______
Interstate 8, heading east from San Diego, early May 2002
Ever since I’d started working the Dago Hells Angels, people I trusted had been counseling me to pack my bags and get out of southern California. Things could only end ugly, they’d said. Now, two years later, I was finally taking their advice. And fast.
I hadn’t even bothered to pack up my things. I’d just thrown a few clothes, some papers, my computer and some music for the road into my Nissan pickup, called for my dog, Dog, and headed east into the desert.
Goodbyes with my police handlers had been cursory. They’d wanted me to spend one last night in the San Diego area, give us time for a goodbye dinner. I let them book me a room at a local motel. But once I got in my truck and started driving, I wasn’t about to stop.
My adieus to my biker buddies had been even ruder: I’d left them in a squeal of tires and a cloud of burned rubber after Bobby Perez, the most volatile and vicious member of the San Diego—or Dago—Hells Angels, made it clear that things were, indeed, about to end ugly.
A few days earlier, he’d asked me to carry a handgun, a little Bersa .380, back from Laughlin, Nevada, to El Cajon, California, after a shoot-up in a casino had left three bikers dead. I didn’t know whether the .380 had been used in the gunplay or whether Bobby just didn’t want to carry it across state lines himself. He was, after all, on parole and not even supposed to be outside of California, let alone in the company of criminals. Whatever the case, his asking me to drive the gun back to the Dago Hells Angels’ home turf in El Cajon was a major vote of confidence. So when my handlers seized the gun, saying they couldn’t possibly allow me to return it to a known felon, they were blowing a chance for me to work my way even further into the inner sanctum of the gang. “Tell Bobby you had to ditch it,” they’d said. “Or that you lost it. Or whatever. Come up with something.”
It was the stupidest of decisions, all the stupider if they had any idea how important the little gun was to Bobby. When he asked for it back during a late night meeting in an El Cajon parking lot, I put him off, telling him I’d hidden it deep in the engine of my truck and hadn’t yet had a chance to retrieve it.
That won me a venomous glare and an order: “Bring it tomorrow to the bar. Ten o’clock!” he spat at me.
A memorial ride was taking place the next morning, for another biker killed in the previous days. Christian Tate, a member of the Dago Hells Angels, had been shot off his bike from behind as he headed back to California from Laughlin about an hour before the nastiness broke out in the casino. Bobby, it seemed, wanted the .380 for the ride.
After the scene in the parking lot, I contemplated cashing in the Dago case. It had been going south for a while, from even before the botched—and highly secret—police ambush of a Hells Angels drug run through the California desert had left who knows how many dead. I’d witnessed at least four bikers and two cops bite it before I was dragged out of that particular mess.
The case had never had a clear objective to begin with. It had begun in 1999 as an investigation into a Quebecer who was suspected of running coke from Colombia to California and then up into Canada with the help of the Dago Hells Angels. But the guy had disappeared into thin air the day before I arrived in California. So the case had turned into a basic intel probe of the Dago Angels—accumulating information without a particular goal of making any arrests and putting bad guys in prison. To get close to the gang I opened a photo studio specializing in strippers’ “media kits” and bike porn—shots of chromed-up Harleys against a setting sun and that kind of thing. Eventually gang members and associates began inviting me to parties and gatherings to document their fun for posterity (in an uncompromising way, of course—I knew better than to shoot a member with his nose in a big pile of coke).
After several months I began buying moderate quantities of coke and crystal meth—half a pound, a pound—from criminals affiliated with the gang, along with stolen cars and restricted weapons: fully automatic machine pistols, M-16s, converted SKS carbines, hand grenades and the like. I made myself out to be a criminal middleman interested in pretty much anything that could make me money. Those buys elevated our little intel probe to “operational” status—our sights set on arrests and convictions.
Still, the case had no real focus and my handlers tended to proceed in a dangerously ad hoc way. Over two years I gathered dirt on crooked members of the U.S. military selling government-issue guns, Mexican border runners smuggling arms and humans (both of the very dangerous variety), and Russian mobsters—along with my work on the Hells Angels and their friends. And that created a problem: with so many investigative fronts, we never identified an exit strategy, a predetermined point at which we could say, “Okay, we’ve got the goods. Time to wind things up.”
To make matters worse, I had a vague suspicion from early on that Operation Five Star—the multi-squad task force I was reporting to, comprising the DEA, the ATF and the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, along with the municipal police departments of San Diego and El Cajon—wasn’t an entirely tight ship. It seemed to me that information was leaking out and finding its way to the wrong people. Initially it was really just a gut feeling with nothing tangible to back it up. But in the fall of 2001, I got a call from an FBI supervisor in San Francisco with a storied career busting bikers asking me to visit him for a chat. It turned out he had the same suspicions.
Along with the shoot-up in the desert, all of this should, perhaps, have been enough to convince me to bail from the case long before Bobby Perez ordered me to give him back the .380. But I like to finish what I start, and there had never been any sustained or substantial threat to my safety on this case, and the money was good: US$5,000 plus all expenses per month, enough to buy a new house back in Canada for my second wife and daughter.
The encounter in the parking lot, however, had finally convinced me that the case was almost certainly done for, at least as far as I was concerned. Still, for whatever reason, I thought I might be able to forestall the inevitable with Bobby for at least a day or two. So, the next day at 10:00 a.m. sharp, I drove to the stretch of El Cajon Boulevard that effectively belonged to the Hells Angels: it was home to their club-house, Dumont’s—better known simply as “the bar”—and Stett’s motorcycle shop.
When I pulled up, there were already about a hundred bikers hanging around on the sidewalk in front of Dumont’s. Right in the middle stood Bobby. I parked in front of a hydrant and left the motor running.
As I approached, I could see that Bobby was in a particularly unpleasant mood.
“Did you bring it?” he demanded.
“I can’t find it,” I replied. “It must have fell out on the road on the drive back.”
Bobby started to vibrate. “You follow me to the back of the bar,” he said. I knew what often happened behind Dumont’s, and it wasn’t a place I was going to visit.
“Sure,” I said, turning away. “But let me park properly and turn off the truck. I’ll be right there.” I got in the Nissan and threw it in gear.
Bobby turned and yelled to an underling to stop me. The guy lunged for the passenger door, but thankfully it was locked. I floored it and he let go. I wheeled around the corner, raced to my studio for a few essentials and was gone.
At this point, a bad novel might describe a wave of relief washing over me as I headed into the pure, clean desert, away from the danger and treachery of the past two years. Yeah, right. Whatever relief I felt was more like a trickle than a wave. Sure, leaving El Cajon and the San Diego area felt good, as did the fact that it was me, and me alone, who was now in control; I no longer had handlers or Hells Angels telling me what to do. But all the turf between San Diego and Phoenix, Arizona, three hundred miles to the east, is Hells Angels country. There was a distinct possibility that before jumping on his Harley for Christian Tate’s funeral ride, Bobby had picked up the phone and sent word to the Hells Angels chapters east and north of San Diego to be on the lookout for me. But the last ride for a member—any member, even a relatively unremarkable one like Tate—is mandatory for all Hells Angels in the region, and strongly recommended for all affiliated clubs. I had to hope that everyone who might have a mind to get in my way was already behind me.
The fact that no one had shown up at my studio as I packed had been a good sign. But if that had quelled my sense of unease somewhat, the desert exacerbated it. While in the San Diego area I’d spent many a Sunday in the desert, walking and exploring, with Dog or alone, the peace and quiet the best therapy available. Now, however, the desert wasn’t offering serenity: I just felt exposed.
Still, the farther I drove, the farther the mess was behind me and the better I felt. For the first day or two I caught catnaps in rest areas and truck stops and drove all night, trying to put some distance between me and my problems. Later, once into the Midwest and farther east, I slowed down and made regular stops, to see the sights, have a meal or spend the night in a motel.
All the while I was thinking about the operation that had just ended so unceremoniously and about my whole career as a hired-gun infiltrator.
For almost twenty-five years, almost half my life, I’d been working for an alphabet soup of police forces—the RCMP, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the RHKP, the RNC—insinuating myself into criminal groups from around the world and then helping police bring them down. Along with outlaw bikers, I’d gone after Asian Triads and Russian mobsters, Pakistani heroin smugglers and garden-variety drug lords, crooked cops and military types. Even the KKK. It had been lucrative, it had been exciting, it had been a job. I may have been doing the work of good, but what had it left me with? Or, more exactly, what had it left of me? Each job required that I create a new persona and inhabit him fully for anywhere from a few months to several years. Sometimes I’d pretend I was all criminal, a border runner, a hit man or a drug dealer. Other times my cover was more complex: a life insurance underwriter also into investment scams and money laundering; an importer who also brought in drugs and sex trade workers and shipped out stolen luxury cars; a concert promoter who was interested in anything that might make a buck.
I made myself into these people, and any number of other characters, and became them completely, putting the real me on the shelf. Always I thought, when the game was over, I’d be able to take that real person down and become him again. But as time went by, it was clear that whoever the real me was was withering away for lack of sunlight, drying up for lack of nourishment, atrophying for lack of exercise.
Even between jobs—a period usually lasting several months—I increasingly resisted becoming myself again. If the operation had ended in a major bust, that time would sometimes be taken up with court preparations; other times it was just pure R & R. In either case, resurrecting the real me became a hassle. It would just get in the way of my next assignment.
I’d thought about retirement on a few occasions during my career. Indeed, until the mid-1980s and my tangle with the KKK, I’d never thought of what I was doing as an actual career, just a series of jobs I’d accidentally fallen into, and which I’d just as suddenly and unwittingly fall out of. But no job had been as unsatisfying as San Diego. None had come up so short of what we could have accomplished. None had left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth.
And so, never had I contemplated calling it quits as seriously as I did on that highway-hopping drive across the south-central states and then up the eastern seaboard to Maine. There, crossing into New Brunswick and heading home to my family in eastern Canada, the allure of retirement grew. Not only had the game changed from when I first started—and not for the better—but I was becoming too old for it, or at least worn out by it. All that put me in a mind to finally do what cops I’d worked with over the years had constantly urged me to do: sit down and tell my story.