I’m sure that every UC who ever lived can rattle off their top ten “oh, shit” moments. Here’s mine, including some from personal experience and some courtesy of my fellow RatSnakes around the country.
#10. MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
You will not be well served as an ATF undercover agent if you panic at the sight of a firearm. You probably won’t survive your twenty years if having a gun pointed at your face freaks you out too much to function, because in the life of a RatSnake, that can be a frequent occurrence. I broke my gun-in-the-face cherry before I ever came to law enforcement. I was thirteen years old and helping an older friend, Bruce, clean up and bag a couple pounds of marijuana in exchange for some cash. I asked to use the bathroom, and Bruce pointed down the hallway. On my way to the bathroom, I passed through a living room where several older people were hanging out. One greasy-looking, long-haired dude had his foot up on a chair. Without a word or warning, he pulled a pistol from his boot, pointed it at my face, and asked, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I’m with Bruce,” I squeaked.
They all laughed, and he put the pistol back in his boot and pointed to the bathroom. I didn’t need to pee anymore.*
#9. OUTSKIRTS OF KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI
Shortly before ATF became a bureau in 1972 (when it was still the ATF division of the IRS), Pat Kelly took his young trainee, Bob Harper, on a classic UC operation. They wanted to get close to a well-known firearms trafficker. The problem was, he was serving a short stint in the county jail. Pat said, “No problem. We are going to jail.” Bob wasn’t all that keen on the plan, but what the hell, he was ATF. With the help of a local detective, they were placed in the same pod as the violator and passed themselves off as car thieves. They were only supposed to be there for a few hours before someone posted their bail, but something got screwed up and they ended up spending the whole night in jail. It paid off though. The violator gave them his telephone number, told them he would be out in a couple of weeks, and that they should call him.
When it came time to get in touch with the violator, Pat was tied up on another case. Bob was still new, so Pat reached out to Virgil Walker, another experienced agent and ATF legend, to help make arrangements to meet the violator. They hit the jackpot. The violator told them that he had a fully automatic Thompson submachine gun to sell.
Known by many other nicknames, the deadly “Tommy gun” was invented by US Army officer John T. Thompson in 1918 and became an infamous weapon of choice by the military, law enforcement, and criminals during Prohibition years. Fully automatic guns—meaning the weapon will continue to fire as long as the trigger is depressed and there is ammunition in the chamber or magazine—are one of the most strictly regulated classes of firearms today. So much so that they cannot even be manufactured anymore. The fully automatic firearms that are legally possessed in the United States are the last we will ever see. They must be registered through the Treasury Department, special transfer taxes paid, and a thorough background completed. However, there is no shortage of bootlegged or black-market converted machine guns on the streets. Most semiautomatic firearms easily can be converted to fire fully automatic, which is a serious felony. Machine guns and submachine guns still are widely used by special military and police SWAT teams for close-quarters operations.
Virgil and Bob met the violator out at a small secluded farm, where the deal was done under a porch light, because the guy didn’t want his neighbors to see what was going on. The agents examined his firearms and conducted a field test (a technique used to determine whether a firearm will fire fully automatic without actually firing the weapon). It usually is a good technique to ensure you’re not duped into buying a semiautomatic, but it’s not foolproof. A semiautomatic gun is self-loading but requires a single trigger pull for each shot, creating a much slower rate of fire. Because of this fact, semiautomatic guns carry less street value than fully automatic guns, and in the United States can be legally owned and sold by private parties.
Virgil and Bob bought the gun and headed off down the road.
When they were almost to the office, Virgil, who was napping in the back seat, suddenly bolted upright and yelled, “Let me see that fucking gun.” Bob almost drove off the road. Virgil turned on the dome light and said, “Son of a bitch.” He had remembered seeing a memo come through the office warning agents about replica Thompsons. The knockoffs field-tested properly but weren’t machine guns. Virgil and Bob had just handed over $250 of ATF’s funds—about $1,600 in today’s money—for a legal gun.
The next day, they reported to the boss what happened and his response was simple: “You better go get my fucking two hundred and fifty dollars back or write me a fucking check.”
Of course, it wasn’t the boss’s money, but shit would roll downhill if agency funds were lost to a blown deal.
Bob was in shock and turned to Virgil and asked, “What are we going to do? I don’t have two hundred and fifty dollars.”
That amount was about half a month’s pay at the time.
Virgil told Bob to go eat lunch and then meet him out in the parking lot. When Bob got back from lunch, Virgil was sitting in his government car and told him to jump in. A sawed-off shotgun lay on the front seat. Bob didn’t ask, and Virgil didn’t volunteer. He just said they were going to get the boss’s money.
The violator worked at a service station in the next town over. When they arrived at the spot, Virgil waved the violator over to the car. When the guy bent down, Virgil grabbed him by the collar and pulled him halfway in through the open car window and stuck the sawed-off shotgun in his face.
“That piece of shit you sold us was fake, but this one is real. We want our money back,” Virgil said.
The violator started emptying dollar bills out of his pocket onto the front seat. Hell, he even gave them his change counter, but he was about fifty dollars short. Virgil and Bob made him get into the back seat, and they drove to his mother’s house where the violator got the rest of the money. They dropped him off back at the service station and returned to the office.
The boss was a little shocked when Virgil and Bob handed him the buy money, but he didn’t ask any questions. Virgil returned the shotgun to the evidence vault and it was never spoken of again.*
#8. MARIN COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
I’ve already explained that undercover agents often wear concealed transmitters, both for agent safety and to record conversations for use in court. Working with a transmitter requires a certain level of focus. If you turn it on too soon, the battery may die before the violator shows up. If you turn it on too late or forget to turn it on, you miss the conversations altogether.
A good undercover constantly is aware of the status of the transmitter. He does a sound check before going to meet the target. A transmitter has a fairly short range but gives the cover team real-time audio so they can hear a distress or bust signal. As I’ve said, violators often are undependable and don’t show up when they are supposed to. Or they show up and then need to leave to get the guns or dope after they see the money. The UC always needs to know the time available on the batteries and must be able to turn the transmitter on and off to save battery time.
On one occasion, I was working with a bunch of local cops in Marin County. My supervisor at that time was not very aggressive or very skilled at undercover work. In fact, he hated it. Suffice to say, not many of the guys liked him.
This particular deal was on-again, off-again. During one of the down periods while waiting for the violator to call back, we all were in a concealed parking lot drinking coffee and talking shit. My supervisor was sitting in his car by himself. One of the officers asked, “What’s wrong with your boss?” I blurted out, “He’s just a big pussy and only out here because he’s required to be.”
I heard the squelch break on the PA system in my boss’s car, and then: “Cefalu, your wire is still on. Come over here and see me.”
Oh, shit.
#7. SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA
Everybody loved Spike Gleba. By the time I came on, he had started to glide toward retirement. He wasn’t burning up the world by then, but word was he used to. Spike would help any agent, any time. I had secured a search warrant on some gangster’s house and we were spread thin, so I asked Spike if he could help me. He said he would if he could find his gun. That was a running joke, since if he wasn’t helping on somebody’s case, he’d rather be clipping recipes out of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Well, he found his gun, but I later wished he hadn’t. In those days, we would fill up a bunch of government unmarked cop cars and race up to the front door and all pile out and kick in the door. It was fun but not very efficient, depending on the size of the street, available space, and traffic. This day, we raced in and whoever was driving the car Spike was in slammed on the brakes. Spike was holding his .38-caliber revolver with his finger on the trigger (a no-no), and accidentally squeezed off a round inside the car. Aside from the other agents’ eardrums, the only thing that died that day was the police radio in the car.
#6. ATHENS, GEORGIA
One time, we were searching a building where a burglar alarm had gone off. After scouring the entire one-story structure, there was only one place left to look: the attic. I slowly ascended the ladder, using my flashlight to see ahead. Another Athens officer, Ray Chinn, was right behind me. I peeked up and shined my flashlight around and couldn’t see anybody. However, there was a big industrial heating unit blocking about half of the attic. I had to climb up and straddle the rafters, inching across until I could see behind the heater. Ray shined his light for me so I could focus on the potential threat. After I cleared the area behind the heating unit, I turned around to slowly make my way back to the ladder.
I hollered at Ray, “Clear!”
When Ray heard the word “clear,” he shut off his flashlight, and I couldn’t see where to put my foot. The next thing I remember was lying flat on my back, on the main floor, having crashed through the Sheetrock ceiling.
Ray hollered out, “Hey, Vince, are you okay? Where are you at?”
He had gone back up the ladder to see what happened.
I said, “I’m down here, you stupid motherfucker.”
“How’d you get down there?”
“Not funny, dude.”
#5. ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Considered ballsy and innovative, UC operators often were the proving ground for new techniques, tactics, and equipment. One such tactic that was being tried around the country in the 1990s was the use of remotely detonated flash bangs—grenade-like devices that create a brief, bright flash and a loud explosion—as a distraction during takedowns. Hey, I’m the first one to try new and crazy shit, but this one had several of us raising an eyebrow. ATF’s Special Response Teams are the equivalent to police SWAT teams. The flash bangs were being used in conjunction with our SRT deployments, and the idea was as follows: We buried or otherwise concealed flash bangs immediately adjacent to where the undercover deal was going to happen. Our Explosive Technology Branch (ETB) guy would be present and have the ability to remotely detonate the stun grenades. As the UC exited the area, but before the violators could leave, we’d set off three bangs simultaneously to completely disorient the bad guys and then rush in to arrest them.
On this day, we isolated the deal to the very back of a mall parking lot, as far away from the public as possible. We had surveillance everywhere. The UC was supposed to buy the guns and dope, walk back toward his vehicle, and then give the bust signal. At which point, kaboom. The violators would be temporarily incapacitated, and the SRT would swoop on them. That was the theory.
What actually occurred was the UC gave the signal, the bangs were initiated, and all hell broke loose. The bad guys thought they were being shot at. They jumped in their car and hauled ass, driving over curbs to avoid our surveillance vehicles that were attempting to block their escape. The violators headed straight to the main entrance of the mall, bailed out of their vehicle, and disappeared.
In all fairness, we actually had used that technique several times successfully. But we decided after that caper that our tactic needed more work.
#4. SOME COUNTY, GEORGIA
Before encrypted and scrambled signals were in use, it was a very real possibility that wearing a wire could be detected by a cheap RadioShack radio frequency (RF) detector. There are many other pitfalls to wearing too much or the wrong electronics. There are some accounts of the wire creating static in a nearby television or radio. Some transmissions actually have been captured over a police scanner. Imagine hearing your conversation blasted live over a scanner in the violator’s living room. That’s one more reason why placement of the wire was important. You needed to be able to shut it off instantly.
In the late 1990s, I was working a case against a dirty deputy sheriff, clearly not my fave thing to do. However, the informant was another deputy, so the boss assigned the investigation to me. One day while communicating with the CI on my cell phone, while the CI was on a cordless house phone, we got severely compromised. Apparently, our call was broadcast over a baby monitor frequency and right into the violator’s scanner. The only other possibility our tech guys could come up with was that the violator, being a friend of the informant, may have secured the phone frequency at some point when he was at the CI’s house.
The violator immediately called the CI and recounted our entire conversation. That created a shit storm. We believed the violator was capable of violence, so security had to be put in place for the informant. Then we had to locate the violator and lock him down until we could get a search warrant. We did both of those things and ultimately recommended federal prosecution for possession of an unregistered Title II firearm. Such highly lethal weapons—machine guns, short-barreled shotguns and rifles, explosives and other incendiary devices—are federally regulated by the National Firearms Act (NFA). Because the sheriff at the time was fond of the deputy/violator, ATF was asked to defer prosecution/discipline to the sheriff’s office. We did so, but our team never felt good about it.
#3. CASTRO DISTRICT, SAN FRANCISCO
When I was just getting my investigative legs under me during my first years in San Francisco, I was pumped when the then head of the San Francisco Gang Intelligence squad called to make me an offer. I’d provided UC support on many of their cases, and now they were offering me an introduction to a highly placed informant.
The CI lived in the heart of the Castro District. The Castro had become a mecca for gay rights in the 1960s and ’70s, so I was not surprised to find out that this informant was a flamboyant gay man. He was referred to me because the gang guys knew I was actively working the Northern California white supremacist movement as it was linked to allegations of firearms trafficking.
The CI was cordial, well educated, and provided information for money. It took months to establish trust, and although he never said it specifically, I deduced that he had a background in government intelligence. As I developed the case against various extremist groups in Northern California, including the Aryan Brotherhood, the White Aryan Resistance, and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), this informant wanted me to meet with two guys who, he said, had intimate knowledge and contact with members of these organizations and others. I by now trusted him and told him to set it up.
When the CI got back to me, he was very specific about how and when the meet was to go down. It involved a late-night rendezvous and code words and shit like that. It stunk of setup. To make it worse, I was told to go alone. Like that shit was ever going to happen. I reached out to one of the gang investigators I knew, and he said he was familiar with these guys, and this was legit. He said that safety wasn’t an issue. Just the same, I had my partner Darren Gil staged up before the meet as a backup.
Initially, I only met one of the guys referred by the CI. We chatted and felt each other out, and he gave me his address and we agreed to meet the next day with the second individual. I still didn’t know their names, but since the meet was going to be at a residence I was fine with it. Suffice to say I wasn’t the only ATF agent listening to the next day’s conversation. Yes, I was wearing a wire, and I had another agent close by. This meeting was creepy and for good cause. The two men had great intelligence on the people I was investigating but refused to go on record or testify. Not even for money. They merely were doing their part to help law enforcement. I told them I was concerned about all the secrecy, and they looked at each other, and the one guy put his finger up, signaling to wait just a minute.
He left the room and came back with a box of heavily redacted government documents from the US State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Looking over the documents, it became immediately apparent that they referred to a well-known and subsequently exposed government covert operation in the 1970s, and these two men were the principals in that operation. Due to the nature of the documents and the prior actions of these guys, I was resistant to report or use any of the information they provided, and I told them so. Their information, identities, and background were more than likely highly classified. This meant it would be damn near impossible to use them or their information in a criminal trial. One of them handed me a business card from a lieutenant colonel at the National Security Agency (NSA). He said, “Call him. He will vouch for us.”
When I got back to the office, I researched the NSA to see if this was a good phone number for their public exchange. Anybody could print up a fake business card. RatSnakes did it all the time. I’ll be damned, the number was good. I called the colonel and explained what I wanted to know. He in turn asked for my call-back number, no doubt to verify who I was. He called back shortly and said, “Whatever they told you, you can take to the bank. I guarantee it.” Then he hung up.
I remember sighing and thinking that I had come to ATF as a normal and reasonably well-adjusted guy who just wanted to catch bad guys. FMTT,* I really didn’t need all this cloak-and-dagger shit. It was just too damn scary. In the end, I pursued the investigation without further utilizing the informants.
#2. SOUTH ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Whenever round tabling an upcoming deal, we always would anticipate the worst-case scenario so we had a contingency for every conceivable situation. There were, however, those cases where you walked away scratching your head and asking, “What the fuck just happened?” One case I’m still scratching my head about to this day happened in South Atlanta in the mid-1990s.
A licensed firearms dealer had cooperated with ATF for years, reporting suspicious firearms purchasers. Depending on the violator and their background, we would either let the sale go through, surveil them away from the store, and effect the arrest, or actually put an agent behind the counter to try and elicit where and to whom the guns might be going. Sometimes we would surveil the violators and their cargo to the guns’ final destination.
In this case, a violator was flagged by the federal insta-check background check. At the time, this was a fairly new process and we (the government) were still working out the kinks. After identifying the violator, I went back to the office and ran his criminal history. The report showed an arrest in the early 1970s for first-degree murder, somewhat surprising, but there was no disposition listed, which was puzzling. Any time a person was convicted of a crime, the originating agency was supposed to follow up with the outcome. If the person was found guilty, there was supposed to be another set of fingerprints on file and a description of the sentence. At face value, we did not have proof that this individual was even a felon or prohibited from possessing a firearm.
The jaw-dropping aspect of this case came several hours later, when I queried the National Crime Information Center (the centralized crime-tracking database maintained by the FBI) regarding further identification and disposition of this individual. Communication with NCIC almost always was done via fax or a telecommunications messages. Only rarely were such interactions done in person or via personal contact between NCIC, the FBI, and the investigating agent. So when our secretary said, “Vince, line one—it’s NCIC,” I gave my office partner a quizzical look.
The person on the phone from NCIC said: “You don’t have the guy you think you have. The guy you think you have is sitting on death row awaiting execution.”
Say whaaat?
We told the gun store owner to put the guy off for a little while and just to tell him his background check hadn’t come back yet. Then a flurry of fingerprints and photos began flying back and forth over the teletypes.
My boss, and his boss, and his boss’s boss’s heads were spinning. It took hours to figure out just what was going on. The records in the system for this guy were in shambles. As it turned out, he in fact had been convicted of a double homicide in the 1970s. He was sentenced to death and sat on death row. However, in the mid-1970s, the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional for a brief period, and everybody who was on death row at the time had their sentences commuted to life, including the members of the murderous Charles Manson family. Since this particular violator’s sentence had been commuted, he became eligible for parole and had, in fact, been released from prison. We had a convicted murderer on the loose whose crimes were so heinous that they warranted execution, and now he was about to buy some firearms.
Once we pieced it together, it was all hands on deck. We weren’t going to take any chances with this guy. It was decided I would conduct the transaction with him, and we would immediately arrest him inside the store.
The arrest went without incident, and I’m reasonably certain I will go down in history as the only ATF agent to arrest a condemned prisoner. Whether I am or not, the situation was so high profile that then President Bill Clinton mentioned it in a speech, affirming the new background checks system worked—although in this case, the system almost didn’t work. Because of Georgia state law at the time, if they merely had revoked this violator’s parole, he would have been sent back to prison for only one year. ATF and the US Attorney’s Office decided to prosecute him as an armed career criminal, exposing him to fifteen years to life of federal prison time. He was convicted and received fifteen years.
#1. NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
Charlie Smith and I went to the ATF Academy together, and we worked The Teams (SRTs) together. Charlie had been a standout college football player with a heart and demeanor as big as his biceps. I never heard Charlie speak ill of anyone. I remember thinking early on that he was going to be a great ATF undercover, but I also remember wondering, “Is he too nice for this job?”
Over the years, Charlie participated in several lethal encounters. The most well known of these was as a member of the New Orleans SRT on February 28, 1993, when he found himself in the fight of his life during the raid at the Mount Carmel compound of David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers outside Waco, Texas.
I sat helplessly watching the shoot-out unfold on national television while on standby with the Atlanta SRT. We knew something huge was going to happen, but for operational security reasons, we had few details. When my pager went off to call me in from standby, I immediately knew something had gone horribly wrong. My team hit the ground and remained there until the tragic fire that engulfed the compound. My most pressing personal concern was for my fellow agents and friends, Charlie being one. When my team arrived in Waco, I finally saw him upright with no bullet holes in him, and I smiled in relief. By all eyewitness accounts, Charlie took the fight to the armed and violent criminals that fateful day.
Charlie’s lethal encounters didn’t end at Waco. Later, he was confronted once again with one of the most terrifying aspects of being a RatSnake: having a gun pointed at your face at point-blank range without knowing if the violator on the other end has the stones to pull the trigger. As said, many of us endured these occasions, and for me, as I narrowly avoided shitting my pants in each case, I conditioned myself to believe that if the perp was going to pull the trigger, they would have, and so I merely went on to work the problem. On this occasion, however, Charlie saw it differently.
It was late at night, and I was at home when I got the phone call from another agent: “Charlie Smith was just in a shooting. He killed the guy. He’s fine.”
As a trained peer-support member and a friend, I was intimately aware of the turmoil that would follow for Charlie, both personally and professionally. At the moment, I also knew the most important thing: Charlie was okay.
As I got a few more details, I wanted to call Charlie right up and say, “What the fuck were you thinking?”
Instead, the next morning I said, “How you doing, brother? You okay?”
“Yeah, man,” he said. “I’m good.”
“Dude, what the fuck happened?”
“I’d met these guys a couple times. We had a couple deals under our belt.”
That was a red flag. Having done multiple deals with a specific violator without incident could lull an undercover operator into a false sense of security.
“Dude,” Charlie went on, “I thought we were cool. We were in a public place. Cover team was super close. It was a buy walk, so it should have been a cakewalk.”
A buy walk is a technique where the agent and the violator exchange money for the product, and the violator is allowed to leave with the money to be arrested another day.
“Brother, if it was such a damn cakewalk, how come you had to kill the guy? What the fuck?”
We both laughed, but nothing about this was funny.
“I walked up to the car parked right there on the street in public view. I shook hands with both guys. It was just like the last couple times, but then the driver got kinda weird. He started asking me over and over, ‘You got the money?’ I told him, ‘Yeah, you got the guns?’ But we’d never had this weirdness before.”
“Okay, and?”
“We did the back-and-forth a couple times, and the driver pulled a pistol so fucking fast I didn’t have time to blink. He reached across the front of the passenger seat, pointed it straight at my face and said, ‘Give me the fucking money now.’”
“What happened after you gave him the money?”
Charlie paused for a very long time.
“I didn’t give him the money,” he said.
“What the fuck, Charlie?” I screamed into the phone. “What the motherfuck?”
It is a hard-and-fast rule in undercover work that you do whatever you have to do to get home safely at night. Money can be replaced. Dope can be recovered. Guns can be seized down the road. I was damn near speechless, because Charlie knew this. He had done this type of operation a hundred times.
Charlie was very quiet, and then he said, “Vince, I knew he was going to kill me. I could see it in his eyes. I knew the cover team would never get there in time. So, I ripped my pistol from my belt and got off the first shot and hit him right in the head. He got a round off before he died, and it went through the windshield inches from his partner’s and my faces. I backed away, thinking that the partner may try to shoot me. Instead, he took off on foot, and the cover team caught him moments later.”
“I love you, Charlie,” I said, realizing he’d done the only thing he could and still make it home that night. “I’m sorry it shook out that way, but he made the decision. You did your job.”
Never again did I think Charlie was too nice for the job. He was found to be justified in his use of deadly force and went on to rise through the ranks of ATF.
BONUS ROUND: MACON, GEORGIA
In 1995, Jay Dobyns and I had, in record time, gained direct undercover access to the Iron Cross Motorcycle Club, more accurately described as a gang. Not only had we gained access, but we were invited to their clubhouse—a big deal as it was normally reserved for friends and close associates.
Our early and rapid success may have gone to our heads.
UC agents often carry wallets containing “wallet clutter.” If a violator ever had occasion to look inside the wallet, at a quick glance it would appear to contain the things a normal bad guy might have: driver’s license, pictures, traffic citations, and other misleading clutter.
I’m laying most of this on Bird, because I recall it being his idea. But I also remember thinking, “This plan is brilliant.”
Well, it wasn’t.
The plan was to hang out and drink with the gang president, “Lil Rat,” and other gang members at the clubhouse. Whenever we decided to leave, Bird would “accidentally” drop his wallet on the floor for them to find. They would rifle through the wallet, and the contents would support our story and give us immediate credibility with the club.
The next day, Jay and I got called to Lil Rat’s tattoo parlor. Bingo. We were high-fiving and pretty smug when we got the call, because we knew exactly why we were summoned to the shop, or so we thought. We arrived to find the shop closed midday, and that was not a good sign. Someone unlocked the door to let us in, and the entire club chapter was there, numbering about ten gang members. The mood was serious, and I immediately assessed exits and went over target selection in my mind, just in case this went to shit.
The Rat, as we referred to him, said, “Vinny, sit right there. I’ll get to you in a minute. Bird, come with me.”
Bird briefly glanced at me as if to say, “Be ready,” and disappeared into Rat’s office with Lil Rat and the club’s vice president. I sat out in the lobby, smoking cigarettes with the other eight club members, and endured what only could be described as a not-so-subtle interrogation. Approximately fifteen minutes later, Bird exited the Rat’s office, and Lil Rat motioned me in.
What happened to me is exactly what had just happened to Bird. I sat down, facing Lil Rat, with the club vice president standing behind me. The Rat had Bird’s wallet on the desk with all its contents spread out. As I sat down, he reached in his drawer and placed a loaded .357 Magnum revolver on the desk.
“Do we have a problem?” I asked.
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” said Lil Rat.
I mimicked his action and placed my .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol on the desk. It’s generally not good when the guns come out, but it’s not always guaranteed to be bad.
Lil Rat slid a picture from Bird’s wallet across the desk to me. “Who’s this?”
The picture was one Bird had acquired over the course of his career, depicting two Outlaws Motorcycle Club members out of Chicago holding a naked woman in the air as she spread her legs for the camera.
“Who are these guys?” the Rat asked again, referring to the bikers in the picture.
“How the fuck should I know, and where did you get Bird’s wallet?”
“He left it at the clubhouse the other day. I know those two Outlaws, and one of them is dead. I need to know where Bird got this picture.”
“Well, ask fucking Bird then.”
“I did, and Bird said from the chick in the picture.”
Wanting not to show weakness and trying to reestablish some high ground in this scenario, I said, “Well, good, you figured it out. I got shit to do. I’m gonna bounce.”
“I ain’t done yet,” he said.
In my sometimes overly aggressive way, I said, “Can we just hit the high points, please?”
He didn’t particularly like that response. He slid a business card from Bird’s wallet over to me.
“What’s this about?”
The card was that of a neo-Nazi KKK group known for its violence. These are often used as calling cards by violators, so the possessor can show an affiliation to the organization.
“This card has a tack hole in it,” said Lil Rat.
My attitude was getting worse by the second, and I think I responded, “What the fuck?”
“It looks like a card a cop would pin to his trophy board.”
Damn, this guy was a smart motherfucker. But I guess my indignant look worked, and he said, “Meet us at Whiskey River (a regular watering hole for bikers and rednecks) for drinks tonight, and I’ll bring Bird’s wallet back.”
We walked out of his office, shook hands, and Jay and I left.
Outside, Jay whispered to me as we mounted our bikes, “Don’t say nothin’. We’ll talk back at the crib.”
When we were alone, Jay explained he was pressed by Lil Rat to identify the woman in the picture and produce a phone number. Jay spat out the number of an ATF female UC based in Chicago. Now all we had to do was advise her of the scam before Lil Rat got to her.
Jay called her right away, and it turned out Lil Rat also was ringing her.
She merely said to Jay, “I got this, guys,” and hung up.
Well, she did good, and all was well when we met the club members at Whiskey River. Jay got his wallet back, and the gang paid for all our drinks all night long.
Just, damn.
* The greasy guy with the long hair was none other than Hells Angel member Charles “Chucky” Diaz. Now you know why I had stomach cramps when, years later, I had to give him back his firearm. Diaz is now is serving a life sentence, having narrowly avoided the death penalty for the Grondalski quadruple homicides in Fort Bragg, California.
* Needless to say, they never brought charges against the violator for the fake Tommy gun they bought.
* Fuck me to tears.