Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  When I got to Jaybird’s, he was there with two or three other agents. I filled them in on what had happened and told them about the bikers trying to cross the river by boat. Jaybird then used his radio to pass the information on to the troopers, and several boatloads of Hells Angels were subsequently stopped. Not long afterward, I was fast asleep on Jaybird’s couch again, for the last time, thankfully.

  The next morning, Jaybird’s house was abuzz with chatter about the shootout at Harrah’s. Finally, some action they could talk about, and they did so eagerly, to the exclusion of doing anything useful. By noon I had had my fill and headed out, under orders from my handlers not to stray far.

  I went to the Gretchen, where the Hells Angels were on a war footing. They’d learned that three of their brothers had been killed in the fight with the Mongols the night before, and they were feeling both under assault and intent on revenge. They had forced all the other patrons to find other accommodation and posted members of the Red Devils and Iron Horsemen around the hotel as security. I parked on a side street near the river and walked around to the front, where two rows of cars formed a makeshift barricade by the entrance. When I was twenty or thirty feet from the front door, a shotgun-packing Hells Angel asked me what my business was.

  “I’m here to see Bobby Perez, HA Dago,” I answered. “My name is Q-Bob.”

  The biker radioed in and after a few minutes a Hells Angels sergeant-at-arms came to check me out. I explained that Bobby was on probation and wasn’t even supposed to be out of California. “I’m his emergency ride out,” I explained. “I’m here to see if he needs me.”

  Another call was made on the radio, this one by the sergeant-at-arms, and Zach Carpenter appeared. He gave the okay and accompanied me into the main reception area. Given the mood, I got the impression the gang was expecting an all-out attack on the hotel. There were patches everywhere, all armed and very serious. Zach handed me over to yet another Hells Angel, who led me to the hotel office. There was no manager in sight; the gang had turned it into their war room. I was patted down and vetted once more before another sergeant-at-arms accompanied me down the hall to Bobby’s ground-level room. He was with his girlfriend and another couple. Seeing me, he beckoned me outside and back to the lobby area, where we talked.

  After a bit of small talk I told him I was hoping to leave that day because of all the heat resulting from the shootout. “But I don’t want to abandon you here if you guys need a ride back to El Cajon.”

  “None of us can go anywhere without the say-so from above,” Bobby said. “But thanks for coming and asking.”

  It was as warm and effusive an expression of thanks as I’d ever heard Bobby make. When he then grabbed my hand and hugged me to emphasize his point, I had to wonder if I was talking to the same Bobby Perez.

  “If you want me to stay and help out in any way, I’ll hole out somewhere,” I said, caught up in the warmth of the moment.

  Bobby thought for a second. “Well, you can help by taking a couple things back for me.”

  “Sure,” I answered. “Whatever you want.”

  With that, he instructed me to wait there while he went back to his room. A few minutes later he returned and handed me his Fender Stratocaster guitar and a .380 semi-automatic wrapped in a nylon stocking.

  “Thanks again, man,” he said after he’d accompanied me to the Gretchen’s back gate, where my truck was parked.

  He hadn’t mentioned the coke deal. Bobby and the rest of the gang were obviously too preoccupied with the events of the night before—and the botched ambush—to think of much more than circling the wagons. And considering that I didn’t have a couple million or so in cash handy to hold up my end of the bargain, I certainly wasn’t going to bring the matter up.

  I returned to Jaybird’s house and filled my handlers in. Just being seen in the Hells Angels compound under such circumstances was a major coup for my street cred with the gang members. Being asked to help out an influential member was an even greater sign of trust. Even if I had decided to pack my bags as soon as I got back to El Cajon, the gang’s confidence made me proud of my work. Perhaps, I began to think, there might be a way for me to stick with the investigation.

  My enthusiasm didn’t last long.

  Brooks asked me for the .380. I thought the agents would just want to take a ballistic match and register the serial number before I took it back to El Cajon, but Brooks told me it wasn’t going to work that way.

  “It might be evidence,” he said. “You can’t have it back.”

  I was dumbfounded. “What do you mean I can’t have it back?”

  “Well, he’s a convicted felon.”

  “So?”

  “We just can’t release a gun back to him under these circumstances.”

  I told him that not giving Bobby the gun back was going to destroy any credibility I had built up with the gang and, in particular, with one of its most influential and dangerous members in southern California. But Brooks wouldn’t listen.

  “All you have to tell him is that there was a roadblock and you threw it out the window,” he said.

  It was clear that arguing my case was as futile as it had been when I pleaded with my handlers to give me some breathing room from Rocky and Highway Mike. Still, I was so beside myself that I phoned my rabbi in Ottawa.

  “This is totally nuts,” J.P. said, promising to phone up Bob McGuigan immediately to plead my case.

  When I phoned J.P. back an hour later, he told me Bob had shut him down just as Brooks had done to me. “I can’t help you,” he said, and after railing against the tactics of his American counterparts, he gave me a simple piece of advice: “Décrisse de là,” he said. “Get the hell out of there.”

  I had heard stories about contracted agents being cut loose by their handlers and left to drift and, ultimately, hit the ground hard, like a kite without a string. It looked like it was about to happen to me.

  I drove back to El Cajon that night, too beat to think, too overwhelmed by the events of recent days to process everything that had happened. Upon arriving back at the studio in the wee hours of the morning, I crashed into my first good, deep sleep in what felt like months. When I awoke, my resolve to leave had softened again. I’d spent a long time working the investigation; the professional in me wanted to see it succeed, or at the very least leave it in decent shape.

  At the same time, I doubted that my employers were as determined as I was to do a good job. For reasons I couldn’t fathom, someone somewhere in a position of influence seemed to want the operation to fail—and me to get screwed at the same time. But maybe I was still just being paranoid.

  I seesawed back and forth on the question over the next couple of days, hanging out at Dumont’s, not doing much of anything, until the inevitable happened: late on the Tuesday night I got a call from Bobby.

  “Meet me in fifteen minutes,” he said, naming an intersection that was at least fifteen minutes from my place. Even if he hadn’t mentioned it, explicitly or in code, I knew he wanted his gun back. I would have to play dumb—but not without backup.

  I immediately phoned around and the only handler I could reach was Billy Guinn, from the sheriff’s department. He told me to go ahead, that he would have close cover at the parking lot in a matter of minutes.

  When I arrived, late in order to give my backup time to get in place, there were three carloads of Hells Angels, prospects and hangarounds in the parking lot—none of them looking the least bit happy at being kept waiting. It was clear to me they were on their way somewhere to kick some ass—or possibly a whole lot worse—a likely scenario given the events of the previous few days and the tendency, in the biker world, to exact revenge promptly and violently for even the merest of slights.

  Bobby was standing alongside one of the cars. As I rode up, he extended his hand, but not in greeting.

  “You bring the piece?” he asked.

  “Oh! No . . . you never said you wanted me to. Besides, I’ll have to dig it up
from the engine where I stashed it.”

  Bobby wasn’t the type who would have hidden his anger even if he could have, and it was obvious he was about to explode when, fortunately for me, Mark Toycen shouted from the car, “Bobby, get in, goddammit!”

  So all I got was a venomous glare and an order spat at me: “Bring it tomorrow to the bar! Ten o’clock!” Bobby said, jumping in the car and slamming the door.

  Shortly after I got back to my place, Billy showed up for a debrief. It didn’t take long for me to tell him what Bobby had told me. Then I asked him how much cover I had had for what had been a potentially ugly encounter—after all, it had been a dark and desolate parking lot and there had been three carloads of California’s nastiest, one of whom was seriously pissed at me.

  “There was me and Barbie,” he said, referring to the agent whom I’d seen blushing in her panties at Jaybird’s house.

  “You and Barbie—what could you have done?” I asked, incredulous.

  The plan, Billy explained, was that at the first sign of anything unpleasant happening to me, Barbie would have jumped out of the car and started screaming to create a diversion.

  “If they were going to kill me, they would have just done her as well,” I said.

  “Well, I was there with my shotgun,” Billy answered defensively.

  I felt completely hung out to dry. Billy should have phoned and told me not to go to the meeting if he couldn’t round up adequate support. Still, something kept me from packing my bags then and there.

  The next morning, a memorial ride was planned for Christian Tate, a Hells Angel from the Dago chapter who had been gunned down on Route 40 heading out of Laughlin back to El Cajon less than an hour before the fun and games broke out in Harrah’s. His killing was a mystery. There was speculation in the media that it had provoked the attack on the Mongols in the casino, but I doubted it. I didn’t see how the news of his killing could have spread so quickly when he had died alone more than a hundred miles away in the Mojave Desert minutes earlier. I also wondered what Tate had been doing leaving the River Run just when the real party was getting started. My gut feeling was that he had been in one of the SUVs or on one of the bikes that had escaped the ambush the day before. I suspected that either he had been slightly hurt and was heading out of town for medical treatment or he was taking the news of the Mongols burn back to California. And needless to say, I was willing to bet that the attack on the Mongols was prompted by that same event.

  It all meant that I was curious to see what the mood at the memorial ride was going to be—and what kind of scuttlebutt was being whispered. There wouldn’t be any danger, I was certain—few gatherings anywhere attract such police scrutiny as biker funerals or rides. Along with dozens of uniformed officers, there were usually dozens of plainclothes cops not even bothering to make a serious effort at blending in with the gawking onlookers.

  There was a hitch, however. The ten a.m. meeting Bobby had ordered me to attend coincided with the gathering of the Hells Angels, their friends and associates at the gang’s clubhouse before the ride. Since Dumont’s was just a few storefronts away from the clubhouse, I would almost certainly have to deal with Bobby if I wanted to join the gathering. My only hard and fast rule, I decided, would be a simple one: stay in the open.

  I did stay in the open—for the minute or so during which I was in the company of the Hells Angels that morning. When Bobby ordered me to accompany him to the back of the bar, any illusions I had that I might finesse the situation were shattered. So I jumped in the Nissan and burned rubber the hell out of there. The case was over for me before I’d even wheeled around the corner.

  Back at the studio, Brooks, Hunter and a couple of other cops helped me pack my things. What I couldn’t carry in the box of the pickup, my handlers said they would ship to me.

  They seemed to understand my need to get out, and to agree that the investigation, or at least my part in it, was finally, completely done. There was no saving it, no going back. Nevertheless, they wanted me to hang around one last night, to toast our successes and commiserate together over our failures. But once I got back in my truck and started driving east, I wasn’t about to stop. I just kept going, heading home.

  EPILOGUE

  ______

  Home safe in Canada, I wanted nothing more than some downtime. Time to think about what next—retiring, maybe another career. And, sometime, telling my story as had been suggested by so many of my handlers: George Cousens and Barney, Bob McGuigan and Billy Guinn, the Rabbi, the Blainedidos (as my handlers back in Washington had called themselves).

  It was not to be. After my return to New Brunswick, things quickly fell apart at home. Once again, I had been too gone for too long. There wasn’t any warmth left between me and Natalie. We weren’t fighting or angry—there was just nothing there except a cold silence. My inability to open up precluded any real relationship. My disdain for her family, to whom she had become very close again since moving back to Saint John, didn’t help. Even if Natalie could forgive them, I couldn’t get over the way they had sold her out when she had fled Bashir a decade earlier. I was also hugely irritated by their constant romanticizing of life in Lebanon and their habit of disparaging Canada at every opportunity.

  I blamed it all on Natalie. She made no effort to understand what I had been through, I thought at the time. In fact, I was burned out physically and emotionally and not really fit for small-town society. After about a month in Saint John, instead of staying and working on my marriage, I got back in my Nissan pickup and headed west again. Ostensibly I was visiting my son, who had a summer job in Ottawa, but really I was doing what I always did, fleeing from the clouds of discord at home.

  Shortly after my arrival, I began to renew old contacts in the Ottawa-Hull region. Some were family, whom I got in touch with because I felt I should; some were criminal, whom the Rabbi had suggested I look up in anticipation of possible future assignments. The two didn’t present as much of a conflict as they might have. After all, since my relatives still had no idea what I did for a living, they figured I was a big-time crook who dropped in and out of their lives, usually loaded down with cash and tales of faraway places.

  That didn’t mean family and crooks necessarily intersected—until they did, in a collision that really messed up my life and that of my son.

  A few years earlier, my sisters Louise and Pauline had left their subsidized apartments overlooking the ocean in Vancouver to return to what the tourism people now call the National Capital Region, Ottawa in particular. The reason Louise came back east was, I always presumed, to live closer to her grown children. It was a mistake as far as I was concerned: her daughter was a drug-addicted screw-up; her son, Danny, a hateful neo-Nazi skinhead who had long been considered the scourge of the family.

  I knew Danny’s father, Johnny, well. He had been part of the old gang all his life, and in his younger days had been an armed robber of some repute. But his luck ran out when he and four other guys relieved a bank courier of sixteen thousand dollars at gunpoint. They were all soon arrested and Johnny was sentenced to five years in the pen. He had been going with my sister Louise at the time and she decided to wait for him. But he wasn’t so loyal once he was out and they didn’t last long.

  Johnny was never a racist; he was just an old-fashioned crook. So even if Danny spent much of his childhood living with his dad, I don’t know where the racism came from. By the time he was in his late teens, Danny’s whereabouts were frequently mysterious for long periods. I heard he had lived for a time in Texas and later Toronto, so maybe that’s where he picked up his hatefulness. Either way, he really despised non-whites, and back in Ottawa in the mid-1990s, where he worked as a construction laborer, he joined a hate group called the Heritage Front and became an active member.

  By the time I arrived in Ottawa from Saint John in the summer of 2002, Danny was in the Ottawa–Carleton Detention Center, serving the tail end of a short prison sentence for assault. During a visit to my s
isters’ place, I ran into a friend of Danny’s who needed help getting to the prison to visit him. At Louise’s request I drove the guy, and decided to go inside and see Danny at the same time. That led to what might be called, for lack of a better term, some uncle-nephew bonding, at least from his perspective. Having grown up with hints and suspicions about my criminality—all buttressed by the occasional glimpse of me in a new car and the knowledge that I regularly bailed out his broke mother—Danny was very candid with me about his own activities.

  When he was released, not long after my visit, we saw more of each other. My interest was no longer familial—I’d been in touch with J.P. In the days following his release Danny told me that he and his skinhead friends had recently sold ten pounds of explosives to the Quebec Hells Angels but were hanging on to another ninety pounds for their own use. That was cause for concern—and then some—as was information I’d learned about the friend, Paul, whom I’d driven to visit Danny in jail. He was a computer technician for a software company that, not long before, had installed security software at the RCMP headquarters. Paul had kept a copy of the program and hoped to sell it to les Hells.

  In brief, this all led to a month-long mess of an operation that didn’t result in any arrests or criminal charges but completely destroyed any relationship I had with my sisters and burned any bridge that still remained between me and my hometown. I haven’t lived in or spent any time in the Ottawa-Hull region since. It also made the city unsafe for my son. When I left town, he came with me and shortly afterward moved overseas to continue his university studies. These days he only comes back to Canada for visits.