Under and Alone (3 page)

The walls were painted black and white, the Mongol colors, and adorned with biker paraphernalia in honor of the Mongols. Carrena was a hard-core biker chick, the “ol’ lady” of a Mongol called The Kid, who was away doing a prison sentence. She had the words
PROPERTY OF THE KID
tattooed on her back. Ironically, Carrena’s father was a retired cop.

I strolled in behind Sue. The joint was dimly lit, filled with stagnant cigarette smoke and unsavory patrons, including two full-patch Mongols huddled together toward the back of the bar, beers in hand. Sue could have dropped me right in my tracks when she openly pointed at them in her death-defying effort to identify them for me.

“Jesus Christ!” I hissed. “What the hell’s the matter with you? Settle down, before you get both our asses killed.”

She was not only a hard-core tweaker but felony stupid on top of it. Luckily, no one saw her blatant move. I moved toward the bar, dragging her in my wake. Of course, I’d known that I was going to have to watch my back, but now I realized that if I wanted to stay alive, I was going to have to keep an eye on Sue also.

The bartender, an older, hard-looking soldier from The Rock, looked my way. I yelled, “Two Buds!” over the guitar-crunching music and passed one of the beers to Sue. I’d planned to stay on top of things and nurse my beer for the entire evening. Apparently Sue had no such intention. In less than thirty seconds, her bottle was empty and she was hollering, “Let’s have another!” Jesus, I could see trouble coming. I gave her ten dollars to cover her beer tab for the next few minutes and watched as her beer, and my federal money, quickly vanished.

Sue moved around the bar on her own, hugging and talking with one patron after another until she finally reached the two Mongols. My moment of truth. I watched as she reached out and hugged the first biker, then the other. Neither hugged her back. But they didn’t shrug her off either. She turned and motioned for me to come over. “Billy,” she said when I got there, “this is Rocky.”

He frowned menacingly and tipped his beer bottle my way. I returned the gesture. “Good to meetcha, Rock.”

Rocky looked more American Indian than Mexican, with long—almost to his butt—black hair that he wore braided like an Indian warrior. Dressed in all black, he carried a thick length of chain on his belt, along with a large hunting knife. He was on the young side, maybe mid-thirties, and had only been in the gang for about a year and change. He didn’t have that real hard-core, badass look yet, but he was working on it.

Sue nodded toward the second Mongol. “This is Rancid,” she said.

I tipped my Bud and said, “Good to meetcha, Rancid.”

The moniker fit. Rancid had long, black matted hair that hung well past his shoulders. The amount of grease and dirt under his nails was surpassed only by the grease and dirt in his hair, which had turned the top rocker on his patch almost black. He had an array of tattoos that started with an Uzi on his neck. There was a big black
MONGOL
tattoo across his enormous beer belly, which was displayed for everybody when his T-shirt rode up. He was “sleeved out,” meaning that there was no more unmarked skin on his arms for inking. His gruff voice was loud enough to be heard over the Santana guitar riffs blaring from the jukebox he was leaning against. He was wearing black jeans and sported a huge chain and a hunting knife on his belt. I would later learn that the chain and knife were standard equipment for Mongol patches. His black steel-toed boots had chromed metal spikes on the tips—designed for nothing less than ripping open the flesh of whomever he kicked. He was equipped for battle, and made an ominous impression on me.

Sue was talking faster than her brain could function. I knew she was only trying to help, but in her reckless, intoxicated efforts she was digging a hole both of us could fall into. She went on and on about how well she knew me and all that we’d supposedly been through together. This caused me anxiety for more than one reason. First, she was no prize to be seen with. Second, I knew how easy it would be to get caught in the tangled web of bullshit she was weaving. I had to get her out of there, fast. She’d served her purpose for the night. I turned to her and said, “Look, Sue, we need to go—I got some things to take care of.”

She threw back her head and laughed. No way. She was in an alcohol-and-crank-induced party frenzy. She was
home.
This was her niche. She’d dug in for the night with her Mongol buds, and there was no way she was leaving.

After a few more tense minutes, I made my way toward the exit. It was tough, but like dragging an unruly dog on a chain, I managed to pull Sue out to the street with me. I felt like I had walked out of the twilight zone back to reality. No runs, no hits, no errors, and nobody left on. Just like that, our first night of the Mongol undercover investigation was over.

3

To the general public, outlaw motorcycle gangs may seem like a throwback to the 1960s and the freewheeling spirit celebrated in the movie
Easy Rider;
others may associate them with the infamous 1969 murder at Altamont Speedway in which a group of Hells Angels knifed a concertgoer as Mick Jagger danced around singing “Under My Thumb.”

But contemporary biker gangs aren’t simply hard-charging, heavy-drinking “wild child” Americans, a version of the James Gang on iron horses. Today’s biker organizations are sophisticated, calculating, extremely violent—nothing less than the insidious new face of global organized crime.

With written constitutions, bylaws, monthly dues, and a hierarchy of national officers, OMGs are just as organized and dangerous as traditional Cosa Nostra families, and indeed more violent. In fact, their membership now dwarfs that of the Mafia, and they are spreading around the globe, with chapters in far-flung countries like Sweden and New Zealand. They form a closed, impenetrable society like the Italian-American Mob, but the fundamental distinction, from a law-enforcement perspective, is the brazen, in-your-face violence of today’s biker organizations. Where the Mafia seeks a pretense of respectability, cloaking its illegal activities in legitimacy, outlaw biker gangs proudly fly their “colors,” identifying themselves as Hells Angels, Pagans, Outlaws, Bandidos, or Mongols.

To a biker, these colors—denim or leather sleeveless vests decorated with coded patches that detail a member’s sexual and criminal exploits—are absolutely sacred, his most prized possession. Colors are worth fighting for and, if need be, dying for.

A biker wears his colors (or “cut”) like a neon sign, announcing to the world precisely who he is. And make no mistake: Outlaw bikers
want
you to know who they are. They
want
to make you tremble when they hit the highways in convoys of a hundred or more deafening Harleys. Bikers feed on the fear that they instill in the mainstream; it’s this fear that allows them to control a vast, multibillion-dollar economy of illegal drugs, gunrunning, and prostitution across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

By the late 1990s, when I first began riding undercover to gather intel on the OMGs of Southern California, the biker underworld was in a state of war, an unprecedented international conflict pitting the long-dominant Hells Angels, still the largest outlaw motorcycle club in the United States, against various allied gangs—principally, the Bandidos, Outlaws, Pagans, and Mongols. From Long Island to Montreal to Los Angeles, newspapers were filled with headlines about the widespread knifings, shootings, firebombings—wholesale violence that has resulted in many murders and attempted murders.

Sometimes the violence is the result of sheer machismo. But it also stems from a battle for control of a massive international drug economy. Figures within the OMG drug underworld are difficult to quantify accurately, but a recent Canadian prosecution against the Hells Angels gives a sense of the scope. In March 2001, local and federal law enforcement in Canada brought down a major case called Operation Springtime, during which they seized more than $5.6 million in cash from one apartment safe in Quebec, money described as one day’s drug sales. In Quebec alone the Hells Angels controlled an estimated billion-dollar-a-year distribution network, moving hundreds of kilograms of cocaine and hashish each month, with importation tentacles reaching as far as Pakistan, South Africa, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, and Jamaica. And this was just one law-enforcement operation, focusing on one group of Hells Angels within one province of Canada. The Angels now have chapters in some twenty-seven countries, and they are second to the Bandidos in overall membership.

In many instances outlaw biker groups have begun to resemble international terrorist organizations. In Denmark the Bandidos launched rocket-propelled grenades at a Hells Angels house. In Montreal Maurice “Mom” Boucher, leader of the Quebec Hells Angels, was put on trial—and ultimately sentenced to life in prison—for ordering the murder of two prison guards. The Quebec government had to construct a special courthouse in which to house and protect the sequestered jurors during his trial.

Outlaw biker gangs trace their origins to the years immediately after World War II. Many returning veterans, seeking camaraderie and adventure and having difficulty adjusting to civilian life, formed clubs and took to the highway on their Harley-Davidsons and Indians. They tended to ride hard, drink hard, and fight hard.

The term “1 percenter” was coined in the aftermath of a 1947 mêlée in Hollister, California, the “motorcycle riot” that inspired the film
The Wild One
and sparked the first wave of antibiker hysteria in the United States. Following the unrest, the American Motorcycle Association denounced the small minority of bikers who were sullying the reputation of the “99 percent” of motorcycle enthusiasts who were law-abiding. The outlaw biker groups quickly embraced their characterization as a public menace, and to this day, almost all don a
1%
ER
patch on their colors.

Among outsiders, the Hells Angels may have the most famous name, but within the world of the 1 percenters, there’s no gang more feared than the Mongols. In fact, to those of us in ATF, the Mongols represent a throwback to the anarchic spirit of the early outlaw motorcycle gangs. Their motto is “Respect few, fear none,” and they live by those words.

For seventeen years they engaged in a homicidal turf war with the Angels—a furious fight over the right to wear the
CALIFORNIA
lower rocker on their colors.

When the Mongols first came on the scene in the early 1970s, the Angels gave the new gang an ultimatum: Give up your
CALIFORNIA
rocker or die. The Hells Angels had never let another gang wear the lower rocker in a state where the Angels had chapters. Everyone expected that the Hells Angels would quickly annihilate the much smaller Mongols. But after seventeen years of war, in which more than two dozen Angels and Mongols were stabbed, machine-gunned, or blown up, the Angels finally backed down. They acknowledged the Mongols’ right to wear the
CALIFORNIA
lower rocker on their colors. And the Mongols acknowledged the right of the Angels to continue to operate in Southern California.*
 
²

Though much smaller in number than the Hells Angels, Bandidos, or Outlaws,*
 
³
the Mongols were reputed to have a higher percentage of convicted felons and murderers in their ranks. From the beginning they’d made efforts to recruit from the Chicano criminal culture of East L.A., which had become a feared force within the California prison system, and forged a dangerous alliance with La Eme, or the Mexican Mafia.

All the criminal gangs of California—including the infamous Crips and Bloods—had learned to give the Mongols a wide berth. The Mongols were willing to kill at any time, using murder to resolve even the most trivial disputes and insults. And the intense loyalty and communal focus of the gang made the Mongols a kind of urban commando force. To date, the Mongols have never been beaten in a confrontation with any other outlaw motorcycle gang.

Whereas the Hells Angels today tend to use violence in the pursuit of profit, for the Mongols murder and mayhem have become simply a lifestyle choice. It was no accident that the founding members chose the name Mongols; they take pride in being the scourge of straight society, heirs to the rape-and-pillage terror of Genghis Khan.

Though they’d long been flying beneath the radar of law enforcement, by the late 1990s, the Mongols’ penchant for murder, assault, extortion, armed robbery, narcotics dealing, and gunrunning had caught the attention of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. And, more specifically, they’d caught the attention of ATF Special Agent John Ciccone.

Ciccone could see that this had the potential to be a great case; the FBI and plenty of local police departments would have loved to take a crack at the Mongols. But ATF, having a long history of successful investigations into outlaw motorcycle gangs, was the agency best equipped to take on such an investigation.

The groundbreaking ATF undercover operation was the “Widow Makers” case in the early 1970s. The Widow Makers Motorcycle Club was made up of six undercover ATF agents—Ray Ramos, Paul McQuistion, Paul Burke, Dick Newby, Jay Lanning, and Bobby Greenleaf—and targeted actual outlaw bikers in Long Beach, California. The investigation resulted in thirteen arrests for guns and drugs and is considered the first undercover operation on OMGs on the West Coast. Around the same time, ATF, working with the Drug Enforcement Agency, was running an investigation in Northern California, targeting the Hells Angels. Special Agent Douglas Gray went undercover for a couple of months in the Angels, though he didn’t actually patch in (that is, become an official member of the club). That case marked the first time that an outlaw biker gang was successfully prosecuted using the federal Title 18 United States Code 1962, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute.