by George Rowe
6
God of the High Desert
There were three steps on the road to becoming a full-patch biker—the same any recruit had to follow when joining a club like the Vagos. First was the hang-around phase, when you and the membership sized each other up. As a hang-around you were like a wallflower at the school dance, hoping for an invitation to strut your stuff. Until then you were expected to back the club in a brawl and wear their colors as a sign of loyalty. With the Vagos, this might mean a green bandana tied around the head or hanging from a back pocket.
If the members liked what they saw, you were invited to prospect, a courtship that often took months. A prospect with the Hemet Vagos wore a single rocker sewn on the lower back of his cut that said “California,” identifying the chapter’s home state. Back then there were over three hundred greenies riding outlaw up and down the West Coast, with more chapters in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and over in Hawaii.
Without a doubt the most difficult part of becoming a patch holder was the humiliation that came with prospecting. In effect, a prospect became the club’s personal bitch. If a full-patched member dropped his pants and commanded you to wipe his ass, you’d damn well better do it. Trust me, it took real willpower to survive this—especially when you were a forty-two-year-old man like I was. But if you could stick it out through months of bullshit tasks and degradation and the members voted you in, you were awarded full-patched status in the club. This ’til-death-do-us-part marriage meant you’d earned the right to wear the Loki center patch framed by the top and bottom rockers, pay your weekly dues and attend church meetings—those weekly sessions when patches in each chapter gathered to discuss club business.
For me, one of the most emotionally draining aspects of gang infiltration was buddying up to the people I was working to send to prison. By necessity I was forced into long-term relationships with human beings I wouldn’t wish on my own worst enemy. Of course, there was no way around this dilemma. For the sake of the mission I had to hold my nose and take the plunge. So around the holidays in late 2002, I walked into Big Roy’s Lady Luck tattoo parlor and hinted I might be interested in joining Green Nation.
Big Roy Compton, president of the Hemet Vagos.
Roy, Todd and most of those Hemet boys welcomed me with open arms. I say most because there was one Vago who seemed suspicious of me right from the get-go. He was the chapter’s sergeant at arms, responsible for club discipline and security, a three-hundred-pound blob named North, who hit like a sixty-pound schoolgirl. North was one of a handful of Vagos who’d recently come over to the Hemet chapter from another motorcycle club in town called the Bros.
Bro’s Toy Box was a motorcycle repair shop with an interior decorated in red and white, the same colors found on the club’s patches. Red and white were Hells Angels colors, and the Bros had some farfetched notion of someday joining that select company. Their president was the shop’s owner, a union boilermaker named Bro, who could carry a car engine in his hands just like my buddy Freight Train.
Despite the red and white décor, the Bros were theoretically a support club for the Hemet Vagos. That all changed when Big Todd started feuding with Bro over a transmission part he thought he deserved for free. When Bro told him to fuck off, Todd convinced Big Roy they should forcibly shut down the Bros and take the club’s members for themselves, doubling the size of the Hemet Vagos in one fell swoop.
So on a night when the Bros were holding church inside the Toy Box, Big Roy’s crew came calling, and some were packing guns. They were backed by another Vagos chapter from the city of Corona, one led by an outlaw named Mumbles, who weighed one hundred pounds dripping wet but fought like the Tasmanian devil. Mumbles’s forte was knives, which the man could fling with precision from long distances, like some kind of freaky circus act.
At one Green Nation campout, some Northern California Vagos bet three thousand bucks their knife-throwing champion could best Mumbles. With total confidence we upped the bet to five and turned our boy loose. Well, Mumbles started dealing steel from sheaths hidden all over his body. They came from his back, his belt, his ankles, his boots, hell, maybe even his ass, I don’t know, but one after another those blades nailed a tree trunk about sixty feet away—THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, THUNK! When that little fucker was done his knives were grouped tighter than a virgin’s cha-cha. It was an impressive performance and an easy five grand.
Mumbles was carrying those blades the night that he, Big Roy and the rest of the Vagos stormed Bro’s Toy Box. Once inside, they demanded the Bros turn over their colors—which was a big no-no in the outlaw world. Few sins trumped a man giving up his patch. In most cases, try taking the colors off an outlaw’s back and you’d best be prepared to fight and die.
I say most cases, because apparently the Bros weren’t so keen on self-sacrifice. Instead, confronted by superior numbers, loaded weapons and Mumbles’s sharp steel, they peed their panties and gave up their colors like a bunch of playground pussies. Only Bro himself manned up and stood tall.
“Fuck the Vagos. You want this patch, come and take it,” were his defiant last words.
I admired Bro for his stand. Of course, after the Vagos finished whipping him with a tire chain they ripped the patch off his back anyway. But at least the man kept his dignity.
Big Todd Brown.
Oh, and Big Todd walked out of the Toy Box with that transmission part he coveted . . . free of charge.
As for Bro’s chickenshit brothers, a handful opted to join the Hemet Vagos—including North and Doc, the dentist who’d bought my Harley shovelhead, and the only two chapter members older than I was at the time, an ex-con named Sparks and another the Vagos christened Buckshot.
Road names, bestowed by the club when a prospect reached patched status, were sometimes real head-scratchers, but that wasn’t the case with Sparks and Buckshot. Sparks got his name simply because he was a certified electrician. And Buckshot—well, Buckshot had barely escaped the business end of a shotgun down in Mexico. His brand-new Harley, on the other hand, hadn’t been so lucky.
In addition to those turncoats, Big Roy had scraped together a handful of other recruits for his chapter, including Ready, who worked as a tattoo artist at the Lady Luck, Jack Fite, a notoriously violent human being, and Jimbo, a muscle-bound juicer who supplied the Vagos with anabolic steroids. I never touched that shit myself. I’d heard too many horror stories about shriveled dicks and wooden balls.
And then there was Crash.
If ever there was an appropriate road name for a motorcycle outlaw, Crash was it. That big bastard crashed his stock Harley just about anywhere and any way humanly possible. And because we came into the club around the same time, I found myself traveling many nervous miles beside that spun fool, worrying whether he would dump his bike and take me down with him. With the exception of my mother, I think that crazy Vago gave me more migraines than any other human being on the planet.
Crash, my fellow prospect and one crazy-ass sonofabitch.
First time I laid eyes on Crash he was standing outside the Lady Luck wearing a skintight tank top and a green bandana, eyeballing me over his ratty moustache like he was king shit. I had no idea where that dude had come from, but prison would have been the obvious choice. The man had that behind-the-walls mentality, a way of talking and behaving that was hard to define but easy to recognize when you’d hung around that type as long as I had.
Crash had fathered a crew of kids with a woman so skinny she’d almost disappear when she turned sideways. Wasn’t long before I discovered he had another love in his life: crystal meth. Methamphetamine has been the one percenters’ drug of choice for many years now; its use is so prevalent that in the summer of 2001 the feds pulled the trigger on Operation Silent Thunder, sweeping up a large meth ring in the California High Desert that included several Vagos.
From the late sixties into the seventies, “Reds” were the outlaw world’s preferred drug. Sold in red capsules under the brand name Seconal
, the pharmaceutical was prescribed as a sedative. But that drug was anything but sedating for the bikers who abused it. Reds amped a man up and made him fearless enough to commit murder, which was not uncommon in that particularly violent era. For their own survival, outlaw clubs began banning the use of Reds. After a brief fling with PCP, they hitched their wagon to methamphetamine. Man, outlaws just loved their crank. Gave them that little extra giddy-up they needed to keep riding and partying straight through ’til morning.
In Crash’s case, meth just made his incredibly inept riding even worse. The man would continue to be a terror in the saddle for as long as I knew him, but when I first hung with the Vagos, the bigger concern was the chapter’s sergeant at arms. Right out of the gate, North was telling Big Roy I couldn’t be trusted—that I just might be a snitch.
As true as that might have been, there wasn’t a chance in hell that fuck could have known what I was up to. That closely kept secret was between me, John Carr and Kevin Duffy. Every precaution had been taken to safeguard my identity. Regardless, the word was out there now. North had started the rumor mill grinding. And once that snitch jacket gets hung on a man, it’s damn hard to remove. This was the worst possible start for someone in my situation, and my only defense was calling North out as a “fat, lying bastard” and demanding proof of my infidelity. The sergeant at arms promised he had a reliable source and would show his hand soon enough.
“If I find out this is true,” Big Roy warned me, “if it turns out you’re a rat, I will personally fuck you up, George.”
Yup. North was going to be a problem.
I’d been hanging around the Vagos about a week when I finally told my buddy Old Joe that I was thinking about joining the Hemet chapter. The conversation came up during one of our early-morning chats on the drive out to a tree-trimming job.
“I don’t get it,” said Joe. “You’ve been doing nothing but bitchin’ and complaining about those people.”
“Just gonna try it. See where it goes,” I said.
“But why? Why would you do that? They’re like a bunch of kids who never grew up. Why the devil would you want to hang out in bars and get into fights and all that other childish stuff?”
Fact was, there was no rational explanation. Nothing I could say would make a damn bit of sense, so I shut my buddy off with, “Don’t worry about it.”
End of conversation.
Freight Train, who I’d stayed in contact with over the years, was even more upset—and that big Hells Angel didn’t mince words telling me so. Both he and his brother Donny, who was a full-patch Vagos one generation ahead of Big Roy and the Hemet boys, unanimously agreed I was a “dumb motherfucker.”
Of course, they didn’t know my true motive for hooking up with the Vagos. Nor would I have shared it with them. Regardless of our past history, there was zero tolerance for snitches among outlaws of any generation. Had the brothers known I was working on behalf of the feds, they would have tag-teamed my ass and kicked it from one end of Riverside County to the other.
Not long after I first started hanging with the Hemet Vagos, I went on my first official “run” with Green Nation—the annual New Year’s Run to Buffalo Bill’s casino on the California-Nevada state line. Club runs—always a good excuse to gather members in one location—were usually organized at the chapter level, but the largest, like the New Year’s Run, were handled by national and its top dog, Terry the Tramp.
Tramp was best known for plotting runs to a biker bar north of San Bernardino called The Screaming Chicken or farther south to Mexican border towns for cerveza and señoritas. But because the Vagos’ international president had a hard-on for the slots, the largest runs were usually reserved for the Nevada casinos.
By New Year’s 2003, the year of my first Vagos run, Tramp had reigned over Green Nation for seventeen years, governing his minions from his ranch-style home in Hesperia, a High Desert city in the Mojave. As testament to the devotion their international P inspired, many a Vago would have taken a bullet for Tramp. In fact, in their own way, many already had. Men had gone to jail on their leader’s behalf. It was telling that the rank and file had a pet name of their own for the man.
They called Tramp “God.”
The fact that their supreme being had clung to power for nearly two decades was no small feat and certainly no accident. Terry Lee Orendorff was a survivor, bred with street smarts, a criminal’s cunning and a gift for manipulation. Born in 1947, he was raised in El Monte, California, by his alcoholic stepfather, kept in a one-car garage like a caged dog. When Dad let little Terry out for some fresh air, the budding mechanic built himself a motorcycle, took off to raise hell and never looked back. He followed his stepbrother, Parts, into the Vagos and became the San Gabriel chapter president in the early 1970s.
While Tramp inspired a good deal of fear and awe among his subjects, those he terrified most were chapter presidents like Big Roy Compton. Green Nation thrived on the weekly dues that members forked over at the chapter level, a percentage of which went to Tramp at national. But whenever a larger injection of cash was needed, Tramp found reasons to fine the chapters for every conceivable offense—fines that could run into thousands of dollars. For this reason, Big Roy was constantly on guard against pissing the international P off. Not only did he fear those hefty fines but Tramp had the power to confiscate a man’s motorcycle and convert it into quick cash.
Not coincidentally, the largest fines seemed to hit the membership around the holiday season—right after Thanksgiving and during the weeks leading up to the New Year’s Run. There was good reason for this. Tramp had a big gambler’s itch, and to scratch it that high roller needed lots of cash. God’s ignorant flock didn’t have a clue back then, but their shepherd was pocketing tens of thousands of dollars and blowing it on slots and blackjack.
The New Year’s Run to Buffalo Bill’s offered even greater opportunity for Tramp to line his pockets. As members arrived after a long day of riding through the Mojave Desert, they’d find stands set up with all kinds of Vagos merchandise for sale—from Green Nation T-shirts to Vagos-branded jewelry. And every member was encouraged to spend freely. After all, it was for the good of the club . . . and what was good for the club was even better for Terry the Tramp.
Buffalo Bill’s casino stands on the California-Nevada border in a town identified on maps as Primm but which we called “State Line.” Buffalo Bill’s and two other casinos had been erected in that desert wasteland for a singular purpose—to snag Southern California gamblers before they could spend all their money in Las Vegas, forty miles to the north.
Nevada’s dens of iniquity were always popular destinations for motorcycle gangs like the Vagos, and huge magnets for trouble. Only eight months earlier, members of the Mongols and Hells Angels found themselves rubbing elbows at Harrah’s Laughlin. Wasn’t long before that elbow-rubbing led to brawling, which led to killing. When the chips stopped flying, two Angels and a Mongol lay dead. Just to even the score, a third Hell’s Angel was murdered on his way back to California. Meanwhile at Harrah’s the cops doing cleanup recovered nine guns, sixty-five knives, and assorted bats, hammers and wrenches.
On Tramp’s orders, the Vagos descended on Buffalo Bill’s from all directions: Northern California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, Mexico—even Hawaii. I knew for a fact a lot of those boys hated making that New Year’s Run, especially the poor bastards from the Northwest, who froze their nuts off, forced to ride their Harleys through snow and ice.
Terry the Tramp wasn’t about to suffer that kind of discomfort. No fuckin’ way, man. Braving the elements was strictly for the peons. Instead the international P came motoring into State Line behind the wheel of his big ol’ Cadillac. And when Tramp wasn’t driving that boat, chances were you’d find him cruising along in a brand-new Corvette the suckers of Green Nation had bought him for his birthday.
Without a motorcycle to call my own, I was also four-wheeling it to Buffalo Bill’s that afternoon, same as Tramp. And that wa
s just fine with the Hemet chapter. Whenever one of their bikes broke down they knew George would be there to roll it into his truck bed and haul it home. Besides, no fuckin’ way did I want to ride a bike through the Mojave in late December. The desert was cold as a penguin’s cooch that time of year. So I piled into my pickup, cranked up the heat until the cab was nice and toasty, then followed the Hemet Vagos as they rode out of town and started north on the I-15, bundled against the cold with their cuts worn over leather jackets.
A few more chapters joined the pack as it rumbled through Victorville and roared toward Barstow in the High Desert. From there it was a frosty two-hour grind through the empty Mojave all the way to State Line.
The Primm casinos came into view miles before you arrived, rising like mirages above the desert landscape. And you couldn’t miss Buffalo Bill’s. The place had this crazy amusement park vibe going, with a giant roller coaster twisting around the hotel and a Ferris wheel off to one side. Walk through the hotel and head out back and you’d even find a giant buffalo-shaped swimming pool.
As I stepped onto the casino floor, I could feel the fever coming over me again. In those days I had a gambling addiction that could have gone toe-to-toe with Terry the Tramp’s. Entering a casino was goddamn intoxicating: the cheers from the craps tables, the flashing lights, those ringing bells.
Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
Man, it was like the Sirens calling Ulysses to the rocks.
The place where I’d blown most of my money was an Indian-owned casino that sat a few hundred yards from the banks of a cement river channel north of Hemet. To reach Soboba Casino, I used to drive off-road, charging eight miles up that channel when the water ran low just so I could spend my money faster.
Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding.
I have no idea how much wampum I donated to that tribal den, but it was a shitload. There were Fridays I couldn’t meet the Family Tree Service payroll because I’d blown it all on slots. I’d have to tell my six-man crew, “Sorry fellas, I’m flat busted this week . . . see you on Monday.” All those poor bastards could do was shrug their shoulders and pray I wouldn’t blow their paychecks again the following week. Sure, I’d occasionally hit the jackpot, but more often than not I’d walk out of Soboba like a whipped dog with my tail between my legs.