I Took Down One of The Most Dangerous Biker Gangs | ATF Agent Ken Croke

[Music] you know when you're undercover you must see these guys ids sometimes or no or is that kind of not a thing that happens it depends on you know the type of undercover like if it's short-term or regular undercover um you you you know exactly who it is you're meeting with you know what their background is what they're capable of and you'll know their names but it's short-term Um when you're doing this long term and you particularly when you're meeting you know hundreds of people over a period of time um you know the odds of

use because some of them go by their real names some of them go by their club names and so whatever it's just like i'm introduced to jordan and you know if i knew your nickname was bill and somewhere i refer to you as bill and you'd be like where'd you get that from mm-hmm um you know i See yeah you know so yeah so i always told him just don't tell me you know just you as long as you know who they are now you can tell me you know hey how bad are they like

if they killed five people so i know you know i have that going in um but outside of that um don't don't give me much more yeah cause you don't wanna you don't wanna say like a gang name that only a gang member would know and if they haven't introduced you is that way and they've given you Something totally different it just totally blows you up right because it's like who do you know that knows me that told you my name right or these guys use aliases all the time and um they'll throw them out

there and if also and they threw an alias out five years ago and i happen to use that alias i suppose they'd be like only a cop would know that um and so you just yeah you're always trying to stay i just try to keep it as Simple as i can and it and like i said this type of investigation it's you know people always like oh yeah it's amazing it's this is it you know the hardest part of this was keeping your story straight i bet for two years and um you know people have

always asked me like you know how do you do it and i'm like well you know how difficult is it and and i use the same analogy which is so tell me a lie about last night where You went to dinner who you went with what was the restaurant what did you eat what was the environment who was sitting around you and get into some details and you'll you'll sling that out in a second and um and it'll sound very convincing and i'll believe you but then i'm gonna circle back next week and i'm gonna

come back and i'm gonna say to you hey um how did you have your steak cooked last week and you have told me and if it was a Real memory you'd remember it if it's not then it's very hard to recall because you just made that stuff up and so then do that over two years and it gets to be really difficult and these guys would regularly particularly roadblock would regularly circle back on my um stories to see how valid they were roadblock is one of the guys on the was that the guy that sort

of sponsored you to see if you were or was he just a guy It's hard to keep these names straight for me having read the book there was one guy who kept testing you i assume that's what it that's who that was yeah yeah there's i mean him and peter probably the the the two biggest when it came to testing but uh roblox was my sponsor um and that he was at the time he's the sergeant-at-arms the the the chapter president want me it wanted me into the club but presidents generally are not Supposed to

sponsor folks so he designated roadblock to be my sponsor yeah so that's that seems to be one of the reasons why you hear undercover say like always use as many real details as you can so that you don't have you can always default to like hey i get my steaks done medium this i am maybe i'm a vegan you know a vegetarian you don't have to pretend you're not or that you are for something else and maybe you use like what like a real first name but a Fake last name is that kind of the

general yeah most folks will use their real first name because you know i mean especially again if i'm going to an alley and meeting you and buying a gun it's going to be a half hour whatever you could stay focused for that but over two year period if also when i changed my name to harry inevitably somebody would have been like hey harry and i wouldn't have turned Around like you just wouldn't click whereas if keep the same first name you know you can you know you'll naturally respond yeah that's how man the pressure is

just ridiculous uh let me back up a little bit how did you end up deciding to slash getting selected to work undercover do they i assume they don't make you do that they ask you if you want to right yeah you talking all the way back at Like day one of my career yeah yeah yeah so you know they do not make you do it um when you're in the academy uh at least when i went to the academy everyone was um you had to do it in that environment so you could at least for

two reasons one see if you liked it number two you have to have an appreciation of what it's like to be an undercover and again it's an academy environment nobody's gonna die but it is they do make it as Real as they possibly can and even if you never did it again you'll understand what undercovers go through and when you are planning your operations and you're asking someone to do undercover for you you'll you know you'll have a little bit more understanding of how that process works and what they're going through when they're doing that

so um but then afterwards it's just for me you know i did it in the academy um and you know i Thought i did pretty good at it and i also felt like a lot of the undercover work was kind of pushed on to um different minority groups and so it'd be like hey you looked apart type of thing and i always felt like you know looking the part is i mean there's you got to look you got to be able to explain what you look like and so um you know i did um undercover

with um african-american Gangs hispanic gangs it's all your story and who's introducing you in so i did you know a fair amount of undercover with ms the mayor substitute the street gang everyone's like how's a white guy you know do that yeah isn't that is that el salvador based gang yeah yeah exactly and so they were this is when i was in los angeles and they were big in los angeles and um it but my story was there was a um a Prostitute who worked down that area who's white and um she introduced me into

into the gang so i was her brother and so then they accepted like all right yeah we got this white guy here he's you know buying some guns and some drugs and what have you and so it's really your story more so than it is what you look like and so i wanted to kind of change that and then further i i went along with it um or got into it um The more i enjoyed doing it you know i looked at it as a challenge it's almost like a chess match um and um you

know i i i was not one dimensional in my career and and i never intended to you know i worked you know really good cases i had gone up into management up to the highest levels within the agency so it was you know all these things i i just wanted to be a well-rounded agent yeah i mean it sounds like the level of excitement for Undercover is much higher than i mean i'm stereotyping here but it seems like if you want if you're joining the police or the atf in your case to be close to

the action there's no closer to the action than pretending to be in a gang and selling drugs with a gang and running guns with a gang for whether it's half an hour or half a year some would view it that way and i i Think it's it's but there's also you know if you're on the srt team you know there's a lot of adrenaline that's like a swat team situation yeah exactly and so um there's a lot of aspects of the job that get that adrenaline you know flowing and um but this this to me

was one where um it's kind of like a skill set and you develop it as you go along and you get a little bit better you have to be very quick In thinking because even the short term stuff you know also when something comes up and somebody throws something at you you've got to be able to respond to it just like you naturally would um in this case was full of you know things that happened that you i would get out of bed every day and you know i'd have a plan and what i was

going to do by nine o'clock in the morning that plan completely was blown up and not a single day when according to what i Thought it was going to do yeah it sounded like that from the book too you know like this is a full-time job and we'll kind of get to this because i took a copious amount of notes but tell me a little bit about how biker gangs work there's different club ranks right there's like the full-on patched members and then there's these kind of i guess prospects who are for lack of a

better word like Applicants almost right initiates more like indentured slaves but yeah the um so the process starts with hang-arounds and so hang-arounds actually you know if you're ever going to hang around a biker gang that's that's the level you want to be at because they get to go to the parties they have no responsibility nobody cares what they do they're also not involved in any of the inner workings of the club they won't know any criminal activities They won't know a lot of anything any of the dynamics that are happening inside but they go

to the clubs you know they go to the parties they'll support them and so forth and that's but for the biker gangs that's a important part because they're watching you and how you are just normally and so they're wanting to see you know is this a stand-up type of person is this somebody we want to be part of this um do they have what It takes to be a part of it and then if you do the next phase they're gonna ask you to prospect and that's by far the worst phase and um it's a

little bit different for each club for the pagans it's six months the the period um and they can add days to it um depending on what happens and during that period of time you and with the pagans you're a prospect for the what they consider to Be the entire pagan nation so you don't belong to a chapter you don't belong to a person you belong to the entire pagan group so when on a normal day you know you're you're holding to the to the chapter that you're in but when you go to these mandatories where

there's you know a thousand bikers there you're holding every single one of them and so it is like indentured servitude you you will Um so like my first uh mandatory we were up uh it was actually like a half a mandatory we were up at four o'clock in the morning after you know maybe going to sleep at three o'clock in the morning and um you're running the grills you're going around picking up trash you you have these bags of things that you have to carry with you things being like spark plugs um lights for the

motorcycles cigarettes Tampons like you name it you're carrying all this stuff and there's a list like figure you have to have a lighter you know all the stuff toothpicks um and if you don't have one of these items and one of those members ask you for it several things can happen one they'll bang check you which is an open palm strike to your forehead two they can hit whack you with an axe handle if it's significant enough i mean if you're missing a toothpick you're probably not Gonna get an ax handle but if you um

other violations you would or they add days to your prospecting and so you have this little calendar booklet you carry with and you cross off days as you complete them and um and so if you screw up you'd be like hey add another week which honestly i'd rather get i'd rather get bang check than add time to to the um to the prospecting phase and so and there is no like they say it's six months but it's Not like six months you're watching the clock wind down you're like hey i've got four more hours it's

not that way it six months is the general time and they'll let you know uh in their own special way when you're when you've made it and when you you know or if you haven't right so you're done when they say you're done not when you're like hey guys this is my last day yeah yeah yeah exactly now and then um yeah then then you're a patch Member and you're you're on probation uh for a period of time and then there's officers within the club and so back to you your original there's a treasurer secretary

there'll be a um vice president who really doesn't have status unless the president is dead or in jail um sergeant arms which is the number two in a chapter and also responsible for the weapons but also the discipline and then the the chapter president and then those chapters report up to uh what they Call a president of presence a pop and that's the level right below mother club and then mother club has its own chapter so the national president the national vice president of national sergeant arms are all across mother club and so everybody reports

up to that so mother club sounds like what it's it's the national chapter instead of the local chapter of the pagans exactly it's the national oversight and so you'll have Each mother club member will have an area so um you know i was in new york so the mother club member at the time was kano and he had um new york and northern new jersey that was his area so everybody reported up to him and he was part of mother club wow it's like regional management but it's also like a mafia with the commission and

everything right or the yeah is that what it's called the commission yeah yeah no that's exactly And there is a hierarchy i mean you know people think the these are just a bunch of morons running around partying uh yeah and they're not they uh they're very sophisticated in how they move their money they're very sophisticated in their structure they're also very sophisticated in what they do you know they they plan operationally they have undercovers the other people who they call ryan slickback no colors no nothing people Who kind of look like they'd blend in if

they're going to events and stuff they'll have those people out there planted watching to see if rival kings are showing see what the local law enforcement are doing um so they do their i mean they're planning maybe not on paper like what law enforcement agencies do but in the end it's really the same thing you know they would brief in and debrief after you know their You know events wow yeah it's it's surprising because some of these guys are really horrific human beings and i've got some examples that we can talk about in a little

bit here early in the book you talk about simulating using drugs and drinking at a party and this is something i'd never thought about right okay you pour out a beer when no one's looking maybe you hold a Shot in your mouth and then you kind of spit it back into your beer bottle when you're looks like you're chasing the booze so you don't get super drunk but how do you fake a line of cocaine right that's that sounds like a challenge yeah so people ask that question and honestly i i don't go into it

and i'll tell you why because it just makes it more difficult for the people behind me the folks that are going to get in this type of work but i will i will say this And it's easier to talk about the alcohol in that sense it's that um you know there'd be plenty of nights that folks would be like oh my god you we were out slam had 10 beers last night um well the reality is like you think about the last time you're in a bar with some buddies and you know they're ordering different

beers where did you really see them drink the beer did you really watch that liquid cross across their lips now if you're watching Somebody drink a beer and you're paying attention to it you're gonna be able to tell whether they drink it enough but who doesn't you know it's not so if you're gonna sit there and say hey watch me and i'm gonna i'm gonna fool you into thinking i drank 10 beers but just stare at me the whole time you're not gonna be able to pull it off but that's not how it works and

so you um you do like when it comes to alcohol hey take your beer to the bathroom dump it Out most of it out and then you go back in the order you make sure you buy everyone around you know so people know hey you know he's back up at the bar again you know doing that kind of thing and and again it's just people assume um and there was a time in the book where i talk about where it was a test and in a test that i would have failed if i didn't have

some dumb luck on my side and i had plenty of dumb luck throughout this case Yeah there was uh you definitely had some good luck in in this case which is fortunate it's probably why you're here to tell the story um i just doing the fake lines of cocaine it seemed like there were some close calls and i guess i've done all this training and tolerance building just in case i need to go undercover and i didn't need to do it for no reason at all could it could have just done it could just fake

cocaine could have just faked it the Whole time but you know like to your point like you could sit here and say hey i'm not because there is a huge risk to do to faking you know using drugs or the alcohol whatever it is and um and even if on the alcohol you know people are going to say oh he was drunk the whole time so when you take the stand they're going to be like oh you were drunk because you had 10 beers so you're like you're always going against that but the reality is

you know take the Flip side so here's this guy who parachutes in from nowhere also he's hanging around with these guys oh by the way he doesn't do drugs or alcohol but he's willing to be a biker it's like come on you know at some point they're going to be like really mother teresa now wants to be a biker like how does that work why not just do this is probably a dumb question but why not just do a real line of cocaine right it's not like It's it's probably not going to kill you right

away i don't know it seems like the risk but the guy if he finds that you're not doing it in front of him he could kill you right away right yeah and listen this rules against it um and and you know it also will put you under the influence when these are all things like like everything everyone thinks like oh you're just hanging out and you're having a good time there's nothing fun About this not one minute of it is fun because it is a constant chess match you're constantly at risk but you're also constantly

building a case and everything you do during that time is going to be scrutinized later on when it comes time for trial or emotions or what have you and so you constantly have to be on guard against that and you have to take you know get the evidence you can get as far as whether it be recordings Video audio copious notes and be able to you know attest to everything that happens during that time and so if something does happen on a script now listen if somebody were to to put a gun do an undercover

head and said do this lineup before you blow your brains out the undercover's going to do the line but then they're going to come out and they're going to write a report about how they did this line they're going to Go to the hospital because you know i know this will come as a shock to you but somebody may say it's coke and it's not coke it could be yes yeah yeah and there's all sorts of bad things that i mean that alone would be a reason not to do because you don't know what the

hell they are actually giving you you know um so you know but having that documentation you know in any anytime you had like you Know for me anytime i you know was part of any a little illegal activity you had to make sure you documented all that because it's coming back somebody said he was there you know he saw this person get beaten or whatever it was and you you better have documented it all yeah you can't be like so i was really high on meth but they made me do it you're right they made

me do it yeah exactly i think this is what happened that doesn't really play well in court right i was Seeing triple but but i'm pretty sure that that was the guy that that hit him and one other addition to that so yeah i mean we've all been drunk at some time in our lives and that's generally the time you do the stupidest of things and so if your real life is what it is and then also you do this undercover role and you let your guard down and your you drink 12 beers what's the

odds that you're not going to say the wrong Name or the wrong thing about yourself um it's super high just another reason it's hard enough to do it when you're sober another mind trying to add that into it yeah good point yeah you don't want to start crying about your ex-girlfriend from back in michigan and they're like i thought you were from new jersey man what oh uh yeah and also then you can't really defend yourself because you can't see straight yeah yeah you talk about the devil's disciples Which is like i guess like a

minor league support club or versus the outlaws who are legit so what is the difference here and why would somebody be in one but not the other you know why why be in one club if you're trying to hang out with that pagans all the time it is like triple-a baseball so i mean in some ways it is and that's you know when i do some training with law enforcement i talk about it that way it's like it's the minor leagues but Really you know i don't mean that to sound negative what it really is

is that it's a proving ground to start number one number two the support clubs are not as regimented as the big five are um or the big six depending on the other day but the bigger clubs there's a lot more to that membership there's a lot more expected from you um with you know the the small support clubs it's like yeah they're on if They're going to a mandatory in support of like the pagans you know for example yeah you better have your stuff dialed in because bad things could happen to you there is a

support role but generally they're treated pretty good because they want numbers and so when there is an issue they're going to call that support club and and bring them in so um so for some people that's about as much like they're willing to be a Weekend warrior if you will and but they don't really want that full-time commitment and and so a lot of them go in there and they stay stay exactly there or their lives change and they decide hey this isn't for me or whatever it is uh but a lot do come up

to those ranks oh okay yeah that that makes sense you can keep your day job as a truck driver or lawyer or doctor and then you can sort of almost like larp Badass biker dude and hopefully you don't get shot during uh hell's angels dust up yeah exactly you said big five or big six that you're talking about the major biker gangs right so what hell's angels pagans uh mongols outlaws what which other clubs are there it depends on you know the warlocks the the vagos um you know it depends on kind of the time

you know because their Numbers swell and shrink um but really the the the biggest and most violent would be those gangs warlock i've never even heard of them i guess i have heard of th that's a is that a latin gang so vagus is people will consider them to be a west coast gang and part of my back story was that i wrote the vodkas i was not a Virgo but i rode with the virus now i had done some undercover work against the virus when i was in l.a um and it seemed like a

safe bet to use that as kind of a you know back and i had done a bunch of research and and i you know we had some folks that we knew where their bars were and i went out and it was a part of that so i had my whole backstory intact um what i never expected was the vagos to skip the entire country and open a friggin Chapter in new york in the middle of our case but that's like that was an example of really bad luck but going back to my point at the

beginning where i said you know you got to be quick on your toes their initial inclination was to talk about me knowing that i knew people like oh hey you know in the time i was a prospect you're like you know ken and um and so i had said to them when i Caught one of this i was like hey listen man something's shady about this like the vargo skipped the whole country and decided to open up in new york something going on here i said let's let's not let them know you know who i

am and let me check through my people back in california and check in and they bought that hook line singer thank god um and so they never did tell them and i would feed them a bunch of bs intel that i was getting out of california that made Sense but it wasn't true um and they they were like hey this is great okay so to clarify for people who are listening and maybe a little confused so you your cover story included you were riding with this other gang back on the west coast that wasn't present

on the east coast and when you were undercover uh with the pagans on the east coast suddenly this gang the real actual gang wanted to come and start a chapter there and you were like they're gonna ask About me i'm get then the people are going to say i've never heard of this guy then your cover's blown or at least there's a hole in it so you made up some some spiel about how they shouldn't say anything because it looked shady that they were jumping into york and thankfully they just decided to keep it quiet

because of that yeah if they don't know that i have connections there then we could check on them you know them unknowingly and uh so Yeah it it worked like a charm but it was you know for for a minute or two i was like oh man i'm screwed you know yeah that way this is going to stand up pagans and these other clubs are are these big five big six these are full-time jobs right so these are not things where you go oh that would be fun to do uh you know i could probably

take friday afternoons off now that i'm older and i'm established in my career this is this is your life right this is how you Generate revenue it's how you support your family if you have one this is your job right when you're in a gang like this so some of these you know a lot of them don't have jobs um some of them do have jobs and and some of them have like there was one guy worked on wall street and he did a lot of the money laundering set up the llc's for the the

funding and stuff like that um he's not the guy you bring into a bar room brawl um you know Because he's about five five feet tall and he looked like a bowling ball but the like there there were some that had legitimate jobs um the club priority is the club activity and so you have to live by that but there was i will say that if you had a legitimate job um they would work around that for the most part they weren't looking to get people fired from their jobs and just say hey you have

to be full-time you know pagan to be here you know whatever Now if there's a mandatory you better be there um but mandatories were planned out so you would know um and if you know one of your brothers needed you then you better drop whatever you're doing and get there so most weren't working in the corporate world if you will but you know you have a lot of mechanics and you know folks like that that were part of the gang and a lot more unemployed yeah Everything i've learned like everyone else you've probably talked to

about this everything i know about bikers is aside from your book from the show sons of anarchy i gotta wonder did these guys watch that and go oh that's not how it is or are they obsessed with this show that wouldn't surprise me so they they refer to as the sons of malarkey and um but i will say this uh it was the ultimate in irony so i'm a make-believe Biker hanging out with real bikers watching a show about make-believe bikers like you can't you can't make this stuff up and they would just make fun

of the show the whole time now part of their uh there was some h.a uh hells angels consultants uh rumored to be you know uh on that show so that just made the pagans hate it even and even more um and so but yeah they these guys uh and not so much with the sons of anarchy these Guys did their homework when there was books written like they gave me two books right when i you know it was part of the gang they said read these and look for information in there that can help us

identify who undercover cops are um yeah so they and they would watch all those um shows under discovery and things like that um gang land and all that stuff looking for tidbits it's one of the Reasons why when i wrote this book i was in to your question at the beginning about you know hey how do you fake a line like i don't give up that stuff uh yeah in the book because there's no purpose it doesn't change the story but it does make it you know i don't want to make it more difficult on

the person who comes behind me no i completely understand that i've had all kinds of people on here before and they're like hey that was a little bit Of tradecraft that while interesting to you probably shouldn't be because it's gonna be very interesting to al-qaeda or like iranian special service secret service and i'm like okay you know i'll cut it out it's not yeah i'm not trying to i'd feel pretty bad if somebody got in trouble at the expense of me entertaining somebody with an anecdote on this podcast right Tell me what the one percenter

thing is because i've heard of the patches i've heard of the one percenter clubs i've seen that in movies as well like what's the deal what is a one percenter so it all comes back from a study that was done by the military back in i think it was the either late 50s or early 60s and it you know everyone was saying hey motorcycle enthusiasts bikers are all bad so they did this whole study and basically had a study it came back and Said hey listen 99 of them aren't this you know one percent of

these bikers might be problematic or gang members or what have you but the rest aren't so the point of the report was like don't judge just because they're bikers well then the bikers the real bikers the outlaw bikers we're like hey this is great we are the one percent we're proud to be in the one percent and there's only certain clubs that can wear the one percent Um patch and if they see somebody you know riding with a one percent patch and they're out for one of the big clubs they will go and rip it

off of them or worse um they're very protective of who can be in the one percent club if you will and a lot of that patch structure when generally when you see a three-piece patch on somebody's back then you're then that's going to be one of the bigger Five clubs or it could be one of the support clubs but the sport clubs won't have one percent on them someone will have like .99 which is kind of a joke um or but the support clubs will have something so like the the pagans had yeah it would

be a p or 16 um and a support club would wear that patch and so it showed that they were support club of the pagans so they kind of flew under the protection of the Pagans there's a lot of symbolism and almost like numerology when it comes to these things and i noticed that since pagans are also white supremacists they have that in common right where it's like this number means this and this is the 14 words from adolf hitler and this is the number of uh mother club members or branches of the club and

you got to put this in there and then this skull has This in the shape of the eyes they always do that and it's a it's a little culty kinda i mean it is and it's and you have some that are much stronger believers in it than others like others are kind of like yeah i'm into that and they're not and then others are like hey this is like the core of what we are uh but you're right there is a lot of similar there was one and i use the term old lady because that's

how they refer to the Females that are either they're married to girlfriends or whatever it's not my my uh view but they um one of the old ladies had said you know all these guys are and she was drunk and probably shouldn't have said it but she was like hey all these guys are as evil boy scouts and uh and that was a tribute back to the patches like all these patches that they wear there's not a single patch they're wearing that doesn't mean something some Of it may be trivial um and then you know

with my colors like i was selective of what patches i would put on um because some of them you earn some of them it just depends on what's happening um but there were some that were given to me you know like the ss lightning bolts stuff like that i would i just you know i didn't i wasn't like oh no hey i i don't but i'm not a believer in that i just took them and never put them in my Colors yeah i'm kind of wondering how you got away with that you know like how

well how would you even explain that to some like oh hey i just this is an ss nectar don't worry daddy's going to cover it up with a butterfly when he's done with this project at work well early um not early on after i become patched so after one year in with the with the pagans you would get sutar's sword on your neck And it's kind of a level like after uh three years you can get the word pagans or a small version of the colors and after seven years you can have full colors like

on your back and you know tattoo that is so the chapter president at the time was like hey listen uh i got permission for you to get sutar's sword early um and they they broke a bunch of things with me early like i became an officer Earlier than i was supposed to um there was i i you know not to jump ahead but i um i got arrested and so i should have been pushed out of the club until that case got adjudicated and we can get into that in a minute but like there's all

these different you know things that they had rules they've broken for me so when it came to this i'm like oh man i go home with sutar sword in my neck this is not gonna play well uh with my wife to start with and then forget where Else and so i said to him i said hey listen man i'm already getting some attitude some for some folks because you know i've been cutting corners and you guys have been doing things for me earlier then you know probably should have you know let's just let this one

run out let me do my time and um and you know earn this one um and the chapter president was like hey man that stand up you know 100 behind you um Yeah let's do that so it was another you know bullet dodged yeah no kidding that's one of those kind of closed calls you know it's funny when i search for suitor sword one thing that comes up is the pagans motorcycle club worldwide trademark application for their insignia they have this trademark like there's an attorney of record on file they have a registered agent office

everything it shows the patch well In one case in the mongols case they um they seized the trademark for the mongols and it was a battle it's gone on for years i don't know where it stands right now where the mongols had it could not use their colors and then they got it reversed and then they could use their colors this ongoing battle that um went on but the hell's angels all that stuff's trademark like they they've all done it yeah that's uh it makes sense when you Think about it but it's just kind of

it's kind of funny like we're outlaws but make sure you register that trademark on time and don't let it lapse right it's like having a domain name in good standing or something for your meth and money laundering business and not for nothing like you don't want to be making up your own pagan shirt and wearing it around town because you will get called out and you will be beaten severely i mean if they found out Somebody was wearing a pagan shirt um like you're not supposed to have you could wear a shirt that says support

16s and that's what they do for a lot of the supporters they can wear those and they know what that means and people know it but you cannot have anything that says pagan not unless you are a pagan even if it's just like a random the word pagan had nothing to do with the club they're still going to take offense the or take issue with that eh i mean if if You were on a baseball team and your last name is pagan and you have pagan on your back like they're not going to come beat

you out you know come out of the stands to beat you for it but if you're in any reference to like what a pagan would be so if you had a t-shirt on it says you know pagans are the best you'd have problems interesting and even as a prospect as a prospect you can't touch anything that says pagans you can't touch pagan colors Nobody's supposed to be touching um and there was an incident uh in the book that i talked to where somebody actually put their hand on the back of the chapter president and that

created all sorts of problems oh man yeah it's really uh interesting symbolism and like you see the same kind of reverence for the colors as you do for like uh like the flag in north korea for example it really it has cult languaging And everything so you're building trust you're staying at these guys homes you're drinking you're hanging out with them another possibly foolish question but why bother to go undercover and bust these guys right if are they mostly killing each other if not you know why take the risk no i mean if so i

should say if so why take the risk not if not right no it's it's a great question Because there there is people out there believe like hey bikers just kill bikers um and it could be further from the truth you know if you um you know and people have asked me i'm like how would you feel if a clubhouse opened up in your neighborhood um it's going to change your neighborhood dynamics dramatically like to the point where you're not even going to be able to live there um they do extort they sell drug like they

affect just like any other Gang they affect the area that they're in and they recruit from the areas that they're in and they don't just like i was you know when i was in the club they would extort protection money from whether it would be bars or different establishments depending on what chapter and where you were um and so they their criminal organization just like anything else and and the reason why to go undercover is the only you can From the outside to you know maybe some prospects or some hang arounds you'd be able to

deal with you know maybe some low-level members um and maybe you can build a case on them you're never getting anywhere near the leadership of the game because they're just they're insulated the only way to do that is to go undercover in the club and go up into the ranks and for me out of the two years it probably took the first year and a half just to Get to the level where i was dealing with all the club members and in the legs wow wow the way you describe these guys they're all absolutely enormous

it's always like this guy was six foot five 345 pounds is that normal or are these just the absolute monsters that you came across that were noteworthy like is there anybody where you're like yeah he was five nine on a good day depending on how thick the soles of issues were Former lawyer now he's got a podcast probably get his ass beat with two punches in a bar fight or or is that not exactly the phenotype of what outlaw biker gangs are looking for i'll be honest there was some little cats in there too okay

and some scrappy ones but the chapter i was in has some very large humans and i'm not talking like weight lifters fit marathon runners or anything like that these are some big humans had a lot Of weight but also you know for some of them were very tall um and so yeah they were when when we walked into the bars and and into businesses in some cases like into restaurants um the presents i mean anybody wearing the colors is going to get you know some sort of recognition but these are some large humans and and

so people would stop and gasp and be very focused on and in quite honestly you feared them you Know and you could see that when you walk into these areas or there would be this sick attraction like i could never say like we would be in bars and you'd have guys who'd be coming up and like buying your beers and doing all this stuff like you were you know a sports star or rock star and then you'd have women and some beautiful women who'd be hitting on some of these guys and some of these are

the ugliest humans i've ever seen in my life And they would regularly have you know some beautiful women who were very interested to be with them and and i could never i could never figure out why yeah it's uh that whole bad boy thing turned up to 11. uh it seems like a little bit it's a little bit too dangerous i think it's it's not uh i assume these women don't know what they're getting into a lot of the time with it you kind of figure they have at least some idea i Mean it's not

like you're hiding it they're wearing colors they're impacts um you know they um you know it's probably not a safe bet you know um hanging out with the this group of folks but there was definitely that attraction and uh and i'm not saying everyone buying especially imagination but they were taught like i'd be like you've got to be kidding me how could she be interested in him um and and some of it i think was just Like you said the bad boy image yeah oh man yeah that's yeah it's it's bizarre but also i guess

look power if people are afraid of somebody and this person has that pattern in their past i mean that's a whole that's a whole psychological episode of this podcast i suppose uh the pressure just seems enormous you're no stranger to to action and pressure tell me about that shootout you got Involved in earlier in your career that was kind of like it seems like you got a taste right from the jump yeah it was you know it was um supposed to be kind of a routine activity and i was in between academies and so at

the time i mean they still have two different academies you have a basic academy and then like the advanced specialized like geared towards your specific agency um and so at the time you would go to the first one which Would be about 12 to 16 weeks and then you'd have a gap of maybe two three weeks and then you go back down for another 12 16 weeks so in that gap uh when i was back in la we were going and we were executing an arrest warrant uh so it was gonna be kind of like

a buy bust uh for a couple kilos of coke and then um we were doing a search warrant on the apartment that was above where the buy Bus was gonna take place and so the buy bus was going to be in a parking garage la style you know it's underneath and you can see into them but they're gated and what have you so um we uh so i was on the team going in to secure the apartment and do the search warrant but as we approached it was um right out of the get go the

shots were fired and um and so we had an agent go down uh who shot the foot And um and one of the one of the bad guys was standing so the garage ends up closing so those were inside were inside and those were outside outside you were not going to get through the other way so you're trapped in a parking structure that's locked with guys shooting at you and and you shooting at them yeah yeah yeah so they had yeah and they had you know tech nines they they had some pretty good weaponry but

um one of them Was standing behind a pillar and this round's fine everywhere there's hundreds of rounds that were fired and um he never gets hit which is amazing the other one had multiple it was like i forget the the exact comp but it was like 32 entry and 26 exit wounds like he had been shot but the way he was shot and he was strong on a coke uh he lived um you know he lived unbelievable um he was crossed behind Our car the only thing that stopped it was his magazine uh he had

an extended clip and uh the magazine got shot and all the rounds fell out um and so that's really what ended that and an agent had come in uh an agent that was in there had a shotgun with a slug and it basically blew his arm off and that shut it down but it was and then we still had to go up and and clear the apartment because we thought there was two more individuals up there So we go to do that and then it gets locked down and it happened to be only about three

blocks from how i lived but it got locked down and we were there all night got a bunch of coverage and so then it's like you're trying to notify family members and so anyways long story short they were like hey it's too stressful we're not gonna send you back to the academy so i ended up being on the job for almost two years before i fully got through the Academy um but one of the things they had done is because um you know they um had some undercover opportunities and so they they gave me a

memo that said hey before you even go to the second account we're gonna let you do some undercover work and so i started doing out of work before he had finished doing the academy and but back in those days la la was different uh in the sense that you know There were a whole lot of brand new agents there were not a lot of senior agents they were all trying to get out it was too expensive too dangerous and so as a new agent you got to do a lot of things that you weren't able

to do in other areas in the country just because physically there was nobody else to do it so you give it a lot of latitude so it really helped you learn the job faster than you know Somebody who might have been in say boston yeah although being short staffed and underexperienced is probably not a good like it's not exactly the best way to further your career i suppose they're the safest way yeah plenty of ways that you could make mistakes or or worse so yeah but yeah but no i i really valued my time in

la i learned a lot by being out there your parents must have been thrilled right you go to school you get an accounting Degree and then you come out and you're getting shot at by drug dealers right like on the you know first first year in or first few months in it's like what'd you do today oh man this guy got shot 27 times 32 times they i'll tell you they were um you know again as you just said i went to school for accounting my dad was a cpa member i was a cpa so

they were like oh he'll be a cpa and uh i was like it's just not in my dna um to Do you know that sit behind a desk for 25 years or whatever it is and i applaud those who do but just wasn't for me and my mom had you know a couple big things she hated hated motorcycles hated tattoos hated guns and so i was you know pretty much like the giant disappointment um you know because i i had done done them all but and really they were just concerned about my safety i think

they they knew how much i liked the job and and uh how Much i put into doing the job and they just wanted to stay in one piece sure yeah no understandable they it's hard to you're doing all this exciting stuff it's hard for them to be like have you tried spreadsheets those are fun too well they weren't they weren't digging when i was particularly in this case because i i just looked like a dirt bag yeah and so you're going to family events and even for my kids and stuff it it it's hard to

explain you know your bag the son you know what why does he look the way he he does but um yeah they they got through it yeah this is my son the deadbeat oh no he's gonna make something of himself like oh man they must be so disappointed in him yeah oh man it sounds a little bit like my career except to replace accounting degree with law degree and replace taking down international drug rings with doing a podcast in your underwear [Laughter] So a lot of these guys they seem mentally ill the bikers right one

of the least disgusting examples aside from the violence is the guy who found like freshly born kittens and licked the blood off of them and he did so many worst things in the book but i'm afraid if i describe them here people will literally if they're eating right now they're gonna they're gonna at least stop eating if not worse because some of the examples Are just like i can't get them out of my head they're so disgusting and that's not even the crimes this is just the weird personal habits to some of these dirt bags

and yeah and and you know it's funny one one of the folks that i knew who read the book you know their advice was don't read it while you're eating for for that reason and within your stories tied back to hogman there's worse than that um that i didn't I chose not to put in there um and so he you know was a fight he had a blood fetish he was a vile human being um and in it like even when you have in in to your point you know we don't have to cover them

all here but when you have a chapter president react in a very negative way and throw him out of the hospital that we were in when he had done something it's like You've crossed a lot you've really gone above and beyond if you can get a pagan to actually feel that that was disgusting um so yeah he was he was at a different level but you know these guys um you know people always ask about like oh what was the makeup and in the makeup was really just like society just like any group of people

you know you'd have some folks that were narcissistic some folks that were you know just looking For a belonging you know people just straight out criminals um you know people are just like hey i like this guy i like to intimidate i like to bully people you know um and maybe by themselves they couldn't do it but in a pack they could um so there was a there was no really hidden formula people like oh there's a lot of military joint biker gangs that's not what i saw i mean there were some military members but

no not huge amount i mean there's There's a lot of different bike organizations out there and going back to we're talking about the one percent the vast majority of them are just in bike clubs um and enlisted law enforcement has bike clubs you know much to my cigarette when i do presentations you know i ask anybody in here part of law enforcement any part of a um you know a club and if you have a structure in there like a sergeant arms and a president of Those things and i'm like you know what you're in

the wrong profession because why do you need a sergeant arms what does the sergeant arms do you know and so some some of the but there's there's like really no rhyme or reason of who who belongs to it and who's successful at it hey if you like what you're hearing and seeing check out the jordan harbinger show podcast feed there's a lot more Just like this you can find the jordan harbinger show in apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcasts now back to the show you've got to really work to create this sort

of undercover life in character right because i assume you need to have like a fake high school diploma or bills laying around or fake junk mail that's addressed to your fake name right that's there's got to be an office that helps with that i assume at atf right yeah and This and it's one of those things that you do over the course of your career you have one or maybe more undercover identities that you're building over time and and yet you do like they do an extensive background i had to fill out a bunch of

forms a very long background they were supposed to polygraph which they ultimately ended up not doing uh but but they have and other clubs do so you have to have all these things Lined up and then like you know so my criminal history you know so i was a convicted felon um in my undercover world and um you know my felony was for kicking the out of a cop which was not a good choice that i later learned to uh or lived to regret but also not get arrested and and now all that comes into

play so you have all these different levels of Backstopping if you will and you never know if it's going to come into play and but you better have it squared away because when something happens in that so like when i got arrested they're going to pull those prior convictions and they there better be prior convictions there better be police reports when they order them and all those kind of things or that's the end of it because the attorney that was representing me was a pagan attorney Given to me by the pagans so you don't think

they're going to make a quick call to hey by the way this guy you know i know you told you he's a convicted felon there's no felony conviction he never was convicted that name doesn't even exist so um there is a lot that goes into it and a lot that you know um i don't spend a lot of time talking about because i don't want to give up something but just Simple things like it's just more common sense but like you get all this junk mail at your house well you get it because you belong

to all sorts of different things you do different things but when you don't do anything because you don't exist you don't get junk mail so like how do you get junk mail so you actually have to put in an effort to go out and get yourself on these mailing lists that you wish you could get your real life off of but you have to do that So you can have this stuff because when they come to your house in your apartment you better have that stuff there it can't be this sterile environment yeah you'd be

like like a birthday card from a used car dealership that's like come in in and look for your new ride yeah that's an annoying ass trap like car warranty spam uh yeah yeah and you better have a story about like what's your family who who Are your family where are they because they did you know background checks and they went and did surveillance on where i said i work they did a lot of their homework on me and so if you say hey your dad lives at 123 main street they're going to go by to

see if your dad's there now they may not knock on the door they may just sit there and watch see if he comes out what who knows what they're going to do but you better have your stuff squared Away what's really the cringe that i remember reading in the book this is really cringe they y'all kiss each other on the lips as a greeting like what the heck is that about that's so gross it's a uh it is a accepted biker you know they all do it and um in some you know it's it's most

will kiss on the lips some will kiss on the cheek it's It's kind of hard to explain but it is what it is but there's other there's some that like hog man the dude had a blood fetish like who wants to be kissing that guy yeah that's why it's gross i don't care about the dudes kissing each other on the lips that's the least gross part the part that's gross is these guys probably have hepatitis for the last 20 years from sharing a lot of stuff and a lot of them did and openly would tell

you i have Hepatitis they'd be like hey by the way you want to try my pasta it's like no i'm pretty for sure i'm all set man thanks yeah um but there's and that's why you know um you know i had a a wonderful personal doctor who you know every opportunity was testing me for everything out of the sun because you just never knew um you know what you were being exposed to yeah i have to clarify that i don't want people to think that it's a homophobic thing That's far from it it's mostly that

these guys are i mean the guy you talked about before he looked the blood off the kittens when you read the book you'll understand why you wouldn't want to kiss a guy like that on the lips besides the kitten thing there's a that was like that the g-rated version compared to the stuff that that was in the book and you said there was stuff that didn't even make it and yeah he's not the only gross one in The pack that's for damn sure um they would joke amongst themselves you know there was one guy named

um whiz dude had lizard breath and it was like nobody wanted to you know every time he's coming they're like oh god here comes whiz like so they would joke amongst themselves about who you still thought of the culture you had to do it but nobody enjoyed it you know yeah How do undercovers get permission to do illegal things i had a guy on the show named joe barone he was a mafia gangster turned fbi informant and i he so he showed me a lot of his court documents and the fbi clearing him for doing

illegal activity but it was pretty vague you know it was like maybe involved in money laundering and other racketeering gambling activities and i was like man that's a wide berth you know of the illegal stuff but there's no way To script it right you don't know like i was saying earlier like i don't know how my day was going to turn on any day and you don't know what criminal activity now there was never going to be a day that i was going to go out and be part of a murder or anything like that

you're not authorized to do it nor would i do it even if i was but you know when it came to narcotics trafficking or weapons trafficking and um then yeah those things could happen And did happen and that you uh had to have the authorization so it's you know your agency along with the us attorney's office and they basically sign a memorandum saying that you're authorized to participate in these you know tier one tier two activities blah blah blah and it's all part of it's all part of when you're starting the case up and you

get those things in order uh ahead of time You did all this when you had kids your wife must have just loved that i mean that's ugh that's so stressful already but when you have kids and you're married it's just 10x yeah like i could tell you people are always like oh i can't believe you your marriage is survived i'm like listen the first thing i'll tell you if you're ever looking for like how to strengthen your Marriage going undercover for two years is not going to be on that list of things to do um

but you know my wife was an agent and so that's great she understood what it was but it was also horrible because she understood what it was and so you know she was you know right you can't lie to her and be like no no no i'm safe the whole time they're right next to me i'm wearing a wire she's like that's and i know it she could Go in and pull up the report she had access to the system she could see every single thing so yeah there's there's absolutely no bs in her as

to uh as to what it was but yeah and then she had the burden you know our girls were teenagers at the time and um you know that's just a tough age to start with and so she's she's dealing with that she had her own job and then she's got you know she's getting phone calls in the middle of the night that You know um you know ken got arrested or whatever was happening in that time um because the case agent would try to keep her as uh up-to-date as he could on to what my

activities were so um yeah not a uh it was a very tough time really for the whole family and a lot of a lot of stuff with the kids was kept for me at the time because my wife wanted me to focus on what i was doing and you learn a lot about it after or later um and and even to this day like They don't they now know they have a really good view of the case but they didn't know a lot of what had happened and then you know they read the book and

they're a big part of why i wrote the book i had no intention of writing a book my wife and my daughters were like you need to memorialize this because you'll be gone someday and and the story needs to be told and so that's what you know made me do it yeah i loved it i plowed through the book in Two days i mean i'm a fast reader but two days is that's fast for a book this size that's good i mean it had i wanted it to be an easy read i wanted to be

you know ability for somebody to come in and take a look inside my world during that time to just get really kind of get a feel for it yeah absolutely okay so your wife was an undercover as well what was she what type of work was she doing so it goes back to your original question about hey do you have to do Undercover and so my wife is hispanic female and so she was kind of like hey we need you to do this and so she was working in new york and so um she they

would ask her to go in and buy drugs more drugs sometimes guns um in the projects in new york and um you know which is not and you know first of all there's no cover team some of those projects go up 30 40 floors uh there's no cover team ever going to get to you Um and being a female that brings up a whole lot of other concerns and risks so um she was very good at it um but she didn't like it and when we were early dating and i was in california and i

had the better end of the deal only because she'd be doing on it we'd both be doing undercover at the same time or in the same day and so for her she'd be you know doing a drug buy at 11 o'clock at night well That's eight o'clock for me and we would we would notify each other when we were safe but for me i if i'm doing it at midnight it's three o'clock in the morning for her so she lost a lot of sleep over those that time because um you know she wouldn't you know

here for me and i was involved in the shooting and one of the undercover deals that i had done and she didn't hear from me for like a day um so there was a lot of stress that Went with that but she uh she was really good at it but when she when you got married and she came out to la she's like you know i really just don't like this i don't like doing it i'm like then don't do it and i said here's a clean break you come in a new division just so

that the asic at the time was a really good guy um he said oh i can't wait to get you going undercover i heard all this stuff that's the special agent in charge right so he's like the boss So the assistant special agent yeah so he's like there's two of those below the special agent oh you said asac okay yeah yeah asa so he um and he was like hey can't wait to get you involved and undercover workout here you'd be a great fit and so she told him she's like yeah i'm not doing undercover

work anymore um and he was like what what are you talking about and i i was like hey this is a perfect opportunity so she focused her Career more on arts and explosives arsenal explosives wow yeah that was her thing and more of a whodunit like something blows up and you figure out who did it where mine was more like okay here's the people who are doing it build the box around them type of thing did you work on that case where it turned out to be a firefighter the whole time burning buildings down for

like 20 years actually that was me that was you oh okay Yeah my degree is in accounting so when i first started on the job they put me in arson group because a lot of arson work is based on uh money insurance fraud right yeah exactly and so um yeah so i i was a brand new agent kind of um myself and glenn lucero uh la fire department arson investigator um started that case and we initiated that case and worked it through i was going back forth the academy so others were involved as well but

yeah that guy was one sick Individual yeah you you think of arsonists as weird solo crazies because you gotta love burning something down that might hurt a lot of people does a lot it does damage to people's stuff ruins people's lives like there's no it's there's almost no kind of real obvious upside for it if you own the building man yeah you do some insurance fraud you get it but if you're just burning down someone else's building it's just there's it's pure crazy There's there's a um for most of them it ties back to like

a sexual um deal it's it's a lot yeah there's a lot of studies to it but this particular individual he was one of the most probably the most prominent in california arson investigators and because he wasn't just a firefighter he was an arson investigator and i worked scenes with him um and he's probably one of the top five in the country and um and so he was He was starting these fires and of course we'd go out work scenes and work grids to look for devices and he was always the guy who found it so

in retrospect you're like oh i wonder why now i know look it was under this chair the whole time how did you find that well definitely yeah if you put it there right but i mean he was responsible for the deaths of uh more than one individual you know through these fires and some you know horrible yeah Grandparent uh a grandmother and her um granddaughter both were killed so yeah he's he's right where he needs to be yeah it's horrible how do you manage the undercover work you were doing with kids because on the one

hand you almost get blown up with a huge explosion when this this bomb maker in the book right but how do you tell your kids uh hey i'm not going to be around for a while but also i can't tell you what i'm Doing especially when they're teenagers like they kind of they kind of know and but then you gotta have rules right for explaining this sort of thing you can't be kind of hot and cold with it or it won't work we always tried our best to keep a low profile with our neighbors about

what we did not to say that some didn't know i mean you're walking out your house at four o'clock in the morning because you're gonna do warrants people are Gonna figure things out but we we kept a very low profile when it came to that and we also had raised our kids like don't talk about what mom and dad do um and and if any conversations you hear you know keep it here uh because they're sensitive and they were pretty good about it but this was a little bit different um this was like hey dad's

gone when he comes home you know like my wife would be the first one to tell you when you came home You weren't really home you know and in in retrospect thinking back how could i possibly have been home because sometimes it was more stressful being away from the gang because you didn't know what was happening and then you had to re-engage with them it was easier when you were just with them day in and day out and you could see how things would develop um and then they would hear unbeknownst to my wife and

i they would Hear conversations that we would have as kids do you know you think they're asleep or they're in you know whatever and um and that came out when i i was able to to get home and i went to one of my daughters my youngest daughter's hockey games and i saw and i was supposed to be the head coach of the team but you know that was before i'd agreed to do this case and so um i was over by the bench and one of the girls has said um hey you Know coach

ken we have we haven't seen you in a while i'm like yeah i'm sorry i've been working and she's like oh yeah we heard you were at a party with roblox holy like this this is a big deal like you don't know if that name gets out and gets you know somebody post something or whatever it is that your whole identity is gone um and so like simple things like that and and um so you know we talked to kids and my wife and i were Also like hey we gotta we we gotta go to

the garage when we talk we just cannot talk about this in here because they're hearing us thanks you must have had to have a like a parent like a baseball or what a soccer meeting like hey you can't tell your kids about this i know you know some stuff and you hear some like this will get me killed or worse right like did you have to manage that Somehow well the the the folks that like i'm sure they speculated um the parents of players or whatever but we never i never told them anything you know

now they could see i look like a bag and when i was at games you could see parents from like the other team looking at like who's the bag you know over there watching the game but you know it's and it used to infuriate my wife because my wife would Be like i just want to scream out he's a federal agent because he's super broken yeah yeah and she's like we go in the supermarket and and people look at you like you're a dirt bag and and at one point i was in a bank actually

i wasn't even in the bank i was in the bank and came out and i took a phone call standing out front i got jacked up and threw on the back of a cruiser just because In i let you learn there was a guy who did an armed robbery and he was like five foot one i'm like six three like he didn't look anything like me but i still ended up getting jacked up and thrown in the in the cruiser so um you know stuff happens and you know you you know you just kind of

reflect back you're like why am i doing this again yeah no that would uh you would second-guess it i mean the undercover Life has to spill into your home life a little bit even in addition to that like i would imagine you you can't be with a bunch of guys talking about violence drugs misogynist stuff and and disgusting activity and then come home and and be a model citizen at home i assume the language at least the foul language is at the least of that has to spill over into your home life and then you're

just like wait a minute wait a Minute i can't oh my god no my wife would say to me she's like hey you we can't lose you to the dark side like you're like so we were talking one night and i was describing somebody and um and i'll just say the name you know john she's like well who's john cause she didn't you know like anything if i'm telling you the story you're like wait a minute who's who and so i'm like you know the dude who puts peanut butter on his balls and his dog

licks him off And she's like she's like do you realize what you just said she goes you say that like you're describing something with blonde hair like you that was your description you didn't bat an eye like you didn't even think that was weird she's like you cannot turn into one of them and i'm like i'm not she said that's the the thing that pops in my head what i think of this idiot uh so she that concerned her and she she Always like was there to try to level set and be like hey remember

keep a foot in reality right um and and yeah obviously i did and it all worked out but yeah you know to your point it does it does give you a different view for sure when you say get lost to the dark side does that just mean it degrades the way you talk and act as a person or are there agents that are like you know what this criminal life I'm making a lot of money screw this police thing this is great i mean does that ever happen i don't ever think it's for the money

um but i i think maybe the lifestyle so um there's we've lost people to the dark side and um not law enforcement is that what that's so much no but they they will make um they change and their personality changes ultimately they're not able to Survive on the job anymore um because of choices that they make afterwards and so um atf made a real concerted effort to really monitor that so like when i was in i had to every six months go see a shrink to and so they level that before you go in and

then every six months you get evaluated now it's problematic because you gotta come up with an excuse to disappear um and so i but i you go and And they would evaluate you and you know i assume if they saw something wrong they'd be like hey you gotta pull them out um now i always joked i'm like okay if i can fool 2 000 pagans i'm pretty sure i could fool one shrink uh but my shrink friends say no they're smarter than that and they'd be able to detect it so i don't know the real

truth i didn't go to the dark side so i don't know but they do put a lot of effort into Making sure that those who are doing this stay healthy and and stay entrenched in where they're at and you know when they come back out they give you a transition period to get back you know into a normal life again i know you said that there's cover teams nearby where possible obviously not when you're in the top of a 40-story building in the projects or whatever if you can't do that but a lot of this

biker stuff man you're out in The middle of what sounds like just like a in the middle of the desert in a campground at best or in the woods somewhere i mean you can't just have a police van with tinted windows parked on the side of the road anywhere near this thing right no no you can't and and so other than one exception in the entire two years i never wore a wire because there were times the churches where they do all their secretive meetings and where they do their you know criminal Planning and things

like that so they refer to as church when you go to church and this is because they learned over the years on criminal prosecutions that there's ways through cell phones that you can monitor cell phone batteries blah blah so there were no electronics allowed in church at all and in some cases uh most cases they were they had rf detectors so rf picking up a frequency of a transmitter they would want you to Make sure that you didn't have any transmitters on and there were times where we had to strip naked and we'd be sitting

these are some ugly people man and i'm just sitting in you know church naked um you know having our meetings so that they knew nobody could have had a wire on so wow um and and so even if a cover team was around the corner they're not gonna know anything happens until way in maybe they see your body getting dragged out yeah exactly Um and so it it um but in most cases they were way too far away anyways i mean there's times miles miles away so they always joked it was the body recovery team

not really a cover team um but there's these cover teams if they get too aggressive and they're too close they can actually burn um burn you much more than you can burn yourself um and so you have to have trust in Those folks that are out there and they know and i'd much rather i'd rather work my way out of something than have somebody come gangbusting to you thinking they're helping me when they're not did your cover team ever get you in trouble or come close to it there was only in it's pretty amazing for

a two-year investigation um and i will caveat this so when you were at certain events like if i went to a Mandatory which humanitarians is a prosperous worst experience we could talk about that but there was a law enforcement there all everyone was there and they knew law enforcement was there and so they'd be flipping them off pose them for photograph because they knew the cops were all watching it because it was known that these events were happening so like anybody could be there there's no problem um but there was a uh night When i

was buying um a couple ounces of crack cocaine off a hog man in his as one does yeah yeah you know just a regular friday night um and his source came and delivered the crack cocaine and uh so paid him did you know our thing we were done um and a a not so bright uh supervisor was in a crown vic and got way too close the classic police car that every kid recognizes from age 15 through the rest Of your life yeah exactly like if you're in that just go to like the local coffee

shop and have a coffee because you're not going to help anyways but anyways this this clown got way too close uh and this this guy calls back to it was hog man where i was buying the crack from he calls back and he goes hey um cops are all over me you know something's up your place heated this up you know what's going on over there blah blah blah and so hog man's saying this to me and i'm Like hey this guy he's clearly got the cops on him he brought him to him tell him

he better not bring his ass back anywhere near here just tell him to keep fricking driving they jack him up better keep his mouth shut and so just put it back on him um and we had several transactions we didn't need to deal with him again uh but when i met the the cover team um later you know i met him at like three in the morning to give him the crack cocaine uh i let in You know like hey who was that who was in that car they should never be out here again um

and unfortunately it was the supervisor so they kind of they kind of had to be out there so yeah yeah yeah that's oh man it's it sucks because it's it's the classic boss maybe doesn't really know the what the guy in the ground is dealing with except for in instead of like oh you messed up a week of work it's like oh you got three people killed Or you got me murdered in front of my colleagues and ruined or just ruined the whole case where i was undercover for years with these guys right yeah no

that's exactly it the amount of time blood sweat and tears that go into this and listen there's things that happen over that's why people are always like oh you know what whatever made you decide to do a two-year undercover well you don't go into it known as two years it could be Two minutes you know i listen i didn't sign up for a two-year undercover deal that's just what it turned into and um most of the or a lot of these as they're progressing along get stopped for different reasons one something's going to happen where

you have to come out a roll and stop it number two your cover does get blown it happens regularly like there's so many things that can happen That would stop it the fact that very few of these run for two years um and so you know you're always kind of just seeing how it's going to play out and and that's where you know some of this um dumb luck comes into it and people always think i'm making light of it but it is a fact yeah i've heard i've had other undercovers on before jack garcia

who infiltrated the mob he was with the fbi and he basically just abruptly had to stop because one of the guys he was With just saw somebody he hated at the mall and picked up like a glass centerpiece and hit him in the head with it and he's like well if he hits him again that guy's gonna die and i'm standing right here and we're at a shopping mall and so he was like what are you doing and he like basically i think i can't remember the exact details but i want to say he stopped

the guy or he arrested the guy right there and was like You got to pull the rip cord because this idiot is an impulsive dumb ass and i'm i can't let this guy get beat to that another criminal actually and you know it's unfortunate like you can't let this guy get beat to death in front of me because laws yeah and uh yeah no there it was there was a couple times there was one night that uh i was the sergeant arms and i and there was another sergeant-at-arms and two presidents and We were heading

over to see a president of a support club and uh it got heated uh we were going back in they were the two presidents were like we're going to kill um we're going to stab him and we're up on the rooftop of a motel and they wanted to toss them between these two buildings there's like a three-foot gap and they're like we're Going to stop and throw them between these two buildings and so it's like 700 of their gang members in this hotel and i'm like there's no way that i can let this happen for

sure and i've got a gun with six rounds in it so that's not you know gonna do me a whole lot of good right and so i'm looking around and on the rooftop and i see some blue flashing lights way off in the distance and i'm like how do i get Their attention anyways long story short was um i was able to use their own rules back on them you know to kill a president of another club you've got to have mother club to bless off on that and i'm like hey we got to go

back and get mother we were at a mandatory so i was like we got to go back get mother club to bless off on this and one of the one of the presidents like up we're doing it anyways The other president was like yeah he's right let's go we'll go and about time we went got there everyone kind of cooled off talking about the club and they're like no there's other ways we could handle it so bottom line we were able to avoid it but like at that point i there's no choice i was gonna

have to come out a roll oh man i mean good thing you were such a good student and you memorized all these little bylaws that They have right you had you could have been a lawyer yeah uh sorry subsection four says we have to get sign off on this ah you're right he's right yeah yeah use their own stuff back against him i know eventually they put a female agent in as your girlfriend which seems like a good idea because then at least you're not alone right so uh maybe if they got a female agent

coming in as Your girlfriend she's just like another set of eyes what what other benefit is there aside from that so so this you know in a lot of these cases they they would do that it would cycle somebody in and out as a girlfriend um in this particular case there's a couple things one is you've got a lot of these women who like not not the undercover but a lot of other women involved in the case um like old ladies are hanging around so what Have you and they're gonna be hitting on you all

the time and so like at some point you know if you don't have a girlfriend or uh a wife or something out there like you're only gonna be able to say no so many times before it's gonna start looking weird it kind of goes back to like the you know here's the new guy in oh he he's not interested in women he's not doing drugs he's not doing um you know Alcohol and allison so it just doesn't look right um and so when you could have a female as part of that that would take that

burden away the problem is on a female in news and i talk about in the book is you know you could go alone you can go and have a female who's you know there but they can't be there for a lot of stuff but especially when you're prospecting they don't want girlfriends wives or anything around Um and even when you're a member certain events they can't go to um so that limits their uh involvement but they are less scrutinized like they're nobody's searching them nobody's really paying attention what they're doing um they there's also like

an underground chatter between old ladies and and you may get some intel because even though you're not supposed to talk to your ladies about anything these guys do um So you can get some intel the other option is to take another male you know agent and that's that's happened many times where you've had two three four people in a chapter certainly you know and somebody's might have done it that way and they're like hey the upside is you at least have a normal person to talk yeah when you're in there but the other side of

it is like there's so many ways your story can get crossed up when you bring other People in because they start asking questions like hey you've known him you know what what did ken think about this what it can do last and they start checking up on your story it's the quickest and easiest way for them to to get you crossed up um so for me it was always like hey i'd rather just do this on my own and if i screw up i screw up it's on me and it's not going to affect nobody

but me Yeah i think also man the guys are so violent many of them are rapists and murderers like you could have i don't know i guess old ladies are probably off limits but maybe they don't care or maybe they're too high on methamphetamine and they just go after her and you're like great now she's with the guy who eats dead things with the blood fetish alone in a room somewhere and she doesn't have a phone and now like Or they or they take it out on her if they don't like you i don't know

does that happen well yeah and well that absolutely could happen but when you're so when you're a full patch they they have they also give you a property patch and so if if you're a member you have a property patch so if you say property islam and that would go to my girlfriend wife or whatever it is They're protected if you will now it's not i wouldn't take it to the bank but it's better off than not but the bulk good part of this investigation you're not a patch member so there is no property patch

there is no protection and there's one meeting uh where some old ladies have been doing some stuff and and one of the mother club members get really pissed and they're like hey um i'm i'm sick and tired of these old Ladies and their friends causing all these problems remember this rape and beat them kill we don't care but they are not going to be talking so they're like laying this out and so it puts you at risk and in in the book i talk about one opportunity it was i never wasn't even opportunity it was

something that happened that was and it was 100 my fault um where i had um you know my uh undercover girlfriend There and i was not a pastor i had been kicked out of the club and and i got kicked out for nothing that i did that the national vice president who vouched for me had tried a coup and tried to become the national president the night before and um or actually this goes back about a month or two before and he gets beaten out of the club severely and then everybody who had um that

he had sponsored got kicked out of The club as well so i was out nothing to do with me um and quite honestly i was done i just want to go home and go back to my normal life um but some folks convinced me to just kind of hang around see what would happen it was long story short they um you know um i ended up down at this mandatory as a civilian not anything with the club and um we were over we weren't allowed to go in the compound of where all the Pagans were

because i wasn't a pagan but some of the presidents had a motel nearby and so we were over there and people were hanging out and um i left her there and with some old ladies in in the room and i i was up front and peter had walked up to me and with the sergeant arms he said hey i want to talk to you he's like let's take a walk which wasn't abnormal And so we start walking and before long i realized like where are we going in like you know i felt like hey these

guys are leading me away and um so i got this pit in my stomach and i'm like oh man i i and we've walked like a fair distance um and so i was like hey i just give me a quick call and so i called um the female undercover and she didn't answer her phone and as it turns out she Had the phonon vibrate which is normal that's what we always did but it was sitting on a bed so it didn't vibrate and so i mean it did vibrate but she so um so i'm sitting

there i call multiple times and i'm like i cannot believe i let these guys lure me away and um so i very awkwardly was like hey i gotta go back i gotta take care of something and they're like wait wait we're not done hold on and i'm like no i got to go and There was no stopping me i was going because again this is one of those things you you if you have to you come on a roll like you i didn't know i didn't know what the hell was happening to her back there

so i'm trying not to run but i'm walking as fast as i can and i get back in the in the doors it was open when i left and it was not all the way closer to the jar but not by much and so i went and pushed the door open Expecting to see the worst there was nothing there was a bunch of you know old ladies hanging in there and talking and she was one of them and you know it's like you lose your kid in the mall and then you find them and like

the first thing you do is yell at them uh mostly because you're just scared you're just happy that they're there but it's not how it comes across right and so i did i'm like what the hell are you answering your phone you know blah blah And it was totally on me i never should have walked out of that room i never should have left that area but just kind of you know mistake that i made and luckily you know nobody you know got hurt because of it although it's in character for you to be kind

of an to your girlfriend as a outlaw biker guy right and yeah in front of her friends totally and it was it was totally not Even acting because i was but again it was mostly i was yelling at myself because i never you know i knew better i should never let it happen how do you weigh keeping your cover versus someone else's well-being right the the the grossest guy in the book later on or one of the girls it's hard to even keep them straight they're all disgusting right but he tells you oh there's this

girl hanging out at the tattoo shop who's like a young student right and it's a Biker own tattoo shop and he's like i'm going to brutally rape and murder this woman because i want to and you're like that could have torn you out of your your role right because you have to make sure that this innocent girl doesn't get doesn't have this happen to her a hundred percent and it would have you know again it comes back to just kind of thinking real quickly like okay what can i do and this this one was kind

of slow Developing over a period of probably i don't know a couple weeks because it started with a very attractive art major um comes by the chapter president's tattoo shop and uh she really gifted artists but she didn't know how to tattoo and there's a big difference between drawing it and then actually putting on some skin So she was there kind of as an apprentice and um so he he worked with it legitimately but there was a couple of pagans who were there and you know like they're like trying to flirt with and it was

comical for me at the beginning because i'm sitting back and there was like a big sofa in the uh in the tattoo shop and i'm looking at i'm like you idiots like go look in a mirror and then go look at this girl like you really think you have a Snowball's chance in hell of of getting with her um but then it it went from being funny to like oh wait a minute because hogman started talking and he you know started getting more aggressive in what he was saying not towards her but the way he

was looking at her i'm like man this dude's like he's heading down a path and then eventually he was like hey uh i'm gonna rape this girl and i'm gonna you know he was talking about What he was gonna do to her and and so i was like well obviously i'm not going to be able to and you like some people may talk to that stuff you know but this like with this guy i would never put it past him and so i wasn't going to wait around to find out and so i had approached

her there's one of a couple things i could do is come out a row and take the whole thing down or i could try to get her to go away um So i approached her i basically said hey listen i could get i could get myself in a world of trouble by even telling you this i said but you need to leave you're not safe here uh hogman's very focused on you and this is not going to end well for you you need to leave um and i didn't mean need to leave like in the

next three minutes but like when you leave tonight don't come back like there's like this is not because it was easy enough to just to be around her to Make sure nothing was going to happen and to her credit she did leave never saw her again and yeah and she was she was gone i'm sure she went to another tattoo parlor and got her training she probably i mean these guys are obvious creeps right it's not like this guy was undercover chewing on blood clots and all the stuff that he was doing so he she

probably already had a bad vibe from him and then you coming in being like Yeah this this guy isn't just a gross guy that we can sort of like wave off and she's like yeah i was already on the fence i'll yeah see whatever and you can see how people are looking at you yeah and it's like looking at you like hopeful and is looking at you like you're a piece of meat and that's what it turned into for him there's a war between the pagans and the hell's angels among other gangs right and they're

dealing guns these illegal Guns as felons the whole time you're making a huge list of crimes right what are what's the most intense or severe felony you had a front row seat for was it some of these bomb making uh bomb threats and things like that well the murder conspiracy was probably uh the biggest where they were talking about how they were going to kill certain people in in large part with hell's angels and they had very specific Ways they were going about it and there's some recordings that really laid out their intent and how

they were going to do it and some of it was with bombs they had the bombs we ultimately ended up getting some of them um you know before the case was over but um but there was uh there was gun trafficking drug trafficking vicar you know beatings like there was there's a whole string of um events that You know eventually became a ricoh case and and prosecutors organized crime case yeah right exactly and so um but you know to your point like it there'd be some days that not a lot was going on other days

it'd be like five different things going on and and then as you get later in the case it's like okay you have to share up these charges by getting this conversation so like if you had a bodyguard statute where Somebody's carrying a gun in defense of a felon who can't carry a gun that's a federal offense but you have to show that they knew that person was a felon so then you basically have to have a conversation with them somehow getting them to say or acknowledge that they knew this person was a felon um so

like some of those things to kind of tie up the the loose ends of the case the closer you get to the end and then you have to freshen up The pc for the warrants because you could be in a house and like you see a probable cause right right right i appreciate you translating it no problem man somebody's got it they but you would be um you know like i'd be in trucker's house uh who's one of you know the brothers roadblock um uh hog man and trucker and i saw our gun there but

you know i'd seen it months before so now i got to figure out a way to go back to trucker's house to see if That gun's still in trucker's house you know as the case is getting closer to coming down um and so like a lot of that kind of activity as you're moving along and kind of putting those because that's the whole reason you're there is you know to to build the case and listen there was plenty of people actually there were some who could have been charged who weren't charged um but the one

there's some there that Didn't do anything illegal so it's like okay that's fine too you know you you're not going in with uh oh i'm gonna get this these 20 guys in this chapter now i'm gonna go in and get whoever's doing what they're doing and and you know documented make sure i put together a solid case so for people who are maybe not american or their law background is not not up to snuff probable cause is what police have when they say hey i see something Illegal or smell something illegal in your car now

i'm going to search your car you need that to get a warrant so what you're talking about is if you saw a gun in someone's house eight months ago and it's illegal and maybe he had a bunch of drugs in his safe and some cash you can't say hey eight months ago this guy had something in there you have to find a reason to go back in the house look in there again when he's not looking make sure that stuff is still in There then you can go back to the the the prosecutor the judge

whatever and say that stuff's still in there i just saw it a couple days ago the warrant if we go and we search it you're probably gonna find it and then that makes the warrant hold up in court when they're prosecuting because otherwise you could have this old thing you could even find it and then they say well this probable cause is kind of nonsense you saw something almost a year ago on that You got a warrant you went in there yeah you found it but that that's that's called fruit of the poison tree and

it's so that police don't overstep their bounds and it it can really screw up a case cases i'm sure you've uh seen and haven't probably had happen before sure yeah and that's really what so not a single one of these individuals went to trial uh because the evidence was overwhelming but they all Can't say they all the majority of them file motions much to like what you're just describing um in hopes of being able to suppress some of the evidence and uh in the end you know they weren't successful and they all pled guilty so

you know i was amazed at how cheap it is to have some of these crimes done it really is dirty deeds done dirt cheap for some of these guys there was one Example in the book where i think you said you wanted to blow up someone's boat because they poured sugar in your gas tank it's just kind of a nonsense story and this guy's like yeah no problem i've got a grenade or a homemade bomb or something and he's like yeah i'll blow up this guy's boat with you with an explosive which is like you

know decades-long felony to have an explosive use it to blow something up and he wanted like 300 bucks to do it right so Yeah so the the whole story though is um he wasn't really charging to blow up the boat what it was is we knew they had what they referred to as christmas presents we knew they were bombs i had no i i hadn't seen him yet and i didn't know where they were so i came up with a story like if i if i was in new york and i just said hey listen

i want to go blow up jordan okay the problem is they're going to go Blow up jordan they're not even like i might even know about it and they're just going to go do it because they think they're doing me a favor um so i had to have an environment where i could control it so i said to him hey you know because part of my cover story was that i post lobsters it allowed me the few times that i could go and say hey i'm going out poaching they couldn't track me because i was

out on the water and that would allow me to go home or do You go see the shrimp whatever it is i had to do so part of the story was hey you know these poachers and it's true if you know you get caught poaching lobsters watch out for the lobsters coming along with a sawed-off shotgun because he's going to blast you you know they they take that stuff seriously so poaching lobsters is what you go up to somebody else's traps and you just empty them out and steal is Just catch take yeah take that

take their lobsters and so um you know the so what i was saying is i was out there approaching you know in in i got into this battle with this other guy and anyways long story short as he poured sugar into my the tanks of my boat and you know destroyed my engines uh and i wanted to blow up his boat and so when i told that to izzo he's um he's like hey i may be able to help you with that And so i'm like all right well hey that'd be great we talked about

a little bit but we didn't we didn't iron it out we didn't have any set plan to do this but i knew that he wasn't going to be able to go and use it on somebody in new york or something i couldn't control long story short again another part of my back story is that i did collections for my boss who would you know he was doing running some numbers and some things and and i would Help do collections and i'd get a piece of that action so you're like collecting money from gambler gamblers or

something like that right exactly and it's just the more of like this time criminal stuff the more legitimate it makes you be and so part of that was we set this up um where it was agents but i had set it up that i was doing these collections and that izzo was going to come with me oh so it's fake collections To like boost your it's like street theater stuff that's exactly what it is street theater and it builds my credibility and so he comes up to do this and it still has danger to it

because if he goes and does something crazy now it's an agent that i've put in that wrist so i told him i said hey the last guy who did this with me he got too handsy and i threw him out and he's never did it again you do one Thing that i tell you not to do then you're out and so he's like i'll do whatever you want me to do you know don't worry he was i was just gonna pay him a couple hundred bucks you know for for doing it so anyways he he

comes up and um until we meet at a 99 restaurant and uh when i say come up it was up to the boston area so we're in the 99 restaurant we have a beer uh we're eating something and so we're just about done and so i gotta go Take a leap so i go in the bathroom and uh he follows me and uh i'm like it's a little weird but then he's like kind of standing behind me at the area i'm like this is really weird so um you know i finished doing what i'm doing

and i turn around he's got one of those a long uh bike trench coats you know the oil slick ones and so as i turn he like like a flasher you know whips open his jacket and he's Got a bomb in the inner pocket of the jacket i'm like holy he's got this bomb inside this restaurant like that's like can't have so i'm like hey bro like let's let's get out of here man we don't want to get caught with that thing and he listen i just want him the hell away from all these people

got him i said hey go meet him by my truck so i'll pay the bills so he went out and anytime you say i'll pay the bill they're going to run out the door Anyways so i uh so i go pay the bill real quick and get out out there and i'm like hey we got work to do man we could be driving around with this thing and so that i had one of those big star from dunkin donuts cups who um gave me the bar i put it into the the cup and i left

it in my vehicle i said we'll take your vehicle and uh so we did and i faked making some phone calls we went out to these you know the The street theater and uh i said hey listen the boats out um you know he's out of scene he's like oh we'll just wait and i'm like no you don't understand man he could be out for days we could be sitting on the dock for days waiting for him to come back he's like oh and then i'm like listen i talked to my boss he'll give you

300 bucks for it and then i'll just take care of it whenever it comes back in or he'll take care of Himself and he's like all right cool he gets 300 bucks right so he i give him the 300 bucks he leaves me with the bomb uh oh so he sold it to you yeah he basically yeah he sold it to me so now at least we knew it this it was a high explosive rapper steel it was a legit device and so um but when we got back to new york and we had church

roadblock who's you know one of the more intelligent of the crew um he caught Wind of what had happened and um so in church he's like hey where's the bomb and i'm like he used it sunk the boat and he's like you know who leaves or takes stuff like that cops that's what cops do now i'm thinking he thinks i'm a cop but as it turned out as a story the conversation went like for another minute he thought my boss was a cop and so his whole thing was like hey how do you Know that

he used it in in something boat how do you know this how you know that i'm like listen you know you guys know i dive i'll dive and get photos i'll tell them to you know tell me exactly where it was i'll get pictures that he's like get the pictures of the boat and he goes and if i end up in a jail cell and he's pointing at me and izzo he's like you two better pray to god you're not going to sell anyone near me because i'm going to kill the Both he is like

he was he was hot uh that that you know the device had gotten left behind so did you get the pictures i mean how did you manage that so so then so i went up and so i i just kind of strung it along for a little bit and eventually it so then these guys it's like if it doesn't happen right away it's not going to happen so like i think it's time and we never talked about it so it wasn't like in 10 days they felt good about it Nobody got arrested but as time

went by i just stopped bringing it up and i never brought up he brought up a couple times i'm like yeah i'm working on i'm gonna make it happen man next time i go up but uh then he just kind of dropped it and i think it was more because nobody went to jail for it and so yeah okay if they were gonna arrest us they'd have done it by now right that kind of that kind of thing 100 yeah Man you always mentioned during your interactions with these guys that they might know you're a

cop or they might have a suspicion and you're worried about them obviously shooting or killing you you're that's one example was another one where you're moving a dead body in the woods and you're like oh man are they making me dig this grave for myself do you think that these guys were actually suspicious or was this just Your mind playing tricks on you because of the pressure no i think well i think it's a combination right you're you know it's not even minds pain you you always have to have your guard up you always have

to be thinking what if and um now the the moving the body uh without getting too far into that story because i want to be a spoiler but the there We learned um from post-arrest interviews that they had gotten suspicious and um it was never really clear what it was that tripped them that they felt was suspicious but i had um i just bought some drugs off of tracy i was at the end of cover house and uh and i got back inside the house actually to put the drugs away and when i came out

there's a group of the pagans were in the driveway and you know how you Walk out and you know everyone's talking about you yeah because they all stopped talking and so that happened i was like what the hell is going on and um and we later learned that they they had thought that there was um that something you know had happened that i was a copper informant and i'm not sure which is worse and you know on day one if they figure you're a copper and a foreign big deal they're just gonna say hey cop

leave Um day you know 100 when you've got charges on three quarters of them that's not going to end as is easily um and so you know as it went on they they felt you know more secure um that i wasn't and you know hence i got more and more involved in some of the heavy hitting things that were going on the in the gang which then raises the stakes which makes it more difficult to use to stay in what made you finally pull the trigger On this one and have everyone arrested you know what

what was sort of like that all right here's the flag like let's pull it let's do this i mean you have so the investigation goes on and you have all these different times some of them are like things that they did that you put you in a bad spot like you know i was talking about having to kill that guy and throw them off other stuff was just the dumb luck like you dodged a bullet you know there was You know i mentioned to you when i got kicked out of the club i was supposed

to be doing guard duty out in front of the clubhouse um i got kicked out of the club so i obviously wasn't gonna be doing guard duty so sergeant arms was out there and the hell's angels rolled up in the clubhouse they surrounded the clubhouse um and they beat the sergeant-at-arms with ball peen hammers fists feet uh b he had he got med flighted out and that Should have been me uh it would have been me if i hadn't gotten kicked out like dumb luck i got kicked out there's another incident right not too long

after that when um i was a sergeant-at-arms and we had been on this big run there was like 30 of us and the way it works is the highest ranking rides front left and then the next highest and it works its way all the way back to the back of the pack And so we've gotten back in the in the chapter president that said hey hogman and slam i need you guys to go pick this up something at home depot so like all right so i pull out i'm the sergeant-at-arms he's the uh vice president

vice president as i mentioned before doesn't have any status if the president's alive and out of prison and he was so i pull out front left i'm the highest Ranking i should be right in front left he pulls out like around me into the other lane of traffic to to get over to my left and so i'm like whatever man i'm a make-believe biker i don't give a rat's ass if i'm riding front left front right whatever man you want to ride front left go ahead we don't get a quarter mile down the road and

uh a minivan splatters him on the road and it wasn't his fault it was the minivan's fault splatters him he Codes out they bring him back to life he ends up coding out like two or three times on the on the way to the hospital and at the hospital that should have been me if if he hadn't done what he had done it absolutely would have been the minivan hit me so it's like it's almost like russian roulette you know at some point but the real driver is the further you get into this and the

more trusted you are um they assigned me to this what they call This hit squad inside the game and most of the gang members don't even know that this group exists within um and it's selected by mother club members of what they consider to be their heavy hitters you know the ones that can do the real down and dirty work and so hellboy um who's you know his pitches in the book and and he had approached me he's like hey they want you to be a part of this and so i Was and um and

so they we were gonna be targeting hell's angels and uh we were gonna be killing them so you had that and you have that lack of control and then i had i had gotten arrested during the uh during the case legitimately got arrested with a gun by the local um gang task force and so i i spent some time in jail in in but that case was going through the courts And that and of itself so it's like the fuse is burning like you know at some point this had to come down but at the

same time we had other elements of the crimes that we had approved so it was like you know chicken in the egg we're like scrambling as fast as we can they had to get all the evidence together and like i was originally supposed to come out at christmas then it went to june and the june one was a real date like i actually thought i was going to be out At that point and then it got continued until october and that's somewhat demoralizing too because yeah you know not only for me but my family my

family's expect to know he's going to be home and now since i'll see him four months yeah cancel all the summer plans yeah yeah exactly so after all these guys get busted aren't you worried that then they're gonna try and kill you because i would imagine it's unsettling knowing that like 1300 scumbag bikers Want to kill you in the most painful way they can imagine and also their patron support clubs too probably have your photo somewhere yeah i know there's plenty of photos that were um were out there but they uh yeah they did put

two contracts out on me after um after the case came down and um one of them um they investigated i won't go into a lot of details on it but you know the recording of that hit did not come out Um but it was an active conversation they knew um there was a lot of protection um put into place i mean there was agents at my house for for months afterwards but they're uh a lot of other safeguards and also um they monitor you know this listen as informants part of these gangs there's a lot

of information that comes out to law enforcement but they're con it's constantly to this day still monitor all that that activity and anytime something Comes out or there's a reference or anything towards you know i get notified the she looks into it and you know investigates it so uh it's it's part of what you do uh and there's also i will say for for some of them yeah that you know obviously they were mad enough to put a hit out on me uh for others they're like hey that's the job like better to be a

cop than an informant i think um because at least with a cop it's like your job And they're like hey he's doing his job like we're doing our job so it's a little bit of both but yeah you always you know you you're very aware of your surroundings and you try to do what you can to minimize it are you worried about it at all now i mean it's been like 10 years but some of those guys are still probably in the gang doing stuff and probably higher ranking now right or no yeah and there's

still some that are in jail um that will get out but there's um Yeah i mean i i think i don't know that you ever totally relax about it but i don't live my life looking over my shoulder either you know i i've i've gotten on with my life um and you know like i said a bunch of time has passed some some of them are dead you know some some are still you know active um but you just you you live your life and and you know you try to be smart about it and

know that your agency's got your back and um you know that's all you Can really do once you're a part of a big operation like this i assume you can't do undercover work again right because you've met like thousands of scumbags over the years like someone could easily recognize you at this point after all that time in the game right um well i did undercover work after this so um yeah that's not 100 you know it depends on the case and it depends on so like None of these guys went to trial they all ended

up pleading guilty so there wasn't any big dramatic trial that had a lot of media coverage um and so you could have the simplest of case that generates a whole lot of you know whether it be media attention or if there was a shooting and that kind of coverage um or um or you can kind of fly alone so i i mean i did undercover for you know 20 years and was able to do that successfully Now writing this book yeah right now i was still on the job yeah yeah it was over anyways but

if it wasn't it would be now but you're retired now right i take it yeah yeah you must still have that those that axe handle and those that pagan the cut the leather the jacket and the patches and stuff and the ring and all that stuff right you still got that stuff yeah it's all locked away in a bank vault uh right you know it's uh but yeah i i keep it more for Training purposes okay um so because you know a lot of that stuff means there's messaging behind a lot of the patches a

lot of those other things so when i speak to law enforcement groups i'll sometimes bring that out um and you know i always get people like hey you know would you mind if i take a picture of you in your calls i'm like never happened so the day i came out i swore i'd never put them on again and i never have yeah i don't blame you it's Kind of i mean i don't blame you at all you're not it's not like you're dressing up as somebody you admire right this is yeah i hated wearing

them when i had to wear them so why would i wear them if i don't you know um and then there's other people be like hey can i take a picture with the colors and i'm like if that ever gets out good luck because it's not gonna end well for you because you know they take this stuff really serious uh but there Is a training value behind those yeah now not only them taking a picture with something they're not supposed to be wearing but your cut is definitely like oh so not only are you wearing

something you're not supposed to be wearing it's the one from the undercover cop that put away like a dozen of our brethren yeah it's like the worst version you could find um yeah what do you miss about the biker world now that you're completely out of The game there's got to be something no no no now well you know people ask me out like hey do you still ride and people ask did you ride before yeah i absolutely did um and when i came out of this case i sold my bike and i didn't ride

for a long period of time because it took away the fun of riding you know riding at 110 miles an hour two feet off the person in front of you one gear down It's not fun it's not relaxing by any stretch of the imagination and it just i got burnt out on it um i've gotten back into writing again so that that's been a good thing um but the i really don't maybe a little bit of the the chess match of um you know how you're strategically putting together your case and trying to stay one

step ahead um but now i've moved on you know um it it's I'm i'm glad i did it i wouldn't do it again um and i hope others do because and that's why you know teaching and talk to law enforcement cruises because i think it's one of the few ways that you can get to the hierarchy the shock haulers because without being a part of the group you're not going to get there you don't even miss the barbecues the food i would say they did have some good food man they There's a couple of them

particularly roadblock who could cook i mean now he cooked with every of the worst ingredients so that's probably why it tasted so good but he the dude could cook um it's still to this day the best uh brisket i've ever had yeah i'm just imagining like hey you think this meth is good you should treat you gotta try the brisket try his brisket yeah that was that was the one thing i could eat as much as i wanted so it was always a Good thing i'll tell you what an embarrassing thing don't ever go to

a a chinese food buffet with these guys because they're like animals i mean it's just it's embarrassing there's food flying everywhere it's just it's ugly using their hands to get the chicken out yeah yeah exactly man i've kept you for too long thank you so much this is fascinating stuff really and thank you for what you did as well i'm sure that we are safer not having some of these Horrendous human beings out in society even if they're detached from society now i appreciate and appreciate you having me on you know being able to tell

my story thanks for checking out this entire episode of the jordan harbinger show if you're interested in exploring this topic further check out the jordan harbinger show podcast feed we dive even deeper on this and many other topics in the audio podcast i also close open Loops cover things discussed off air and give some parting lessons from our guest you can find the jordan harbinger show in apple podcasts spotify any podcast app or at jordanharbinger.com and also if you found this episode useful please share it with those you care about last but not least like

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