Under and Alone (30 page)

We were about five miles out of Laughlin when everything went to shit. First, I felt my bike starting to slow down. Even though I rolled the throttle, it got slower and slower. I began to smell something burning and turned to see that my back brake was seizing up. I pulled off onto the shoulder, and Ciccone stopped behind me in the U-Haul. I told him that I’d have to stay put until the brake caliper cooled or until I could get a pair of pliers to bleed it off.

At that very instant a Las Vegas Metro car rolled up. Las Vegas Metro Police have jurisdiction over the Laughlin municipal area. The cop asked me if I needed help, and I explained to him that my brake had just seized up and that I needed a pair of pliers. He stared at me, then at Ciccone, then back at the U-Haul. Shit. I knew what was coming.

“Who’s the guy in the U-Haul?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen him before in my life. He just saw me on the side of the road and stopped to see if I needed help.”

The cop wasn’t biting. I tried to keep his eyes—and my own—on my mechanical problem.

“Got a pair of pliers I can use, Officer?”

The diversionary tactic didn’t work.

“Yes, I do, but I want to check some things out first.” He backed his patrol car in behind the U-Haul and got out. I muttered under my breath to Ciccone, who had gotten out of the U-Haul, “Don’t tell this guy anything.” Ciccone nodded his silent acknowledgment.

The cop walked back to my bike. “Got some ID on you?”

I knew the drill; I’d been through this routine more times than I cared to remember. I broke out my undercover license and handed it over.

“This your bike?”

“Yeah, it’s mine.”

“Where you riding in from?”

“L.A.”

Predictable cop questions; predictable Mongol answers. Then the cop asked me once again who Ciccone was.

“I got no idea. The guy just stopped to help me.”

He walked over to Ciccone. “Got some ID, bud?”

Ciccone handed over his license. The cop asked Ciccone where he was coming from, and Ciccone’s response mirrored mine. “L.A.”

Pointing toward me, the cop asked Ciccone if he knew me personally.

“Nope, I just stopped to see if I could help him.”

With his clean-shaven face, neatly trimmed hair, flip-flops, and Bermuda shorts, Ciccone didn’t look at all like the kind of guy who would risk his neck by stopping to offer assistance to some hard-core outlaw biker on the side of the road. If I’d been in this Metro cop’s boots, I wouldn’t have believed us either.

The cop took one look at the rinky-dink paper plate on the U-Haul, and it was game over. He picked up his radio and called for a backup unit. I looked at Ciccone and whispered: “Don’t tell ’em shit.”

“Where you headed?” the cop asked me.

“Laughlin.”

Then he looked at Ciccone. “Where you headed?”

“Laughlin.” Clearly Ciccone hadn’t heard my answer over the traffic, or just didn’t expect the cop to keep harassing us.

“What’s in the back of the truck?”

“Nothing,” Ciccone responded.

We’re sitting in the middle of the desert, just outside Laughlin, where thirty thousand bikers of all types are congregating. I’m plainly a 1 percenter in the company of Mr. Clean Jeans, who happens to be driving a very suspicious U-Haul truck, trying to sell this cop a bag of rotten goods he can smell a mile away.

Ciccone had his ATF identification on him, but we had no idea if we could trust these Las Vegas Metro cops with the truth. The Mongols spend a lot of time partying in Laughlin and Vegas, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that they had developed informants with access to confidential police information.

The Metro cop turned his attention back to me. “What’s in the back of the truck?”

“How should I know? I told you I never seen this guy in my life.” I tried to sound like an illiterate punk. The cop looked like he’d heard this line a thousand times before and made no effort to hide his disdain. His backup unit arrived with lights flashing. The cop now told Ciccone and me to assume the position. We placed our hands against the side of the U-Haul, over our heads, legs spread wide. They began to frisk us for weapons.

Both cops went after Ciccone this time. “Sir, where’d you rent this truck?”

“In L.A.”

“Let’s see the registration and rental papers.”

This was a demand, not a request. I could see the cop walking to the cab of the truck. We waited with our hands still overhead. The minute I said I didn’t know Ciccone, I knew I’d bet the wrong horse. I was probably too exhausted to think clearly—why hadn’t I simply claimed Ciccone was my brother-in-law, helping me move? It’s just the nature of undercover work; you’re thinking on your feet 24/7, and sometimes you improvise wrong.

The cop, rental agreement in hand, returned to the side of the truck where I was still in the assumed position. He unfolded the agreement, took maybe five seconds to look it over, and discovered that everything he’d heard in the last ten minutes was just so much fabricated bullshit.

Raising his eyes from the rental agreement, he glared at me. “So you’ve never seen this guy in your life, huh?”

I was off balance, with one foot on the ground and the other in my mouth. I responded like a true Mongol: “No comment.”

The two cops decided that the situation demanded a little more backup. One cop got on his radio, while the other decided to take a closer look in the truck.

There were no warrants out for Billy St. John’s arrest, and the truck wasn’t stolen. So what if I’d been the one who rented the truck and we’d lied to the cops? There was still no justification for an arrest. People lie to cops every day, and cops know it. I figured they’d badger us for a while and then let us go. Standard police procedure. Then I saw the cop who had been looking in the truck jog back to where we were all standing. He grabbed Ciccone and threw him forcefully against the truck. He had him handcuffed in seconds.

What had my little straight-arrow case agent done to deserve such rough treatment?

“Ooh, you musta really fucked up!” I said under my breath.

No sooner had I made my cheap-shot comment than the other cop grabbed me and snapped the cuffs on me. Just then I saw John Carr and Darrin Kozlowski cruising past on Interstate 40—just in time to catch a glimpse of us being cuffed and thrown up against the U-Haul. Seconds later we heard a huge roar and I saw a large group of Mongols on Harleys cruising past and staring at me. Things were going from bad to worse with each passing minute. I’d considered all kinds of things that might go wrong on this last big run with the Mongols, but getting arrested with Ciccone in the desert wasn’t one of them.

I saw one of the cops go back to the cab of the truck and return with Ciccone’s gun in his hand. “Did you know he had a gun?” the cop asked me.

“No way, man.” Like he was going to believe anything I had to say at this point.

The cops were doing everything by the book now. No chances, no mistakes. They demanded to know what was in the back of the truck. When more backup arrived, they opened the U-Haul to find nothing except the elastic tie-downs we’d used to hold my bike.

I saw Ciccone motion to one of the cops, a sergeant, saying that he wanted to talk with him around the back of the truck. The sergeant and another cop led Ciccone off. After about ten minutes they all returned to where I was standing cuffed.

The sergeant made a kind of public statement, as if he was trying to get it on record for his guys as well as for me. He said that there was no evidence that the gun was unlicensed, and since it had been found in a closed briefcase, they wouldn’t be able to charge anyone with its possession. He also said that everything else looked in order and that they would be letting both Ciccone and me go on our way.

Free and clear. After taking our pictures and filling out field interrogation cards (standard operating procedure for dealing with known gang members, and my Mongol colors identified me as a real gangster), the cop who’d originally stopped us finally gave me a pair of pliers so I could bleed off the back brake on my bike.

We drove off separately. I was worried about what the passing Mongols might have seen, but it wasn’t worth risking another stop to call Ciccone. I had to hurry into Laughlin, show my face at the hotel, and try to pick up my role as Mongol Billy as soon as possible. It wasn’t until hours later—when I managed to place an inconspicuous call to Ciccone—that I learned what had really happened behind that U-Haul. Not relishing the prospect of a few hours in the hoosegow, Ciccone had decided to admit to being an ATF agent while at the same time preserving my UC identity.

He told them that he was working undercover on the Mongols and that I was a full-patch member of the club. As a hang-around, he’d been told to drive the truck and follow me to Laughlin, then get lost. Taking into account his straight appearance and my outlaw appearance, I knew the cops had to be dubious. But Ciccone had federal credentials, and when they ran a check on his license, it verified that he was a U.S. Treasury Department agent.

For these cops to buy the line of crap Ciccone was selling, they would have had to conclude that Ciccone was one the dumbest people they had ever run into. “If you’re an undercover agent, then why the hell are you carrying your ATF credentials?” one of the cops asked. Ciccone explained that the Mongols had told him to follow me out, drop off the truck, and beat it. He didn’t think he’d be hanging out with them.

These Las Vegas Metro cops weren’t going to risk fucking up a federal investigation, no matter how stupid the undercover agent might be, and risk whatever consequences that might bring down on them from their bosses.

I finally rolled into Laughlin and met up with a group of Mongols standing in the parking lot of the Riverside Hotel. Word had reached them that the Metro cops had Billy St. John hooked up about five miles outside Laughlin. I knew I’d have to come up with yet another story about what had happened on the side of the road—in particular, why I didn’t end up behind bars like a good little outlaw.

I had my slightly-resembling-the-truth alibi concocted for them. “Yeah, I can’t fuckin’ believe it. My back brake locked up on me, and a couple of dudes in a U-Haul stopped to help. The cops swooped in and were on us like stink on shit. Turns out one of the dudes in the U-Haul was wanted for murder up north somewhere. Man, I thought I was going to the gray-bar hotel for sure. They had me hooked for about an hour before they finally let my ass go. Shit, I’m just glad I’m here.”

“Brother, you fuckin’ lucked out.”

“Yeah, I did.”

I walked into the Riverside with the Mongols I’d met out front, and we joined about twenty more of our comrades in arms just inside the front doors.

But my luck was about to change. It wasn’t going to be a laid-back Laughlin run after all. The Mongols were going into combat mode. There was going to be a showdown with the Hells Angels here in Laughlin.

The state of war between the Hells Angels and the Mongols had never been declared over, and tension between the clubs had been building in the two-plus years I’d been undercover. One night Domingo and I went down to Chatsworth and partied with a group of Angels at the Cowboy Palace. It had been a cool night, Angels buying beer for Mongols, Mongols buying beer for Angels.

But the situation east of L.A., in San Bernardino County, quickly ended any such fraternization. The original chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club was founded in Fontana, within San Bernardino County, as an offshoot of an older outlaw group known as the Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington. Consequently, the Angels considered San Bernardino, or “Berdoo,” hallowed ground. The Mongols, having won the right to wear the coveted
CALIFORNIA
lower rocker, agreed not to form a chapter in Berdoo.

The agreement had been honored for decades. But in 1999 a problem arose over a technicality. The agreement stated only that there would be no Mongol chapters established in Berdoo, but it didn’t say that there would be no Mongols
living
in Berdoo. And a good number of Mongols did live in Berdoo. Mongols frequented the bars in the area and rode the streets, flying their black-and-white patches with impunity. In time, it started to rub the Berdoo chapter of the Hells Angels raw. The Angels began putting out the word that they were getting fed up with the Mongols invading Berdoo and that they were going to start throwing Mongols out of the bars and shooting them off their bikes if they didn’t leave San Bernardino County.

During Church at Evel’s place one Thursday night, Domingo announced that the word had come down from Little Dave: Enough was enough; it was time to put the Angels in their fucking place. It was time to show them who really ran the show in Southern California. Little Dave had decided that we were going to go down and make our presence known at the Crossroads, the most popular Hells Angels watering hole in San Bernardino County. We rode out to Berdoo in a Mongol raiding party at least one hundred strong. We only stayed inside the Crossroads for a couple of hours, just long enough to make a point. The Angels weren’t going to be kicking any Mongols out of Berdoo anytime soon.

Massing in the lobby of the Riverside, the brothers from Mother now gave me the lowdown on what had happened in Laughlin while Ciccone and I were getting the third degree on the highway. Before I’d arrived, the Mongols had already had a run-in with the Hells Angels inside the casino of the Flamingo. All the months of tension, posturing, and bad blood were coming to a head. Mongols were milling around in the lobby and casino areas waiting for the word on how to deal with the Red and White.

The orders had already come down for a number of Mongols to ride sixty-six, armed but not wearing their colors. This signified seriously bad news; the Mongols are never more dangerous than when massing at a rally like Laughlin, with a cadre of armed “undercovers” ready to kill for the club at a moment’s notice. I wondered if Ciccone and the boys had gotten the word, too.

Standard protocol at the Laughlin River Run was for the Mongols to occupy the Riverside Resort Hotel and the Hells Angels to occupy the Flamingo Hilton. It was about nine
P.M.
when Little Dave and Bobby Loco rallied the troops in front of the Riverside. Bobby Loco addressed the group of Mongols that was now thirty strong and said that there had been a confrontation with the Angels earlier in the day. The plan was for all of us to go to the Flamingo and confront the Hells Angels in the casino, to see what they were made of. There was no way I was going to be able to contact Ciccone to let him know about the impending confrontation. I just hoped he and my backups were out there watching closely.