No Angel (7 page)

When I told Slats I wanted Pops, he asked why. I said, “This guy knows the meth game from the street up. He’s not a One Percenter, but he
knows
these guys in ways we simply can’t. He wouldn’t be faking.”

“Do you trust him?”

“Enough to let him carry a piece. Yes, I trust him like he’s one of us.”

“I’ll have to meet him, but OK. Go talk to him.”

I did. I went to Pops’s place in Tucson—he lived there with his wife and two whip-smart girls—and asked him if he wanted to work a big case for me. “Hell yes,” he said. I gave him the details. He said he was game to play a big role. I told him I couldn’t give him that, that he’d just be an associate. I didn’t make any bones about it: “You’ll get five hundred a week, no overtime, plus expenses. You’re going to make runs to Mexico for us. Agents can’t go down there. You’ll be traveling with another, less trusted informant—make sure he stays in line. As always, you’re our drug guy. You know the shit better than we do, and if there ever comes a time when one of us needs to take a bump or a puff, when we got no dodge or escapes left, then you gotta come to the rescue and be that guy.”

“All right.”

“Think you can handle that? Without getting hooked again?”

“Jay, I hook that shit again, I’m telling you now to go ahead and arrest me when it happens. That or shoot me. It won’t happen.”

“Good.”

In addition to the undercover crew, Slats put together a stellar task force staff of cops from a broad spectrum of agencies: ATF; the Phoenix, Glendale, and Tempe police departments; the Arizona Department of Public Safety; the Maricopa County sheriff’s office; and the Drug Enforcement Agency all contributed. Put together, the task-force members had over two hundred years of law-enforcement or military training and experience. Slats couldn’t persuade Sugarbear to come on board. He opted to see the Riverside case to the end. He eventually arrested all of the guys in that case and sent them each away for quite a while.

Every case gets a code name. We wanted something mysterious—“The Sonny Barger Investigation” or “The Arizona Hells Angels” didn’t have any pop. We also needed a name that would help keep the case hush-hush. Undercover work cuts both ways—we try to get in on them and, one way or another, they try to get in on us. There are plenty of cops who are buddy-buddy with Angels or Angel associates, and the Angels have plenty of friends, usually wives or girlfriends, who work for state or municipal offices. For those reasons we needed to keep our case on the down-low. Slats was a huge Detroit Red Wings fan, so he decided to call our case Black Biscuit, which is slang for hockey puck.

We were ready to go.

The Saturday before the day-to-day operations were to commence, Slats had a barbecue at his place. His wife cooked up a feast. Everyone was invited, including wives and kids. Making a weekend of it, Gwen and I checked into a hotel and left the kids with the grandparents. At the party we laughed and drank beer and sweated in the Slatallas’ backyard. It was a blissful state of communal denial.

At the height of the party, Slats made his way through the crowd, asking people to come inside. Gwen and I were chatting with Carlos, who was there alone, when Slats came up to us. We followed him, and on the way he threw out an empty beer can, grabbed a dripping fresh one out of an ice bucket, and snapped it open.

Once inside, he took his wife by the arm and climbed a few steps leading to the bedrooms upstairs. He turned around.

“Friends. Everyone. Please. You may think otherwise, but I’m not much for speeches. I just wanted to thank you all for coming. This meal we’ve made for you is a very small token of appreciation for what you are about to undertake. This is gonna be a long haul. It’ll take nearly all our time and energy. Make no mistake, no one has done what we’re about to do in the way we intend to do it. It’s going to take all the brains and balls and heart that each of us has.” He paused to take a long swig of beer. “I gotta warn all of you: This is going to be a shit detail.” Slats’s wife nudged him for cussing with kids around. He continued, “The work will be big and good, but the demand will be high. So I’m here to say now that if you or any of your families have any reservations about being involved, then, please, with my blessing and understanding, say so now and walk away.”

He paused. Silence.

I raised my hand. “Fuck it, Joe, I’m out.”

Everyone laughed.

Joe said, “All right, then, I’ll see you on Monday. Enjoy the last free Sunday of your foreseeable futures.”

MAY 2002

OUR CI, RUDY
Kramer, was a longtime biker and repeat offender. His rap sheet revolved around meth, which he had cooked, dealt, and used, thereby violating rule number one of the Successful Drug Dealer’s Handbook. He’d been pinched on a felon in possession of a firearm, which was made worse by the fact that the weapon in question was a machine gun. Given the alternative of turning informant versus going away for a very long time, he wisely chose to cooperate.

Rudy was not a Hells Angel, but he could name an impressive number of them from mug shots and claimed to be on speaking terms with at least three prominent Arizona Hells Angels: Mesa charter president Robert “Bad Bob” Johnston, Cave Creek charter president Daniel “Hoover” Seybert, and Sonny Barger himself. He told us Sonny had exchanged alcohol and drugs for the pleasures of Pepsis and ice cream. He also said that Sonny rode with a windshield to protect the tracheostomy hole he’d received as a result of laryngeal cancer.

Rudy also knew a guy named Tony Cruze, a greedy drug user who dealt openly in guns and narcotics. Cruze was the president of the Tucson Red Devils, a Hells Angels support club. Support clubs are distinct from their superiors—they have their own member rolls, clubhouses, and officers—but they operate with the official sanction of their parent clubs and do basically whatever’s asked of them. Other Hells Angels support clubs in Arizona at the time included the Spartans and the Lost Dutchmen, but the Red Devils were the largest and most dangerous. They mainly provided muscle to the Angels for enforcement, collection, and extortion jobs.

This was all great, but Rudy had one more box in his checkered past that sealed his importance to us. He was an inactive member of a Mexican OMG called the Solo Angeles, based in Tijuana, Mexico. The Solos had about a hundred total members, with minor representation in the San Diego–Los Angeles area.

We knew the Hells Angels were paranoid, but we also knew they weren’t insecure in the ways the smaller clubs were. If we’d run straight at the Hells Angels as average Larry Bad Guys, they would’ve ignored us or, at the most, handled us with extreme caution. We had to be invited into their house. It was an issue of respect. In biker circles this was universally understood, just like it’s understood that the sky is blue.

The plan was to have Rudy ask the HA permission to set up an Arizona Nomads charter of the Solo Angeles, and then we’d tell them we were Rudy’s crew. The fact that this club was Mexican dovetailed perfectly with my established claim that I ran guns south of the border. Being Solo Angeles Nomads, we wouldn’t need affiliation with an established charter, so existing members wouldn’t have an opportunity to get in our way. It also set the stage for RICO charges, since it would establish that the Angels controlled the outlaw clubs in Arizona. It was pluses all around. Rudy would be our president. Carlos would be a full patch. My trusted informant, Pops, would be a prospect, as would Billy “Timmy” Long. And I, Jay “Bird” Dobyns, would be the Solo Nomads’ vice president.

BEFORE WE GOT
started, I had to meet Rudy. Slats set up a date at the Embassy Suites near the Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.

Rudy knew practically nothing about me. By design, Slats hadn’t told him I was a fed. We wanted his first impression of me to be formed with as little prejudice as possible.

I rode my ’63 Harley-Davidson Panhead to the hotel. Slats’s car was out front. I was dressed in my usual. I wasn’t openly armed.

I knocked on the door of room 11. Footsteps came to the door and it opened, streaming sunlight into the otherwise dim room. Slats held the doorknob and waved me in.

Seated at a round table to the right of the door was a thick man with close-cropped brown hair who wore wraparound sunglasses. He kept a tidy mustache he was obviously very proud of, and a triangular tuft of brown hair was tucked below his lower lip. He had a deep, horizontal worry line on his forehead. He wore a black tank top. His entire upper body—arms and neck included—was covered in tattoos.

I turned to him and stuffed an unlit cigarette in my mouth. He pushed his seat back and stood up. A couple of seconds passed while we sized each other up.

“I’m Bird.”

“Rudy.”

I stuck out my hand and he took it. It was a knuckler of a handshake. He looked at my shoulders and chest, checking out my ink. He didn’t let go of my hand. I didn’t let go of his.

“Where’d you do your time? What’d they get you for?”

I smiled at Slats and turned back to Rudy. “Man, they didn’t get me for shit, and I’ve never been inside.” Neither of our hands buckled, but both must have hurt. Mine sure did.

“Then what the fuck’re you doing with this guy?”

“Hey, dude, I don’t know what Big Boy over here told you about me,” even though I did, “but I’m here because Slats and I have a working relationship.” I paused. “I’m a fed.”

Rudy let go of my hand and drew his head back in a motion of disbelief. Pleasant sensations returned to my knuckles. I wanted to shake it out but didn’t. He said, “Bullshit.”

“Nope. God’s honest truth. They send me a check every two weeks to dress like this and hang out with guys like yourself.”

Rudy laughed, looked at Slats, and pointed at me. “That’s not fair. How are we supposed to win against motherfuckers who look like this?”

Slats shrugged.

“You’re not, dude.” I motioned for us to sit at the table. “That’s why there
are
guys who look like me—and there are more of us than you can probably imagine.”

He considered this. Maybe he ran through a file of faces and names, picking out candidates. “Fuck it. No point in me worrying about that now.”

I sat down and took off my shades and placed them on the table. I put my cigarette behind my ear and laced my fingers together. My rings joined in a tinny little symphony. I projected calm. I said, as kindly as possible, “Look. We got you, it’s true. I know Slats has told you this already. You’re an old-timer, you know the game as well as we do. This is a good chance for you, dude, a good chance for you to correct past wrongs, if you care to. If not, then you know what’s waiting for you.”

He said, “Look, man, I’m here to work.”

“Good. Then let’s talk.”

I told him all about Bird and nothing about Jay Dobyns. I told him how I’d managed some token intros to a few of the Angels he claimed to know. We talked about Smitty and Bad Bob. I told Rudy he’d be an essential component of the next phase of the case. Slats reiterated that we needed him. It’s always good to talk up an informant, especially one who’s separated from you by a flow of ambivalence. You need to build trust, or at least the illusion of trust, in a case like Rudy’s. He asked what we wanted from him. Slats outlined the plan. Rudy listened carefully, nodding and smiling from time to time. When Slats was through, Rudy said it was risky, especially for him. But he also said it was so crazy it might just work, and that we’d chosen the right guy. I said we couldn’t do it with just anyone, we needed him and only him.

I pulled the cigarette from my ear and lit it. We all lit cigarettes.

He said, “You don’t need to flatter me so much.”

I said, “Maybe not. But you’ll be in charge as far as anyone knows, and you can’t forget that you’re not. If this works, and we start to roll as a unit with you as our ‘leader,’ then you have to remember that it’s us—and especially me—who’s calling the shots on the street. Got it, dude?”

He went, “Mmmmm.” I stared at him. He still had his sunglasses on. I knew I wouldn’t get to see his eyes that day. Maybe it was the shame of being put in a bad spot, or maybe he was jazzed by the prospect of doing something so ballsy—but whatever the reason, he kept them hidden behind his shades. I couldn’t blame him. He was a man with no choices, and you don’t want to stare in the face the guy who’s taken control of your life, not right after you’ve met him.

I asked, “Well?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he pointed at my left arm and said, “That tattoo.”

“Yeah?”

“What is it?”

“It’s Saint Michael.”

“Oh.”

“You know him?”

“Think so. He’s the patron saint of cops, right?”

“That’s right. And grocers. I looked it up on the Internet once.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

He didn’t think it was cute. Whatever.

He said, “Well, you’re gonna have to come up with some other story about that if you wanna run with these guys.” He sat back in his chair and twirled his finger at the ink on my torso.

“Shit, dude, you think I got to where I am without a story for my Saint Mike? I’m the guy with the sword, the dragon’s my addiction to junk, and I’m killing that motherfucker. I’ve been around the block, Kramer, don’t sweat it.”

Satisfied, he grunted and parted the drapes. “What about that?”

“My bike?”

“Yeah.”

“What about it?

“It looks OK, but it won’t keep up with the guys we’ll be seeing.”

“I’ll keep up.”

“Not on a worn-out Panhead, you won’t. You might be king-shit undercover, but I’m king-shit biker, so watch and learn.”

“I can’t argue with you there, dude, I can’t argue with you there.”

And I didn’t.

JUNE–JULY 2002