The old undercover pool and its successor were created to help rapidly identify an agent with a specific skill set to fit a particular UC role or plan. For example, if a case required transport of a load of stolen guns across state lines for a violator, you might want a UC who could drive an eighteen-wheeler or an agent who had a pilot’s license. Maybe you needed a Spanish-speaking black guy or a woman who could ride a motorcycle. We relied heavily on networking within our little RatSnakes world.
There was no regulation or policy mandating use of the UC pool. In fact, most UC requests were made agent to agent. So it really didn’t matter if you were in the pool or not. The pool was just another resource in case a particular agent didn’t know somebody to reach out to. A typical request for a UC went like this: Somebody would call one of us and ask about availability and willingness to take on a particular role. Then the requesting agents, SAC, or ASAC would call the UC agent’s SAC or ASAC and formally request their assistance. Normally, it would be approved without issue. Once in a great while, an SAC might resist letting one of his superstars go work for another field division.
Being the UC for outside agencies always presented a give-and-take scenario. Some of our federal policies were too strict for the locals, and some of theirs too loose for our liking. We usually met in the middle. I have to admit, it was pretty empowering to be the “hired gun.”*
During the 1980s, the US Marshals had an annual fugitive roundup code named Operation Falcon. It was an all-hands-on-deck affair, and all federal and local agencies contributed manpower for this operation. I was always assigned to the Marshals’ covert ops team. They would use me to get close to suspected fugitive houses. I might knock on a door, pretending to look for somebody who didn’t live there. Or I’d curl up in the street wrapped around a whiskey bottle. The Marshals used and abused me in those days, and I loved it. It got me on two episodes of the TV show Cops. I’d tell my mom to watch when I was going to be on. She’d say, “Let me guess, you’re the one all blurred out.” True. But hey, the hired guns got the good gigs.
Very unexpectedly, I was asked by the Atlanta FBI office to be the UC on a fairly high-profile coke and gun deal. The FBI supervisor hated me, and I hated him right back for the empty suit he was. But he had no choice: He didn’t have anybody skilled enough, and I was the only show in town. I suspect that I also was expendable if it went bad.
I was getting ready to meet three Colombians in a hotel room for a kilo of coke and a machine gun deal. FBI SWAT would be covering me from the next room. As a rule, I wasn’t thrilled when it wasn’t ATF covering me. But it was the FBI’s case and their money, so their rules.
I always attempted to lower my anxiety before a meeting by using controlled breathing and mental preparation. If you could stay calm, it was easier to work the problem. This would be a meeting in a hotel room with known violent gangsters, and this exact scenario had met with some disastrous results over the years.* I was particularly anxious. Luckily for me, the ATF group supervisor, Louis Quinonez, was an old friend of mine with an ample background in undercover work. It was not uncommon for me and others to say a prayer before going on an operation. In this case, Louis did the honor. After some prayerful words, he ended it with, “If this goes bad for you, Vince, please say hello to Jesus for me.” The FBI guys gasped. I looked at Louis to see his sly grin, and my anxiety went away.
The Colombians called and said they were running late. I had about an hour to wait, which could ratchet my nerves back up. Louis didn’t want me to just pace back and forth in the hotel room, so he opened the door between my room and the cover team’s room so we could chat and share a cup of coffee. The cover team could warn of anyone approaching the room well in advance.
After standing around shooting the bull for a couple minutes, the FBI SWAT team leader called Louis and me over for a sidebar. Apparently, when communicating with the cover team, I’d dropped the “F” bomb a couple times. The team leader said he was a Christian man and didn’t appreciate my language. Louis immediately put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed tightly, as if to say, “Don’t throat punch him, Vince.”
“Several of my team were offended as well,” said the FBI team leader.
Louis squeezed my shoulder harder.
I wanted to say, “Fuck you, I am a Christian as well,” but I didn’t. Nor did I say, “Why don’t you or one of your pussy team members come on in here and do this UC?”
I made the buy without incident. The FBI cover team performed like pros. Bad guys in custody and dope seized from the vehicle they arrived in. FBI buy money secured, which probably was the only thing the FBI boss cared about. This case illustrated some of the shit that non-operators didn’t always understand. See, the one absolutely unique aspect of being an undercover operator is that you were alone. There always were people close by to help, but no human is faster than a bullet. UCs don’t get to go into our world with guns drawn. We don’t get to wear heavy ballistic vests. We don’t bring specialized protective equipment, flash bangs, or body bunkers.* So, when the tactical boys tried to weigh in too heavily on how to run a UC, our normal response was thank you, but how about just shutting the fuck up.
This also is why I always felt more comfortable doing UC work for other ATF offices and state and local police. They understood and appreciated our contributions and the inherent risks. There were requests from certain departments and/or individuals to which my reply was an instantaneous yes. One of those individuals was Bambi’s partner, Randy Beach, based out of the Savannah, Georgia, field office. If Randy was asking, it was an important case, and he took the job seriously. One time Randy called; I said yes, figuring I’d go to Augusta, where he needed me, make a buy, afterward party with Randy, probably Bambi and Dino, and go home.
I got to Augusta, and Randy brought me up to speed. A multiagency task force had been in place for a couple years, working up and down the Eastern Seaboard on a large arms trafficking case. Randy’s team all had been burned, i.e., their cover was blown, while working the case for so long. He wanted me to meet one of their targets, even though he thought it was unlikely the violator would agree to meet or deal with me. Randy introduced me to his CI, and we put a plan together.
I not only met the trafficker, but he agreed to sell me a fully auto MAC-10. We set a next-phase plan in motion, which would be a buy walk. In the hierarchy of my most intriguing buys, I thought this one was way down the list. I went in and bought the gun and agreed to meet the violator later. This is where it got weird.
A day or so afterward, I was back at my home office, when Randy paged me “911.” He wouldn’t talk over the phone and just said he needed me back in Augusta ASAP. I cleared it with my boss, jumped in my G-ride, and hauled ass. When I got to Augusta and met with Randy, there were several bosses at the office.
This was real bad, Randy said, and then he dropped the bomb.
“Vince, wanna know where the last place that MAC-10 was documented to be?”
I said, “This is what you had me drive four hours for? To reveal the trace results on one gun?”
He calmly said, “We had already recovered that particular gun.”
My mind was swirling, trying to figure out where he was going with this. Then he said, “The last place that gun was documented as being was in the FBI’s possession.”
WTF? WTF? WTF?!
I gestured for him to keep going. I hadn’t noticed at first but now understood why IA was in the room. After hearing all the theories, I asked, “What now, and what does this have to do with me?”
They wanted me to reinitiate contact with the violator and try to arrange another buy, and then attempt to garner information about the last gun. This would have been a buy bust, but ultimately, I could not reach the violator. I later learned he probably had left the country. I never heard and never asked what they ever found out about that MAC-10. Simple buy walk, my ass. I should have just assumed if Randy was involved, “weird” was involved.
TV shows can have the cops meeting the bad guy, gaining his confidence, and making the buy and arrest in a forty-minute time frame. In reality, every undercover operation requires planning, paperwork, more planning, and more paperwork. When embarking on an undercover operation outside of our area of operation, we had to do a lot of advance legwork and address a number of questions. For instance, how long did we expect the operation to actively continue? This led to concerns about funding. Which field division would pay the related expenses? Would it be funded out of headquarters? Who were the violators? Did the UC have any prior exposure to this violator(s), location, or organization? What special equipment, electronics, or vehicles might we need? What backstopping or identification would the UC need? It could take days, weeks, or sometimes months to attempt to answer in advance every question that might arise.
In discussions of undercover work, you will hear much about round tabling. To keep everybody on the same playbook, this often was done formally with all participants present, including the bosses. Most of the real planning went on unofficially between the affected agents as well as those who possessed special knowledge of similar cases. We would want to know what had previously worked and what had not. Some of the planning sessions could get quite heated. There were large egos and widely diverse personalities in the room. There was vast experience in the room. We didn’t hold back our opinions, and we didn’t always agree. I sometimes had in the back of my mind: “Hey, you guys learned about criminal shit in cop school. I was a criminal and know this shit firsthand.”
I was never a huge proponent of long-term UC operations for a number of reasons. Although we had many successful long-term UC cases, they brought more peril than working narrowly targeted violators. The longer an agent is undercover, the greater the chance of compromise. The longer that agent is away from fellow cops and family, the more the lines can blur. Many long-term cases just don’t pan out for one reason or another, and many precious resources can be squandered on those cases. To be clear, this was my personal position and not always shared by my peers or the bureau. The good thing about so many agents having input was the diversity of ideas. Sometimes that led to a case being called off by agreement of all the factions.
I also was not a true believer in OMO long-term cases. Again, this was my personal opinion. It can be argued that all 1-percent club members are guilty by association.* I wouldn’t disagree that they are of questionable character, and they choose to associate with criminals, but that doesn’t make them all criminals. In contrast, all Mafia members are criminals. All narcotics-dealing street gang members are criminals. Bird and I often lamented that ATF was too consumed by all things biker related. Over the years, neither of us thought the big biker infiltration cases were a good use of resources. Yet, Bird worked one of the longest, most notorious biker cases in the bureau’s history.† Even I relented at the request of others and did my own long-term biker ops.
Once I was working a long-term UC in Gainesville, Georgia, when the Mexican informant we were using had to step away for a while. He could, however, make an introduction to the violator, who was holding a bunch of stolen guns and a kilo of coke. Our only problem was that the violator didn’t speak English. So, drawing from the Core, we enlisted Dino. He was only a couple hours away and didn’t have anything pressing back at his office.
Within a few hours, Dino came down from Savannah to help us out. We knew Chewy, the violator, wasn’t going to sit on those guns and the dope for long. We got Dino briefed up and set up an introduction by the informant. The next day we hit the ground running. The violator agreed to meet Dino but would only bring one of the stolen pistols to the first date. We accepted, and the meet was set. My partner on this caper was Butch, an ex-cop and a very good investigator and experienced UC. We were supported by the guys at the Hall County narcotics unit, who were some of the best I’ve ever worked with.
We briefed, Dino got wired up, and off he went. The violator was on time, which almost never happens with drug dealers. He was introduced to Dino, and they immediately started speaking Spanish. Luckily, a couple of the task force guys were bilingual and were monitoring the wire and keeping us posted. Plus, Dino knew that not everybody on the wire spoke Spanish, especially the shot callers—me and Butch. Being an experienced UC, Dino mixed the conversation back and forth from English to Spanish to relay key info to us: the make of the vehicle the violator was driving, license number, make and model of the pistol, and things like that. It was pretty clear that Dino was buying a Bryco .25 semi-auto pistol—basically, in my opinion, one of the biggest pieces of shit handguns ever sold. They were heavy and not engineered for extreme accuracy.
Imagine our shock when the violator said he wanted $800 for this pistol, which could be bought brand-new for $175. Just like any deal in the real world, price and terms always are negotiable. In the underworld, it’s expected that you argue about the money. If you don’t, you’re usually considered a punk or a cop. Butch and I laughed right up to the point when Dino said okay to the price without putting up a fight. Butch speed-dialed Dino—slightly unusual in the middle of a deal—and said, “You better not give that fucker eight hundred dollars, you fuckin’ Puerto Rican.” Dino just hung up and gave the violator the money.
In this situation, both Dino and Butch were right. A UC always must be mindful of the entrapment defense, which, in this particular case, would have gone something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, which one of you in that jury box wouldn’t jump at selling something for five times its value?”
What Butch and I didn’t know was that Dino had protested the price, in Spanish, and the violator said he needed the cash right that minute but would cut $1,000 off the price of the kilo of coke when they met next.
What we also didn’t know was that when the violator showed up, he hadn’t come alone. He arrived with two other Mexican males. When they entered the ten-by-ten-foot studio, they locked the door behind them. To this day, Dino admits he didn’t hear or see shit after that door lock clicked. The only thing Dino was thinking about was whether or not he could shoot all three dopers before they could get him. We never knew any of this until our debriefing because Dino’s voice never changed inflection. UCs have to be able to multitask, and Dino was one of the best.
For years, we busted Dino’s balls over that particular buy. His comeback was always: “Twenty years in prison, two guns, and a kilo of coke off the street. Not bad for a Puerto Rican, huh?”
Working as hired guns or otherwise, RatSnakes aren’t always easily recognizable as the superstars we think we are. UCs have to realize that their appearance might be unnerving to others. We often were the only ones who knew we were the good guys. To everybody else we encountered, we were scary-looking street guys.
Box was transferring out of the academy and back to the field, and Jay and I were heading home after Box’s going-away party. In other words, after a weekend of consuming lethal amounts of JD, Bird and I were hauling ass to Atlanta so he could catch a flight back to Arizona. We’d gotten up, said goodbye to everybody, and hit the road. No shower, no change of clothes, and hung-the-fuck-over. I was wearing cutoff jeans, no shirt, flip-flops, and hair down to my ass. Bird, well, Bird always looked like he just stepped out of the Special Housing Unit, a.k.a. SHU, for the worst of the worst at Pelican Bay State Prison.
Turns out, Georgia state troopers frowned on driving eighty-five miles per hour. We saw the trooper turn on his lights and do a U-turn in the median. It was clear that we were his target. When he pulled up behind us, our actions were slow and specific. We had multiple firearms in the car. Because of this and our appearance, our hands were on the dash, palms up. That apparently caught the trooper’s attention, and he exited the vehicle with his Remington 870 shotgun, which, of course, elevated our anxiety. As the trooper got within earshot, Bird blurted out loudly, “We’re cops.”
It wasn’t out of the ordinary for a trooper on this stretch of road to come across FLETC students coming or going. The trooper stopped short of my driver’s-side window, leveled the shotgun in our direction, and commanded us to exit the vehicle out the driver’s door. He said in his very deep, Southern voice, “I better see some goddamned badges pretty quick.”
It worked out fine. No ticket was issued, and the trooper was last seen walking away shaking his head.
As I’ve said, most ATF agents have multiple collateral responsibilities. Some include SRT work, hostage negotiator duties, or certified explosive specialist duties. This made it common on big roundups to keep running into the same folks. Unlike the FBI, we didn’t have thousands of agents located in two or three states to call upon. If we needed a hundred agents for an operation, they would come from across the country. The reason for generally trying to hit all of the targets at once was to reduce the number of fugitives in the wind once word got out. We’d hit them first thing in the morning to catch them off guard and to reduce the possibility of a confrontation. Let’s face it, who wants to fight first thing in the morning after drinking all night?
One raid I worked on was a roundup of the Sons of Silence motorcycle gang based in Colorado. Daryl and Blake, two of our best, had spent two years infiltrating the gang and perfecting dozens of criminal cases ranging from narcotics to firearms and explosive violations.* I was paired up with Milton the Ragin’ Cajun for the duration of this operation, which lasted for days.
We had hundreds of agents and cops on this roundup. The night before, Milton and I were drinking in our hotel room. Milton was extremely distracted, and it only took me a few minutes to figure out why. This would be the first big roundup he would participate in since the Waco shoot-out. Milton had lost friends/brothers during the Waco raid, and those events affected him for the rest of his career. There were some basic similarities with the Sons of Silence raid that had him anxious. It was another huge operation, with hundreds of ATF agents staged at a local airport. We were going to execute on a rainy morning. One ultimately had nothing to do with the other, but for Milton, like many of those present during the Waco shoot-out, it brought back horrible memories. We talked about it briefly and then went to bed. In the morning, it would be business as usual.
Our SRT hit the Sons of Silence clubhouse at 0600, and that was everybody else’s cue to execute their warrants. This gang had terrorized portions of Colorado Springs and also put our boys through two years of hell. We were on a mission to get as many in custody as fast as we could. Call it payback time.
Milton and I were assigned to the clubhouse with the SRT. The gang president was extremely hostile and noncompliant, so the SRT did what SRTs do: They lit him up with a beanbag. Direct hit to the chest. He folded like a cheap card table. Guess who had to stop the fun and escort him first to the hospital and then to lockup? Yep, that duty fell to Milton and me.
The guy spent the whole trip to the hospital explaining to us what motherfuckers we were and how we wouldn’t be so tough without our badges. Milton was not known for his compassion for criminals, so I merely warned the biker he might not want to poke that particular tiger. When the violator was in the treatment room, the doctor came in. The violator was handcuffed and now proceeded to run his mouth at the doctor. The doctor opened the guy’s shirt, exposing one of the nastiest pink, purple, and blue bruises I had ever seen. I kind of chuckled, which further set him off, and he tried to sit up. Only he was restrained by the handcuffs. So, instead he screamed: “That shit don’t hurt, motherfuckers!” The doctor jammed a finger dead in the center of the bruise and said, “Really?” At which point, that biker shut his pie hole and went to jail like a good boy.
Once the overt phase of the operation (search and arrest warrants executed in uniform) was completed, Milton and I were called upon to go covert, a.k.a. UC. After the first two days of the roundup, we still had fugitives in the wind. Blake and Daryl provided a list of known hangouts for the Sons of Silence members, and one by one, Milton and I visited the bars and motorcycle shops undercover. We were able to track down a couple of the outstanding fugitives and get them arrested. The last place we visited was a bar under the control of the Sons, and we choreographed how to approach this location. Milton and I would insert ourselves prior to uniformed agents showing up. We could then document the patrons’ actions and determine who might or might not be confederates of the club.
We entered the bar, immediately noticing support paraphernalia on the walls. The ATF raids were the talk of the bar. It was on everybody’s minds.
After the bar filled up, the uniformed ATF teams showed up, locked down the parking lot, and assigned agents to the exits. Our guys immediately began identifying patrons and started basic interviews. Many of the patrons told our guys to fuck off. Others were more cooperative. Milton and I were in position to finger any patrons who stashed dope or chucked their weapons under a table. As a result, we made additional arrests, but we weren’t done yet.
Next came the unofficial part of the plan. After our uniformed agents left, they went back to their rooms, changed into their civvies, and then came back and joined me and Milton in the bar. Free country, right? We could enjoy an adult beverage off duty just like anybody else. We all would be leaving over the next few days, and this was the last chance to have a little wheels-up party. The only thing unique about this one was that we held it at our enemy’s tavern. We did so with great arrogance.
Bird, Gundo, Daryl, Blake, and others started coming into the bar. It didn’t take the patrons or management long to figure out who we all were. There were a couple low-key confrontations with a few patrons until they realized how many of us there were. Our message was clear: The Sons of Silence and their associates were out of business in Colorado Springs.
We were drinking and really feeling good about what we had accomplished. Then one of the band members made some sort of reference of support for the Sons, or an anti-ATF reference, I don’t remember which. But that was it. Bird tapped me on the arm and said, “Come on.” I didn’t know what he had planned, but he was my twenty-plus-years partner, so without hesitation I followed him to the stage.
Bird took the microphone from the band member, who clearly wasn’t going to say shit to him. Bird then announced that the reign of terror by the Sons in Colorado Springs was over. This was met with an equal amount of cheers and jeers. Some greasy biker type at a table close to the stage thought he was going to get involved. As quickly as he stood up to show his ass, Milton put a hand on his shoulder and told him to “sit the fuck down before I knock you the fuck out.” The biker sat down.
I then took the microphone and simply thanked everybody for their support. I added, “The Sons of Silence’s Colorado Springs privileges are hereby revoked.”
Was it fun being the central figure in a case? Of course it was. Despite the UC’s pivotal role, most times the case agent was really the driving force. Case agents were responsible for everything from manpower to budgeting a case to scheduling surveillance and cover teams. There would be no opportunity to do undercover work if it wasn’t for devoted case agents. The case agent had to be good at investigating and gathering the necessary intelligence and evidence to justify using undercover as a tactic.
Being the hired gun also came with a downside. Mr. or Ms. Cool Hired Gun UC was expected to follow through until the end. No backing out because you were scared. No changing your mind because you had a gut feeling. One such occasion presented itself to me in the 1990s. I’d come to ATF as a school-trained bomb tech and had a healthy respect for explosives, especially street or improvised explosives in the hands of untrained criminals.* In this case, I was asked to meet a John Doe who allegedly had a buttload of high explosives for sale.† Pete Beck was the case agent and admittedly didn’t have much intel to go on, but there was an informant who would introduce me to the guy. Pete was a highly skilled investigator but, as was often the case, he didn’t want to do the UC while also being the case agent. Because of the urgent threat to public safety, I agreed to meet a violator we knew almost nothing about. I wired up and met him in a public parking lot with a huge cover team. We arranged the meet after business hours to avoid possible civilian casualties if something went wrong.
I always hated doing explosive undercovers. Many times, the deals involved improvised explosive devices (IEDs), poorly made and very unstable. In this case, we were meeting an unknown person who was supposed to be bringing a sample of high explosives, without having a clue about what kind of explosives he was bringing or how much he knew about handling them.
Immediately upon meeting the violator, I got a really bad feeling. First, he was as big as a house. More disconcerting was his agitated state. He was sweating profusely and appeared to possibly be on meth. He stared me up and down, and then, without warning, he reached over and pulled my shirt up to see if I was wearing a wire. I tried to calm him down, thankful that I’d taken the time to conceal the body wire well. He nervously shook my hand and said, “Sorry, man, I just got out of prison.”
To maintain my bad-guy persona, I said, “What the fuck, motherfucker?” and insisted on checking him for a wire. He agreed, and then tossed me a small brick of military-grade C-4.* The scenario went from possibly serious to no-shit serious. To this day, ATF has a hard-and-fast rule: We don’t let guns or bombs “walk.” I asked him how much more he had. The answer was: a trunk full. It would be disaster if that amount of explosives remained in criminal hands. We had to get all the explosives this guy had. I immediately made the decision to give him five hundred dollars for the brick of C-4. That far exceeded the street value, but I needed to get him to leave the explosives he was carting with me, and then entice him to bring me the rest. If I couldn’t do so, we would have to arrest him on the spot, and we might never find the rest of the explosives.
We arranged for me to meet him later that same day. In the meantime, we identified him and his brother as violent bank robbers. While they were in prison, their mother had married a bomb technician from a local police department. Apparently, this officer had, over time, stolen explosives from police evidence and had the devices stored in his basement. That’s how the bank robber got access to the explosives. This was all determined through the excellent efforts of Beck and the cover team, who followed the violator away from the first meeting.
The SAC was about to have a heart attack. He couldn’t argue our tactics but knew if something blew up, it would be his ass. The second meeting with this violator was the most heavily covered in my career. We had bomb squads, life flights, SWAT teams, and an army of surveillance agents on hand. The location for the deal became critical. Any explosives are potentially dangerous, but with improper handling by the bad guy, the cover team could be scooping me up with a shovel. We picked an old, deserted school parking lot as the location. This definitely was going to be a buy bust regardless of whether or not the bad guy brought all of his stash. The plan was to execute a search warrant at the mom’s house right after the arrest.
The violator was on time. Again, he acted as if he was geeked up and paranoid, looking all around. I prayed my cover team would wait for my bust signal. I wanted to get the violator away from the explosives in case he had fight in him. When I walked to the back of his car, I remember thinking: “I’m going to shit myself.” There were Claymore mines,* fuses, detonators, and enough high explosives to blow up a city block. Now, we both were sweating.
I showed him the money—which he was never going to get—and he started tossing the explosives into my trunk. I hollered, “Be cool, motherfucker!” He nervously laughed, but I wasn’t joking. He was handling the explosives like they were just bricks.
I finally got him somewhat relaxed and laughing. I said, “Hey, man, I’m going to step over here to have a smoke.” He followed to join me. When I completed the calculation in my head as to how long it would take the cover team to pounce and separate this guy from the explosives, and fully prepared to jump all over his ass if he took one step back toward that vehicle, I gave the bust signal: “Joey Buttafuoco,” woven into whatever I was saying at the moment. I had positioned the bad guy with his back to where the cover team would be coming from and attempted to light his cigarette several times to distract him. Pow! Before he could take his first puff, he was face down on the ground in handcuffs. The search warrant recovered the rest of the explosives at the mom’s house. It was a good day for the good guys.
The part I left out of this story is that every agent coming out of the academy is looking to bust the big one: a case of M16s stored in Cosmoline, a cache of bombs, or that record drug score. Truth be known, we all thought such mega busts were unicorns, dreamt about but never seen. That day, I caught the unicorn.
* My business cards had “Have Gun, Will Travel” printed on the back.
* The tragic shootings of ATF agents Ariel Rios and Alex D’Atri have been mentioned earlier in this book. In 1982, five drug and gun dealers met with the undercover agents at the Hurricane Motel in Miami to sell large amounts of cocaine and machine guns. The violators grew suspicious and opened fire in the hotel room. Special Agent Alex D’Atri was wounded five times and survived. Special Agent Ariel Rios died as a result of his wounds. The two violators were convicted of first-degree murder, assault, and firearm charges. Ten other defendants also were convicted on related charges.
* Also called ballistic shields or ballistic blankets, body bunkers are the handheld bullet-resistant shields used by law enforcement.
* Outlaw Motorcycle Organizations such as the Hells Angels or Outlaws Motorcycle Club often are termed “1 percent clubs,” since the other 99 percent of motorcycle riders generally are law-abiding citizens.
† Jay Dobyns tells about this case in his book No Angel: My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels (Crown Publishers/Random House, 2009).
* A case is “perfected” when it is collectively agreed that the necessary elements of the crime have been satisfied and that the evidence is strong enough to convict.
* Athens PD had sent me to hazardous device school at the Redstone Arsenal at Athens State University.
† “High” explosives refers to compounds with a lower flashpoint but a much faster burn rate, hence the explosion instead of just hot fire.
* Military grade C-4 is a demolition-grade, chemical-based explosive often used for razing buildings and other manmade structures. It has a higher shock point, so it won’t explode if hit by a bullet in combat. One 11 × 2 × 1.5-inch (M112) block of C-4 can destroy a vehicle or significantly damage a light-framed building.
* Claymores are deadly and designed for maximum personnel casualties. These military-grade mines are command detonated and directional (vs. upwardly exploding) plastic-encased explosives that release about 700 one-eighth-inch-diameter steel balls in a 60-degree radius to a distance of around 110 yards, with an optimum distribution of fragments around the 55-yard range. Also having booby-trap capability, Claymores were heavily used during the Vietnam War.