Gods of Mischief (8 page)

Joe's father was a Methodist minister who'd married the church organist and retired to Hemet in the early eighties. After the preacher died and his wife suffered a paralyzing stroke a few weeks later, Joe played the dutiful son and moved down to Hemet to care for her. Unfortunately his mom was gone within a year.

Alone again, with his career over and too much time and money on his hands, Old Joe started abusing methamphetamine. I know this for a fact because I was his supplier back in the bad old days.

Meth beat Joe up pretty good. In his gentle, soft-spoken way, my friend would be the first to tell you he wasn't the most handsome sonofabitch on the planet, but tweaking—that's what meth-heads call the high—didn't help his looks any. Meth rotted the teeth, sucked up his cheeks and wilted that man's face like a baked apple. It took a little time, but my buddy managed to kick that nasty habit, only to fall hard
into alcohol. When the IRS came calling a few months later and seized his family home for taxes, Old Joe threw up his hands and hit rock bottom.

Now he was living in a fifteen-foot travel trailer, bought from a dude named Pooch, that I'd parked under a tree at the far end of the chicken coop. When I returned to Valle Vista from Bee Canyon, Joe heard my truck arrive and emerged from his trailer. I was in no mood to talk, so I went straight into the apartment, grabbed a glass and poured myself a stiff jolt of Turkey.

My buddy knocked once and stepped through the door as I was pouring another.

“Where you been,” he said in his lazy drawl.

“Had some business.”

“That right? Something I should know about?”

“Nothing that concerns you,” I said.

Joe fidgeted uncomfortably. “Everything alright, George?”

“Everything's fine,” I said before draining the bourbon.

He lingered a moment, then drifted back outside, quietly shutting the door behind him. I never kept secrets from Joe and I hated to start now, but this was a big one, and I didn't want to open my mouth until I'd finalized things with Special Agent Carr. Besides, there was no telling how Old Joe would react to the news. Yes, he saw the Vagos as a bunch of misbehaved children who needed a good belt whipping, but there was no love for the United States government either. Just a few years earlier the IRS had snatched his family home and booted him into the street. Now here I was, sleeping with the enemy.

T
here were three steps on the road to becoming a full-patch biker—the same any recruit had to follow when joining a club like the Vagos. First was the hang-around phase, when you and the membership sized each other up. As a hang-around you were like a wallflower at the school dance, hoping for an invitation to strut your stuff. Until then you were expected to back the club in a brawl and wear their colors as a sign of loyalty. With the Vagos, this might mean a green bandana tied around the head or hanging from a back pocket.

If the members liked what they saw, you were invited to prospect, a courtship that often took months. A prospect with the Hemet Vagos wore a single rocker sewn on the lower back of his cut that said “California,” identifying the chapter's home state. Back then there were over three hundred greenies riding outlaw up and down the West Coast, with more chapters in Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Oregon and over in Hawaii.

Without a doubt the most difficult part of becoming a patch holder was the humiliation that came with prospecting. In effect, a prospect became the club's personal bitch. If a full-patched member dropped his
pants and commanded you to wipe his ass, you'd damn well better do it. Trust me, it took real willpower to survive this—especially when you were a forty-two-year-old man like I was. But if you could stick it out through months of bullshit tasks and degradation and the members voted you in, you were awarded full-patched status in the club. This 'til-death-do-us-part marriage meant you'd earned the right to wear the Loki center patch framed by the top and bottom rockers, pay your weekly dues and attend church meetings—those weekly sessions when patches in each chapter gathered to discuss club business.

For me, one of
the most emotionally draining aspects of gang infiltration was buddying up to the people I was working to send to prison. By necessity I was forced into long-term relationships with human beings I wouldn't wish on my own worst enemy. Of course, there was no way around this dilemma. For the sake of the mission I had to hold my nose and take the plunge. So around the holidays in late 2002, I walked into Big Roy's Lady Luck tattoo parlor and hinted I might be interested in joining Green Nation.

Big Roy Compton, president of the Hemet Vagos.

Roy, Todd and most of those Hemet boys welcomed me with open arms. I say most because there
was one Vago who seemed suspicious of me right from the get-go. He was the chapter's sergeant at arms, responsible for club discipline and security, a three-hundred-pound blob named North, who hit like a sixty-pound schoolgirl. North was one of a handful of Vagos who'd recently come over to the Hemet chapter from another motorcycle club in town called the Bros.

Bro's Toy Box was a motorcycle repair shop with an interior decorated in red and white, the same colors found on the club's patches. Red and white were Hells Angels colors, and the Bros had some farfetched notion of someday joining that select company. Their president was the shop's owner, a union boilermaker named Bro, who could carry a car engine in his hands just like my buddy Freight Train.

Despite the red and white décor, the Bros were theoretically a support club for the Hemet Vagos. That all changed when Big Todd started feuding with Bro over a transmission part he thought he deserved for free. When Bro told him to fuck off, Todd convinced Big Roy they should forcibly shut down the Bros and take the club's members for themselves, doubling the size of the Hemet Vagos in one fell swoop.

So on a night when the Bros were holding church inside the Toy Box, Big Roy's crew came calling, and some were packing guns. They were backed by another Vagos chapter from the city of Corona, one led by an outlaw named Mumbles, who weighed one hundred pounds dripping wet but fought like the Tasmanian devil. Mumbles's forte was knives, which the man could fling with precision from long distances, like some kind of freaky circus act.

At one Green Nation campout, some Northern California Vagos bet three thousand bucks their knife-throwing champion could best Mumbles. With total confidence we upped the bet to five and turned our boy loose. Well, Mumbles started dealing steel from sheaths hidden all over his body. They came from his back, his belt, his ankles, his boots, hell, maybe even his ass, I don't know, but one after another those blades nailed a tree trunk about sixty feet away—THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, THUNK, THUNK! When that little fucker was done his knives were grouped tighter than a virgin's cha-cha. It was an impressive performance and an easy five grand.

Mumbles was carrying those blades the night that he, Big Roy and the rest of the Vagos stormed Bro's Toy Box. Once inside, they demanded the Bros turn over their colors—which was a big no-no in the outlaw world. Few sins trumped a man giving up his patch. In most cases, try taking the colors off an outlaw's back and you'd best be prepared to fight and die.

I say most cases, because apparently the Bros weren't so keen on self-sacrifice. Instead, confronted by superior numbers, loaded weapons and Mumbles's sharp steel, they peed their panties and gave up their colors like a bunch of playground pussies. Only Bro himself manned up and stood tall.

“Fuck the Vagos. You want this patch, come and take it,” were his defiant last words.

I admired Bro for his stand. Of course, after the Vagos finished whipping him with a tire chain they ripped the patch off his back anyway. But at least the man kept his dignity.

Big Todd Brown.

Oh, and Big Todd walked out of the Toy Box with that transmission part he coveted . . . free of charge.

As for Bro's chickenshit brothers, a handful opted to join the Hemet Vagos—including North and Doc, the dentist who'd bought my Harley shovelhead, and the only two chapter members older
than I was at the time, an ex-con named Sparks and another the Vagos christened Buckshot.

Road names, bestowed by the club when a prospect reached patched status, were sometimes real head-scratchers, but that wasn't the case with Sparks and Buckshot. Sparks got his name simply because he was a certified electrician. And Buckshot—well, Buckshot had barely escaped the business end of a shotgun down in Mexico. His brand-new Harley, on the other hand, hadn't been so lucky.

In addition to those turncoats, Big Roy had scraped together a handful of other recruits for his chapter, including Ready, who worked as a tattoo artist at the Lady Luck, Jack Fite, a notoriously violent human being, and Jimbo, a muscle-bound juicer who supplied the Vagos with anabolic steroids. I never touched that shit myself. I'd heard too many horror stories about shriveled dicks and wooden balls.

And then there was Crash.

If ever there was an appropriate road name for a motorcycle outlaw, Crash was it. That big bastard crashed his stock Harley just about anywhere and any way humanly possible. And because we came into the club around the same time, I found myself traveling many nervous miles beside that spun fool, worrying whether he would dump his bike and take me down with him. With the exception of my mother, I think that crazy Vago gave me more migraines than any other human being on the planet.

Crash, my fellow prospect and one crazy-ass sonofabitch.

First time I laid eyes on Crash he was standing outside the Lady Luck wearing a skintight tank top and a green bandana, eyeballing me over his ratty moustache like he
was king shit. I had no idea where that dude had come from, but prison would have been the obvious choice. The man had that behind-the-walls mentality, a way of talking and behaving that was hard to define but easy to recognize when you'd hung around that type as long as I had.

Crash had fathered a crew of kids with a woman so skinny she'd almost disappear when she turned sideways. Wasn't long before I discovered he had another love in his life: crystal meth. Methamphetamine has been the one percenters' drug of choice for many years now; its use is so prevalent that in the summer of 2001 the feds pulled the trigger on Operation Silent Thunder, sweeping up a large meth ring in the California High Desert that included several Vagos.

From the late sixties into the seventies, “Reds” were the outlaw world's preferred drug. Sold in red capsules under the brand name Seconal, the pharmaceutical was prescribed as a sedative. But that drug was anything but sedating for the bikers who abused it. Reds amped a man up and made him fearless enough to commit murder, which was not uncommon in that particularly violent era. For their own survival, outlaw clubs began banning the use of Reds. After a brief fling with PCP, they hitched their wagon to methamphetamine. Man, outlaws just loved their crank. Gave them that little extra giddy-up they needed to keep riding and partying straight through 'til morning.