Under and Alone (2 page)

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.

At about 8:30
P.M.
I jumped on my new hot-rod Harley and headed for the Rose Bowl, where I found Ciccone sitting in his black Pontiac Grand Am. John loved that car but drove it like he was going to turn it over to the junkyard tomorrow. I’m not a deeply religious person, but every time I rode anywhere with Ciccone, no matter how short a distance, I said a prayer for myself and any innocent bystanders in his path.

The Rose Bowl, focus of the sports-loving nation every January 1, is a huge venue that holds more than ninety thousand people during college football games. It’s located in a narrow pass that separates the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys. The area is mostly residential, with an affluent, old-money feel. Even during periods with no special events, people come from all over to walk around the area. But on this night the Rose Bowl was dead calm and the parking lot dark. A thousand stars spread out across the clear California sky.

In his Pontiac, Ciccone and I mulled over the upcoming operation while waiting for our CI to show up. Ciccone hadn’t said too much to me about the CI. I knew that she’d contacted an LAPD detective and was willing to introduce someone into the Mongols. She claimed, according to this detective, that she was pissed off at the Mongols because of what she’d seen them do to a friend of hers. Not that the bikers had stolen everything he owned, or beaten him within an inch of his life, or some other god-awful thing. Nope, she was angry because she’d watched as the Mongols scooped up one of her friends and turned him from a good family man into a flaming Mongol asshole. The fact that he was an eager participant in the transformation (or that she herself continued to be a willing Mongol hanger-on) didn’t play into her twisted logic. Personally, I didn’t care why she was doing what she was doing; I was using her, albeit with her permission, to further our noble cause.

Within the law-enforcement community there is a saying about confidential informants: “You never know when they’re gonna piss backward on you.” I knew that an introduction into any undercover operation by way of a CI was risky, but I really had no clue how risky until I met Sue*
 
¹
face-to-face.

Within a few minutes a pickup truck rolled into the parking lot. It was old, dirty, banged up, reflecting no pride of ownership. It pulled up under the sole streetlight where Ciccone and I were sitting in his Pontiac. Although I’d never really given it much thought, I suppose in my own wishful mind I’d envisioned the CI to be a cute little biker chick who’d been turned around by an attack of conscience.

But what rolled out of the truck was two hundred pounds of bleached-blond tweaker that could neither stand still nor shut up. “Tweaker” is cop vernacular for a methamphetamine addict; anyone who knows anything about meth can tell you that its physiological effects are brutal. It can take an attractive young woman and make her look like Medusa in no time. In Sue’s case, she had probably started from a disadvantaged position, and it had all gone downhill from there.

As Sue rambled on, I glanced over and gave Ciccone a little nod of gratitude for his expert selection. The three of us agreed to split up and meet at a joint called In-N-Out Burger on Foothill Boulevard in Tujunga. Sue would get on my bike, and we would ride over to The Place from there. So that was that. With a loose game plan, we headed out.

Tujunga is a bedroom community within the boundaries of Los Angeles proper, on the northeasternmost edge of the San Fernando Valley. It borders Glendale and Pasadena, nestled quietly into the surrounding mountain range. The residential terrain runs the gamut from beaten-down shacks to palatial custom-built homes on substantial horse property.

Tujunga, per capita, has more than its share of white trash and rednecks as well as an ever-present biker element. In police circles, Tujunga is referred to as The Rock, after Alcatraz’s beloved nickname. In my tenure as a criminal investigator, I’d participated in many cases on The Rock, and in this community I began my odyssey.

I rolled into the parking lot of the In-N-Out Burger followed by Sue and Ciccone. Sue parked her truck and got herself ready while Ciccone waited in his car and I sat on my idling bike. Ciccone and I looked at each other across the parking lot and gave a thumbs-up.

Sue walked over to my bike and then, like something out of an old western, hopped onto one of the back passenger foot pegs as if it was Trigger’s stirrup. For the uninitiated, any Harley-Davidson could rightfully be called heavy metal, and an FLHTC is heavier still. There was no way I was going to be able to hold up that bike with her big glow-in-the-dark white ass hanging off one side. Though I held on for dear life, down we went with a horrific crash in the parking lot—me, my CI, and Steve Martin’s revered Harley. It was a less than auspicious start.

From the ground where I lay, I looked up at Ciccone. It’s impossible to describe the look on his face. I think he wanted to laugh, wanted to apologize, and was praying to the ATF gods that this was not a harbinger of things to come. I picked up the bike and my ego and prepared for round two. As if I were talking to a six-year-old, I explained to Sue that there was no way I was going to be able to hold up a thousand pounds of motorcycle and her at the same time. She was going to have to use a different technique to get on the bike. She looked at me with a wounded expression but then took a deep breath and carefully got on.

With its reputation for casual violence, The Place was the worst of the many biker bars that dot the Tujunga landscape. There had been frequent assaults and mêlées involving a variety of weapons both inside and outside the bar, and there was no way in hell I would have set foot in there under normal circumstances, at least not without a warrant, a gun, and maybe a backup unit. As we approached, I felt something in the pit of my stomach. Something I’d felt before on other undercover assignments. The edge, I guess. Keeping me sharp, appropriately nervous, greasing the skids for bravado to move front and center, if necessary.

There were six or seven bikes parked at the curb out front. As I got closer I could hear the hard-rock tunes blaring through the front door. A disheveled patron, who had obviously consumed more than his fill of alcohol, stood by a pay phone mounted on the front of the building. I rolled past the bar and turned around in the street to get in a position to park my bike. No one paid us any attention, which was fine by me. Although I carried my gun, I still felt uneasy. I was about to meet some of the infamous Mongols for the first time.

I stopped the bike just short of the front door so Sue could get off. With the In-N-Out incident fresh in my mind, I held on to the bike for dear life. Dropping it in front of The Place would have made one hell of a first impression. Sue managed to dismount without pulling the bike and me down to the ground. I backed the bike against the curb and killed the engine. As I got off I saw Ciccone roll by in his black Pontiac. I took off my helmet and put it on one of the rearview mirrors.
Game time.

Surprisingly, considering that it’s such a dump, The Place is located in a historic building that was a Pony Express stop in the 1860s. Above the bar were five or six one-room apartments sharing a common bathroom. The inside was cramped. Carrena, the owner of The Place, had managed to squeeze two pool tables in and maintain an area for throwing darts. The two bathrooms were filthy. The wood floor looked like it was original construction from the Pony Express era, warped and aged by the constant soaking of Budweiser, piss, and puke. And of course there was the requisite jukebox full of Marilyn Manson, Metallica, and Santana.