by Alex Caine
I pulled off my Hells Angels support T-shirt—When in doubt, knock ’em out, it read—and put on the vest. It was several sizes too big for me, but I had a feeling style wasn’t going to be an issue wherever we were headed. I wore it inside when I paid for my gas and stocked up on supplies—several bottles of water for me and the dog, chips and other snacks. We were clearly heading to the burn, and I didn’t want to be stuck hungry and thirsty in the desert. Cowboy either already had his own supplies or didn’t share my concerns. I didn’t ask.
Once I was back in my truck, we headed south on 95 again. We hadn’t traveled more than a dozen miles when we turned right onto a gravel road and then quickly turned left again onto a dirt track running parallel to the highway. We drove along it a short distance, up a rise to a point where we were perhaps thirty yards above the highway, at the top of a steep slope. The area was treeless and exposed, but sufficiently elevated from the roadbed that we and our vehicles couldn’t be seen by anyone traveling either direction along the highway. I found myself a spot among about a dozen pickups parked crookedly and just out of sight of the highway. Before I got out of the truck, Rocky came over.
“Leave the keys in the ignition in case someone has to move it,” he said.
I did as I was told, rolled down the windows to keep the truck from becoming an oven and stepped out, Dog scampering along at my heels. Then we followed the track a bit farther up the rise into a bizarre and busy scene. Fifteen or twenty men—some of whom I knew, including Highway Mike, others I recognized from Jaybird’s, still others I’d never seen before—all wearing Mongols colors, were digging shallow trenches to lie in, taping ammo clips together to allow for quicker reloading, inspecting their guns. Some of the agents had MP5s, others MAC-11s. One was carrying an AR-15. I began to feel uncomfortably under-armed. My only hardware was the KA-BAR knife that had been issued to me twenty-two years earlier on my way in-country in Vietnam—a place this scene in the desert was beginning to take me back to.
An agent I remembered from Jaybird’s house threw one of the small folding shovels my way and told me to find a spot. I found a place on the high edge of the bluff, as far from the trucks and up the track as almost anyone else. We were all spaced anywhere from one to five yards apart and there were only two agents to my right. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best spot. It gave me an excellent view of the road, but I was very exposed from behind.
As I prepared my hole, Dog ran around, greeting those agents he knew, making friends with new ones and earning himself at least one enemy.
“The dog shit in my hole!” one guy down the line shouted all of a sudden. A chorus of guffawing went up.
“Better you than me,” another agent answered.
“Can’t think of a better place,” said another.
I kept quiet. No one had really spoken to me yet and there didn’t seem to be a great deal to talk about. Whatever was going on, I figured we’d be there for a while, more than enough time for chat and to get somebody to share some information with me. Then someone’s radio crackled. A second later the guy yelled, “They’re coming down the road now!”
Everyone hit his hole and looked down 95. So much for finding out what was going on, or for eating any of those chips I’d brought with me. Either our intelligence on this operation was more precise than usual or the bad guys had watches. After a couple of minutes I could see a small convoy of SUVs coming down the road to my right. I looked to my left, back up the highway in the direction we’d come from, expecting to see interceptor vehicles ready to block off their escape, but the road was clear. Maybe they were just well hidden, I thought.
Within moments, the first of the four SUVs was directly below us. I was still wondering how they planned to stop the vehicles when the agents all around me opened fire. In seconds, the SUV was ventilated by bullet holes, screeching and swerving to a stop. The four doors opened and men piled out. The driver, clearly a Latino, came out shooting, but not for long. He hadn’t taken more than a step or two before he was shot in the head and it literally exploded. He’d either been hit by an armor-piercing round or by two bullets simultaneously. The guy behind him never even got his second foot on the ground before he was hit several times. The two on the passenger side fared better. They were shielded by their SUV and were able to get into a crouch before they ran toward the other three vehicles arriving behind them. Swirling dust and dirt kicked up by the trucks and the bullets helped their cover. Still, their chances of making it would have been slim to non-existent had the police operation not gone south at that particular moment.
With all the automatic gunfire, no one noticed the roar of the approaching bikes until they were almost right behind us. When the sound finally got my attention, I looked toward it, behind me and to my right. About twenty yards away, roaring up the track we had followed ourselves, was the vanguard of a staggered line of at least a dozen Harleys, most of them with passengers on the back. They had come out of nowhere and weren’t happy to see us: the passengers on the back were shooting at me and the line of agents, all of us exposed from behind. Mercifully, the firepower they were packing was a lot less impressive than our side’s. Most of them only had semi-automatic handguns.
But all it takes is one bullet, as the agent a yard or so to my left found out. I glanced over at him and he was lying on his stomach half out of his hole. He wasn’t the only victim on our side. After the SUVs on the highway came to a stop, several agents had recklessly gone over the top and run down toward them. But after starting down the hill, they were distracted by the shooting and shouting behind them. In their confusion, at least three hesitated and stood up from their crouches—then promptly went down after taking bullets from men in the SUVs. The drivers of the vehicles seized the moment and got the hell out of there—apparently only the lead truck had been crippled. They hit the gas and tore off around the far side of the stalled SUV, using it for a moment’s cover.
Behind us, the bikes roared past, going as fast as was possible on a bumpy dirt track. Only two went down, hit by agents’ bullets. A cloud of dust rose behind the others as they turned off the track and raced north on 95.
By this time I had grabbed the nine-millimeter semi of the dead agent beside me—he was one of the less well armed—and pointed it at the fast-disappearing line of bikes. I fired off a round and then another and another. I didn’t come close to hitting anyone, but the act of shooting gave me a sense of relief. When the magazine was empty, I threw the gun back toward its owner. The firefight, which had lasted only a matter of seconds even if it seemed an eternity, was over.
Dust filled the air and an eerie silence descended, broken only by the groaning, coughing and wheezing of injured men. For a moment everyone seemed to keep to themselves, catching their breath, checking to see if they had indeed made it through unscathed, and trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. Then, just as the uninjured agents began to tend to the injured and inspect the dead, Cowboy grabbed me.
“We gotta get outta here,” he said, pulling me to my feet by my vest.
That was when I noticed for the first time the large tattoo on the inside of his forearm: MFFM in two-inch-high letters. Mongols Forever, Forever Mongols. It was another mystery on a day full of them. But I couldn’t afford it much thought. I hurried to keep up with him as he strode back to the truck. On the way, I had to step around a downed Harley with a dead Hells Angel next to it—his patch said Arizona. I glanced down the slope to the highway. There I counted three bodies around the abandoned, bullet-riddled SUV, and one more farther back. Turning toward our trucks, my eyes met those of a DEA colleague of Ryan’s. He didn’t acknowledge us or say anything; he just stood there, staring.
When I got to my pickup, it was already running. I opened the door and Dog, who had run around in a panic through most of the shootout until he found me again, jumped in. He scuttled into the rear of the cab and hid, shaking, as rattled as I was. When Cowboy’s truck pulled out, I was right behind it, and we were s
oon hauling ass back toward Laughlin and Bullhead.
On the way, question after question rushed into my head—none of them with any answers. Why hadn’t whoever was at the other end of the radio warned us about the outriders? How could the motorcycles have avoided detection? Why hadn’t there been any interceptor vehicles? Had police wanted some of the Hells Angels to escape? Why had the agents gone over the top like a bunch of kamikazes—just so their Mongols colors would be seen? It had been reckless to the point of suicidal. And what was with the MFFM tattoo on the muscled arm of the man driving the pickup I was racing to keep up with? I had never run into another agent or infiltrator who went so far as to get a gang tattoo. Who was this guy?
I wasn’t about to ask him, however, as he pulled back into the Tempo station in Needles and took my Mongols vest back. As he leaned into my window, he asked, “Can you make your way back alone from here?”
As directionally dysfunctional as I am, I wasn’t about to become a problem. I wanted to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible, from the scene of the ambush and anyone involved in it.
“Yeah,” I answered as I put my Hells Angels support T-shirt back on.
That was the last I ever saw of Cowboy.
I pulled up to Jaybird’s confused and not knowing what to do next. I didn’t have much time to dwell on it, however. My cellphone rang. It was Brooks, my ATF handler.
“I want you to come over to the hotel,” he said. “We’re in room 303.”
I pulled a U-turn and headed toward the bridge to Laughlin. It was mid-afternoon by now and the River Run party was getting under way. Traffic was bumper to bumper, festive and boisterous. It all struck me as surreal. Didn’t these people know what had just happened?
I fought to get a grip on myself. Of course they didn’t. Still, I knew that important meetings were happening somewhere and instructions would soon be coming my way. By the time I reached the Flamingo Hotel, I felt better, in control of myself, if not of the day’s events.
I took the elevator up to 303 and found one of my handlers alone in the room. Brooks was nowhere to be seen. He was a talkative man, but today he offered only perfunctory chitchat. “How you holding up?” he asked. I just shrugged.
Then he got straight to the point. The ambush that day was not to be discussed with anyone, period—not my handlers, not his superiors, not anyone who might come sniffing around. If anyone, cop or otherwise, brought the subject up, I was to tell him right away. As far as everyone was concerned, he said, it never happened.
“You got that?” he stressed, looking me deep in the eyes. “It never happened.”
The other orders he gave me were delivered almost as an afterthought. I was to hang around town and wait for further instructions from Bobby Perez as to the completion of our drug deal; disappearing from town at this point would look suspicious.
The meeting lasted no more than fifteen minutes. No one else had come into the room, and I didn’t run into any other cops I knew at the Flamingo or outside. I got into my truck and headed to Jaybird’s once again. I was dirty and tired and needed to just sit for a while.
I had a lot to figure out. Strange as it may seem, one of my main concerns was how I would ever write notes of the day’s events. On all jobs, since my first operation in Hong Kong more than two decades earlier, I had been contractually required to keep accurate notes. But that didn’t seem to be the way they did business in southern California. I had done so anyway, as much from force of habit as anything else. Today, however, there were just too many question marks, starting with a verified body count. I had seen a lot of people get hit, but I had no idea how many died. Except, that is, for the Mexican, the agent next to me and the Hells Angel from Arizona—there was no way any of them survived.
I could be reasonably sure of one thing: the drugs and most of the Hells Angels had got away. Unless, of course, the cops nabbed them farther down the road, but I doubted that. To arrest them at that point would have risked exposing the whole operation, which surely wasn’t in the plans, judging by my conversation at the Flamingo.
I had other unanswered questions. As far as I knew, I was the only non-cop to have taken part in the ambush or to have any knowledge of it. That made me a loose cannon in the eyes of my law enforcement employers, one they might want to tie up in any number of ways, some of which were highly unpleasant to contemplate. I had been asking myself all afternoon why they had even brought me to the ambush or let me know about it. Everyone involved had to be considered a security risk in this kind of black op; as the only non-agent, non-American, I had to be seen as far and away the biggest such risk. I wondered if their original plan in taking me out to the desert with them was to kill me or let me be killed. If so, why hadn’t they done it? Why had Cowboy pulled me out of there in such a hurry? Surely my death would have been even easier to cover up in the chaos of the outriders’ counterattack.
Of course, in retrospect, a lot of my thinking was paranoid confusion. Nothing made any sense to me. Except one thing: it was time to get the hell out. As soon as I got back to El Cajon, I would gather my shit together, throw it in the truck and head home to Canada.
I spent that night hanging out on the strip and the next day took it easy at Jaybird’s. The mood at the house had changed after the ambush. The subject everyone wanted to talk about—at least those who were aware of it—was off limits. So, more often than not, an uneasy silence filled the place. I didn’t mind—all the storytelling and bragging had worn thin on me, and the quiet gave me the chance to catch up on some sleep.
That’s what I was doing the next day when Jaybird came over to the couch and shook me awake. “We all have to go into town and hang out for a while,” he said.
It was Friday night, and Laughlin’s Casino Drive, which hugs the Colorado River as it flows south past the town, was rocking. The Flamingo was at the top end of the strip and that’s where I headed once again. The hotel was home to many top Angels as well as cops that week, and it had been reckless for my handlers to call me to a meeting there the previous day. I had taken it as an indication of their disorganization in the aftermath of the botched ambush. My cover, however, seemed to be still intact and when I arrived that evening I found Ramona Pete, the owner of Dumont’s, hanging around the front of the hotel. I chatted with him for a bit and then wandered about, making my way casually down the strip.
As I walked, I saw small groups of Hells Angels talking in a serious, conspiratorial manner at odds with the backslapping bonhomie that otherwise pervaded the run. In front of the Colorado Belle, I noticed Brooks. Since he was new to the ATF, not well known to the bikers and dressed like any other tourist, I judged it safe to chat with him briefly, making it look like a casual conversation between strangers.
“Something’s going on,” I said.
“I know,” he answered. “I can feel it too.”
He also relayed to me some intel that he’d just been given: about eighty Mongols had recently arrived and were taking over the south end of the strip. I was wearing another of my Hells Angels support T-shirts and a vest with a patch that read Red & White supporter, so Brooks offered a bit of advice: “Stay out of the area.”
I didn’t disobey him, at least not immediately. Instead, I wandered across the street from the Belle to the Ramada, where a group of Iron Horsemen I knew from San Diego and El Cajon were standing around shooting the breeze. Along with the Red Devils, the Saddle Tramps and the legendary Booze Fighters, the Horsemen were a Hells Angels puppet club in southern California. I figured that if something was about to happen, they might have been told what.
Knowing better than to pry, I just sidled up to them and listened to the conversation. Before I heard anything interesting, however, I noticed groups of Hells Angels, including Ramona Pete, briskly heading down the strip in twos and threes. That’s when I disregarded my handler’s advice. It was about 1:45 a.m. and all hell was about to break loose.
When I arrived outside Harrah’s, I came across Pe
te and a small group of Hells Angels and supporters waiting for reinforcements. I joined them and within five minutes there were about twenty of us—enough, it was determined by some fool, to make a respectable fighting force. We headed through the automatic sliding doors. I stuck close to Pete. He was as influential as Hells Angels got in El Cajon, and even if I had resolved to cash things in as far as the investigation was concerned, I still reflexively wanted to impress the right bikers. If he saw me, a short, slight, aging supporter, standing tall beside him and the rest of the gang, it could only pay off in the long run.
The Mongols were clustered around a bar in the middle of the casino. The men around me headed straight for it. There was no question what was about to happen. There were a few words, but not many. The fists and feet—and any object at hand that might be used as a club—started flying almost immediately. I landed one blow—a high side kick—on a Mongol who was going after Pete. But it was soon every man for himself, and Pete and I were separated. A herd of stampeding seniors and other gamblers—screaming and clutching their change buckets—made the confusion that much worse.
It didn’t take long before knives were drawn. That—along with the fact that we were seriously outnumbered—was my cue to get out of there, and quick. When I reached the doors, I heard shots ring out. That only made me move faster.
I hightailed it back to my truck and headed for Bullhead City. I felt like a fish swimming upriver. All the traffic, pedestrian and motorized, was moving toward Harrah’s. News of the confrontation had evidently spread quickly. I made it across the bridge to Bullhead just in time: state troopers closed it almost as soon as they got news of the battle, and many of the rank-and-file Hells Angels, staying at the Gretchen, were stuck on the Arizona side of the Colorado River. But that didn’t stop them trying to get to the action. As I passed the hotel, I noticed activity along the shoreline. People were getting into boats. I tried to call my handlers and warn them, but the cellphone system had collapsed under a surge of activity.