The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Undercover Federal Agent Reveals How He Infiltrated Secret World Of Hell's Angels Motorcycle Gang

Episode Date: July 14, 2024

Jay Dobyns was an ATF agent looking for undercover work. When he was told he was being sent in to infiltrate the notorious Hell's Angels gang he apprehensive to say the least. The gang was known for drug smuggling and being extremely violent. He reluctantly took the assignment and quickly ingratiated himself with one of the biggest motorcycle gangs in history. As he moved up and got closer to being "patched in" he learned more about the inner workings. His years of being undercover led to a massive RICO case that took down numerous members of the organization. He's here to tell us all about it. Go Support Jay! Website & Books: https://jaydobyns.com/index.html This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following Brands: BlueChew! Visit https://bluechew.com/ and try BlueChew FREE when you use our promo code MITCHELL at checkout, just pay $5 shipping! Field Of Greens! Visit www.fieldofgreens.com and use code CONNECT at checkout for 15% OFF plus FREE SHIPPING! Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I was always willing and I was always looking for undercover opportunities. They approached me with this opportunity to make a run at the Hells Angels. I thought I was prepared. I wasn't prepared. There was a business card in my wallet that was from the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. So he pushes this card in front of me and he says, what's the story on this? And when I look up, he's got his elbows bipotted on his desk and he's holding a pistol in my face. In the very corner was a tiny, tiny pin.

hole. He said, you know what that looks like to me? That looks like some cop took this card and had it thumb-tacked on the bulletin board behind his desk as a trophy. Jay Dobbins is a former ATF agent who went deep undercover with the Hells Angels, the most notorious 1% biker gang in the world, whom he infiltrated for more than three years. Jay is a former University of Arizona football star who became an ATF agent after he graduated and went to work undercover on some of the biggest cases in U.S. law. enforcement history, including the siege in Waco, Texas, and the Oklahoma City bombing. He's taken down countless illegal gun running operations, murder for hire plots, home invasion crews, and even foiled a conspiracy to blow up three major casinos in Las Vegas. Jay reveals what it's like being undercover for two decades and exposes the dark underbelly of some of America's worst criminals. He also gives fascinating insight into the Hells Angels

and how their organization actually works. He's written two New York Times bestselling books about his experience, which you can get on his website. And for more content with Jay, go over to patreon.com slash the Connect show. By the way, for fully uncensored episodes, those are also available over on Patreon. Without further ado,

it is my great honor to present Jay Dobbins right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. The one thing in my research that kept, popping up in my own mind, these dudes will kill their own. That Hells Angels name, that death head center patch, that is the most important thing in their life. It's more important than their house, their wife, their kids, their money, their motorcycles, their cars, their dogs. It's their religion. They live by that and they die by it. The Hells Angels told me, when the bandito show up, if you don't shoot them before they get their kickstands down, we're going to

shoot you. That's when I see the lights behind me start to flash. And I didn't even think I just hit I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, hopped out, closed the door, and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shank. It's like six inches. And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours. Don't ever leave the cell block without this.

He was the reason I made it out of that place alive. Well, what struck me about you is like your bullishness when it came to just doing it, which comes from being an athlete. But it's part of your personality. It's, you know. was never the best undercover. I was, I never portrayed myself to be or claimed publicly or privately to be. I was always willing. I never said no. When someone came for help, I never said, no, I can't help you. It's, it's too dangerous. It's too complex. It's going to be too long.

I was always, yes. Let's go. What do you need me to do? Yeah. And on the field, you know, because your background is as a pretty accomplished football player. And I know you downplay your accomplishments, but you got a huge Wikipedia page that says you were like the star of the state of Arizona in high school and then on into college. Well, I wish they had NIL when I was planned. Like I was on billboards and magazine covers and all that stuff. But I was back in the day when you were happy to be on scholarship and get your education paid for. That's not enough anymore.

In today's world, I mean, those kids are making a living, a good living, a very living, a valuable living playing college athletics. And bless their heart, man. It's like a professional sport now. Like, you know, in basketball, like those kids are paid seven figures before they even get to the pros. There's kids who are staying in school

because they can make more money as a college athlete than they can as a professional. Right. Is that the same with football? Absolutely. Wow. Absolutely. Wow. So you grew up in Arizona,

born in Indiana, I believe. Yeah, I was spent my, my young childhood in northwest Indiana, just outside Chicago, and then moved to Arizona when I was probably 10 or 12. My folks moved there. To Tucson? To Tucson, yep. And they were working class people. Yeah, my dad was a blue collar guy.

He was a carpenter for his life. My mom cut hair and was a house cleaner. And so that's the world I grew up in. I grew up in that grinding blue collar. That was the example. I said, I had great parents. Like I had that white picket fence childhood. My parents were solid.

There wasn't booze in my house. There was no violence in my house. No one was swearing in my house or raising their voice. We went on vacations every summer. I had a bicycle and a baseball mitt. All those things that are just very simple and sweet. and innocent. Probably respected police. Didn't break any law.

Absolutely. Pager taxes. Huge integrity. My dad was like the best man that I've ever known or ever would know. He said a great example for me. I don't feel like I lived up to the example and to the role model that he presented for me. But yeah, I had a wonderful child. I didn't have this difficult, struggled childhood that predestined me to like live

a gangster lifestyle and exposed me to that world. That was, I had to, I had to learn all that. But that takes a real level of balls to go that deep undercover, you know, dealing with gangster disciples in Chicago or white militias in the Midwest and then Hell's Angels back in Arizona. Like that takes a level of guts. Does you think that comes from athletics or do you just have that in you innately? I think there are things that we learn as being part of a sports team, being part of an athletic program. There's elements that you learn that translate into that aspect of life. You know, in sports, you want someone to remember your name.

You have to do something they can't forget. You want something that you never had before. You're going to have to do things you've never done to get it. That's sports. That's athletics. But it's life too. When your football career ends, you know, you played, I think, a year professionally in Canada or semi-pro or something. Yeah, you know what?

To say that I played professionally, that's stretching things. I had opportunities. I was in Canada for a little while. I played in the USFL for a little while. I had a try out. I had an NFL tryout. All those things showed I wasn't good enough. And, you know, as athletes, we have egos.

And like I have an ego and I had an ego as an athlete. And that's, I never had a plan B. I was always going to be a football player in my mind. I went to the 1985 NFL combine, which is for the people that aren't NFL fans, football fans, the combine is the NFL's meat market. You're tested and weighed and measured and you run and you jump and you compete. And like, so all these scouts and coaches are there evaluating you to see if you are worthy of being a part of their organization. If you're draftable, if they if they think you bring something to the table for them.

So I went into the combine. Like I had a very successful college football career. And so I went in thinking I was all that, right? So they group you up and I meet a couple guys that I'm going to be working out with. One dude's from Cutsown University. And I shake his hand and like, where? I never heard of your school. Where is it? That's in Pennsylvania. And I'm shaking his hand. And internally, I'm telling myself,

I'm going to whip your ass today. Another guy's from this little school in Mississippi, right? So we start working out. And Al Davis, who was the owner of the Raiders and a legend in the NFL, I find him. And I'd been a Raiders fan. And I said, Coach Davis, man, like, how am I doing? And he finds his score sheet and he finds my name. And he's like, oh, there you are. He said, you're the fastest slow guy I've seen today. And I'm like, like, oh, it didn't really register. I'm like, okay. So we get out there and we start working out.

These dudes I never heard of, I couldn't do what they do. They were more athletic. They were stronger, faster, quicker. They could jump higher. They were amazing, right? 10 minutes into these drills, my plan A, like coming to life, 10 minutes, I was like, plan A is shot, man. You're not going to play professional football.

You can't keep up with these dudes and you never heard of them. Well, the dude from Cutsdown University was Andre Reed, who played for 15 years in the league, played in four Super Bowls, is in the Hall of Fame. The guy from the little school in Mississippi, it was Jerry Rice. Wow. So, like, I wasn't judging myself against the fairest competition, but, like, these dudes, they were the shit. Yeah. And I thought I was, and it took all of 10 or 15 minutes to realize, dude, you. you're going to have to find a new plan a now is that heartbreaking because with athletes especially

at by such a young age you're already like the most popular person at your school and your friend group you know by the time you're a freshman in high school and you're playing varsity you're the man and by just as young of an age 22 is when you either figure out if you are elite enough to go to the league or your whole existence and reason for being is just gone. And that makes a lot of people depressed. My brother was the same with basketball. He was like the star at his college and his high school, but he couldn't make it to the league. And it really took it like he was lost. He had no identity. Was that difficult for you? Or do you just keep moving? You know, it was, but I'll tell I had no excuse.

I did every single thing I could to position myself for a chance, for an opportunity. And that's all hard work and the grind. That doesn't guarantee you anything. It doesn't promise you anything. All it promises is the opportunity. And so I had put myself in a position to have an opportunity. I left nothing on the table. There's no one to blame.

I didn't have an injury to blame. I didn't have a coach that didn't like. me to blame. I had no one to blame but me. And so if you can look at yourself, honestly, transparently, and say, you did everything you could. You just weren't good enough, Jay. You just weren't good enough. Like, okay, like, that's not the answer I want, but that was the honest truth. And I was like, okay, plan A is not working out. You don't have a plan B. So, like, what's the new plan A? Yes, you have a good attitude. You have an attitude that most of a struggle for years to kind of adopt.

So how did you become a pig? I'm kidding, of course. Yeah, no. How, yeah, tell us about law enforcement. Like, where is this coming from? To go back to your setup, life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of what you do about it. So that's what had happened to me. That was taken away.

So now what are you going to do? How are you going to move forward? Upward and onward is like the only objective to have. Right? So, and this, this sounds hokey, but it's, but it's just the honest truth. At that time, we're talking mid-80s. As an audience, all we'd ever seen is, like, in police shows was these procedurals, uniform cops, detectives showing up at crime scenes, doing interviews, and then all of a sudden,

Miami Vice hits, right? And, like, the music and the rock and roll and sunny crocket and. And Don Johnson's got the white blazer on. Oh, he's got the Hugo Boss suit on. And he's driving a Ferrari and there's tons of cocaine. And there's these stripper models like sitting on his lap at these kingpins mansions feeding him mojitos. And like I thought like that world smells like hibiscus flowers. That's how, you know, Michael Mann created that vision for us as the audience.

And I was like, man, like, that's, that'd be pretty cool. Like, you think you can do that? Like internally, you think you can do that? Wow. The reality of it is, is that once I got into that world, the Ferrari was like a beat-up Crown Vic. The Hugo Boss suit was like camos and a wife-beater t-shirt and flip-flops. The tons of cocaine, it was like an eight ball that was so stepped on with baby

laxative, you'd shit before you'd get high off of it, right? Those stripper models, they were straight skanks with tits like sweats, socks with rocks in the toes. Yeah. It didn't smell like ibiscus flowers. It smelled like dirty diapers and stale cigarettes. And when I realized that my vision of what I thought it was going to be wasn't, I loved it.

I loved every day of it, man. My alarm clock went off in the morning. I couldn't wait to go try to get a chance to see if I could do something good. I loved it. The good days and the bad days all the same. This episode is sponsored by Blue Chew. I've been waiting a long time to say those words. You know them by now.

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Now, ATF, alcohol, tobacco firearms. A little known federal. arm of, you know, the Justice Department. Some call it redundant, you know, some say, why do you exist? I remember getting arrested by DEA agents and they were like talking shit about the ATF. Like, well, I was in handcuffs. You know, just weird. Like nobody really knows what you guys do.

Tell us why, who the ATF is, what makes them distinct, why they're necessary and why you chose to go into them. ATF has always been the little brother of all the big name agencies, the FBI, the DEA, Secret Service, like everybody else has name recognition. And over the years, ATF has even toyed with changing the agency's name because there's nothing sexy about the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Where does alcohol come from? Well, that's alcohol's legal and ubiquitous.

But it is. So ATF was a treasury agency. Alcohol and tobacco are taxed. So it fell under treasury. So like way back in the day, when ATF was, let's go back to the 30s to Capone. ATF was the Prohibition Police, the Elliott Nest Days. So they're chasing alcohol. They're chasing gangsters.

So the gangsters are using Tommy guns. They're using machine guns. So it was natural to give the prohibition unit the firearms laws. So these investigators would go out and find these remote stills, these whiskey stills. They're out sometimes like in the middle of nowhere. So rather than dismantle them, they would wire them up with explosives and just blow them apart, make them unusable. So let's give them the explosives laws. So now you've got firearms laws and explosives laws.

We also have the arson jurisdiction. But with that are the tools of the trade of violence. So ATF ultimately became the federal violence. crime police because of our jurisdiction, because of the things that we did. Then you get narcotics involved in that armed narcotics trafficking. We have an element in that with the firearms. So you guys were like the DEA of the prohibition era. Exactly.

Exactly. Interesting. Chasing, you know, bad booze, which led to all these other things. And then ultimately, after the government was reorganized, ATF becomes a justice department agency. I see. I see. Do you think, and this could be just such an ignorant question, do you think that in today's day and age where everybody is on camera,

everybody's location is tracked through their phone, everybody voluntarily gives their information up to private businesses, to the government, everybody's tracked all the time, do you think the ATF still has a function to stop, you know, people that would blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City like Timothy McVeigh or, you know, the Branch Dividians in Waco, Texas, or Ruby Ridge in Idaho? Like, can't all of that just be solved by dorks on a computer at the, you know, the FBI building somewhere in that locality? Is it necessary now that we have a digitized world for the ATF? So like using that example, that analogy, if you were just tracking those people, can you identify them? You can, but like then like there's the next step, the investigation.

It's not just having intelligence. Intelligence on its own is not knowledge, not knowledge. knowledge on its own is not wisdom. So, like, you have to have investigators with boots on their ground that chase that, that chase that original piece of information. Mr. X is acquiring explosives. Mr. X is trafficking in machine guns or silencers or call in the shots on violence. Like having that answer presented to you on a computer screen is only the start. I see. And are there enough people like that that still exists, that kind of criminal that still exists in America? As long as there is life on earth, there's going to be people breaking the law.

There's going to be people going outside the rules. But people that would try to blow up casinos, as in your case? Well, let me give you this example. What if, like hypothetically now, and going back in time, what if we had an operative that was entrenched in the terrorism world? And that operative reported out to a handler. I don't know if this makes any sense. You have to decide what we're going to do about this, but I'm with this group of people, and they're talking about taking a commercial airliner

and flying it into a building. You have to have those people, those infiltrators, with boots on the ground who can assimilate into the criminal community to be able to like get that intelligence reported out and then decide okay what do we do about this we didn't have that person yeah we didn't we didn't have that so then we get caught off guard and then you have planes crashing into the world trade center hitting the pentagon right you know the other one goes down in the in the in the field in Pennsylvania so like would an operative have stopped that or solved that like like we're looking at a crystal ball trying to decide what would have or could have might have been.

In law enforcement, you don't have that crystal ball. You go out every day and you do your best with what you have with no guarantee of what it might be preventing happening from tomorrow. What if there was an operative in with Eric Harris and Dylan Clybold before they got to Columbine High School? But what if what if someone was in on that plan before they showed up with their guns and bombs, which was ATF's jurisdiction? Eric Harrison, Dylan Kleibold used guns and bombs. They bought up the internet, I think. To terrorize Columbine High School and kill a dozen kids and a teacher and then ultimately, you know, commit suicide themselves. Yeah.

So if you drop the vigilance, you'll see a criminal element start. to regroup and this stuff will start happening again. Well, and so the criminal community, from your past, from your past experiences, people involved in the criminal community are uniquely paranoid. And they have to be paranoid. That's a prerequisite to being a good criminal because that paranoia keeps you out of jail. It keeps you out of prison. They're inherently untrusting.

So as an operative, like how do you get past that and gain trust and gain faith and gain loyalty and sometimes even gain love? You have to have people with boots on the ground and you have to have that presence. People in the community, it's cat and mouse. It's good guy, bad guy. You think that the people in the criminal community, they know that there's cops looking at them, that there's undercover's potentially trying to infiltrate their scheme. It's their job to be better than the police. It's the police's job to overcome all that paranoia and get inside the scheme and see if it's real.

And so if there were less police, conversely, there was no ATF. The Hells Angels would find out about it and expand their activities even more than they already do. We're finding out real time with very hard conclusions that defund the police is not the answer. Yeah. And it's just not. Okay. So you join the ATF. How long does that take?

And, I mean, you're assigned to an Arizona unit. So, you know, right away, you're working from. where you grew up. So yeah, I mean, was that, did you expect to go undercover right away when you first joined the ATF? Well, the reason that I pursued ATF was for undercover. ATF had then, has now the premier undercover program in federal law enforcement. Wow. All right. And so a lot of it is... Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine. and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives,

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There's no ATF agent that gets the recognition that Joe Pistone that Donnie Brasco got at the FBI. But like we have those Joe Pistones. So you guys go undercover more than the DEA even? In today's world, yes, absolutely. So Joe Pistone and Joe's a friend of mine, Donnie Brascoe, All the amazing things he did on behalf of the FBI, infiltrating the mafia in New York. Jack Garcia did the same type of work infiltrating the mob in New York.

Bob Delaney, who was a New Jersey state police officer who infiltrated the mob in New York. These guys all did amazing things. ATF has Dominic Polyphron who infiltrated the mob's serial killer hitman, Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman. that like so ATF has those guys and they have that history they just the agency hasn't promoted that work the way some other agencies do can I tell you why I think that is why you guys have a lesser brand if we will we were talking about the hell's angels brand earlier I think the FBI and the DEA have sexier targets targeting the Italian mob that what think about that branding think about how the fascination

by America. These WAPs have built this secret society for generations. I mean, most middle Americans can't even, were completely enraptured by that. The DEA has these Latino kingpins, right, that do have the Miami, had the Miami Vice lifestyle, mountains of cocaine and, you know, Colombian hookers. And so it's a real sexy criminal element to it. The ATF is investigating white trash dudes in Laughlin, Nevada. So nobody really cares or pays attention. They think, oh, those are like gross criminals that drink bud light and put their cigarettes out on their girlfriends.

And I don't disagree with that. And I think that some of ATF's targets, not all, some of ATF's targets, there's a sympathetic public view of some of those targets. So you look at like Ruby Ridge, right? ATF had their hand in Ruby Ridge. ATF had a sought-off shotgun transaction with, I'm standing at the guy's the main guy at Ruby Ridge. At Ruby Ridge, the name escapes me.

I'm not sure about that. Let's talk about, put that aside for a sec. Let's talk about Waco. Waco, to me, I'm from Portland, Oregon. I grew up looking at people in Colts in Texas as subhuman and, you know, just a lower class. And then I look into it and I'm like, oh, no, the government was the criminal in this case. And I still kind of maintain that opinion. So you have people, you say the Second Amendment is an inalienable right to American citizens in the Constitution.

That we all kind of agree with that. It's Americans should have the right to be armed. So why is there a federal agency that's policing this Texas organization, religious organization, again, the rights of an American citizen to have guns and have a religious organization? What right is that of ATF to go snooping around? I understand your perspective, but I'm going to debate that with you. Sure. Let's do it. Okay. And let me preface that by saying, were there mistakes made there? Obviously, there were, big ones. But the Branch Davidian compound was receiving machine gun parts.

They were receiving components to build explosive devices. There were allegations of child abuse and sexual child abuse going on in there. So with ATF, with the federal firearms laws, the federal explosives laws, the abuse of kids, sexual abuse of kids with going on allegedly. within the branch Davidian compound in Waco. Do you want ATF to have that information, like you said, someone finds it on a computer and then just say, okay, well, let's just see how this plays out. Or do you want them to do something about it?

So ATF is investigating those crimes with under their jurisdiction. Ultimately, the evidence proved those allegations to be true. Those things were taking place. There were machine guns. There was illegal weapons there. There was explosive devices being used and built there. I'm not aware of the explosive devices. Yeah, absolutely.

You know what? Ask the people who attempted the raid on the compound when they were having hand grenades dropped out of the windows on them, whether there was explosive devices there. Ask the agents that were picking, shrap in a lot of themselves and in the hospital if there were explosives there. Do you guys have regrets about your health? I do. A small regret would be slouching in the dentist's chair thinking, I should have brushed and flossed better. A big health regret is listening to your doctor and thinking,

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Are they, are the grenades illegal across the board? you don't have the right. There's no like open carry grenade laws in Texas. No. So what else is illegal? Is a machine gun illegal or is it depends what type of machine gun? A machine gun by itself, just a standalone item is not illegal. It's just it's got to be registered.

It's got to be, it's, you have to be accountable for it. So they weren't registering. Short barrel of shotguns, fully automatic machine guns. You can't, whether you agree or disagree with. the law, you can't take your rifle, turn it into a machine gun and not have it registered and be legal. Like, if you don't disagree, if you disagree with that law, I understand that, but it is the law. Right, but were they doing that at Waco? Were they not registering their machine gun parts?

Yeah, they were acquiring the elements to build machine guns. They were building machine guns. They were building explosive devices. the abuses that were going on there were all proven to be true so ATF and which is where the mistakes end up being made decide to raid the compound they're tipped off the the Divideians are tipped off that the feds are coming and they're not having it and it turns into this massive shootout dozens of agents are wounded four agents are killed in the process which then You know, we back out. The FBI takes over. Ultimately, the standoff and like, you know, 51 days. And then, you know, Janet Reno made the call. The fires. Yeah. Janet Reno made the call to go in. And so you've, you know, you end up with, you know, massive casualties. You get like, like innocent civilians who die in that process. I would never sit here and say, like, we did everything right. But did ATF have not only the, the, the right to investigate.

that case. They had to investigate that case. Like you can't turn your back to that. Yeah. I think investigating is okay. According to the documentaries and the like the movies and the Showtime series that came out about it, it was pretty light on the investigation and heavy on like the aggression. I think that was part where the mistakes were made is they went in way too hard, too hot, too quickly instead of trying to talk it out. In hindsight? Was there a better way to execute and enact the enforcement element of that? Could Timothy McVeigh have been taken into custody off-site and diffuse that? Those are all valid questions.

I don't have those answers. I wasn't a part of it. We talked about Ruby Ridge. Ruby Ridge and then Waco, Timothy McVeigh, is sympathetic to, the quote unquote victims of both of those things, which inspires him to build his bomb, which he uses in retaliation at the Murrell Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Yeah, horrible. So with all that said, right, and going into the previous elements of our conversation,

Timothy McVeigh is acquiring explosive components, and he's building this bomb. Like, that needed to be investigated. Yeah. If we had an operative in there, like that potentially, hypothetically, could have been prevented. We didn't, and it wasn't. So now in the wake of all that, the generations after all that happened, are those, like, white militia guys? How prevalent are those criminal elements still in the United States? Well, for me to make a...

My answer would be uneducated at this point. Like I'm not dialed in on who's who in the zoo in that world. But are we seeing those same elements in society and in culture today of the overreach of government, the abuse of rights of the government and a group of people saying, I ain't having it and I'm going to stand up against it and we're going to do something about it. Um, it, we're seeing it today. I think probably even more than ever now. Because even guys like, you know, coastal elites are like, yeah, we're being, there's a overreach of the federal government. So you got to figure those white boys in the Midwest are strapping up. So. Well, and in that time in the,

in the early 90s, so much of that was inspired. There was a novel written called the Turner Diaries. And the Turner Diaries was the Bible for that militia movement. which told this fictional story of these group of militia members overthrowing the government. And it was used like the Turner Diaries were recovered time and time again in these militia groups. It was their Bible. Right. Wow. Wow.

Yeah, I just think it's so much easier to get caught now is maybe why these things don't actually come to fruition. But I imagine the ATF and other federal agencies are thwarting these like domestic terrorism potential. all the time. You don't hear about it. Is there, is there someone out there right now as we speak, assembling a bomb, assembling components of a bomb,

building a plan to do harm? Absolutely there is. Do we know about it? I don't know. Hopefully we do. Hopefully we're doing something about it. Chances are, I mean,

there's going to be more events like that. Yeah. There just is. the unabomber. You know, the guy operated for years and years setting off devices and maiming people and killing people

before he was caught and found out and he wasn't caught through an undercover operation. He was caught through the gathering of intelligence and traditional investigations. Do you think that domestic homegrown terrorism is more prevalent and more of a threat

than terrorism from abroad from the Middle East for example. Oh man, that's like, that's, I'm not sure that that's a fair question to ask me because I can't give you a definitive answer. I can't say, like where the biggest threat is. I'm not dialed in enough into today's world to say where the biggest threat is from. Okay. Hey, everyone. I hope you're enjoying this episode with Jay. I just want to make a little tour reminder. I'm going to be in Chicago, Illinois on July 19th and 20th at the comedy bar. I'm doing four shows, two on Friday, two on Saturday.

Come out and see me. Get tickets at linktree.com slash Johnny Mitchell. Once again, linktree.com slash Johnny Mitchell. It's in the bio of my Instagram profile. I love to see you guys out on the road. It's going to be a great time. Come see me in Chicago, July 19th and 20th. All right, let's get back into it.

Well, let's talk. Let's go back to you. So you're kind of a famous for your athletic achievements in Arizona. when you join the bureau, when you join ATF and decide to go undercover, was that like a worry that you were going to get discovered? You're going to be like going to be like, hey, that's that's Jay from University of Arizona. Well, here's the thing. The people that I was investigating, they're not the people that read the sports page. They're not watching the wildcats football.

They're not going to football. They ain't paying attention. Right. And so is that enough of enough insulation? apparently it was. But did you have to do anything when you go undercover? Do you have to do anything, change your look? Do you have to get tattoos?

Do you bulk up? Do you take acting classes? Do you interview people that used to actually be criminals in this world to kind of like get the slang down? Or do you just kind of put it together as you go? Well, my appearance evolved over time. Like I had a. undercover persona, a cover story as a gunrunner and a debt collector. And so, like, I grew up in a very, had a very innocent life. So I had to train for that.

I had to become educated in the elements of that, talking, like you said, talking to people who were involved in that lifestyle and trying to learn from them. But here's the thing. I never really, ever tried to pretend that I was someone that I wasn't because I always felt like you have to respect the intelligence of the people you're working on of the suspects and the targets. And if you don't, if you underestimate the people you're working on, that's a dangerous game to play. So I was always very respectful of the people that I was investigating, at least respectful of their intelligence. I'll tell you a story when I wasn't and when it, when it betrayed me. It's working in

an investigation in Georgia. And the target of the investigation owned a bar and a tattoo shop. So part of trying to accelerate the trust and credibility element, I had decided I was going to drop my wallet in his bar intentionally. And then in my plan, I would call him the next day and say, man, the last place I saw my my wallet was at your place. Did you find it? Knowing that he'd find it, knowing that he'd go through it and search everything in there and see that what he was finding on his own was going to validate my credibility, would accelerate my credibility. You see your ID in there. The guy is who he says he is. All my pocket litter, all the stuff in there. And it would just help advance and speed up the credibility process. So I call him and he says, yeah, I found it. Come on in.

come and pick it up. So I go to his tattoo shop to pick up to grab my wallet. So he invites me into his office and he closes the door and he padlocks the door from the inside. It's got like a gate latch on it. And he puts a padlock on it. And I'm thinking like, like who locks their door from the inside? Like he's making sure no one's coming in from the outside. Right.

So he pushes the wallet in front of me and there was a business card in my wallet that was from the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in Joliet Illinois that I had obtained legitimately. It was just part of my pocket litter, right? So he pushes this card in front of me and he says, what are like, what's the story on this? And I said, dude, I lived in Chicago for a while. I, you know, hung out in some spots in Joliet. Dude gave me this card and said, if you ever have a problem, if you ever need help, man, like look out, reach out for me.

Like, I can help you out. That was the beginning and the end of that story for that card. Yeah. It's like, look harder at it. And he pushes this jeweler's magnifying glass in front of me, the kind with the big dial, right? So I'm looking at this card through this jeweler's glass. And when I look up, he's got his elbows bipodded on his desk and he's holding a pistol in my face. He's like, what do you see?

And I'm looking at it and I don't have an answer. And that's the worst thing in undercover is to not have an answer or an explanation for something. something that's on your person, something that's in your house, something that's in your car. You better be able to like explain how and why it got there. And my explanation was, man, I got this thing years ago. It's been in that wallet for a long time. In the very corner was a tiny, tiny pinhole in the corner of this card. He said, you know what that looks like to me?

That looks like some cop took this card and had it thumb-tacked on the bulletin board behind his desk as a trophy. And I'm thinking to myself, fuck, that's exactly what it was. That's exactly. He had it figured out. So my story, I had underestimated the intelligence and the willingness to examine every tiny detail of that wallet. And he caught me flatfooted.

I had no other choice but to stick with my story and to say, dude, I can't explain the pinhole in that card. I don't know how it got there. it was there when I got it. And so we moved beyond it. But like I'm being interrogated. I know I'm weak. I know my story's got flaws and got holes in it.

And I got a 45 pointed in my face. Do you have your shit on you? Yeah, but it's like, you know, it's the, you know the team. Dude, you think you can outdraw a trigger squeeze? No. You want to draw, draw trigger squeeze? See if you can outdraw this trigger squeeze, dude. He's got the drop on you.

Yeah. Unless you can run away from here. At faster than 1,500 feet per second, I'm going to catch up to you. My bullet's going to catch up to you. And so ultimately, I got through it. The moral of that long story was that I had underestimated the intelligence of the suspect I was working on. I did not do that again. Okay.

So just finishing this up, so you just convinced the guy and he put his gun away? I think that I had laid enough groundwork with him. And I had stuck to my story, which was flawed. It was a partial explanation. But like, what choice did I have? There was a pinhole on that card. He had decided what it meant. He was correct.

But I couldn't corroborate his explanation. I couldn't say, dude, you got me. You know, this was pinned up on the back of my bullet. Yeah, I know. But how did you convince him? Did he keep working with you after that? I just held my ground. Did he keep working with you after that incident?

Yeah, we moved forward. And did you end up arresting him? He was. Yeah, we ended up moving forward. There was nothing glamorous about it. Really, there was nothing glamorous about that case. But the moral of the story was that I didn't give the guy I was working on credit that he deserved. And he outsmarted me.

Now, do you put that in the indictment? hey, this guy drew his gun on a federal officer? Yeah, I mean, he didn't know it was a federal officer. He just thought it was a dude. Like, that paranoia kicked in. We talked about earlier. He was inherently paranoid. That's...

So you're a very disciplined guy. I would have waited his gun and I would have blasted him because that would have pissed me off, you know? I was more scared than pissed, to be honest with you. Wow. And which is part of undercover work is that your heart is racing a million miles an hour, but your hand can't shake. Right. Yeah. Okay, so tell us about your first week on the job. Take us back to 1987 when you start working undercover. Yeah, I got hired in November

of 1987 on a Monday. I raised my right hand. I swore my oath to the government and to protect the Constitution and all those elements of our oath. And it was an amazing day for me. I was and still am honored to be given a badge and a gun and be asked to stand up on behalf of good and innocent people in the communities I worked on against the predators. I took that very serious. like that was important to me. Four days later, I am on an arrest scenario. I'm not on the point.

I'm so far removed from the action that like I can barely see what's going on. So ATF is running an operation to arrest a convicted felon who was in possession of a firearm. One man, one gun case. So we're surveillance. I'm like on this like third tier of the perimeter of the surveillance. Dude shows up at his house. He sees the initial team moving in on him and he takes off and he's on the run. Well, you know, man, I didn't have any training.

I didn't have any experience. And I just jumped in the chase. I'm like, this is what we do. Right? So I'm chasing this dude. It's a foot chase, right? Yeah, it's a foot chase. I was not fast enough to play in the NFL.

but by cop standards, I was Hussein Bolt. Like I could outrun most people, right? I wasn't fast enough to play in the NFL, but I was fast enough to beat cops running, right? So I'm passing people and I'm chasing him down. So this dude were in his neighborhood. He serpentines around and he's gone, vanished. And man, I was so pissed and I was defeated.

I was like, man, you know what? Like I had a chance to put my hands on this dude and I couldn't catch him. And my partners, my peers, I'm brand new on the job. We're mocking me. They're like, oh, now we know why you're a federal agent, dude. NFL stands for not for long when you run as fast as you do, right? You can't chase down 140 pound junkie in biker boots.

No wonder you couldn't make it, right? And like, it was good nature teasing, right? But I was pissed. Well, we decide to like rescour the area. Let's like, let's continue to look for them. So I'm out searching and this this dude like pops up from some deep grass like underneath a trailer. And before I can even react, I've got my gun out, but like down at the ground before I can react, this dude is up and closing in on me. And he's like, you know, like motherfucker, today's your last day.

Put that fucking gun down. Like he like had the drop on me. Right. And I start to like, I start to playing my gun up to get a like a site picture. and he's like, I'll fucking kill you where you stand. And like he gets around behind me. Like I had freaking like put my gun away. I'm like, this is going to turn into hand-to-hand combat, right?

I had re-holstered my gun. So as he's closing in on me and he's got the gun extended, I'm like thinking, I'm going to pop on that gun and freaking twist it and get out of this, right? And as he gets like within striking distance, he pulls that gun in real close and he had it anchored against his chest. and I had lost all my leverage. He swings around behind me. He's got an arm around my neck. He's got the gun to my head.

And he's walking me towards one of the government cars that we had used to arrive on the scene. It was a two-door Monte Carlo. And he pushes me in the front seat and he slides in the back seat behind me. And he's like doing, let's go. Let's get me the fuck out of here. Right? And I'm like. And so now the other agents see what's going on.

And they're starting to close in. and I see help coming, right? And he's starting to panic. Let's fucking go. Get me the fuck out of here. So my first reaction was I saw a telephone pole probably 30, 40 yards in front of us. And I was like, I'm going to fricking ram this car into this telephone pole as fast as I can get it going in the next 40 yards. And we'll just see what happens.

Right. So I go to start the car and then plan B kicked in. And I had the keys in my hand and I pulled the keys out of the ignition and dropped them to the floor. And I'm like, fuck, I dropped the keys. And as I leaned forward to the floorboard to grab the keys, he's trying to ride with me to stay with me. The other agents have now arrived at the car. The gun comes off my head. And this five second like lead and glass storm of bullets and chaos takes place.

He shoots me in the back, point blank in the back. He gets shot to shit. Yeah. Do you think he got the shot off before they said? started shooting into the car. It, you know what, dude, it was so chaotic. It would be impossible for me to tell.

This is like your own little Waco. This, like, you take the worst Tony Scott, Quentin Tarantino, like movie shootout. Yeah. And this was a million times worse, a million times faster, a million times more violent. Right.

And so, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, 20 rounds fired. like that. And so I'm like, what's the danger of you getting hit by your partners? Yeah, I think that they were, they were pretty dialed in on,

on the target. Right. They weren't just randomly blasting into the car. They, they had a sight picture. They had focus, right? They're hitting him. They're lighting him up.

Right. But I knew that, does he get hit in the chest? He was like all X-ringed. All X-ringed all over the torso. Wow. Wow. So, so, but he managed to, he pops.

He pops me. And like, and all of a sudden, like, like, I, it's like the worst case of having the wind knocked out of you've ever had. I can't breathe in a row. Can't breathe in a row. And I look down and there's a hole in my, in the front of my chest. And I knew everything came from behind. And I'm like, this is fucked. Oh, right?

So they, they, they pull the, like, the, my partners pull the car door. open. They pull me out. They pull the suspect out of the back seat. He's like got the death rattle, man. His eyes have freaking rolled back and he's gurgling. He's, I mean, this dude is ventilated, none. And I'm laying there and there's, they pull my shirt open and there's blood coming out of my chest like you're holding your thumb over the end of a garden hose. It's spraying out. And this big pool of blood is growing around me. And this crinkled up old like, potato chip bag, like blows across and it sticks in the mud, sticks in the blood and the dirt and it blows past. And I'm like, I'm back and like my eyes are rolling back in my head.

And I'm surrounded by like single wide trailers with like aluminum awnings falling off of them, cars on blocks, rusted out swing sets, dog shit. And I'm like, I'm going to freaking die in the middle of all this, you know. And the thing is with with the feds, we get paid every two weeks. I hadn't gotten a paycheck yet. Like, it was on the house. I comped him that one. So they pushed me back into the vehicle that we just had the shooting in the back seat where the suspect got shut up. Now I'm laying where he got shut up.

I'm laying in his blood and my blood. And my supervisor jumps in the car, races me to the hospital. Is it painful yet? Or is it just a numb? You know what? That's such a good question. And I'll tell you, I was so scared. I don't know.

I don't remember it hurting. I don't remember being in pain. So much adrenaline. I remember choking. I remember not being able to breathe. I remember glass, like shattered window glass falling on me and blood squirting out on my chest. And why did you guys not have vests on? Well, good point.

Initially, we did. Initially, like, I was vested up, right? So we go into this chase and then the suspect eludes us. We regroup. and dude, I'd been on the job four days. Fliqin straight, freaking idiot. I had no idea what I was doing. I took my vest off.

Like, you don't do that? And then go back into, go back into a pursuit or like into a, you know, looking for this dude. You don't do that. Wow. And so, you know, they, they race me to the hospital and they pull me out of the car

and they put me on a gurney and I'm being rolled into the emergency room and I'm laying back and I can see like a nurse. I can see her face and I can see her hat like over me. And she pushed me in and I said, am I going to die? And she looks down and she said, we're not sure yet, baby.

And I was like, bad bedside manner, man. Tell me what I want to hear. Give me the answer I want to hear. Even if you're lying to me, tell me what I want to hear. That's right. Tell me it's the biggest you've ever had.

And I'm suffocating, man. I can't breathe. I'm spitting blood. Blood's come out of my ear. out of my mouth. It's pumping out of my chest. And I hear the doctor say, get me a finosio retractor. And like a layman terms, I don't know what that is. That retractor, ultimately I found is a rib spreader. And they, he said like, you know what kid? He goes, this is going to be unpleasant. Just, just hang in there with me. They scalpel my side open. Like no, nothing. They don't give you any kind

of numbing agent before. I mean, they're working fast. Yeah. They scalpel my side open. He's He takes this like screwdriver type thing and pops the cartilage out between the ribs underneath my arm. And then he puts this retractor in there. And it's like a ratchet. And he twists it or cranks it. And it slowly separates your ribs. And then they put a chest tube in, which has this like electronic suction bucket at the end of it. And they put that tube in.

And then all of a sudden these stewed tomatoes start getting sucked out of your chest into the, into this collection bucket. Which, and what is that? That's stewed tomato. Well, it was, they put this chest tube in. It was blood clots and it was just blood that had been filling up in my chest. Okay. So the point of that is to get the blood out of your lung. I had a deflated lung and the blood was further collapsing like my chest cavity.

It was squeezing my lungs, which is why I couldn't breathe. I see. Because my lungs are getting squeezed with all the fluid like collecting in there. They call that a sucking chest wound because as you try to breathe in, you're sucking in air and blood and you're not inflated. your lung, you're further crushing your lung. They also caught a sucking chest loon just because it sucks. It sucks to go through it. So you could, if you died from that, you're literally like suffocating and kind of drowning in your own blood. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. So it was, you know, and that was like, that was my fourth day at work. But it went in and out though, the bullet, right? It did. It was through

and through it like went in my back, went through my lung, narrowly missed my heart and exited my chest on the left side. But ultimately that's a good thing. you'd rather have that than stay in there rather than having to dig a slug out like i'm not a doctor i don't know which would be better or worse but it was what it was and then so does your lung how do you heal from that does the body naturally yeah ultimately when they you know they they relieve that pressure on your lung and it allows you to start breathing and your lung can expand again um an interesting aspect to that story is my doctor was this still somewhat unknown trauma surgeon very skilled trauma surgeon.

Ultimately, his name's Richard Carmona. Ultimately, Dr. Carmona becomes the surgeon general of the United States. He was an amazing, amazing, life-saving trauma surgeon. The dude saved my life. There's no doubt he saved my life. And he was a cop. He was on the Sheriff's Department SWAT team and was their trauma doctor and their medic. and he was like a point guy on the like an actual operator on their SWAT team two weeks after

I got shot he got shot my doctor got shot this dude like for for for a guest for your show and I'll dial you in freaking like bring Dr. Carmonia in wow like one of the most amazing personal stories this dude like grew up in Harlem was in trouble went into the military became a field medic, became a trauma surgeon, did all kinds of rescues, like, like repelling out of helicopters

to rescue people that were stranded like in remote mountain areas. Save me, saved dozens of people in Tucson as a trauma surgeon. Ultimately, the dude, Dr. Carmona is,

he worked at the University of Arizona football games, like just as like an emergency doctor in the stadium. You have a heart attack. You have something. You got a guy there, right? He's on his way to University of Arizona football game. There's a carjacking taking place in front of him. He confronts the carjacker. He shoots the carjacker on his way to a football game now and then performs CPR on the guy he just shot waiting for the medics to get there. This dude is a like straight pipe hit and badass doctor, man. Wow. Anyway, the dude saved my life. And this is Tucson, Arizona.

Oh, yes, and you've brought the shirt that you were wearing. Oh, my God, this should be in a museum. Look at this artifact. So this hole, am I looking at that camera? So that hole, that's where it went in my back. What kind of gun was it? It was a 38. So that's a big slug.

It was a full metal jacket 38 round. Wow. That's where the round went in, which doesn't look all that traumatic, right? But that hole there is where it exited my chest. Wow. And that was like that was only like a short period of time of bleeding. They got my shirt off me pretty good looking for like pretty quick. How much time from when you got shot to when you were in the hospital getting the tube put in you?

I couldn't tell you. It was pretty fast. But they, it's safe to say you had about a half an hour left of life or maybe an hour with the way you were bleeding. Yeah, I was, you know. And like this in itself as as as traumatic as that looks, that like I know people that have been through much worse. much worse. What's maybe interesting about this story is that it was four days on the job. It was traumatic.

I'm not trying to minimize that or have false humility about it. I know people that have been through much worse. My friend Jason Redmond, who's a Navy SEAL who was shot up real, like bullets in the face, bullets in, like he's shot to shit. Like I tell him that story and I showed him my shirt. And Jason's a friend of mine. He goes, like, dude, he goes, that's a paper cut. Right? So like there's people that have been through much, much worse.

Much, I mean, well, there's kids that are coming home missing arms and legs and with traumatic brain injuries that like, like this is a walk in the park. So you continue on with the ATF. You're offered disability. You're offered basically your walking papers after four days. So I had like these like personal injury liability attorneys like lined up waiting to talk to me. Hey, kid, you know what a million dollars looks like? Man, I grew up with a carpenter and a house cleaner, Ron.

No, I don't know what a million dollars looks like. I still don't know what a million dollars looks like. How about $5 million? You tell me how many zeros you want on that check. I will get it for you and it will be an uncontested suit. And that would have been them suing the ATF? Yeah, the government wants you to go away. The government wants you to go away.

They don't want you to leave. They don't want this story out there that they allowed a four-day agent to get shot to shit. Like, they'll pay whatever you want. This is generational money for you. All I could think of was get out, man. I don't want to talk to you. I just wanted another chance to see if I could go and do it and not fuck it up. Right. I wanted another chance. I wanted to try There is no cop that I've ever met that took a badge or a gun with money as the motivation. They're like school teachers, public servants. Like none of those people take those jobs thinking that they're going to get rich. They take them for other reasons.

That was my other reason. Like the money didn't mean anything to me. I wanted to see if I could do this job and not embarrass myself. So how did you redeem yourself after that? Did they send you? Do they transfer you? or did you stay on in Arizona for a little while longer? Well, I recovered.

So this happened. This shooting was on the 19th of November, 1987. So I was in the hospital for a little bit. I was at home, convalescing, healing for a little bit. Before Christmas, so like, let's say a month later, like I come into the office. And my boss is like, what are you doing here? And I'm like, what do you mean? What am I doing here?

I know that there's limitations to what I can do. But I didn't take this job to sit at home and feel sorry for myself. Like, find something for me to do. Let me participate. Right? He's like, dude, you can milk this thing for as long as you need to milk it. Like, you're going to continue, don't worry about getting paid. You're going to continue to get paid.

But my mentality was, I just wanted to get back. I just wanted to try again. I was embarrassed. I was ashamed of myself. I wanted another shot. So when did you eventually go undercover? Well, so my, my, my, that was my objective. My, my, my mission was to work undercover.

Well, my supervisors were like, dude, you know what? That's out the window now. You played football here. This shooting just got a ton of publicity, which is, is advertising who you are and what you're doing. Yeah. Like, so, so take that off your list of, right. Like, take that off your bucket list.

That ain't going to happen. And I was like, I got to move. Yeah. I got to go somewhere else because that is not out of my bucket list. That's why I came to this job. Of course. I wanted to be Donnie Brascoe part two. So where did you end up going?

I wanted to be Sonny Crockett, right? So I get transferred to Chicago, which is where I got the card working in Joliet that was later used that caused me problems with the pinhole in it. Right. But I'm in Chicago. And a year later, I'm in another shooting in Chicago, in Joliet. Okay. So tell us about the undercover. work you were doing there, you know, involving the gangs that were purchasing machine guns off of you. This is fascinating. Well, um, so in Joliet, the, the gangster disciples were prevalent in

Chicago. And, you know, the, the gang community at that time, I can't speak to what it's like today. The gang structure was so established in Chicago in that area, like crips and bloods couldn't get in there. Wow. It was just like gangster disciples and vice lords and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And these old school Chicago gangs, like weren't like letting loose of any territory, weren't compromising that ability to make money to anybody. And how were they structured compared to like the Bloods and the Crips? Does all their activity revolve around crack dealing at the time? Or were they in-

Drug sales and territory? Okay. Money in territory is what the drug game is. Like how much territory do you own? Do you own this street corner? Do you own this neighborhood? How much money does your territory produce? It's economics. It's econ 101.

But compared to the Hells Angels, is it kind of the same structure with like the African-American gangs like the gangster disciples? It's like, you guys are crack dealers. You go make money relatively independently, but then you pay dues to our club and you have the, you're at the meetings and maybe you don't wear patches like the white bikers do. But you're in the gang. Is that kind of how it works or is it more organized? And more hierarchical. I found that the Hells Angels were much more structured and had a more established hierarchy. Okay.

And then like I never got deep in the in the drug game with the Hells Angels. No, but I'm talking about the Black gangs. Like, so they were less structured than a gang like the Hells Angels. That's hard for me to say, whether they were more or less. I think they all have their hierarchy. You know, you've got like soldiers with boots on their ground doing the dirty work. And then you've got various levels of insulation and superintend. supervisors and bosses making their way up to the top.

Yeah. Right. So there was nothing that I did. There was no undercover assignments that I had in Chicago that were amazing. There was no like special recognition type operations. We're buying guns and drugs from gangbangers. Is it hard as a white guy to work in a place like Juliet? Well, you know what? Like I tried to have a cover story that I could apply to no matter who you were. If you were a white collar guy, if you were like a black street gangster, if you were an outfit guy, if you were a mobster, if you were a biker, if you were, whoever you were, that like gun runner, debt collector element, I could, I could figure out how to morph that to make

it somehow fit with what you either believed or wanted. Because every gang needs guns. You're the gun guy. And maybe debt collection, maybe you're a murder for hire. So we cross Paz with some gangster disciples in Juliet that they're they're trying to acquire guns. It's how the streets are run. You know, how much firepower do you have to protect your territory, to protect your street corner, all those things. So we do an undercover reverse selling machine guns, selling guns to gangsters. And then they were kids.

Would you sell them? What do they want? What kind of guns? You know what? I just, I think they were just some like like Mac 10. type, like mini machine guns. Right. Was that the most common machine gun that you saw on the street?

There were, like, that was in the day when, like, the Ouzi was like the top of the line, right? And there was Mac tens and there was like Narinco's and there was like cheap knockoffs, but like still, you know, would, we're very dangerous. We're like wicked weapons, especially in the wrong hands. Um, so the, the objective is, is to like transfer these guns to these kids and then follow the guns back and see if we could climb the ladder. Where are they going? Where are they going to land these? Ultimately, who's going to take possession of these? Right. They were babies, man. These kids were like, like 17 years old. Yeah. Um, so we start following them around, uh, me and my partner, uh, an agent named Chris Bayless, who's just like one of the most amazing undercover operatives in the history. of undercover. Like we're like out of the mix. We're not really part of the surveillance.

And these kids start serpentineing and run around and and trying to make a heat run. They're trying to lose. If anybody's on them, they're trying to make sure no one's on them. They're trying to clean off whatever the surveillance might be. Well, it turns out when it's time for the for the takedown, me and my partner have now landed up the street from them. Like we're intentionally trying to stay off the point and we end up being on the point. So, there's a conga line of cops behind these kids with our machine guns in their car, and it's decided like, look, these kids are doing everything they can to shake us. We need to knock this down before we lose these guns.

That's the worst thing that can happen. We cannot lose the guns. If we end up arresting some teenagers, okay, so be it, but we cannot let these guns hit the street. So they're moving in, and we're just in a position to kind of like block things a little bit. and as they get ready to call the bust and initiate the traffic stop, there's a kid coming down the street on a bicycle. So the point man says,

let's push this up the street and get this kid behind us. Like this kid's going to be in the line of fire if something breaks bad. Before he's able to communicate that, the other units behind them start spinning their lights and running their sirens. And so now instead of being able to squeeze the, the suspect vehicle with the vehicle I'm in and box them in. Now they've got a big run at us. They see it lighten up behind them.

They do what they do. They're going to run for it. They take off and they're coming right at me. And like our car is on the side of the road and maybe 20 feet outside of the edge of the road is a cornfield. Like with like this is in August of 1989. It's like fully grown like, you know, 10 foot high corn. stalks. It's dense. There's nowhere to go. So I'm trapped between my car and this cornfield. And there, I can hear the engine. The engine is not like idling. It's, it's, it's, this dude's got his

pedal to the metal. Yeah. One of the kids hangs out the passenger side and starts firing. I'm, I start firing at them. I get hit by the, by the escaping vehicle of the kids that we had just tried to do the reverse with. I get flipped. over the car i get hit flipped up in the air spinning around firing more shots as they go my partner pulls up next to me and he's like get in like let's get in the chase and i'm like dude i can't move like i can't get in the car i can't i can't stand up he takes off they get into this big chase they ultimately chase the kids they corner them in this cornfield um they're hiding in this dense cornfield and like you you like you can't go in there and you're going to

like you'd be face to face with someone before you saw them. So they get the cornfield all corned off and sectioned off. And then they start sending the dogs in. And when the dogs go in, then the dudes are like, hey, time out, man. I'll give it up. I don't want to get bit. So even though they just shot at you and ran you over, flipped you over.

So we were trying to do our job. And we did our job. I can't say we did our job well because if you did, do it well. It doesn't end up in a shootout. We did our job the best we could. Mistakes were made, some of which I own. But the hard part of that was that, man, they were babies. They were 17-year-old kids. You know, so we end up going to the hospital. And my, you know, I'm pretty chewed up from getting hit by this car. and there's these two gurneys coming down, coming down the corridor. And it's, it's, I had shot the driver during this shootout and that he had a bullet hole in his shoulder.

I had shot him through the windshield as I'm getting hit. Bang, get him. They continue to take off. So the kid that I shot and me are, are being passed with doctors pushing our, our gurneys together. And the doctor stops, like we're side by side now. And this kid's looking at me. And it actually, like I had just been in this life or death confrontation with this kid. And my heart broke for him.

He was a baby, right? And he was scared, shitless. Yeah. And the doctor, like this is like a Joliet trauma surgeon who'd seen like this gang war stuff all the time. Yeah. He's like, agent, let me tell you something. He says, don't shoot him here. And he's pushing on this kid's bullet hole.

And his fingers got blood on it. He's like, shoot him here. And he leaves like a little blood down. And he says, he goes, then I don't have to fucking deal with this dude. And the kid is like scared shitless. And I just was like, you know, I guess there was nothing to feel good. There wasn't anything to feel good about. No.

Well, I mean, in that doctor's defense, the 80s were out of control. So he was desensitized and angry. hopefully, you know, hopefully he changed his perspective on human life, but, you know, I understand that a little bit. So we got, we end up going to trial on these kids and, and like, what had happened had it happened. Oh, by the way, so you recovered the machine guns, the Mac 10s. Did you ever, did you move that case further up the line in the gang or no? I think that's probably where it, not where it began, but definitely where it ended. Yeah.

Right. we did recover the guns. Yeah. Right. The kid that I shot survived. His partner survived. So we go to trial with these kids. And we're in the courthouse in Joliet.

And the defense attorney says like in the middle of trial. Like I'm taking a break from my testimony. He's like, hey, man, can I talk to you? And I'm like, you can't. I can't. Like we're in the middle of trial. I can't have a conversation with the defense attorney. Like out of the courtroom.

If you have anything to say, you need to say it on the record. Yeah. And he's like, come here, man. Just let me, just give me a minute. He's like, and this defense attorney said, you need understand something. They know what they did. I know what they did. There's no avoiding that.

My job here is to make sure that the system does not run over the top of these kids, that the system treats these kids fairly, that they're given a right to defend themselves, they're given a right to tell their story, they're given a right to hear the testimony of the witnesses against them, they're given the right to see the evidence being put on table against them. My job isn't to get them off. My job is to make sure that the system does not run over these impoverished gang kids. And like with that explanation, like I had this newfound respect for defense attorneys. Defense attorneys were always the enemy.

They were always like the guy trying to get off who you were trying to make a case against. The bad guys. Yeah. They were the adversary. And I was like, man, like, that was such a, uh, a heartfelt explanation of, of what he viewed his role. And I understood it. I understood that many, like, like my job is to make sure that the system doesn't abuse

these kids. And, and that, that's the beauty of living in America, man, that you, that you get the right to do that. You get the right to face your accusers. Yeah. But the other beauty is you have to follow the law, everybody, or else you have El Salvador and MS-13. So I don't care if you're 17.

You need to go, you got to go sit down when you do something like that. Well, like we talked about earlier about like gun laws and explosives laws and things like that. There are laws on the books. Not everybody agrees with the law. Not everybody likes the law. But the law is the law. If you don't like it, then you have to either vote for people that will change laws that,

in a way that you agree with. but you don't get to say like, well, you don't get to say, the speed limit here is 25, but I don't agree with the speed limit. So I'm going to drive 75. It doesn't work that way. Yeah. Well, anyways, that's besides the point. These are 17-year-old gangsters.

There's no political aims. There's nothing. They're from the hood. And this is just, this is what it is. They were doing what they were told to do. What happened? What happened with these kids? They were convicted.

They were convicted. And I think, ultimately, I think they were convicted. They did a little bit of time. it wasn't like. That just makes me angry for a guy that did two years for selling marijuana that some kids, like I should have shot at a cop then. If I had known I could have just got off with a couple of years. They did not take a big lick.

Wow. And they got out and ultimately both of them were killed in gang violence. Right. Like it would have been better for them to do 10 because then they would have got out as adults with perspective. And, you know, maybe they would have done some something constructive with their time. I've seen that. In a perfect world, like, no one wants to, like, have to live their life in a cage, good or bad. But in a perfect world, like, you get disciplined, you get sentenced, and then you say, like, man, I need to change my ways.

I don't want to live this life. I don't want to come back here. I don't want to do this again. So when I get out, I have to be better in a perfect world. Sometimes that happens. Sometimes it doesn't. How did they get off with such little time, especially in federal court? Is it because they were minors?

You know what? I don't know. I don't know that I have any legal explanation for it. I think that that definitely helped. Right. I think they were remorseful for it. And I think that that helped. Yeah.

And I think that and again, like I can't put like, I can't read the mind of a judge or a jury. But like a compassionate judge was probably saying like, these are babies, man. They made a bad mistake. They have to pay for this for this. mistake, but they don't have to have their lives ruined over it. So the ATF, it sounds like, gets the most action of any federal agency. I'm talking about action, like what you just described.

The reason I loved ATF, like in addition to their undercover program, was that they were, ATF was the closest you could come to being a street cop and be a Fed. Right. They were, like, ATF was at that point, it has changed now. it is evolved like on who they're looking for, on who the candidates for agents are, they wanted ATF wanted cops. Right. They were recruiting from police departments and state agencies and other federal agencies. They wanted people that knew how to run investigations, that knew how to run informants,

that knew how to, like the mechanics of an investigation, that those are the people that they were recruiting. And so like if you came to ATF undercover work or not, you were going to get in the weeds, man. you were going to get dirt underneath your fingernails, man. Because like an ATF historically worked very closely with state and local police departments because that it was the action that was on the streets. Yeah. They weren't looking for like some massive cartel load of cocaine or some massive like white collar conspiracy to self.

They were like down with with Jojo. Yeah. Like trying to figure out like, you know, one man, one. One gun cases. Right. Getting shot at in a cornfield. Exactly. I mean,

that gets us the most getting in the weeds as you can get. And that's probably why you get in shootouts all the time as an ATF agent because you're dealing with street people. Kingpins bringing in tons of cocaine

don't shoot at cops. Well, the thing is with kids. Rich people don't do that. We're talking about these kids. Yeah. They, at least part of my explanation,

they did not have enough life's experience behind them to understand the consequences of what they were doing. As you get older, you should become more wise. Right. And I'm saying that to myself,

and it doesn't even apply to me. Wisdom is always something that came to me right after I needed it. Like I've made so many mistakes. I've done so many things wrong. After the fact, the wisdom hit and said, like, dude, why didn't you see that that wasn't the right thing to say or do? The wisdom always came to me after I needed it. So you have more sympathy for, you know,

17-year-old black gang-banging kids from Chicago than you do for like grown men in the hell's angels Because those guys know better and it's like that's their choice. That's like how they're wired. I I think you know like when it's framed that way like who do I have more or less empathy or compassion for man I don't know that I can answer that but I think that it's You got to have some kind of opinion I mean the hell's angels are guys that have been in and out of prison And those seem like guys that basically are incorrigible. Well, they've had plenty of time to decide that this is the lifestyle I'm going to pursue. You got a 17-year-old kid who grew up, you know, in a rough neighborhood without parents at home in the gang lifestyle.

Right. They haven't fully had an opportunity to figure out things yet. Yeah, their brains are formed. So the compassion for that element of it, yeah, sure. So the 90s roll along. You've been shot. You've been run over. You start foiling bomb plots, right?

There's a whole part of your career. We're going to skip over because I want to get to the Hells Angel stuff and they can read about it in your books. But. Well, in that in that 90s window. Yeah. What was your like a couple of favorite cases that you worked? Well, like I, like I said, I was always willing and I was always looking for undercover opportunities. So I bought guns undercover.

Little guns, little P-shooter Satellite specials to shoulder-launched rockets. I bought dope from dime bags to cartel-level dope. What was the cartel-level dope? Can you go into that? Like the biggest case that I ever personally had my fingerprints on that I personally touched was a 50-key Coke deal. Wow. Please.

That's a lot of coke. Yeah, it was cartel coke. And it was, you know, but like explosives. I bought everything from home. Hang on. I'm not going to let you. We like talking about drugs here. Where was this?

And how did you get yourself into that deal? It's actually, it's good that we're chasing this story because this was one that probably hasn't been told much. I meet this guy. I buy four remanufactured pineapple hand grenades from this cat. They were pineapple hand grenades, empty hulls that he had reloaded with smokeless powder, put a hobby fuse in them, and then sealed it with like J.B. Weld. So, I mean, they were, they were just as dangerous as if you had a pin in them and pulled a pin and threw it. They were, they were super dangerous. I bought four hand grenades from where was this?

In, in Tucson. Okay. I buy the hand grenades from them and I'm leaving with the hand grenades and the dude says, are you interested in Coke? And like, I was never, I was never like a drug expert or a drug guy. And I'm like, well, like, what are you talking about? He's like, I got a thousand keys of Coke right now. And my instant reaction, my street reaction, my spidey senses, my common sense said, you just sold me fucking $200 worth of fucking bullshit fucking hand grenades. And you're sitting on a fucking thousand keys of Coke.

You're full of shit. I said, you can go fuck yourself, dude. I ain't walking into some fucking trap. And I left with my hand grenades, right? So time passes. He reaches out to me again. He goes, dude, he goes, I'm still sitting on some Coke. You good?

We end up like climbing the ladder and doing this Coke. Is this a white guy or a Mexican guy? A white dude. A white dude. So we end up buying five keys a Coke from him. We raid his house after the buy bust. And he has a septic tank buried on his property, which is in this ranch outside of Tucson, this remote like middle of nowhere white trash ranch in freaking in Avra Valley Arizona.

You got to be ready to shoot when you go into those places. It's freaking the wild west out there. Are you ready to bust your gun? Well, we had done the, we had done the deal with him. Yeah. Right. And so in the in the in the in the post arrest search of his house, we find this septic tank. He has a septic tank buried, which was never designed to put any sewage in to process any sewage.

It was a dope concealment tank. You could literally climb in it with a ladder and stand in this septic tank and have head clearance. Wow. In the corner of this septic tank were the 50 keys that were sitting there. And they took up this little corner of this septic tank. So like, you know, we're questioning about septic tank. Like, dude, there's 50 keys down there. And he said, remember when you told me to fuck off when I sold you those hand grenades and I told you I had a thousand keys?

he's like that septic tank was full to the top he goes you couldn't climb in it you take the top off and you could reach down and grab a key out of it wow he said there was so much coke in there it was uh i don't know what cartel it was but they were air dropping coke loads on this dude's property and then he would go out and fetch the coke and put it in the storage tank he's like there was so much coke in that septic tank that at christmas time They were coming and taking keys out and putting Christmas ribbons on them and giving away the keys as presents. He goes, I'm glad you got me with 50 keys. He's like, because that was the lightest that that septic tank has been in a long time.

And I'm like, man, I had the opportunity to bust a thousand bricks. Thousands of freaking keys of cocaine. And I was so smart. I was so freaking good at what I did. Oh, there's no way that a dude that just sold four remanufactured pine. apple hand grenades is sitting on thousands of keys of Coke and I walked away from it. Well, you know what I would have thought. Oh, this guy's a fucking cop. Did you ever come across that where you were buying drugs, weapons, or reverse selling them to a suspect? Come to find out that

guy was an undercover. I'll tell you a story. I meet this Armenian dude in Tucson, who's a Coke dealer. And he wants to do a Coke deal with me, but he wants to do it in L.A. He's like all my all my business is in L.A. Like right on. So we go out to L.A. together. We meet them. I meet him in Van Nyes. And like I don't know this city that well, but I think we meet them like in this parking lot, like a used car parking lot like on Van Nyes Avenue and there's traffic. L.A. traffic, man. Craziness, right? So he brings these two like massive Samoan dudes with him. Like like the biggest human beings I'd seen. And I like I played football. I'd been around big boys, right? These dudes were freaking 300 pound plus dudes with bad attitudes. I bring my partner

with me, a guy named John Carr, who's an L.A. agent, who's a pretty big dude, right? He, like, he's, he's my enforcer, right? So, um, the guy I'm dealing with is a cat named Ohan Barsemian, right? And Ohan's like, um, let's, let's, let's go across the street and, and, uh, I'm gonna, he, he's going to show the Coke, right? How much you're supposed to be picking up? It was like a couple keys. It wasn't, it was nothing massive, right? And so we start walking across the street and the Samoans start walking with us. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

All you dudes ain't coming. Just me and him. Like, we're not all looking at it. If it's here, it's here. Right. And so they start bucking up to me. So my guy, John Carr, like, steps in front of these Samoans. And he's like, you guys need to fucking step back, man.

Fucking let him fucking do this deal the way it's going to go down. So I get out to the median on Van Nuys Boulevard. and Ohan is like stuck in the middle lane traffic and he's like spinning around and he's like like like like I'm like like like come on dude what are you doing? The Samoans are yelling me dude he's fucking legally blind he can't fucking see you got to help him

get out of the traffic. They weren't going across the street to see the Coke they knew the Coke was there. They were going across the street to make sure their boy fucking didn't get by a car. So we go across the street. He flashes the okay, it's good. The Coke takes off. We come back. So we're going to meet at a red lobster

to finish the deal. And the Coke is going to show up in a gold Corvette, right? So me and John Carr, we're sitting in the Red Lobster. Ohan's there. The Samoans are there. And we're just, we're kind of hanging out. And he's like, hey, you know, it's coming. It's coming. It's close by. It's nearby. And out of the window, I see this gold Corvette circling the parking lot. And I elbow baby face, John Carr. I'm like, dude, it's the shit's here. His car's pageer goes off. he goes and makes a call, comes back to the table, and he looks at me, he's like, we're out of here, let's fucking go. And I'm like, what do you mean?

We're like, this shit's here, dude. He's like, don't fucking argue with me. And we're going. And I'm like, dude, don't know what's going on, man, but I got to bounce. So we leave out on the street, there's two surveillance units. There's our surveillance unit and another surveillance unit. And these guys see each other and they know each other. And they're like, what are you doing here?

One guy's like, man, we're buying Coke. What are you doing here? we're fucking selling Coke, dude. Shit. The operation had not been deconflicted. There's a deconfliction process that if I'm buying Coke and you're doing a reverse, you're selling Coke, there's a clearinghouse that you call into and say, hey, I'm going to be at the Red Lobster and Van Nuys today at 3 o'clock and we're doing a Coke deal.

Okay, they make a note of it. Now when it's de-conflicted, when the other side calls in and says, hey, we're going to be selling Coke today at the Red Lobster and Van Nuys. This central depository, this deconfliction center says, hey, well, wait a minute, everybody pumped their brakes. Like, we might have a blue on blue here. Right. Right. It didn't get deconflicted. It didn't get deconflicted until we were out on the streets. One of the Samoans was a snitch. One of the Samoans had given up the deal and had cooperated with his side. And so was that DEA? You know what? I couldn't tell you. I don't remember who it was. So you were buying Coke from cops.

We, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we fit. This is another mistake. That's so, um, another failure. We failed to de-conflict our deal. And had we gone out, had we gone to the, to the corvette, had we taken possession of the cocaine, had we made the money exchange, it was going to be a blue on blue, all these undercover guys, pointing guns at each other that all look like gangsters, man. That's a bad, a bad scenario, man. Wow. That's crazy. Let's go back to Tucson for a minute. So this is the 90s. when does meth start to overtake cocaine as like the main drug that you're busting? Well, like we were getting at least what I was seeing, right? And I was never a dope cop.

I was never a great dope cop. It wasn't necessarily within the jurisdiction that I was enforcing. And if there was guns involved, I would I would play ball. But straight dope deals, like I would push those to the dope cops, right? To the experts. Yeah. Because I was never a dope expert. Yeah.

But we were seeing like that pink, the pink meth that had like that they were using the Sudafed to cook. We were seeing what they called peanut butter. It was that, it was that like kind of, it looked like peanut butter, right? And then you were seeing like that, that like kind of crappy, powdery meth. And then like every once in a while, you'd get that ice. You'd get the flakes. Yeah.

You know, and so. That's Mexican dope. And then, you know, so that's what we were seeing. Right. But like I said, man, like I never did. that like these guys have these stories of doing these massive hand-to-hand undercover like drug deals like like I never I never did those I saw those loads but I was never the point guy on those cases right you just stumbled into something I saw I saw I saw the house

that had a room stacked with with crates of money yeah but that wasn't my case so I mean in Tucson you're so close to the border it is the fucking wild west down there. I think it's still like that. Well, it was such a great, like, stash house transition spot. Point. Yeah. Because, like, we're 60 miles from, from Nogales. We're 60 miles up, what, I-19. And it's, you know, there's, there's a lot of space. Yeah. A lot of room out there. Now, is that why the biker gangs, like the Hells Angels,

the Mongols, you name it? What's another, what's like a third, third level, giker gang that we would know. Well, like, in talking in Arizona, there's kind of the Hells Angels and nobody else for the most part. Like they own Arizona. The Huns are out there. The devil's disciples are out there. Right.

There's some smaller gangs. The Mongols are out there now. They weren't at that time. But in Tucson, at that time, talking about like the dope game. Yeah. The home invasion game was flourishing. And so that's, I did have an angle on home invasions because now, you know, you you got drug dealers ripping off other drug dealers.

Okay, tell us about that. Very simple. But tell us about how you would get involved in home invasions. Well, as a home invader, someone else has taken the responsibility of importing and smuggling that dope. Someone else has stashed it. Someone else is sitting on a low distribute. If I can go rip that off, man, I've eliminated all that mechanics of getting the dope

there. And then who's going to call in on me? Like, is someone going to call and say, hey, man, some dude just came and stole all my dope. It's, it was free crime. I know that, but how does the ATF, how does that fall under your jurisdiction and how do you solve those cases? Armed narcotics trafficking. Like, like, they're, they're not doing home invasions, you know, with a butter knife. Do you tell us about some wild ones that you remember? Um, well, um, I did, uh, I did, I did several of them. I, and, and, and my, my routine was my cover story was consistent throughout it was that I I know some guys who are in the dope game I I'm occasionally asked to drive loads or move loads from point A to point B and I'm tired to getting underpaid I'm tired to like getting a small commission off this I feel like I have too much risk I want to knock down one of these places but I can't do it myself I can't like I don't have enough manpower even if I put some guys together but if you'll put a crew together.

If you got some guys that can do it, together we can go make this rip and then we can figure out what the cut is. We can figure out how we're going to split it. We're going to split the money. We're going to split the dope. What are we going to do? And there was, Tucson was saturated with home invasion crews. There was no entrapment or outrageous government conduct going around. You'd get into a conversation.

I had a conversation with a dude. I bought some sought off shotguns from him. He had stolen these shotguns and cut them down. during the course of this shotgun, sought off shotgun investigation, I knew he was doing robberies. Like, do you ever rob more than guns?

Shit, dude, he goes, I freaking go into these freaking dope houses, tie everybody up, use the phone cord. I wire them up. I duct tape them. I go hit the place.

You know, there's the predisposition. This dude just told me that he's a home invader and not only, like, how he does it, how many times he've done.

He's like, I've done like 10 of these. Okay, so that's not entrapment then. you suggesting. He's predisposed. I ask a question, man. Like, you rob anything other beyond guns?

I didn't say, hey, I've got a thousand keys in a house. And this guy has never done a dope robbery before. And it's like, man, I don't know what I'm doing. I don't think I should do this. But I can't turn away from my split of a thousand keys. Now I freaking walked him into a situation where entrapment comes into play. Okay. And are you trained on entrapment?

Please clear this up for us. Because I've heard that entrapment doesn't ever hold up as like a legal defense. But could you, if you led somebody along like that, could they end up getting off in court? There's two, two of the most common defenses as an undercover operative that you face in a trial is entrapment. My client was not predisposed to commit this crime. And you made it so sweet. You enticed him. and you made it so sexy for him that even a common person couldn't say no to it.

So you got to like make sure that there's, and the same thing in murder fryer cases, you got to make sure they're predisposed. And so in the process, you're asking people like, man, are you sure you know we're doing? We're not stealing grandma's freaking purse off her shoulder and running away. We're going to go into a freaking dope house. There's going to be people there with guns. And how do you quantify that? Are you wearing a wire or do you go write that in a report?

So as proof that you said that. Both. Both, like best evidence is electronic evidence. Right. Best evidence is recorded evidence. We don't always get it, but that's best evidence. So would you be wired up basically all the time? Because it sounds like a lot of your job is just opportunism.

You're buying guns from this guy and you meet this guy. You're just always kind of around shady people. And that's why you want to try to keep your persona and your street reputation cleaned off the best you can because you want to be able to recycle it. You don't want to be a one hit wonder. Yeah. Like can do one deal and now you can never do it again. Right.

Right. Right. So you're trying to be able to replicate that scam. Right. But and I would tell the home invasion crews, like I'd explain to them, like, this is, this is what we're doing. Have you ever done anything like this before? And then when they tell me like, yeah, I do it all the time or, or, you know, I'm down for it. Or let's, you know, they start talking about their past jobs. Now the predisposition is gone.

And I would tell them, like, I'm not looking for robbers willing to murder. I'm looking for murderers willing to rob. That is who I need you to be. be. You down for that? Like, don't show up here with a freaking butter knife, man. And dudes would show up with guns, rubber gloves, bulletproof vests, hoods, freaking, like full on SWAT freaking mentality, right, going to do drug rips. And then you write that down in your report. So you have proof if they go to court and try to say that you led them, you entrap them. It's like, hey, I got absolutely. And in a perfect world, it's not only recorded. Yeah. Like,

no one ever went to jail for what they didn't say. Right. Right. So when you're telling me how you do home invasions and how many you've done before and the success you've had and the money you've made, I can write that down and I can present that to a jury and the jury will decide whether I have credibility as a witness or whether the suspect, the defendant has credibility. But when it's recorded and that recording is being played in a courtroom or the video of

you saying it, or the video of you showing up and showing me the guns and the rubber gloves and the bulletproof vests in the hoods. Like, it's hard to say, like, I didn't know what I was getting into. Oh, yeah, you did. And we talked about it a bunch of times. That's remember the line in Scarface when his lawyer is talking to him? Honey, baby, it's kind of hard to prove to a jury. You found it in a taxi cab. We go out for a predisposition meeting before the night before a home invasion knockdown. And I just want to make sure that the suspects are predisposed. I'm like crossing every T, dotting every eye.

Are you working with the U.S. attorney now? Oh, yeah. Okay. So, yeah. Okay. They know who these suspects are. So I'm like, hey, tomorrow, you know, tomorrow we're going to go hit this. You know, we're going to put a lick on this place.

Let's get together night and just make sure everybody knows who's who in the zoo. So I got like my little crew with me, the, the, the, home invasers, the home invaders bring their crew. I'm sorry to cut you off. This is, like, this is so fascinating. Have you set up the lick? Okay. I'll, I'll, let me get through the story and I'll tell you how to do that.

All right. So these guys, like, let's meet. Let's just make sure everybody knows who, who's. So we knows, like, everybody who's going to be playing. If they don't come to the meeting, they don't get to play. I don't want you bring in some freaking last minute dude to show up because I don't know who he is and I won't bring any last minute dude in. So I'm there with, I, I told, I told,

You told you about John Carr, Babyface, who we did the deal, the Red Lobster deal in L.A., Chris Bayliss, who I was in the shootout with in Joliet, and a cat named Lou Velozzi, who's a phenomenal undercover, like one of the best ever, right? So I've got this all-star team of Alpha Dog pipe hitters that are my part of the crew. So we're meeting this other, the suspect crew at this strip bar. And so we're just showing how we're being gangsters, man. We're acting like gangsters. We're drinking and smoking and and talking shit and setting up how things are going to be. This is what we're going to meet. This is what's going to be like.

Right. So this girl comes up to me this dancer and I'm just being a smart ass, right? And I tell this dancer, I'll give you 20 bucks if you kick me in the, she had these big high heel boots on. So I'll give you 20 bucks. You don't need to dance for me. I'll just give you 20 bucks if you can kick me in the head. And she laughs. Ha, ha, ha, ha, I can't do that.

My boss would get, I would be in trouble with my boss. Right. So end just smoking and joking. right being a jackass. Velozzi, my partner Velozzi pulls the girl aside and he's like, here's 50 bucks. Hit him in the face as hard as you can hit him, man. Like he likes that shit. He's going to think that's funny.

So this girl comes up, hey, your friend bought you a dance. And so like I'm, you know, getting ready for the freaking lap dance. This girl draws from the floor this freaking hook and freaking catches me on the eye and knocks me out. Knocks me out in front of the suspects and in front of my crew. And Lou is like, like, Lou, the guy that orders the dance is like, oh, shit, I fucked up. Like I fucked. So we had a cover team there. We had a like some SWAT guys that were covering our predisposition meeting.

I go into the men's room, lock one of the toilet stalls. And the medic from the SWAT team sutures my eye closed in the freaking men's room of the strip bar. So we go the next day. now it's operational day and all the bosses are there and I've got these big sunglasses on my eyes freaking closed it's freaking black and blue I've got sutures in my eye my eyes closed are all the other gangsters laughing at you everybody is the bad guys and the good guys right I'm the freaking jackass that just got knocked out by this stripper she had a handful of rings and she freaking split my eye open and freaking $50 hooker piss out of me so the bosses are like the fuck happened

to you and I'm like look let's let's figure that out after the fact we got to get through this Boys will be boys. And so we go out and do the deal. But getting knocked out in front of your suspects the night before the deal, how much more credibility can get? Cops don't act like that. Totally. Totally.

We used to go into deals in the credibility part like you're meeting someone new. Am I meeting you for the first time? And this is our living room, right? This is where we're meeting. I'd freaking like, I'd say like, dude, my back is jacked up, man. I'd lay down on the floor and light a cigarette and be laying there and talking to you about whatever the scam was we're going to do. Right. And the suspect would be looking at me laying on his floor.

He just met me 10 minutes ago. I'm smoking a cigarette. And I could see it in their eyes. Like, I don't know who this cat is, but he ain't a fucking cop. Yeah. Because cops don't act like that. Right. Right.

What about drugs? Did you ever have to, like, do coke or smoke some. There was dope in front of suspects. In that world, there's always dope right. Always white dope. Always. Always. Always.

So did you have to hit? And so like, and you're constantly being challenged with it. And back in the day, like when I was brand new, that was the test drive. There's new test drives now. But back in the day in the test drive, freaking hit this and you're fucking cool. Don't hit it. You're a cop because cops can't do dope. Right.

So through like trade craft and experience and all those things, I for the most part, learned how to dodge that and learned how to get around that. But, you know, there's times, too, like you're sitting there and there's a line cut out on the back of some toilet tank. And this is a true story, right? And dude's like, freaking, you're going to hit that line. And I go through all my routine of why I can't and won't and don't do that. And all the reasons why. And all my tradecraft and the dude pulls a gun and he's like, freaking, dude, you're going to fucking hit that shit.

Or fucking this stall is going to turn into a fucking mess. well, that's not a hard decision to make, right? Like, I don't want to die for this. Yeah. I don't want, I'm not going to get shot in the head over this. Yeah. Right. So then you hit the line.

So you freaking, you know what? Was that meth or coke? It was coke. Yeah. It was coke. And then, and then you know what? At that point, your case is fucked. Really?

Your case is fucked. Because we talked about entrapment. The other element to a case is outrageous government conduct. when the agents, when the operatives are acting beyond the extreme of the people they're investigating, outrageous government conduct, you can't have it. You can't, you can't, you can't, a defense attorney is, you're on the witness stand and you're fielding questions as an agent. A defense attorney is going to say, that agent is worse than my defendant sitting here at this table. So entrapment and outrageous government conduct. And if you ingest narcotics,

by policy, you have to report that. And then by policy, you have to go to the emergency room. You have to be checked out. And that's not a bad policy. Because like, you don't know if you get some tainted batch of bullshit, right? Especially now. And the boss's mentality is if I'm going to put you in that position, if I'm going to trust you to be in that role and you can't avoid that, then you shouldn't be in that role. You shouldn't be doing this job.

Wow. So that could really mess up. That could blow a whole prosecution because you were doing coke with the suspects that you were trying to take down for Coke running or something like that. Wow. And you know what? Like I don't disagree with that. And do the feds follow the rules? Like, do you guys really follow the rules to the law?

But my experience is yes. I mean, universally, can I speak for everybody? But you can't do that. You have to be good enough at your crap. to avoid those things. And if you can't, then, then, then how do you make allegations and, and, and lay charges on someone for doing the same thing you're doing? Do you just, are you just going to talk it off and saying like, okay, well, like, yeah,

I was like using drugs with these guys all the time for my credibility. Like, you can't do that. Was there ever an investigation that you made with an arrest that went to trial and the defendants got off? there was a case I had in Chicago where the defendant was a three strikes guy and the Chicago Police Department caught him with some pistols and I kind of inherited that case and took it into federal court

and the defendant like all along was saying those guns weren't mine those guns weren't in my trunk and I was like yeah you know what everybody's freaking no one's ever guilty everyone's always it's always some excuse it's always someone else's fault the cops get on the stand and their stories of how the guns were found and and the mechanics of it didn't match up. These two partners didn't match up. And the attorney came to me and said, I'm going to dismiss this case. And I'm like, are you sure?

And they're like, I think those guys planted those guns on that kid. I'm like, you know what? I think you're right. I think you're right. And there's always different, you can take any event. and different people have different perspectives. But theirs were like so far apart. Right.

That it like, it would have been just obvious. They hadn't gotten their story together. Right. But nothing that you were personally involved in that the U.S. attorney had to go, whoa, I got to toss this? No. Okay. No.

So tell us really quick and we'll get to the Hells Angels, these armed robbery crews, these home invasion crews. That makes sense because Tucson, they know that every third house is a cartel stash house it's a field day. So with these guys, the crew that saw you get knocked out by this stripper, this lady of the night,

what had you told them you were on your way to go rob? Yeah, I just told them, hey, look, I know where this stash house is. And what I... But did you give them... Did you give them like an idea of what the... I gave him like a general idea.

Like, and I said, hey, it could be light. It could be heavy. Like, I don't know. I don't know what's there. And what I also did. didn't want to do is tell them that I knew where it was at because I didn't want to get kidnapped. I didn't want them thinking that I knew exactly where the spot is and then holding a gun to my head and saying like, you know what, the home invasion's off. Now you're going to take us there and we're

going to take all of it. Right. So it was always like, we got to wait for a call. We got to wait for this thing to come in because I just don't know. You can take me hostage. You can hold the gun to my head. I don't have any place to talk to you until I get that call. So it was like pushing it down the road as far as we can. But did they and they bought that most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. And it made sense. Like these guys aren't advertising what they're going to do like way in advance of freaking like when they're going to move a load from point A to point B. And were these white guys, these home invasion crews or were these other like cartel guys like Mexican guys. Like white and Mexican guys, not cartel guys. Just like guys looking for a quick lick. Yeah.

We were doing one, we had one set up, a home invasion crew, and they were going to provide me with some pipe bombs that we were going to use in the home invasion. We were going to use them like, hey, look, if we got to like blow this place up, we'll blow it up, right? So that morning, my supervisor, one of his kids had passed away. And so we went to a funeral the morning of this home invasion pipe bomb deal. And I had a boss, not my supervisor, like a higher tiered boss who was not very well liked, not very well respected. Kind of just, I'll leave it at that. So we get done with this funeral service and this second tier, third tier boss says like, hey, everybody, let's go, let's get something to eat. Like, you know, my treat.

And I tell them I said, I can't. We can't. We're in the middle of a home invasion case. We got a pipe bomb deal scheduled this afternoon. We're like, we can't go to lunch with you. And so I'm like in a suit and tie from this, from this funeral. And he says to me, like, and tries to embarrass me in front of my people. He's like, you ain't got a hair on your ass fucking Donnie Brasco if you don't go buy those

pipe bombs with a suit on. And I was like, like, really? You think that that's what I do? You think that like all I do is put on some costume and go buy dope or guns or bombs? You think that's really? It was so insulting. I was like, I'm going to stick it in his ass. I'm like, let's go.

And went out, met the gangsters. All they'd ever seen me is dressed down. All they'd ever seen me is like it, like in that street persona. I walk into the deal. I got a freaking suit and tie on. I didn't have to create some bullshit for it. Duke, J.berg. What's up, man?

Why are you all dressed up? I was at a funeral this morning, man. And I knew that we had this deal. I didn't want to be late. I didn't have time to change clothes. So here I am. We good or we not good? Let's go.

Wow. It's improvising. Well, and part of it was making sure that, like, that was not, it was not a good decision on my part. What I should have said is, like, you know what? You don't get to, like, dictate the terms of this operation. I'm the guy with his ass on the line. I'm on the guy on the point. I'm going to go meet him dressed however I want to meet him.

But, like, my ego was, like, I'm going to prove this guy wrong. I'm going to, I'm going to show him that I can do this. It doesn't matter what I'm wearing. So then do you lead? How far do you take the operation before you actually arrest the crew, the home invasion crew? Do you lead them up to the supposed house? In the process where it's like going like typically the ones I did and there's not always this way. I would typically say I've got, well, like I'm going to use a U-Haul. We're going to use a U-Haul to to load up our product. You know, we'll get it there. We'll pull a U-Haul up. We'll load it in. We'll get out. and then the SWAT team was in the U-Haw. So like, hey, let's go check out the spot. Just let's check out the truck, make sure it's everything's cool with you guys. And then walk them up to the truck and then the tailgate, the roll top comes up.

And then all the SWAT guys jump out and do their thing. Damn. They are those fucking guys had the shock of their life, I'm sure. Yeah, it's, you know. Did you ever have to play like you didn't know what was going on? Yeah, I got arrested. You got arrested sometimes, too, to try to protect. or extend, you know, the cover story for whatever reason.

Now, so what would you get, what would be the sentences for guys that were getting ready to go tie up some drug dealers and jack a bunch of narcotics? Not as much as you'd think. Right. Because, yeah, because there's no dope. There's no, they're not getting a drug charge. Yeah. Not as much as you'd think. It would be like, you know.

Like 10? Probably five to 10. Wow. Five to 10. You know, some take a bigger lick, but a lot of that depends on their criminal history, too. How many times have they been around? that are convicted before. Like, you know, like, do I got to hit you harder now to teach you this lesson or is just the

first time you've been through this? God, it's so fascinating, you know, because the difference between state punishments versus federal punishments. I've said this on this podcast a million times. Sometimes it is way better to get caught by the feds doing a bunch of bad stuff because the sentences are, again, national, right? if you got caught you know pulling a home invasion

in the state of Arizona once you could get 50 years like that's how hard they these state these these trashy kind of dusty Christian states will hit people you know Louisiana

you get caught pulling a home invasion once you get 50 fucking years but the feds you might only get seven you'd um like knock guys down on state charges and they'd say like dude can you kick this to the feds because I would rather do Fed, like in a Fed facility. That, that too.

That too. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That is so crazy. Okay. So now it's 2001. You got 15 years under your belt, hundreds of collars, you know, your J-Bird. Like you've got this persona.

With all of this work you've done in Tucson, you know, with the home invasion crews, you know, some dope cases. didn't part of you get nervous at the thought of infiltrating the Hells Angels in Arizona since you had played football there? I know you look different. You know, it's been 20 years since you played football, but you're kind of like, Nome, were you not worried about being sniffed out? I was too, my ego was too big,

and I was too arrogant to, like, even consider that. I was like, and this is not a flattering statement to make. I'd had a bullet go through my chest. I'd been a shootout where I'd been run over by a car. I had, you know, 15 years of undercover experience. I thought I was invincible. I thought I was bulletproof. I wasn't.

I ultimately learned how unspecial and unimportant I truly was. But at that point, man, like I could do anything in my mind. And I didn't necessarily feel like I was like a tough guy. I didn't feel like I was a great fighter or like some great street gangster, but I knew that I could absorb punishment. I knew I could absorb punishment and keep moving forward. It's the old Rocky line when Rocky's given the speech to his kid. It's not how hard you hit. It's how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.

Life's not going to treat you fair. That was my mentality. Were you excited by this opportunity when it came along? Well, I had a case agent that was a. good friend of mine and that I knew to be the most amazing case agent, complex case manager that I'd ever crossed past with, a guy named Joe Slatella. And so Joe approached me with this opportunity to make a run at the Hells Angels. My first reaction was, dude, I'm not the right guy.

I can name 10 guys, 10 of my peers that will serve you in this role better than I can. I'm not a biker investigator. I'm just this white trash peckerwood freaking debt collector gun runner, man. I'm not a biker. It's a completely different culture. It's a subset. I know dudes that have spent their career like perfecting this role. Like, let's find one of those dudes.

But I had a pre-established reputation in the criminal community of where we're going to work and where we're going to start. And his reaction was like, dude, you've got a head start. Like, you'll figure it out. Like, you'll figure this out. I had no idea like what was coming. I thought I was prepared. I wasn't prepared.

I started doing my research on these guys. And the one thing that stood out with as big a mass as the hells angels were, like this international organized crime syndicate, like charters all over the world, thousands of members. The one thing in my research that kept popping up in my own mind, these dudes will kill their own. If they feel betrayed, you can have a Hells Angels patch on your back.

They will kill you if you turn against them. And so I was like, man, I don't know if I can pull this off, but it goes back to what I said. Like, I was always willing. I was always willing to try. I was like, I'll figure it out. So tell us about why this particular time 2001, 2002, the ATF, the feds start to move in on the Hells Angels. I think there was like a murder that was super brutal where they decided that they needed to infiltrate. There were two elements that were critical.

Well, three elements actually. The Hells Angels in Arizona were operating with impunity. No one was looking at them. They were running wild. What activities are? Just like you name it, man, assaults, shootings, guns, drugs. Gun running. I don't know if it was gun running, but there was guns involved in a lot of what they were doing.

Okay. The murderer of Cynthia Garcia, who was a lady who ended up at the Mesa, Arizona, Hells Angels Clubhouse, popped off, got knocked out, got stomped to near death in the clubhouse. They rolled her up in a piece of carpeting and took her out in the desert and cut her head off. Stabbed her and cut her head off. And those are elements that happened before I was introduced. Shortly after I was introduced, the Harrah's Riot in Laughlin, Nevada, where the Hells Angels and the Mongols got in a full-on shootout riot underneath 100 close circuit television cameras where it was all captured.

Those elements really drove. Those were the two elements like we were trying to find out who was behind the violence, who was ordering the violence and the murder of Cynthia Garcia. Right. And that brought the heat down on them. That was, you know, that made it easy to justify the investigation. It wasn't just some random like, hey, let's look at the hell's angels. And then they're going to say, like, you can't just look at us just because you don't

like who we are. Right. You can't look at us just because we're the hell's angels. Like, we had cause. Okay. So now you've got to approach them. You're this, you know, your cover for 15 years has been, I'm a gunrunner and a debt collector and a murder for hire, just kind of a brute, you know? So this is hard. This is tough work. They know that the feds are always at least watching them probably trying to infiltrate, how do you get in there? What's the first step? Well, the whole case was full of a series of street theaters, which street theater is inaccurate conclusions from accurate observations. We'd let them truly see and smell and hear things. They would inaccurately conclude what that meant. So to try to get quicker credibility in their

world, there was an infiltration within the infiltration. We actually infiltrated the solo Angels motorcycle gang, which was based in Tijuana, Mexico, not to investigate the solo angels. They were into their own stuff, but so that we could wear that patch in the presence of the Hells Angels and have credibility in the biker community. That was the first big step. And that was like the mastermind plan of Joe Slotella, who we talked about earlier, just an amazing, amazing case agent, like the mastermind behind all this. But it was, we called it Operation Black Biscuit.

People are like, why Black Biscuit? Joe Slatella is a big hockey fan. People say Black Biscuit, that's racist. You can't call it that name. Slotella being a hockey fan, a Black Biscuit is a hockey puck. It had nothing to do with nothing. It was intentionally named that to like diffuse any attention that might be on it. Operation Black Biscuit, this isn't the Hells Angels.

It's not Operation 81 or Operation Red and White or it was like this kind of anonymous case name, case title. What are the first things you have to do? You know, obviously you're trying to get patched in. You know, the layperson knows what that is by now. That's when you become a full-fledged member. But what are some of the first steps? Do you have to sully up to a member and start doing crime for them and start bringing them money the way that they do in the mob? Right?

The mob, there's a hang around, an associate, and he's paying a guy who's made, who's part of a family. Is that similar in the Hells Angels? So we start presenting ourselves as solo angels in Arizona based in Tijuana, Mexico. Well, you can't do that without the Hells Angels sanctioning your presence. We had a solo angel informant who was close to the president of the Hells Angels in Mesa, a guy named Bob Johnston, which getting way ahead of the story, Bob Johnston ultimately was left being held responsible or accountable for our infiltration. man that like i actually felt and feel bad for bad bob um he helped us he he spoke on our behalf but that dude would have died for the hell's angels when the case came down they needed someone to scapegoat they needed someone to take ownership over our infiltration and they came

back to him which he did have fingers in it okay so you posed as somebody from the solo angels in Tijuana. How does a white guy justify being from Tijuana? Well, there are some white members of the solo angels, not a lot, but we're like, hey, look, we're an offshoot. And we sold it to the solo angels. We said, look, let us set up this charter in Arizona. We are going to put you next to the kingpins in the biker world, the best of the best. No one knows who you dudes are. We're going to make you credible. We're friends with the hell's angels. And us being friends with them means you're friends with them. Now you're friends with the king of the mountain. Right. And, and you sold that to the Hells Angels. You were like, hey, we, I'm a white guy with the Tijuana

faction. Where did they say, did you say you were from Arizona originally? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And we basically bought and extorted our way into the, into the solo angels for credibility. We went down there, met with their leadership. Said like, look, we're going to represent you outside of Tijuana in Arizona. We're going to expand your club. And we're going to start sending money and, and motorcycle parts and motorcycles down to you in Tijuana, which ultimately became like not maybe not my biggest mistake, but one of my biggest mistakes is that once we got that solo angel credibility, I never serviced that account anymore. I had it. I got what I needed. And I forgot the solo angels in Tijuana because they weren't necessary for us besides their vest. The solo angels leaked to the

Hells Angels. Man, I think we think these dudes are counterfeit, man. They came down here and made a bunch of promises. They never come down here. They never come to our church. They never come to our parties. We never saw them after they got in. I think these dudes are running a game on you, which caused huge problems, which ultimately I got confronted on that at gunpoint, right, over like, man, like, we're not sure we believe you. And I went through the chronology of events that led me to that point and that time and convinced the hell's angels that I was a legitimate at Solo Angel. And then at that point, I was told, okay, I believe you, but you're going to drop that Solo Angel cut and you're going to be with us now. And if you don't drop the solo angel cut,

if you don't become Hell's Angels, I never want to see your face again. Okay. And so is there, it was designed. It was the case by Joe Slatella was designed to be a side by side investigation, solo angels next to the Hells Angels, where we had control as solo angels. We could be where we want, when we wanted, how we wanted. When we moved over to the Hell's Angel site, now I was their step and fetch. I had to be where they told me to be, when they told me to be there, do what they told me to do. So it made things much more complex. It made things much more difficult.

So did you have to, is a prospect? Is that way? Are you a prospect? I started as a hang-around. Okay. So hang-around is an official term. It is. A hang-around is an official title, which is exactly what it says.

You're hanging around. you're deciding and finding out if club life fits your lifestyle and then the members of the Hells Angels are deciding is this guy that that we want around us and so like you're you're constantly being mud checked you're constantly trying to prove yourself ultimately we were said okay you passed your hangarround status we're going to make you prospects what are okay so what are some of the qualities that they look for in a prospect and eventually a fully patched in member well like can you you show respect to your brothers? Do you follow orders? Are you on time? Are you reliable? I always had money in my pocket. I had a great cover story. I'm a gunrunner and a debt collector. So I paid tributes to various Hells Angels charters in Arizona for their sanctioning my gun running and my debt collecting. I'd take an envelope to a president of a Hells Angels charter and say, And this is just thanks for letting us operate underneath your umbrella. I just ditched a load in Mexico.

It made sense. Okay. You know, like. So they like somebody who earns as well, an earner. It was my objective was never to embarrass or humiliate the hells angels. My objective was never even really to make sure people went to prison or got long prison senses. My job was to get inside, get as close and as deep as I could, and then deliver out.

intelligence and evidence to a case agent, a handler, ultimately a jury and a judge. And somebody else decides guilt and innocence. My job was just an acquirer, acquirer of information. Do you think how much of the Hells Angels is illegal versus legal? You know, that's so hard to say. You know, their pitch is, is that they're not a criminal organization. There's criminals within the organization. Like, I don't disagree with that.

I don't dispute that. I think that that, on the big picture, from 30,000 feet is accurate. Because I met Hells Angels who weren't involved in crime, who weren't doing things illegal. They were wearing the patch. They were part of the organization. But they weren't running guns or selling drugs or committing rapes or extortions or, or beatings or arsons or whatever it is that you're investigating. But when I crossed paths with those guys, they became very uninteresting to me.

I wasn't, there was plenty of crime going on out there. I didn't need to invent crime. I was looking for who had their fingerprints on the crime. So why be in the hell's angels if you're not committing crime? The power and the influence of that organization is worldwide. You can take someone who's, take some guy who, a nobody and he walks into a tavern and no one pays attention to him no one turns their head no girls want to talk to him now you walk in that same person that's walking in with a hell's angels

cut on his back everybody's looking you're a rock star girls want to hang on your shoulder people are giving you free drinks people are giving you drugs the the the influence and of of that association of that membership in that world is man it's as good as it gets so you'd be on the Yankees. And that's why there's so much hatred for the Hells Angels and so much competition for them. They are the heavyweight champ. If you want to win the heavyweight championship, you've got to knock out the champ if you want to wear the belt. That's why everybody's fighting with them. Everybody wants to wear that belt. They're the king of the mountain. Can you explain how the beef between the Mongols and the Hells Angels, which is quite famous, like how that started

and what that was over? You know, it would be a counterfeit for me to pretend to be a Hells Angels historian, but my experience and my explanations are that the Mongols started wearing California bottom rockers. The Hells Angels said we own California, and you cannot wear that bottom rocker without our permission. And that's, you know, the Mongols were like, you know what, like we don't take orders from you and we don't take instructions from you. We're going to format our vest the way we want to. And then now you've got this 50 plus year bloodbath over, which essentially started on the formatting of a vest. Right.

Bottom rockers are the piece of the patch that goes along the bottom of the vest, the back of the vest. Yeah, the bottom rocker typically designates like where you're from, like what state you're from typically. And then your state is your bottom rocker, and then you'll have like flash on your tab that will identify your charter. So, you know, there's a dozen charters in California. So they'll have California bottom rockers with San Fernando Valley or San Diego or Vallejo or Ventura. So in the Hells Angels, you have a group of people. Are people networking like about crime the way that like mob guys that used to hang out in bars in Brooklyn and the Bronx were constantly saying, hey, I got stolen furs.

I got some dope. My buddy's trying to unload. We've got a hijacking here. Like Hell's Angels clubs. Is that what they're talking about? Given the fact that some people aren't involved, like how does that, is there conflict there? Do guys that are straight that have real jobs but just come here to ride and hang out on

the weekends? Do they form their own clicks and then the guys who are doing dirt kind of form their own clicks? I think there's at times overlap from the charter. but the charters operate from my experience independently and then independence even within that charter. So you can have people within a charter who are keeping their nose clean and going to work every day and enjoying all those privileges that come with being a hell's angel.

Within the same charter, you've got people that are doing dirt. Yeah, I understand that. I'm saying like, does it get weird? Like if you're like, hey, man, I got a bunch of guns to unload. And I'm like, dude, I'm an insurance agent. Like, does that get weird? Well, I'll tell you this. I didn't find the Hells Angels to be any different in that aspect as any other element of society.

Hells Angels, gangs, ATF agents, cops, doctors, lawyers. You put a group of people together. You naturally are going to gravitate towards certain people. You're not just going to love everybody. Every ATF agent doesn't love every other ATF agent. out there. You form friendships based on personalities and interests and all those things. The Hells Angels are no different. Okay, so you don't have, unlike the mob, to get straightened out, at least historically, it's not that way anymore, but historically, in order for you to become made, you had to be involved in a murder. The Hells Angels is not like that. My experience is no. My experience, and again, I am not talking like that I have some like universal. No, no, this is of course. We get that. My personal experience, like you didn't have to commit a murder to become a Hells Angels member. I think that's a fallacy.

It's maybe a myth, but it's kind of a sexy myth. Right? It's like if the public wants to think that, the Hells Angels are like, let them think that. But that's not true. In my experience, that's not true. Okay. So you, so do you, in the Mesa, in your experience, obviously, in the Mesa chapter, Did they discriminate against somebody that wanted to be patched in that wanted to be fully made, but that wasn't a criminal?

Would that like kind of, would that kind of hurt their chances of being patched in quickly? Well, to get full membership, you have to have a 100% universal vote of the members in your charter. So you're going to have to impress everybody, regardless of what their lifestyle is. So we started in Mesa, which is where we wanted to focus. Mesa was a big flamboyant charter. 20, 25 members. They had a glorious clubhouse. We'd made inroads with Bob Johnston.

And there was a lot of crime going on there. Cal Schaefer was one of the shooters in Laughlin at Haras. The two cats that murdered Cynthia Garcia, Paul Ishite and Kevin Augustinia, We're Mesa members. We wanted to focus our attention there because we knew there was dirt there. Got it. When I got confronted with saying, like, you're going to drop the solo angel patch and you're going to start being Hell's Angels now, we were sent to Skull Valley charter, which is outside

of Phoenix, outside of Prescott, Arizona. Because Skull Valley was light on membership. I see. So, like, I didn't get to make the call on that. I wanted to stay in Mesa because I knew that there was a lot going on there. Then I go out to Skull Valley, and Skull Valley was a pretty clean charter. So it's got a charter to charter. The answer is it's just kind of luck.

Wherever you end up, hey, this place is clean so you could probably get in if you're not a criminal. The Hell's Angels, when they assigned us to Skull Valley, made a business decision. Yeah. They needed members. They needed to pump up the membership in Skull Valley. And I was like, man, this is going to make things a million times harder. Right. Because you're trying to get the Mesa guys. trying to infiltrate them, not Skull Valley.

I just wanted to be in a bigger charter with more members. We go out to Skull Valley and there's, you know, four members. And they were pretty clean. They were content to be Hells Angels. They owned their territory. And they ruled it with an iron fist. But how can you rule with an iron fist and be clean? Because that patch is so universally intimidating.

Right. It doesn't matter. You don't have to be beating the crap out of people. when you walk in with the Hells Angels patch, people are going to tow the line. And because they know, hey, look, you know what, maybe I don't have a problem with you. But if I do, who knows who's coming to help you. And they're going to bring some pipe hitters here. And my problem is going to get much bigger.

So like, let me just stay cool with you. Okay. So you're, you're hanging around. What does some of the, what's most of the time spent with the Hells Angels hanging around look like? You just partying? partying, socializing. I was a step and fetch. I had extreme examples and mundane examples.

If one of the officers, one of the members has a hangarounds at 2 o'clock in the morning, your phone rings and says, hey, man, bring me a chocolate milkshake. Got to go get a chocolate milkshake. If you're at a party and someone says, hey, set up this table and sell t-shirts or sell stickers or sell baseball caps. You're like, you're like, what the heck am I doing? this like like what is this proving how am I advancing the case I also got the call that said hey get all your hardware and come to skull valley show up at skull valley hey there's banditos that are showing up in Las Vegas they don't have our permission to be there and we're going to go kill them okay so hang on them you're taking orders right it's like being part of a fraternity right you're the low man on the totem pole you do as the bosses say but say I'm not a hitter say I'm not say I'm not say I'm not

a criminal, but I want to be... Do you see what I'm trying to get here? But that's part of the hang around and prospecting process. They're vetting you. They vet who's who, right. And you've already come across as a gun runner as a criminal. So they're treating you as such. I bought and sold guns in their presence.

I'd done debt collections in their presence. So how do you explain the debt collections real quick? And then we'll get into the bandito stories. This is wild. Well, I had a... My cover story was that I was a debt collector. And that I worked for people in Vegas, but I didn't want to live in Vegas because I didn't like Vegas. And so that's why I had a house

in Bullhead City where I was at for the Laughlin shootout. And it just made sense to me. But hey, look, I got a pager on me. When my phone rings, I got to bounce because that's where I make my money. Yeah. So I go to a hell's angel and said, hey, man, you want to make some easy money with me today? What are we doing? I'm going to go pick up some money from a dude. Yeah, come along, show up, walk into a restaurant, females sitting at the at the table with another dude and they're having dinner

and the dude's being real flirty with the girl, right? I slide in next to the guy in the booth, the hell's angel that's with me, slides in next to the girl. I pull his plate of food in front of me. I start eating his food. He's got a glass of wine. I start drinking his wine.

Dude's looking at me like, do I know you? And I'm like, you're about to, dude. You know what? Because you owe some money and I'm here to get it right. And he's like shrugs and rolls his eyes I'm like, man, I knew this was coming. Give me your wallet.

Give me your rings. Take his wallet. Take his credit card. Take his money. Leave. Take his car keys. Get outside or get ready to leave. And the girl slides out of the bar.

And I put my arm under who is my partner, a girl named Jenna McGuire, who was an ATF agent. I said, dude, you got scammed, man. You got set up. You need to be better at what you're doing because you're not as good as I am at what I do. what they didn't know is the victim of the debt collection was another ATF agent. He knew what the play was. He knew the skit was. It was all designed to put on a debt collection in front of this hell's angel,

who then went out and told people, man, I was with Bird. I saw him, man. Took the dude's dang car keys, man. He drove off with a Porsche. Yeah. Like, seeing and hearing and tasting and smelling it is way better than any story I could ever tell you. Sure. Holy shit.

That's why. You guys, it's just theater. You guys are just playing these games. We had a script. Everybody knew what the role was. Wow. Jenna grabs a steak knife and I tell the hell's angel, get that fucking shank out of her hand.

Fucking do your job. And I'm like talking to a hell's angel like that. And he grabs it from him. I'm like, you better fucking settle the fuck down, bitch. Right? Then we leave. And I'm like, dude, man, we ran such a freaking hustle on you. Well, we're running the big picture hustle on the hell's angel.

The guy that's playing the victim is just this defeated, broken, sulking, freaking dude. Like, fuck, man. And what were you supposed to? to be collecting the money for and for who? Just it wasn't even important. It was just an old debt. When he came up, I said, dude, I said, today's your lucky day because normally I

introduced myself by putting a tire iron on the back of your head. But how are you ever going to make this debt right from the hospital? I need to keep you on two feet. But in a week, I'm going to come back and get the rest of this and the Vig. And if you don't have it, it's going to be a bad day, dude. So like, get your shit together and get me my money. Yeah, you really sold it to me right there. get that fucking shank out of her hand.

Well, you know, and it was all scripted, man. It was all scripted. Get out in the parking lot, pay the Hells Angel out. That's how easy it is to make money with me. All you got to do is ride along. And I'm a nobody, man. I'm a fucking zero. And I'm with a full-patched Hells Angel running this scam.

Well, man, I just went up a notch because can't keep his mouth shut. He's going to tell everybody what he saw, what he did. I got people coming to me now. I got Hells Angels saying, hey dude, next time you need a hand, call me. Wow. Like, I'm down for this. Okay, so they see this and when now there's funk, there's this banditos is moving in on their territory. And so they hit you up and they say, grab your guns, the hardware, we're riding out.

So explain, explain that. How does another biker group roll in on another gang's territory? And, you know, explain the whole like bike riding. the motorcades of a bunch of bikers coming through. What is that about? That was like I was never a great motorcycle rider. I never portrayed myself to be. But that was one of the big challenges is that like you better keep up.

Yeah. And so, you know, the way those cats ride is 100 miles an hour, 18 inches apart, two by two, and there could be 10, 20, 40 dudes, right? And one mistake in that conga line is going to freaking wipe out everybody. And I've been at, I've been in some of those where there's a tangle start. and it's just bam after bam after bam after bam, right? And dudes dodging and freaking trying to go around it. Right.

So I got to the point when I was pretty confident with the infiltration, I was telling Joe Slatella, man, these dudes ain't going to hurt me. They're not going to shoot me. The danger of me getting hurt is I'm going to freaking run this motorcycle into a telephone pole. That's the danger. Or a Mongo's going to roll a hand grenade up at my feet and I'm going to get blown up. I'm cool with the hell's angels. Yeah.

So explain the bandito's beef, please. So this is one of the wildest different gangs can control different territories, right? So they will give passes. If another rival gang like goes through the proper protocols and says, hey, we need to pass through your territory, they can get that sanctioned, like a free pass to pass through. Not always, but it is part of the protocols.

So the word was, hey, there's some banditos in Vegas. we own Nevada and they don't have a hall pass. So like we need to teach them a lesson. So we're on the way to Las Vegas from Skull Valley from Prescott. I get a hold of Joe Sletella and I'm like, dude, it's about to be a bad day, man. You need to freaking step in here and rescue us because when these dudes, the hell's angels told me when the bandito show up, if you don't shoot them before they get their kickstands down, we're going to shoot you. So like I'm in a bad spot, man.

I'm a rock in a hard place, freaking analogy, like times a million. Who's giving you that order, by the way? The Skull Valley leadership. Okay. So that's those is top leadership. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Of this supposedly clean organization.

Really, all there was in Skull Valley was leadership. Because it was only four guys. There was a president, a sergeant at arms, and one auxiliary member plus the ATF infiltrators. And during this whole conversation, like, I'm focusing my answers on my story. I didn't do this alone. You never accomplished anything alone. in law enforcement. I had a whole task force behind me. I had a Phoenix Police Department officer that was a partner of mine, another ATF agent, an informant, a female ATF agent, and then a whole

cadre of surveillance people and intel people. And so it would be a counterfeit for me to like take all the credit for this because those guys made every bit the sacrifice I did, all the blood, sweat and tears. Every day I was out there, they were out there. I don't understand this. You call the Skull Valley guys clean and then they ordered you to go kill some people. But anyways, we just got to let you. Clean as you know my thing. I can't like, I have to get to the, I always need like a definitive answer on things when it comes to the underworld and crime. And just sometimes you just, you got to accept that you're not going to get that.

But I can answer that for you. There was a member in Scho Valley, George Walters, his name Joby, straight pipe hitter. Like, not a physically imposing dude, but nuts. For the two years I spent with them, short of two years, that dude constantly was reminding me, it's your job to kill girls. And girls was his code name for the Mongols. We say the Mongols, like, don't let that fucking name cross your lips. They're the girls.

It's our job to kill girls. Well, how so? I don't know how so. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. It's just your job to do it. You see a Mongol, it's your job to fucking kill them and get away. And if you don't get away, do your time and come back out. We'll be holding the place for you.

So that was like that dude's mentality. So when he says, hey, bring your hardware to Skull Valley, we're going to fricking blast these freaking banditos. There was no doubt in my mind, we were going to blast banditos. So I get a hold of Slatella and said, dude, this thing's getting ready to break bat. And this thing, I'm going to be put in a bad spot real quick if you don't do something. Slatella finds with some Las Vegas metro police department units, some marked units, uniform officers, finds this conga of banditos. Traffic stops them, holds them. So me and these other cats show up to the, to the conflict point, but the enemy never shows.

The victims never show. But in the eyes of the hell's angels, I was there. I was ready to take care of business. Like I was down for the cause. Right. So like I walked away from that like a hero. Right. Like hey man, freaking young buck fucking was ready to fucking go to war for us, man.

Damn. And that's in the middle of Las Vegas. Like those guys are ready to shoot people on camera. Dude, the thing is, is that if they're a clean organization with criminals within it, all those dudes, if you're wearing that freaking vest, you better be down for the get down. And you don't get to call time out and say like, hey, you know what, man, this really isn't my thing. I've got a nice job. I've got a family. My kids are in school.

When that call comes, which is why I think defeats that big picture, like claim. claim is that you don't get to call the ball on that and step out when it's not comfortable. You're in, you are all in. That Hells Angels name, that death head center patch, that is the most important thing in their life. It's more important than their house, their wife, their kids,

their money, their motorcycles, their cars, their dogs. It's their religion. They live by that and they die by it. What are these shootouts now like, you know, you hear about like 20 people getting killed in a bar in Louisiana or Texas, you know, these small towns. And it's bikers literally being in getting in shootouts like in a, as you said, a Quentin Tarantino movie, all these people getting killed. What is that over? Is that over, you know, beefs from certain conga lines trying to pass through other people's turf? I think the event that you're referencing, at least from my familiar, is the, it was in Waco, Texas, I believe, at the Twin Peaks restaurant. Yeah.

Where these two gangs. Yeah. There was a gang meeting there, another gang rolled up, and they got it on. Yeah. To say that I know what that was over, I couldn't say that because I don't have firsthand knowledge, but I'm assuming it was over territory and out of respect. Right. There's protocols and policies and procedures and bylaws. and I've said this many times

it always gets disputed. For a group of people that doesn't want to live by society's rules, they have a lot of rules. Yeah, right. Okay, so you're making good with the hells now, with the H.A.

You're ready to kill. You're this tough dude that knows how to get money out of people, Gun Runner. You move from hang around to prospect. So now you're one step away from getting patched in. So what's the difference

between a prospect and just a hang around. A prospect, you're still in that vetting process, but I was told when I got my prospect patch, you are a member without a patch. You haven't earned your patch yet, but all the rules, all the obligations are equal to you as to anybody else. So you're still trying to prove yourself.

You're trying to make your way. You're trying to impress, especially the people in your charter, because those are the ones whose vote you're going to need to be granted full membership, to be, you know, awarded the honor of being able to wear that patch and call yourself a hell's angel. And what are some of the operations that you're running at the time as a prospect?

Well, one, I did a gun deal with some members of Skull Valley, did a gun transaction, just like the debt collection. I'm buying guns from another ATF agent who's playing a trafficker. But it's witnessed by the Hells Angels. So we're in Vegas and I have this debt collector background. So I tell the Hells Angels, you want to meet Mr. Big? You want to meet my mob connection? Like, yeah, why not? Well, I was familiar with some Vegas metro detectives who were in the organized crime

undercover unit who played the mob role to a T. They played John Gotti. Like Italian mobs. $3,000 suits. Tie bars. Like flashy sunglasses, pinky rings, the whole, the language, the dialect, everything was believable, right? Wow. So I'm like, you want to meet, you want to meet Mr. Big?

Yeah. So we set it up. We've got our script. We've got everything set up. I know who I'm meeting. I know that these Vegas Metro guys are playing my mob boss, who I call Big Lou. So we go into this restaurant and there's some dudes standing back in the corner and they have these Fila like track suits matching tops and bottoms with tennis shoes.

Big fricking muscled up dudes with that crappy orange spray tan on them, right? And they're giving me the finger like over here. So I tell the hell's angels, I think he's over here, right? So we walk up and out from behind these muscle heads, these bodyguards, comes Big Lou. But it's not my Big Lou. It's not Big Lou that I'm familiar with from the Metro Police Department. This dude is 5-7, 135 pounds. He's 80 years old.

He's got like Sansa belt slacks and a blue light blue cardigan sweater on and house slippers. And I'm like, fuck, this is not the script. This is not. This is the way this is supposed to, this is supposed to be going down. I don't even know this dude. I've never met Big Lou, my mob boss, who I've been telling these guys I've been working for since I was a kid. He comes up. Jay Bird gives me a kiss on both cheeks and he looks me up and down.

And he makes the sign of the crossover himself. And he's like, your mother would be so disappointed if she's. saw you right now. If she could see you like this running around with these guys all with all these tattoos, she's like, you would break her heart. He's like, when you see her, you tell her I said hello because your mother makes the best lasagna in our neighborhood. And so he's, he's playing, right? So he starts, he tells the Hells Angels standing there now and I said, hey, I said, Big Lou, I said, these are the Skull Valley Hell's Angels. And you're improvising. I'm just going with it. You're tapping into those college improv classes. I'm going with it. Just yes and it. Right.

And so I said, you know, Big Lou, these are the Skull Valley Hells Angels. And he's like, oh, you're the Hells Angels. Well, sit the fuck down, Hells Angels. And this is little old man. And they're looking at me like, what did you walk me into? And he's like, did you hear what the fuck I said? Sit down. There was a pool table there.

And they kind of lean back half against this pool table. So Big Lou starts pacing back in front, forth in front of these Hells Angels. And he lights this big Stogey. He's like, let me tell you something. J.bert has been doing collections for me for years. He leaves on time. He comes back on time. He's never a penny short. The day he comes back and there's a nickel missing, that's a nickel you owe me as he's trying to be a hell's angels. And he's like, that means you're going to owe me money. No one owes me money without paying the price for it. So you fuck me. Somebody you're going to turn your car ignition on and your head is going to land in your fucking neighbor's front yard. And you know why you'll never know what's coming. You'll never see it coming. Because my guys don't wear fucking suit. to say the mob on the back like, you fucking assholes. And I'm like, oh, man, we are so far off script.

We are so out of bounds. Now, do you think that's a little over the top? He was playing it out, right? He was playing it out. Criminals don't really talk like that. He chills it out. Not anymore. He puts some money on the table.

He gives everybody like this like, like $300 Cahiba frickin cigar. And he's like, hey, look, you guys, enjoy your time here. This is my town. If you have a problem, call me. don't have a problem because I don't want to get a call. So he leaves. Him and the Big Lou and the bodyguards leave. And this is your weapons connection.

This is supposed to be the guy that's selling you and the guy. I'm doing debt collections for. Okay. I'm doing mob debt collections for this guy. Okay. And so he leaves and I'm turning around and I know I'm going to get socked in the face. I know these hell's angels are going to like, like, what the fuck are you doing walking me into something like that allowing me to be embarrassed?

And I turn around and one of them looks at me and he's like, dude, that was just like, like the fucking Sopranos. And I was like, oh, good Lord. Okay, right? So things chill out. I separate from the Hells Angels and I call the detective sergeant from Vegas Metro. And I'm like, I don't know where that dude came from. I don't know where you found that guy.

But like what happened? And they were like, the real Big Lou got called out on another assignment last minute. He couldn't be there. And I'm like, well, your replacement played it pretty good. He was believable. Yeah. And they're like, it was Joe Pesci the whole time. The detective sergeant says, he's believable?

are you sure? And I'm like, well, my guys bought it. He's like, dude, the guy is a legit mafia member. We caught him out here in Vegas laundering money. He's a snitch for us. Wow. Everybody in this game is a fucking rat. That's so crazy. Dude, it was, it was just this, like, you remember the game with the, with the paper and you did the did, did, did, and then you'd get your answer. Yeah. Like the shell game. Yeah. Every answer was freaking wrong for these dudes. Every answer was right for me. It didn't matter what you opened it up. I was going to have the right answer for you. Okay. So then did that end up being a gun deal? It ended up being nothing more than them meeting Mr. Big and saying like, you know what? The dude says he's a debt collector. He's a debt collector.

When we were doing the solo angels thing, when I said when I started, I was like, there's a bunch of dudes who are better at this than me. Right. Like let's pick somebody else to be your lead. Right. I ultimately brought all those dudes in to Phoenix. they all put on solo angel patches, and we ran around for a month, and I introduced these guys as my brothers,

and they were what I said they were. They were the best. I stood back and let all these other guys, all these other agents work for me. Everything they said, everything they did was believable. They leave town. The Hells Angels are saying like, man, your boys are freaking legit, man.

We need to get them over here with us. So then when did you end up committing crime with the angels? When did I, well, you know what? I bought guns from them, bought small levels of dope from them. I never hit that freaking jackpot doped load. And that's one of the people saying like, oh, you think you're freaking king shit undercover? You never got that big freaking meth load from those dudes, did you? I didn't.

Either it wasn't there or they didn't never trusted me enough to let me get close to it. I saw large scale dope, like at parties and stuff, or Coke. More Coke. Okay. I never got to it. And like my only explanation is, is I wasn't good enough. I wasn't good enough to get to the big, big dope. Or they didn't trust me enough.

Or they didn't have it. This is my theory. The angels aren't real dope smugglers. They're not really about that because if they were, they wouldn't be the hell's angels. They would be under, they would be secretive guys making multi millions of dollars. They're different from that old school, Oakland, Kenny Owen, like being this like phenomenal meth cook and them like running Haydashbury. Right.

Like the Mexicans have come in and like you literally like the domestic cooks can't keep. We domestically cannot produce methamphetamine at the price and the quality that the Mexicans can. They monopolize the drug trade. Now can we be distributors? Do we have contacts to move Mexican dope? There's a value there. Yeah. But it's not as the manufacturer like it once back in the day.

And I don't even think the angels, I deal with Mexicans that much. This is my theory. And maybe you could tell me better. But I think they deal with other Mexican biker groups now, like Chicano's Mexican-Americans. You know, for me to say like what the angel's source of narcotics was, like I can't say that. No, no, no. We know the source. It's the Mexicans.

But I'm saying I don't think the Mexicans really deal with the hell's angels as distributors. I think they deal with the Mongols. the banditos, because it's a racial thing. Like, they're more, you know, they're Chicanos. They're Mexican-Americans. There's more of a direct kinship there. Yeah. But there's Latino Hells Angels, too.

Oh, there are. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So you didn't see any cartel activity within the angels. I personally didn't. Okay. I didn't see, like, some dude who, like, fit that, like, cocaine cowboy, Sinola-F, like, vibe in anything that I did.

Yeah. I just didn't see it. Now, did they keep me away from that? Was I not good enough to get there? Maybe all the above. Yeah. My speculation is they just weren't really about it. I know that there's certain territories and certain illegal markets that make the Hells Angels more illegal.

Like in Vancouver, BC, that's a super great market for illegal business. You're helping drug traffickers smuggle drugs across the border. You're controlling the back when pot was illegal. You're controlling a ton of the bars where pot used to get distributed in downtown Vancouver. So there's a lot more opportunity to make a lot more money, you know. But there's certain markets that just the Hells Angels just don't make a lot of money. But from my perspective, as an observer at times, there's different vibes even within the Hells Angels. Like the East Coast vibe is different than the West Coast vibe, which is different from the Canadian vibe, which is different from.

the European vibe. They're all wearing the same patch. Yeah. They all believe in the same mentality. Right. But there's just different vibes about them. You know, I showed up one day in Skull Valley with some shorts and some flip flops on. And my president in Skull Valley was an old school East Coast Hells Angel, like a New Yorker.

And he's like, don't you ever fucking come to this fucking clubhouse with shorts and flip-flops on? We ain't some fucking beach boy fucking charter like out in fucking California. You're fucking an embarrassment right now. like okay well I freaking won't wear my fucking flip plops to the friend clubhouse anymore like I only need to be told once yeah yeah and if you and they tell you the second time by freaking giving you a black eye tell you once and then the second time you're gonna get a black eye

I used to wear a um uh sS ring like the the the the the the the secret police of the the Nazis correct yeah I know and I had this SS ring and I had a one of my um charter members tell me you gotta take that ring off that Nazi paraphernalia is illegal in Germany. They can't wear it in Germany. So in support of the German brothers, we don't wear it either. So, you know, a week later, I show up and I still got my SS ring on.

And he said, like, look, I asked you once to take that off. And he had some tree pruners. He's like, take that fucking ring off right now or I'm going to take it off. And I was like, dude, like, you don't need to cut my finger off, man. I'll put this in my pocket. You'll never see it again. So you're buying some small arms. arms, a couple ounces of dope.

What else? Was there any violence that you observed? You know what? There were fights. There were beatings. There was one. A dude was getting his ass beat. He tipped over or scratched to Hell's Angels motorcycle.

It was just a drunk dude at a bar, right? And they were freaking lumping him pretty good. I fought to the center of the fight. I got the victim. I got him by the head. And I laid some legitimate punches on him, right? Right. But what I was trying to do was protect his head.

because he was going to catch a steel-toed boot in the face and end up dead or retarded. Yeah. So like I got him and I'm like, I got him. I got him. Get the fuck out of here. Right. So everybody scatters. So the case ends, and this is an extended period of time after the case ends, I get an email from this dude.

Hey, you don't remember me, but you saved my life because those dudes would have killed me. Like I have now come to know who you are. Yeah. Like after my story got exposed. Like those dudes would have killed me had you not jumped in there. I didn't understand it at the time. I just thought you were one of the guys putting a beating on me, but you saved my life. Wow.

So you're still, you're in school valley. You need to get to the murders in Mesa. Like those seem like those are the real targets, correct? There was two competing investigations. One of the Hells Angels that was present at the murder of Cynthia Garcia had flipped. They had moved him out of Mesa and moved him to San Fernando Valley to, insulate him a little bit. So there was a faction of the investigation that was being run out of LA that was running this Hell's Angel informant through the California charters and trying to

gain information on the Garcia murder. We were trying to gain information on the Garcia murder like more hands on, more real time. I will say this. The California investigation had a bigger impact on the Cynthia Garcia murder than we were able to than I was able to, because they had that actual member that was present at the murder. He was able to make more progress. But nonetheless, we were trying to get next to Kevin Augustiniac and Paul Isshide, which were Mesa guys, which I was friendly with. I hung out with them.

And I'll tell you this, the scary part looking at it from outside that picture. These dudes cut Cynthia Garcia's damn near cut her head off in the desert in Apache Junction. By the way, do we know what prompted this, the beating at the clubhouse in the first place? She was in the wrong place, said the wrong thing, insulted the hell's angels. And like, you don't insult the hell's angels. You don't insult the hell's angels when there's multiple members there. And you surely don't insult them in their own house. Right.

So she was like an old lady or she was like just a girl that was on the street, that was a party girl. Right. That ended up, you know, thinking like, hey, this would be fun. I heard these guys throw good parties, man. Right. Wrong place, wrong time. She said the wrong thing. End up paying for it with her life.

And they don't even, they don't care that it's a woman. But those dudes that did that, this is the scary part, they were pretty pleasant dudes to be around. They were pretty enjoyable guys to be around. You didn't, like, I wasn't around them thinking like, man, these dudes freaking cut this chick's head off. Like they, like, I got along with them. Yeah. Now, were they sociopaths or psychopaths? Like, I think sociopaths are like inherently violent and psychopaths have freaking like no remorse or regret.

Were they sociopathic or psychopathic? Like, I don't know. Sounds like it. But, like, my interaction with them is like, like, like, these dudes are pretty enjoyable to be around. Wow. Were they drunk or intoxicated at the time? You know what? I don't know all the details on the actual murder, but I know this.

A lot of those dudes, some of the most dangerous, some of the most violent angels were charming as fuck. Wow. They were super personable, super easy to get along with. Yeah. Which is like, but I also knew. Like this dude is like super friendly, but if things break bad, they're going to break bad so fast that I can't recover from it. Was your cover ever close to being blown? Well, it was when the solo angels cover story was compromised when the solo angels were telling the Hells Angels, hey, man, I think this dude's counterfeit.

You need to freaking check them out. So how do they check you out? Well, I know at one point, like at three different times, the Hells Angels put a private investigator on me. I was so well backstop that the private. investigator came back with the same information that I was telling them. So their private investigators were actually cooperating my cover story for me. Like I was so well backstopped in that. Do they run your credit? Like don't they run your background to figure out how they did it, you know? But like, like did you have a criminal record? Like does the, if you're posing under cover,

will the feds, because I as a private citizen could get your, find your information, get your social security and probably find out if you have a criminal record. And they say that's how you can tell if it's a Fed is if you can't find anything on it. Well, and as a licensed private investigator, you can go even deeper than a common citizen. You can get more information. Right. But so how do you backstop that? Do you give? It was all in place. Like when they when they said like, hey, look at Jay Davis. This is his date of birth. This is a social security number. All checked out. Hey, man. Did you have criminal? Did you have a criminal record? Absolutely. Absolutely. Everything was backstop. Wow.

Everything was backstopped. So when the private investigator came back, say, hey, this is what we found out. They're nodding their head saying, like, well, that's the same shit he's been telling us for two years. So it must be real. Right. Okay. Yeah. So what crimes did you have in place on your sheet?

Like, they were pretty low-level stuff, but it also played with my gun running and my debt collecting. It was like, I got caught at the border with, like, ammunition. I was involved in an assault in Chicago with some outfit guys. stuff like that. Right. That like, okay, this makes sense. This makes sense. This makes sense.

Yeah. Yeah. So like I was so well backstop that the high school I was portraying myself to have gone through. I had records in the registrar's office at that high school. And I had a counterfeit yearbook that had my picture in it. Fascinating. So if they went that deep, which I don't believe they did. But if they went that deep, all it was going to do was like, was tell them that I was telling the truth.

Right. So when do you decide, okay, now I need to get patched in? I really want to be made. Well, so this is where the case diverted from the plan. Joe's letellel's plan all along was to do a side-by-side investigation. The side-by-side got blown up when they said, you're going to be with us and you're going to get rid of that solo angel's life, right? So now, like I'm like under their control. I got to be where they want, when they want, how they want. The goal was never to become a member of the Hells Angels. That was never a goal of the investigation. That was my goal.

That was my selfish goal. I started making selfish decisions and decisions that were outside the operational plan. And so the case is coming to an end. We've got like evidence and recordings and all this stuff and I still hadn't gotten my patch. And I was like, man, like, like I've got to do this for no other reason. And this is not a flattering statement to make for no other reason than me. I want to be able to say that I saw this thing through to the end. I do not want to fail.

That is when I went to the same Skull Valley Hell's Angel that sent us to Vegas, this, this dude who was like a true believer and said, I got a line on a Mongol in Mexico. Well, how do you got them in Mexico? Dude, I've been running guns down there for freaking 20 years. I know people all over Mexico. The word is getting back to me. There's a Mongol down there running his mouth. And he's saying that they kicked our ass in Laughlin,

that they're freaking that the better club, they're going to start running Mexican meth. Like, right up into Sunny Barger's backyard in Phoenix and there ain't a damn thing we can do about it. Like, I need to go down there and kill that dude. There was no trepidation. There was no second thought. This dude had lived to kill girls.

Gave me the pistol. Said, hey, man, pop him in the eye, pop him in the ear, pop him in the mouth, somewhere where you can penetrate his skull. Scramble that motherfucker's eggs, man. Disassemble this gun. Get back home if you can. Predisposition. The guy had been talking about killing Mongols for freaking two years.

He was predisposed. I'll clear everything else up with you. So we take a few days off. They think, the Hells Angels believe I'm in Mexico hunting this, Mongol. We just went outside of Phoenix, found a place in the desert. We got a Mongol vest that was seized from Billy Queen's Mongol investigation, the under and alone investigation. We took that vest. We put it on a member of our task force. We dug a shallow grave, duct tape his hands and feet together, drug him into the grave. He had a Mongol vest on. And then we had a homicide detective that got some parts

from the butcher shop and put like what appeared to be brain matter in this pseudo-mongles head and squirted blood around his head. I took pictures of it. You guys are literally like Hollywood set designers. Dude, this is like the ultimate street theater. This is crazy. Take pictures of it, cut the bloody vest off his back, put it in a FedEx box that has a Magdalena, Mexico origination address on it, send it back to myself at my undercover house in Phoenix and then call the Hells Angels, man, we got to meet. You know, like we got to get together. We're not talking about it on the phone. Dudes come in. They're like, you know, what's up? I hand them the FedEx box. I wasn't crossing the border with this. I wasn't putting this in the trunk of my car. The dude opens it up. First thing he sees,

he sees a Mongol vest with blood all over it. And so he's got his back to where he's opening this box up. He's got his back to all of us. There's like four Hell's Angels in. me and my Phoenix police department partner there. And before these dudes showed up, I told my partner, I'm like, do not let one of these dudes stand behind us. I was like, they are about to be implicated in a murder. And I don't know if they're going to embrace us or they're going to kill us. Do not give these dudes a shot from the back of my head.

Why would they kill you? They wanted you to kill a Mongol. Well, because they were like almost involuntarily being implicated in a murder by like being presented this story and being presented this evidence. I didn't know what their reaction would be. I anticipated it being good, but there's like these dudes are unpredictable. It's a big risk. So he pulls it out.

We can't really see what he's looking at. And you hear him say, whoa. And then one of the other hell's angel says like, well, what is it? It's like, it's like it's a Mongol cut. He turns around and there's blood drips down the back of it. And then he's got the pictures of the Mongol in the shallow grave. And I tell the story, we found this mongle and this canteen. And we dragged him out and I beat the shut out with my baseball bat and stuffed him in the trunk of my car.

And we drove him out in the desert and we dug it. grave and I duct taped him up and we shot him in the head and and we were selling a murder to murderers. And so the risk was through the roof. Yeah. But it was also signaled the end of the investigation. Management and the supervisors were like, dude, you are so fucking far out of bounds. You're so freaking like, like you've pushed this to the point where you can't contain.

continue now. Because, like, have you thought about, like, what the next play and the next play and the six-month play is after this? So now they're going to want to get you into, like, some real murders. And my argument was to, I was like, man, I'm in. The Hells Angels I was with, they're like, you took care of business. You showed what it got, what it takes to be a hell's angel. This is where the conflict and the stories come, but it's really not a conflict. I've never portrayed this to be anything other than what it was. A member put a vest on my back. And he's like, you're a hell's angel now. We'll get you stitched up.

I'll get you your own vest. First, I have to go to the West Coast officers and tell them what happened and get it sanctioned. Then we have to go to a national run, which at that time was going to be in Laconia, New Hampshire. Once we get this all approved and everybody sanctions it, and I will sponsor you in this, I will tell this story on your behalf. We're going to fast pat you in. So my story was like, look, they put a cut on my, they put a cut on my back and said, you're a Hells Angel. It's just not official yet. The Hells Angels are like,

he was never a full member, which is true. I'd never disputed that. They never got to that full vote because we closed the case down. Yeah, the Hells Angels is a criminal organization, man, because you're running a murder, you're taking proof of a, well, they thought it was a murder. It's as good to them, it's a murder. You're taking proof of that literally to the national organization that makes decisions for all of the local chapters in order to get yourself patched in? Like, what more proof do you need right there? So the angels are saying like, look, he was never a full member. He never made membership. I did not dispute that. I never got that club vote at Laconia. All I'm saying is what I was told by the Skull Valley leadership

after I delivered that murder evidence. So, but now you have all these guys implicated. Did they, do they all get charged with conspiracy? Yeah, there was various charges from that. Okay. So tell us about the whole indictment. How do all the rests go down? How does this all wrap up? Yeah, the case comes to a close.

And then it ends in a very traditional way. Like we had indicted, I think, 55 members and associates. 16 members and associates were indicted on RICO charges, racketeering charges. That leads to raids. and arrests and, you know, a very traditional ending. Now, what about the guys involved in this fake murder? What happened to them? Yeah, they get arrested.

They, they, like I said, there was 55 guys. But what's the, them? What is the charge? What's the, what are they charged with? There was more than, there was more than just this fake murder with these guys. There was, there was drug or there was gun involvement. There were, you know, like they were part of this conspiracy to go to Vegas and kill the banditos. Like, so, like, there was numerous charges.

Right. So there's conspiracy to commit murder, a conspiracy. ERISA, traffic weapons. Yeah, we had six or seven hundred guns seized at the end of this case, bombs, silencers, drugs, hundreds of hours of audio and video recorded criminal conversations. The case was a solid case, right? So it ends in like ATF's executives, the management hold the press conference, which is always kind of a, kind of a trippy time. and they were making statements like the Hells Angels are now going to cease to exist. This has never been done for him.

And I'm like, oh, man, don't make that statement. Yeah. Like you're overstating our success. So the case goes, now it goes to the attorneys. And it goes for the prosecution. There's other, there's other Hells Angels investigations being run simultaneously. And there's other, there's informants involved. So the defense team for our case says, like,

like we need every bit of information you have. Like we're entitled to it through discovery. ATF holds back on that and says like we're not going to give you everything. Like we're not going to compromise these other investigations. We're not going to compromise these other sources. When that happens, the Arizona case starts getting shipped away at. They start reducing charges. They start dismissing charges all because like they don't want to compromise the big picture of everything.

But in the eyes of the hell's angels and their defense attorneys, they're like, why are they dismissing charges? Why are they freaking eliminating charges? It must be because their undercovers are dirty. And so, like, we got that, like, jacket put on us, which was undeserved. That case today is every bit as prosecutable and winnable as it was in 2003, based on evidence, recordings, agent testimony. We just never got the chance to tell it. It's because they, the higher-ups decided we, there's a more important, bigger investigation

with CIs that will get exposed if they brought all of your charges to discover. And the big part of that was the Cynthia Garcia investigation that was being run in California and Nevada, which was somewhat coupled with the Laughlin shootout investigation. That was still an active investigation. And they didn't want to compromise that. And so, you know, after two years of blood, sweat and tears and doing this, that's super frustrating to, like, see your case fall apart. for, well, in my mind, what was the wrong reasons, and then being, like, laid, like, laid blame for it. Did, um, did they ever end up solving the Cynthia murders? Oh, yeah. So those two guys you mentioned,

I can't remember their names? Oh, you're seeing. I can I shite are both, as far as I know, still locked up for Cynthia's murder. Okay. So they ended up getting them. Uh, what about your people at the Skull Valley branch? Did they end up going down? You know, what, there was people that, uh, in the, in the Arizona case that, uh, were convicted, that did time. There was people that did reduce charges. Like no one took any massive lick. No one took a lick that probably justified the amount of time and risk and energy and money

that was put into the case. Wow. And so, which is one of the complaints. Like, you spent all this money and you spent all this time and you freaking never hit anybody very hard. That means you're fucking shitty at your job. I'm like, actually, we were pretty good at our job. It just didn't work out that way.

But if I try to say that, it sounds like I'm being whining. or complaining over spilt milk. I don't get to prosecute the cases. I don't get to make those decisions. Got it. But they ended up getting the murders, which I guess was the big one, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So that's something to take away from it. I will say this. When it's all said and done, Jay Dobbins, Operation Black Biscuit, the members of our task force, but I'll speak more from my personal experience, the Hells Angels ran right over the top of me and kept going. In the history of the Hells Angels,

of the Americana myth and legend of the Hells Angels, I was nothing more than a speed bump. I was nothing more that just tempt something that temporarily got in their way and maybe slowed them down a little bit. They're bigger, badder, stronger, faster, quicker than they ever were right now. Are they? I'm an afterthought. Are they really?

Unimportant to these dudes. Are they really bigger, batter? I heard they're trying to clean their image up. I heard they're trying to, they're rebranding as like just a motorcycle club. Well, when you think about that, you know, like, they promote their toy runs. Hey, we do toy runs. We collect, you know, toys for kids and we deliver toys to the hospitals.

Like, just take the next step on that. If you're a hell's angel, do you want to be thought of as a guy that's riding around with a teddy bear bungeeed to the back of his motorcycle so that you can take it to a kid on Christmas? Or do you want to be the baddest cat on the planet? It's probably why they'll lose membership. That's why people go to the Mongols. Real, real outlaws will end up going to these other groups. That's my guess. I know that every day the Hells Angels,

all you got to do is put Hells Angels in your Google search, and every day there's crime events that they're tied to every day and wicked ones. Wow. Wow. Jay Dobbins, fascinating. We're going to switch over to Patreon now because this wasn't the end of the story, but it was the end of your time. It's the end of the free story. Yeah, that's right.

It's the end of your time with the Hells Angels. What a career you've had. What a fascinating life. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. And let's promote your book really quick, too. Your books, yeah, I've written two books. The first one was called No Angel,

my harrowing undercover journey to the inner circle of the Hell's Angels. That was released in 2009. And then I wrote a second follow-up book, which is kind of a preamble and a post-amble of No Angel, which is called Catching Hell, a true story of abandonment and betrayal. Yeah. And we're going to go discuss those books on the Patreon,

as well as your beef with the ATF after your retirement. Thanks again, man. You look great. You did great. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show for more Jay Dobbins. Jay, thank you so much. Thank you.