Gods of Mischief (32 page)

Me (blurred) with the Vagos in 2005.

A discussion followed on which chapter members would be “slingers” and “shooters.” The slingers would fight, the shooters would carry iron. I was designated a shooter because I owned a gun. Todd was a shooter. Iron Mike was a shooter. Even Crash was a shooter.

A few days later members of the Vagos support club, The Green Machine, were brought into my garage for a briefing by the sergeant at arms. I'd been forced to boot the Vagos out of the living room after they'd treated the floor like their personal ashtray and Jenna had had herself a hissy fit. House or garage, though, didn't really matter. Those ATF techies had wired the whole damn place for sound and picture.

At the briefing Big Todd did his best General George Patton impersonation, slapping around one Green Machine member who was slow to take his seat, then warning the rest they should just turn in their patches if they weren't prepared to face the vaunted red and white.

One of the Green Machine members in attendance that night was Crusher, the sergeant detective from the Cathedral City PD who had been tasked with running background checks on Vagos prospects. At that point Crusher was on borrowed time, the subject of an internal affairs investigation probing his relationship with the Vagos. So far the man had managed to stick around longer than I would have liked, but John Carr assured me Crusher had one foot out the door and the other on axle grease.

I won't get into the details of how the ATF nailed that dirty cop. Suffice to say some of the names handed to the sergeant for background checks were tagged by the feds and traced right back to the Cathedral City PD. Sergeant Crusher had shot himself in the foot.

In the end that crooked lawman would never be prosecuted for betraying his solemn oath; to do so would have exposed me as the informant. With Operation 22 Green active and with bigger fish to fry, ATF decided against blowing my cover—not unlike the situation with Quick Draw. Sergeant Crusher would eventually be squeezed like a pimple on the ass of law enforcement and wiped from the Cathedral City PD.

October slid into November,
and still all was quiet on the western front. At that point it was trench warfare, with all of us hunkered down in our holes on either side of no-man's-land. Nobody, it seemed, was willing to come out and fire the first shot.

Leave it to Rhino, that mullet-headed man-mountain from San Bernardino, to toss the boys over the top and into the fray. The international sergeant at arms instructed the Hemet chapter to begin surveillance on the Sons of Hell, gathering member's addresses so the Vagos could pick them off one by one. Big Todd was handed the assignment, but he didn't waste much gas in the effort. All he came up with was one fuckin' address.

That was enough, though, to at least start things rolling.

I got a call one night from North, who by this time had ditched the Hemet chapter and signed on with Quickie John's bunch over in Norco. I was given an address and told to meet him there right away. He wouldn't say why. When I arrived in my truck I found North, Big Todd and Junior, the Winchester chapter's sergeant at arms, holding baseball bats and tire irons on a residential street.

“See that truck there?” said North, pointing me toward a house down the block where a pickup was parked at the curb. “That belongs to a Sons of Hell patch. Tramp gave the order to take him. Once he comes out, we're gonna fuck him up.”

Oh, shit.

These idiots were going to ambush that poor bastard—maybe even kill him—and I didn't know what the hell to do. It was one of those no-win scenarios John Carr had warned me about. I couldn't leave, but I couldn't get involved either. And to try and convince those guys not to beat their intended target would be futile and suspicious.

No, man. All I could do was stick around and hope for the best.

Within minutes of my arrival, Chopper, Sparks, JB and Iron Mike showed up carrying bats and metal pipes. But Mike also carried something
more worrisome—a .45 caliber semiautomatic tucked under his belt. It wasn't exactly shaping up to be a fair fight, but then again, nobody ever accused an outlaw of fighting by the rules.

Less than an hour later the Sons of Hell member left his house and climbed into his truck.

“Handle it,” Big Todd commanded Iron Mike.

“I'm going to shoot him,” the little Vago announced.

Iron Mike scrambled into a pickup driven by Junior, the Winchester sergeant at arms, and the truck roared off with Mike ready to blast away from the passenger's-side window. The Sons of Hell patch saw them coming as he started his truck. He slammed into gear and veered sharply around the oncoming pickup, then sped past us like a frightened rabbit. In a moment came the hunter, tires screeching against the asphalt as the truck turned the corner and disappeared.

I never heard gunshots, or anything else for that matter, until later that night, when I got word that the rabbit had managed to evade his pursuers and escape with his skin. Later when I was wired up, I spoke to Iron Mike about what happened that day.

“That was a pretty tough situation they put you in, brother,” I told him.

Mike turned to me with a serious gaze and said, “If I could have, I would have shot him.”

And I have no doubt that little Chicano spoke the truth.

I
t was a Code 69—drop everything and get to the barn right away. I was supervising my work crew on a tree-trimming job when Big Todd called my cell phone and told me to get to Buckshot's place. Apparently Terry the Tramp had just authorized the Hemet chapter to roll on the Sons of Hell in Lake Elsinore, and my work truck was needed to carry the war chest.

Just when I was starting to think the gang war had been pushed to the back burner, the heat had suddenly been cranked up again. Here might be one last chance to nail the Vagos on a RICO, one final opportunity to put a stake through the heart of the operation that refused to die. I left the job site, hopped in my truck and called John Carr on the road to Buckshot's place.

He didn't pick up.

Shit.

I punched in the ATF field office and found myself talking to Special Agent Jeff Ryan.

“Where's Carr? I need to talk to him, man. It's important.”

“Special Agent Carr is unavailable,” said Jeff.

“Where the hell is he?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, what should I do? We're about to roll on the Sons of Hell.”

There was a brief pause before Jeff replied, “I'll call you back.”

Just minutes from Buckshot's property I still hadn't received a return call from Special Agent Ryan, so I rang ATF on the Nextel again. This time there was an anxious edge to Jeff's voice when he picked up the phone.

“I can't get hold of John,” he said to me. “I'm trying to contact someone higher up.”

“There's no time for that, man. We're rolling at seven.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“You're asking
me
?”

I couldn't believe it. Here was a golden opportunity to wrap Operation 22 Green with a nice, fat RICO bow, and my handler had gone missing.

“Alright, man, here's the deal,” I said after a long pause. “We're rolling at seven o'clock for The Hideaway Bar in Lake Elsinore. We'll be coming in on Railroad Canyon Road. You got that? Railroad Canyon.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay,” replied the special agent.

When I pulled into Buckshot's driveway I found most of the Hemet boys already gathered—maybe sixteen in all, which was just about the entire chapter at that time. Per Code 69 stipulations, they should have all been traveling incognito. But there were no dark shirts and pants, no change of clothes, no rubber gloves and no private vehicles. Everyone was mounted on bikes and flying their colors. Everyone, that is, but our fearless leader.

Once more, Big Roy Compton was commanding from the rear.

Two of the Vagos emerged from Buckshot's barn hauling the chapter's war chest. They slid the arsenal into my truck bed. Big Todd climbed into the cab beside me, and the green army rolled with a burst of dirty thunder. I trailed the pack for several miles down Highway 74 before we turned off and headed in the direction of Lake Elsinore.

The closer we came to The Hideaway Bar, the more nervous I got. John Carr was AWOL, and one of his recurring themes was to avoid trapping myself in felony situations. Yet here I was, driving a pickup loaded with illegal weapons on my way to commit felony assault.

Just remember John's advice,
I told myself.
Don't lead the charge.

Now I was hoping and praying for a miracle—that once we got to the bar the law would be there to jump in at the last moment and stop the rumble before anyone got hurt.

About a half mile out, a Riverside County Sheriff's Department cruiser went rushing past. Then came two more with lights flashing.

Fuck. The cops are red-lighting us.

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.”