by George Rowe
When John Carr swore he’d send backup the day I went to Tramp’s place to face the Hells Angels, it was Shelli Kelly who hustled up to Hesperia to cover me. Now she had a CI of her own to handle . . . and that was asking a lot.
John once described handling informants as “worse than having a kid.” Being one of those kids, I wouldn’t disagree. I sometimes called ten times a day looking for words of wisdom from Uncle Johnny Law. Over the course of a long-term investigation like 22 Green, there might be thousands of calls and meetings.
Shelli Kelly wasn’t prepared to shoulder that kind of load by herself, and her department lacked the resources to babysit an informant 24-7, so she turned to the ATF’s Los Angeles field office and Special Agent Darrin Kozlowski for help. For Koz it must have felt like old home week, coming back to the Vagos to handle Charles. Only a few years before he’d been on the inside looking out as a patched member of the Hollywood chapter.
Getting patched hadn’t nearly been the ordeal for Koz’s CI as it had been for me. Those desert chapters were like the Wild West, man, and infiltrating was as easy as hanging around the same bars. From there it was a quick run up the ladder. Charles, aka Quick Draw, had been under a year less than me and was already a sergeant at arms in Victorville. And according to John Carr, those desert boys had already given Quick Draw plenty of indictable material.
In July, just a few months earlier, two Victorville Vagos had walked into a meth dealer’s home in the Lucerne Valley intent on robbery. Both those boys were spun on crank, armed with revolvers and acting on a tip that a buyer with six grand in his pocket was coming over to score some dope. But the only person in the house was a forty-three-year-old tweaker named Little Jimmy, who freaked out when the Vagos walked in and ran for the door. One of the Vagos, a twenty-six-year-old dimwit named Twist, turned his gun sideways gangsta-style and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore through Jimmy’s back, then his heart. He made it out to the front steps, where he died.
The two Vagos fled the town and thought they’d gotten away with murder. And they would have too, except a few nights later Twist was cruising the High Desert with his new buddy, Quick Draw. And Quick Draw, it turns out, was an excellent listener. He wanted to hear every thrilling detail of Twist’s robbery gone bad, and that dumb-ass Vago was only too happy to put it on the record.
But now ATF had a dilemma. Charging those two Vagos with murder would mean revealing Quick Draw as the undercover source, and that informant was too productive to lose. For the long-term sake of the mission, John Carr and ATF made the decision to hold the evidence and keep fingers crossed that nobody else got hurt while those killers roamed free. It was a gamble. A big fuckin’ gamble. Eventually when Operation 22 Green wrapped and the takedown happened, Twist and his partner would answer for Little Jimmy, a dead man who only wanted to get high.
“It’s a checks and balances thing,” John told me. “We can get information from Charles that we check off with you and vice versa. This way one hand knows what the other is doing. Koz and I think it would be smart to get you two together and coordinate our efforts. What would you think about meeting him?”
“You want me to meet the CI?”
“Yeah.”
“Does he know who I am?”
“Not yet.”
“Good. Because that’s the way I want to keep it. He’s a doper, John. And I don’t trust dopers. That’s all I fuckin’ need is for this guy to flip on me. It ain’t happening, man.”
My handler tried to convince me the Victorville CI had cleaned up, just as I had. But I wasn’t going for it. In my experience addicts rarely changed. Sooner or later the old Charles would rear his ugly head and I’d be fucked. Like I told John, it came down to trust, and I didn’t trust that ex-tweaker CI. No. I wanted to keep the circle as tight as possible. Already with Detective Shelli Kelly aboard, it had widened more than I was comfortable with. Those in the know now included Detectives Kelly and Duffy, John Carr and some of his ATF colleagues, my buddy Old Joe and, last but not least, the mysterious undercover cop from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who rode outlaw but my handler refused to identify.
Terry the Tramp didn’t want any part of a gang war. Wars cost money, which meant fewer funds in the club account, which meant fewer coins for the slot machines. The Vagos international P was anxious to find a way around Hemet’s call to battle, which was why he was busy trying to talk through the impasse with the Hells Angels in San Bernardino. But the natives of Green Nation were restless, and as the drumbeat for war grew louder, Tramp had no choice but to act.
So he threw Big Roy a bone. He green-lit a hit on Bro himself. It was a move that risked pissing off the Sons of Hell and the Angels anyway, but it was a risk Tramp had to take.
When Roy informed the chapter that Tramp had given a thumbs-up on Bro, they were immediately into it—all revved up and ready to go.
“We going to Bro’s house to handle this?” asked Chopper, a husky young Mexican. He was a former high school classmate of Jenna’s and Doc’s stepson—the dentist I’d sold my bike to for gambling money.
“I think we should get him when he’s leaving for work in the morning,” offered Big Todd. “We could use baseball bats.”
Better get a sledgehammer if you plan on taking down Bro, I wanted to say. That boilermaker was a huge, no-necked motherfucker—the kind of guy you’d have to shoot to stop, as Freight Train used to say. I was hoping that wouldn’t happen, though. I liked Bro. That big boy could get along with just about anybody. But because he’d stood up to Todd and Roy (and got a chain wrapped around his head for his trouble) he was number one on the Vagos shit list.
Roy decided whacking Bro with Louisville Sluggers was a pretty good idea. So he directed Big Todd, Iron Mike and Chopper to grab some lumber, ambush Bro on his way to work, and take batting practice on his head.
This is what Big Roy was good at, firing up the troops and sending them into battle while he watched the carnage from yonder distant hill. Hemet’s P was one of those generals who led from behind, and in my book that made him a pussy. But it also made him smart—smart enough to understand the danger of leading a charge where laws were being broken. Club officers were prime targets for the feds, who saw cutting off the heads of leadership as an effective way to cripple outlaw gangs like the Vagos. If Big Roy wasn’t careful, the United States Justice Department could take away everything.
Including Big Roy.
Better the peons go down, he figured.
But at the end of the day, as was usually the case, nothing happened. The hit squad hung around Bro’s house a few times but always returned dragging their baseball bats, claiming their target never showed up or they couldn’t find him. So as the summer months waned, Bro was still out there flying the Sons of Hell colors, and it was driving Roy to distraction. Bro was an itch he just couldn’t scratch.
Big Roy wanted to go after the Sons of Hell, and Tramp had run out of time to broker a deal. In mid-October of 2004, the Vagos international P sanctioned a war against the Sons, notifying Vagos chapters in Venice, Southside, Victorville, Pomona, Norco and Corona to stand by with Hemet for the coming fight.
Tramp also warned his rank and file they should be prepared to go toe-to-toe with the mighty Hells Angels if they wanted to remain in the club. If they weren’t prepared for bloodshed, he told them, they should turn in their patch immediately or face physical punishment.
“Tramp says we’re gonna roll on those motherfuckers,” Big Roy announced during church at his home in San Jacinto.
“Are we talking guns . . . knives?” North wanted to know.
“It would be guns, knives, bats, chains, everything,” Todd chimed in. “If they have their gunners, we’ll have our gunners on the side.”
“The Sons and the Angels are gonna be in war mode,” Roy warned. “Tramp may roll us in club strong to Hells Angels and Sons of Hell functions. This won’t be like a bar fight. You could be in a situation where you have to decide if you�
��re going to take a life.”
Big Roy then refreshed memories by laying down the guidelines again for a Code 69. He was wasting his breath, because while Code 69s sounded cool in theory, they seldom came off the way they were drawn up. Maybe it was just too involved for those geniuses. If a member received a Code 69 on his cell phone, he was expected to immediately drop whatever he was doing. He had to wear dark shoes and dark clothes (no club colors), and pack an extra shirt and Levi jeans (in case one pair got bloody and had to be tossed). Gloves would be required, either rubber or the cotton gardening variety. Members also had to travel alone in a private vehicle (no motorcycles) and without weapons of any kind. Everyone had one hour to show up at Buckshot’s barn, where the war chest was stored. Instructions would follow.
How ’bout instructions for the fuckin’ instructions?
“This is serious Vagos shit,” Roy reminded the troops, as if they were headed for the shores of Normandy. “A Code sixty-nine comes before everything else. And you’d better fuckin’ show up at Buckshot’s place. If not, you’d better have a damn good reason.”
Me (blurred) with the Vagos in 2005.
A discussion followed on which chapter members would be “slingers” and “shooters.” The slingers would fight, the shooters would carry iron. I was designated a shooter because I owned a gun. Todd was a shooter. Iron Mike was a shooter. Even Crash was a shooter.
A few days later members of the Vagos support club, The Green Machine, were brought into my garage for a briefing by the sergeant at arms. I’d been forced to boot the Vagos out of the living room after they’d treated the floor like their personal ashtray and Jenna had had herself a hissy fit. House or garage, though, didn’t really matter. Those ATF techies had wired the whole damn place for sound and picture.
At the briefing Big Todd did his best General George Patton impersonation, slapping around one Green Machine member who was slow to take his seat, then warning the rest they should just turn in their patches if they weren’t prepared to face the vaunted red and white.
One of the Green Machine members in attendance that night was Crusher, the sergeant detective from the Cathedral City PD who had been tasked with running background checks on Vagos prospects. At that point Crusher was on borrowed time, the subject of an internal affairs investigation probing his relationship with the Vagos. So far the man had managed to stick around longer than I would have liked, but John Carr assured me Crusher had one foot out the door and the other on axle grease.
I won’t get into the details of how the ATF nailed that dirty cop. Suffice to say some of the names handed to the sergeant for background checks were tagged by the feds and traced right back to the Cathedral City PD. Sergeant Crusher had shot himself in the foot.
In the end that crooked lawman would never be prosecuted for betraying his solemn oath; to do so would have exposed me as the informant. With Operation 22 Green active and with bigger fish to fry, ATF decided against blowing my cover—not unlike the situation with Quick Draw. Sergeant Crusher would eventually be squeezed like a pimple on the ass of law enforcement and wiped from the Cathedral City PD.
October slid into November, and still all was quiet on the western front. At that point it was trench warfare, with all of us hunkered down in our holes on either side of no-man’s-land. Nobody, it seemed, was willing to come out and fire the first shot.
Leave it to Rhino, that mullet-headed man-mountain from San Bernardino, to toss the boys over the top and into the fray. The international sergeant at arms instructed the Hemet chapter to begin surveillance on the Sons of Hell, gathering member’s addresses so the Vagos could pick them off one by one. Big Todd was handed the assignment, but he didn’t waste much gas in the effort. All he came up with was one fuckin’ address.
That was enough, though, to at least start things rolling.
I got a call one night from North, who by this time had ditched the Hemet chapter and signed on with Quickie John’s bunch over in Norco. I was given an address and told to meet him there right away. He wouldn’t say why. When I arrived in my truck I found North, Big Todd and Junior, the Winchester chapter’s sergeant at arms, holding baseball bats and tire irons on a residential street.
“See that truck there?” said North, pointing me toward a house down the block where a pickup was parked at the curb. “That belongs to a Sons of Hell patch. Tramp gave the order to take him. Once he comes out, we’re gonna fuck him up.”
Oh, shit.
These idiots were going to ambush that poor bastard—maybe even kill him—and I didn’t know what the hell to do. It was one of those no-win scenarios John Carr had warned me about. I couldn’t leave, but I couldn’t get involved either. And to try and convince those guys not to beat their intended target would be futile and suspicious.
No, man. All I could do was stick around and hope for the best.
Within minutes of my arrival, Chopper, Sparks, JB and Iron Mike showed up carrying bats and metal pipes. But Mike also carried something more worrisome—a .45 caliber semiautomatic tucked under his belt. It wasn’t exactly shaping up to be a fair fight, but then again, nobody ever accused an outlaw of fighting by the rules.
Less than an hour later the Sons of Hell member left his house and climbed into his truck.
“Handle it,” Big Todd commanded Iron Mike.
“I’m going to shoot him,” the little Vago announced.
Iron Mike scrambled into a pickup driven by Junior, the Winchester sergeant at arms, and the truck roared off with Mike ready to blast away from the passenger’s-side window. The Sons of Hell patch saw them coming as he started his truck. He slammed into gear and veered sharply around the oncoming pickup, then sped past us like a frightened rabbit. In a moment came the hunter, tires screeching against the asphalt as the truck turned the corner and disappeared.
I never heard gunshots, or anything else for that matter, until later that night, when I got word that the rabbit had managed to evade his pursuers and escape with his skin. Later when I was wired up, I spoke to Iron Mike about what happened that day.
“That was a pretty tough situation they put you in, brother,” I told him.
Mike turned to me with a serious gaze and said, “If I could have, I would have shot him.”
And I have no doubt that little Chicano spoke the truth.
18
A Snitch in the System
It was a Code 69—drop everything and get to the barn right away. I was supervising my work crew on a tree-trimming job when Big Todd called my cell phone and told me to get to Buckshot’s place. Apparently Terry the Tramp had just authorized the Hemet chapter to roll on the Sons of Hell in Lake Elsinore, and my work truck was needed to carry the war chest.
Just when I was starting to think the gang war had been pushed to the back burner, the heat had suddenly been cranked up again. Here might be one last chance to nail the Vagos on a RICO, one final opportunity to put a stake through the heart of the operation that refused to die. I left the job site, hopped in my truck and called John Carr on the road to Buckshot’s place.
He didn’t pick up.
Shit.
I punched in the ATF field office and found myself talking to Special Agent Jeff Ryan.
“Where’s Carr? I need to talk to him, man. It’s important.”
“Special Agent Carr is unavailable,” said Jeff.
“Where the hell is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what should I do? We’re about to roll on the Sons of Hell.”
There was a brief pause before Jeff replied, “I’ll call you back.”
Just minutes from Buckshot’s property I still hadn’t received a return call from Special Agent Ryan, so I rang ATF on the Nextel again. This time there was an anxious edge to Jeff’s voice when he picked up the phone.
“I can’t get hold of John,” he said to me. “I’m trying to contact someone higher up.”
“There’s no time for that, man. We’re rolling at seven.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You’re asking me?”
I couldn’t believe it. Here was a golden opportunity to wrap Operation 22 Green with a nice, fat RICO bow, and my handler had gone missing.
“Alright, man, here’s the deal,” I said after a long pause. “We’re rolling at seven o’clock for The Hideaway Bar in Lake Elsinore. We’ll be coming in on Railroad Canyon Road. You got that? Railroad Canyon.”
“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” replied the special agent.
When I pulled into Buckshot’s driveway I found most of the Hemet boys already gathered—maybe sixteen in all, which was just about the entire chapter at that time. Per Code 69 stipulations, they should have all been traveling incognito. But there were no dark shirts and pants, no change of clothes, no rubber gloves and no private vehicles. Everyone was mounted on bikes and flying their colors. Everyone, that is, but our fearless leader.
Once more, Big Roy Compton was commanding from the rear.
Two of the Vagos emerged from Buckshot’s barn hauling the chapter’s war chest. They slid the arsenal into my truck bed. Big Todd climbed into the cab beside me, and the green army rolled with a burst of dirty thunder. I trailed the pack for several miles down Highway 74 before we turned off and headed in the direction of Lake Elsinore.
The closer we came to The Hideaway Bar, the more nervous I got. John Carr was AWOL, and one of his recurring themes was to avoid trapping myself in felony situations. Yet here I was, driving a pickup loaded with illegal weapons on my way to commit felony assault.
Just remember John’s advice, I told myself. Don’t lead the charge.
Now I was hoping and praying for a miracle—that once we got to the bar the law would be there to jump in at the last moment and stop the rumble before anyone got hurt.
About a half mile out, a Riverside County Sheriff’s Department cruiser went rushing past. Then came two more with lights flashing.
Fuck. The cops are red-lighting us.