Before he became a weed runner, Lucky had a different nickname: the Jangler.
That’s what his skateboarding friends called him, because of the keys that hung from the carabiner clip attached to his belt. He had a funny habit of jangling them with his fingers right before dropping down a near-vertical ramp. “I grew up smoking weed at a pretty young age,” Lucky tells me over breakfast back in Southern California, and it’s clear that whatever skateboarding memories he has are completely wrapped up in his rise in stock of general coolness and ultimately his current status as top-of-the-line weed dealer turned medical-marijuana capitalist.
Growing up in the affluent East Bay suburb of Walnut Creek, Lucky hung around other incredibly overprivileged, under-supervised, disaffected rich kids, including Christy Turlington, who was already scoring the occasional modeling gig in San Francisco, and was just on the brink of becoming a supermodel. That’s when Turlington ran away from home with two of her sisters and moved into his apartment. Lucky liked her parents enough that he felt compelled to tell them she was with him and would be back in a week or so. Together he and the girls would run off to Berkeley to panhandle in the street, just for kicks. “Between the five of us, after two hours, we’d have fifty dollars,” Lucky remembers. “It was a joke, just a fun thing to do. I don’t know why we enjoyed it.”
Turlington soon set off to Europe, appearing in a music video with Duran Duran and dating bassist John Taylor. Lucky, who never finished high school, also left the Bay Area. He and a buddy who shared a shared passion for weightlifting moved to Los Angeles, hoping to win work as Playgirl magazine models. “We were basically going to try to become male gigolos and break into this industry,” he says. “But we got down there and we were just laughed at.”
At eighteen years old, Lucky explains, he looked too young to pose nude. His life ambitions amounted to what would have looked to perverts and prosecutors alike as child pornography. Instead, Lucky and his friend moved in with a model from Northern California who was living in the Los Feliz Towers apartments just downhill from L.A.’s Griffith Park Observatory. As they soon discovered, the woman was working as a call girl and running counterfeit money.
“She’d take us out to dinners and give us a couple of hundreds to buy drinks and would always say to keep the change,” Lucky says. “It was so much money.” Lucky quickly realized he and his other friend passing the bills were pawns, whose function was basically to spend the fugazi bills in various nightclubs and risk getting arrested. “She was using us to see how good it worked in the clubs. After we discovered that, we decided to take some, and we always had as much money as we could handle.”
The call girl had so much cash on hand that while trying to pursue a modeling career, he not only had free rent but could stay at the nicest hotels and, short of a new car, buy just about any toy he wanted. Unfortunately, he bragged about his fortune—and more recklessly, his host’s status as a call girl. Word got back to her. “A day later, I get a call,” Lucky says. “You’re such an asshole,” the model told him. “You better get down here and get your shit out of my apartment. I’m pushing your shit out on the street in a shopping cart.”
Newport Beach, where Lucky moved a few days later, was overrun with coke parties in the mid-1980s. For weeks one summer, he lived out of his car, sleeping off hangovers in the backseat or on someone’s couch, waking up just in time for the next party. About a week into this dead-end existence, he accidentally bumped into an aggressive surfer, causing him to drop his beer. The surfer demanded Lucky go outside to fight, swung the first punch, and missed. Lucky grabbed him by the face and slammed him into a nearby trunk. Watching the whole thing was another reckless young punk like Lucky named Anthony, who happened to know the surfer Lucky had just laid flat.
The teenager roared up on his motorcycle. “Come on. I live right down the street,” he shouted. “Where do you live? You’re living with me.”
Lucky’s new roommate turned out to be the son of a man named Robert “Fat Bobby” Paduano, who was reputed to be the head of the Southern California branch of the Chicago Mafia, which had settled in Newport Beach, wreaking havoc there. Police jokingly referred to the outfit as the “Mickey Mouse Mafia,” in reference to its Disneyland environs. One of the people who often crashed at the house was one of the mob chief’s rumored enforcers, who was typically passed out on the couch with his gun in his belt. “For the three or four months I lived there,” Lucky recalls, “they were doing the craziest shit. They were out robbing cocaine dealers and shit.”
In fact, Lucky had stumbled right into the middle of one of the most colorful chapters of the history of organized crime in Southern California. Newport Beach in the late 1980s saw a string of assassinations, professional and otherwise, within several months, spotlighting the city’s status as a playground (and killing field) for shady businessmen, drug kingpins, and organized-crime figures affiliated with the Mickey Mouse Mafia, who reveled in Newport Beach’s glamorous lifestyle and coke-fueled nightlife scene.
On January 1, 1987, forty-eight-year-old Jimmy Lee Casino, the owner of the Mustang Topless Theater, a Santa Ana strip club, returned to his Buena Park home after attending a New Year’s Eve party with his twenty-two-year-old girlfriend. As the Los Angeles Times later reported, two “masked and armed intruders were waiting. The intruders tied up and raped his girlfriend and dragged Casino downstairs. They ransacked the condo, taking jewelry, furs, credit cards, and two cars.” Then they shot Casino three times in the head. (In May 2008, police arrested Richard C. Morris Jr. at his home in Oahu, Hawaii, and charged him in connection with the shooting.)
Casino, whose real name was James Lee Stockwell, was a well-known mobster with a three-decades-long rap sheet, the Times wrote. He wasn’t the last person connected with the Mustang to find himself on the wrong end of a gun. On May 1, 1987, local mobsters Joseph Angelo Grosso and Michael Anthony Rizzitello forced Bill Carroll, one of the strip club’s investors, to a Costa Mesa parking garage. The two men were angry because Carroll had barred them from the club for selling cocaine. They shot him through the face, blinding him, but he survived. Both men were convicted of attempted murder and sent to prison, where Rizzitello later died. (In January 1988, the Mustang, which had survived earlier, unsolved arson attempts, mysteriously burned to the ground.)
Just six days after the attempted hit on Carroll, Joe Avila, a Mexican-American restaurateur whose family still owes the Avila’s El Ranchito chain in Southern California, was driving his Porsche in an unincorporated area near Newport Beach when someone blew him away with automatic weapons fire. Police had long suspected Avila of being involved in drug smuggling with certain ex-affiliates of the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, and that either Mafia hit-men or Colombian cartel assassins had murdered him. Aside from the bullets, all they found at the scene was a discarded motorcycle.
Meanwhile, between late 1986 and early 1988, it seemed as though every cocaine dealer in Newport Beach was being ripped off by a trio of Samoan mob enforcers led by Johnny Matua. Between August 1987 and March 1988, Deputy DA Wallace Wade probed the robberies—none of which had been reported to police—and put a string of witnesses on the stand before a grand jury in an attempt to implicate Paduano in the crimes. Each of the robbery victims, all of whom unconvincingly claimed they had nothing to do with the coke business, alleged that Matua had shown up at their front door carrying flowers, only to pull out a gun, steal whatever cash was lying around, and then leave with a demand they either work for Paduano or get out of Newport Beach. One of the last witnesses to take the stand was George Yudzevich, a former Mustang bouncer who had recently turned state’s evidence against the Mafia in a federal case in New York. He repeatedly attempted to plead the Fifth, but then reluctantly answered several questions. On March 16, 1988, someone shot Yudzevich to death at a business park in Irvine. Both Paduano and Matua were convicted of the robberies and sent to prison for several years.
“Those were crazy days,” recalls Lucky. “Fat Bobby’s son Anthony was fucking crazy. After I moved in, he and I were off and running, getting in fights, causing shit everywhere.” One morning, about four months into his stay at the house, Lucky was awoken when several Newport Beach police officers came flying through the windows. They searched the entire house with drug-sniffing dogs, and put everyone in separate rooms. “The cops warned me to move out. They straight up told me to get out, that I should not be living there, but I loved those guys, and they loved me, because I was a fighter.”
A modeling gig in Europe provided an escape route. He lived in Italy for a year modeling for Emilio Cavallini and other brands before returning to the Bay Area to work as a design consultant for Levi Strauss. “I gave them a whole bunch of insight into their product line,” he claims. “One of the ladies in upper management suggested I seek royalties because I was contributing a lot more than I was expected to, and when I did that, I found myself out of a job.”
Lucky landed a six-figure Nintendo commercial, which allowed him to start his own fashion line. He founded his own fashion label, which we’ll call B. Lucky, in 1990. Before long, the B. Lucky logo was on stiff-brim ball caps and T-shirts worn by skaters throughout California. “I was friends with all the skaters up and down the coast,” he said. “It was the raddest vibe. I was skateboarding, and hanging out, getting in a lot of trouble.”
During that time, he sponsored a generation of up-and-coming skaters, including Christian Hosoi, who went on to become a world-famous skateboarder before falling into drug abuse and eventually being arrested and sent to federal prison for smuggling. He also promoted up-and-coming Bay Area bands such as Primus, which would often play at his Oakland warehouse. This is when Lucky leveraged his connections with the extreme sports and music world to become a successful weed dealer. His timing and location couldn’t have been better. In the early 1990s, Lucky explains, graduate students in botany at the nearby University of California, Berkeley, were engaging in some extracurricular research. They took a sativa plant from an outdoor grower in Humboldt and began experimenting with it. For lack of a better name, they called it the Builder.
“The reason they called it the Builder was the way that it grew was so particular,” Lucky tells me. “They would cluster together and build on top of each other almost like building blocks.” Very few people were privy to the genetics of the original plant, but its fame quickly spread once a small group of botanists began creating strains from Builder mother plants. “If you give this plant to five different botanists, it will be grown five different ways and you will get five different results,” he explains. “Somebody in New York started growing it and changed the name to the Diesel, and then someone else doing the same thing called their strain Chem Dog, but they were really offshoots of the Builder from Berkeley.”
One of Lucky’s good friends was one of the original marketers of the Builder. “He wasn’t the genetics engineer but just a friendly guy who knew dudes in botany class. He was a stoner, and into snow-boarding, and knew how to deal weed and how to stack money.”
Lucky and his friends benefited not just from their botanical expertise but also from bands such as Primus, who had stoner entourages and who could help popularize and market the Builder strain through time-tested branding strategies. “That’s why now, all the Chem Dogs and Sour Diesels have the genetics of this Builder strain,” Lucky says.
Lucky’s friend did well with his gardens over the years. Most of his money is now invested in other properties: a restaurant in Oakland, a sandwich shop, and a couple of cleaning businesses. “He’s got steady income—each of these businesses makes five, ten, fifteen grand a month, and it’s all legitimate, and now, all of a sudden, everything makes sense, because we were some of the first guys that were privileged enough to enjoy and experience the Builder before anyone else got in on it.”
One afternoon during the Builder era, Lucky was watching television when he saw the famous rapper Ice-T wearing a No Fear hat. He couldn’t believe a rapper of such reputation would wear such gear. “This guy is one of the most hardcore guys in the world and he’s wearing the gayest clothing,” he told himself. “I have to find him now.”
Ice-T was playing at the Lollapalooza show in a few weeks, so Lucky bought a dozen tickets and showed up at the concert, along with his entire company team, in full B. Lucky gear. After talking himself backstage, Lucky ran up to the rapper and introduced himself. “You can’t wear that,” he said. “Take that shit off.”
Instead of kicking his ass, Ice-T turned to one of his assistants and ordered him to get Lucky’s contact information. Lucky then bullshitted his way into a radio station in Colorado that was promoting a local Lollapalooza skate jam, and used the airplay to falsely claim that he was now handling Ice-T’s official wardrobe. As soon as the segment ended, he and his entourage appeared at the event gate with several large duffel bags full of B. Lucky gear. But lacking passes, security refused them admission. After a few minutes, a bus pulled up and began emptying members of Ice-T’s hip-hop crew, the Rhyme Syndicate. Lucky began running alongside them as they walked into the show.
“Hey, bro,” Lucky said to the biggest of the bunch, a six-foot-eight-inch-tall heavyweight. “This is Ice-T’s personal gear.” Just then, one of the security guards caught up with Lucky and tried to pull him back outside. Lucky threatened to drop all of the clothing on the ground if he wasn’t allowed in, adding that whoever stopped him from entering would have to explain everything to Ice-T. “Hold up a minute,” said the biggest guy in the rapper’s entourage. “Y’all wait here. Let me go get Ice.”
Five minutes later, the star walked up to Lucky, dripping with sweat from his interrupted workout session. Lucky began talking before Ice-T could say a word, reminding the rapper that they’d met in California. “Hold up,” Ice said to the security guards. “These guys are with me. Take all this shit into my dressing room.” Inside, members of the Rhyme Syndicate started pulling open the bags, and Ice-T picked out several hats and shirts for himself. “This shit is OG,” Ice declared. “This is badass.”
About a month after the show, Ice-T called up Lucky and invited him to run his new clothing line. For the next decade, Lucky worked for a series of companies and startup enterprises in the extreme-sports world, typically coming up with promotional concepts and then selling the ideas to investors, using the cash to seed his next endeavor. “But all along, ever since back in the day, I was still selling weed,” he admits. “That’s how I had so many friends. We’d smoke, I’d sell a little weed, and then all of a sudden, I’d have another business venture. I’d sell a little more weed and then all of a sudden I had more investors and partners and a new idea to launch.”
In the mid-2000s, after twenty years of developing his nationwide network of business contacts and high-end pot customers, Lucky was ready to get into the marijuana industry full time. He’d kept in touch with his friends from the Builder days. “These guys had grown so much in the pot world,” he says. “They went from selling pounds to tens of pounds, to hundreds of pounds to thousands of pounds, from citywide to statewide to nationwide and international.” Like Lucky, many of his friends had used their weed money to fund legitimate businesses. “That’s how the entire rap industry was built,” Lucky observes. “It all came from the streets.”
A major factor in Lucky’s decision to go into the legitimate marijuana industry was the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, a known stoner in high school and college who signaled during the campaign that he had no intention of standing in the way of states such as California that had legalized pot for medicinal use. Lucky opened his collective, as well as an online marijuana cultivation school by the same name, and even a weed-centric magazine, within months of Obama’s election.
But arguably the biggest reason behind his move to open a dispensary, Lucky claims, was witnessing his mother fall ill with breast cancer and endure a double masectomy. Having survived the ordeal, she credited her mental stability to smoking marijuana. Lucky recalls going to a 2009 city council meeting where Lake Forest officials were debating how to handle the proliferation of cannabis clubs. He felt a mixture of pride and relief to take a public stand on something that he’d been involved in for so long in the underground economy. “God forbid any of you wind up with cancer, or your wives or children,” he said. “That, I guarantee you, will change your attitude, without question.”
But even as Lucky entered the quasi-legitimate world of the medical-marijuana industry, he continued making money the old-fashioned, and much-more-profitable way: pot smuggling. Along the way, he built alliances with a broad array of associates in organized crime, players that continue to play a hidden role in the underground economy of marijuana cultivation and transportation, players with names like the Hells Angels and the Irish Mafia. Perhaps the most unusual—and ultimately tragic—operation he pulled off involved both those groups and also smugglers from the Mohawk Nation whose reservation straddled the US-Canada border, as well as a hip-hop artist from Montreal nicknamed Bad News Brown.
Bad News Brown, who was born Paul Frappier in Haiti in 1977, is most widely known as a harmonica-playing MC. But when he wasn’t opening concerts for Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, or 50 Cent, Frappier was dealing marijuana in Montreal, where the Hells Angels controlled the marijuana market.
“The Hells Angels own Montreal,” says Lucky, comparing the club’s presence there to what he witnessed in Oakland as a kid growing up in the 1960s. “Eighty percent of the club’s entire membership is in Montreal. I’ve watched these guys take over streets in Montreal—whole streets, no questions asked.” While there was plenty of opportunity to make cash selling weed in Montreal, the challenge for Frappier and his Hells Angels cohorts was finding enough high-quality product to meet the demand. That’s where Lucky came in.
Someone with the biker club in Montreal talked to a comrade in Southern California, who in turn talked to a mutual friend of Lucky, an Irishman, who set up a meeting at a pub in Huntington Beach on St. Patrick’s Day. Without mentioning Frappier by name, the Irishman explained—over a round of Harp Lagers, their conversation muted by a Pogues album blasting from the jukebox—that he had a Canadian contact capable of unloading multi-hundred-pound quantities of marijuana. All Lucky needed to do was get himself to Montreal for a tête-à-tête. Accompanied by a friend who rode along for protection, he boarded a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to Montreal, but upon landing in Canada, immigration authorities refused to allow him entry in to the country because he had been arrested there several years earlier—unfortunate baggage from his days as a barroom brawler.
Lucky and his friend quickly found themselves on a one-way flight to Atlanta, Georgia, on which they got insanely drunk while awaiting instructions from their Irish friend, who would put them in touch with the Mohawk smugglers. “The Indians on this reservation, they smuggle eighty thousand cigarettes an hour into the United States, and all over the place,” Lucky explains. “My Irish friend told us to get the fuck up there and don’t worry about it, these guys are doing to do whatever needs to be done to get us there.”
So that afternoon, Lucky and his friend boarded a flight to New York City and drove to Vermont, then boarded a ferry across Lake Champlain to upstate New York, where, well after dark, they arrived at their rendezvous point, a gas station on the Akwesasne Mohawk reservation, which straddles the US-Canada border along the St. Lawrence River, an area known as “Smugglers Alley.” There, fast boats and Jet Skis bearing loads of contraband—untaxed alcohol and cigarettes, drugs, firearms, and cash—dodge Coast Guard and border patrol vessels all year until the water freezes over, at which point snowmobiles take to the ice.
Lucky and his friend had been warned not to drive onto the reservation, but to take an Indian taxi instead. As they rode in, they passed road signs that had been spray-painted with various threats and epithets directed at the US government, the most popular being FUCK FBI. The cabdriver explained that the roads were the site of countless car chases between state troopers and Mohawks fleeing for sovereign land in their Land Rovers and Lamborghinis. The tit-for-tat game had recently escalated, the cabbie added, when a female trooper had been kidnapped and left hanging naked but otherwise unharmed thirty feet high up a telephone pole.
The taxi left Lucky and his friend at the gas station and disappeared. Fifteen minutes later, several Mohawks pulled up in a separate car and brought the pair down to the water. Waiting for them on the shore was a cigarette boat that had been spray-painted black, with twin 500 Mercury engines. The driver wore a motorcycle helmet, night-vision goggles, and a bulletproof vest. He told Lucky and his friend to hold tight, and raced across the water in pitch dark, running the vessel aground on the gentle slope of a lawn in someone’s backyard. After paying the driver, Lucky and his friend jumped into the backseat of a black Ford Expedition driven by a middle-aged Indian man whose wife sat in the passenger seat. They reached Montreal by sunrise.
That evening, Lucky met with several Irish mob and Hells Angels representatives as well as Frappier, who had access to what he described as high-grade hydroponic marijuana. “He was a super cool guy, a badass harmonica player,” Lucky recalls. “He thought he could hook us up with all this weed.” Lucky’s role was to use his connections with dispensaries and other parties to broker the best deal he could for the pot. But when the product arrived in the US, following the same smuggling route that Lucky used to get himself to Montreal, it turned out to be inferior, and Lucky couldn’t sell half of the agreed-upon amount. He never talked to Frappier again, but knew that the misbegotten venture had engendered some very bad blood between him and the bikers. “I don’t know what they wound up doing,” Lucky says. “But four months later, Bad News Brown wound up dead. It’s so sad; he had a two-and-a-half-year-old baby.”
Lucky said he has no knowledge of those responsible for the murder, but speculates that Frappier’s fate could have been set in motion by the failed marijuana scheme, and perhaps sealed by something Frappier did or said when confronted about it. “He might have said the wrong thing to the wrong guy,” he adds. “Usually the nicest, calmest little dudes have really gnarly friends. Ninety percent of the time, in my experience, you really have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
According to the Toronto Sun, a passerby discovered Frappier’s body on the street, near some abandoned buildings adjacent to the Lachine Canal in southwestern Montreal early in the morning on February 11, 2011. He’d been severely beaten and shot in the back of the head; the police had no motive or suspects.
Lucky’s closest call as a smuggler happened shortly after Frappier’s murder. A friend who was working with an Emerald Triangle marijuana grower fronted him one hundred pounds, which Lucky planned to sell in Chicago for a tidy profit of $130,000. He and a friend posed as a pair of roadies who were caravanning in a car and truck full of sound equipment that was needed for a gig in the Windy City. “We made a crate that we could seal up with all the weed in it and loaded it into the car,” Lucky explains. “We had walkie-talkies so we could talk to each other on the road.” Despite such preparation, the pair made a series of entirely preventable errors. First, they were driving west along Interstate 80, the biggest smuggling route in the United States, with California plates. “We should have switched plates in Utah or Colorado,” Lucky explains. “Also, our orders were to drive straight through, never stop in the same place together, and never talk to anybody, and we ended up picking up this girl on the side of the freeway who [was] doing speed.”
After driving all night, the pair pulled off to get gas in rural Nebraska, and ate breakfast at the café next to the truck stop. It was only after they sat down, bleary-eyed, and began eating their omelets that they realized they’d stopped in a one-horse town where most of the men sitting at the tables were either cops or city workers whose brothers or fathers were cops or judges, or for that matter, the mayor. All eyes watched as they ate their eggs. “It was getting weirder and weirder,” Lucky says. “We get up to pay and walk to our cars, and my friend opens the door to the truck and you can smell the weed.” Instead of driving away, Lucky’s friend went back into the restaurant and, in front of everyone, purchased a pine-tree-shaped air freshener to mask the scent.
Not more than ten miles down the road, with the two vehicles driving about a mile apart, Lucky passed a state trooper coming from the other direction. The patrol car made a quick U-turn, hit the siren, and pulled behind him. The cop appeared to know that Lucky was caravanning with another vehicle; Lucky told him their cover story, that they were carrying concert equipment to Chicago. The cop put Lucky and the girl in the back of his car, and while the officer fruitlessly searched Lucky’s car for drugs, Lucky heard over the cop’s radio that the police had found the stash in his friend’s truck.
Immediately, the speed-freak girl began sobbing. “She’s crying and screaming, having the whole tweaker meltdown,” Lucky recalls. The cop takes them all to the station. “My friend comes from a wealthy family in Irvine and has never been arrested, and now we’re looking at doing fifteen to twenty years in Nebraska.” Both he and his friend stuck to their story, refusing to acknowledge under relentless questioning that they knew anything about the marijuana sealed inside the equipment. The girl, meanwhile, turned out to be the daughter of a high-ranking US military officer who was serving in Iraq. “She’s yelling at the cops to get on the red phone and call her dad,” Lucky says. “Get the fucking red phone! I figured this bitch was going to get us all put in the loony bin, but sure enough they call the dad and the next thing you know, it’s ‘yes sir, we have your daughter here, sir, yes sir, no sir.’”
After the cops cut their passenger loose, Lucky and his friend made bail. The charges were eventually dropped when the cops failed to provide any justifiable cause for the stop. He still marvels at the fact that the police apparently never tested the stash area for his fingerprints. “It would have been all over for me if they’d just said they had my fingerprints on the pot,” he insists. “I’m sure I’d have confessed. But they never did.”
Meanwhile, Lucky had just lost $130,000 or more worth of confiscated marijuana, and even though the charges didn’t stick, his troubles were far from over. What Lucky didn’t know until after he lost the load was that the pot had belonged to the Hells Angels, who weren’t going to wait long to collect their cash.
Lucky talked to an intermediary and offered to set up another deal to repay the money. He was told to wait for an answer, and be open-minded about how he might have to atone for the bust. A few weeks went by, during which time Lucky procured a stolen handgun. “I’m getting sick every day, convinced somebody is going to show up and tell me that I have to kill somebody, take a name and address, and not ask a fucking question. I didn’t eat for two weeks without throwing up, trying to convince myself that whoever I’d be told to kill would be some piece-of-shit rapist or fucking child abuser, so I wouldn’t feel any remorse, like a normal person.”
The knock on the front door of his suburban Orange County house came late one weekday morning. Lucky was taking a shower upstairs. He looked down from the top of the staircase though a moon-shaped window at someone’s rather large chest, which was decorated with a prominent Orange County motorcycle club logo. “This is a nice little neighborhood with kids, and these guys are both decked out with their patches in full effect, so I opened the door and told them to come inside right away,” Lucky says. Before the two men could say a word, Lucky explained that he’d procured a gun and was ready to kill whomever they asked. The bikers looked at each other, eyebrows raised. “No, no, no,” one of them protested. “Back up. Stop. We don’t want any of that.”
Meanwhile, Lucky’s cell phone is ringing nonstop. “I probably took two out of ten calls,” he says. “One from Ice-T and one from a business partner of mine who owns a big toy company.” When Lucky finished his calls, the bikers told him that all they wanted from him was help promoting their rallies, getting bands to play, and finding legitimate ways they could raise money for the club. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Lucky asked. “That’s all you want me to do? Make a few flyers and promote some fucking events?”
Since the visit, he’s occasionally had to field favors from the club, such as getting them backstage for an Ice-T concert. But the club has also come in handy, like when Lucky’s ex-wife started going downhill, living with a drug dealer in Los Angeles and getting strung out. The bikers rode up north, scared her friends away, and told her that she wasn’t allowed to hang out with them anymore.
“They’ve been very helpful,” Lucky says. “They don’t want to see me stressed out. Now, I’m their golden goose.”