by George Rowe
Now I’m crapping my pants. I’ve got a war chest filled with weapons in the truck bed behind me and three sheriff’s deputies out front. Two of those lawmen stepped from the cruisers and approached Slinger, our VP at the time, who owned a Chrysler dealership in Hemet. After talking with the cops, Slinger strode back to my truck and spoke to me and Todd through the open window.
“We’re screwed,” were the first words from his mouth. “The cops said we should turn around. They know we’re headed for The Hideaway. They know what we’re doing.”
The instant I heard that my balls shriveled like pecans.
“How the fuck could they know that?” Todd wanted to know.
Later I found out the answer. Special Agent Ryan had called the ATF contact at Riverside County, who then rang their Lake Elsinore station for a heads-up. Somewhere between ATF and Lake Elsinore there was a monumental brain fart. What the cops should have done was intervene once we entered The Hideaway Bar, not made a goddamn traffic stop before we got there. Not only had this catastrophic blunder threatened the operation but it had also put my life in serious jeopardy.
“We’ve got a snitch,” Todd fumed. “We’ve got a fuckin’ snitch.”
“Think so?” said Slinger.
“How else do you explain it? They knew which direction we were coming. Only our guys fuckin’ knew that.”
This was bad.
“Could’ve been the Sons of Hell,” I said, trying a little misdirection. “Maybe they saw us coming in. We’ve used spotters when we thought something was coming, right?”
It was lame, but it was the best I could do on short notice.
Believe it or not the Hemet chapter was baffled by that bullshit for a couple of weeks. But it wasn’t long before their focus turned inward again, and the question on everyone’s mind was . . .
Who’s the rat?
“We’ve got a snitch in the system.”
It was our first church meeting since the traffic stop in Lake Elsinore, and you could feel the tension in JB’s garage that night. As Big Roy scanned the faces of the guys he’d brought into the chapter, you knew he had to be thinking, Which of you fuckers is the one? Who’s the snitch? I thought he was looking my way more often than the others, but that could have been my imagination.
“Someone’s feeding law enforcement information,” Roy continued. “And I think it’s coming from this chapter. So starting tonight, we’re tightening security. I want all of you to take off your shirts and pants. We’re doing a strip search before we start.”
A couple of the patches spoke up in protest, but Roy steamrolled them.
“I’m the P of this club, motherfuckers. If something happens, it’s gonna be me going down, not you. So get the fuck out if you don’t like it. The rest of you, everything off but the underwear.”
I was wired for sound that night. I was always wired on Wednesday nights when church was held anywhere but the house. As I stripped down to my socks and boxers, I honestly didn’t know what was about to happen. Chopper and Big Todd came out with one of those security wands. I prayed it was the same worthless hunk of junk that had failed so miserably at my home a few months earlier.
One by one, the ugliest mix of stripped-down, steroid-pumped, overweight, out-of-shape, hairy-assed men in recorded history shuffled forward for inspection. When it came my turn, all I could do was hold my breath.
Todd ran the wand over my crotch.
Nothing beeped.
He ran it over the clothes I’d handed Chopper.
Nothing booped.
Sue the manufacturer . . . I was “all clear” again.
It took over an hour for the line to move through security, but all sixteen of us passed with flying colors. After everyone was seated, Roy stood before the group and held up one of the local Riverside County newspapers.
“See this?” he said, tapping the front page. “There’s a story in here about how the Vagos went looking for members of the Sons of Hell to get into a war. And if you read this fuckin’ story it’s gonna say everything we’ve been talking about in church.”
Roy rolled the paper and continued. “So here’s the deal. From now on we watch what we fuckin’ say. No one talks to cops if they get stopped. All these careless comments about going to war or killing somebody or stealing motorcycles are what the law can use against us. All they have to do is link a few things together and we’re busted. Every one of you needs to assume that any time you talk to someone face-to-face or on the phone it’s being recorded and will be used against us. So new ground rules. From now on we run this chapter from inside the room. Everything stays in-house, you got that? And nobody discusses club business on the phone or cell phone.”
Roy held up one of those throwaway cell phones.
“Get one of these instead. This is a virgin phone. I’ve got it under a fictitious name and a fake address. This is the phone I’ll be using. But remember. I don’t want anyone calling me about club business because it shows a structure, and that’s what the feds want. If you have questions, ask them in church.”
He lifted the rolled newspaper and shook it at us. “Listen up, motherfuckers. I’m not sure exactly what the fuck is going on around here, but I’m watching every one of you. If there’s a rat in this chapter, I’m gonna find him . . . and I’m gonna fuckin’ bury him.”
Was it my imagination again, or was Big Roy looking at me when he said that?
The next time I saw Special Agent Jeff Ryan would be the last meet-up until the takedown. We were meeting in the Little Luau parking lot so he could swap out my recording gear. As he was approaching, the agent had the hunched posture of a whipped dog.
“Listen, George,” he said. “I want you to know that when I called our contact at Riverside I told him not to divulge any information. Somewhere along the line we had a breakdown.”
A breakdown? Yeah, I’d say so, buddy. Because of someone’s fuckup, the opportunity to nail the Vagos had been blown and now I was under suspicion and getting strip searched. There was heat on my back and a draft on my balls.
“I won’t be seeing you for a while,” Jeff continued. “My supervisor is taking me out of the field. I’ve been assigned to the shooting range.”
“Is that a good or a bad thing?” I asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m okay with it.”
I almost felt bad for the poor bastard. But I’d been this goddamn close to getting out from under Operation 22 Green, and now Big Roy was too scared to move and the Hemet chapter had gone underground. Hell, Roy was even forbidding us to wear our colors around town.
And the fallout didn’t end with Hemet. At least two other operations being run through the Riverside Gang Task Force had also ground to a halt. It was dead calm out there, man. You could almost hear the crickets chirping.
As weeks turned into months and Operation 22 Green continued to flounder, frustration was mounting. It cost hundreds of thousands, sometimes even millions, of dollars to run an undercover case, and John Carr’s superiors needed to see results in order to justify the huge investment of money and man hours. My handler was starting to come under pressure to get things moving again, and he, in turn, was laying that pressure on me.
“What the hell do you want me to do?” I bitched at him over the phone.
“I don’t know, George, but we need to do something. My supervisor’s dogging me to pick up the pace.”
“Well, then tell your supervisor to get his ass down here and make something happen. I’m doing everything I can, alright? Everything you guys have asked me to do, I’ve done. But these assholes are watching me now. Until everything calms the fuck down I’m not pushing a goddamn thing, okay? And if your supervisor doesn’t like it, well, all I can say is fuck him and fuck you.”
Whenever I behaved badly, John Carr’s punishment was to withhold my chicken katsu at the Little Luau and force me to drive sixty miles to a McDonald’s in Pomona. Following our heated exchange that’s exactly where I was headed for
our next Friday meeting.
I finished my last cheeseburger, then sat in my yellow plastic booth chewing on a straw as I waited for my handler to arrive. John was always chronically late, but two and a half hours was obviously some added punishment for being naughty. I was close to walking out of the place when the man finally walked in.
“You’re as bad as a fuckin’ tweaker,” I told him as he plopped down in the seat opposite me. “I’ve been sitting here over two hours, man. I’ve eaten four fuckin’ cheeseburgers and an apple pie.”
John leaned forward and said straight-faced, “You give me any more shit, Rowe, and I’ll throw your ass in jail.”
Then he gave a sly grin, and that broke the ice.
“Go fuck yourself,” I cursed under my breath.
“Don’t worry about it,” said John. “We’re both under pressure, dude. I’ve got other shit I’m dealing with too. Our CI in Victorville just got arrested. It’s a big mess up there.”
Charles, aka Quick Draw, had been in a bar called Mickey McGee’s with a handful of patches and prospects when a dispute had arisen with a civilian over—surprise, surprise—a pool table. Per international FW1-UFWA regulations, the Vagos had gone berserk and stomped that civilian bloody while Quick Draw had roamed the sidelines warning those greenies that the cops would come.
And sure enough, the cops had come.
A San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department sergeant had been watching the bar from the parking lot, knowing the Vagos had been inside. He’d come in like the cavalry and arrested the whole bunch, including ATF’s inside man. Now Quick Draw was cooling his heels in a cell, slapped with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar bail, and special agents Kozlowski and Carr were looking for a way to spring him without compromising the case. It would take them a month.
It was a mess, alright. But to be perfectly honest, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Quick Draw McGraw and his problems up in Victorville. I had worries of my own. After more than two years undercover and months of stress, I’d hit the wall.
In the past when I’d come to this point, John would pump my tires with a pep talk. Keep it going, George. The goal line’s in sight. We’re in the home stretch. Rah, rah, rah! But I wasn’t listening anymore. I was done with the grinding pressure, the long hours and being pushed around and treated like a child by Big Roy, a punk I could have bitch slapped with one hand—make that two hands—tied behind my back. I wanted the whole fuckin’ thing over and the Vagos out of my life . . . whatever that life was going to be.
And that was the big question.
My eyes were finally opening to a future beyond 22 Green, and I couldn’t see any. Life would change once this was over. I realized that now. This wouldn’t be as simple as removing my cut, exiting the Vagos and merging back into my old life in Hemet. I’d detoured onto a fucking road without an off-ramp. I’d never get back to the place I’d been.
Fact was, I’d eventually have to testify against the brothers I took down, and once George Rowe’s name was out there, his ass would be grass. And the lives of those closest to me would be in danger too. Certainly Old Joe was screwed, just like he’d warned from the beginning. And even though I’d kept Jenna in the dark, no doubt the Vagos would assume her guilty by association.
I’d dug everyone a big-ass hole . . . and no matter how hard I thought it through, I couldn’t figure a way out.
“Let me ask you something, John,” I said, stirring what was left of my shake with a bent straw. “What happens to me when this ends?”
“I don’t follow.”
“When this case is over, I’m fucked in Hemet, aren’t I? I can’t ever go back.”
John didn’t answer right away, but I could read the look on his face.
“Maybe not, George,” he finally said.
It was almost a relief to get it out there—to finally address the elephant in the room. The big bastard had been standing there all along, and I’d been ignoring him. Well, not anymore. Hey, there, Jumbo. Nice to finally meet you.
“Okay. So what can I do?” I asked. “What are my options?”
“Well . . . we could move you. Put you someplace safe.”
“You mean like Hammer?”
“Hammer killed himself, dude.”
“What else we got?”
“Well, there’s always WITSEC. Witness security. What they used to call witness protection. The U.S. Marshals Service runs that program. We’d have to apply, but there’s no guarantee they’d take you.”
“But if they did?”
“Then you disappear. They’d move you, give you a new name, new Social . . . a whole new identity.”
I considered this a long moment.
“What about Joe? Could he come?”
John shook his head. “Not unless you’re legally married.”
I returned a wry smile. “Joe’s a great guy, but . . .”
“Listen, George. Don’t worry about your friend. If WITSEC is the direction you decide to go, you have my word Joe will be protected. Far as I’m concerned, when you signed up for this operation, he came with the package. But here’s the thing you need to know about the Witness Security Program. If the marshals take you and you do go in, you’re basically cut off from the past. You can’t have any contact, any communication, with anyone you might have known. If the marshals find out you’ve compromised your new identity, you’ll get thrown out of the program. It’s a big step, dude. A life changer.”
I leaned back in the booth to watch a young family across the way chowing down on their Happy Meals. Sometimes it was easy to forget there was a world out there where people didn’t worry about things like getting buried in sand or rebooting their entire fucking lives. Man, I just wanted to live in that world again. But I couldn’t. It was gone.
“This was the deal right from the start, wasn’t it?” I said matter-of-factly. “I was never going back to Hemet.”
John leaned closer. “It’s just how things worked out, George.”
Yeah. It’s how things worked out, George. And now here I sat in the land of Ronald McDonald. Totally fucked.
“I need to think about this,” I said after a moment.
“Yeah, you do. It’s a big decision,” agreed John. “But I’ll do whatever I—”
I put up a sudden hand, stopping him midsentence. Someone familiar had just entered the restaurant. I’d watched him knock down beers with Terry the Tramp and hung out with him at the Screaming Chicken. I knew this long-haired bruiser. It was Bubba, that big, friendly biker who refused to join any outlaw club.
“Fuck,” I hissed at John under my breath. “I don’t believe it.”
“What’s wrong?” John said, turning to follow my look.
“That’s Bubba, man. He’s a friend of Tramp’s. What are the fuckin’ odds?”
Bubba spotted me.
Oh, shit.
He walked up to the table, hovering above it, and offered me his big paw.
“Hey, George. Good to see you, brother.”
“What are you doing here?” I answered as calmly as I could, pumping the big biker’s hand.
“Working, brother. Always working.”
Then he extended his hand to John Carr.
“How goes the battle, John?”
I was floored.
John slid over, and Bubba pushed into the seat beside him.
“Wait. You two know each other?” I said.
Bubba turned and smirked at John. “Look at this handsome sonofabitch. I hate sitting next to this guy. He always makes me look bad.”
“Show him where you work, Bubba,” said John.
Bubba discreetly reached under his shirt and pulled out a gold star hanging from a chain. The badge was stamped Deputy Sheriff, Los Angeles County.
“This is where I work.”
“No shit” was all I could manage.
“No shit.” Bubba smiled.
Born and raised in Long Beach, California, Bubba was turned on to law enforcement at an early age watc
hing television cop shows, much like John Carr. Only where John was a fan of Miami Vice, Bubba loved Adam 12. He’d entered law enforcement in 1969, then gone undercover as Bubba the biker, buddying up to motorcycle outlaws and gathering intelligence for over twenty years.
For a good chunk of that time he’d worked with Special Agent Carr as a core member of ATF’s One Percenter Task Force, taking an occasional hiatus to travel the country, speaking at law enforcement seminars as an expert on outlaw motorcycle gangs. In fact, it was Bubba, I found out later, who had introduced my friend Detective Duffy to John Carr. This man was the matchmaker behind my marriage to ATF.
Now pushing fifty, Bubba was nearing retirement and looking forward to rejoining his family, including a long-suffering wife who had pretty much raised their four kids during her husband’s long absences.
“I wanted you to meet Bubba because he’s going to be helping me out more—exchanging gear, delivering money for the buys . . . that sort of thing,” said John.
“Yeah, if I’m still around,” I replied.
“Having a tough time in Hemet, huh?” Bubba said.
“Big Roy’s been riding me pretty hard lately,” I told him, still trying to wrap my head around the fact I was talking to a lawman.
“Roy thinks you’re the informant?”
“He hasn’t said that, but I’ve got a feeling he’s thinking it.”
Now John cut in. “There’s always somebody who thinks somebody’s a cop, George. Don’t worry too much about it. There’s nothing they can pin on you.”
“Listen to the man. He should know,” said Bubba, nodding toward John.
Then that big biker leaned his elbows on the table and shared with me the most important bit of advice I’d ever receive on the art of surviving undercover.
“Listen. Here’s all you need to remember if someone accuses you of being a rat. Whatever happens, never cop to it. You understand? Even if they claim they’ve got you dead to rights, never admit who you’re working for. They’ll try to bluff you out, and that’s how guys get caught. No matter what they say. No matter what they do. Never cop to the truth, brother. Never.”
For six months a chill hung over the Hemet Vagos. Never mind that Operation 22 Green was floating facedown, our chapter’s weekly church sessions had become painfully uncomfortable exercises in paranoia. Every Wednesday night suspicion seemed to fall on someone new, passing from one member to the next like a loaded gun in a game of Russian roulette. There was a chambered bullet with the snitch’s name on it, and everyone was wondering whose head would get blown off.