Gods of Mischief (6 page)

It took an eight-year-old to hit the brakes for me.

Darlene's youngest was like a son. I'd helped raise that child since he was in kindergarten. Hell, he even called me Daddy. But the boy had heard some schoolyard talk and wanted a straight answer to his not-so-simple question.

“Daddy, are you a drug dealer?”

Fuck, yeah, I was a drug dealer. One of the biggest in the valley. But that's not what I told him. Looking that child straight in the eyes, I flat-out lied.

“No, buddy,” I answered. “Daddy's not a drug dealer.”

It was exactly what that kid wanted to hear, and he skipped away happy. But I was left feeling like a worthless sack of shit.

What a gutless coward I was. What a miserable human being. And it wasn't just the drugs and the dealing, it was all the other fucked-up things I'd done in my lifetime, most of which I've yet to confess. At that moment I couldn't stomach the man in the mirror. Not for another second. Like a puss-filled boil, my past had to be lanced.

I stood from the chair, walked straight into the garage and returned with twelve pounds of high-grade methamphetamine. Darlene's jaw nearly hit the floor as I flushed every last gram of it down the shitter.

“I'm done,” I told her.

That woman had prayed to see me clean. But now that the moment had come, she couldn't believe it.

“You won't last,” she said.

For once Darlene was wrong. I never touched drugs again.

Not long after the big flush, I took the Pottery House preacher's advice. I removed the padlocks from my storage units, threw open the doors and walked away. As word got around, the meth-heads came swarming like flies to the mother of all yard sales. They carted off thousands of dollars' worth of “Satan's stuff,” but I didn't care. That preacher man was right. Unloading the past felt pretty damn good.

Months later the Pottery House threw a rummage sale, and a bunch of my old U-Haul property ended up tagged in the church parking lot. Caught with his hand in the cookie jar, the hypocrite preacher hung his head and explained to me why he was selling all the shit he'd grabbed from my old storage units.

Turns out Satan's stuff had brought nothing but hard luck to God's chosen junkie.

Shortly thereafter, I left Darlene and her family—including the little guy who got me started on the road to clean and sober. Darlene never asked me to go, but once I was clearheaded enough to understand what I'd put her through, I walked anyway. Maybe it was guilt. I don't know. I'd like to think I did the right thing. That for love's sake, I finally set that good woman free.

She'd suffered enough.

Taking my first baby
steps on the road toward redemption, I felt like a man awakened from a drug-induced coma: suddenly twenty-seven years old without a clue how I got there or where I was going. I wanted to rejoin the world, become one of the “normal” people, but it was hard breaking from the past when you were defined by it. “Drug dealer” was a damn hard reputation to shed. I no longer wanted to be that person, but the
world wasn't letting me be anything else. If I wanted a second chance, I had to earn it. So I pulled up my boots and began walking the walk.

My first steps led me down into the church basement where Narcotics Anonymous held weekly meetings. I'd always heard a junkie needed group support to avoid temptation. Well, that was some fucked-up group, let me tell you. I knew most of those addicts. Hell, at one time or another I'd probably sold drugs to half of them. The majority were in that basement not because they had a burning desire to get clean but because they were under court mandate. More than once I saw those tweakers duck into their connect's house to get high before a meeting.

Six weeks later I walked out of Narcotics Anonymous for good.

I was never a religious man, but religion was where I turned next. My father, a tribal Indian, had raised me an atheist—reverential of nature, not some anonymous supreme being with a bushy white beard. Dad used to preach that the roads we take in life are the ones we pave ourselves. But shortly before he died, a VA hospital chaplain turned the old man's thinking around and convinced him to join the Jesus team. I guess Dad was no different than many of us in that respect. When he felt he'd lost control over his life, he surrendered to The Man. And because my father embraced a higher power, he believed all his sins would be forgiven.

That sounded pretty good to me.

I found myself standing outside Catholic churches, looking for the courage to step inside and embrace the mystery of faith. I was a sinner desperate for forgiveness, but I felt unworthy to sit among the righteous. I finally grew some gonads and made it through the door, only to conclude that maybe faith and forgiveness don't require a priest or a church—that maybe it's something personal between you and the Almighty. So I bought myself a jailhouse Bible, written so any ten-year-old could understand it, and began to study.

Seek and ye shall find, sayeth the good book. And that's just what I did. Much like that first trip to Hemet in mother's Oldsmobile, I was
again looking for signs. A way back to God's good graces. A return to sanity after all the madness and chaos of my life.

I just had to keep my eyes open.

When the Vagos came to town and began harassing the locals, that was the first sign. I saw it but never stopped. When David vanished, it was as if someone had taken that sign and slammed my face with it. And now that meeting with the sheriff had me thinking . . .

Was this the time? Time to get right with The Man?

Through a long and sleepless night I paced the floor of my shack in Valle Vista, chain-smoking cigarettes while praying hard on what to do. By sunrise those prayers had been answered. This wasn't just about payback for the Vagos, it was about paying back a community that I'd dumped on for years. Here was an opportunity to honor the vow I'd made to God and myself when the sins of my past, along with twelve pounds of high-grade crystal meth, went flushing down the shitter.

You had to live where I lived, see what I saw, to understand the way I felt. I could have moved on and lived life like any other cleaned-up drug addict and been alright, but the Vagos were behaving like animals and had to be stopped.

Only who would cage them?

I already knew the answer.

No one would. No one could.

No one but me.

T
here are hundreds of motorcycle clubs throughout the country with members who follow the rules of the road and society, like all good citizens should. But in the playground of life, there will always be the misfits, loners and bullies who choose not to play well with others. And when those bad boys band together and begin picking on the rest of us—or even each other—they fall under the state of California's definition of “criminal street gang,” which is, to wit, a
“group of three or more persons whose activities include the commission of violent criminal acts; have a common name or identifying symbol; and whose members have engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity.”

This description originally targeted the Hispanic and African-American street gangs, like the Crips and Bloods, that were causing havoc throughout Southern California in the 1980s. Of the more than 120,000 gang members reported in cities across the United States during that time, over half were residing in Los Angeles County. By the midnineties there were over a thousand gang factions in the Los Angeles County area alone, and gang-related homicides accounted for nearly 40 percent of murders countywide.

The California Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act (S.T.E.P.) passed by the state legislature in response to that growing menace was eventually broadened to include one percenter clubs like the Vagos. Every outlaw biker in California can probably recite the salient section of California Penal Code Section 186.21, which reads,
“. . . the State of California is in a state of crisis which has been caused by violent street gangs whose members threaten, terrorize, and commit a multitude of crimes against the peaceful citizens of their neighborhoods. These activities, both individually and collectively, present a clear and present danger to public order and safety and are not constitutionally protected.”

The S.T.E.P. Act particularly resonated with one percenters because it allowed judges to slap gang enhancement penalties on those found guilty of crimes committed while a gang member. A felony conviction, for instance, might add from two to ten years to a sentence depending on the crime's severity. In other words, if you were in a gang, five could get you ten.

So was the Vagos MC a criminal street gang?

According to the state of California, the answer was yes as defined by the S.T.E.P. Act.

A group of three or more persons whose activities included the commission of violent criminal acts?

Check.

Had a common name or identifying symbol?

Check.

Members engaged in a pattern of criminal gang activity.

Check, check, check.

Every California outlaw fears the S.T.E.P. Act even more than the dreaded RICO. RICO is a federal statute originally used to prosecute organized crime. RICO is the most potent weapon in the federal arsenal, and the statute that all one percenter gangs fear most. A successful RICO prosecution could potentially bring down an entire outlaw motorcycle club and lock away its key members for a long, long time. But the legacy of S.T.E.P. is evident everywhere within the California
penal system. Thousands of gang members serve extended prison terms thanks to S.T.E.P., and a good number of them once rode outlaw.

Of course, the one percenters will claim they're just a bunch of rough-and-tumble bike enthusiasts who love the freedom of the open road and the camaraderie of like-minded men. They'll bitch that S.T.E.P. is just another example of how law enforcement tramples the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.

Bullshit.

I was practically raised by one percenters, some I still consider family, and I can tell you there was only one reason they wore that 1% patch and declared themselves outlaws. Those boys took real pride in straddling the hairy edge of what society considered civilized behavior. And too often they stumbled and fell on the wrong side of the law because of it. It was a dangerous line to walk, but it came with the territory.

It's what they signed up for.

Of course, when an outlaw finds himself in court wearing ankle bracelets, he'll piss and moan about being picked on. He'll gripe that he was singled out and unfairly persecuted by “The Man” because of the patch on his back. It's hard to believe these people actually buy into their own hype. Law enforcement wouldn't waste time and resources on a bunch of Harley-riding free spirits if they hadn't been committing crimes. Otherwise every motorcycle club in America would be under siege by the government. No, law enforcement comes down hard on the patch because laws are being broken by the men who proudly wear it.

With some of the
most violent one percenter gangs in the country based on the West Coast—including the Vagos, Mongols and Hells Angels—Southern California has always been ground zero in law enforcement's battle with America's outlaw culture. And the lawmen most experienced at targeting OMGs (outlaw motorcycle gangs) in that corner of the world are those working at the Los Angeles Field Division of the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a federal agency under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice.

For two decades now, a handful of ATF undercover specialists have been a constant thorn in the side of California's outlaw bikers. Fact is, most of the largest OMG takedowns in United States history came as a direct result of that group's expertise.

Every outlaw in the state is aware of those ATF boys, and every outlaw club works constantly to keep those special agents and their hated CIs (confidential informants) from infiltrating the ranks of the brotherhood. This tug-of-war between the one percent who refuse to compromise their lifestyle and the lawmen determined to hold them accountable has been waged since the end of World War Two. That was when returning GIs, who learned to ride and repair motorcycles in the service, banded together on war-surplus V-Twins and rode off to have some fun.

Over time those bikers' reckless definition of fun had them butting heads with law enforcement, but then things got territorial and clubs began turning on each other like children fighting over the same sandbox. This roughhousing was tolerated to a point, but when the bullies stepped outside the box to brawl with the rest of us, law enforcement began smacking them down. For the ATF, this evolved into a marathon game of Whac-a-Mole. Every time the feds clobbered an outlaw on the head, another popped up. They simply wouldn't go away.

The Los Angeles Field Division of the ATF has been whacking away at Green Nation and its international president, Terry the Tramp, since the late 1990s. In 1997, Darrin “Koz” Kozlowski, one of the ATF undercover specialists out of Los Angeles, managed to infiltrate the Vagos Hollywood chapter posing as an outlaw. The agent's cover was soon blown and the operation folded, but two years later the ATF went after the Vagos once again, this time using a confidential informant named Hammer.

Hammer was a full-patch Vagos and known narcotics trafficker doing time on a parole violation. With only a handful of months to go
before his release, he was ordered to do an inside hit for the Nazi Low Riders, a white supremacist prison gang. Hammer declined the job, which pissed off the Low Riders and put his life in jeopardy.

Hammer was desperate to get out from behind the walls, and his parole officer put him in touch with ATF. In exchange for a “get out of jail free” card, Hammer agreed to inform on the Vagos, going under with his old chapter in Pasadena. Operation Green Nation folded prematurely but resulted in the arrests of a dozen Vagos members on firearms and narcotics charges. Mission accomplished, ATF relocated Hammer to Utah, where he was later found drowned in a Jacuzzi, done in by a drug overdose.