Vagos, Mongols, and Outlaws: My Infiltration of America's Deadliest Biker Gangs

by Charles Falco

  But movement near the exit sign caught my attention. A kid, maybe twenty-two, stumbled a few yards from Psycho. He looked clean-cut, dangerously polished. Psycho noticed him, too, the way an animal picks up a scent. Mentally I kicked the kid home. Move on. But he walked toward Psycho, slurring his insults, looking directly at him. Then he hurled his varsity frame at the president, and I swung, propelled by instinct, by club motto, Protect protect protect. My fist collided with the kid’s front teeth, the impact so forceful I knocked them in half. Porcelain veneers embedded in my knuckles and punctured my hand. The kid fell to the pavement, scrambled to his feet, and through a lisp apologized to Psycho for his stupidity.

  Meanwhile, blood trickled from my hand and I vaguely registered the dull pain.

  “Nice shot.” Psycho laughed and summoned me inside Mickey McGees for a round of gratitude. As the night wore on and the bar thinned, my hand throbbed. When I finally stumbled home and flopped on my girlfriend’s couch, it had doubled in size. It looked deformed, like a borrowed limb from a monster. A yellow glaze coated my dreams. Bugs pricked my skin from the inside, trapped in a sticky goo. And by morning, my fever raged to 103 degrees. A puffy red line snaked from my hand to my elbow.

  “Staph infection,” a nurse diagnosed me later and threaded an IV into my arm. Antiseptic and bleach made me nauseous; the emergency room was so white I squinted.

  “Something bit him,” my girlfriend confirmed, her voice sounding distorted.

  “Human. Animal?”

  Maybe a little of both?

  * * *

  As a prospect I had attended any Church meeting that involved discussion and preparation for war. Now that I was a full-patch, I could do more than listen. The Vagos’ latest battle was to occur at their annual run over New Years at the Gold Strike and Nevada Landing casinos. Terry the Tramp, the Vagos’ national president, had sanctioned a war with the Vagos’ rival, the Sons of Hell. He had commissioned other Vago chapters in the area, specifically Hemet in the San Jacinto Valley in Riverside County, to assist the Victor Valley chapter. Anyone who refused to fight was given the option to leave voluntarily at the next Church meeting or suffer “physical punishment” for his cowardice. No one left. Even those who were not felons or decent sharpshooters like Spoon, our chapter’s sergeant at arms, were expected to participate at least as “lookouts.” The plan, Psycho explained, was to blast the Sons of Hell “all at once to make a statement” and then pull their patches and steal their bikes.

  “Watch yourselves.” Psycho lowered his voice, “We have a leak.”3 Psycho elaborated that the “fucking police” had apparently questioned several Vagos during a routine traffic stop. One cop let slip that his department had “received an anonymous tip.” Vagos were headed to the Mission Bar. My mind flipped cartwheels. Who warned the police about the impending massacre? Hammer’s face swirled into focus. The former Vago turned snitch had once sold explosives and firearms to club members. No one suspected he had a double agenda. Spoon promptly posted Hammer’s photograph on the Web site whosarat.com. But publicly outing an informant wasn’t enough for Psycho. I knew what they did to snitches. I was fairly sure I didn’t want to be the leak.

  “A lot of brothers are riding on that motherfucker,” he said. “If you see him, kill him.”

  * * *

  War with the Sons of Hell was postponed.

  “Did you hear about Sonny?” Rhino’s voice cracked through the line.

  “No,” I said. Morning seeped through my blinds. Hercules opened one eye. I had overslept and he’d left me a gift.

  “He was killed last night in a motorcycle accident.” Rhino wheezed and he seemed genuinely upset, like maybe he had feelings. But sadness transferred to fear as he ranted that Sonny’s death must have been intentional, payback for his involvement in the botched home invasion and murder Twist committed. My head ached. Sonny, Victorville’s largest methamphetamine dealer, supplied the club with significant drug revenue. He would have been a major player in the investigation. His death represented a setback.

  “A great loss,” Psycho honored Sonny later at Church. Condolences soon turned to business. “Several people still owe him money. It’s going to be our job to collect.” He nominated Rhino for the task.

  Bubba, who had stayed in the background, suddenly stumbled forward, looking more disheveled than usual, and cautioned Psycho about speaking openly, considering “there was the business of the informant.” But Psycho dismissed Bubba’s paranoia and confided in me later about Sonny’s methamphetamine source, an 18th Street gang member named Sticky Fingers, who supplied meth to Sonny and Truck.

  “I’m thinking of asking him to take over Sonny’s business. What do you think?”

  Someone had to be Sonny’s successor. And while the Vagos shoveled dirt over Sonny’s casket and family members shed genuine tears for his passing, Sticky Fingers hovered in the crowd, waiting for the appropriate pause before inserting himself into the sentence. I needed a new target, a new way in to the drug trade. Two steps forward. One step back. That was the undercover dance.

  * * *

  As a full-patch I had access to more than drugs. Now I could participate in gun buys. I had seen Psycho’s arsenal of sawed-off shotguns, assault rifles, and machine guns. Powder, the chapter’s vice president, offered to sell me a stolen automatic weapon. Simply, he needed the money. Koz supplied me with cash, and the next morning, armed with my recorder, Powder drove from Barstow. He had a rental in Hesperia, a dive he used mostly for storage. Bullets pocked the windows. The front door creaked open, missing a hinge. Powder ushered me inside. Dull afternoon light cast long shadows over broken and discarded toys scattered across the carpet. Barbie dolls with missing heads, metal tractors, Erector Sets, baseball bats, gloves stretched palms up gripping plastic balls.

  “We had a toy fund-raiser,” Powder mumbled. Pale and skinny, he disappeared into a side room. A cold draft scratched my face.

  “What happened to the good ones?” I asked, accidentally crushing a Barbie’s head. The notion that motorcycle gangs had any interest in charities or children was perverse. They needed money to fund their drug and arms deals. And they fit into the real world the way sociopaths blended, by mimicking human emotion and wearing acceptable masks, by pretending to care about children’s causes.

  “We kept those.” Powder slung his AK-47 over his shoulder. He blinked at me, his pale blue eyes framed by white lashes. He resembled a human negative, underdeveloped. “The rest we can sell for dope.”

  I nodded to the weapon. “Is it hot?”

  “I’m not worried.” Powder winked. “I have a contact in the department who runs interference.”

  “He’s checked the serial number?”

  “I stole it from a guy I worked for in Silver Lakes.” My recorder picked up his confession; he was a prohibited possessor with a hot assault rifle. “I have a stash at my place. The rest my mother keeps.” I made a mental note to find those guns next.

  “Does it work?”

  “Absolutely,” he said in earnest for the tape. I slipped ATF cash into Powder’s hand and sealed his fate. A cannibalized bike lay in pieces near the toys.

  “It’s a rebuild.” Powder shrugged as he counted the bills.

  “Where’d you get it?” I pretended to be impressed. Really, I just wanted another confession.

  “My friend reported it stolen to his insurance company so he could collect the money. I’m trying to get after-market cases and frames to put it back together.”

  “I could help you with that,” I lied.

  * * *

  Later that night, an off-duty San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputy drank with us at the Motherlode. The Vagos forced the owner to keep the place open after hours. We parked our motorcycles inside the bar, most of us too drunk to risk the ride home. And, too, we didn’t want them stolen. As dawn seeped through the cracked windows, the deputy’s face smarted from alcohol. Even seated, he was an imposing figure, with a large belly and early gr
ay at the temples. Married to a woman who worked in the sheriff’s office, he talked bitterly about his years in law enforcement, his low pay and impossible schedule. I nursed my third beer and watched him guardedly. Amid black and chrome, dirty denim, and rows of empty bottles, I listened for verbal cues, words that signaled betrayal. But the Vagos seemed amused by the deputy’s conflicted loyalty. More than a threat, they considered him useful.

  “Steer clear of him,” Koz warned me. “He might dig up something on you.”

  As the deputy stumbled home in bright sun to put on his uniform, I puzzled over his choices. We were opposites, each of us dressed in costume hoping to disguise his true identity.

  6

  The Murder Unit

  Ten o’clock Saturday night and my head was spinning. Flushed with fever, I had a raging migraine and already too much Tylenol. But sleep was not an option, and flu a weak excuse. Psycho planned a birthday celebration for Head Butt’s brother, the chapter’s newest hang-around. He expected me to be at Mickey McGees in twenty minutes. My hands shook as I laced up my boots. My face ached from the night before. Yellow tint shined beneath my right eye. My lower lip was swollen and my knuckles were split. My dog hid in my sheets. My girlfriend slept soundly. I still needed to do something about her, but at least for now she had promised to quit snooping.

  Loud music pulsed from inside Mickey McGees, a smoky, standing-room-only Irish bar that attracted a dangerous mix of bikers and yuppies. A security camera scanned the rows of motorcycles stacked in the parking lot. More recorders were tucked into ceiling nooks inside the bar. But all the monitoring proved no deterrence. The Vagos routinely pulled out the videos and shredded them. No witnesses. Several unmarked cars from San Bernardino’s gang unit dotted the dark streets in response to the random violence that had erupted just three weeks prior in another high desert bar between Victor Valley Vagos and local patrons. Those bikers, released on $50,000 bail, faced aggravated assault charges for the brutal beating of a student with a pool cue. Their arrests made local news but had little, if any, chilling effect on the club’s activities.

  Bandit and Psycho, well into their second round, stomped and clapped as a prospect, Rodney Rust, a musician by trade, belted out karaoke. He looked pissed. Lyrics morphed on the screen. I had no strength to walk the distance to the bathroom. My reflection in the chrome mirror was pasty white. Shapes moved behind me; pool sticks clacked against felt; balls swished into pockets. I nursed a beer, the urge to pee so strong my bladder hurt. Psycho, tired of Rust’s croaking, pounded on the table and ordered the prospect to the ground. “Knuckle push-ups.” Bandit joined in Psycho’s chant. My only thought was peeing. But just as I considered wading through the crowd, a short-cropped clean-cut pool player brushed Rust’s elbow. The prospect bristled at the contact.

  “This is a Vagos table,” Rust snarled, dribbling his beer on the kid’s Rockports. We were in trouble. I wanted to yell to the patron, Run, get the hell out while you can! But instead I quietly sipped my beer. Meanwhile, the patron looked perplexed, like he hadn’t heard Rust over the din of heavy percussion. He shrugged, positioned his pool stick on the table, and prepared to strike. Rust swung; pure reckless abandon cracked the kid’s jaw and jerked his head backward. Screams erupted nearby. Hang-arounds rushed from the darkness like wolves on a rabbit. Bandit, too, leapt from his barstool. Beer sloshed over his hand as he grabbed the kid’s hair and smashed his face into the pool table. As an active Marine stationed in Barstow, Bandit had managed so far to straddle both his gang and military lifestyles. As long as he committed no crimes; being a gang member apparently qualified only as an extracurricular activity. Red streaks blotched the green felt. The kid’s burly friend swung his stick at Psycho, and I knew that was the beginning of the end. Bandit rushed to defend Psycho, transforming the scene into a tangle of tendons, muscles, and veins, corded and wet under a cube of white light. Bandit wasn’t going to stop; relief came with each blow as he smacked his fist into thin, hollow ribs. Meanwhile, hang-around Joe picked up a stool, lifted it high above his head, and prepared to smash it into the first kid’s face. Joe’s whole body shook until he blurred around the edges.

  “Stop!” I blocked the blow.

  The kid writhed on the floor, clutching his head, blood oozing between his fingers. Patrons scattered into the far corners, slipping on pool balls and beer. Glass broke. Bottles smashed. Shards glittered on the floor. Jagged bits crushed between exposed wooden planks. People bolted for the exit. No police stormed inside. Joe tossed the stool against the wall and struck a woman in the head. Unflinching, he let out a low whistle, and Vagos bounded from the shadows, dragged the bloody kid by his limbs toward the exit, his sweaty body tinged yellow, as if dipped in wax. In the parking lot, his beating continued. Steel-toed boots pummeled his temple, and still the police waited for backup. Panicked, I pleaded with Joe, Eric, Walter, and Rust to stop, painfully aware that if I didn’t do something the kid would die.

  “Get the fuck inside.”

  And as if stunned back into consciousness, Joe suddenly stopped. The kid curled on the pavement. He coughed up blood and several teeth. Where were the fucking cops? I hoped they had staked the perimeter and had called for reinforcements. A strange stillness defined the moment between retreat and risk. Would the Vagos grab their guns and shoot their witness point-blank like a boar they’d tracked in a hunt? As we waited inside the now empty bar, my body shook with tension. Would they accept that I had stopped the beating because of the cops? Would they question my loyalty to the club because I had intervened? Joe was agitated. His boots crunched over shards of glass. The kid’s friend had already bolted. Bloody prints tracked his movements to the exit.

  This was it. No doubt he had gone to the police or the hospital. We all sensed it like trapped animals. But no one moved to leave. We were like sitting ducks. A bald bulb suspended from a ceiling cord spotlighted our faces. I steadied myself on a stool, needing so badly to pee. The kid moaned outside. At least he was still alive.

  Then, as if a camera flashed, cops, dressed in green raid jackets and Kevlar vests, stormed the bar. White lettering across their chests announced SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY SHERRIFF’S DEPARTMENT and HIGHWAY PATROL gang units. Barks, smoke, and commotion followed as police pinned my hands behind my back, cuffed me, led me outside into blinding white light, and shoved me into the back of an unmarked car. Psycho followed, his expression grim. Neither of us spoke. We suspected that the cops had a recording device planted somewhere inside the car. My knees hit my chest. A mesh cage separated our plastic bench from the front seat. Pain shot through my bladder. Psycho watched me intently. Joe and the others climbed into different cars. We traveled in tandem to the San Bernardino West Valley Detention Center—“Gladiator School”—one of the most violent facilities in the country.

  7

  Pulp Fiction

  Your asses would be dead as fucking fried chicken, but you happen to pull this shit while I’m in a transitional period, so I don’t wanna kill you, I wanna help you.

  —JULES, PULP FICTION

  My head spun with the image of the kid on the pavement. If he didn’t die, he would suffer for months drugged and numb from his injuries, fearful of leaving his house, worried about gang retaliation. All for what? So strangers could flex some muscle and prove their allegiance to a biker club? Across from me, Psycho dozed, jerking with the bus’s movements, and I marveled that he could sleep at all. Vagos were criminals always; they didn’t have downtime or conscience or moments where they lived any kind of normal. Undercover operatives debriefed, had hours, sometimes even days where they decompressed, but not bikers, not me. Safety dictated that I pretend to cherish the Life and not just the criminal enterprise.

  I had committed no assault. I knew I would be released. I was okay.

  “California Penal Code 186.22, the STEP Act,” Koz explained to me later. This was the Street Terrorism Enforcement and Prevention Act, which adds time to sentences for being a gang member.

/>   I cradled the phone between my shoulder and ear and squeezed my eyes shut; fever pounded in my head as Koz elaborated, and I heard only snippets of his plan: “Best to proceed as normal … no one but Sergeant Bentson knows who you are.” Bentson was head of the San Bernardino gang unit. Local law enforcement couldn’t be trusted with the knowledge of a federal investigation; in fact, the ATF already knew of four San Bernardino sheriff’s deputies who regularly supplied sensitive information to the Vagos. Koz and I agreed to inform the U.S. Attorney’s Office about my arrest and instruct them to keep me incarcerated in the state judicial system until it became “absolutely necessary” to intervene with the local District Attorney’s Office.

  The judge set our bail at $50,000 each. Psycho looked smug; he planned to be gone the next morning. He had “people” on the outside with cash.

  Meanwhile, deputies hustled us into a holding cell. The walls smelled of wet stone. My palms sweated on the steel bars. Psycho crouched low; his toes—the only body parts without ink—were exposed through the jail-issued sandals. They looked unnatural, sickly white like the underbelly of a fish. He mumbled something about scraping off his Vago tattoos and denying any affiliation with the gang.

  Familiar claustrophobia enveloped me. We had been dropped in a cage with no skylight. Shock and hurt slid behind Rust’s eyes as he absorbed Psycho’s betrayal. I couldn’t believe that Psycho had renounced his own leadership either, but I used his weakness to my advantage. All color drained from Joe’s face. Hang-around Walter clenched and unclenched his fists. Puffy bags framed his pale eyes. His expression cold and distant, broken already by a system meant to break people like him.

  Deputies targeted Walter, Joe’s half brother, and pegged him as a Vago. Because he was already on parole, they placed him with the Aryan Brotherhood, where he received lockdown in a super-maximum-security unit. Survival instincts kicked in. My emotions shut down, and although I knew my fate was temporary, that knowledge didn’t erase my apprehension. At least for now I was a gangster and a felon and, according to the jail’s classification system, I belonged in the “Murder Unit.”