Under and Alone (31 page)

After Bobby Loco’s announcement, we immediately left for the Flamingo. We were being led by Mike Munz, who everyone—Angels, Bandidos, and any other outlaw gangsters—knew to be a human hurricane. Earlier in the evening, in fact, Munz had bumped into a girl, one of the Angels’ groupies, in the men’s room at the Flamingo and knocked her unconscious. Munz made no distinction between a three-hundred-pound male adversary or a ninety-pound female, especially if she was stumbling into the wrong bathroom and a loudmouth to boot. Even when unarmed, Munz wouldn’t hesitate to wade headlong into a gun-and-knife fight or, in this case, into a group of five hundred Hells Angels.

With the precision of an army platoon, we rolled into the Flamingo Hotel, right through hundreds of the Red and White. All around us were those brothers riding sixty-six—a dozen dressed-down Mongols who I knew were all armed to the teeth with clear instructions to take care of business if the shit hit the fan.

The Mongol Nation was stone-faced as we moved through the Flamingo, more than ready to go to war over the day’s disrespect. I think the Red and White knew it; the Angel crowd parted wide when the army of Black and White came through. The Mongols strolled around the casino until they found an area in which to circle like a wagon train preparing to stave off an Indian attack. In a defensive maneuver reminiscent of my tour in Vietnam, we stood facing outward, arms crossed, staring out at the crowd from behind dark glasses. There was no doubting the Mongols’ mood tonight.

We were substantially outnumbered, and if it went bad, we might get slaughtered. I looked around for Cleetus and Paul, the two deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department who looked and dressed like bikers and were able to mingle freely among the thousands of bikers in Laughlin. I knew that if the bullets started flying in the Flamingo, my only way out alive might be with them. But where the hell were they?

Behind my black shades, I scanned the crowd. I noticed various groups of Angels growing visibly agitated at the Mongol presence. I returned the angry glare of several Angels—what we call the “mad dog”—an outright invitation to confrontation among 1 percenters. While glancing around the casino, I finally spotted Cleetus. He didn’t have full-patch status, but he fit right in with any biker crowd. He was able to go places clean-cut John Ciccone—especially in his Bermuda shorts and flip-flops—could only dream of.

Cleetus towered over me at a beefy and muscular six foot four. A gregarious guy with a bellowing laugh, he had a beard longer than mine and wore attire just as offensive to the mainstream as my own. His partner, Paul, tended to stay in Cleetus’s shadow but could more than hold his own in any rough situation.

Despite being a cop, Cleetus was something of a Hells Angels aficionado and, truth be told, probably bought into the Red and White hype just a bit. It wasn’t that uncommon, even among biker experts, to believe that the Angels were still the gold standard they’d been back in the 1960s. Prominent Hells Angels like Ralph “Sonny” Barger, longtime Oakland Chapter president and considered the founding father, and Chuck Zito, the former New York Chapter president, helped perpetuate the Angels’ mystique, keeping the allure of the so-called Big Red Machine in the media spotlight.

We continued mad-dogging the Angels, and in less than five minutes, the club’s upper echelon showed up for a powwow. Even violent criminals are occasionally willing to try a little diplomacy. Little Dave, Bobby Loco, and Mike Munz talked with the Angels’ representatives for a few minutes. The Angels assured the Mongols that there would be no further shows of disrespect and apologized for any shown earlier. I was amazed at this act of contrition on the part of the Angels.

Cleetus’s black-leather-clad arms were folded across his chest, and his head was shaking in disbelief. He looked at me without saying a word or making a sign, but his eyes spoke volumes. I knew his esteemed Angels had sorely disappointed him.

As we left the Flamingo, various Angels snarled at us under their breath. None dared to make a move on us, though. I read the faces of various Angels’ prospects, hang-arounds, and groupies as we rolled out. The followers of what was reputed to be the premier outlaw motorcycle gang in the world were perplexed by what they’d just seen. It was a Black and White world now.

A distinct feeling came over me as I strutted through the Flamingo. I couldn’t help myself—I was proud. Proud of my brothers. Proud of myself. I had just stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Mongols against the notorious Hells Angels. We had backed them down. Right in their own yard, in front of God and every other eyewitness. Without even needing to get physical, we’d given the Angels a lesson in respect.

Having played my part, I marched in lockstep with my Mongol brothers through the flashing lights of the Flamingo casino.

Now it was time for Billy St. John to go home for good.

15

42 A
RRESTED IN
M
OTORCYCLE
G
ANG
R
AIDS

BY
M
ITCHELL
L
ANDSBERG,
L
OS
A
NGELES
T
IMES

Hundreds of federal agents and Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies fanned out over three states Friday to drop an investigative net over the Mongols motorcycle club, arresting at least 42 people in Southern California and seizing dozens of illegal guns, cocaine and stolen motorcycles, they said.

The crackdown was the culmination of a perilous, 21⁄2-year investigation in which an undercover federal agent joined the club and rose into its executive ranks, an official of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said.

Authorities described the Mongols as among the most violent of outlaw motorcycle gangs, and said its members were suspected in a wide variety of crimes that included murder, extortion, arson, weapons violations and illegal drug dealing. . . .

The undercover ATF agent, who was not identified, joined the Mongols’ San Fernando Valley branch and rose through the ranks to become club treasurer. . . . Before joining, the agent was subjected to a background check by a private investigator working for the Mongols.

How a veteran federal agent managed to pass that check and remain undetected for two years in a reputedly ruthless motorcycle gang was among the tantalizing questions left unanswered by the federal officials, who declined to discuss the operation in any detail. . . .

“Our undercover agent put himself at great and prolonged peril to develop evidence of murder, weapons and narcotics violations, and other serious crimes,” Donald Kincaid, the Los Angeles division director of the ATF, said in a written statement. He said the crackdown had “shaken the gang to its core.”

It was a harrowing final month, between the last run to Laughlin in April and preparations for the end of my undercover role. Leaving the role meant vanishing at the last possible moment. Adding to my stress level, in the weeks before I was to disappear I had to hang out daily with the gang, while at the same time Ciccone was taking the investigation before a federal grand jury. For hours each day he was laying out the details of our undercover operation for seventeen civilians. We had no idea who some of these men and women might have connections to. Seventeen people who were not in law enforcement now knew of the investigation and could tell their friends and family about a federal undercover agent infiltrating the Mongols.

It took several weeks to complete the operation plan for the final raids. I spent my remaining time with the gang gathering intelligence for Ciccone and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for search warrants. I would feed them information about known weapons and narcotics locations for them to write up in the warrants.

On the day of the takedown, May 19, 2000, I vanished forever from my role as Billy St. John. I was relocated to a safe house in downtown Los Angeles. Weeks earlier, my ex-wife and my sons had been moved far from Los Angeles for their safety. Until the investigation was almost over, we’d had no idea they were going to have to move. Although we protested the distant destination chosen by ATF, it was to no avail. We were all very upset.

One week in advance, ATF personnel from bureau headquarters in Washington and from around the United States began to converge on Los Angeles; every ATF Special Response Team from around the country was ordered to participate in the operation. More than 300 ATF agents and 375 Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies and detectives raided scores of locations, mostly in Southern California but also as far away as Oklahoma, Colorado, and Georgia. The raids netted some seventy illegal firearms, including handguns, machine guns, and assault rifles, as well as explosives; seventeen stolen motorcycles; two kilograms of cocaine; significant quantities of marijuana and methamphetamine; and tens of thousands of dollars in cash. It also led to fifty-four indictments, which, in turn, yielded fifty-three convictions.

(Raids on some of the Mongols’ homes turned up frighteningly powerful arsenals. At the residence of Lonnie “Slick” Gallegos, secretary-treasurer of the El Sereno Chapter, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officers and ATF agents found the following: a Beretta shotgun, a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun, a Glenfield .22 semiautomatic rifle, a Maverick 12-gauge shotgun, a Norinco 84-S assault weapon, a Norinco Mak-90 assault rifle, an Intratec 9mm assault weapon, a Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol, a Jennings .22 semiautomatic pistol, a Charter Arms .44 Special revolver, a .357 Magnum blue-steel revolver, a bulletproof vest, nine plastic bags of marijuana, military and firearms training manuals, $1,400 in cash, and a set of brass knuckles. Though much of the contraband was in plain view, Gallegos’s Mongol colors, his most prized possession, were found locked inside a Sentry safe in the garage.)

Throughout the raids, representatives from the United States Attorney’s Office, U.S. Customs Service, U.S. Marshals Service, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms manned a crisis center in downtown L.A.

The crisis center was a buzzing hive of law-enforcement activity. In these cases, no matter how carefully the logistics have been laid out, the facts on the ground invariably change throughout the raids. Some of the gang members can’t be easily identified; some lie about their given names and don’t have legitimate identification on their persons. I was constantly on the phone helping other agents ID suspects. There were also numerous instances when we had to get “rollback” warrants. In these instances, agents and deputies executing search warrants at dozens of residences and places of business would discover that a location not covered by the original warrant—for example, a detached garage—was actually suspected of housing a stash of firearms or drugs. They would call us at the crisis center, and we’d handle the paperwork of getting a judge to issue a rollback warrant so that we could legally complete the search.

For safety reasons, I could never return to my undercover apartment, and the place was shut down by other ATF agents. I was housed in a downtown Los Angeles hotel and had a Special Response Team assigned to me around the clock for protection. The day of the raids, I reported to the crisis center at four in the morning and began working the phones. It was a surreal feeling: The undercover role was over for me, but what did the future hold? I knew I would be called upon to testify against numerous Mongols and their associates, perhaps for years to come. As I walked around the buzzing crisis center, law-enforcement officers I didn’t know kept pointing at me. It made me feel like some kind of sideshow attraction. Other officers were slapping my shoulder, shaking my hand, congratulating me.

After a few hours I felt numb, and deeply conflicted, as I monitored the progress of the raids. I worried about the safety of the agents and officers going into those seventy locations—Mongol residences, clubhouses, and places of business. Hard-core gangsters would be going to jail today, but for years I’d been calling these gangsters my brothers. I was both proud of my work as an undercover agent and sad about the ramifications my work would have for some of the men I’d grown close to.

The case was among the most ambitious and logistically complex undercover operations ever undertaken against an outlaw biker organization. In the following months ATF made thirteen more arrests and I began the grueling task of preparing to testify against many of my former Mongol brothers in various federal and state trials. Supplementing my eyewitness testimony were hundreds of hours of tape recordings I’d made—in my wired Mustang, in my undercover apartment, and using covert ATF digital recorders secreted on my person. I’d gathered evidence of major drug dealing, motorcycle theft, extortion, assault, and rape; I’d helped solve the November 1999 homicide of Daniel Herrera.

Of the fifty-four people we indicted in the operation, fifty-three were convicted. Most of them opted for guilty pleas when they saw the overwhelming evidence against them. The lone acquittal was the result of one Mongol, Rancid, taking full credit for a firearms violation and exonerating his brother outlaw on the witness stand.