Yet, after nearly fifteen years on the job, I still had something to prove. I still had more to see.
IN THE SUMMER of that year a young, ambitious case agent named Greg “Sugarbear” Cowan called about running some game up in Bullhead City, Arizona.
Sugarbear said that Bullhead was ripe for the picking, and that getting evidence up there would be like shooting fish in a barrel. He said we could take a lot of guns off the street. I agreed to have a look. One morning I got up, ate breakfast, rustled the hair of my son, Jack, kissed my daughter, Dale, grabbed a plate of cookies that my wife, Gwen, had baked, and hit the road.
Bullhead City is near the southern tip of Nevada, ten hours from where I lived in Tucson. It’s a broken-down town full of semi-employed mechanics who’ve shacked up with women who are—or were— “dancers.” It’s a meth capital teeming with high-school dropouts, and it’s all set down in a brown and tan valley that looks more like Mars than Earth. Across the brown Colorado River is Laughlin, Nevada, Bullhead’s dusty twin sister, with her twinkling strip and brand-name outfits: Flamingo, Golden Nugget, Harrah’s.
I met Sugarbear at the Black Bear Diner on Route 95. We sat in a window booth in the refrigerated air while the desert sweltered outside at 115 degrees. He slurped coffee and nibbled at dry toast while I crammed a bacon double cheeseburger into my mouth.
He talked about a local gun shop called Mohave Firearms. The owner, Robert Abraham, dealt with a band of regulars who were all gun strokes. Most of the deals were off the books and there were significant numbers of modified machine guns going in and out of the shop. A guy named Scott Varvil, a former Marine sniper and ace bike mechanic, did the machine-gun mods in his garage.
We drove around town after lunch. I watched the dusty roads and subdivisions skim by from the comfort of our car’s air-conditioning. Sugarbear said I’d go undercover as a biker. I said fine, in spite of the heat and the fact that I wasn’t a biker expert. He said he knew I’d be fine, that I looked the part and that bikers were respected in Bullhead. I said I imagined they were. He said that all the guys, especially Abraham and Varvil, were Hells Angels groupies. He said the Angels were around but not everywhere. I didn’t think much of it either way. I agreed to come on board.
We got started in late August. Cowan continued to run an informant while I staged-up in Tucson. I got my bike tuned and checked out an ATF car—a black Mercury Cougar. I took target practice at the field office. I helped Gwen get the kids off to another year at school, making trips to the mall. Jack, a good athlete, got cleats and gym socks and a book bag. With saved allowance he bought a box of Fleer football cards. He was on the hunt for Drew Brees rookies. He got three from that batch. I bought Dale a used guitar, with the promise that if she applied herself I would get her a brand-new one down the road.
In the early morning of September 11, I was at home getting ready to leave when Chris Bayless called. He said turn on the TV.
The ride to Bullhead was off. Gwen and the kids and I sat mesmerized in front of the TV, like everyone else. Jack, who was seven at the time, is a fun-loving kid who’s always smiling. Dale, then eleven, is a little moodier, endearingly righteous, and occasionally indignant. Gwen and I sensed fear and confusion in them. We sensed fear and confusion in each other. We watched the gray explosions over and over and over. I told my kids, “Be brave. That’s what this is, a chance for you to be brave. Set a good example for other kids who might be scared. And be proud that you’re an American because we’re about to kick some ass.”
I spoke with Sugarbear later that day. We were pretty sure the Bullhead case would be deep-sixed or at least put on hold, but to our relief this didn’t happen. I looked forward to work. I didn’t want to sit around and think about how America had just been attacked.
By the end of the following week I was holed up in Bullhead at Gretchen’s Inn, a contemptible riverside hideaway off Route 95. From the outside it looked harmless, but from the inside it was something else. A fleabag meth flophouse, busted locks on the doors and windows that wouldn’t close, people screwing all day and night. I slept with my arms folded over my chest and one of my beloved Glock 19s in my hand.
On the night of October 22, 2001, as I listened to methed-out tweakers bang away above and below my room, I lay down for the last time as 100 percent Jay Dobyns. The next day our case, code-named Operation Riverside, would go into full swing. Sugarbear’s informant, Chuck, would take me to Mohave Firearms for some introductions. Chuck would say, “This is Jay Davis. Good guy to know. Good guy to be known by.”
HERE’S WHAT I SAID:
What’s up? This’s a nice place you got here, looks like you know your business. Yeah, Jay’s my name, but everyone calls me Bird. Here’s my card. Imperial Financial. I do collection work. Yeah, that kind. You know, a John Doe fucks up at the Bellagio and goes back to Omaha with a line of unpaid credit, they can’t send a security detail to beat the gold out of him on his front lawn. Bad publicity. That’s where I come in. Yeah, I guess it’s pretty cool, if I stop to think about it, which I don’t. Pays the bills, keeps the lawn green, and doesn’t take up too much of my time. Yeah, I ride. You see a patch on my back? Well, then I’m not a One Percenter, so quit asking. Yep, that’s my bike, the one with the baseball bat strapped to the sissy bars. What’s it for? I’m a huge D-Backs fan, Luis Gonzalez is my boy. Naw, man. Whaddaya think? That’s right, dude, the collections. Baseball bat can come in handy in my line. But, listen, I got another business, maybe you can help me out? I need guns. Small ones, big ones, fast ones, slow ones. No papers. Hit-and-run deals I can throw in the river, you know what I’m saying? I appreciate your discretion, dude, you’re a class businessman. Yeah, so what if I already got a couple pieces? My Glocks are my babies and they’re for me and me alone. Right now I’m looking for .45s. Also, know anyone who can work on my bike? You do? Thanks, dude, I owe you one. Anytime you wanna go down to the Inferno for beers, you let me know. Next night out is on the Birdman.
Bob Abraham, the owner of the gun shop, filled in the blanks. He was forty-seven, short, portly, strong, and knowledgeable about every gun under the sun. The intro went well—Abraham ate every scrap and crumb.
The next day he sold me two .45s, no papers, no forms. All cash. It was too easy.
Through the years I was often amused by how quickly suspects decided to trust me. Criminality is a brutal, sometimes comical, game of one-upmanship. Bad guys are constantly trying to prove to one another—and themselves—that they’re badder and harder than the next guy. This is one reason Abraham wanted to know if I was a “One Percenter.”
This phrase originated when rogue bikers ran roughshod over a 1947 motorcycle rally in Hollister, California. These troublemakers were described as “the one percent of the American motorcycle riding public that is criminal” by the American Motorcyclist Association. The name stuck, and was proudly worn by those riders who considered themselves to be “outlaws.” Since law-abiding bike enthusiasts— “Ninety-nine Percenters”—had ostracized these outlaw riders, and since they were usually societal outcasts to begin with, they formed clubs. These riders were easily identified by their motorcycle vests— leather or denim jackets, usually with the sleeves cut off and therefore known as “cuts”—which were adorned with the “three-piece patch” of the outlaw biker. This patch was really three separate patches found on the back of the vest; it consisted of a large center patch depicting the club’s logo (the infamous laughing winged skull, or “Death Head,” in the case of the Hells Angels); a curved, rocker-shaped “top rocker” containing the club’s name; and a “bottom rocker” containing the vestwearer’s charter affiliation, usually the name of a city, state, or, in the case of international clubs, country. The four major American outlaw clubs are the Pagans in the east, the Outlaws in the Midwest, the Banditos in Texas, and the Hells Angels, who are found throughout the country in at least twenty states. The other three clubs may beg to differ, but the Hells Angels are the premier outlaw club in the Un
ited States—and the world.
Abraham wanted to know if I was a One Percenter because if I was, I would’ve had instant credibility. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t a One Percenter, though, because for small-time guys like Abraham, credibility was cheap.
After a couple more sales, Abraham intro’d me to Scott Varvil, John Core, and Sean McManama, who intro’d me to Tim Holt, a machinist who ended up making me a bunch of silencers. Each of these men had four things in common: They loved guns, they were white, they were not rich, and they all told me they knew Smitty, the local Hells Angels brass.
Smitty belonged to the Arizona Nomad charter of the Hells Angels. Most large One Percenter clubs have Nomad charters. They’re divisions within the club that belong to a state but don’t have a fixed location. At the time, the Arizona Hells Angels had fixed charters in Tucson, Mesa, Phoenix, Cave Creek, and Skull Valley, while their Nomad charter kept a small clubhouse in Flagstaff. They had the state covered.
I’d seen Smitty around. He looked like a hippie granddad—a swirling black and white beard, big old-man eyeglasses, a bald crown that topped a curtain of long, stiff hair. When he smiled, which I’d learn was often for a Hells Angel, he looked like a lovable goofball.
Varvil loved Smitty the most. Varvil maintained that the Angels wanted to recruit him, but that they couldn’t because of his job, which he refused to give up. He was a school nurse, which was simply not badass enough.
Varvil was the most interesting of the Mohave Firearms bunch. I first got with him on November 7, three short weeks after having met Abraham, when along with Abraham and the informant, Chuck, we paid Varvil a visit. I wanted to drop off my ’63 Panhead to see if Varvil could fix it. He said he could. We admired his Harley Road King for a while, and as Varvil gloated over it, Chuck said, “Well, we’ve seen your scooter, now where’s the guns?” Varvil asked Abraham if he trusted us, and Abraham said, “They know about my toys, so if we’re going down, I guess we’re all going down together—yeah, I trust them. I trust them with my life.”
Varvil proceeded to let us into his gun vault, a fifteen-by-twenty-foot room off the cluttered garage. Every wall of the room was lined with guns of every kind from damn near every decade of the twentieth century and probably two dozen countries. Varvil handed me an AR-15 with a three-position switch and said, “Yep. Fully auto. Did the work myself.” He stuck a thumb in the direction of a hulking machine mill. “Man, I can trick out these ARs all day.”
Good for him. After a while, we left.
Weeks passed and we worked. The guys were flush. I did a ruse deal with John Core. I told him I was selling guns to some Mexican gangsters at a body shop, and I asked him to come along as backup. Before we went to the shop, we stopped at a 7-Eleven for gas and Big Gulps. After the Cougar filled up, I dumped my soda on the pavement and filled the Big Gulp cup with gasoline. I said, “Look, these are bad fuckers. We’re gonna go in there and take care of business, but if shit goes bad, I’m gonna throw this on the main dude and flick my cigarette at him, send him up in flames, got it? Then we run like hell.” The guys we were “dealing” with were all cops, and this was never going to happen, but Core thought it was as real as daylight. He was so nervous during the deal that he ashed his cigarettes into the tops of his shoes so as not to offend the buyers by littering on their floor.
After that I set up some deals with Core and Sean McManama, and, with McManama’s help, had Tim Holt custom-manufacture the silencers. McManama also asked me to kill his wife’s ex-husband and gave me the gun to do it.
This “murder-for-hire” scenario was one I was familiar with. My MO in these situations was to slow-play the request, demanding that if I were to undertake such a serious crime, it had to be on my own terms. Often, in the interim, suspects would come to their senses and I’d be called off. Murders-for-hire were usually beneficial—I could gain credibility for being willing to kill for money, and the prosecutors would have a good conspiracy charge to level against a suspect when his or her day came in court.
I accepted McManama’s request according to my guidelines, and sure enough, a few weeks down the line, he called me off, while I cultivated the reputation of being a hit man.
I stayed on Varvil, but he only danced around deals. I went to pick up my bike and found him fiddling at his workbench, wearing baby-blue nurse’s scrubs. When he saw me he got up and took a Sig Sauer pistol from the table, stuffing it into his waistband, the grip hanging over the lip of his drawstring pants. We shook hands and he walked me over to my bike. He straddled it, started it up, and rode the throttle in neutral.
He yelled over the engine, “That Spectre pistol Core’s selling you? How much he want?”
I yelled back, “A grand.”
“Mommy. That’s too much for a pistol, Bird. It was me I’d charge you three hundy.”
“That’s cool of you, dude, but he ain’t budging. All the same to me, just have to work extra hard”—he turned off the engine and in the sudden silence I was still yelling—“on the next collection.”
He shrugged, said, “Hey, it’s your money.”
I stuck my chin at the bike. “Sounds good.”
“Like a motherfucker.” He cut the engine and swung his leg over the seat in a fluid motion, the pistol still in his waist. It defied gravity, with so little baggy cotton medical nonsense holding it in place. “Hey, come with me. Wanna show you something.”
He led me to the gun room. It was the same as before: gun after gun after gun. Varvil opened a large drawer and started rummaging through it, pulling out rags and rifle butts and holsters and bulletproof vests, throwing everything in a heap. He spoke in a stream of words. He sounded like he was tweaking on meth: “Abraham and those guys want me to trick out everything they got. Fuck that. I don’t need more automatic shit sitting around to incriminate my ass. These guys don’t understand the risk I take doing all their fucking mods. Shit, I already got a PVC garden out back that would make Ted Nugent cream his pants.” I assumed this referred to his backyard, where he’d buried his excess firearms in sealed PVC piping. He stopped going through the drawers and put his hands on his hips. “There you are.”
Varvil removed an MP-40 from the drawer. “This’s a German Schmeisser. The Nazis used it during the invasion of Poland. It’s an open-bolt, blowback, slow-cycle machine gun. And this”—he pulled out another gun—“is British. Sten gun. Come by these once in a while.” “Cool. Can you get me any of those?”
“Sure. I’ll keep my ear to the ground. This! This is an STG-44, Russian, precursor to the AK-47. You can switch this shit on the fly. Better have your clips handy. And this. This is a snowplow. A flat-top AR-15, but the sighting mechanism is for clearing brush.”
He lined the machine guns along the blank wall next to the doorjamb. He handed me the Sten. I placed it alongside the MP-40 and we stepped back. Varvil looked down on his collection, his arms folded. He gave his head a slow, prideful, almost disbelieving shake. He took a deep breath through his nose, filling his lungs, and made a little stab with a short exhale from the back of his throat. He was in awe.
“Bird? You’re looking at the loves of my life is what you’re looking at.”
WE RAN AND ran and ran, and I cracked the whip. Sugarbear had trouble keeping up. Within twelve weeks I’d purchased a grab-bag of guns: a Czechoslovakian .32-caliber semiauto pistol; a Rohm .22-caliber revolver; an FIE model A27 .25-caliber pistol; an Intratec Tec-22, 9 mm pistol with compatible silencer; a Sites Spectre HC 9 mm semiauto pistol; a Ruger .22-caliber model 1022 rifle with a sawed-off thirteen-inch barrel; and a Colt AR-15 .223-caliber machine gun. I bought fortyodd silencers from Holt, with McManama acting as a middleman. The silencers, the machine gun, the sawed-off, and the Tec-22 with the silencer were all banned weapons. I was never asked to fill out any paperwork, as I’d always implied to them that I was using them for kills or that I was running them south to Mexico to sell at a markup. The guys didn’t ask questions. They made quick tabulations with the crimina
l calculus and nodded to me like I was their dear old brother. I danced around four murder solicitations, delaying or bluffing, never actually killing anyone for money. They all kept me very busy.
During that fall and winter my son, Jack, kept me busy too.
I made sure to drive down to Tucson twice a week to coach a rabid gang of seven- and eight-year-olds in a T-ball league. During the whole Riverside case I never missed a single game, even if I had to drive through the night, showing up as the boys took the field. I did this because I felt guilty for not being there, but I also did it because it was a pleasure. For a couple of hours a week I was around innocence. I could encourage kids to succeed and hug them after they did something fun. It was the highlight of my week.
One Saturday in mid-January, Jack reminded me that we didn’t have a T-ball game on Tuesday.
I asked, “Why not?”
“I dunno. Martin Luther King Day’s on Monday, so for some reason they canceled the game on Tuesday.”
“Right, then next Saturday it is.”
On Sunday I went back to Bullhead with a trunkful of food made by Gwen. As I left the house, my family stood in the front yard, waving. I thought, Jay, you’re a lucky man.
That night I hung out at the Inferno Lounge with Abraham and Varvil. The Inferno was the place to be and be seen in Bullhead City. It was a dark, bland bar in an unremarkable two-story concrete building, with bikini-clad bartenders keeping the customers coming back.
No Angel: My undercover journey to the dark heart of the Hells Angels Page 3
