The Coyote's Bicycle

by Kimball Taylor

  “Are they crossing themselves?”

  “No. I’m saying that this is critical work. If your mind isn’t right, you shouldn’t be here.”

  “Amigo, no matter where she is, I am a reflection of her. She worked up to her last day. I’m not going to stop.”

  34

  The building was low and flat—an insignificant aside to a wide palm-lined street that ran from the Coast Highway down to the railroad tracks. The empty spread of asphalt summoned a forlorn sense of Los Angeles noir. One could smell but not see the ocean. Abandoned-looking cars occupied curb space. Errant grocery carts were parked on grassy, overgrown meridians. Nothing inside the building broke the spell. It was cool and dark and filled with the presence of large men. The sensation was of entering an arboreal longhouse with vague questions about lost people and things. I didn’t have much of anything to trade for the information other than my enthusiasm—or rather, a middling obsession. The truth was, if not for Kim Zirpolo, I would not have been greeted at the door. She arranged the meeting, calling the men “my boys” or “my guys.”

  “Imagine my guys,” she said. “They’re huge, intimidating, and most likely wearing their gang colors. They’ve got a truck full of bicycles and guns, and they’re driving through Texas. There’s no paperwork. What would happen, God forbid, if they got pulled over by some ranger? How would they explain, if they didn’t get shot first?”

  The moniker “swing gang” emerged from the era when multiple movie sets occupied one studio stage; via the swinging of hinged walls into and out of place, the sets could be efficiently changed. The nickname was originally used for the workers who moved those walls, but the position grew into any kind of breaking down, transportation of props, or set dressing. And it might have been inaccurate to describe the men who worked for Stu Segall as a swing gang, because they did anything and everything to pull the job off. They were the strategy behind Strategic Operations.

  Most of them hailed from Oceanside, California’s significant Samoan community—known as a tough crowd in one of the coast’s last rough-and-tumble beach towns. I was hesitant to approach them about an interview at that time because the most esteemed citizen Oceanside had produced, NFL linebacker Junior Seau, had recently shot himself in his beachfront home. The Samoan community was tight and extremely family oriented. Seau’s death came as a sudden blow. He was their icon, their star. Further, the guys I’d come to meet had just been severed from employment with Stu Segall Productions. They’d seen it coming since talk of cutbacks in government spending began. But I didn’t imagine they’d be in the mood to share tales of high times on the trail of coyote bikes.

  The black vinyl chairs sat low and wide, as did the coffee table between us. I had to gaze up to meet the eyes of my hosts. Aaron Garrison, who sat across the table, looked something like the actor known as the Rock—handsome, intelligent, amiable, oversized. Eric Amavisca was tall and slender with bright blue eyes. Ron Nua stood a bit shorter, with thick rounded shoulders. He spoke with a raspy swagger. His sentences were peppered with “bitch” and “shit.” And within minutes of entering, I discovered that I really liked these guys. They laughed easily. Each of them could tell a story. They were fans of off-color details, and they never framed their answers to place themselves, or anyone, in a softer light.

  The work had started with Garrison. In the late 1990s, one of his football coaches at Grossmont College happened to be a ranking member of the local filmmakers’ union. He helped Garrison get work on a series of Mexican soap operas called telenovelas that were filmed in San Diego. In time, Garrison brought friends from the neighborhood into the business. Around 2000, work with the novelas waned and so they “filtered” over to the only other gig in town, Stu Segall Productions. This trio represented the core of the swing gang. They confirmed that Kiser had turned Zirpolo on to Terry Tynan’s swamp bikes. And one day when the workload at the studio was light, Zirpolo sent Garrison, Amavisca, and Nua down to the Kimzey Ranch with directions to load three hundred bikes onto a stake bed.

  “That shit was a bike cemetery,” Nua said. The hemmed-in feeling of the border, broken-down ranches, dirt roads, and the demand for cash all evoked the foreboding of a strange deal. They described Tynan as an oddball. “He was into the bikes, the most I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  But Tynan greeted the men much as he had me, with an unmasked appreciation of his own good fortune. He indicated the trails where he did his collecting. He walked through his piles, organized by style and quality, and separated the studio sales from the pack. In the beginning, it was the junk bikes for Segall. “Some had no seats. They were just bombers—two tires, a chain, and half a handlebar,” Nua said. Then Terry popped the doors of the wood garden shack, and “it was like bike heaven in there.”

  There were vintage Italian racers and pristine Mongoose and Diamondback BMX bikes from the eighties.

  “I was always looking for a bike,” Garrison said. They all were, in fact—everyone who ever marveled at the swamp bikes. Nua had his eye on a Redline, a model he remembered from his childhood. Amavisca developed a possessive fondness for a murdered-out beach cruiser that he’d later hide around the studio lot lest someone else admire it too. The men marveled at Tynan’s operation. “He was making money,” Garrison said, “and not just off us.”

  Nua called it clockwork. “We’d want to make an order, and he’d be like, ‘Give me another week,’ and then there’d be another five hundred up in this bitch.”

  The swing gang never questioned the origin of the bikes. They never considered the fact that each bike represented at least one new migrant. They admired certain machines but mostly, “We just put ’em on lots.”

  This was not as easy as it might seem. Like the troops for whom they did their work, the men experienced a kind of deployment. They’d receive a packing list, broad instructions, and keys to a truck or a one-way plane ticket. They could remain on the road for six-to-nine-month stretches, unaware of the next destination, or the final one. Their per diem food allowance could be set as low as the cost of meals at the base cafeteria. In Louisiana, it was $11.25. Their salary was comparable to an army private’s, but half of a base janitor’s.

  There wasn’t a whole lot of support from Strategic Operations headquarters, either. For whatever reason, be it the fly-through nature of the movie business or the culture at Stu Segall Productions, permissions, forward notices, and paperwork on the dangerous loads were considered only in the rearview. Nua was once sent to Canada with a truck that contained bicycles, props, and sealed boxes. After a three-day drive that crossed state and international boundaries, Nua opened boxes to discover that they contained authentic AK-47 assault rifles. Nua was on parole at the time. A pull-over, or a single curious inspector, and there was a strong chance he would have been returned to prison. “Even the fake shit looks real as fuck,” Nua said.

  “You really have to grab it and have a look at it,” confirmed Garrison.

  Another contingent of the swing gang drove a load of pyrotechnic explosives to a base in Virginia. The studio had not communicated with the officer receiving the shipment. So the men spent their day standing outside the base gates with rifles trained on them as soldiers searched the truck and verified identities.

  “You’re definitely scared,” said Amavisca, describing the experience of approaching any kind of state or Border Patrol checkpoint. The swing gang knew that in most instances, officials refrained from unpacking a fifty-three-foot truck. Still, Garrison said, “It’s our job to drive. So we drive—and we have no idea.”

  Garrison once worked at an East Coast facility for a week before his background check came through. It indicated a previous arrest for arms possession. The facility was an arms depot. He was kicked off but merely directed to another base. In Virginia, he’d just finished situating props when a small squad of soldiers entered the set. One of the troops looked around the street scene Garrison had just finished building. The man dropped his rifle in the dirt, thr
ew up his hands, and ran away. “I thought, wow, that’s crazy,” Garrison said. “I thought he was going to get in trouble because—well—that’s some bitch shit, just running away.”

  Garrison later learned that the fleeing soldier had just returned from Iraq, where he’d taken a bullet in a firefight—a shoot-out on a street that looked, apparently, just like the replica.

  Desert winds, humidity, driving rain, hail, and snow—over distance and time, for the swing gang, the Baby Baghdads installed at disparate locations became, if not reality, a way of living real life. “When they throw the role players in there, it’s like, you are there,” Nua said.

  At a village built in the Nevada desert, role players lived on set for twenty-one-day stretches. They commuted and ran errands on the swamp bikes. They shopped in fake markets that became real markets. They repaired their real bikes at the fake gas station. Because training exercises were ongoing, the swing gang was required to wear Iraqi “garb” while at work. The pyro explosions rattled even their private thoughts. Special Forces training at the facility didn’t live in the village but occupied the surrounding mountains. They raided the hamlet at night and at random intervals—shakedowns that put the swing gang on edge.

  “Where exactly did you take the bikes?” I asked.

  “Everywhere. Every set had bikes there.”

  Garrison, Nua, and Amavisca began dropping place names like Ping-Pong balls in a lottery drawing: Hawaii, Canada, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Michigan, Nevada, California, and Arizona. “Bill Anderson is in Japan right now, at Okinawa—he’s got bikes,” Garrison said.

  The place names became a blur of camps, forts, and airfields, but then as they dwindled, the men began to mention the places with no names. Nua described a “compound” near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, that was limited to Special Forces training. The outer perimeter of the installation was odd, like a rectangular box with the far two corners sheared by walls set at angles. The main building was three stories high and had a walled balcony.

  “The inner layout was a maze that they told us to build,” Nua said. “Some hallways led to nothing.”

  He was describing what he said he later came to believe was a replica of Osama bin Laden’s estate in Abbottabad, Pakistan. “I shit you not, this compound we put up with these big-ass walls: when I seen [bin Laden] got caught, I was on it. I was like, ‘Whoa, that’s like the shit we built out in North Carolina.’ I mean, to the exact T.”

  I asked if he brought bikes to the location. “Yeah,” Nua said.

  “We took bikes everywhere,” Garrison said.

  I asked again because, well, Nua was suggesting the possibility that SEAL Team Six members, the killers of Osama bin Laden and, for a time, the most celebrated defenders in America, might have trained in the presence of—and, if other scenarios are any example, likely pedaled—the same bikes that El Indio’s migrants used to infiltrate the United States.

  Kim Zirpolo doubted that Strategic Operations contributed to the re-creation of the Abbottabad compound. And there might have been more than one. When I talked to the swing gang on August 22, 2012, however, no details of the top-secret training facility had been released. Only a select few in the world knew for certain that it existed, and where. Then, former SEAL Team Six member Matt Bissonnette’s book No Easy Day, which described the training and hunt for bin Laden, was published on September 4. A paragraph placed the “mock-up” where they had trained in North Carolina. Two months after I met with the swing gang, a whistle-blower website called Cryptome.org referenced No Easy Day and posted old TerraServer satellite images housed on the Bing search engine. These revealed a compound of near exact proportions to that of bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound. It had the high walls and shipping containers. It was located near Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

  Bissonnette described the compound as constructed of plywood and shipping containers. He complimented the construction workers who built it. “The level of detail on the mock-up was impressive . . . changes were made. The construction crew didn’t ask why and they never said no.”

  By way of advice, Garrison warned me off the search for the bicycles. He described a fairly open base in Louisiana. “The townspeople would come in and steal a bike. Once we were done training in [any] village, people would steal bikes. And I’ve never been to a spot where the POC [point of contact] wasn’t saying, ‘I want a bike. I need a bike.’”

  Eventually, I’d reach Bill Anderson on the phone, and he’d describe a similar scene. “The bicycles tend to walk away. Marines would pull up and throw them into the back of their pickups. They’re just kids. They will do stupid stuff. You see ’em riding around on the bikes, doing wheelies. Kim would yell at them and say, ‘Get off those bikes.’ But pretty soon everyone in the lot would end up with a bike to ride.”

  At the end of our meeting in Oceanside, Garrison said, “The only place you’re going to find those bikes is on San Clemente Island.” He was describing a crescent-shaped desert island forty miles offshore, the southernmost rock in the Channel Island chain. Part of the island was used as a bombing range for cruisers. Regardless, the whole thing was off-limits to civilians. The swing gang had once been sent there with props and bikes.

  “They told us we were going to be gone for four days”—but the gang was stuck on the island for two months, wearing the same four sets of clothes. They knew how hard it was to get off that island.

  35

  The status they’d attained felt something like that of a plucky local soccer club on an unexpected rise from the bottom of the draw. If not stars, they were lauded as wily, cunning, and brave. The money that came with that success was something none of the polleros had ever experienced. There were rumors of El Indio having thrown lavish parties for authorities, the chief of police among them—one in which he had entertained the attendees with an unannounced performance by the famous cumbia group La Sonora Dinamita.

  Solo, however, had fallen deeply in love with a local girl, and so certain was he of their future together, he quit the people-smuggling business in its headiest days. El Negro found Indio’s former lieutenant in the Postal neighborhood with a new baby in his arms. Solo was surprised to see the bathroom worker, but he was friendly. He said he worked in his mother-in-law’s packing plant now, and because he’d been focusing on his family, he was living up to his solitary nickname more than ever. Solo hadn’t talked to his childhood friend and former boss in some time. He described his final days with the operation, when El Indio, in the smoldering energy of his loss, pushed the gang to cross more people than ever. The week following Marta’s funeral, Solo said, they crossed 495 migrants. At some point, Solo felt he couldn’t expose his young wife to the risks they were taking on the border and he quit. Because of this, he said, he didn’t know what had happened in the end. Solo could only judge the outcome according to alternating rumors he’d heard: that El Indio was in prison, or that El Indio lived in security with his parents and siblings on the other side.

  El Cholo, the deportee who’d stumbled into El Indio’s camp nearing the point of starvation—“dog hungry” is how he described it—and worked his way from bike mechanic to the bagman who personally doled out bribes to customs agents and police commanders, also retired in 2007. He now owned a house with a bit of land near the border. He pointed out the new cars in the driveway and the fact that he was able to pay for his mother’s hernia surgery as indications of his windfall. Like Solo, El Cholo had no knowledge of the gang’s final days. In his heart, he believed that El Indio had been caught, and that was why the operation ceased so suddenly and the workers scattered so completely.

  Juan, El Indio’s early friend from the bus station, was more difficult to find because he’d fled Tijuana for a safe house in Tecate. As the drug wars escalated in 2008, Juan got caught up in some bad dealings—unrelated to migrants, though he wouldn’t be specific—and there were people who wanted to “take [him] down.” Early
in his flight, El Indio had sent Juan $30,000 to help his compa make a new start. But because, as Juan said, “I can’t go back to Tijuana if I want to stay alive,” he had lost all communication with the gang. El Negro found Juan through a mutual acquaintance, a taxi driver, and this only after El Negro displayed the scrawled pages of his interviews there in the back of the cab.

  Javy was also residing in Tecate, and though prior arrangements had been made, he was not at all happy to be visited by El Negro. He didn’t like the idea that a gringo writer knew anything of the bicycle business. And he didn’t want the story told. With his gains from the smuggling operation Juan had purchased a couple of party vans, and he ran charters. He didn’t want to put his business, or himself, in jeopardy. El Negro suspected that his own personal appearance was what had sparked Javy’s reassessment of the situation. Negro pegged Javy as arrogant and vain. Negro was dressed in his normal, well-worn clothes. And it dawned on him that Javy had expected to greet a journalist wearing a crisp suit, maybe followed by a cameraman, and now Javy was biased against Negro and declined to talk.

  Seated in the shade on a park bench, Javy and Negro argued. With his reading glasses resting on the bridge of his nose, El Negro reminded the young man that Javy himself had promised their mutual friend Solo that he’d be open and honest. Only on the strength of that promise had Negro made the expensive trip from Tijuana. Javy seethed. Negro then threatened to relay the details of their encounter to a dear friend of his, a man named Roberto. At this—because, Javy said, he thought so “highly” of El Negro’s friend—the interview proceeded, halting with intermittent argument until Javy bellowed, “I can’t understand journalists. They always get involved in stuff that they shouldn’t. That’s why they get killed.”

  The interview degraded into a trade of insults and character judgments that precluded further inquiry into the ultimate fate of El Indio, or anything else.