Under and Alone (5 page)

With his cover blown while deep inside an outlaw biker gang, Darrin Kozlowski should be dead today. The fact that he’s alive and well is not for lack of various Vagos efforts to see otherwise. When the investigation went south, Koz got a phone call from one Vago, acting as if nothing was amiss and wanting to arrange a meet. The sixth sense that frequently saves a cop’s ass served Koz well that day, and he didn’t show up for the meet. Nevertheless, the Vagos found out where he lived, began to terrorize his family, and threatened him repeatedly.

But Koz was no one to mess with. A tall, strapping, midwestern boy with a quick smile, an easy laugh, and an affable demeanor, Koz refused to relocate or cower. Eventually ATF had to assign members of our crack Special Response Team—armed with assault rifles—to move in with Koz’s family for a couple of weeks.

But he was still on the job, and a hell of an ATF agent. As I’d watched him working the Vagos case—despite the ultimate investigative dead end—I made sure to take copious notes.

After my introduction to Rocky and Rancid at The Place, I became a frequent visitor to the Mongols’ preferred watering hole in the San Fernando Valley. My CI, having served her purpose, was out of the picture now. I was spending nights on my own in that dingy little bar, shooting pool, talking shit, and draining Buds. The Mongols knew my background as a rough-edged guy named Billy St. John—divorced father, U.S. Army vet, working a legit job in the avionics industry—but I hadn’t managed to get past the initial trust issue with them.

I had probably met ten or twelve Mongols by early April 1998, and the pressure was on me to make things happen—and fast. John Torres, the ASAC in the L.A. Division, was already badgering Ciccone and me to show some tangible results for the federal dollars we were spending. Torres simply didn’t appreciate or understand an undercover operation this complex. I knew that pushing the Mongols wasn’t feasible; the bad guys could feel it when you were trying too hard. And I knew that in a UC operation mistakes only invite suspicion and make for a more difficult and dangerous task. Unfortunately I also knew that, in the L.A. Division, the operation could be jerked right out from under us for no reason at all.

Ciccone and I decided that, in order to push the investigation to the next level, I should try to get an invitation to ride to Laughlin with the Mongols I’d met at The Place.

The Laughlin River Run is the third-biggest annual motorcycle event in the country, ranking just behind Sturgis, South Dakota, and Daytona, Florida. But for Southern California bikers, it’s the most important run of the year. The town of Laughlin—sometimes referred to as the “poor man’s Vegas”—is situated on the Colorado River near Lake Mohave and Lake Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border, a relatively easy five-hour drive from Los Angeles proper. A small town with year-round balmy weather, it has a population of around ten thousand. But on the third weekend of April the town swells with law-abiding Harley lovers, wannabes, and outlaws—about twenty-five thousand of them. Along with them come plenty of motorcycle thefts, motorcycle traffic accidents, and outlaw gang rivalry incidents, in addition to the prevailing good-natured fun.

My window of opportunity to get an invitation to Laughlin was narrowing fast. I assessed the personalities of all the Mongols I’d met so far. Rocky was a bad dude, to be sure, but he was nowhere near as hard an outlaw biker as Rancid. Bucket Head, another member of the San Fernando Valley Chapter, struck me as someone I might be able to get next to, but he was unpredictable and wasn’t around as much as Rocky. It looked like Rocky was going to be my way in. I did some background work on him and learned that he’d worked a legitimate job for the City of Los Angeles for thirteen years, then joined the Mongols and had been on a downward spiral ever since. He had no convictions, but his arrest record boasted several assaults.

I watched Rocky as he moved around The Place shooting pool and drinking beer. For an outlaw biker, he laughed a lot and seemed to get along with everyone. When I noticed his beer was nearly empty, I knew it was time to make my move.

“Rocky!” I yelled over the jukebox as I passed him another cold Bud. “Listen, you goin’ to Laughlin?”

“Sure am. You goin’?”

“I want to. But I haven’t found anybody to ride out with yet.”

“Shit,” Rocky said after a pause, “you oughtta ride out with us.”

“I’d love to.” I held my beer out as a salute. Rocky clinked his bottle against mine.

“Gonna be a fuckin’ good time.”

Though I tried my best to mask it, I was beside myself. I wanted to talk to Rocky about the particulars of the trip but didn’t dare push it. Tonight I’d settle for the invite. Laughlin was a few days away, and I could get the details straight later. I bought Rocky another beer and shot a few more rounds of pool.

At two in the morning, I high-fived Rocky. He repeated the invitation to ride with him, and I headed for the door. I couldn’t wait to hook up with Ciccone. I strapped on my helmet and fired my machine. I let go like someone had just dropped the green flag and disappeared into the night.

For the next couple of days I hung out at The Place, trying to get Rocky to talk about just how we were going to do the Laughlin run. But Rocky was as unreliable as he was unpredictable. His whole attitude had changed, and it seemed like he didn’t want to go to Laughlin anymore. Tuesday rolled around to Friday and we still had no plans for the Laughlin trip. Some of the Mongols had already rolled out Friday morning, and I was getting anxious.

Why had his attitude changed? Had he suddenly started to distrust me? I was convinced that if I didn’t say something to Rocky, the trip would be off. Shooting pool, I asked him straight out. “Rocky, what time we hitting the road in the morning?”

“Be at my place at about nine.”

As I turned and walked out the door, a hard-core Tujunga chick followed me out. She’d obviously been eavesdropping on my conversation with Rocky. “Billy, take me to Laughlin with you,” she said.

I turned to look her up and down. She was a tough, typical biker chick (meaning she had a great body but a face that could stop the space shuttle). She asked for a ride home. I smiled at her. Being seen leaving with her on the back of my Harley would do nothing but lend credence to my role as Billy St. John, both tonight and on the Laughlin run. “Jump on. Where ya live?”

“Just head down Foothill Boulevard. I’ll show you.”

She reached around me and tightened up as I pulled away. As we rolled down Foothill I told her that if she really wanted to go to Laughlin, she should meet me at The Place at about eight-thirty in the morning. In my rearview mirror I saw Ciccone tailing me. I knew that he would be waiting to hear what the plans were for Laughlin. He had a group of agents on standby ready to roll out to Nevada with me.

I dropped the chick off, and Ciccone jumped in behind me. I signaled him to follow me as I turned onto Lowell Avenue, then picked a dark parking lot at a driving range near the 210 for our meet. There wasn’t much to discuss besides Rocky’s sudden reluctance about the trip. I rolled my bike around in the parking lot and pulled up next to Ciccone’s car.

“We still on? What’d he say?”

“I’m gonna meet Rocky at his house at nine in the morning. He didn’t say anything else about meeting with other Mongols or anything else about the trip.”

“Who’s the chick?”

“Just some TJ chick who wants me to take her to Laughlin.”

Ciccone smiled knowingly. “It’ll be good cover.”

“Yeah, it will.”

I hadn’t yet worn a concealed surveillance device, or wire, at this point in the investigation. I was still too new on the scene, and there was far too great a risk that Rocky or one of the other Mongols might suddenly try to pat me down. Getting caught wearing a wire in a closed criminal society like the Mongols—or any outlaw motorcycle gang, for that matter—is an almost certain death sentence.

Rather, Ciccone and his gang would follow us and I’d make contact through a pay phone if I could. I rode home, uneasy, trying to tell myself everything was going to go according to plan. I couldn’t help but feel the whole operation was coming down to tomorrow. My mind played games with me. The night seemed darker and the trip home longer.

I was up before dawn making sure that I had myself together. I still wasn’t feeling too confident about the whole situation, but I called Ciccone and told him that I was ready to roll and that I’d be leaving for Tujunga in a few minutes. He told me to be careful.

I turned off Lowell onto Foothill Boulevard and rode down the hill. I was surprised to see the little Tujunga chick waiting for me in front of The Place. I pulled over and she hopped on, wrapping her hands tight around my waist. It was still too early to roll to Rocky’s place, so I told her that we’d hit a restaurant down the street before we picked him up. Like Sue, this chick was a hard-core tweaker, but unlike a lot of tweakers, she still had quite an appetite. I watched her shoveling down the pancakes and sausages. I didn’t say a thing to her throughout the meal besides “Pass the salt.” I was too focused on what would be waiting for me at Rocky’s house.

Rocky lived a minute’s ride down the road, and we were in front of his place before I could work myself into a more negative mind-set. I backed my bike to the curb. It seemed more like five in the morning than nine; there was nothing to indicate that anyone in the house was alive as I banged my fist against the door. After two minutes, Rocky’s “ol’ lady” came to the door. Her name was Vicky, and as I was to learn in the coming months, she and Rocky had been childhood sweethearts. Her face was weathered, and her eyes had the vacant look of a long-term dopehead. Vicky let us in, mumbling something about Rocky being still in bed, told us to hang on, and turned and walked back toward the bedroom. In a few minutes Rocky emerged, looking half dead.

“Ah, fuck, Billy, what time is it?”

“Nine.”

“Come back about eleven.”

I nodded. At least he didn’t say the trip was off.

“Okay, Rock—see you in a couple of hours.”

The TJ chick and I walked back to my bike. She started complaining, saying that she needed to go back to her place and pick up some dope for the trip. I figured I’d better drop her off, then tell her that I’d changed my mind about going. “Look, baby,” I said, as I pulled into her driveway. “I don’t think I’m going to Laughlin anymore. Think I’m just gonna head home.”

She sighed a few times and tried to talk me into making the run, but to no avail. I headed back up Foothill Boulevard to find a phone so I could let Ciccone know what was going on. I told him that Rocky was still asleep and wanted us to come back about eleven. No big deal, Ciccone said, as long as we made the trip.

I tried to put on a good face; Ciccone and a team of ATF agents were fired up for the run to Laughlin, and I didn’t want to let them down.

There was no one at The Place at this hour, but the R & J Motorcycle Shop next door was open, and I strolled inside. “R & J” stood for Roy and Johnny. The proprietors were two old-school Harley-Davidson mechanics, disorganized, rough, and dirty, but they knew their way around a Harley like no one else on The Rock.

I made my way back through the jumble of motorcycle parts. “Yo, anybody home?”

“Come on in!” hollered a deep voice from the back.

I found Johnny doing surgery on a Harley engine in his little shop area.

“What’s up, Billy?”

“Just fixin’ to take off for Laughlin.”

“Who you rollin’ with?”

“Rocky.”

Johnny looked up from the Harley, raised one eyebrow at me. His look spoke volumes. Although not 1 percenters, Johnny and Roy could hang with the best of them. But they had better sense than to put on a patch. They knew what it meant and wanted nothing to do with it.

One evening after Johnny had seen me hanging with the Mongols, he came up to me, put his arm around my shoulder, and with all the sincerity in the world told me: “Billy, stay away from that brother shit. If you get involved with them, you’ll come out a loser.”

Johnny didn’t have a clue who I really was, of course, but after that piece of advice, he held a special place in my heart.

At ten-thirty I decided to head back to Rocky’s. If I let too much time pass, it would just give him an excuse to bail out of the trip. As I rolled up to Rocky’s place, I tried to be as noisy as hell. “Yo, Rocky!” I shouted, banging repeatedly on the door.

After a long wait, I saw some signs of Mongol life. The lock jiggled. Then the door opened, and Vicky stood staring uncomprehendingly, like I’d just woken her from the deepest sleep of her life. “What’re you doin’ here, Billy? Rocky’s still in bed.”

“Can I come in and talk to him?”

I walked straight back to the bedroom where Rocky lay snoring, twisted up in his sheets. “Yo, bud,” I said. “We goin’?”

“Yeah, gimme a little longer. Come back in an hour.”

I wanted to stay at Rocky’s place so that he couldn’t change his mind. But I knew better than to push it. I fired up my bike, drove back to The Place, and killed the hour drinking beers with Carrena’s father, the retired LAPD officer. I talked to him as if there was no love lost between Billy St. John and the LAPD. He made it clear that he and the LAPD were no mutual-admiration society, either. Over the course of the investigation I had numerous talks with him about his life as a cop, and though he’d retired under favorable circumstances, he just seemed to be one of those guys disgruntled by their whole police career. All of the Mongols treated him as a harmless old man, convinced that he’d never inform on them for any criminal activity that went down in The Place. I sometimes stared at him as I drank my beer and wondered how a guy who’d spent twenty years chasing bad guys could feel so at home in a hornet’s nests of outlaw bikers, but he always treated me aboveboard, and I didn’t worry much about him. Ciccone, on the other hand, felt I should steer clear of him as much as possible. Who knew if he was still capable of using his LAPD connections to do some background digging on me?

I nursed my beer for that hour, then fired up the bike again, wondering if Rocky was going to give me some new excuse about not making the trip. My heart came alive as I saw him outside his house, working on his bike. I backed my straight pipes to the curb. “You ready to roll?”