by Alex Caine
Like Sue’s husband, JoAnn’s son was in prison for murder, and she complained that she wasn’t allowed to visit him for some reason. I assumed that her dealing for Toycen meant that her son received protection inside from the gang.
On her second or third visit she offered to sell to me. “If you’re ever looking for something, you can come to me,” JoAnn said. I took the bait.
“Sure. It might be good to have a bit, a quarter or something, for when people drop by.”
I did a couple of small purchases, figuring that down the road, if need be, the cops could pick her up and likely turn her without much effort.
By this time I’d bought myself a bike, a souped-up 1999 Harley Sportster 1200, and started going on rides with individual members and associates. Sometimes we’d go out after the weekly barbecue; often we went into the desert. On the weekend of December 8/9—I remember because it was my fifty-third birthday—I went to one of the California Hells Angels’ big promotional events, the Toys for Tots run. It was the Berdoo (or San Bernardino) chapter’s turn to host the event and Brandon had asked me to produce a poster for it.
I rode to San Bernardino on my bike, followed by a full detail of cops: Ryan, Brooks, Billy from the sheriff’s department—a half-dozen or so in total, spread over three vehicles. Angels were coming from across the entire state, and all of Dago was going to attend, so it was a choice surveillance opportunity, with or without criminal activity. The Angels were holding the run at a country lodge–like establishment owned by two of the Berdoo members, and gullible members of the public were encouraged to drop by with “new or gently used” toys. The gang would then pass the toys on to charity organizations, which distributed them to needy kids in time for Christmas. If I remember correctly, they amassed something like four eighteen-wheelers full of goodies over the weekend.
I spent much of the weekend taking photos of the assembled, always asking permission beforehand, of course. A few times it was denied. Still, despite my deference, around eight o’clock on Saturday evening, about when the public was sent on its way, I felt a large hand on my shoulder. I turned and it was the president of the Berdoo chapter.
“Who are you and why are you taking all these pictures?” he asked politely, but nonetheless menacingly.
“I’m with the Dago chapter and they asked me to come up and shoot some pictures for them,” I said hopefully.
Brandon Kent shouted from about twenty feet away, where he was leaning against a wall. “Hey, it’s okay! He’s with us.” I was happy to hear his voice and even happier to hear what he said after he walked over. “He takes all our charter pictures. Don’t worry, he’s cool.”
The Berdoo president then gave me his stamp of approval. “You have any problems, tell them to come to me.”
An hour or so later, when the party had become an exclusive Angels event, I realized how much weight Brandon’s word carried. The only other photographer had been shooting for Easyriders, a tits-and-choppers magazine dedicated to the hagiography of the Hells Angels and their ilk. He was told that his presence was no longer required. I, on the other hand, was allowed to stick around as long as I liked. I did so for most of Saturday night.
The next day, I returned to the party to hang out some more. Toward the end of the afternoon, after many of the Dago members had left, Cisco, a member of the Oakland chapter, was looking for someone going back to San Diego and someone pointed me out to him.
“Bring these down to the Dago chapter,” he instructed, handing me three advance copies of the next Hells Angels calendar. “One’s for Mark,” he said, meaning Toycen, “one’s for the Boss and one’s for the clubhouse.”
Obediently, I took the calendars.
On the way back to San Diego I rendezvoused with the team at a rest stop on a highway east of San Bernardino, a different road than any HA would be riding. Except for a brief phone call, I hadn’t been in contact with my handlers since arriving the day before, and they were eager to know what I had to report. I gave a summary debriefing and told them about the calendars, which were individually vacuum sealed in plastic. Ryan took them and looked them over.
“I guess I’ll be taking these,” he said. “You’ll have your hands full printing up your photos.”
“I need those things,” I protested.
“Well, then you better hurry up and get those pictures to me,” Ryan said, turning and starting to walk to his DEA-supplied SUV.
I lost it. “You’re a fucking asshole,” I screamed, adding a long list of expletives. I suppose I was a bit ragged from having spent two days alone with two hundred Hells Angels, not having had much sleep, and having a two-hour drive through the cold, high desert ahead of me. Still, I knew Ryan was just provoking me and getting a kick out of it. He knew perfectly well that any credibility I had with the gang could easily be shot if I failed to deliver the calendars promptly. I swore some more at him. “Come back here, you fucking jerk! I’ve had it with you! Let’s do it! Now!”
He turned, handing the calendars to Bob or Billy, and started to come at me. But the rest of the team was on its toes and jumped in the middle to keep us apart. All we could do was yell at each other some more. Eventually, Ryan was corralled back to his truck and I got on my bike again. Whoever had the calendars gave them back to me.
That was it for Ryan and me. News of our roadside standoff reached the bosses and they ordered Ryan to step back and not have any direct contact with me. They didn’t pull him from the case, though, and before long I realized that Ryan was letting himself into the listening post next to my shop in the evenings and monitoring my activities. It was creepy and unnerving, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Bob, always playing the mediator, told me that Ryan was really only coming by the listening post for refuge; apparently things were even worse for him at home than they were with me. I hoped that was the reason for his off-hour visits. The circumstances of the investigation also meant that eventually he and I had to converse, and it wasn’t more than a few weeks before he was phoning me with instructions and orders—one of which, in my opinion, would bring the whole case down.
I went back to New Brunswick for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year’s and wasn’t especially eager to return to San Diego in January, even if it meant trading snow and cold for sun. The investigation didn’t seem to be going anywhere. The cops were content just to let it meander along, I felt. So, once back in El Cajon, I decided to set my own targets and get things moving.
Bobby Perez had offered to sell me drugs at least once, but we’d been at the bar at the time and I was without backup, so I had refused. The offer would come again, I knew, and likely when we were in the comfort of my shop, where the surveillance would pick everything up. He was always dropping by, and at all hours; as far as Bobby was concerned, if he was awake, you should be too. Sure enough, one night at about three a.m., he came by eager to sell.
“I’ve got some great crank—you interested in buying some?” he said.
I went for it this time, telling him I had a courier coming down soon who would probably be interested. I ended up with a couple of ounces of crystal meth. Not long afterward I did a second buy from him.
My next target was a Hells Angels prospect whom I’d got to know at the toy run. His name was Zach Carpenter and he worked at a tattoo parlor across from Dumont’s. He’d done a cover-up tattoo for me before Christmas and at that time I’d sounded him out about scoring some drugs.
“I don’t have anything now but will soon,” he’d said.
We saw each other at church night in mid-January and I mentioned it again.
“I’ll come by your place tomorrow,” he said, and did. I bought an ounce of meth from him.
My handlers didn’t try to stop me from making the buys, but they weren’t excited about them or even the least bit encouraging. It struck me as somewhat odd.
Their lack of enthusiasm, however, was easier to handle than some other shit they pulled. One time Purple Sue dropped by for
a visit and before leaving asked, “Is it okay if I do a line before I leave?”
“Sure,” I answered, though the question was more rhetorical than anything. Sue was already pulling out her little bag of crank, and had drawn out a line and snorted it within seconds. Then she got on her purple Harley and sped off.
Later that day, the phone rang. It was Ryan, who wasn’t even supposed to be calling me.
“We could arrest you for that,” he announced.
“For what?” I answered, honestly mystified. I’d forgotten about Sue’s line, and even if I’d recalled it I wouldn’t have thought it cause for anyone, even Ryan, to come down on me.
“For letting someone do drugs on your premises,” he said.
“What?!” I answered.
“For letting someone do drugs on your premises.”
There was a pause. Finally I had to ask him, “Are you on drugs now?”
They didn’t let it go at that. A couple of weeks later I was asked by a gang member if I could use my photo and computer skills to concoct some fake ID for a Dago Angel who was being sought by police. I said sure and scheduled a shoot for the following afternoon, duly informing my handlers.
As the fugitive and a buddy of his pulled into the parking, the phone rang. It was Ryan, who was monitoring the cameras from the listening post, telling me the guys had arrived. “And don’t let them do drugs in your place and thereby contribute in the distribution of narcotics yourself,” he said.
Again it seemed like nothing more than an effort to provoke me.
Eventually, I began to think that the DEA or someone within it had a hidden agenda, perhaps to derail the whole case. It was an idea that seemed more and more plausible after a phone call I received later in January. It was from an FBI agent in the force’s San Francisco office. He asked if I could come up and meet him. “We’d like to talk to you about a few things,” he explained.
A few days later I met with the G-man, who was a Hells Angels specialist, and a colleague of his at a restaurant in San Mateo or San Carlos—one of San Fran’s southern suburbs. He seemed to know all about the case even if the Feebs were conspicuous by their absence from Operation Five Star. Then he got to the point of the meeting, which may have explained that absence. The FBI, it seemed, had very deep misgivings about the San Diego DEA office.
“We think there might be a leak there and we’d like you to help us figure it out,” he said.
It didn’t take me long to say no. My life would have just got too complicated, too messy, if I’d agreed to help investigate the lead agency employing me to investigate the Angels. I needed someone I could be straight with, someone I wouldn’t have to watch my back around—even if they weren’t necessarily being straight with me.
Just as would have been the case if I’d been dealing with criminals, refusing the offer meant that I couldn’t know anything more about it. So I didn’t ask, nor did I share with him my own misgivings about Ryan and some of my other handlers. I just didn’t know the G-man well enough, and suspected that saying something could come around and bite me in the ass later.
“You will let us know if you notice anything out of the ordinary or illegal, won’t you?” he asked before I left.
“Of course,” I said, and headed back to El Cajon.
The notion that my handlers had a hidden agenda of some sort—whether it was torpedoing the investigation, edging me out of it or something else altogether—was buttressed a week or two after my return from San Francisco when they told me to introduce two undercover ATF agents into the case as my “associates.” As had been the case months earlier, I didn’t have a problem with this plan in theory. In fact, I thought it could actually help. Associates could show that I had a life beyond El Cajon and the Hells Angels; I could pretend that the two were part of my crew from a past criminal life; and, of course, they would serve as backup for me against both the Hells Angels and the Mongols, who had recently been flexing their muscles in the San Diego area.
The San Diego Mongols chapter was small and low-key, maybe a half-dozen members, but that hadn’t stopped them from causing trouble. In January, the Hells Angels had planned a barbecue in a downtown parking lot. That same day, coincidentally, about four hundred Mongols passed through San Diego on a run from L.A. to Mexico and decided to drop in. Needless to say, the Angels lay low. The Mongols later retired to Cheetah’s, the strip bar Taz managed—a fact that had made Taz persona non grata among the Angels. According to Angels protocol, he should have refused them entry and taken the inevitable beating.
The Mongols had also made a much more subtle show of force in Hell Cajon. Monk, the San Diego chapter president of the Mongols, had quietly walked into Dumont’s alone and wearing his colors one weekday afternoon, sat down at the bar and ordered a pitcher of beer.
The barmaid, whom I always knew as the Wiener Girl for the tricks she would perform with a hot dog, didn’t know what to do, so she phoned Ramona Pete at home. He told her to serve the guy, and sent Bobby Perez and another member over to keep an eye on him. But Monk was making a statement, not trouble. He just drank his pitcher and left.
The Mongols’ actions had put the Hells Angels on edge—and me by extension, since I was by that time what the police would describe as a known associate. So I thought having a backup or two might be a good thing. But the way Ryan and Brooks insisted on me bringing the two ATF undercovers into the Angels fold struck me as not just ridiculous but dangerous. They demanded complete and immediate immersion; they wanted the two agents to be with me at all times. I was suddenly to go from being a lone-wolf operator to a guy who didn’t travel anywhere without a couple of shadows. It made absolutely no sense, even after Ryan and Brooks argued that the two could corroborate drug purchases and eventually testify in court if need be. That could have been done by one agent who was with me occasionally, or simply by the video and audio tape. Being accompanied by both agents, at all times, would just have been a red flag and, in its own way, a provocation.
Making matters worse, the two undercover ATFs seemed to have both studied Badass Bikers 101 and were happy to play the part without any originality. I knew them as Rocky and Highway Mike. Rocky had a black ponytail most of the way down his back and muscled, tattooed arms. Highway Mike was a bit older, a bit balder and, at five-eleven, several inches shorter than Rocky. He wasn’t quite as muscular or tattooed, but he made up for it with his aggressive, in-your-face attitude. Their style ran counter to what I had built my whole career as an infiltrator on—being small and easy to get along with, not a walking, talking cliché. In other words, a convincing human being and a pleasant respite for bad guys in a testosterone-charged world.
My handlers turned a deaf ear to my protests, and as of mid-February Rocky and Highway Mike were my constant companions. Immediately, my relations with the Angels deteriorated.
“Who are those fucking guys?” was a regular refrain the first time I dared bring the pair to Dumont’s, one evening when there was a party and most everyone was welcome. And once the two became fixtures at my shop, I suddenly saw a lot less walk-in traffic. Gang members just stopped dropping by or would call beforehand. “Make sure you get rid of those guys before we get there,” they would usually insist before coming over.
That was easier said than done. The two agents had orders to stick with me as much as possible, and often wouldn’t leave even when the bikers demanded that I receive them alone. “They have to meet us sometime,” Rocky and Highway Mike would say.
On one occasion when Zach Carpenter and another member instructed me to be alone but my shadows wouldn’t leave, the bikers turned on their heels and left as soon as they saw Rocky and Highway Mike. It wasn’t that the gang members suspected the pair were cops. Rather, their first concern was that they were bikers with loyalties to another club. Given the recent tension with the Mongols, that was even worse.
Regularly I’d plead with my handlers, especially Brooks from the ATF, to pull Rocky and Mike, or at least one of them, f
rom the operation, but I was always stonewalled.
“Do the best you can,” they’d say. “They’re not going anywhere.”
The investigation effectively ground to a halt. It was worse than before Christmas. Even if I hadn’t had any direction then, the Angels had at least seen me as an ally. Now they regarded me much more cagily.
I was thoroughly discouraged, especially because I felt that I had finally been getting somewhere. I wondered if I was introducing the two agents so I could be yanked, and I contemplated bailing on the whole investigation. I began to wait for the inevitable, really just putting in time.
Then, about a month after Rocky and Highway Mike had landed on me, Pat Ryan came into my store on Cuyamaca Street and told me to set up a major coke purchase. There was no exchange of pleasantries. “This is what I want you to do,” he said, his usual opener. No consultation, no “Do you think it might be a good idea if . . .” Just a direct command: “I want you to get a hold of Bobby and make an order he can’t fill himself, an order he’ll have to go to his SOS for,” Ryan said, using police shorthand for “source of supply.”
“Fine. How much are we talking about?”
It sounded like standard procedure, a move that might let us begin climbing the ladder to the bigger players. Since most of my previous deals had been for four ounces, the biggest a pound, I thought Ryan would want three or four pounds, five maximum.
“About a hundred pounds,” he replied.
“Okay,” I said, keeping my surprise to myself. This was it, I immediately assumed, the takedown deal. If I’d been speaking with Brooks or any other cop in the operation, I would have simply asked. Or more likely they would have just told me. With Ryan, however, things were so strained that had I put the question to him directly, he would have refused to answer just to spite me.
Like that, the meeting was over.
Later that day, I phoned Bobby Perez. As much as anybody, Bobby was at the top of the police’s wish list of gang members they wanted arrested—another fact that made me think this was the takedown buy. They weren’t after him for his contacts, influence or big-league criminal activities, as they were with Brandon Kent; they wanted Bobby off the street because of his raw viciousness. A street-educated dealer and club enforcer, his only loyalty was to the gang, his only concern the protection and promotion of its interests. Bobby hadn’t had any time for me when I began to show my face around El Cajon, but he had warmed to me after his girlfriend started a fight at Bonita’s, a Mexican bar next door to Dumont’s. Bobby had found himself facing down an angry horde with no one but me backing him up. The incident ended when everyone went their own way after an angry staredown. Bobby, however, didn’t forget who had stood by him.