Gods of Mischief (23 page)

Doug was missing for three days, and the whole time Jenna had this creepy feeling the man was out there watching her. She'd stand in the window with a pair of binoculars and search the hills behind the apartments. I even buried a pressure plate outside the window where the air-conditioning unit was mounted and hooked it to an alarm in case the sonofabitch tried climbing through.

After three days the truck showed up in the parking lot with the
keys in the ignition. Later that afternoon some of the Vagos spotted Doug strolling down a Hemet street and gave chase. Doug flagged down a police cruiser, jumped into the backseat and begged the cop to save his life.

Big Doug Brown had finally gone 'round the bend, and I'm not sure that whacky bastard ever made it back again.

T
he primary mission of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was first and foremost to get illegal weapons off America's streets. Special Agent Carr had emphasized that point when I first came aboard, and since then I'd been spreading the cheese to catch a few mice, hinting to the Vagos that I was in the market to buy weapons.

This wasn't raising any red flags with the Hemet chapter either. Most of those boys, including Big Roy and Big Todd, knew my history with firearms. I'd been a gun freak since I was a kid shooting deer and rabbits with a .22 rifle in the California Cascades. As I grew older I bought and sold weapons for profit. In the early eighties I was purchasing replica semiautomatic Thompson submachine guns through a pawnshop for three hundred bucks and flipping them for seven.

Despite the fact that I was a felon, I was usually packing some kind of firearm on my person too. If it wasn't the .380 strapped to my ankle, it was the modified shotgun with the six-inch extension. I'd used that shotgun as a drug dealer in the San Jacinto Valley, then later during a
stint as a bounty hunter back in the days when you could kick in a door without a search warrant.

My love affair with guns was perfect cover during my time undercover. Yes, I'd make drug buys here and there, but only when the opportunity presented itself. I never forced it. The Hemet Vagos knew I wasn't a drug user anymore, so I only bought on someone else's behalf. Firearms, on the other hand, were right up my alley. And the weapon I coveted most was a little beauty Big Roy made the mistake of showing me one day at the Lady Luck, a rare, Czechoslovakian-manufactured 7.62 x 25 caliber pistol.

“Hey, how much you want for that?” I asked him. “I'll buy it from you.”

“It's not for sale. But if it ever is, I'll give you first crack,” promised Roy.

Man, I wanted that pistol in the worst way. Didn't matter where it came from, Big Roy was a felon just like me, prohibited under federal law from possessing firearms.

There was an even bigger prize to be won, though. More than Roy's 7.62, I had my eye on the Vagos' war chest, a cache of weapons Buckshot kept stashed in his barn. That arsenal, contributed by Hemet's members, included revolvers, rifles, sawed-off shotguns—just about everything but a rocket launcher . . . and there were rumors the chapter had one of those squirreled away too. Hemet's war chest was the mother lode I was after for ATF, the giant pot at the end of Operation 22 Green's rainbow.

But until that day came, I kept busy buying whatever weapons crossed my path—like the stolen .30-30 rifle I bought from Big Todd, who had a felony conviction the same as Roy. At other times Vagos members knew someone outside the club who was in the market to unload a gun. The seller might come out to my shack in Valle Vista, or I'd go to a location of their choosing, all wired up for sound and picture. Because I was a convicted felon, selling me weapons was itself a felony. Once I paid for the gun and took possession, they were screwed.

The only snags I seemed to hit came in the month of September, the end of the government's fiscal year. That's when the money dried up for ATF and deals could slip away—including a fully automatic AK-47 and some Mac 10s I could have bought for five grand. Operation 22 Green fell under OCDETF (Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces), a multiagency program that provides supplemental federal funds for approved cases like ours. But when spending limits were reached and the fiscal year was done, getting additional money from the government was like prying a gun from Charlton Heston's cold dead hands.

John Carr was desperately trying to tear through bureaucratic red tape and put together the cash while I delayed the buy. But I couldn't stall for long. A few days late, he called the Nextel. Our conversation went something like . . .

“George, I've got the five thousand. Get those Mac 10s.”

“What do you want me to do, shit them? Those Mac 10s are gone, jack.”

But lost opportunities were the exception.

In early August I was contacted by one of the Vagos who had a friend looking to move some stolen firearms. The guns were being kept at an old farmhouse in Winchester, a rural community nine miles west of Hemet. I called Uncle Johnny Law on the Nextel and let him know I was heading out for a look. No need to wire up just yet—I was just window shopping, establishing a price then getting right out again. But John wanted someone watching my ass anyway, so he dispatched his right-hand man, Special Agent Jeff Ryan.

As I limped toward the door wearing my walking boot—I'd recently had the cast removed from the leg Jack Fite had busted—Jenna hurried to intercept me.

“Where you going now?”

“Got some business.”

“Business, huh?” she sniped. “Business with who? Your Uncle John?”

She made sure to put the snide emphasis on “Uncle John.”

Jenna had obviously been eavesdropping again. For the past few weeks she'd been probing me on this mysterious uncle I kept talking to, and when I stonewalled her it only made the girl more suspicious.

“I want to come with you,” she insisted.

“You can't leave Sierra alone.”

“I'll bring her with me.”

I wasn't about to waste my time with pointless conversation, so I limped out the door. Jenna followed me to the truck, pleading her case at my backside.

“Between work and the gambling and your motorcycle pals, you never have time for me anymore. You go off for days, and then you come back like nothing happened. And you can't even tell me where you've been or what you're doing.”

“We hang out plenty,” I told her as I climbed into the cab.

“No, you and Joe hang out. He's another one,” she said, nodding toward the trailer. “Why is it you always have time for him? I'm jealous of that stinky-mouthed motherfucker.”

I slammed the truck door and snapped at her from the open window, “Watch what you say.”

Jenna was close to tears now. “Are you listening to me? Are you even listening? What about me, George? Pick me for once. Pick me.”

I turned the ignition and Jenna went wild.

“That's right! You go meet your Uncle John!” she raged. “What's that all about, huh?! You two a couple of faggots or something?!”

I backed the truck away, leaving her frothing at the mouth.

“Say hi to your faggot boyfriend for me!”

Later I found out Jenna was cruising the parking lots of gay bars in the San Jacinto Valley looking for my truck. She actually thought I might have gone homosexual. But what could I do? Better gay than dead, which is what I would have been had I told that girl the truth. Jenna was like nitroglycerin, man. One false move and . . . BA-BOOM!

About a quarter mile from the Winchester farmhouse I met up with
Special Agent Ryan. Jeff always struck me as friendly but a little preoccupied. Might have been a reason for that. A couple of years earlier, just two weeks before the World Trade Center fell, he'd seen an L.A. County sheriff's deputy get blown away right before his eyes.

Post-traumatic stress disorder wasn't exclusive to the military.

The farmhouse where the guns were stored was completely isolated, set back in the woods at the end of a long dirt road. Special Agent Ryan wouldn't be able to get close enough to back me up without attracting attention. At that point it wasn't a huge concern. I wasn't wired or making any deals, but things might get tricky when it came time to make the buy. This was shaping up as one of those complicated scenarios that gave an informant ulcers.

CIs worked alone on an island of hostile natives, often making critical life-and-death decisions on the fly. Many of those decisions involved proper behavior in felony-type situations. See, when you were playing outlaw, people expected you to behave as an outlaw, doing things any run-of-the-mill bad guy would do . . . from snorting meth to putting a bullet in someone's ear. Difference is you were far from ordinary. You were working for the United States government. A real challenge for a CI was figuring out how to get around those pitfalls without exposing himself.

And there were no easy answers. Every situation was different.

John Carr once shared an anecdote about sitting in the back of a car with his informant, waiting on a drug buy, when a Mongol jumped in the front seat and cut three lines of coke. The biker snorted his line and handed the mirror to John, who pretended he was busy counting money for the transaction and passed the blow along to his informant. Well, that poor bastard wasn't a drug user, but he took one for the team and snorted both lines. Looking to get higher still, the Mongol cut another three lines of coke and passed it around. John kept peeling bills, still stalling, and handed off to his informant, who hit both lines again.

“And now I see his eyes going wide,” John told me. “Then that fuckin' Mongol cut another three lines.”

I was laughing pretty hard now.

“After we'd made the buy I opened the door and my guy fell right out of the car,” John continued. “I thought he'd OD'd. I called my cover team and said, ‘I think we've got to take this dude to the hospital. I don't think he's breathing.' ”

I knew it was wrong, but I couldn't stop laughing.

“You might think it's funny,” John lectured me, “but get yourself in a tight spot and you'll find out how tricky things can get. That's what you need to understand, George. An informant who commits a felony hurts his case. Credibility goes right out the window, and the defense will jump all over that shit in court. We had a big problem with Hammer because of that—because of his drug use. So be careful. Don't let yourself get cornered if you can help it.”

“What if I'm in a fight and weapons come out?”

“Just don't lead the charge, dude. If you have to get into it, then that's what you've got to do. But don't lead the charge.”

That had my head spinning, but there was no point making myself crazy. I'd just have to figure it out as I went along.

I left Special Agent Ryan and headed down the long dirt road toward the farmhouse. The place was a shithole, and after I met the owner I immediately knew why. The man had been a carpenter once, but methamphetamine had taken control of his life and he couldn't keep his own home from falling apart.

He led me into the living room, where four of his spun pals were crashed on the couch and chairs. The place was being used as a tweaker pad—a location where meth-heads gathered to get high. And, man, did that place stink. Garbage was strewn everywhere, and a dog (least I think it was a dog) had taken a dump in the corner, which nobody had bothered cleaning up.

The carpenter pointed out six rifles leaning against the wall next to a
fish tank filled with green water. On an end table beside the rifles were a couple of handguns. All were stolen. We negotiated a price, and I told him I'd be back with the cash. Then I got the hell out of there.

A few days later
I was headed back to Winchester to make the gun buy, this time with Old Joe riding shotgun. I'd told him about the farmhouse and how ATF couldn't get a cover team close enough to help out in a jam, so my buddy had volunteered to come along as lookout. Guess a gun buy was more exciting than feeding branches into a wood chipper.

We rendezvoused with Carr at a remote location far from the farmhouse. I left Old Joe in the truck and climbed into the front passenger's seat of my handler's cover car, the same rusted-out shitbox I'd seen him driving on the way to Yucca Valley. John was busy copying serial numbers from the hundred-dollar bills he was about to hand me.

“See you brought your boyfriend,” he said, pausing to glance out the window. “You two are thick as thieves.”

Joe returned a wave and smiled, which he rarely did because of the condition of his teeth. The front set looked like a picket fence missing most of the pickets, and the back ones were mostly gone, thanks to a topped tree that had come down, pole-vaulted into his head and blown out the molars.

“Listen, I've got a chopper coming in,” said John. “They have a telescopic lens that can pick out your moustache hairs.”

“Lot of fuckin' good that'll do me at ten thousand feet.”

John resumed jotting down serial numbers. “Yeah, well, you picked a hell of a spot to make a buy, dude. That lot's almost twenty friggin' acres.”

He finished copying the serial numbers, then counted each hundred-dollar bill out loud into a recorder. When he was done he slipped the two grand into an envelope.

“Let's check your pockets,” he said to me.

Standard operating procedure was to make certain an informant
had no money on his person before a buy. The only cash you could have was supplied by the agency. After a thorough search, John hooked me up with sound and picture. That wasn't always the case, but with gun and drug buys my handler wanted all the coverage he could get.

“What's the code?” I asked once he'd finished.

There was always a code word or sentence in case of trouble. Usually it was “Big John isn't going to like this.” If my handler heard that over the mic, the cover team would come in guns blazing. Of course, by that time I'd probably be toast.