Under and Alone Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Mongols Motorcycle Club Defendants’ Court Proceedings

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  To the men and women

  who make up

  the Thin Blue Line

  Author’s Note

  Except as otherwise noted, the facts recounted in this book, as well as the names of individuals and the places depicted, are real. The government’s three-year investigation into the criminal activities of the Mongols Motorcycle Club led to a number of firsts in the efforts of federal law enforcement to curb a growing problem of organized violence in the United States. Criminal acts described in this book are reflected in thousands of hours of covertly recorded conversations as well as thousands of documents generated by law enforcement agencies, along with the United States attorney’s office and district attorney offices in numerous jurisdictions.

  To the extent that my recounting is less detailed in certain sections of the book than in others, the reader will understand that I have been purposely vague in places where I have felt the need to protect myself and others who may be at risk of retaliation from members of the Mongols Motorcycle Club. Although years have passed since the investigation was concluded, threats continue to surface, making me acutely aware that I will always be looking over my shoulder.

  1

  SEPTEMBER 1998

  SOMEWHERE NEAR VISALIA, CALIFORNIA

  “All right, Billy, how long was your fuckin’ academy?”

  Red Dog pressed his ruddy, windburned face three inches from mine. I smelled that thick mix of Budweiser and crank-fueled sleeplessness on his breath. The words he spat felt hotter than the midday Southern California sun. He cocked his head to one side and pushed closer. “I’m askin’ you a fuckin’ question, Billy!”

  Red Dog, the national sergeant at arms of the Mongols Motorcycle Club, stood six feet tall, with long, stringy hair and a rust-colored handlebar mustache that drooped below his chin. From his pierced forehead, a silver chain swept down ominously past his left eye. His powerfully muscled arms were sleeved out with a web of prison tattoos, and his right hand clutched a loaded 9-mm Glock semiautomatic. Behind him, six other Mongols—Evel, C.J., Domingo, Diablo, Bobby Loco, and Lucifer—all in various states of drunkenness and methamphetamine highs, were slapping magazines into their Glocks and Berettas. More than one had his Mongol colors decorated with the skull-and-crossbones patch, boldly announcing to the world that he had killed for the club.

  Here at the end of a long dirt road, in an abandoned orange grove a 180 miles north of Los Angeles, what had begun as a typical Southern California day—that perfect golden sun beating down on a ribbon of black highway—had quickly turned into my worst nightmare.

  For several months now, working deep undercover on assignment for the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), I’d been posing as a Mongols “prospect”—a probationary member of the club, a position that allowed me to wear my black leather vest with the lower rocker reading CALIFORNIA but not yet the official black-and-white center patch and top rocker that distinguished a full-fledged member.

  As a prospect, you’re a slave, the property of the club. You have to do everything a member tells you to do, from hauling drugs and guns to wiping a member’s ass if he orders you to. Some members were good for simple orders like “Prospect, go get me a beer,” or “Light my cigarette,” or “Clean my bike.” But other members, guys like Red Dog, took inordinate pleasure in making a prospect’s life a living hell.

  Prospecting inside the Mongols was a dangerous game. According to intel developed by ATF, the Mongols Motorcycle Club had assumed the mantle of the most violent motorcycle gang in America, a tight-knit collective of crazies, unpredictable and unrepentant badasses. With 350 full-patch members, the gang was a small fraction of the size of the Hells Angels, their hated rivals, but the Mongols had wreaked more than their fair share of havoc since they were founded in the early seventies.

  Their most significant violent acts in the 1970s and ’80s were committed against the Angels, with whom they fought (and ultimately won) a seventeen-year war. But by the mid-nineties, infused by the ruthless Latino gang mentality of East Los Angeles, the Mongols’ indiscriminate violence spread outside the biker underworld and began to terrorize the general populace of Southern California. When the Mongols frequented mainstream bars and clubs, where people were not as familiar with the gang’s fearsome reputation, the result was a series of vicious assaults, stabbings, and gunfights. In late 1997 the Mongols got into a confrontation in a club in the San Gabriel Valley, just outside of L.A., which resulted in a shoot-out, leaving one man dead. Also in 1997, the Mongols went to two nightclubs in the Los Angeles area and stabbed patrons in plain view of dozens of witnesses, but no one would come forward to testify against them.

  Nor was the Mongols’ violence limited to the outside world; even within the ranks of the club, the gang had such a reputation for assaulting its prospects that by the late nineties, the membership was dwindling: No one wanted to join a club if it meant that every day and night he had to worry about taking a savage beat-down. In 1998 they adopted a new national policy: No beating on the prospects. And almost everyone stuck by it, except for Red Dog.

  Despite the fact that as national sergeant at arms he was supposed to be enforcing the club’s rules and constitution—yes, the club had a seventy-page constitution—Red Dog was a loose cannon, riding his Harley through life with a “fuck everyone” attitude. For months he was in my face, smashing his heavy fist into my chest, at times uppercutting me as hard as he could. More than once he’d sucker-punched me in the gut, leaving me doubled over, gasping for air, and ready to puke. But I was a prospect, so I gritted my teeth and sucked it up.

  That morning we had all hooked up at C.J.’s house, where the dudes drank hard and I did my prospect thing, fetching beer for the patches (as fully inducted members of the club are called), lighting their cigarettes, watching them do line after line of crank and coke. Then when Red Dog figured everyone was drunk and high enough, he gave an abrupt order: “Let’s go shoot.”

  This was a Mongols membership requirement: Before any prospect could attain full-patch status in the club, he had to prove that he owned a firearm and was a decent shot. When I got behind the wheel of my bullet-pocked red Mustang, I thought we were heading out to an actual firing range—and so did my ATF backup. We formed a ragged convoy behind Red Dog’s burgundy Monte Carlo as we left the Visalia city limits. I kept glancing in my rearview mirror, checking to see that my backup was still there. But as we got farther and farther into the countryside of vineyards and orange groves, eventually turning down a remote dirt driveway, I realized we had completely lost my backup. I also realized this wasn’t going to be a standard firearms-qualification exercise. There was nothing ATF could do to help me now. If shit went bad, it just went bad. I was alone.

  Now, with a collection of new semiautomatic pistols on the hoods of our cars and the loaded magazines clicking into place, the mood in the orange grove suddenly turned dark and twisted. One Mongol brother stood loading rounds into a street-sweeper, a high-capacity, drum-fe
d semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun that looks similar to the old Thompson submachine gun from the Prohibition era. An awesome assault weapon, beloved by drug dealers and hard-core gangsters, the street-sweeper has since been banned by the feds. I knew that a gun like that was useless for target shooting; like the tommy gun, a street-sweeper is a pure killing machine.

  Without warning, Red Dog was up in my face again, head cocked to one side, hollering crazily—accusing me of being an undercover cop. “How long was your fuckin’ academy, Billy?”

  “What are you talkin’ about, Red Dog?”

  “You know what I’m talking about, Billy! Who the fuck did you tell you was comin’ up here? Who the fuck did you tell you was gonna be with the Mongols today? Who, Billy?”

  “I didn’t tell nobody. Come on, Red, why you acting like this? I didn’t tell nobody I was coming up to Visalia.”

  He locked his slate blue eyes on mine and, in torturous silence, stared at me for fifteen seconds. “So you’re saying if I put a bullet in the back of your fuckin’ head right now, ain’t nobody gonna know where to start looking for you? Is that right, Billy?”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s right, Red Dog.”

  He gestured across the dusty, desolate, trash-strewn field, told me to go set up some cans to shoot at. My first thought was of the infamous 1963 Onion Field case, chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh’s bestseller and subsequent movie, in which two young LAPD officers, after stopping a vehicle in Hollywood they suspected had been involved in a series of armed robberies, were kidnapped by a pair of ex-convicts and taken to a remote onion field outside Bakersfield. Officer Ian Campbell was shot dead while Officer Karl Hettinger watched in horror before escaping with his life.

  When I turned my back to Red Dog and the other armed Mongols, the icy realization hit me: After the firefights in Vietnam, after twenty-five years in law enforcement, this was the way it ended—I was going to die on a gorgeous Southern California day, by a Mongol bullet, in the middle of a godforsaken, abandoned orange grove somewhere outside Visalia.

  I closed my eyes and began to walk, waiting for the bullets to start tearing through my back. I couldn’t even turn to shoot it out: Red Dog and Domingo had made certain that I was the only one without a gun. It was a simple equation: If they’d made me, I was going to die today. I stumbled across the field in my motorcycle boots and suddenly saw an image of my two sons standing tearfully over my open casket. I’d felt similar eerie premonitions during my tour of duty in Vietnam, but here, without question, there was nothing worth dying for.

  Suddenly, I heard a loud pop and felt my boot crunching an empty beer can. My knees buckled, but I bent down and picked up the can. I glanced back toward the Mongols and saw them talking in a tight circle instead of pointing their guns and training their sights on me. No, they weren’t going to shoot me, at least not right now . . .

  2

  “Queen, line one!”

  It was a bright morning in late February 1998, and I was sitting in my office on Van Nuys Boulevard, typing up reports, when I got the call that changed my life. Picking up the receiver, I heard the voice of Special Agent John Ciccone, calling from ATF Group II in downtown Los Angeles. “Billy Boy,” he said, “how’d you like a shot at riding with the Mongols?”

  I stared down at the stream of muscle cars and motorcycles speeding down Van Nuys. Ciccone was known for his bad practical jokes as well as his choice of bad nicknames, but I could tell he was dead serious on this one. “What’s going on, Johnny?”

  Ciccone knew I’d been hanging out with the Hells Angels for a few weeks, gathering intel for another case agent. At the time, ATF was working an investigation in conjunction with the Internal Revenue Service and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department, trying to make a prosecution against the Angels. Ciccone also knew that the Mongols were the gang responsible for much of the biker-related murder and mayhem in the L.A. area.

  “Billy, why don’t you forget that Red and White crap and take a look at the Mongols?” The Hells Angels are often called the Red and White because of the colors of their patch. The Mongols are known as the Black and White.

  Ciccone, an eleven-year veteran of ATF, wasn’t your stereotypical agent: “One-man, one-gun” cases really didn’t excite him much. Five feet seven, wiry, clean-cut, Ciccone was the kind of guy you might easily pass on a sidewalk or in a shopping mall and take no notice of. Despite his small stature, he had the fierce determination of a long-distance runner—he ran marathons and pumped weights with fanaticism—and, within ATF, carried himself with tremendous command presence.

  Ciccone and I had worked together from 1992 to 1998 in the ATF’s Special Response Team, the federal version of SWAT. Over the years I’d developed a deep admiration for John’s skills; he could manage complex investigative cases like no one else I had seen at ATF. It’s not a talent they can teach at the ATF academy in Glynco, Georgia. John was gifted with the ability to juggle the fragile egos and self-promoting attitudes of ATF management, often a good-ol’-boy network with an ingrained us-versus-them mentality. I had also come to recognize Ciccone as a barracuda who could swim in the shadow of great white sharks and still manage to come away with dinner.

  “Talk to me, Johnny,” I said. “What you got on the Mongols?”

  Over the previous few months Ciccone had been receiving increasingly disturbing reports on the surge in the Mongols’ criminal activity across the United States. Those of us who worked the biker underworld for ATF had become alarmed as the Mongols’ penchant for assaults, gunfights, and cold-blooded murder spread from the biker scene into the general population.

  While this “Mongol Nation,” as they refer to themselves, spans the southern and western United States and Mexico, with growing chapters in Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado, and Georgia, its stronghold is Southern California, in particular the Hispanic communities in and around Los Angeles.

  Ciccone told me that he had a confidential informant—or CI—who looked promising. The young woman was willing to make an introduction to the gang. And if I was interested, Ciccone said, he’d deal with the administrative types, handle the paperwork, and we’d be good to go.

  I watched the candy-painted Chevy Impalas blasting bass-heavy Latino rap and the roaring Harley-Davidson bikes chewing up the asphalt. “Well, then . . . line it up.”

  Neither Ciccone nor I realized the extent of the perils we’d be facing or the personal sacrifices we’d be making over the next twenty-eight months; neither one of us dreamed that this routine phone call was about to become the most extensive undercover operation inside an outlaw motorcycle gang in the history of American law enforcement.

  In March 1998 I’d gone up to Oakland to trade motorcycles with Special Agent Steve Martin, the group supervisor, also known as the resident agent in charge (RAC), of the Oakland office. I held Martin, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, in high esteem; we’d had a friendly but intense rivalry during our time at the ATF’s Special Response Team school. He and I were the two oldest candidates in our class. He’d finished number one and I’d finished a tight number two.

  Earlier in his ATF career, Martin had ridden undercover with another outlaw motorcycle gang (or OMG), the Warlocks, out of Florida, and managed to send a well-deserving group of them to prison on federal drug, guns, and explosives charges. He had a soft spot for the bike he’d ridden in that case. When he relocated to Oakland, he’d brought the bike with him as a trophy of his accomplishments. Now I hoped it would bring me a little luck.

  It was definitely a biker’s bike. A stripped-down version of a Harley-Davidson FLHTC, it was black with leather bags and a badass, hot-rod engine that would rival the fastest bike in any gang. With straight drag pipes and a compression ratio well above a stock Harley, this hog could be heard from a mile away. If you were a cop, from two miles. The fact that I would enjoy riding it was simply icing on the cake.

  After lining up all the required paperwork, Ciccone called me to say that he’d just talked
to his CI and she was going to meet us at the Rose Bowl parking lot in Pasadena at about nine P.M. It was a Thursday night, and we knew that various Mongols would be at The Place.

  It had always struck me as appropriate that the Mongols, not the sharpest knives in the drawer, would pick a place called The Place as their watering hole. Reminded me of a little kid’s sneakers with L and R written in Magic Marker on each rubber-tipped toe.

  “Okay,” I told Ciccone. “I’ll be there.”

  Strangely enough, I didn’t really think too much about the plan at the time. It was going to be just another undercover caper. Merely an introduction. No buys, no recordings, no big deal. A basic intelligence-gathering mission.

  At this early stage, Ciccone and I, as ATF special agents working out of different offices, answered to different group supervisors. The chain of command in the field looks like this: The special agent (sometimes called a field agent) answers directly to his group supervisor (or resident agent in charge), who oversees six to ten field agents. Directly above the RAC is the assistant special agent in charge (ASAC, pronounced “ay-sack”); for Los Angeles there are two ASACs, each responsible for overseeing half of the groups of special agents. Next in line comes the SAC, or special agent in charge; in L.A. the SAC is responsible for all of Southern California, from the Mexican border to as far north as Paso Robles. Administrators above the rank of special agent seldom leave ATF offices to see action in the field.

  I left Van Nuys after informing my RAC that I would be working that night. He ran his standard admin-babble by me. “Be in the office in the morning, and don’t forget your duty-agent assignment.” “Duty agent” was yet another genius boondoggle dreamed up by ATF administrators wherein they assigned senior investigators to do secretarial work—answering telephones and sorting messages. I doubt this was what Uncle Sam had in mind for his tax dollars when he trained me to be a federal law-enforcement officer.