Table Of ContentContents
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Photo Insert
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Epilogue
Mongols Motorcycle Club Defendants’ Court Proceedings
Endnotes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
To the men and women
who make up
the Thin Blue Line
Author’s Note
Except as otherwise noted, the facts recounted in this book, as well as the names
of individuals and the places depicted, are real. The government’s three-year
investigation into the criminal activities of the Mongols Motorcycle Club led to a
number of firsts in the efforts of federal law enforcement to curb a growing
problem of organized violence in the United States. Criminal acts described in
this book are reflected in thousands of hours of covertly recorded conversations
as well as thousands of documents generated by law enforcement agencies,
along with the United States attorney’s office and district attorney offices in
numerous jurisdictions.
To the extent that my recounting is less detailed in certain sections of the book
than in others, the reader will understand that I have been purposely vague in
places where I have felt the need to protect myself and others who may be at risk
of retaliation from members of the Mongols Motorcycle Club. Although years
have passed since the investigation was concluded, threats continue to surface,
making me acutely aware that I will always be looking over my shoulder.
1
SEPTEMBER 1998
SOMEWHERE NEAR VISALIA, CALIFORNIA
“All right, Billy, how long was your fuckin’ academy?”
Red Dog pressed his ruddy, windburned face three inches from mine. I
smelled that thick mix of Budweiser and crank-fueled sleeplessness on his
breath. The words he spat felt hotter than the midday Southern California sun.
He cocked his head to one side and pushed closer. “I’m askin’ you a fuckin’
question, Billy!”
Red Dog, the national sergeant at arms of the Mongols Motorcycle Club,
stood six feet tall, with long, stringy hair and a rust-colored handlebar mustache
that drooped below his chin. From his pierced forehead, a silver chain swept
down ominously past his left eye. His powerfully muscled arms were sleeved out
with a web of prison tattoos, and his right hand clutched a loaded 9-mm Glock
semiautomatic. Behind him, six other Mongols—Evel, C.J., Domingo, Diablo,
Bobby Loco, and Lucifer—all in various states of drunkenness and
methamphetamine highs, were slapping magazines into their Glocks and
Berettas. More than one had his Mongol colors decorated with the skull-and-
crossbones patch, boldly announcing to the world that he had killed for the club.
Here at the end of a long dirt road, in an abandoned orange grove a 180 miles
north of Los Angeles, what had begun as a typical Southern California day—that
perfect golden sun beating down on a ribbon of black highway—had quickly
turned into my worst nightmare.
For several months now, working deep undercover on assignment for the
Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF),
I’d been posing as a Mongols “prospect”—a probationary member of the club, a
position that allowed me to wear my black leather vest with the lower rocker
reading CALIFORNIA but not yet the official black-and-white center patch and top
rocker that distinguished a full-fledged member.
As a prospect, you’re a slave, the property of the club. You have to do
everything a member tells you to do, from hauling drugs and guns to wiping a
member’s ass if he orders you to. Some members were good for simple orders
like “Prospect, go get me a beer,” or “Light my cigarette,” or “Clean my bike.”
But other members, guys like Red Dog, took inordinate pleasure in making a
prospect’s life a living hell.
Prospecting inside the Mongols was a dangerous game. According to intel
developed by ATF, the Mongols Motorcycle Club had assumed the mantle of the
most violent motorcycle gang in America, a tight-knit collective of crazies,
unpredictable and unrepentant badasses. With 350 full-patch members, the gang
was a small fraction of the size of the Hells Angels, their hated rivals, but the
Mongols had wreaked more than their fair share of havoc since they were
founded in the early seventies.
Their most significant violent acts in the 1970s and ’80s were committed
against the Angels, with whom they fought (and ultimately won) a seventeen-
year war. But by the mid-nineties, infused by the ruthless Latino gang mentality
of East Los Angeles, the Mongols’ indiscriminate violence spread outside the
biker underworld and began to terrorize the general populace of Southern
California. When the Mongols frequented mainstream bars and clubs, where
people were not as familiar with the gang’s fearsome reputation, the result was a
series of vicious assaults, stabbings, and gunfights. In late 1997 the Mongols got
into a confrontation in a club in the San Gabriel Valley, just outside of L.A.,
which resulted in a shoot-out, leaving one man dead. Also in 1997, the Mongols
went to two nightclubs in the Los Angeles area and stabbed patrons in plain view
of dozens of witnesses, but no one would come forward to testify against them.
Nor was the Mongols’ violence limited to the outside world; even within the
ranks of the club, the gang had such a reputation for assaulting its prospects that
by the late nineties, the membership was dwindling: No one wanted to join a
club if it meant that every day and night he had to worry about taking a savage
beat-down. In 1998 they adopted a new national policy: No beating on the
prospects. And almost everyone stuck by it, except for Red Dog.
Despite the fact that as national sergeant at arms he was supposed to be
enforcing the club’s rules and constitution—yes, the club had a seventy-page
constitution—Red Dog was a loose cannon, riding his Harley through life with a
“fuck everyone” attitude. For months he was in my face, smashing his heavy fist
into my chest, at times uppercutting me as hard as he could. More than once he’d
sucker-punched me in the gut, leaving me doubled over, gasping for air, and
ready to puke. But I was a prospect, so I gritted my teeth and sucked it up.
That morning we had all hooked up at C.J.’s house, where the dudes drank
hard and I did my prospect thing, fetching beer for the patches (as fully inducted
members of the club are called), lighting their cigarettes, watching them do line
after line of crank and coke. Then when Red Dog figured everyone was drunk
and high enough, he gave an abrupt order: “Let’s go shoot.”
This was a Mongols membership requirement: Before any prospect could
attain full-patch status in the club, he had to prove that he owned a firearm and
was a decent shot. When I got behind the wheel of my bullet-pocked red
Mustang, I thought we were heading out to an actual firing range—and so did
my ATF backup. We formed a ragged convoy behind Red Dog’s burgundy
Monte Carlo as we left the Visalia city limits. I kept glancing in my rearview
mirror, checking to see that my backup was still there. But as we got farther and
farther into the countryside of vineyards and orange groves, eventually turning
down a remote dirt driveway, I realized we had completely lost my backup. I
also realized this wasn’t going to be a standard firearms-qualification exercise.
There was nothing ATF could do to help me now. If shit went bad, it just went
bad. I was alone.
Now, with a collection of new semiautomatic pistols on the hoods of our cars
and the loaded magazines clicking into place, the mood in the orange grove
suddenly turned dark and twisted. One Mongol brother stood loading rounds into
a street-sweeper, a high-capacity, drum-fed semiautomatic 12-gauge shotgun
that looks similar to the old Thompson submachine gun from the Prohibition era.
An awesome assault weapon, beloved by drug dealers and hard-core gangsters,
the street-sweeper has since been banned by the feds. I knew that a gun like that
was useless for target shooting; like the tommy gun, a street-sweeper is a pure
killing machine.
Without warning, Red Dog was up in my face again, head cocked to one side,
hollering crazily—accusing me of being an undercover cop. “How long was
your fuckin’ academy, Billy?”
“What are you talkin’ about, Red Dog?”
“You know what I’m talking about, Billy! Who the fuck did you tell you was
comin’ up here? Who the fuck did you tell you was gonna be with the Mongols
today? Who, Billy?”
“I didn’t tell nobody. Come on, Red, why you acting like this? I didn’t tell
nobody I was coming up to Visalia.”
He locked his slate blue eyes on mine and, in torturous silence, stared at me
for fifteen seconds. “So you’re saying if I put a bullet in the back of your fuckin’
head right now, ain’t nobody gonna know where to start looking for you? Is that
right, Billy?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s right, Red Dog.”
He gestured across the dusty, desolate, trash-strewn field, told me to go set up
some cans to shoot at. My first thought was of the infamous 1963 Onion Field
case, chronicled in Joseph Wambaugh’s bestseller and subsequent movie, in
which two young LAPD officers, after stopping a vehicle in Hollywood they
suspected had been involved in a series of armed robberies, were kidnapped by a
pair of ex-convicts and taken to a remote onion field outside Bakersfield. Officer
Ian Campbell was shot dead while Officer Karl Hettinger watched in horror
before escaping with his life.
When I turned my back to Red Dog and the other armed Mongols, the icy
realization hit me: After the firefights in Vietnam, after twenty-five years in law
enforcement, this was the way it ended—I was going to die on a gorgeous
Southern California day, by a Mongol bullet, in the middle of a godforsaken,
abandoned orange grove somewhere outside Visalia.
I closed my eyes and began to walk, waiting for the bullets to start tearing
through my back. I couldn’t even turn to shoot it out: Red Dog and Domingo had
made certain that I was the only one without a gun. It was a simple equation: If
they’d made me, I was going to die today. I stumbled across the field in my
motorcycle boots and suddenly saw an image of my two sons standing tearfully
over my open casket. I’d felt similar eerie premonitions during my tour of duty
in Vietnam, but here, without question, there was nothing worth dying for.
