This photo was taken at the 1994 National Coalition of Motorcyclists annual meeting, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. From the left: Randy, from the Sons of Hawaii MC, Moth Eater from the Pagans MC, Terry the Tramp, Chico from the Dirty Dozen, and an unknown rider from Germany.

TERRY THE TRAMP HAD A GROWING REPUTATION as a hard-line bad-ass. The Vagos were his life, his mission, and his family. In 1988, he turned 41, a treacherous age for any man, a time of questioning, rampant ambition, and personal searching. But Terry didn’t have much time for deep, introspective thought processes and questioning. He was now the international president of a rapidly growing organization of supposed criminals and thugs. Between busts, raids, fights, disputes with other clubs, and his son, he had precious little time for soul searching. Ambition was the order of the day for many clubs and fending off challenges was almost like a full-time job.

Motorcycle clubs faced a turning point. They’d run ragged for a couple of decades, but now they confronted drastic and sometimes life-threatening decisions. The knife-edge existence of the competitive motorcycle outlaw club was sharp. Some one-percenter clubs spread across the country and around the world. Others chose to remain one-chapter organizations. Some clubs chose to challenge themselves to be a part of the one-percenter ranks; others chose to become lighter-weight groups, family clubs, Christian, community, or even touring groups. Some clubs chose to make money illegally and become full-blown criminal organizations: pimps, drug runners, meth cookers—you name it.

Ambition was the order of the day for many clubs and fending off challenges was almost like a full-time job.

Terry’s group resided in the center of the West Coast action. Facing opposite the club was the growing law enforcement footprint, with seriously expanding budgets, actively inflating powers, increased use of technology, and their prosecutors’ scorecards. Thanks to the dictatorial powers given to law enforcement by the RICO Act, the shoe making that footprint was starting to resemble a jackboot.

Law enforcement sought any means to break down a brotherhood, and snitches proved to be the most expedient tool. When law enforcement agencies arrested any club member, they’d immediately try to pressure him into snitching, telling him if he snitched he could avoid serving jail time. It became an absurd and dangerous cycle, and an extremely ineffectual police practice. Only the weak ratted on brothers. The cycle ended when they arrested someone with too much integrity to snitch. Cops always threatened to throw the book at club members, even for the most minor crimes, but if the brothers held up and didn’t snitch, the courts would ultimately take the case out of the hands of law enforcement, and every brother would have his say in front of a judge.

In 1994, a young member of the Vagos, Spike, opened Custom Cycle Creations, a small bike shop in Riverside near the suburb of Rubidoux. He was just a three-year member of the San Fernando Valley Chapter, but he’d grown up in the club world.

“He was the driving force behind the Vagos,” Spike said of Terry. “The club was changing and different types of folks were coming into the club. Terry was the boss and I watched from a distance.”

Spike had a full-time regular job as a Frito Lay fleet mechanic for fourteen years, but he injured himself on the job and collected disability payments, which afforded him additional time to tinker with Harleys in his garage. He was excited at the prospect of running his own shop and helping his brothers.

While setting up his small business in the Rubidoux Industrial Park, he met a middle-aged biker named Flash at U.S. Enterprises, a custom shop in Ontario.

“He was a skinny, dope-fiend looking sort, working in the service department,” Spike recalled. “I needed a part and no one was manning the counter, so I stepped into the service area, and this scrawny guy helped me out.”

When he opened his shop, Spike contacted Flash for parts. The forty-year-old Flash lost his job at the Ontario shop and started to come around more often with deals and bikes for sale. Spike’s shop business grew, and they helped bikers all over the blistering-hot Riverside area. Spike tried to learn from Terry, who had a knack for sizing up strangers.

“He had an aura about him,” Spike said. “He was a cautious man. I wished I had picked up that aspect of Tramp’s forceful character.”

Spike leased out an industrial space in the middle row of shops toward the back of the business park, planted against the Pomona freeway’s protective 30-foot gradient, covered in slick ice plant. He hired Flash to hang fluorescent shop lights and run copper tubing for compressed air to the service lifts. The shop kicked off and business started to flow his way.

“He had an aura about him,” Spike said. “He was a cautious man. I wished I had picked up that aspect of Tramp’s forceful character.”

“He started to come around more and opened up to us,” Spike said. “He told us he was a retired Mongol. I knew he was a drug fiend. We started calling him ‘Snortin’ Norton.’”

Flash, always in a jam, drove a rental car and needed help with the payment or he couldn’t make it to work on time. Spike fronted him the cash. Flash lived in a rundown motel with his drug-addict wife and three young boys.

“They were a freaky team,” Spike said of the destitute couple.

Flash showed up at the motel one afternoon and discovered his ol’ lady jawing with a stranger. He went off on her and slapped her in the parking lot. When one of his sons intervened, he slugged the kid. A witness called 911.

Spike received a desperate call.

“I got busted for assault,” Flash blurted from the Riverside county jail. “Can you bail me out? I gotta get out of here.”

It was a Thursday and the shop wasn’t rolling in bags of coin just yet. Spike was short on cash and couldn’t raise bail money for this scurvy loner, a part-time employee, at the drop of a hat.

“I tried,” Spike said, “but I couldn’t move fast enough.”

Two days later, Flash showed up at the shop and did a massive rail of crank, or speed, on the glass of the shop’s counter display.

“I told ’em I was going to commit suicide if they didn’t let me out of there,” Flash said and went back to work.

“I wish I studied the Tramp more closely,” Spike said. “With Flash there was always a deal that was too good to be true.”

Spike’s business stepped up. More bikes showed up for work or for sale. The deals were too easy and lucrative, and Spike’s bank account expanded.

Flash was being paid $300 a week by the cops and promised $20,000 on completion of a successful investigation.

Suddenly, Flash announced that he was opening his own polishing shop in nearby Riverside off Blaine Road. Just as unpredictably, he showed up with a new U-haul van to deliver bikes and parts to his new facility.

“I’ll never forget the day a Mongol MC member stepped into our showroom,” Spike said. “As soon as he heard Flash’s high-pitched, nasally voice, he eyes lit up. I should have known.”

Flash wasn’t a retired Mongol, but a member who had ripped off his brothers and was unceremoniously kicked out of the club. As it turned out, the fully equipped motorcycle parts polishing shop was adjacent to a fully operational police investigation unit. All the phones in the shop were tapped and cameras were installed throughout the facility, leading next door to a bank of monitors watched by officers. All the components or motorcycles delivered to Flash’s facility were photographed and documented.

Flash was being paid $300 a week by the cops and promised $20,000 on completion of a successful investigation. He was also making bank off the law enforcement-paid-for shop. He was working both sides of the system, searching for hot deals for Spike, his brothers, and members of other clubs in the region. On the other side of the wall, he promised Froge, the lead undercover biker and investigator, a massive assault on the region’s one-percenter outlaw organizations, including the Vagos, Mongols, Hells Angels, and Hessians. Spike was unexpectedly at the forefront.

For months the shifty, scraggly, sunken-eyed speed freak worked the bikers, while promising law enforcement vast, far-reaching arrests into the very core of the outlaw community, including the highest leadership positions. That led straight to Terry the Tramp, the international president of the Vagos.

On a bright and sunny 20th of May, 1996, Spike’s wife, Tammy, stepped out onto the porch of their Moreno Valley home at 6:00 a.m. and stretched before her morning walk around the pristine, upscale neighborhood. A tight, 125-pound, redhead who never saw the light of day without makeup and her hair perfectly positioned over her bright facial features, she briskly rounded the corner, and came face-to-face with members of twenty-one county and state agencies positioned to raid Spike’s home.

“They snatched her up,” Spike said. “They were prepared for an all out fire-fight with me. My wife told them, ‘Relax, just call him. He’ll come out.’”

For months the shifty, scraggly, sunken-eyed speed freak worked the bikers, while promising law enforcement vast, far-reaching arrests into the very core of the outlaw community, including the highest leadership positions.

Flash had told the officers that Spike was primed for a running gun battle from an armed-to-the-teeth fortress full of machine guns and heavy artillery. Instead, they rolled on a comfortable middleclass neighborhood with manicured lawns and decent, frightened citizens. Spike was instructed to remove his shirt and shoes and come out of his house, while his neighbors stood and watched from their adjacent lawns.

Cops from myriad agencies stormed his home and thirty-nine other locations throughout Southern California. On that warm morning, while Spike sat in the back of a blistering hot black and white police unit, additional members of the 400-strong assault force busted and arrested thirty-two of thirty-five suspects in Pasadena, Azusa, Pomona, West Covina, El Monte, Rosemead, Glendora, and Shadow Hills in LA County. Raids also took place in Santa Ana Heights and Yorba Linda in Orange County, where supplementary warrants were served.

“I was on the list,” Terry said. “Spike brought Flash over to my house once, but I wouldn’t let him stay. I didn’t like that punk. He smelled bad.”

The Riverside County DA, Grover Trask, brimmed with pride as the undercover investigation unfolded on a hot Inland Valley day. “We found out how they were doing business,” he said. “We broke the code of silence.”

They tracked the flow of stolen motorcycle parts and insurance scams amounting to $4 million, and were able to indict members of the notorious Vagos, Mongols, Hessians, and Hells Angels affiliates.

At Spike’s shop the cops gathered up a dozen Harleys in various states of reconditioning. Some were reduced to bare frames and they discovered two examples of altered vehicle identification numbers.

According to the LA Times, outlaw motorcyclists all over Southern California were conspiring to steal Harleys or stage thefts to perpetuate insurance fraud. They apparently sold bikes to Japan and used the legitimate numbers again on stolen domestic models. The sealed indictment alleged thirty-five counts of stolen property, fifteen counts of altering numbers, three counts of assault with a deadly weapon, and one count each of robbery, kidnapping, and torture. The shit hit the fan, coupled with allegations of operating chop shops and distributing methamphetamine.

Terry was an ace in the hole for Flash and Froge, as they promoted their crime spree effort internally.

“You’ve got to nail Tramp,” Froge told the slippery snitch. If they could take down the international president of one of the most notorious clubs in the nation, they would become heroes in the law enforcement community.

“You’ve got to nail Tramp,” Froge told the slippery snitch.

The morning of the bust a call came from his son, Terry the Wall, from his home. “The cops were here, Dad,” he said. “They’re on their way to your shop.”

Terry knew exactly what was coming down, but he thought it would be best for him and anyone involved in the raid if he could stay on the streets and deal with the legal ramifications. He scrambled to lock the small shop and jumped into his El Camino. He knew his shop was clean, but he couldn’t vouch for every used part stashed in the back.

As he scrambled for the pickup out front, he could hear the sirens screaming in the distance. Undercover cars slammed onto his street as he peeled out of sight. Riverside agents stormed his shop, waving a warrant listing eighty charges for the leader of the Vagos, but they didn’t have warrants to search his shop. That didn’t stop them. They pried open the door, but after a complete search of his facility by dozens of officers, only two insignificant motorcycle components, a front end and a transmission, were taken into evidence.

Terry stayed on the streets for two weeks, working with bail bondsmen and attorneys. Finally, with his bail bondsman and attorney at his side, he turned himself in. While waiting for court, Terry was put in a holding tank in the Riverside County jail. Only one other individual shared the cell. The scrawny kid with long hair and shifty eyes moved as far from Terry as he could. The punk spotted Spike in the adjacent cell and signaled for him to come over.

“You’ve got to get me out of this cell,” he said to Spike, visibly trembling. “If [Terry] finds out I’m Flash’s cousin, I’m done for.”

There wasn’t much Spike could do, but the young man’s fearful eyes told him how unrelenting Flash’s snitch efforts had become. He had busted his own relatives.

Spike shook his head and leaned close to the bars. “Just keep your mouth shut.”

As he scrambled for the pickup out front, he could hear the sirens screaming in the distance. Undercover cars slammed onto his street as he peeled out of sight.

Terry, the IP of the Vagos, was unceremoniously shackled and escorted into court. The courtroom was packed with cops. His photo was flashed in the cold hall, along with photographs of Sonny Barger. They presented Terry as if he was the John Gotti of the outlaw motorcycle world.

“My attorney, Terrence P. Dobins, stuck with me as they read the indictments, and argued on my behalf as the judge set the bail at $2 million,” Terry said.

“The original DA was a smart ass,” Terry said. “I called her a bitch. She got fired and the judge was moved to another court before the case resumed.”

Terry began a lengthy effort to raise funds for his own defense. The club supplied $6,000 of the $300,000 he was forced to muster for the defense of more than 186 felony counts. Sixteen bank accounts were frozen and two prosecutors were assigned to the follow-up investigation.

Once all the shit went down and Terry was behind bars, the pressure was on. Families fell apart. Club members who didn’t have the heart for this level of scrutiny headed for the hills. During the investigation, the City of Los Angeles wrote a letter to the Riverside investigators. “We spent $1.5 million investigating Terry Orendorff,” the letter read. “We never found anything.”

“We hoped all forty defendants would hang together and demand a jury trial,” Spike said. “The [DA’s] case was weak, and if we all stormed the courtroom with our attorneys, we had a serious shot.”

The district attorney’s office, headed by Mark McDonald, scrambled to make deals by offering probation to some of the lesser-charged individuals. Mark eventually brought about his own undoing. He left the district attorney’s office and opened a private practice, ultimately defending Vagos members.

“I suspected that some guys were going to flip to save their asses,” said Spike.

As probation deals surfaced and some defendants began to walk, Flash panicked. Between his lies and promised arrests, and the DA’s assurance to put everyone away for a long time behind Flash’s allegations, he felt safe until he watched Vagos walk out of the courthouse, free.

He stormed the DA’s office and started to picket the Riverside courthouse sidewalk with a makeshift plaque, hoping to draw media attention.

“He used his wife and kids,” Terry said. “They were scared to death. Even the kids carried makeshift placards on wooden poles outside the courtroom on the hot summer Riverside sidewalk.”

Spike’s attorney noticed the commotion in the halls and called their investigators, two former LA cops. They swept Flash up and stuck him in a conference room, where they questioned him for four hours and taped every minute. Flash was the ultimate lowlife. He immediately turned on the cops and spilled his guts about the false evidence, overworked charges, and bad deals.

The information was surreptitiously leaked to the DA’s office and the case rapidly disintegrated. Spike was able to take the unprovoked bullshit rap off his wife, and they cut her loose. His son was given a mere two years probation.

“I loaned him $1,000 to bail his son out,” Terry said.

“We don’t know where he is,” Terry said, “and we don’t care.”

Terry’s case was dropped, and Spike’s case was reduced from twenty-eight years to six. Forced to take a chop-shop charge, Spike was able to grab any charge with Terry’s name on it. “I had to do whatever I could for the leader of the club,” Spike said. Out of thirty-five defendants, only three went to prison, and one of those escaped to Canada. Just two of the convicted men were Vagos, and one was a Mongol. Flash and his wife and kids were transferred to Reno and sequestered into witness protection programs, their names changed. They lived there until they were spotted and Flash freaked again.

Terry and Spike, who took the fall in the 1990s behind the snitch Flash and investigator Froge’s bullshit case against the Vagos and various Southern California clubs. Millions of dollars were spent on the case and thousands of man-hours wasted. Two men went to jail, and another escaped to Canada.

Not that he had anything to worry about. “We don’t know where he is,” Terry said, “and we don’t care.”

Snitches like Flash live in terror, a prison of their own making, trying to hide from the men they tried to destroy for personal gain, or to avoid further time behind bars. There is nowhere to hide when fear consumes a man’s soul.

Spike’s bail was dropped from $2 million to $250,000 during the case, and he bailed out of Riverside County. He dealt with the case for seven months then returned to Riverside for sentencing.

He was bussed to Tehachapi for processing and ultimately to Chuckawalla State Prison in Blythe, California, at the desert border with Arizona on Interstate 10 and highway 95. Blythe was synonymous with “bleak,” in the middle of nowhere California in the Colorado section of the Sonora Desert. During the wettest Blythe year in a century, the dreary area received just over 8.7 inches of rain in 1951. In 1956, it rained only 0.18 inches for a blistering drought.

He was bussed to Tehachapi for processing and ultimately to Chuckawalla State Prison in Blythe, California, at the desert border with Arizona on Interstate 10 and highway 95.

Spike’s prison bus rolled off the freeway and he witnessed his last California greenery before the desert sands of Arizona, and Yuma, 95 miles to the south. It was as dry as a popcorn fart as the bus rumbled west of Blythe in unincorporated Riverside County toward the reasonably new, level II, medium-security prison facility opened in 1988. It covered 1,720 acres, and although it was designed to house 1,738 prisoners it was already overpopulated. Primary housing consisted of eleven open dormitory-styled buildings on four main yards.

General population inmates in the five-yard facility were allowed to enter and leave their living quarters as they wished, except at night, during count times, or during lockdown procedures.

Spike was assigned to the level II secure yard and told the gang coordinator and his counselor, “I want to make good use of my time.” They referred him to the warden’s committee, but for his first year he received only tension from the staff because they deemed him part of a disruptive group. “They expected problems from me,” Spike said.

He read and studied for his GED exam. Once that was behind him, he stepped up again and asked to work with kids. Doors gradually opened and he was approved for level I by the warden’s committee and given the opportunity to counsel kids. Then through his own efforts to be progressive, he was given the chance to work at the fire station and study for various levels of fire service. He received his Fire 1 certification, and then Fire 2 level training.

The brick Chuckawalla Fire Department building resided outside the prison gates. Three fire engineers and the Chuckawalla fire chief managed the facility with twelve prison interns.

“It was the best job on the post,” Spike said. “If you fucked up there, you were done.”

The firehouse duties included all prison building fires, and assisting county units with runs to the freeway to pull folks from burning cars.

Later in life while counseling his daughter, Spike told her, “I always wanted to be a fireman. That was my plan until your mother got pregnant at seventeen, and I was forced to go to work. It wasn’t until I was imprisoned that I had the opportunity to reach my goal.”

“Tramp would be there for me,” Spike said. “He would help me get a job, get settled, and although I was on parole, I would still be supported by the Vagos.”

It was too late for Spike, though. He was forty-four and too old to apply at any fire department, his criminal record notwithstanding.

“I met one lifer inside who told me something that always stuck,” Spike said. “He told me not to make this place a revolving door. I took that to heart.”

As he departed the prison in 2001 with his wife and his son at his side, he immediately noticed the lack of respect by citizens on the streets.

“I couldn’t wait for a good meal.” As he rolled into a Coco’s restaurant, just off the 10 Interstate, he immediately observed the lack of consideration offered by youngsters.

“Everything was about respect in prison,” Spike said. “You didn’t get up from the dinner table unless you excused yourself. It was all about courtesy and reverence.”

As he ordered his first meal of freedom, Spike was certain about one aspect of his new life on the outside.

“Tramp would be there for me,” Spike said. “He would help me get a job, get settled, and although I was on parole, I would still be supported by the Vagos.”

“I would do anything I could to help a brother out,” Terry said.