by Alex Caine
He’d later volunteered to back me up on a crystal meth deal I’d done with Smokey. He didn’t have much to do—he just sat there in a corner of my office wearing his colors and looking bad, his hand inside his vest and obviously very close to a piece, as I bought a football of meth. The deal went as smoothly as it could, the Mexicans evidently impressed by Bobby’s scowling silence.
Since then I’d bought from Bobby himself, so he’d never become as wary of Rocky and Highway Mike as other Dago Angels. And besides, the big buy was too tempting to resist; Bobby was chronically broke and this promised a major payday.
Nothing incriminating was ever explicitly mentioned over the phone with the Angels, of course, so when I called Bobby after receiving my orders from Ryan, our conversation was brief.
“I want to talk to you,” I said. “Can you drop by?”
“Okay,” he answered, and that was it—as long as most phone conversations with Bobby.
The next day, he came by the store. Happily, he dropped in on one of the rare occasions when Rocky and Highway Mike weren’t around, and he was open and relaxed. Beyond selling me drugs, Bobby had another good reason to visit. His house had been raided around Christmas, and police had found a substantial arsenal inside—sawed-off shotguns, a couple of machine guns and half a crack of hand grenades, six or so. The house wasn’t rented in Bobby’s name and he wasn’t there at the time; still, police charged him with possession of illegal weapons. A condition of his bail prohibited him from leaving the state unless it was work-related. So he needed a job—that’s where I came in. That day he was picking up a letter confirming he was an employee of Posterplus. He was supposedly going to attend motorcycle runs across the Southwest on my behalf, and hand out pamphlets promoting our services. But we also talked about what I’d asked him there for.
“I finally landed this big customer I’ve been chasing for over a year,” I told him. “These guys are cool. They buy once, maybe twice in a given year. Minimal risk, you know. That’s why they want serious volume.”
“That’s the way to do business,” Bobby said.
“Problem is, where am I going to find one hundred pounds?”
“I might be able to help you,” he said—exactly what I’d wanted him to say.
Nothing was mentioned of the big coke buy for at least a week, which hardly surprised me. The police and I had expected it would take perhaps a couple of months, maybe more, to put together. Bobby was also not someone you expected regular progress reports from. Then, perhaps ten days later, Bobby came up to me at Dumont’s and told me that he’d be over to see me at my office later. If the subject was too delicate to talk about even at a friendly bar like Dumont’s, he must have news about our coke deal, I figured.
I made my way back to the office, on the way phoning Ryan’s partner to tell him to make sure he got the meeting on tape. There had been no one in the police listening post adjacent to Posterplus to press the record button during the first meeting, and I didn’t want that to happen again.
Within ten minutes of my return, Bobby walked in, and not alone. To my surprise, he was with Mark Toycen, Dago’s hard-ass sergeant-at-arms. A sergeant-at-arms’s job was to enforce club discipline and ensure the club’s security. For the Dago chapter, this meant being particularly paranoid about any new faces—that’s why I was so surprised to see him in my office. His presence could only mean one of two things: either he was directly, personally involved in the procurement of the coke or it was going to be a deal that involved the whole chapter and he was there as its representative. If he simply wanted to check me out, he would never have shown up to a meeting where a major drug sale was going to be discussed—that would have been just plain stupid.
Bobby got straight to the point. “We have a hundred kilos going through the River Run.”
That was more than twice as much as the hundred pounds I’d ordered, but I figured if this was to be the takedown deal, then the bigger the bust the better.
“Great,” I said. “I’ll call my contact. We might be able to take all of it, but I have to check first.”
I asked Bobby about delivery—whether the cocaine would be brought to me in El Cajon or whether I would have to pick it up myself in Laughlin, Nevada, the tiny casino town in the southern tip of the state, on the Arizona border, that hosted the big biker gathering known as the River Run every April.
“You got to take it from there,” Bobby said.
We didn’t talk about price—it was understood it would be less than ten thousand dollars per pound—and I didn’t want to commit myself to a set quantity too quickly. Ideally, things would be left as loose as possible and final details would only be nailed down at the River Run. Then, as negotiations proceeded, I would perhaps have the opportunity to meet Bobby’s partners in the deal—or at least find out who they were. Bobby didn’t want to push too hard either. However nasty he was and however long he’d been a Hells Angel, it was by far the biggest deal he’d ever put together, and it offered the promise of a major payday. He didn’t want to say or do anything that might mess it up.
So we left things like that. Toycen hadn’t said a word the entire meeting and kept it that way as he and Bobby walked out barely twenty minutes after they’d entered.
As soon as they were gone, I got a call from Ryan in the listening post saying he and the others wouldn’t require a debrief. They’d heard everything and got it on tape.
Two days after my big meeting with Bobby and Toycen, Rocky came by my store.
“Let’s go for a ride,” he said, and we got on our government-supplied Harley-Davidsons and headed over to El Cajon Boulevard. There we went to what we called a “civilian bar”—one not frequented by the gang. He ordered a beer and I got a Pepsi. Then he told me something that left me not knowing what to think—though the cowboy in me kind of liked the craziness of the idea.
The police couldn’t afford to buy over two hundred pounds of coke, he explained, but there was no way they were going to let all or even any of it hit the street. And it wasn’t yet time for the takedown.
“So we’ve decided to steal the coke,” he said.
I was speechless. For a moment. Then I saw the flaw in the plan.
“Bobby will know I’m involved,” I said.
“Not if we’re wearing Mongol patches,” he said flatly.
As it turned out, about a year earlier the DEA and ATF had come down hard on the Mongols in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, arresting dozens on drug and gun offenses and seizing all sorts of evidence, including more than fifty club patches. These had been moldering in some police storage room ever since. Now, Rocky said, they would be pressed into service.
I was shocked, but also intrigued and excited. The plan had an audaciousness that I found appealing. At the same time, the term “rogue cops” came into my head and wouldn’t leave. Especially after Rocky’s parting instructions: “Never discuss this inside the studio because it might end up on tape and we’d have to explain it later.”
I stayed at the table in the bar for a while after Rocky left, nursing my Pepsi and thinking. The police were looking for plausible deniability, I figured. They wanted to be able to deny the operation ever existed and to be able to cover their asses if the operation blew up. I didn’t want to be the only one without a chair if the music stopped. But how I might accomplish that, I had no idea.
The River Run wasn’t more than a week or two away, and the following days were filled with planning the trip and the logistics of the deal with Bobby. I presumed that the cops were themselves busy orchestrating the burn, but I was entirely out of the loop on that. In other operations I had been treated as a full member of the team, kept up to speed on any developments in the case, my advice and expertise solicited, appreciated and often acted upon. In this investigation, however, I had got used to being treated as an outsider. My debriefings were more like interrogations and I was never given enough information to form a complete picture of where the operation was going.
I didn’t know when I had surveillance with me; I didn’t know when the tape was rolling. The police, I had the impression, considered me suspect simply because I didn’t have a badge.
I wasn’t just being sensitive. One day that week I left my computer webcam turned on in my studio, but turned off the monitor so it looked as if the computer was shut down. When I later reviewed the video, I saw Ryan and his partner Hunter carefully sifting through my things, in particular my papers.
The only direction I got from the police regarding the burn at the River Run was to tell Bobby to deliver the goods to a house in the north end of Bullhead City, Laughlin’s much larger sister town on the Arizona side of the Colorado River. The house was rented by an undercover ATF agent known as Jaybird (Jay Dobyns), who by then had been infiltrating the Arizona Hells Angels for about two years. His cover was a loansharking and collections operation—Imperial Financial Corporation, Investment and Recovery Guidance, his business card read—and he was well inserted into the gang.
Jaybird, I told Bobby, was a criminal associate of mine and I would be staying at his house for the duration of the run. There was room for him and his girlfriend, too, I told Bobby, and initially he was going to take me up on the offer. Then he had to head to Laughlin a couple of days earlier than planned and took a room at the Gretchen Motor Inn in Bullhead, the headquarters of the Hells Angels rank-and-file for the run. (Most of the gang’s bigwigs stayed at two large casino hotels on the strip in Laughlin itself, the Riverside and the Flamingo. Many police were also staying at the Flamingo.)
Even if Bobby wasn’t going to stay at Jaybird’s, he had no problem with my request that any negotiations regarding the cocaine transaction take place there. It was all academic, as they say—or at least supposed to be. Through an informant close to Bobby, the police not only had learned that he was not to be part of the smuggling run but also had a good idea of the route the coke would be taking up from the Mexican border. They planned to have the drugs stolen before any negotiating took place. Still, they wanted to cover all the bases, and be sure there would be no last-minute surprises.
I made the drive from El Cajon to Laughlin, via Berdoo and Barstow, on Tuesday, April 23. With stops, it took the better part of the day, and I didn’t regret taking my Nissan pickup instead of my Harley. Originally, Rocky and Highway Mike were supposed to travel with me, but then Bobby had expressed interest in scoring a ride. So my ATF shadows made other plans, which suited me just fine, only to have Bobby go on ahead a couple of days early to organize the coke deal, I presumed. That was also just fine. Even if the truck was old and beginning to fall apart, it at least had air conditioning.
It also allowed me to take along a dog that, despite my best intentions, had become my near-constant companion over the preceding few months. Soon after I arrived in El Cajon, I’d run into a speed freak named Daryl trying to pawn the pooch outside Dumont’s. The dog was a Bichon Frise, but the tweaker had shaved him—or half of him—like a poodle in hopes the animal would fetch a better price, at least enough for his next high. I made a deal with Daryl: he’d give me the dog for free and I wouldn’t make him regret mistreating the poor thing. A DEA agent with a sense of humor got him a tag with the name Q-Dog—I was known to the bikers as Q-Bob, a nickname that had been given to me by Taz soon after my arrival when I’d mentioned I was from Quebec—but I never called him anything but Dog. It wasn’t that I lacked imagination. Rather, I’d planned to find him a new home as soon as possible. But after a month or so I’d grown attached to Dog, and he would come almost everywhere with me. He was a regular at Dumont’s, where Ramona Pete routinely gave him a little bowl of beer and let him drink it off the bar. And he never got in the way of my meeting people—just the opposite.
Dog was well received when we got to Jaybird’s in Bullhead as well. Without Bobby there, the house that week became a crash pad and hangout for undercover agents who were infiltrating biker gangs across the U.S. I’d never seen anything like it. There were agents inside the Pagans in the Northeast, the Outlaws in Florida, the Mongols in California, as well as several, like myself, infiltrating the Hells Angels in various parts of the country. The only major biker gang not at the River Run—and thus without a representative agent at Jaybird’s—was the Bandidos, my old friends. In the two decades the run had existed, the Bandidos had never shown up, just as the Hells Angels had never gone to the Four Corners Run, the other big biker get-together in the Southwest, where the Bandidos held court.
The parade of agents gave Jaybird’s place the feel of a small convention—a relaxed one since there were no handlers or suits to monitor the goings-on. It was fascinating and fun, but it also struck me as a crazy security risk. Pretty much all of law enforcement’s undercover biker eggs were together in one basket. Bobby knew exactly where I was staying, and had he dropped by he could easily have come across an agent affiliated with one of the Hells Angels’ rivals sitting on the couch having a beer. That might have got him asking some very awkward questions. And had one of us been targeted for any reason, a single bomb would have torpedoed any number of operations.
None of the other agents, however, seemed particularly bothered by the risks they were running. It took them no time at all to get into the spirit of the run and treat the week as a party. Beyond going down to the strip on rare occasions to hang with the clubs they were infiltrating, none of them were doing much work. Most of their time was spent sprawled on Jaybird’s couches or sitting around his dining room table drinking beer and telling stories.
Some of these agents seemed to have been playing their roles too long for their own good. Jaybird, for example, had gone so far as to get his biker name—Jaybird—tattooed across the top of his back in the shape of a top rocker. Worse, according to what I heard from the ATF handlers, he never reported or called in unless pressured to. His wife had thrown him out, and he didn’t seem to care. He referred to her as “the bitch,” without fail, as a biker would.
Then there was Bubba. He had been under in the Los Angeles area for about five years and knew absolutely everyone. He was an exceptional case—he hadn’t created an entirely new identity for his undercover work; rather, he continued to live with his real wife and kids, who became part of the act. Whether it was because they kept him grounded or the fact that he was only intel and not operational, Bubba didn’t seem as subsumed by his character as someone like Jaybird. He’d managed to keep a solid fix on who he was, to remember that he was a cop.
Some agents at Jaybird’s went beyond drinking and telling stories in their bid to have a good time. As a late arrival at the run, I got stuck sleeping on the living room couch. It wasn’t a big deal; I’d bedded down on much worse. The second night I was there, I fell asleep around midnight and then woke up about four-thirty. The house was dark and quiet. All I could hear was my rumbling stomach. I turned on the kitchen light and checked out the fridge. As I started to make myself a sandwich, one of the bedroom doors opened and a female ATF agent I knew as Barbie came out, also heading to the fridge. She seemed embarrassed, and I assumed it was because she was wearing only a T-shirt and underwear. Then Highway Mike stuck his head out of the room and asked her if she had found any beer. I looked at him, then at her.
She looked at the floor and mumbled something like “How you doing?” before grabbing two beers and heading back to the bedroom.
I sat down and clicked on the tube. Out comes Rocky with a woman.
“Could you tell Mike I just went to drive my lady friend home?” Rocky said to me. The girl was obviously a stripper, but I had to make sure.
“And you are?” I asked.
“Oh, hi, my name is Candy and I’m a dancer. I met Rocky last night at the club.”
I couldn’t believe it: this was supposed to be a safe house for undercover agents! And Rocky brings over a woman who, if she was like most of her colleagues, partied regularly with bikers and provided them with some of their most valuable intel. I should have gone home right then.
Instead, an hour or two later I put Dog in my truck and headed toward town. There was a pancake joint right across from the Gretchen Motor Inn and the parking lot was filled with dozens of bikes and men and women having breakfast beers and hanging out. After my recent experience with the agents, I found the scene strangely comforting. Instead of going in for my own breakfast, I got a Pepsi from a machine and sat on the tailgate of the truck, idly chatting with whoever went by and just blending in.
I had been there a good half-hour when my cellphone rang. It was Rocky, telling me to get back to the house immediately. No reason provided.
When I got there, he met me at the door. “We’re out of here,” he said and, pointing at a pickup with huge tires, a rebel flag in the back window and a vanity license plate that read Cowboy, added, “Follow that truck.” Again he gave no explanation.
When we got to the first major intersection, I expected to turn right, back toward the Gretchen, the bridge crossing to Laughlin and the River Run action. Instead, we turned left and headed south on Highway 95. Soon we were rolling through the desert, and I realized we weren’t going on a short drive. I turned on the AC, mostly for Dog, who was panting.
After about twenty miles, Cowboy pulled into a Tempo gas station in Needles, on the California–Arizona border. I drew in beside the pickup, and Cowboy himself—who looked more biker than cop (in fact he didn’t look at all cop)—came over and, without saying a word, pushed a leather vest with the Mongols colors through my lowered window.