The Dirty Dozen was for decades the only one percenter club in Arizona. Times have changed, and in the 1980s, the Vagos established a charter in Lake Havasu. Gary, the gun dealer, was an upstanding Vago member of the Havasu Charter.

DRUGS AND WOMEN START WARS BETWEEN CLUBS,” Terry said. “I tried to keep the club name good, but drugs got in the way, and every time they came into play there were problems.”

Tension peaked whenever rival clubs were thrust into the same venue. In 2001, a fight broke out in an Orange County Fairgrounds swap meet. The melee started at 8:15 in the evening when the wrong Hells Angels came in contact with members of the Vagos.

“As combatants grabbed merchandise off vendors’ tables and began hitting each other, others joined the brawl, which soon involved dozens more people,” reported Jessica Garrison in her Los Angeles Times article.

The melee started at 8:15 in the evening when the wrong Hells Angels came in contact with members of the Vagos.

Two elements came into play on that overcast Southern California day. During the 1980s, intimidation was a key factor within the club world. A straight citizen who rode a motorcycle wasn’t safe around a group of one-percenters. That left a large population of citizens out in the cold. Many held grudges, fear, and distrust for club guys, while others tried to align themselves with a club they believed would stand up to a bully club. The crowd was split at the Orange County fairgrounds under the pre-fab roof and bright fluorescent lights.

Jon Erickson attended the swap meet to help a friend who was a vendor. “There was a fight between Vagos and Hells Angels, between everybody, dude. I saw a lot of people getting hit with handlebars, gas tanks. There was blood everywhere.”

His friend, Eric Maurer, said he was at his booth when he heard a commotion. “Then I saw a crowd of four people expand exponentially. There were sixty or seventy people in the melee. I saw people getting hit around the head with steel bars. One man got hit square in the center of his skull. I heard it hit his head; then his head went ‘Whack!’ on the cement deck.”

After just five minutes, the fight broke up, Maurer said, and there was a headlong rush for the exits. Dozens of officers from the Costa Mesa, Irvine, Huntington Beach, and Newport Beach police departments responded, along with Orange County Sheriff’s Department personnel and several ambulances and fire engines. Authorities closed the swap meet and police officers in helmets and facemasks stood in formation around the perimeter.

Sheriff’s Lt. Dennis DeMaio said a man was arrested on suspicion of assaulting a police officer. His name was not released. Vendors waited anxiously to reclaim their merchandise, abandoned in the guarded structure while police cleared the area. Sheriff’s officials said two injured people were treated at the scene and released.

“It’s easy to start a war,” Terry said, “but they’re a bitch to stop, especially if someone dies in the conflict.”

The Confederation of Clubs afforded clubs the opportunity to discuss issues in a neutral zone. It also afforded them a venue to share their renegade experiences. They rapidly saw that all club brothers faced similar issues, under similar circumstances. The Confederation created a calming effect.

Unfortunately, expansion pushed the notion of all brothers getting along in a different, acrimonious direction. Another drawback to expansion was cocked and loaded into a large-caliber weapon of conflict. Two clubs could commingle in California, but split skulls on the East Coast.

Steve, from the Jokers in Hawaii, became the boss of the Hawaiian Vagos. In 2004, he lost a leg in an island motorcycle accident. Terry flew to Hawaii and spent days beside Steve’s hospital bed. Steve was never the same.

“He became bitter,” Terry said. “When he lost his leg, he lost his heart.”

While Terry met with potential members in Utah, Oregon, and Nevada, not all new charters survived.

“We tried in North Carolina,” Terry said, “But I was forced to fly out and bring all the patches back.”

Some charters grew and flourished; others stumbled and fell.

“I had to make it clear that once they had a charter, they had to manage all aspects,” Terry said. “I couldn’t fly out every time someone skinned a knee.”

“It’s easy to start a war, ”Terry said, “but they’re a bitch to stop, especially if someone dies in the conflict.”

Some brothers became charter missionaries. There was Rattles in Utah, and C.J., who set up Vegas, Carson City, and Reno. And Spike helped form additional chapters in Southern California.

“Spike set up the South Side Chapter,” Terry said. “He helped keep some faltering charters together. He was good at dealing with internal club politics and other clubs.”

The club became more powerful and nationally recognized, and Terry was at the top of the rock. “So lots of folks shot arrows at me,” he said.

While chapters grew, the feds desperately worked with snitches to bring down the Vago organization. Federal and state authorities concluded a two-year investigation in 2002, when they arrested twelve members in four counties on suspicion of drug and weapons charges.

A dozen members were arrested out of more than 200 in Southern California. The investigation was wrapped around a snitch member of the Vagos named Hammer. He was six-foot one-inch tall, with short black hair and a Fu Manchu mustache.

“He was charismatic and well-liked,” Terry said of the snitch, “but he was a straight rat.”

The club became more powerful and nationally recognized, and Terry was at the top of the rock. “So lots of folks shot arrows at me, ”he said.

Hammer was busted in Redondo Beach for failing to pay a prostitute. He couldn’t face the time for the crime and turned on his brothers.

“I noticed that as soon as he was cut loose from his last beef, he flew around the country like a free man,” Terry said. “He was supposedly on parole. It didn’t add up. I immediately steered clear of him. He started to smell like a rat.”

Hammer flew to Hawaii and tried to hang out with the club while sporting a video camera.

“He said it was cool, since he was visiting a cousin,” Terry said.

As it turned, out the so-called cousin was his police connection. He tried to purchase weapons on the islands and capture video footage of members at parties.

“I took the camera away from him,” Terry said, “and we kicked him off the island.”

Hammer secretly cooperated with authorities, and used government money to buy illegal firearms and drugs, according to Jeffrey Ferguson, an Orange County deputy district attorney. The deputy DA said Hammer provided authorities with unusual insight into the club’s plans to traffic methamphetamine and firearms.

Hammer secretly cooperated with authorities, and used government money to buy illegal firearms and drugs, according to Jeffrey Ferguson, an Orange County deputy district attorney.

Authorities paid Hammer to snitch on his brothers, make up crimes, and glorify minor offenses for his own financial gain.

“He was really tired of going to prison and wanted to get out of the life,” Ferguson said.

“That’s bullshit,” Terry retorted. “He did the crime and didn’t have the balls to do the time.”

Federal officials obtained grand jury indictments and state criminal complaints against twelve people. Then groups of law enforcement officers fanned out across Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties on June 18 to serve federal and state arrest warrants on the suspects.

“Among those arrested were officers of several Vagos chapters,” said Letice Baker, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Teams of cops seized eighty-five firearms and an unspecified quantity of narcotics, Baker said. Several agencies were involved, including the state Department of Justice, the ATF, the Orange County district attorney’s office, Santa Ana police, and Los Angeles and San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Departments.

Officials identified two suspects, Dennis Lee “Bonehead” Watlington, fifty-nine, of Rialto and Richard Garcia Jr., forty-three, of Westminster, both Vagos. They were held at the Orange County Jail on $500,000 bail.

Watlington was charged with conspiring to sell an illegal assault rifle and belonging to a criminal street gang. By this time law enforcement officials had discovered that they could generate hostility toward clubs by calling them gangs, thus associating them with the ethnic street gangs that came to prominence in urban areas in the 1970s and 1980s and harnessing racist sentiments in the general population to use against members of motorcycle clubs.

“That’s bullshit, ”Terry retorted. “He did the crime and didn’t have the balls to do the time.”

The term “gang” itself constitutes sort of a garbage category and has no agreed-upon meaning, even among the most prudent researchers of the topic. Cities, states and countries all have differing views on what constitutes a gang. In 1988 the state of California defined a criminal street gang as any organization, association, or group of three or more persons, whether formal or informal, which (1) has continuity of purpose, (2) seeks a group identity, and (3) has members who individually or collectively engage in or have engaged in a pattern of criminal activity. This awkwardly written, vague, and redundant definition is really more of a non-definition because it offers an extremely simplified view of a gang as being “criminal,” regardless of whether or not any crimes are committed. According to this definition, any youth who participates in a gang can be labeled as a “criminal” regardless of their individual activity or role. Prosecutors have been able to exploit the flaw in the definition to their benefit by applying gang-related “enhancements” that can transform a simple misdemeanor offense into a felony that carries heavier penalties, including prison time.

In Watlington’s case the state’s nonsensical definition of a “criminal gang” had very real consequences; because he was convicted of assaulting a sheriff’s deputy in Los Angeles County in 1999, he faced more than twenty years in prison.

“He got seventeen years, because his son testified against him,” Terry said. “He was basically tried for being a felon with a gun. Another bullshit charge.”

Garcia was accused of selling an automatic weapon and a sawed-off shotgun, Ferguson said.

He faced more than twenty years in prison if convicted, but he got off. It turned into another expensive, hollow case, but the law enforcement community was forced to justify their big-buck budgets, and expanding one-percenter clubs were easy targets.

“I warned everyone about Hammer,” Terry said, “but he was considered a good shit within the club.”

Hammer took his life with an overdose of drugs after he was moved out of state in the witness protection program.

Hammer took his life with an overdose of drugs after he was moved out of state in the witness protection program.

The more the Vagos grew, the more heat the green machine pulled from all corners of law enforcement. In 2006, after two charters were established in Utah, one in Oregon, two in Nevada, four in Hawaii, and after the nationally recognized club survived three turbulent decades, two snitches from within tried once more to take the Vagos down. This time, 750 law enforcement officials conducted sweeps in five Southern California counties. According to the LA Times, they intended to break the Vagos’ back.

“It was a case of Rats on Rats,” Terry said.

The newspaper reported that the Vagos were established in the 1960s to deal drugs and weapons, which was news to Terry and the other long-time members, but such nonsense sold papers and helped law-enforcement efforts. Some twenty-two bikers were arrested in LA, San Bernardino, Riverside, Ventura, and Orange counties, after three years of investigation using a Hemet chapter member of the Vagos, and Charles, a Victorville member, as informants.

Once more authorities thought they could curtail the Vagos’s extensive operations. According to reports from high-paid law enforcement authorities, the counterculture movement was actually a highly sophisticated criminal enterprise with a vast hand in the methamphetamine trade.

“Today is just the beginning,” said Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona. “The Hells Angels, the Vagos . . . they are not clubs. The reality is that they’re supporting terrorism.”

In post-9/11 America, a period during which the country effectively lost its collective mind and saw terrorists hiding behind every shrub, it was only a matter of time before law enforcement began exploiting the fear of terrorism in its persecution of clubs like the Vagos.

According to the LA Times, Vagos leaders had long denied having any ties to criminal activity. The Vagos website stated that the group was formed as a “tight brotherhood to survive the wars between the rival clubs and the constant harassment of the police.” The Internet message went on to say, “Vagos comes from the Spanish language meaning ‘traveling gypsy’ or ‘a streetwise person that’s always up to something.’”

By 2006, the Vagos membership swelled to more than 300 members in California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and Mexico.

Law enforcement boasted that the Vagos investigation was among the largest coordinated law enforcement probes ever conducted in the region. They arrested seven chapter presidents, one vice president, one secretary, one treasurer, and seven sergeants-at-arms. Officials said they seized ninety-five illegal firearms, various illegal drugs including methamphetamine, $6,000 in cash, and two stolen motorcycles. And of course, they threatened to turn the investigation into a federal racketeering case. It was incredible, the level of bullshit and legalese promulgated against a bunch of hard-riding bikers. Their bandolier of legal ammunition grew as racketeering (RICO) and street gang laws were used to curtail club growth.

Since the 1980s many states had adopted legislation and laws specifically drafted to combat street gangs and to make it easier to prosecute their offenses, according to StreetGang.com. California led the nation in laws written to prosecute gangs, but many other states initiated their own laws.

Then after 9/11, terrorism laws were enacted to enhance law enforcement’s stranglehold on society. But nothing stopped the Vagos’s growth. In post-9/11 America, a period during which the country effectively lost its collective mind and saw terrorists hiding behind every shrub, it was only a matter of time before law enforcement began exploiting the fear of terrorism in its persecution of clubs like the Vagos. The Homeland Security Act and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security gave unscrupulous law enforcement agencies an entirely new palette of laws to abuse in this pursuit.

Given the zeal with which law enforcement has pursued the Vagos over the past four decades, and the fact that all these investigations over all these years have only produced a handful of relatively low-level convictions, one has to wonder why the establishment is so threatened by clubs like the Vagos. German philosopher Max Weber might have provided an answer to that. Weber defined a nation state as an entity that maintained and exercised a monopoly on violence. In other words, power resides in the hands of those with the authority to hurt and kill, that is, those who control an army. In the United States that army takes the form of law enforcement agencies.

Clubs like the Hells Angels, the Vagos, and the Bandidos represent a direct threat to the state’s monopoly on the use of violence because they are, in many ways, organized armies not controlled by the state. Thus they are a threat to the state, whether they are cooking meth and running prostitution operations or giving blood and hosting toy runs. The threat from a motorcycle club is not the club’s criminal activity; the threat from a motorcycle club is the club’s very existence. Because of this, the state will hound a motorcycle club relentlessly, even if the only crimes committed are committed by the state itself in the act of persecuting the club.

This is not to say that all clubs, including the Vagos, are composed of saintly choir boys, because they’re not. Rather, the point is that it doesn’t really matter what a club does because the state perceives a motorcycle club as a threat just because it exists. If clubs are growing, the perceived threat is growing. And in the early 2000s, the Vagos was a growing club. “The more we grew, the more bullets I had to dodge,” Terry said.

Terry’s notorious stepbrother, Eddie, a.k.a. Parts. Parts was as tough as they come, but finally succumbed to cancer and died in 2006. He always had Terry’s back.

The club might have been growing, but the circle of people Terry could trust was shrinking. Perhaps the biggest loss was the death of his stepbrother Parts, who died of cancer in 2006. Parts was the true gangster in the family. He fought anyone and everyone, dealt drugs, moved stolen goods, and abused women.

“He didn’t take shit from anyone,” Terry said. “He’d listen for a minute, but when you thought it was time for a fight, he was already throwing punches.”

Parts was the true gangster in the family. He fought anyone and everyone, dealt drugs, moved stolen goods, and abused women.

The man had many character flaws, but there was a straight-up aspect to Parts’s personality. He was true and honest. He didn’t fight without reason or provocation. He was pure Vago and never backed down from anyone. All the clubs respected him.

“He was my closest brother while I was in prison,” Silver said.

He ate women up and spit them out. “I never understood it,” Terry said. “He would smack one around and she’d come crawling back.” A broad magnet, he was a good-looking, longhaired, swaggering brunette biker. He always had four or five strippers working for him, bringing home the tips.

“Parts was the first Vago I ever met,” Silver said. “He embodied the Vagos and got me into the club under age. He was laid back, but had an explosive temper. I never saw him drunk or loaded.”

Terry and Eddie, or Parts, were the same height, but Parts was thinner, yet he was still stocky. He worked out with weights constantly. But at sixty the big C hit him in the lungs, even though he had quit smoking five years earlier and never had smoked as much as Terry. Cancer was the first and only nemesis to kick his ass. It riddled him quickly and he spent the last week of his life at Terry’s home. He wasted away.

“He was a proud man,” Silver said. “He had the best-looking women, so when he started to fade, he didn’t want to see anyone.”

One of his real sisters, Dorothy, ran rest homes, and offered to help, so Terry hauled his dying brother back to his Lake Havasu home to meet his RN sister for his final days. He ran at life hard until the end, and then death came without warning and kicked his ass.

Because the Vagos were classified as a criminal street gang, judges could add enhanced penalties if members were convicted.

The 2006 law enforcement operation was dubbed “22-Green,” because Vagos gang members wore the number 22 on their vests, representing V, the 22nd letter of the alphabet, and green was the gang’s color.

In an effort to justify the investigation, authorities alleged that the Vagos gang also had a long history of involvement in the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine, as well as other controlled substances. They were believed to be responsible for selling drugs in parks in San Bernardino County, officials said.

Because the Vagos were classified as a criminal street gang, judges could add enhanced penalties if members were convicted.

Terry was in the middle of the fracas, between clubs champing at the bit to battle it out and law enforcement agencies grappling for any excuse to enact tougher penalties, build larger prisons, hire vast networks of agents, and expand their powers.

Among those whose homes were searched that notorious Thursday was Terry the Tramp’s residence in the high desert town of Hesperia. Although he was not arrested, Terry and other club leaders remained subject to future federal racketeering charges, based on the gang’s alleged involvement in a July 2004 killing in Lucerne Valley and an attempted murder in Hesperia, authorities said.

Those arrested included chapter presidents Scott “Psycho” Sikoff of Apple Valley, Vincent Mariano of Victorville, Nels “Swede” Bloom of Romoland, “Big” Roy Compton III of San Jacinto, Lino “Umpire” Garcia of Oxnard, and sergeant at arms Michael “Chainsaw” Izykowski of Huntington Beach.

“We expect some of the gang leadership to cooperate with us,” said Thomas Mangan, spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “This is the just the tip of the iceberg.”

As usual, a bunch of members were arrested, but only a couple of Vagos were actually convicted. Still, the war between the Man and the Vagos raged on. What once were fist-fighting, beer-chugging bikers became high-crime, street terrorists running vast drug networks, according to authorities begging the government for more funds, enlarged staffs, and more control. Terry was in the middle of the fracas, between clubs champing at the bit to battle it out and law enforcement agencies grappling for any excuse to enact tougher penalties, build larger prisons, hire vast networks of agents, and expand their powers.

Terry had quit drinking, but he chain-smoked and drank coffee like a man on death row. His hair thinned but his dedication to the club never faltered. He would do anything to prevent a war or allow drugs to pull the Vagos down. Yet as the club grew, so did factions within the organization, factions that didn’t have Terry’s best interests at heart. Most men were afraid of the fireplug with the dead-straight gaze. He melted most men’s bravado, and set any bullshit story straight.