by George Rowe
The situation wasn’t much better at home. I was with Darlene when the gambling bug first bit, and that poor woman did everything but chain me to the bedpost to keep me from donating her life’s savings to the Indians. I remember one day when I was supposed to be at work but snuck over to Soboba with Old Joe instead. When we finally left the casino, the sun was down and I was in deep shit.
I needed a good excuse to hand Darlene, but the best I could come up with was some lame-ass tale about my truck getting stuck in the mud. To sell that ridiculous lie—and despite Joe’s angry protests—I had us both rolling around in the river muck like a couple of moon-touched fools. At one point the current caught my shitfaced partner and swept him half the length of a football field, which really messed with his vodka buzz. In the end it was all wasted time because Darlene had already come out to the casino’s parking lot and found Joe passed out in the truck.
As I wandered through Buffalo Bill’s, I noticed a Vagos entourage surging across the casino floor. This was the first time I laid eyes on Terry the Tramp, the big man himself. The club’s international president was being escorted through the warren of slot machines by six patched bodyguards. I remember thinking the man looked nothing like I’d pictured him—nothing like a commander in chief.
Tramp was short and rotund, with an ample beer gut and shoulder-length white hair sprouting from either side of his bald noggin. To me the head Vago looked more like a circus clown than the leader of California’s largest outlaw motorcycle gang. But Tramp was not a man you laughed at. Who knows how many badass hombres underestimated Terry the Tramp in his time and learned the hard way that looks could be deceiving.
I stood and observed the man they called God, watching as he paused to feed coins into a slot machine while his security team stood dutifully at their posts, ever vigilant for would-be assassins.
It was goddamn ridiculous.
When Tramp ran short of coins, he would tap the shoulder of the monstrous, mullet-headed human being that headed security. This was a signal for Rhino, the Vagos international sergeant at arms, to start gathering donations from the various chapters so his boss could continue feeding the slots.
But Rhino was more than Tramp’s faithful change chimp. The forty-year-old was a feared ex-con who’d earned his road name for an obvious reason. The man was constructed like one of those four-legged African tanks, with a powerful body and a neck as thick as his head. As chief enforcer for all of Green Nation, Rhino was the baddest motherfucker in the neighborhood. Nobody was safe from that brute, not even those closest to him. Rhino had shot and killed his first wife “accidentally.” I’m sure wife number two was understandably nervous.
As I watched Rhino hurry through the casino collecting tribute for his boss, Big Roy appeared and kicked me off the casino floor. Because I was a hang-around I wasn’t supposed to be having fun like the big boys. My job was a supporting role, and for the rest of my time at Buffalo Bill’s that meant I would be babysitting one of the patched members who was bedridden in his hotel room.
R&D Steve was an Army vet who worked as a designer for R&D Motorcycles in Hemet. He was close to fifty years old when I met him but looked twice that age—that’s how bad cancer had beat the man up. So there we were, me and Steve in that hotel room with the heat cranking full bore. My ass was sweating, but that poor bastard was shivering like we were in Nome, coughing up chunks of mucus the size of golf balls.
I swear you could smell death in that room.
Poor R&D. I could almost relate to what that man was going through. I had experienced my own personal hell with the big C. Almost ten years earlier, after I was diagnosed with colon cancer, the surgeons snipped out thirteen feet of my intestines. Then they ran me through that particularly brutal brand of medieval torture called chemotherapy and radiation.
My skin was so fried I could peel it off. My guts were boiling, my eyebrows were burning, my throat was on fire. I couldn’t keep food down. My waist-length ponytail disappeared, and my hair fell out in clumps until I was bald. For three years I couldn’t take a decent shit . . . it was diarrhea every goddamn day.
Five different times, for three months a stretch, I endured that hell. And each time the cancer returned. Finally I’d had enough. I told the doctors I was through. There was nothing left to give. If cancer was going to end me, so be it. I figured I could deal with the pain of dying, I just couldn’t handle the torture it took to survive. The doctors sent me on my way with pain prescriptions for Vicodin and morphine—but those pharmaceuticals just made me fuzzy-headed and depressed, so I stockpiled the pain meds instead and put my life in God’s hands.
Is the cancer gone? I don’t know . . . and I don’t want to know. I’m still here, and that’s good enough for me. But R&D Steve wasn’t so fortunate. Three months after our long night together at Buffalo Bill’s, that Vago was dead and buried.
7
Happy Trails, Motherfucker
In the weeks following the New Year’s Run I began spending more time with the Vagos, hanging around the Lady Luck or drinking at bars the Hemet boys frequented. By all appearances George Rowe was “down” for the club. With the exception of North, who was still sniffing around me like a fat hound, I was considered one of the boys. I was in. As Special Agent John Carr put it, it was time to make things “official.”
In March of 2003 I drove out to the ATF’s field office in Van Nuys, California, gripping the steering wheel with my left hand because my right was in a plaster cast up to the elbow, busted on a trimming job. The process of becoming a confidential informant actually kicked off a few days before when I met Carr in a Burger King parking lot several blocks from his office.
“How’d you get that busted wing?” he asked as I climbed into his car.
“Fell out of a fuckin’ tree.”
“That’d be a bitch riding a bike like that. Thank God you don’t own one, huh?”
“Hey, bust my balls all you want,” I told him, “I can still brake with my foot . . . and you ain’t gettin’ out of your promise. I want that bike.”
Carr took my photograph, rolled my prints, had me sign some papers, then sent me on my way. Now I was meeting up with him again in Van Nuys to make everything official. I was about to be signed, sealed and delivered to the federal government. We met in the building lobby and I trailed the special agent up the stairs to the main offices.
“There’s a sheriff down in Riverside who met with you not long ago, an associate of your pal Kevin Duffy,” said Carr. “Know who I’m talking about?”
“Yeah, I know who you mean,” I said. “That guy’s been pressuring me like a motherfucker.”
“Yeah? Well, he flew up here a few days ago in a helicopter to talk about you.”
A helicopter! Holy shit. I had myself a stalker with a badge.
“He was pretty upset,” Carr continued. “He thinks I’m trying to steal you away from him.”
“What the fuck am I? His girlfriend?”
Carr half-smiled at this. “Something like that.”
We entered a mostly empty office area. Only a few agents were at their desks talking on the phone or doing paperwork.
“What’d you say to him?” I asked.
“I said call George right now. If you’re going to be the guy on this case, knock yourself out. If George is good with that and he wants to work with you, I’ll walk away.” Carr motioned me into his office. “That’s when he offered to share you. Kind of like a joint custody arrangement.”
The agent parked himself on the edge of his desk. “Listen, George, here’s the deal. I’m not about to get into a pissing contest with another agency over you. That’s not gonna happen. The biggest mistake we could make would be allowing two handlers. Only one guy controls an informant, and that’s just the way it works, understand?”
“Yeah, man. Absolutely.”
“Well, then, you’ve got a decision to make. You’ve already been shopped to this guy in Riverside. And if that’s the direction you wa
nt to go, I won’t stand in your way.”
“Hell, no.”
“You sure about that? Because once you sign those papers, you’re with ATF.”
“Just hand me the pen.”
The agent smiled at this. “I’ll call the sheriff and tell him you’re not going through with it. That you got spooked. We’ll keep your pal Duffy in the loop but no one else. The fewer people know what we’re doing the better.”
I shook my head and grinned. “A helicopter? No shit.”
We left the office and walked down the hall to a conference room where I met Special Agent Jeff Ryan, the man who would serve as Carr’s right-hand man during my time undercover. Ryan had started with the Border Patrol down at the Brown Field Station in San Diego before transferring into ATF as a special agent at the Los Angeles Field Division. Next to him a folder was laid out on a polished conference table. I took a seat opposite John. He opened the folder, then glanced up at me.
“You ready for this?”
“Hell, yeah, man. Let’s do it.”
“Before we get into it,” said Carr, “let’s be clear about something.” He leaned forward on his elbows and studied me intently for a moment. “I understand why you’re doing this thing, George. I know how badly you want to get rid of those guys in Hemet. And I admire you for it. I really do. Nobody’s ever come out and volunteered for something like this before. But you need to understand something too. This thing isn’t going to happen overnight. It won’t be game over in two weeks or even two months. An operation like this takes time to find out exactly what these guys are doing and gather enough evidence to make a case. There’s a lot of hard work involved. Having said that, if you’re willing to put in the hours, so am I. For as long as it takes.”
To be honest, when I made the decision to go under, I had no fuckin’ clue what I was doing. I really did think my involvement would be just a matter of months. I’d help get those sons of bitches off the street, slap the dirt from my hands and get back to living again. But I was here now. I was committed. And I’d be goddamned if I was going to quit before I even got started.
I nodded at the folder. “What you got?”
“Okay,” said Carr.
He began sliding documents in front of me to read, a skill I’d managed to improve upon since the days when I was a high school illiterate. Most of the papers concerned my conduct as an ATF confidential informant—basically the dos and don’ts of working undercover. Once each document was read and explained, I initialed and signed on the dotted line.
After the folder was closed I was fingerprinted, thumbprinted, photographed and numbered—the whole nine yards. In the process, I was made virtually invisible to almost everyone, including those within the federal system. For instance, any receipts I signed while working undercover would be tagged to an ID number, and only John Carr, my handler, and a few of his superiors knew which number pointed to George Rowe. In this way I was protected from any leaks—accidental or otherwise—that could endanger my life.
Carr introduced me to several of his ATF colleagues that day, including Special Agent Darrin Kozlowski, the agent who had infiltrated Green Nation only to have things blown apart when the Vagos had sniffed a rat. Koz had been introduced into the Vagos by an informant back in 1997, but the ATF hadn’t had the kinks worked out of their undercover program yet and had lacked the ability to completely backstop the fictitious identity of their UC guys. That situation had changed in the years since. Now agents could roll under a false identity with everything in place; name, past history, a place to live, a workplace. It was all there and practically foolproof. In the years since Koz had barely escaped the Vagos with his skin, he’d climbed right back in the saddle again, successfully infiltrating both the Mongols and Warlocks motorcycle clubs.
Also introduced that day was John Ciccone, the ATF agent widely considered the most productive case agent expert in the country. Ciccone had set a high bar for making outlaw motorcycle gang cases that few could match. The man was case agent for one of ATF’s more high-profile busts, when special agent Billy Queen went under with the Mongols MC starting in 1998. Posing as outlaw Billy St. John, Queen spent two years gathering evidence on the Mongols. On the day of the takedown, forty-one of them were busted.
Ciccone shook my hand but didn’t sound overly confident about my chances of breaking in with the Vagos. After all, his man Koz was one of the top undercover specialists in the country, and he hadn’t succeeded. Not only that, but as Ciccone was quick to point out, I didn’t own a motorcycle. I think in his mind I’d already failed. Maybe he had a bug up his ass that morning, but I got the impression Ciccone wasn’t a fan.
Once Ciccone moved on, Carr handed me a Dr Pepper and sat me down in his office for a private conversation.
“Listen, here’s how this works,” he explained. “You just keep getting tight with the Hemet chapter. See what they’re up to. Find out who’s really running the show down there. We’ll start local and see where it takes us.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean in these types of cases, one thing often leads to another. We follow the evidence, and if that takes us outside of Hemet, so be it.”
That made me a little uncomfortable. The Hemet boys were the ones I was after. If ATF wanted to clean up the Vagos’ messes elsewhere, that was their business. Already I didn’t like the way this was going, but I kept my mouth shut.
“And another thing,” continued Carr. “We’re out to gather criminal evidence on weapons and drugs and anything else that constitutes a felony, but don’t try to come off as something you’re not—like some kind of big dope dealer. If you get outlandish with made-up stories, I guarantee that three days later you won’t remember what you said and someone will call you out on it. Don’t bullshit these guys, George, understand? You don’t want to trip yourself up.”
“Todd and Roy know I’m a fuckin’ gun nut, so that works,” I told him. “But I don’t use drugs anymore.”
“Then we won’t go that way. We’ll stick with guns. You’ve got a felony conviction, and it’s illegal to sell weapons to a felon. But when the time comes, ATF will front you the money and you’ll make the buys.”
“Alright, I’m ready,” I said, rubbing my hands together in anticipation. “Let’s go.”
“We’re not going to push things just yet. I want you to keep a low profile and show the chapter you’re committed. And remember what I said. Be yourself. You’re just an average Joe Blow.”
I nodded. “Gonna put a wire on me?”
“We’ll get to that soon enough.”
“What about a bike?”
“Soon enough,” John repeated.
He pulled out a pad of paper, scribbled on it. “I’ll be in touch in the next few days. Here’s my direct number.”
He ripped off the page and handed it to me. “I don’t have to tell you to be careful with that, right?” He smiled and proffered a hand across the desk. “Let’s take these guys down, George.”
I lifted my cast. John switched up and offered his left. We shook and it was done.
“Oh, one thing,” I said to him before leaving the office. “I’d like to include my friend Joe on this.”
“Bad idea,” said John without hesitation.
“Joe knows how to keep his mouth shut.”
“Oh, yeah? Does Joe drink?”
I hesitated.
“Listen,” said John before I could answer. “If the Bureau is going to invest time, money and resources in George Rowe, they’re going to want their investment protected. Right now it’s just you, me and Detective Duffy in the inner circle. You don’t want it getting much wider than that, okay? Because the wider that circle gets, the more dangerous it is for you. Doesn’t take much to compromise operational security. Man gets a few drinks in him, talks to the wrong person . . .” He shrugged. “Believe me, it’s happened before. Now, I can’t stop you from talking to this friend of yours. That’s your call. But, dude, I’d strongly advise agains
t it.”
I considered this a moment, then replied, “Joe’s like a brother. I’d trust him with my life.”
“I hope you’re right,” said John, “because it’s your life we’re talking about.”
I was telling Special Agent Carr the ironclad truth when I said there was no one on the planet I trusted more than Old Joe. That man always stuck with me through thick and thin. He was my best friend.
Years before, when the IRS seized Joe’s home for unpaid taxes, I’d pulled him off the floor and invited him to live with me in Hemet. Darlene and I were still together at the time, and Joe took a spare room in back, sharing space with Ollie, the family dog. It was a long, hard fall from business executive to rooming with a Labrador retriever, and Old Joe’s self-worth was officially shot to pieces. In a desk drawer I came across a stack of letters he’d written to his boys but hadn’t been able to bring himself to mail. In my opinion, what that wrecked soul needed was a new focus and direction. Just like me.
At the time I was the Hobo Kelly of landscapers, crossing the valley in a rusted pickup with a ladder strapped to the bed and an old wood chipper hitched to the back. My business was gradually being rebuilt—no small feat given the hit my reputation took after I went to jail—and I figured it might be a good time to take on a full-time employee. And since Joe looked nothing like a midget, I hired him to drag and stack brush for room, board and fifty bucks a week.
The man hated the work. “This isn’t for me, George,” he’d gripe whenever I was within earshot. But that shitty job gave Joe a reason to haul his depressed carcass out of bed each morning, and that was a start.