by George Rowe
Following my graduation from the Hells Angels Cooking Academy, I took my little operation into the Mojave Desert, where I set up shop in a rat-infested shed near the Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms. Out there in the blast-furnace heat of the Mojave, where inside temperatures exceeded one hundred degrees, I truly felt like I was plying the Devil’s trade in Hell.
Every batch of meth I cooked yielded twelve pounds of high-grade dope, which I sold to a Mexican drug dealer I trusted. To every pound of pure meth, that Chicano added four pounds of cut, which meant that forty-eight pounds of product went into the San Jacinto Valley and beyond. God only knows how many lives I helped destroy with that toxic shit.
It was around this time that I was introduced to a woman named Darlene, a single mom, twelve years my senior, with a house and three sweet kids. Darlene would teach me more about love and life than any other woman I’ve known before or since. But back then, in the midst of my drug phase, I wasn’t exactly writing sonnets and looking for soul mates. Up to that point in my life I’d managed to torpedo just about every relationship I’d ever been involved in, including a long-suffering girlfriend who supported my addictions while I ruined her credit, and two brides in short-lived marriages—the first, doomed from “I do,” when I was a dumb kid with a cocaine problem, and a second, which I have absolutely no fuckin’ memory of . . . the whole blessed event lost forever in a haze of cheap bourbon, fake tits and psychedelic mushrooms.
Now there’s a horror story.
My mother and little sister, Lin Ann, had moved from Hemet out to Laughlin, Nevada, where the heat really cranked in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The Colorado River cut right through town, and during the baking summer months Laughlin turned into a rolling party of racing boats, getting laid and getting wasted.
I was fresh off a stint in county jail for grand theft auto—which, in the interest of accuracy, was really grand theft motorcycle. One of my meth customers owed me a shitload of money, which, of course, she didn’t have. I was ready to bring in the U-Haul when she bought me a Yamaha 900 crotch rocket with a bad check. When the authorities came to collect the bike I basically told them, “Fuck you, that’s on her, not me.”
The judge didn’t agree. One year in county, three years probation.
I was still under that probationary cloud as I headed for Laughlin for a weekend party on the Colorado River. I was dealing meth and blowing a ton of money on expensive toys back then, and that day I was hauling a real beauty. Two beauties, actually, both exceptionally fast: a flat-bottom racing boat with a 660-horsepower motor and a twenty-year-old hottie with synthetic tits.
On our way through Laughlin to the Colorado River, I stopped to visit my mother and little sister for the first and last time. As much as I detested Mommy Dearest, that’s how much Lin Ann loved that woman. She loved Mother’s bawdy sense of humor, how she would drop her shorts on the highway and moon passing cars or rip a loud fart in a crowded restaurant. Noble traits to be sure, but our perceptions of that hateful bitch were far apart. On Mother we would never agree.
The two of them were living with Mom’s recently retired husband, Bob, who must have heard stories about me, because I caught attitude the moment I walked in the door. My first offense was sweating on the man’s furniture. My second was raiding the fridge and stealing his baloney—which, in my defense, my sister later copped to.
Anyway, by the time I’d allegedly eaten Bob’s baloney I was already plastered on Wild Turkey and, unbeknownst to me, my date had lifted a MasterCard from his wallet as a honeymoon present. I don’t remember that. I don’t remember the wedding that must have preceded the honeymoon. Hell, I don’t even remember the weekend. All I know is, when I finally sobered up Monday morning I’d run up the credit card and married the brick shithouse.
My mother and younger sister, Lin Ann.
When she informed me we were husband and wife, I thought it was a joke—until I saw our wedding photo. There I was, alright, me and bazooka tits getting hitched in a Nevada chapel. One look at my face and you knew the wheel was turning but the hamster was dead. I had this foolish half-cocked grin and eyeballs the size of silver dollars, like I’d just sat on a red-hot poker. A friend of mine later explained I’d eaten psilocybin mushrooms that day, which explained a lot. Apparently mushrooms, chased by mass quantities of Kentucky bourbon, can make a guy do funny things.
Like get married.
I had the charade annulled a few weeks later, but making MasterCard go away was not quite as simple. Bob pressed charges, and Mother testified against me—testified in court against her own son. And when the trial was over, the judge nailed me good.
Grand larceny. Probation violation. Sixteen months.
I was back in the slammer again.
Most of that stretch was served in Riverside County Jail, but near the end I shared a cell with a Mexican behind the walls at Chino—a California state prison that’s louder than a fucking kennel at dinnertime.
Chino was primarily a receiving center where cons are held before getting shipped to long-term destinations. I never got shipped, and I wasn’t there long, but during my stay I was forced to listen to the Chicanos barking at each other and singing their songs from sundown to sunrise, which made for some very long and sleepless nights.
It took years after my prison release to forgive my mother for all the misery she’d put me through, but by then she was gone. The woman died in 1999 after decades of drug and alcohol addiction. Her death devastated Lin Ann.
I skipped the funeral.
My new girlfriend, Darlene, had heard plenty of horror stories about the U-Haul Bandit. She knew all about my less-than-stellar reputation in the valley. But instead of running the other way, she was intrigued. Believing there was good in George Rowe even if I couldn’t find it in myself, that woman took me into her home and shared her family and affections.
Unfortunately, instead of returning that love and trust, I abused the hell out of it in my usual fashion. Unbeknownst to Darlene, I was storing the meth I manufactured in her garage. And if that wasn’t underhanded enough, I was sneaking around behind her back and screwing anything with a pulse and a legal pair of tits. It took a birth announcement in the local paper to finally expose my cheating ass. There it was, spelled out in black and white for Darlene and all of Hemet to see.
Guess who the father was?
Darlene was devastated.
“You don’t know what love is,” she told me that night. “You think love is fucking? Two dogs can fuck. That’s not love.”
Darlene was right. That woman was always right. But I was so messed up and out of control I didn’t know what I was doing or what I had. I’d done hard drugs and hard time, fucked up bad men and fucked over good women. Deep down, I knew the madness was destroying me and just about anyone within reach, but I didn’t know how to stop it.
It took an eight-year-old to hit the brakes for me.
Darlene’s youngest was like a son. I’d helped raise that child since he was in kindergarten. Hell, he even called me Daddy. But the boy had heard some schoolyard talk and wanted a straight answer to his not-so-simple question.
“Daddy, are you a drug dealer?”
Fuck, yeah, I was a drug dealer. One of the biggest in the valley. But that’s not what I told him. Looking that child straight in the eyes, I flat-out lied.
“No, buddy,” I answered. “Daddy’s not a drug dealer.”
It was exactly what that kid wanted to hear, and he skipped away happy. But I was left feeling like a worthless sack of shit.
What a gutless coward I was. What a miserable human being. And it wasn’t just the drugs and the dealing, it was all the other fucked-up things I’d done in my lifetime, most of which I’ve yet to confess. At that moment I couldn’t stomach the man in the mirror. Not for another second. Like a puss-filled boil, my past had to be lanced.
I stood from the chair, walked straight into the garage and returned with twelve pounds of high-grade methamphetamine.
Darlene’s jaw nearly hit the floor as I flushed every last gram of it down the shitter.
“I’m done,” I told her.
That woman had prayed to see me clean. But now that the moment had come, she couldn’t believe it.
“You won’t last,” she said.
For once Darlene was wrong. I never touched drugs again.
Not long after the big flush, I took the Pottery House preacher’s advice. I removed the padlocks from my storage units, threw open the doors and walked away. As word got around, the meth-heads came swarming like flies to the mother of all yard sales. They carted off thousands of dollars’ worth of “Satan’s stuff,” but I didn’t care. That preacher man was right. Unloading the past felt pretty damn good.
Months later the Pottery House threw a rummage sale, and a bunch of my old U-Haul property ended up tagged in the church parking lot. Caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the hypocrite preacher hung his head and explained to me why he was selling all the shit he’d grabbed from my old storage units.
Turns out Satan’s stuff had brought nothing but hard luck to God’s chosen junkie.
Shortly thereafter, I left Darlene and her family—including the little guy who got me started on the road to clean and sober. Darlene never asked me to go, but once I was clearheaded enough to understand what I’d put her through, I walked anyway. Maybe it was guilt. I don’t know. I’d like to think I did the right thing. That for love’s sake, I finally set that good woman free.
She’d suffered enough.
Taking my first baby steps on the road toward redemption, I felt like a man awakened from a drug-induced coma: suddenly twenty-seven years old without a clue how I got there or where I was going. I wanted to rejoin the world, become one of the “normal” people, but it was hard breaking from the past when you were defined by it. “Drug dealer” was a damn hard reputation to shed. I no longer wanted to be that person, but the world wasn’t letting me be anything else. If I wanted a second chance, I had to earn it. So I pulled up my boots and began walking the walk.
My first steps led me down into the church basement where Narcotics Anonymous held weekly meetings. I’d always heard a junkie needed group support to avoid temptation. Well, that was some fucked-up group, let me tell you. I knew most of those addicts. Hell, at one time or another I’d probably sold drugs to half of them. The majority were in that basement not because they had a burning desire to get clean but because they were under court mandate. More than once I saw those tweakers duck into their connect’s house to get high before a meeting.
Six weeks later I walked out of Narcotics Anonymous for good.
I was never a religious man, but religion was where I turned next. My father, a tribal Indian, had raised me an atheist—reverential of nature, not some anonymous supreme being with a bushy white beard. Dad used to preach that the roads we take in life are the ones we pave ourselves. But shortly before he died, a VA hospital chaplain turned the old man’s thinking around and convinced him to join the Jesus team. I guess Dad was no different than many of us in that respect. When he felt he’d lost control over his life, he surrendered to The Man. And because my father embraced a higher power, he believed all his sins would be forgiven.
That sounded pretty good to me.
I found myself standing outside Catholic churches, looking for the courage to step inside and embrace the mystery of faith. I was a sinner desperate for forgiveness, but I felt unworthy to sit among the righteous. I finally grew some gonads and made it through the door, only to conclude that maybe faith and forgiveness don’t require a priest or a church—that maybe it’s something personal between you and the Almighty. So I bought myself a jailhouse Bible, written so any ten-year-old could understand it, and began to study.
Seek and ye shall find, sayeth the good book. And that’s just what I did. Much like that first trip to Hemet in mother’s Oldsmobile, I was again looking for signs. A way back to God’s good graces. A return to sanity after all the madness and chaos of my life.
I just had to keep my eyes open.
When the Vagos came to town and began harassing the locals, that was the first sign. I saw it but never stopped. When David vanished, it was as if someone had taken that sign and slammed my face with it. And now that meeting with the sheriff had me thinking . . .
Was this the time? Time to get right with The Man?
Through a long and sleepless night I paced the floor of my shack in Valle Vista, chain-smoking cigarettes while praying hard on what to do. By sunrise those prayers had been answered. This wasn’t just about payback for the Vagos, it was about paying back a community that I’d dumped on for years. Here was an opportunity to honor the vow I’d made to God and myself when the sins of my past, along with twelve pounds of high-grade crystal meth, went flushing down the shitter.
You had to live where I lived, see what I saw, to understand the way I felt. I could have moved on and lived life like any other cleaned-up drug addict and been alright, but the Vagos were behaving like animals and had to be stopped.
Only who would cage them?
I already knew the answer.
No one would. No one could.
No one but me.
5
Bagging the Golden Goose
There are hundreds of motorcycle clubs throughout the country with members who follow the rules of the road and society, like all good citizens should. But in the playground of life, there will always be the misfits, loners and bullies who choose not to play well with others. And when those bad boys band together and begin picking on the rest of us—or even each other—they fall under the state of California’s definition of “criminal street gang,” which is, to wit, a “group of three or more persons whose activities include the commission of violent criminal acts; have a common name or identifying symbol; and whose members have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity.”
This description originally targeted the Hispanic and African-American street gangs, like the Crips and Bloods, that were causing havoc throughout Southern California in the 1980s. Of the more than 120,000 gang members reported in cities across the United States during that time, over half were residing in Los Angeles County. By the midnineties there were over a thousand gang factions in the Los Angeles County area alone, and gang-related homicides accounted for nearly 40 percent of murders countywide.
The California Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (S.T.E.P.) passed by the state legislature in response to that growing menace was eventually broadened to include one percenter clubs like the Vagos. Every outlaw biker in California can probably recite the salient section of California Penal Code Section 186.21, which reads, “. . . the State of California is in a state of crisis which has been caused by violent street gangs whose members threaten, terrorize, and commit a multitude of crimes against the peaceful citizens of their neighborhoods. These activities, both individually and collectively, present a clear and present danger to public order and safety and are not constitutionally protected.”
The S.T.E.P. Act particularly resonated with one percenters because it allowed judges to slap gang enhancement penalties on those found guilty of crimes committed while a gang member. A felony conviction, for instance, might add from two to ten years to a sentence depending on the crime’s severity. In other words, if you were in a gang, five could get you ten.
So was the Vagos MC a criminal street gang?
According to the state of California, the answer was yes as defined by the S.T.E.P. Act.
A group of three or more persons whose activities included the commission of violent criminal acts?
Check.
Had a common name or identifying symbol?
Check.
Members engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity.
Check, check, check.
Every California outlaw fears the S.T.E.P. Act even more than the dreaded RICO. RICO is a federal statute originally used to prosecute organized crime. RICO is the most potent weapon in the
federal arsenal, and the statute that all one percenter gangs fear most. A successful RICO prosecution could potentially bring down an entire outlaw motorcycle club and lock away its key members for a long, long time. But the legacy of S.T.E.P. is evident everywhere within the California penal system. Thousands of gang members serve extended prison terms thanks to S.T.E.P., and a good number of them once rode outlaw.
Of course, the one percenters will claim they’re just a bunch of rough-and-tumble bike enthusiasts who love the freedom of the open road and the camaraderie of like-minded men. They’ll bitch that S.T.E.P. is just another example of how law enforcement tramples the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.
Bullshit.
I was practically raised by one percenters, some I still consider family, and I can tell you there was only one reason they wore that 1% patch and declared themselves outlaws. Those boys took real pride in straddling the hairy edge of what society considered civilized behavior. And too often they stumbled and fell on the wrong side of the law because of it. It was a dangerous line to walk, but it came with the territory.
It’s what they signed up for.
Of course, when an outlaw finds himself in court wearing ankle bracelets, he’ll piss and moan about being picked on. He’ll gripe that he was singled out and unfairly persecuted by “The Man” because of the patch on his back. It’s hard to believe these people actually buy into their own hype. Law enforcement wouldn’t waste time and resources on a bunch of Harley-riding free spirits if they hadn’t been committing crimes. Otherwise every motorcycle club in America would be under siege by the government. No, law enforcement comes down hard on the patch because laws are being broken by the men who proudly wear it.
With some of the most violent one percenter gangs in the country based on the West Coast—including the Vagos, Mongols and Hells Angels—Southern California has always been ground zero in law enforcement’s battle with America’s outlaw culture. And the lawmen most experienced at targeting OMGs (outlaw motorcycle gangs) in that corner of the world are those working at the Los Angeles Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a federal agency under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice.