego Harley every week, and since three or four patched Hells Angels worked there I’d get another chance to make contact over a burger. The next morning, however, Bob and his DEA sidekick Hunter Davis seemed to have reconsidered.
“How do you get lost in a taxi?” they asked.
“You don’t know me—I can,” was all I could say.
That didn’t impress them much. Bob told me that I would be leaving for home the next day. “Fine,” I said.
The next day, however, came and went with no talk of my leaving. Instead, Bob had another plan up his sleeve; it was slowly becoming apparent that he was desperate to get an investigation going one way or another into the San Diego—or Dago—Hells Angels. He now wanted me to rent a storefront with, ideally, a back room to live in, and to set up a cover business that, somehow or other, would allow me to consort with the bikers. It wasn’t a yacht, but the idea sounded fine to me and I said I’d look around.
A couple of days later, I’d found a store that fit the bill on Turquoise Street in Pacific Beach, a touristy area right next to La Jolla. The place was in a four-store strip mall fronting a two-story apartment building only half a block from the ocean, boardwalk and beach. Still, it was reasonably priced. I’d also figured out a good cover business, one that would require minimal capital investment, not necessitate any inventory and, most importantly, provide me with an excuse to introduce myself to Brandon Kent and the boys: I’d become a photographer, specializing in custom posters and specialty shots of bikes and babes.
Bob liked the idea, and within a week he secured funds to buy me a computer, a very expensive Olympus SLR digital camera and a commercial printer. I went to a store, picked up a bunch of classic posters of rock stars and the like, and plastered my shop walls with them. I even got a couple of easels and used them to display some mounted posters. All I needed now was a name. Bob came to the rescue there: Posterplus. I blacked out the windows and painted Posterplus. By appointment only. In the workspace/office at the back of the shop, I set up a bedroom for myself. I’d survive without a kitchen, but happily there was a bathroom with a shower.
Second time was lucky for finding the barbecue the following weekend. It wasn’t a full-on Hells Angels event this time, but since a few members, including Brandon Kent, worked at the shop, there was a presence—Kent included.
He was sitting behind a glass counter at the parts department shooting the shit with some friends. Milling in front of the counter, I noticed, taped inside, an eight-by-ten photo of him riding his bike on a racing track. I knew Kent raced motorcycles for the HA’s official team and so I used this to break the ice with him. I asked him if he would let me make a 24-by-30-inch poster of the picture to put up in my store; in return I would give him a free copy to put on display in the Harley shop. He went for it.
I left soon afterward, taking the picture with me, and the next day went to a reproduction shop downtown, ordered the enlargements and had them laminated. The next week I brought his poster to the barbecue and Kent was impressed big time, for which I took full credit.
While I had his attention, I told him a bit about my business. I liked shooting runs, custom bikes and dogs, I said, and also went to parties and made photo albums of the event. Media kits for strippers was something I was into as well, I added; did he happen to know anyone who might be interested?
Sure, he said, and gave me the name of a guy called Taz who ran a mob-owned strip joint called Cheetah’s. I was off and running—or at least moving forward in familiar territory.
I dropped by Cheetah’s several days later and was greeted by a large doorman. He was covered in tattoos, including a large swastika on his shaved head. He looked like an extra on the TV show Oz—something I later learned he actually was. I asked if Taz was in.
“I don’t know no Taz,” the doorman replied.
“Can I leave a message for him?”
“What’s it about?”
“Brandon from the bike shop gave me his name. Said he might be able to help me.”
“Brandon Kent?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Taz,” the guy said, “but hang on a minute.”
He picked up a phone and dialed someone I assumed to be Brandon. He talked for a couple of minutes then hung up. “Okay,” he said to me finally. “What can I do for you?”
I explained my photo business and said I had a shop in Pacific Beach. It turned out Taz lived only a few blocks away. He was busy, so we decided he would drop by the shop sometime later that week to talk. I gave him my card with the address and split.
Taz was one of those people who was warm and welcoming to people he considered to be on the inside and a real asshole to everyone else. Since I came on the say-so of Brandon Kent, I was okay. When he came by a few days later, he brought along a tall, muscle-bound friend—who just happened to be wearing the cut of a full-patch Hells Angel. It was a completely unexpected bonus.
The biker’s name was Chris Devon. I initially let him be and talked only to Taz, but in a way that made me intriguing to Devon and gave him ample opportunity to join the conversation. Then, at a given point, when discussing my photo projects, I turned it on with a big ego stroke.
“I want to do a poster of the quintessential tough guy,” I told Taz. “Someone who just radiates power. Someone like him.” And I pointed at Devon.
Devon didn’t just bite, he swallowed the entire hook. Then and there, I did a shoot, and before long he was back to see the poster I had produced. He loved the idea of me displaying it prominently in the store.
During those first weeks I would slip away as often as possible for photography lessons from a sheriff’s department cop who took pictures of murder victims and crime scenes. The man was an exceptional photographer but entirely without a sense of humor. I tried constantly to make him laugh, asking him if he was concerned about stiff competition, or saying that people were dying to be in his pictures. He’d just give me a confused look. After a month or so he had turned me into a passable photographer—certainly up to the standards of the Hells Angels, strippers and other less than demanding subjects.
When I was not taking lessons, I’d hang around my store and Chris would drop by occasionally, almost always with company. Sometimes he’d bring girls—strippers—interested in having me shoot their portrait. Other times he came by with Taz or another friend of theirs, a guy who called himself the Indian, who was a weapons specialist on a navy battle cruiser. There’s a huge military presence in San Diego, which the Angels understood was both a hungry market for drugs and girls and a superb potential source of weapons. The gang members didn’t have much time or respect for the Indian—he was too eager to be liked. As Dago chapter president Guy Castiglione later told me dismissively, “He calls himself the Indian, but he’s really just a nigger”—a supreme insult in their world. Still, the Indian was an entree into the big military market and one the Angels were exploiting eagerly.
Ever hungry for friendship, the Indian cultivated me as well. I hinted to him—and to Taz, Chris and whoever else happened into the store—that the photo shop was really just a cover, that my true business was crime. But we never discussed any specifics, at least in those early weeks and months.
I would also see Chris, along with Brandon, at the weekly Harley-Davidson barbecues, which I attended scrupulously. I’d always bring my camera and take pictures of bikes, which provided a good pretext for chitchat. Often the bikes’ owners—patched Hells Angels or not—were only too happy to have their pictures taken as well.
My next contact in the club didn’t come from the barbecue, however. One day I was telling Chris that I wanted to get some other merchandise in the store. “I want something—postcards, whatever—that will make it look like I’m doing some business. The last thing I need is for cops to come sniffing around because there’s no activity.”
I was letting him understand that I was a career criminal,
of course, without going into specifics. Chris took it a step further.
“Then why don’t you sell some support stuff?” he said, referring to the T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and ball caps that the Hells Angels sell to make a little money and improve their public image.
“That’s a great idea. Who would I call?”
And just like that, I had the number of and an intro to Ramona Pete (Pete Eunice), the Dago member who ran the club’s bar in El Cajon, the town twenty miles to the east that, more than San Diego itself, was the home of the San Diego chapter.
Pete came to the shop and liked the support merchandise idea. Soon I was running out to El Cajon—by then the DEA had bought me an old white Chevy van—to pick up supplies and hang out a bit at the bar, which was named Dumont’s after Pete’s business partner. In many ways the Dago Hells Angels were more approachable than the Bandidos or the PDR had been. It was easier to get a nod, a sign of recognition and a bit of small talk from members. Even so, it was superficial recognition, like you might get from professional athletes or celebrities conscious of their public image but really not interested in having anything to do with you. Getting any more out of the Angels was much more difficult. Even if I played the crook—and I did—no one proposed any criminal activity to me, and I wasn’t about to propose any to them. That, I got the impression, would have been a guaranteed ticket for a quick and rough ride out Dumont’s door.
Even if I hadn’t yet penetrated the inner sanctum of the Hells Angels and wasn’t doing drug deals with them, I was making reasonable progress. Bob McGuigan and his team seemed perfectly satisfied with the way the investigation was developing. After all, I’d only been there three or four months. And Bob’s superiors didn’t seem unhappy. If anything, they were indifferent to the criminal information I was bringing him—Taz controlled most of the drugs in Pacific Beach and lots of the girls—and the Indian’s military connection hadn’t got their radar buzzing either. Try as they might, Bob and his counterpart in the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, Billy Guinn, couldn’t get their bosses motivated. In fact, they still couldn’t obtain funding for a full investigation. I didn’t yet have a firm contract and was only getting paid sporadically with money my handlers could scrounge out of various budgets—two thousand dollars this week, then nothing for a couple of weeks, then nine hundred, and so on.
My rabbi, J.P., whom I was speaking with a couple of times a week, apologized about the situation he had got me into and initially urged me to just pack it in. George Cousens, whom I was seeing fairly regularly on my trips back to Toronto to testify against the PDR and my friends from Niagara Falls, was giving much the same advice. I felt loyalty to Bob, however, and I liked Billy a lot, and I saw that they were doing their best. So I stuck with them, justifying the project to myself and to J.P. as good groundwork. If nothing developed in San Diego, I reasoned, I could at least establish some good HA contacts and use them for an investigation into the club elsewhere. J.P. liked the idea.
Then along came the Russians.
My little shop on Turquoise Street was at the ocean end of the small strip mall. At the opposite end, on the other side of a Latino hair salon, was a very expensive furniture store. Since I lived at my shop, I would often sit out front and relax, and after a while I noticed that the furniture store did even less business than I did. Its owner was a big and burly Czech called Henry, and he was always walking past my shop on his way to visit some guys who ran a used car lot on the ocean side of my store. Eventually Henry and I got to talking, and before long he was matter-of-factly admitting to some pretty serious criminal activity.
Until a year or so earlier, he’d been dealing heroin in volume in Los Angeles on behalf of some Russian mobsters. Then he made a very big mistake and started using his own product—perhaps because of all the sadness and stress associated with his young daughter being born with a crippling genetic disease. Whatever the case, before long he was spending day after day barely moving from his rocking chair except to shoot up. That, of course, had got him in trouble with his boss, who, he said, only spared his life because they’d served in the Russian military together. Henry’s partner, who hadn’t shared a history with the boss, hadn’t got off so lucky. Even though Henry had been allowed to live, no one in L.A.’s Russian mob would have anything to do with him—he had been effectively exiled from the city.
Now he was in San Diego trying to get back on his criminal feet. He’d been importing furniture with hollowed-out legs filled with smack, but there wasn’t much money in it. The drugs weren’t his; he was really just a glorified mule. So he was spending a lot of time on the phone with his connections in Russia, where his reputation hadn’t been so tarnished by his drug habit, trying to put more profitable deals together.
Like any self-respecting criminal, Henry was wary of wiretaps. So, before long, he was asking to make and receive phone calls at my store. No problem, I said. After all, I wasn’t paying the bill, and getting in good with Henry couldn’t hurt.
Of course, I kept Bob McGuigan up to speed on what was going on, and the DEA ran the numbers Henry was calling and being called from. That’s when the bells went off. The numbers were linked to a handful of criminals some federal agencies were already after, a few of them former KGB agents who’d turned to crime.
Soon I was called to a meeting at the ATF’s San Diego offices. There were maybe a dozen suits and agents in a big conference room. I only knew two of them: Bob from the DEA and Brooks Jacobson, the ATF agent assigned to work alongside Bob in our investigation of the Hells Angels.
We started off discussing progress on the biker investigation, which Bob played up as being pretty significant, all things considered. Some of the guys around the table were barely listening, however. Something else was obviously in the works. Sure enough, one of them soon cut Bob off.
“Well, all that’s on the shelf for now,” said a casually dressed man with hair past his shoulders, who nonetheless exuded authority. “We’re now going to focus on Henry and his friends.”
At that point one of the suits chimed in, asking me, “What do you know about stolen art and art in general?”
“Stolen art is art that has been stolen,” I joked.
That got me a withering look.
“Basically nothing,” I added.
It seems some of Henry’s Russian connections had been involved about a year earlier in hijacking a vanload of art being loaned from one museum to another. That interested the agencies represented around the table—but there was more. Basically, the Russians were into anything—drugs, guns, stolen vehicles and other goods, girls—and the feds were into everything the Russians were into.
The suit made some notes on a pad and conferred with some of the brass at the other end of the table. Meanwhile, Mr. Authority, who was sitting a seat away from me, announced in his arrogant, damn-the-torpedoes manner, “From now on you’ll be reporting to me and me alone. Can you keep good notes?”
“I can keep great notes. I was trained by the Mounties.”
“Okay, I want you to write down every meeting, every name mentioned, everything said, everything you do with these guys.”
By this time Bob, who was also sitting near me, was looking very uncomfortable. He clearly didn’t like Mr. Authority but felt compelled to defer to him.
“Would you like the notes he’s kept up to now?” he asked the man, who would only ever be introduced to me as Joe.
“I don’t give a fuck about what he’s been doing up until now,” said Joe, not even bothering to look at Bob.
That was it for Bob. His voice got louder and higher, and he started going on about how the work we’d accomplished so far would be wasted and how the operation was being shortchanged.
Joe listened for a while and then said, “That’s the way you feel, but this is the way it’s going to be. If you don’t like it, you can leave this meeting right now.”
Defeated, Bob began gathering his papers. But before he left, Joe, just to prove he
carried the weight, swung his satchel onto the table, opened it and took out a large bundle of cash.
“Here’s your first payment. For four months. If there are any additional expenses, just let me know.”
The bundle contained US$20,000. The message was clear: after all the scrimping, begging and financial sleight of hand Bob had had to do to keep our biker investigation going, he was being big-footed by someone with real influence and easy access to cash.
Soon enough, Joe ordered me to not even talk to Bob.
Of all the handlers I ever had, Joe was easily the most mysterious. At first I heard he was DEA, but someone else told me he was ATF. I suspect he was something else altogether. He also didn’t seem to have any bosses; everyone deferred to him. And I never learned his last name. Those, however, were the least of his mysteries. He also happened to be both handler and fellow undercover. In fact, I was now to introduce him to Henry, who in turn, we hoped, would connect us to his contacts, most of whom were across the Atlantic.
Fortuitously, Henry was hoping to exploit us in a similar way. In his efforts to impress his contacts in Russia and elsewhere, he was bragging about his new American friends. We were big-time, he said. No matter how mean and nasty the Russians were, they still seemed to suffer from something of an inferiority complex. American crooks, I suppose, were the stuff of Hollywood, and thus the real deal in the Russians’ eyes. (The fact that I was actually Canadian was a mere technicality for Henry.)
One reason Henry believed I was a hardcase criminal was an ugly encounter he’d had with Chris Devon in my store a week or two before the big meeting at the ATF offices. Chris had come by with one of his girls to set up a shoot for her and had just parked wherever. But wherever just happened to be one of Henry’s parking spots. A few minutes after Chris showed up, Henry stormed into my store.
“Who’s za fock-ing ass-hole in my parking?” he shouted. Clearly, he wasn’t having a good day, but that didn’t mean Chris was going to coddle him.