You Can Run but You Can't Hide (6 page)
Read You Can Run but You Can't Hide Online
Authors: Duane Dog Chapman
scooters, waiting.
Hudat was pissed. “Damn, prospect, I could’ve sworn I told you
to keep your ass put and watch the scooters.”
“Right,” I mumbled.
“And what were you doin’ with those Angels? You think I didn’t
see you hangin’ with them? Are you with us or are you with them,
boy?”
“I’m a Disciple,” I said.
“Not no more,” Hudat told me. “Why don’t you run off and
find your other buddies.”
I was too wasted to calm myself down and think straight. My
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eyes started tearing up. “Oh yeah? Well, as far as I’m concerned, all
of you can go fuck yourselves!” I yelled.
Hudat took a step back and looked over to where Tom was
standing next to his bike. “Your prospect’s talking all this b.s. here,
man. You better put a leash on that puppy.”
Without hesitation, Tom lunged over and ripped me down to the
ground.
“Keep your mouth shut right now,” he told me.
I pushed Tom off and got up on my feet. My rage was out of
control. For a second, I actually thought about swinging on him.
“Fuck you, Tom! And all you punks!”
I could have gotten the worst beating of my life for getting out
of line like that, but I didn’t. None of the Disciples would even look
in my direction. I had completely embarrassed myself by disre-
specting the entire gang. Without another word, they thundered out
of the parking lot and left me behind.
In their eyes, the Dog no longer existed. I was crushed. I stood
alone, wondering what I had just done. I’d come so far, just to
throw it all away. I’d let my anger and frustration ruin everything I
so desperately wanted. I got on my bike and headed home. I had to
think of something to get back in.
When I heard
the rumbling of motorcycles outside of my
apartment a few days later, I knew it was the Disciples.
A dozen of them barged in and took over my place like it was
their own. Hudat was walking around, tracking mud all over my
carpet. He was just waiting for me to say something to him, but
I kept my cool. He sat on my couch and put his boots up on the
coffee table. He was trying hard to get me to react, but I wasn’t
budging.
“A real tough puppy, huh? That’s what you are?” he asked.
A couple of the other guys were taking Hudat’s lead, trying to
provoke me, to get a response. I wasn’t taking the bait. I tried my
best to have no reaction, but the tears starting running down my
face.
Little Pat, the club’s sergeant at arms, saw me crying. “Look at
this, boys. Puppy’s a little crybaby!”
Little Pat was a pretty tough guy. He was always riding me,
probably even more than the rest of the guys. Tom Tom told me
that sooner or later I’d have to take him on. I looked Little Pat dead in
the eye, but I knew it wasn’t the right time to make my move. I was
confident I could destroy him if I had to. Hudat got up from the
couch. “What if we ended up giving you your patch and then some
motherfucker came along and tried to snatch it away from you?”
“I’d kill him dead,” I shot back at him.
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The whole reason the Disciples came up to my apartment that
day was so I could apologize to them. They wanted me to admit
that I had screwed up. If I did, they’d reinstate me as a prospect, but
I’d have to start all over again, which meant ninety more days of
taking their bull. I wasn’t interested. Either they made me a full-
fledged Disciple or I was out.
“I ain’t prospecting no more,” I said to Hudat. “I’m a Disciple.”
Little Pat started laughing and heading for the door.
I wasn’t kidding. I stared Hudat dead in the eyes. “You want to
see what I’m made of for real? Why don’t you give me your patch
and see what happens when you try to take it away from me?”
Everyone stood silent, waiting to see what happened next, be-
cause once again I was calling out the president of the Disciples. I
had to take a stand and demand respect or I would always be a
punk to these guys.
Hudat looked around at the other guys in the room, and a grin
came across his face. He suddenly broke out laughing.
“Somebody give this Dog his colors already,” he said, shaking
his head.
Even though I was only sixteen, I wanted to be a presence in the
club. I set a new standard for everyone else to be compared to. If the
guys were drinking, then I drank them under the table. If the guys
were smoking weed, then I smoked twice as much as they did. If a
fight broke out, I hit harder than anyone else.
I took Little Pat’s position as sergeant at arms about a year later,
on February 6, 1970. It was a great honor. I was as proud as could
be. Pat and I never ended up scrapping. When he backed down from
me, he lost the Disciples’ respect, and once that happened, he was
finished.
The guys started calling me the comic-book biker because of my
striking, over-the-top appearance in black leather and sparkling,
polished chrome. I put a lot of thought and effort into my uniform.
I made sure the straps on my boots were braided leather and my
belt buckle was polished chrome master link.
My reputation was sealed because of my constant robbing and
stealing. On a good day, I could scratch together as much as a grand
before dinner. I made all of my money rolling hippies, because they
were easy targets. They were always looking for drugs. Tom Tom
and I rode our scooters down from Phoenix, along with a couple of
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the other guys, and cruised for a week, pretending to be drug deal-
ers. Nearby towns, like Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Grants, Sedona,
and Gallup, were packed with hippie communes and camps. I’d
bring along a couple changes of clothes, and right before we’d bust
into town, I’d exchange my oily leathers for a tie-dyed shirt and a
pair of Levi’s. I blended in perfectly with all the rest of the hippies.
I’d start talking to everyone. We’d become fast friends. They never
had any idea I was setting them up. It was too damn easy.
My job was to track down who wanted to score the most dope
and who had access to the most cash. My story was always the
same. I’d say a buddy had come across a large quantity of high-
grade Mexican weed that we had to unload. I’d tell them we were
willing to pass it on to them for a great deal because we were in a
hurry to dump the dope. If they started getting cold feet, I’d whip
out a joint and get them stoned.
You’d think most hippies were easygoing, but these guys were
stingy when it came to drug deals. All I could do was stand and
wait. I called it the silent close. I didn’t want to break character and
blow the deal. I quietly waited until they said yes. And they always
said yes. It was pretty amazing how a group of dirty hippies dressed
in rags could suddenly scrape together twelve hundred bucks for
drugs. The arrangement was always the same. I’d leave and come
back later with my biker buddies.
We scared the high out of the hippies when we shoved our guns
in their faces and took off with the cash and all their drugs, which
we turned around and sold to other bikers. It was the perfect crime.
They had nowhere to run. They couldn’t tell the police. Not a
chance. “Excuse me officer, some bikers took off with our dope
money.”
As far as my parents were concerned, I was still working hard
at a logging company. They might have suspected I was in with the
Disciples, but they definitely didn’t know where all my money was
coming from. I was flush with cash. I spared no expense on my
bike, and I even bought a couple of cars. Whenever I got the chance,
I’d jump on my bike and head up to Denver to spend time with my
girlfriend, Debbie.
During one such trip, I went over to the mall to waste some time
one afternoon and spotted one of the most gorgeous girls I had ever
seen. She had beautiful long brown hair and an unbelievable rack. I
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stared at her for a while, but she wouldn’t look my way, so I walked
over to where she was sitting.
“Hi, what’s your name?”
“LaFonda.”
“Where you from?”
“I’m up from Texas, visiting my brother,” she said. Her accent
was so thick I could barely understand what she was saying.
“Oh yeah, what’s your brother do?”
“He’s a policeman.”
“No shit,” I said slowly. I sure didn’t want anything to do with
any cops, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off of this girl.
She agreed to go out with me, so later on, that night, I thun-
dered up her brother’s driveway in my new Ford with a 390 engine.
After our first date, I was crazy about LaFonda.
I made regular trips up to Denver a couple times a month. Even
though I was now dating LaFonda, I continued to sleep with Debbie
on the side. I was only seventeen and thought I could have it both
ways.
In Denver, Washington Park was the place where most of the
hippies hung out. I spent hours slinging drugs and finding out who
the major players were. Mostly I was trying to get a feel for who
would be the easiest score.
I got a tip on a house full of hippies and all sorts of drugs. It
sounded like the perfect setup for our latest scam. We were getting
tired of pretending we were hippies. We had gotten to the point
where we thought we could just barge in and take whatever they
had. I asked a couple of my Disciple brothers to come up from
Phoenix to help with the takedown. Beau Rodriguez and his brother
James got word about what I was doing and wanted to tag along.
Although they were members of the Hades Heads and not Disci-
ples, we liked having them with us sometimes, because they were as
cold-blooded as they come.
When we booted in the door, the house was filled with thick
clouds of smoke from the hippies toking weed. We could barely see
where we were going. They all just stared at us, glassy-eyed and
stoned out of their minds, as we ordered them around. We found a
mountain of speed on the kitchen table. One of the Disciples had
taken along a .45-caliber Thompson submachine gun we named
Woody Woodpecker. He stood in the middle of the living room and
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unleashed that fucker.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
The gun had such a
strong kick, he had no control. When he was finished, most of the
room was shredded to bits. There were chunks of furniture and
shattered glass everywhere. The room was destroyed.
James and Beau hit an upstairs room where a hippie family was
hiding. When they wouldn’t hand over their stash, James grabbed the
baby out of the mother’s hands and dangled it Michael Jackson–style
out the window. Beau had one hand around the father’s throat and
the other clutching the mother’s hair.
“Tell me where the fucking shit is!” James yelled at them.
Finally, the mother said, “Check the cigar box.”
Jackpot. The box contained every drug known to man. There was
coke, heroin, vials of liquid LSD, and pills of every color and size. The
other Disciples could barely carry all the bags of pot and speed they
found all over the house. We had it all down like clockwork—from
beginning to end, we were in and out in under three minutes.
On my way out, I saw one of the downstairs closet doors ajar, so
I walked over and whipped it open. A stoned hippie was in there on
his knees, completely freaked out. He looked up at me with crazy
eyes and started laughing. He’d probably been in there the whole
time tripping on LSD.
Rolling hippies was ridiculously easy, but there were a few oc-
casions when we walked into some bad scenes. We figured that a
house in Boulder would be just another group of stoner college
kids who would hand over their stash and run for their lives. Man,
were we wrong. It turned out they were seriously radical hippies,
members of SDS—Students for a Democratic Society.
We were going to run the game like this: A few Disciples and
the Rodriguez brothers would hang back in their car just down the
block to provide cover if we needed it. Me and my buddy Tim were
going to ride in the back of a camper that this chick named Dee
Dee O’Dell would be driving. We planned to go to the house and
explain to the main dealer that we had come across a couple
pounds of weed. We’d convince him to come out to the camper to
take a look and talk business. Once he got out there, we’d shove a
gun in his face and make him hand over all of his dope. If he was a
hard-ass, we would hold him out there until the rest of the hippies
gave it up.
When the front door swung open, however, there wasn’t the
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