Under and Alone (4 page)
Over the years a host of ATF investigations continued to chip away at the outlaw clubs’ armor. There was my buddy Steve Martin’s successful infiltration of the Warlocks Motorcycle Club in Florida, a case in which he managed to bring three other ATF agents into the gang, resulting in a successful weapons-and-narcotics prosecution. And in late 1997, just before I went undercover in the Mongols, ATF agents Blake Boteler and Darrell Edwards infiltrated the Sons of Silence Motorcycle Club, identified by ATF as a major criminal organization in Colorado, which had never had even one of its members arrested and convicted. Boteler and Edwards managed to work two years undercover, earning their full patches as members of the gang’s Colorado Springs chapter, finally bringing in a case that resulted in fifty-one arrests, the seizure of more than seventy-five firearms, and a haul of methamphetamine with an estimated street value of more than $250,000.
John Ciccone, in his years targeting the growing OMG problem in Southern California, had developed a “gang” of his own; ATF Special Agents John Carr, Eric Harden, and Darrin Kozlowski, fondly referred to as Koz, were the core. They’d all started with the bureau together and, after a decade, remained the hard chargers they’d been at the beginning of their careers. Having worked together closely, they knew one another’s individual styles and had developed a comfort zone—as much as any cop can—with one another. They knew that they could depend on one another if the bullets started flying.
For months Ciccone, Koz, Carr, and Harden strategized about the Mongol problem in Southern California. They threw around the possibility, a long shot, of inserting a federal agent inside the gang.
As they scanned the ranks of potential ATF undercovers, they all agreed on one basic thing: They were going to need an agent who could handle the rigors of going “UC” in the outlaw motorcycle underworld, one who could hold it together under circumstances of extreme deprivation, isolation, and paranoia, and who already had an extensive undercover background—since there really wasn’t time to build one from scratch. No one in ATF had as extensive a background in place as I did. Harden is black, and blacks are rarely accepted in the 1 percenter world. Carr had no motorcycle experience. Koz had just come out of a role with the Vagos Motorcycle Gang and could not chance another try. In short, as Ciccone put it, they were going to need an agent with more balls than good sense.
Over many cups of coffee, John and I assessed the Mongols’ current strength: roughly some 350 full-patch members, both in and out of prison. Approximately 300 patches on the street. More than twenty chapters throughout California, Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Georgia, with a growing presence in Mexico. They were expanding their national presence rapidly, moving up through Northern California into the Pacific Northwest, and had formed alliances with the Outlaws (founded in Chicago and now headquartered in Detroit) and with the Texas-based Bandidos.
While 350 individuals may not sound like a huge criminal organization, such numbers can be misleading; at the present time, according to FBI experts, the Gambino and Genovese crime families, the nation’s most powerful Mafia groups, number an estimated 200 to 250 “made members” each. As in the Mafia, each chapter of an outlaw motorcycle gang has its own circle of criminal followers, called “prospects” and “hang-arounds”—roughly equivalent to the term “Mob associate”—to do the gang’s dirty work.
Ciccone and I both knew that prosecutions against outlaw motorcycle gangs are labor-intensive and rarely successful because of the tremendous threat they pose. Outlaw bikers are not run-of-the-mill street criminals. When cases do make it into the criminal-justice system, witnesses, victims—even prosecutors and federal agents—are in extreme danger. In late 1987 members of the Pagans Motorcycle Club in Pennsylvania put out a murder contract on a federal prosecutor and the FBI agent in charge of the Pittsburgh Organized Crime Squad; the plot was uncovered before the murders could be committed, but the intention was clearly to disrupt and terrorize anyone involved in investigating the club. In another chilling incident, two assistant United States attorneys involved in prosecuting the Sons of Silence Motorcycle Club received death threats and had to have remote starters installed in their cars.
It isn’t uncommon for prosecutors to be unable to locate key witnesses—or for police to find them murdered. In 1997 I’d worked on a case involving a Southern California outlaw motorcycle gang in which a full-patch member, having been thrown out of the club, became an informant for the federal government. When the gang learned of this betrayal, the informant was murdered in his home in front of his girlfriend.
Ciccone knew that by agreeing to go undercover, I would be giving up much of my regular life, but precisely how much and for how long, we didn’t know. We would need massive assistance from other law-enforcement agencies, especially the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. And the more outside people who knew about the case, the greater the risk, as even a routine breach in security could prove fatal. As for our ATF bosses, we knew that we’d be fighting an uphill battle to get them to approve all the expenses we’d be incurring while running a long-term undercover investigation, paying bills for an apartment, phone, car, and bike in my undercover alias. Then there was the issue of my personal safety. If we pulled off a successful prosecution of the Mongols, everyone in the ATF hierarchy would happily take the credit, but if things went south—if I got wounded in the line of duty, or worse—I knew that they’d be only too quick to say that the high-risk operation was all Ciccone’s and my doing.
But this was the kind of case that was tailor-made for John Ciccone. John loved a good fight with ATF administration even more than I did, and almost as much as he loved putting bad guys in jail.
4
By this point in my law-enforcement career, I’d served seventeen years with ATF, two as a federal border patrol agent, and six as a city cop in North Carolina. I had also been a Special Forces soldier and was lucky to come home from Vietnam, where I had served throughout I Corps from Da Nang to the DMZ. In my adult life I’d never been anything other than a cop or a soldier, and in that sense I was following in my father’s footsteps. My dad was a Treasury officer who chased down moonshiners and worked undercover in the hills of North Carolina and Virginia during the fifties and sixties.
Within ATF, I was known as a “street” agent—everyone knew that I hated paperwork with a passion and had no time for administrative fools, whom I saw as a hindrance to the business of law enforcement. Ciccone had seen me work undercover, buying cocaine from the Crips and the Bloods in South Central Los Angeles and machine guns from neo-Nazis in rural West Virginia as if it was second nature.
The skills of an undercover agent are largely self-taught. Federal agents going deep “UC” get very little training. There’s a basic course offered at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia, and after some time on the job, agents who are interested and motivated can request to go to the advanced undercover school. In my experience, the instructors teach the things you should already know, like how to build a believable background and what you can legally do within your role on the street and what you can’t. They teach psychological techniques to help you recognize when a situation may be turning bad and how to best use and conceal electronic surveillance equipment. They cover the legal concept of entrapment. An undercover agent can always defend himself but should never instigate violence. Criminal activities need to be initiated by the bad guys themselves.
The ATF rule book explicitly states that there can be no drug use by the agent, with one exception: if he perceives his life to be in grave danger. Having been forced to smoke, ingest, or inject narcotics, the undercover is then treated like any federal agent injured in the line of duty and must be taken to a hospital or doctor at the first possible moment. After recovering, he’s responsible for completing an enormous amount of follow-up paperwork to explain and justify the incident. Then, at the discretion of his superior, he may return to his undercover role.
In reality, undercover work can’t be taught in a classroom. It’s like learning the tailback position in football or learning to play jazz piano. An instructor can give you the basics, but it really comes down to your natural inclination, wit, temperament, and gift for improvisation. Undercover life is more art than science. You eventually learn the tricks of your trade on the street, as I did over some twenty years.
By the time I embarked on my undercover role in the Mongols, I had gone UC on so many operations that I didn’t have to fashion a new identity out of whole cloth: Over the past decade I had developed a deep-undercover identity as Billy St. John, an alias I had used when infiltrating various violent far-right groups across the United States—the KKK, neo-Nazis, skinheads, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance—making undercover purchases of some serious heavy-duty weaponry, from M-16s to 30mm military cannons. In one investigation I’d gotten so deep inside the National Alliance—the largest and most active neo-Nazi organization in the United States—that I had not only become a member but had been invited to stay and work at the national headquarters in West Virginia. There I befriended the National Alliance’s founder and leader, Dr. William Pierce, author of
The Turner Diaries,
the apocalyptic white-supremacist novel later made infamous by Oklahoma City terror bomber Timothy McVeigh, who viewed Pierce as a kind of prophet of the coming racial war. In my personal copy of
The Turner Diaries,
William Pierce himself penned an inscription:
Revolutionary regards
To Bill St. John,
A real Comrade
Wm Pierce
7/17/94
But by January 1998, I was no longer doing neo-Nazi investigations; I was now riding a Harley around the biker underworld of Southern California.
That’s the one thing I didn’t need to fake about my undercover persona: a genuine love affair with motorcycles. I’ve ridden bikes my whole adult life. I have a brother who bought a bike before me, when I was sixteen years old, a Triumph 650cc high-compression piece of crap. Somehow we got the thing running, but my brother was almost killed riding it. After I got out of the army and became a police officer in North Carolina, I bought my first Harley-Davidson. I was twenty-four. I’ve owned Harleys ever since, from hot-rod choppers to straight-off-the-showroom-floor stockers.
Since the beginning of the year, playing my Billy St. John role, I’d been riding an ATF-owned Harley-Davidson and hanging out with some Hells Angels in the San Fernando Valley, trying to gather intelligence for an investigation being run as a joint effort between ATF, the IRS, and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. Mostly I hung out at a dump of a strip bar called the Candy Cat in Chatsworth. The San Fernando Valley, made nationally famous by the LAPD beating of Rodney King and the Northridge earthquake three years later, was a Hells Angels stronghold.
Working deep undercover requires a tempered adoption of the maxim “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Hanging with the Angels, I’d grown my hair long and wild. My blond-gray beard was raggedy, and to be perfectly honest, I think a few people were questioning my personal-hygiene habits. The rub, of course, was that my appearance had come to the attention of the ATF group supervisor and had started to piss him off. As the stereotypical paper-pusher, he had his own idea of what an ATF agent should look like—deep undercover or not.
I had the Harley, I had the look, I had the undercover years and background in place. But I had something even more valuable: the benefit of learning from Darrin Kozlowski’s experience.
We’d both been assigned to the Van Nuys ATF office, and I’d been able to watch Koz during his undercover operation in the Vagos just a year before. I was amazed that he’d actually been able to patch in. It’s no small feat to become a bona fide member of an outlaw motorcycle gang; it entails tests of loyalty, fortitude, stamina, and physical prowess. And that’s for people who really
want
to become members. Sometimes gaining the trust of the gang requires engaging in violent criminal activity, including murder. Their background investigations into prospective members rival that of military clearance checks. For an undercover cop, there are tough calls to make when hard drugs are consumed, robberies and rapes are planned, and violent crimes committed. Any undercover in that situation has to know how to act decisively and instinctively, developing a sixth sense about when to bail out of potentially fatal situations. It can be emotionally debilitating to show the gang one side of your personality, while carefully masking who and what you really are, from what you’re feeling to what you actually stand for.
I’d watched with admiration and some awe as Koz worked the Vagos. I’d watched his backup agents bust their butts to keep up with him as he flew by the seat of his pants time and again. I’d heard his tales of uncanny, split-second thinking when the Vagos tried to rope him into criminal activity or get him to do drugs. I’d also watched as his investigation turned lethal. First, the CI who’d introduced Koz into the club was killed in a traffic accident on Hollywood Boulevard while riding a motorcycle ATF had provided him. The bike’s tag was listed under the CI’s name, but the vehicle identification number (VIN) could be traced back to ATF. This was the kind of routine screwup that could quickly lead to homicide. After the fatal accident, the Vagos went to the LAPD to get the accident report and learned that ATF was the true owner of the motorcycle. They went to the deceased CI’s wife and threatened her, demanding to know why her husband had been on a bike owned by the federal government. The terrorized woman gave up everything—that her husband was working as an informant for ATF, and that Koz was in fact an undercover agent.
