Under and Alone (10 page)

At about ten o’clock, after intimidating the bar manager out of a few hundred bucks’ worth of unpaid-for beer, Domingo approached me and said that we were going over to an associate’s place to hook up with some strippers. I could only imagine what this might mean. Was this going to be some kind of new test for the hang-around? Mongols downed their remaining booze and headed for the door. As I made my way outside I looked for Ciccone and the guys; with Domingo hovering over me, I couldn’t chance more than a quick glance up and down the street. I didn’t see anything remotely resembling a cop car. Reality hit me hard: I’d lost all backup now; it was just my wits against these cranked-up, alcohol-fueled outlaws.

We left the bar and made our way through the streets of Visalia until we arrived at a small house. I had no idea who lived there. Domingo said that the Cen Cal president was going to put in the phone call to the girls and that they would be over in a little bit. I began to wonder just what this was going to turn into.

After a few more beers, Domingo disclosed the real plan for the evening’s festivities. He said that the girls had been told that they would be coming over to give a private dance show for the Mongols, for which they would be paid handsomely. He smiled as he told me what was really going to happen. We would tie them up and gang-bang them all before heading back to L.A.

“Great idea,” I said, smiling back at Domingo.

Inside, I tried to stifle a retch at the thought of premeditated kidnapping and gang rape. I tried my damnedest to mask the panic in my face. I had to think of a way to get out of this one. I looked around. I had no idea exactly where I was. I had no idea where Ciccone or the backup guys were. I had no gun with me—it was too risky at that point of the investigation to take the chance of the Mongols finding it on me. But I knew that several of the Mongols were carrying firearms. And all the dope the Mongols had consumed wasn’t making the situation any better. No one was going to come to their senses.

After about an hour of pacing, frantically wondering what I should do, I was approached by The Kid, Carrena’s ol’ man and the president of the Riverside County (or RivCo) Chapter. The Kid was a hard-core outlaw, a major-league asshole, and about as predictable as a rabid wolverine. He had gotten out of prison for a felony drug conviction a few months before and was back at the helm of the RivCo Chapter, partying like a man desperate to make up for all those lost years. The Kid clearly didn’t trust me. He looked directly into my eyes and said: “You do nose candy, Billy?”

“What?”

“Do you do nose candy?”

I stared at him blankly.

“Cocaine, Billy!” he snapped. “Do you do fuckin’ cocaine?”

“Yeah, sometimes. But I ain’t doin’
shit
tonight.”

“How come?”

“It’s hard enough for me to keep up with y’all—Jesus, you’re half my fuckin’ age. All this beer—and coke, too—that’s gonna knock me on my ass.”

The Kid began to push methamphetamine as an all-purpose pick-me-up.

“Crank will keep you going, Billy. What you need to do is a few lines of crank.”

Domingo walked up, nodding. “Yeah, Billy, you ought to do some crank.”

It was unheard-of for Domingo to push the dope issue. For one thing, he didn’t touch drugs himself. He was still on parole, had only recently come out of prison on an assault charge, and had to pass a weekly piss test with his parole officer. I began to feel the heat of Domingo’s stare. A premeditated gang rape and now a dope test. It was going from bad to worse; I looked around to see several other Mongols watching hard for my reaction.

Gangs like the Mongols have been in the cops-and-robbers game for so long they know the signs to look for in someone they suspect of being an undercover. You can’t just pull some excuse out of your ass without having your corroboration in place. If I’d gone the Domingo route—“Hey, I gotta take a piss test for my parole officer every week”—then they’d want to know my PO’s name, which prison I’d done my time in, and who my cell mate was. The Mongols have plenty of sources in both the federal and state prisons systems and could punch holes in that story in short order. If I said I had to take a random drug test for my job, then they’d soon have their private eyes checking out that story. Few real companies are willing to back an undercover operation of this nature, and while we found one that would, they could not withstand intense questioning on the minutiae of drug testing, and I would have been reckless to put them in that position.

The Kid walked a few feet away and laid out a couple of lines of methamphetamine on a car hood. Then, loud enough for everyone to hear, he yelled: “Get yer ass over here, Billy! Do a line or we aren’t ever going to believe anything you say!”

I could feel my face getting bright red. I was boxed into a corner, and I knew I had to fight my way off the ropes. But I’d done my homework; I’d studied the way Koz had improvised his way out of similar jams when he was undercover with the Vagos.

Rather than back down, I yelled angrily back at The Kid.

“You don’t believe any fucking thing I say anyway, motherfucker! I’m not going to pile my bike into some tree because I did some shit just to make you guys happy. I’ll be lucky to get back to L.A. as it is, so fuck you!”

They were all speechless. Hang-arounds don’t talk that way to full patches. And they definitely don’t talk that way to chapter presidents. I figured the least I’d get away with would be an ass whipping. But it might give me a good excuse to jump on my bike and leave before the strippers got there for the gang rape.

To my astonishment, The Kid laughed. “More for me,” he said, and snorted up both lines. Everybody else laughed, too.

The hours crept by, until it was around three in the morning. The strippers still hadn’t shown up. Just about all the Mongols were too stoned and drunk to focus on anything. Finally, Domingo said, “Fuck it.” He was ready to head back to L.A.

As exhausted as I was, I fully understood that the planned gang rape was meant to be my biggest test yet. If I hadn’t participated I would have been out of the Mongols. Of course, as a cop, as a father—as a human being with a conscience—participation wasn’t a question. But what could I have done? If I’d tried to stop the rapes, I’d blow my cover and risk getting killed when they realized who I was. Without a gun, without backup, there was no way one cop was going to be able to stop a dozen rapist Mongols flying high on meth and coke.

But Lady Luck smiled on me. And she smiled on those strippers, too.

The Mongols had lost interest in testing me. Without any great fanfare they fired up the bikes. I glanced around the block again—Ciccone and the boys were still nowhere in sight.

I was beyond tired. I’d slept about three hours in the last forty-eight. If I made it home alive, that would be a victory as far as I was concerned. We rode mile after mile until the sun came up. It was about five in the morning when we finally hit the Tujunga area, and my weary head was filled with thoughts of the Mongols luring those unsuspecting dancers into a trap of kidnapping and rape.

7

By the summer of 1998, I’d become an official Mongols prospect. As a probationary member of the gang, a prospect is trusted with more responsibilities than a hang-around, but he also has a lot more at stake. By now I’d been educated in the basic club hierarchy, had begun to master the outlaw traditions and codes. Official club meetings are known as “Church.” The club had its bylaws and constitution as well as its own twisted version of the biblical laws of Moses, which I ultimately received from Domingo (and which was vouchered as evidence).

T
HE
F
IVE
M
ONGOL
C
OMMANDMENTS

If you intend to break any of the above commandants [sic], you might as well turn our patch in now or face the consequences.

In order to become a prospect, I had to complete an official Mongols application. I was a little stunned when Rocky handed it to me one day at his house; it was three pages long, and more intense—and personal—than applications I’d filled out to become a law-enforcement officer. The Mongols wanted to know everything from your Social Security number to how long your dick was.

But I stood there nodding at Rocky, acting unfazed. “No problem, my man. I’ll get it back to you in a day or so.”

Meanwhile, I could quickly see that we had a major problem; we might even have to deep-six the whole operation. For one thing, Rocky told me that after I filled out the application, it was going to be handed over to a private investigator—quite possibly an ex-cop. I also knew that sometimes the best you can do is not good enough.

I had started building my undercover background as Billy St. John in the mid-eighties, during my work inside the neo-Nazis, the National Alliance, and other antigovernment groups. ATF had the ability to do anything any other federal or local agency could do as far as covering their UC agents, such as creating a bogus arrest record, work history, credit reports, vehicle registration, driver’s license, and educational records. In preparing my undercover identity, I had been in touch with other agents and agencies who were in the know about potential pitfalls. I had called on my old friend Steve Campbell, a police department captain in North Carolina, who set up a bogus criminal record for me; it showed several misdemeanor arrests for assault and drug violations. I was one of the few guys in ATF who was able to actually go under with some confidence—at least until I saw that Mongol membership application.

I was scanning the questions and thinking,
How the hell are we going to cover all this shit?
There was no way I could do it alone. If Ciccone wanted his UC agent to stay alive, he was going to have another project dumped in his lap.

Once again, Ciccone saved my skin. He proved himself a genius at navigating the complex and often treacherous administrative waters of ATF. We made a great team that way—John handling the behind-the-scenes machinations of the bureau and me handling the face-to-face stuff with the bad guys on the street.

Within a few hours of seeing my application, Ciccone had a team of ATF agents running from one side of the country to the other, getting things in place to bolster my background. Besides the obvious ID issues—Social Security number, California driver’s license, Veterans Administration records—the Mongols wanted telephone numbers and addresses for my relatives. They expected to see high school records, in my case, from North Carolina in the late 1960s. They also wanted to see hard copies of W-2s for five years.

In just a matter of days, Ciccone pulled it all together. He had ATF agents inside the school system in the town where I’d supposedly grown up, doctoring “official” school records for me. He had various agents around the country ready to answer the phone numbers we’d provided, pretending to be my parents, uncles, aunts, cousins.

He got his hands on IRS forms and made some official W-2s “proving” that Billy St. John had worked at a California-based avionics company for the past five years. The avionics industry deals with aircraft instrumentation: radar units, navigational radios, weather scopes, altitude indicators, and speed indicators. My “job” was to buy and sell used equipment. During the day I would pick up equipment in Southern California and take it to a real repair shop. And to give the whole employment cover more credibility, on several occasions I arranged to bring one of the Mongols with me on a pickup. A few times I even took Rocky along to meet with my supposed employer—actually an ATF agent working undercover—so he could pay me in front of Rocky.

We felt like we had covered everything that the Mongols were asking for in the application, and we were sure as fuck betting my life on it. But as thorough as we’d been in preparing my background, I was still a nervous wreck every day I went in to meet the Mongols. And Ciccone was just as wound up and tense as I was.

Following protocol, I turned my application in to our chapter president, Domingo. There was no backing out of it now. Despite my apprehensions, I had to maintain that level of outward confidence, aggression, and surliness that’s expected from men in the world of 1 percenters; I couldn’t let the possibility of being found out overshadow my performance. If I ever appeared too nervous or jumpy, the Mongols would read it instantly as weakness and sniff me out as a cop or, at least, as a guy pretending to be someone he wasn’t.

For weeks as I fired up my Harley, I kept talking to myself:
Hey, Billy, chill out. They like you. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have asked you to join the club. If they really thought you were a cop, they’d have fucked you up a long time ago.