Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  Despite having formed a task force and obtaining funding for the investigation—and despite Bob’s assurances otherwise—the police had no real plan of action. They had no fixed list of particular individuals for me to pursue. They didn’t instruct me to focus on drugs or guns or prostitution or any other criminal activity. Rather, they seemed happy for me simply to be rubbing shoulders with different members, taking vanity photos of as many of them as possible and collecting idle intel.

  The vague parameters of the investigation were fine by me, at least to begin with. I could hang with the members who seemed receptive and steer clear of those who were more wary—really, just approach the bikers as a regular criminal joe might.

  My first real breakthrough came after about a month in El Cajon, in late September 2001. I hadn’t been around too much. In fact, I’d spent most of a week or so in Toronto, initially testifying at a PDR trial and then grounded when the skies over all of North America turned into a no-fly zone after 9/11. But I’d been around enough that I was clearly on the Hells Angels’ radar.

  That was made abundantly clear to me early one Thursday evening when I was at Dumont’s. I’d taken to eating there—there was a microwave and they sold things like corn dogs, which make for a satisfying supper in my books. I’d just finished when an Angels prospect came into the bar and beelined it straight to me.

  “The Boss wants to see you,” he said. “At the clubhouse.”

  “Okaaaaay,” I answered. The Boss was Dago chapter president Guy Castiglione, a cold-blooded killer who also happened to be intelligent, soft-spoken and usually quite reasonable. I didn’t bother searching the prospect’s face for any indication that this was good news or bad; I knew he wouldn’t know.

  Despite a moment of anxiety, a couple of factors suggested I had nothing to fear. I doubted that anything nasty would happen to me in the clubhouse—too incriminating. Anyway, if it was a thrashing I was in for, they would have just done it out back of the bar. Also, it was the Dago chapter’s church night, the one night of the week when there was consistently a police presence—both undercover and uniform—on that strip. The bikers knew it and I knew it. So I was more curious than concerned as I followed the prospect the fifty yards or so down the street and into the clubhouse.

  Castiglione was sitting on a stool behind the bar. A bunch of other members were sitting at tables or playing pool in back, but the Boss was alone. I sat down on a stool across the bar from him and, like a well-bred boy, waited for him to address me.

  “I hear you’re a good photographer,” he said.

  “I do what I can,” I said, relieved.

  “How much would you charge for a charter poster?”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about exactly, but I did know this was a chance to win him over by showing some respect for the club. “What? Money?”

  “Yeah. Every five years we have to take a chapter picture and send it to all the chapters worldwide. It’s time, and I want to know how much it’ll cost.”

  “Listen,” I said. “You guys let me operate in your town. Some of your guys have helped me out. I conduct my shit, my business here. This is your town, these are your streets. So because of that, I would do it out of respect.”

  It was definitely the right answer. He puffed up. Not smiling, but certainly not frowning.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “When do you want to do it?”

  A week later, on the afternoon before the next church, I was standing on El Cajon Boulevard taking shots of the Boss and seventeen other Dago Hells Angels in front of their clubhouse. Any who didn’t know me before sure knew me now.

  And just in time. Shortly after the chapter photo shoot, Chris Devon—my first good contact in the gang—was arrested and imprisoned on a murder charge. It didn’t end up hurting the infiltration assignment at all. In fact, an incident that flowed out of Chris’s incarceration ended up scoring me more points with the chapter—even if it damaged relations with the DEA.

  It began with a phone call from one of Chris’s girlfriends a week or two after his arrest. “Chris wants you to take some photos of me to send to him in jail,” she said.

  I’d never met the woman, and if she was talking about the kind of photos I thought she was, I wasn’t going to do the shoot without talking to Chris first. It’s a fundamental rule of crooks the world over: you steer well clear of women of guys who are in jail.

  “When are you next going to be speaking to him?” I asked her.

  “He’s phoning me tonight.”

  “Okay, well, I want to be there and to hear it from him.”

  I was over at her house that evening and spoke to Chris. He appreciated my initiative and told me how risqué he wanted the photos: not very, because the San Diego jailers were very strict with personal photos.

  A day or two later, Chris’s girlfriend phoned me to book the shoot and presented another issue. Chris wanted the photos as soon as possible, but the only time she was available was the next night after ten.

  Even if I had the green light from Chris, I wasn’t going to put myself in her house late in the evening taking revealing photos—it was a recipe for trouble. All I needed was for another member to drive by, see my vehicle in the driveway, come inside and jump to all the wrong conclusions.

  So I talked things over with Bob and we agreed that the best strategy was for me to take along my own “girlfriend”—an undercover cop. It’s not something I really should have brought up with Bob. He was an analyst, and so my dealings with him should have been limited to providing intel to incorporate into the endless flow charts he drew up with photos of the members I talked to and where they fit in the scheme of things.

  Instead, I should have gone to Pat Ryan, the DEA handler in charge of operations who had come onto the case with the move to El Cajon. So far, however, Ryan and I hadn’t clicked. Anything but. The problems had started with his bad reaction to the standard spiel I’d give to investigators when they or their bosses hired me for the first time, a spiel I’d delivered to him soon after settling into Cuyamaca Street.

  “I don’t want to be treated special, but I don’t want to be treated like an asshole either—I am not one of them,” I would say, knowing that many police assumed that because I was good at pretending to be a bad guy, I really was one. I’d remind my new handlers that I was a professional and finish off with a not very original but nonetheless honest line: “I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to do a job.”

  Most cops didn’t mind the spiel. Some even liked the fact that I immediately established the boundaries and ground rules of our relationship. Ryan, however, didn’t think it was the place of a contracted agent to give such a talk. And he seemed personally insulted by the fact that I wasn’t interested in forming deep and lasting bonds with my handlers. As Ryan left the meeting, he’d told Brooks Jacobson, my ATF handler, “If he doesn’t want to be friends, then fuck him.”

  Things hadn’t improved when, not long after, I flatly refused to take on an undercover cop as my sidekick. It wasn’t that I had a problem with the idea of an undercover sidekick. Rather, it was the cop he tried to foist on me. Skinny, red-haired, freckled: the guy might have been useful in an undercover operation at Microsoft or an Orange County high school—although even then he would probably have suffered daily wedgies—but the Angels would have eaten him alive.

  From that day on, Ryan and I got along about as much as we looked alike. I hadn’t grown—I was still five-six, 130 pounds on a big day. Ryan, meanwhile, is six-four if he’s an inch and at least 240 pounds, none of them fat. Our relationship wasn’t all bad. Ryan could surprise me with acts of generosity. On Thanksgiving, I found a full turkey dinner waiting for me at my door. I suspected it was from one of my other police contacts but later discovered it was Ryan who had prepared and delivered it. On another occasion, he picked me up on the pretext of our having an important meeting to attend, only to take me out to a surprise meal with other agents involved in the in
vestigation. Again, it had been Ryan’s idea. But the day after each friendly gesture, he would act like nothing had ever happened, and our icy relations returned.

  When I made my request for a girlfriend, Bob passed it along to Ryan. He brought a suitable and almost-pretty candidate dressed in standard San Diego attire (jeans, T-shirt, sandals) to our planning meeting an hour or so before I was to do the shoot—and proceeded to give her all sorts of absurd instructions.

  “Anybody comes in, you leave. Anyone there besides the girl when you arrive, you leave. If you get up from the couch, it’s because you’re leaving. You don’t go to the bathroom, the kitchen or anywhere. Don’t make conversation or talk to the girl any more than you have to.” He had no shortage of ridiculous, patronizing orders. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “Is she a cop or what?” I asked Ryan.

  “Of course she is,” he said, giving me a severe look.

  “Well then, let’s treat her like one. Give her a bit of credit.”

  That got me an even dirtier look.

  When we left the meeting, the policewoman climbed into my truck. She had been silent in front of Ryan, looking resigned. In the truck, however, she immediately started going on about her treatment.

  “They’re always like that with me,” she said. “They feel like they have to hold my hand and protect me all the time.”

  After hearing her out, I set about contradicting all the orders that Ryan had just given her. I told her to simply follow my lead, not do anything stupid, and said that if it was time for her to leave I would tell her.

  My phone rang. It was Ryan, as I expected; my truck was completely wired and they had been listening to our conversation.

  “Stop with your bullshit,” he shouted. “It’s got to be done my way. There’s a protocol and we have to follow it. You tell her to follow my instructions.”

  I didn’t bother trying to convince him otherwise. All I said was, “We’re the ones who are going to be in there. We’re the ones risking anything. So we’re going to do it my way.” Then I hung up.

  The photo shoot went well, and a couple of days later I dropped a bunch of prints by the downtown San Diego jail, depositing a hundred dollars in Chris’s canteen account for good measure. It wasn’t that I was all that intent on currying his favor—he was out of the game, after all. But I knew that the biker telegraph would quickly get word back to all his HA brothers and my reputation as a stand-up guy would be enhanced.

  I wasn’t wrong. A day or two later, Ramona Pete and a member known as Hatchet Dave dropped by the studio to get a photo enlarged of the original Hells Angels—a squadron of WWII fighter pilots.

  “I hear you deposited a hundred bucks in Chris’s account,” said Pete. “That was a good thing to do.”

  “Hey man, I was there anyway bringing him the pictures,” I replied.

  “Yeah, I heard about the pictures,” said Dave. “Smart thing for you to take your girlfriend over there.”

  The bikers got the point, but the cops didn’t. I mentioned the hundred dollars I put in Chris’s account and there was no offer to reimburse me.

  “Fuck him,” Brooks Jacobson said about Chris Devon, resolutely failing to see the brownie points the small gesture won me. “Let him rot in there.”

  Even if I was getting in tight with the Dago Angels, the cops still weren’t directing me to do deals with any of the members. On the contrary, the instruction I most frequently heard from my handlers, almost from day one in El Cajon, was to slow down.

  “Give us some time to catch up on our notes,” Brooks and Ryan would say.

  I’d tell them that actually I was going slow, but it didn’t seem to make any difference—they still always acted swamped.

  In the meantime, not initiating any deals was solidifying my standing in the gang’s eyes. The longer I didn’t pursue any criminal activity with them, the less likely it seemed that I could be a police agent. And the California Hells Angels tended to presume that pretty much everyone was out to bust them.

  Not doing deals with the Angels, however, didn’t mean I wasn’t doing any deals at all. A bunch literally came knocking at my door, most thanks to a connection I had made back on Turquoise Street with the most motivated of young hoods.

  His name was Bobby and he was the nephew of the Indian, who had brought him to me a year or so earlier. The Indian hoped I would give Bobby some sort of criminal apprenticeship. We got along very well and hung out some but hadn’t done much in the way of business; I was too absorbed with the Russians. When I moved to El Cajon, however, that changed. Bobby lived just up Cuyamaca Street in the neighboring town of Santee, and that meant I saw a lot more of him. And seeing more of him led to more deals.

  Bobby worked as a journeyman plumber on housing developments, but all of his creative energies—and he had energy in spades—were spent middling deals. He was invariably bright, cheery and enthusiastic, and had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about engaging in whatever non-violent criminal activity presented itself. He would middle guns, drugs, stolen vehicles, even illegal immigrants over the Mexican border, always with a smile.

  One of the first deals Bobby brought me was a pound of crystal meth—crank—from a co-worker of his whose uncle was a major Mexican gangster in San Diego. The pound was called a football because of the way it was bundled in duct tape and car grease to kill the smell and make it easy to hide in a car’s spare tire or engine block when crossing the border.

  That deal led to three more buys, each for a football of crank, from the same colleague of Bobby’s. Normally we wouldn’t have bothered to do more than two buys, but the co-worker kept coming over to do the deals with different buddies, so we ended up nailing nine guys for the price of one.

  Bobby and his buddy also led me to Smokey, a Mexican gangbanger who was one of the most absurd and dangerous people I met in San Diego—and that’s saying something. Smokey had recently finished a stretch in Pelican Bay State Prison, a facility designed for the baddest of the bad, and was looking to make up for lost time. He was short and fat, and the basics of his costume never changed: a wife-beater undershirt and a fedora. He drove a Delta 88 that was both pimped out and rusted out, with multicolored dingle-balls trim inside the windows and windshields. The car was never without a good handful of homeboys hanging out the windows, and the stereo was always cranked to the max. To be heard above the din you had to shout, and Smokey was always shouting. Everything he said, or shouted, was complemented by macho hip-hop gestures. He was perhaps the most abrasive person I’d ever met.

  Still, I liked him, perhaps because he was such a walking caricature. I made very sure, however, that he never realized I was laughing at him rather than with him; because he thought he was dangerous, he was, and would probably have killed me, or anyone else, at the drop of a fedora if he thought any fun was being had at his expense.

  Smokey sold whatever could make him a bit of money. We began with a few handguns, moved on to modified shotguns (with the barrels sawed off and a folding stock) and then got into drugs, in his case Mexican heroin. The first time he offered me smack, Ryan told me to pass on the purchase—Mexican heroin dealers weren’t our assignment. I did and it hit the streets through other middlemen. The second time I approached Ryan, I suggested to him that I might make some noise if he refused me again, so I got the green light for a thousand dollars’ worth.

  Just as Bobby had led me to Smokey, Smokey led me to a truck driver called Robert whose specialty was smuggling people and anything else across the Mexican border. Robert was in a bit of a bind. He’d been working for a network of coyotes—people smugglers—who had brought in a bunch of Middle Eastern types just days before 9/11 and who, after the Twin Towers fell, disbanded in a panic. So Robert was unemployed and was offering his services to me.

  I told him that I was interested but said any border running I’d be doing would be into Canada and that he’d need phony papers. These I offered to provide him with—and used the opportunity to
take his picture and one of his truck.

  I took what I had to Brooks and Bob and suggested Robert be used to get to his former employers. I expected it would be a no-brainer; this, after all, was mere weeks after 9/11 and border security was the hottest of issues. But within hours they came back to me and said forget it. The rationale: it would bring in the Secret Service. “They’ll definitely take the case away, the biker investigation will fall apart and you could find yourself back in Canada,” said Bob. It had happened with the Russians, and the Hells Angels investigation had been sidetracked for a year. They weren’t going to get big-footed again.

  My first deal with the Hells Angels wasn’t hand-to-hand. Rather, it happened through a dealer who sold coke and crank on behalf of Mark Toycen, the Dago chapter’s sergeant-at-arms, and as such one of its most feared and fierce members.

  The dealer was a very overweight woman in her fifties called JoAnn who spent her days and nights making drug deliveries all around the San Diego region. She was pretty small-time, eight balls and quarter ounces, and would regularly come into Dumont’s, where Toycen often left her supply, to stock up. I was at the bar shooting the breeze with Pete one day when she dropped by. Purple Sue the barmaid introduced us and JoAnn and I got to talking. A few days later she stopped by the shop, saying she just happened to be in the neighborhood. Soon she was a regular visitor, sometimes alone, sometimes with Sue, sometimes with other people.

  JoAnn was a real chatterbox and—given that she’d been consorting with the Dago Hells Angels for years—a fount of intelligence. But it was almost all just nice-to-know information. Her insignificant status—and probably her big mouth—meant that she wasn’t privy to much that was actionable.