An ex-member who was kicked out for being hooked on drugs. Note the bottom rocker. Shortly after this photo was taken in 1999, the Vagos switched to California bottom rockers, once an exclusive with the Hells Angels in California.
TERRY AND THE VAGOS RIPPED THROUGH the first five years of the new millennium like their tires were on fire. Terry tried to keep drug dealing away from the club, but many brothers wrapped themselves in the outlaw lifestyle with meth dealing, marijuana, and coke. Most one-percenter organizations banned opiates, and some forced addicted members to the streets. Terry gave no quarter for drug dealing, especially around his own home.
“I met a girl who had recently left her husband,” Terry said. “I got her a place to live and co-signed for a car.” Lilly was a hot, five-foot seven-inch cowgirl on the weekends and all business during the week. “She had bright blue eyes and long, straight, jet-black hair,” Terry said, “always fixed it just right.”
Terry came home to his little string of lath-and-plaster cottages in El Monte one night to find Lilly with an ex. “I was cool with whoever came around, but he wanted to leave three pounds of speed in her unit, and I wasn’t having it.”
The guy said it was only for a quick hour and persisted. “I said that hour could cost me twenty years,” Terry said, and told him to take his shit and leave.
Lilly went ballistic. She was a bright star in public and a bitch in private. Terry moved to be nearer to her in Victorville in 2000, but the run from his shop in Los Angeles to the desert was daunting.
The notion to move to no-man’s land on the edge of the Mojave Desert was alluring. He owned eight dogs and the thought of an acre of open land away from the city, the cops, and the bullshit enticed him away from the city and the heart of the Vago empire.
From a club-politics prospective, the move was not in his best interests. His new, single-story ranch home behind the town of Hesperia sat back off Sultana road, behind privacy-coated chain-link fence in the blistering desert sun. He shut his shop down, escaped Lilly’s wrath, and started to date the real estate agent who sold him his desert hideout.
There was no end to the vagabond treachery, or the conniving police lurking behind long-distance lenses and sound-amplifying devices, attempting to capture the green renegades spreading around the southland.
Janet, also from Hesperia and recently divorced, owned a crane company, and ran a real estate brokerage. She was sharp as a new Gillette razor blade, and that precision edge came with a dangerous allure. As Terry escaped the constant, day-today one-percenter turmoil in the asphalt jungle of 12 million for the rural suburbs, he hoped the brothers in green had his back. He had been at the helm since 1986, and his confidence grew with each legal run-in, with charter expansion, and with the confidence-building vote by the officers to make him IP forever. Plus stepping back from the front line allowed any anti-Tramp faction to fester, like mold on a ripening peach.
There was no end to the vagabond treachery, or the conniving police lurking behind long-distance lenses and sound-amplifying devices, attempting to capture the green renegades spreading around the southland. Authorities tried to pin murder on the Vagos when a Lytle Creek man disappeared. When investigators searched the home of John Edward Rintalan, fifty-four, they discovered a considerable amount of human blood. Three weeks after Rintalan was reported missing, on April 3, 2007, his body was discovered, dumped on a roadway near Phelan, California, just down a shrubbery-covered bluff from the home of a Vago. Officials believed the murder was connected to the gang.
“In reality,” Terry said, “It was another trumped-up charge against the Vagos. The rumor was that the chick shot her landlord. According the the newspaper reports, she shot the guy and thought she killed him.” Apparently they’d wrapped him with duct-tape and dumped the man, still alive, in a ditch. “He suffocated.”
Federal agents arrested John “Pelone” Loza, fifty-eight, after being tipped off. He worked in a traveling carnival and his wife, Jeanne, was picked up in Lake Havasu, Arizona.
Terry dodged most bullets, although a real one still resided near his spine. He splintered most political arrows, but a new twist emerged. Could he dodge every indictment, every political scheme? His home on the edge of the desert was still his son’s residence, along with a couple of other loyal brothers. The single-story, white, ranch-style home with the tile roof was clean. The interior was simply adorned, with western paintings, Vagos memorabilia, and John Wayne prints. A calendar of black-and-white John Wayne movie stills was tacked to the stucco wall above the kitchen telephone. A chunk of burlwood hung in the dining room with a tribute to his brother Parts resined to the thick grain.
Terry and the Duke were similar in many respects. They were hard-riding, hard-fighting, no-bullshit sonsabitches. They didn’t pull punches with fists or words. Like Wayne, Terry was boot-tough and rattlesnake-mean.
Over the years, after experiencing numerous searches by various law enforcement agencies, Terry learned not to keep any Vagos artifacts, clippings, or photographs near his home. During his thirty years as a member and a leader, he had no warrants and no convictions, yet the law was constantly after his ass, viewing him as the evil perpetrator of anything green that screamed through the night to raise hell on a glistening chopper. He didn’t even drink, except for a constantly steaming cup of coffee, which kept him brewing like boiling oil.
Terry was about to face several final challenges. Had he rolled the green dice too many times, trusted the wrong brothers, and pounded his chest too hard in front of the wrong factions? Or were times changing, and younger guns reaching for the green reigns? Would he become a Vago scapegoat, a target once again, or the prey of evil club factions?
Hemet, California, a sleepy little town at the foot of the mountains leading to San Jacinto and Idyllwild, is a touristy, low-elevation mountain community, home to hippies and tree huggers. Hemet was founded in 1887 and quickly became a retirement community just fifty miles southeast of the Los Angeles City squalor. But as the first decade of the new century closed in 2010, it became the next city to attack the Vagos, after four city code-enforcement trucks were burned to the ground in the parking lot of the Hemet City Hall.
“Hemet was never good to Vagos,” Terry said.
Officials immediately suspected the growing green machine in their town. There had been three additional attacks on the Hemet-San Jacinto Gang Task Force before December, 2010. During the first surreptitious strike, someone scaled the roof of the undercover gang headquarters and redirected an open natural gas pipeline inside, filling the building with fumes. A single spark would have leveled the building with a massive explosion. In February, a homemade zip gun was planted in the iron gate of the task force parking lot. It was set to go off when the gate was opened, and when it did, it just missed a gang task force officer. Next an officer discovered a dangerous device affixed to his unmarked vehicle. A local gang was retaliating because of an enforcement sweep. Then an anonymous caller dialed 911 and threatened an attack on a police car in two days if the investigation was not halted.
“We are assuming, because of the timing, that this is related to the other three attacks on our gang task force,” said Lt. Duane Wisehart, who was filmed standing near the charred crime scene off of busy Florida Avenue, just two blocks from the Hemet Police Station. “We are looking mostly at gangs as suspects, because our task force is being targeted.”
Somebody torched the truck engines around 11:30 p.m. A man spotted nearby was questioned and released. Detectives quickly reviewed video surveillance camera tapes.
Hemet police chief Richard Dana was afraid to let his team investigate the crime scene during the twilight hours.
“Every day, we worry about what’s next,” Wisehart said.
Attorney General Jerry Brown visited the Hemet area with Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco and offered a $200,000 reward for the capture of the culprits. Brown called it, “urban terrorism.”
The day before Brown’s visit, officials in Riverside County, Utah, Arizona, and Nevada launched a massive crackdown on the Vagos, which had a chapter in Hemet and a supposed history of violence toward police. They arrested thirty members from Riverside County on drug and weapons charges.
Pacheco painted the Vagos as a 2,000-strong, evil gang, and said the sleepy town of Hemet was “Ground Zero.”
Hemet police chief Richard Dana was afraid to let his team investigate the crime scene during the twilight hours. “I wasn’t going to leave my men out there alone,” he said. “Maybe this was an attempt to get them out in the open and attack again.”
Down the street from the crime scene, new barricades and barbed wire were strung around the gang task-force facility. The city of Hemet quickly spent an additional $155,000 on barricades and fences. It took on the appearance of a fortress. The ATF and FBI were called to investigate, along with explosive-sniffing dogs.
The next day, blast-proof glass was installed in the Hemet Police Department windows, and roadblocks were set up around the facility. Officers monitored surveillance cameras 24/7. Overnight, Hemet became a war zone.
For more than five decades, Hemet had been considered a sleepy retirement community. Dairy cows roamed vast, rolling fields. Gradually large sprawling farms and ranch homes surrounded by stately pepper and oak shade trees were mowed down to make way for cookie-cutter, stucco tract homes and lackluster strip malls. Young families, looking to escape the city and live cheaply, flocked to the base of the San Jacinto Mountains. But members from 100 different clubs and gangs from Los Angeles and Moreno Valley also moved into Hemet.
One month local law enforcement arrested thirty-three Vagos in their paranoid move to find the perpetrators of the attacks against their gang task force. The next month they arrested another twenty-three, searched thirty-five locations in the vicinity, and seized sixteen weapons. Riverside County District Attorney Rod Pacheco said in an interview that the Vagos were “an extreme threat to law enforcement.”
During one of these Hemet-related raids in Desert Hot Springs, a SWAT team raided a dentist’s office during working hours. “The office was full of patients when they stormed in,” Terry said. The dentist was a member of the Vagos, and he immediately sued the agency behind the raid.
A week after the crackdown against club members, less than half of the members arrested had been formally charged. Joseph Yanny, a Vagos attorney from Beverly Hills, told the LA Times that none of the folks arrested were Vagos.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is nothing but politics,” Yanny said. “They know none of the people arrested were guilty of anything.”
The same story ran four times in the Los Angeles Times, with the same accusations against the Vagos regarding the same low-brow attacks against the Gang Task Force. It was as if the media and city officials were on a witch hunt, or were trying to drum up support for a larger police presence, because they had no clue as to who the actual attackers were.
Hemet city officials turned up the heat on the Vagos. They genuinely believed that the club was out to kill them and they lived in abject fear for their lives. Experts and the media exploited the minor attacks, hyperbolizing them into a study of white supremacists with shaved heads, tattoos, combat boots, and fatigues moving into the fertile ground around Hemet.
“There is a significant concentration of hate groups in the Inland Empire, unlike anywhere else in the nation, from the National Socialist Movement to the Hammerskins to the Comrades of our Racist Struggle,” said Brian Levin, the director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino. Hemet city authorities were so afraid, they would only speak to the press anonymously.
The paranoid delusions the officials had regarding the Vagos couldn’t have been more misplaced. The Vagos might have behaved in ways that would generate legitimate complaints at times, but they were not a hate group. The Vagos didn’t hate anyone. They just hated being fucked with.
Hemet arrested two men in connection with the war on local authorities. As it turned out, Nicholas John Smitt, forty, of Hemet, was pissed for being busted for cultivating marijuana, and turned on the cops. Smitt had nothing to do with gangs or motorcycle clubs; he was simply a dope smoker who didn’t like his crop of weed being fucked with.
They also arrested Steven Hansen, thirty-six, a convicted arsonist, in nearby Homeland. He was taken into custody on a parole violation for weapons possession, but he wasn’t booked on any connection to the police department attacks.
“The community is relieved,” said Hemet Mayor Eric McBride. “They wanted to see closure on this, and now we have some progress.”
After arresting more than fifty gang-related affiliates for nothing, after smashing doors down and harassing bikers, Hemet authorities discovered that one individual, Smitt, had organized seven attacks, including three arson attacks.
Ultimately, Smitt was charged with nine felonies, including one count of attempted murder for his zip-gun booby trap. He faced numerous life sentences. His buddy, Hansen, was hit with all the arson-related crimes and faced thirty years in prison. Neither one had anything to do with the Vagos. As it turned out, most of Smitt’s attacks coincided with his court appearances on the drug charges. DNA evidence collected from a failed rocket attack turned out to be critical evidence leading to the arrests.
