by Jay Dobyns
I knew I could cobble together a career of two or three years, but every year I’d have to re-prove myself in camp, and at best I’d be a third-or fourth-string option. My dreams were crushed and I didn’t know what to do. I’d gotten too used to crowds screaming for me, too addicted to adrenaline, to just let it go.
Eventually I turned to law enforcement. I was young and I bought into the Hollywood vision of being a cop. I considered the FBI and the Secret Service, but ultimately I ended up at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms—ATF. This was where I’d transform from star college athlete to hardened undercover cop.
It happened on one of my first training missions, and it went down like this:
We’d gotten a warrant for one Brent Provestgaard, who’d just gotten out of prison and was rumored to be in possession of a used.38 Rossi. We were going to bust him on ATF’s bread-and-butter violation: felon in possession of a firearm, 18 USC section 922(g) (1).
I was assigned outside perimeter cover with my training officer, Lee Mellor. We rode in a crappy 1983 Monte Carlo. We interviewed Provestgaard’s mom at her house south of the Tucson airport, at the intersection of Creeger Road and Old Nogales Highway. She said he wasn’t in and he’d be back sooner or later. We left and staked out the place.
What Mrs. Provestgaard declined to tell us was that her son had sworn he’d never go back to prison, and that he was out in the Tucson scrub shooting his .38.
He came home on his motorcycle. We swarmed and he bolted on foot. I took off, passing everyone and disobeying orders to stay back. While a 4.6 in the NFL is nothing special, it’s sick speed for a cop. It was a full-blown foot chase, but he knew the area and I lost him. I reassembled with my team and they ribbed me about how I was supposed to be some sort of star athlete, but I couldn’t catch a 150-pound junkie in motorcycle boots? No wonder I was in ATF and not the NFL, that kind of thing.
As we restaged, a neighbor yelled from her window that she’d just seen Provestgaard. We took off.
First rookie mistake: no matter how out of breath you are from chasing a perp, never, ever take off your ballistics vest when there’s a lull in the action.
Which is exactly what I’d done.
The team split up. I walked behind our much-loved boss, Larry Thomason, through an overgrown tract between a development and the road. Tall grass and low trees were everywhere. We crept past the hidden Provestgaard. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye but before I could react he was up with his gun on me.
“Drop it, motherfucker!”
I knew better. I held my gun, a. 357 Smith & Wesson revolver, at the ready position: pointed to the ground at a 45-degree angle. He cocked the Rossi’s hammer, yelling, “Motherfucker, I will kill you where you stand! Drop the fucking gun!”
I holstered my revolver and put my hands in the air. Thomason cocked his hammer. He had Provestgaard in his sights, but he was toting a two-inch-barrel revolver and he was thirty feet away. Thomason knew that if he fired there was a good chance he’d hit me. He held. It was the right decision, but one that gravely altered his psyche: He was a committed leader in charge of showing a young man the ropes of a dangerous profession, and he never forgave himself for not taking that shot. I’ve always told him that the blame was mine, but he never accepted that.
The others, searching an adjacent area, responded. When Provestgaard saw the empty Monte Carlo, his eyes—intense, bottomless specks—lit up. He was going to get out of there.
Provestgaard’s gun was thrust out in front of him. When he got close enough, I planned on pulling his arm and using it as leverage to disarm him. That plan died when he tucked the gun to his side. Before I knew it he had me in front of him, his arm around my neck, the cold barrel of the Rossi at my temple.
I didn’t like that. I suddenly realized that it had rained earlier and the desert brush smelled like a clean backyard, which is what I imagine heaven must smell like. I hoped I wasn’t about to find out if my imagining was correct.
We moved to the car. Provestgaard shoved me into the driver’s seat and squeezed into the back, keeping the gun on my head. ATF agents surrounded us, their weapons drawn and their mouths running.
Provestgaard said, “Close the door and drive, motherfucker!”
I didn’t. The car wasn’t running. The keys were in the ignition. He shoved the barrel into the hollow of my neck. I wondered: Should I drive, put the seat belt on, and run into a telephone pole? Or get shot here and let my partners waste him? Or hope one of them gets a clean line on him right this second? Or lie down and try to stay out of the way of everyone’s bullets that were sure to puncture the Monte Carlo any second? Or, or, or … drop the keys? Yes, drop the keys. If I was going to die, then he was going to die too. I pulled the keys out of the ignition and let them fall into the footwell.
I said, “I dropped the keys.”
“Motherfucker—”
I leaned forward and Provestgaard did too. Mellor, who was closest to the passenger’s side of the car, stuck his revolver in the rear window gap and emptied it. Others fired. Provestgaard, his body shocked from the bullets cleaning out his heart and lungs, reflexively squeezed the Rossi’s trigger. The bullet went in between my shoulder blades, just missed my spine, punctured the top of my left lung, and exited under my collarbone.
Provestgaard had the death rattle.
I had a hole in my chest.
They call it a sucking chest wound because when you inhale, air is sucked through the wound directly into the void of a collapsing lung. Blood gushed out of the hole like water from a garden spigot.
We were dragged out of the car. Provestgaard was cuffed (you have to love police procedure in times like this), and laid in the dirt faceup. I was shoved into the backseat, in pools of Provestgaard’s blood and bile and tears, and Thomason jumped into the front seat and took off. I was in and out of consciousness as Thomason channeled Dale Earnhardt Jr. through the Tucson dusk.
I said the Lord’s Prayer and apologized to my parents for not being a good enough cop to make them proud. Then I took a little nap.
I came to at the hospital. I was on a gurney, the ceiling rushed by in blue and white streaks, the soft but anxious pitter-patter of nurses’ and orderlies’ feet on linoleum filled my ears. There were two black nostrils above me, and above them a tuft of brown hair, and around that a half-moon of white paper. A hat. My nurse. Her gaze was locked on the horizon.
I asked, “I’m—I—am I going to die?”
She looked down. She was pretty. Her left hand pushed into my chest. “You’re hurt bad. We’re not sure yet.”
I passed back out.
I woke back up to a screaming pain in my chest. A boyish resident was inserting a clear tube into a hole he’d scalpeled through my rib cage to prevent me from drowning in my own blood. The tube would also be used to clear blood clots before I went into the operating room. I’d never felt such pain and discomfort. Having an inch-wide tube inserted into a raw hole of flesh was like, well, it was just like that. I was not anesthetized—there hadn’t been time. I was dying. I looked at the tube, which was attached to a pump. Stewed tomatoes—aka my blood and guts—pulsed through it. When he was done with that, the resident directed me to a video screen. He said proudly that they’d put a shunt in my femoral artery that helped guide a medical camera through my torso. He said they were looking for heart and arterial damage caused by bullet frag. I thought, Far out.
I passed back out.
I woke back up naked and freezing. A nurse leaned over my midsection, holding a thin tube, giggling. I asked her what was so funny? I knew she was laughing at a shriveled dick whose size would have embarrassed a twelve-year-old boy. I gathered all my strength and said, “You could have a little respect for a guy who should be dead, and what exactly is your name?” She straightened up and stuck the catheter in. She covered me up and put her hand on my forehead. I passed back out.
I woke back up. I was in a bed. The bed was in a recovery room. There were
all the usual machines going beep-beep. There were IV bags and fresh flowers and foil balloons. There was an oversized teddy bear. My feet were elevated. And there was the tube, inserted cleanly into my chest, surrounded by white gauze and tape. A beep-beep went off, unlike the beep-beeps monitoring my heart and respiratory rates. A sound like a small servo followed. Not ten seconds later I was as high and happy as I could be. I passed back out.
I woke up, I passed out, I woke up. Nurses changed my bedpan and sponged me down. I recovered some strength, I got up and walked around, dragging my setup—the IV, the morphine drip, the chest tube detached from its pump—around with me. After a few days I could walk up and down the hall once. After a week I could walk around the recovery unit. Being so weakened was a new experience and a definite low point. It’s truly humbling to be reminded that ultimately we’re just a body. The mind gets a lot of attention, but it is housed, for better or worse, in such a fragile thing. The body goes and, well, who knows? This is why I believe in God.
I prayed. I’ve always been an imperfect Christian. I prayed for my family and for myself. I prayed I’d get to go back to the streets, to go back to work.
As I improved, I began to spend equal amounts of time awake and asleep. I befriended Dr. Richard Carmona, the surgeon who’d operated on me. He was a high-school dropout who’d enlisted in the Army, joined the Special Forces, became a decorated Vietnam vet, and then returned to civilian life, where he took up a career in medicine. He was the head of trauma services in Tucson and moonlighted as a SWAT operator with the Pima County sheriff ’s office. Not ten days after I came in, he was shot himself while executing a warrant. He made a full recovery and eventually went on to become the seventeenth U.S. surgeon general. Gaining Dr. Carmona as a friend was one of the best things that came from my getting shot.
People visited, they stayed too long, my mother cried. My dad, shocked and pale, said he was proud of me, even though I pointed out that I’d been a fool. We agreed that I’d been lucky. Other people came: college buddies, cops, my first wife, whom I’d married out of college. The pump attached to my chest tube ran nonstop. It cleared my wound of clots and errant blood, emptying the stuff into an otherwise white bucket by my bedside. When people stayed too long, I wiggled until the suction caught something, expelling it into the bucket like a tiny abortion. That usually sent them packing.
I got deathly bored. You can watch only so much TV, and the flowers die if they’re not watered. I didn’t do a good job of watering them. The balloons deflated. It’s as if these things are brought to give their meager life-forces to your recovery, dying along the way. I was being reanimated by withering roses and expiring helium. Hell, morphine makes you think funny things. I’d developed quite a taste. No doubt, I was in excruciating pain, especially the first week, but after that it was more recreational than essential. My morphine bump was self-administered but limited by a timer—I couldn’t hit myself more than once over a three-hour period. So I secured the switch with some medical tape from my IV and I’d get a narc bump whenever the timer went off, awake or asleep. I had some wild dreams. It was heaven.
The director of ATF called. He called me his golden boy. I didn’t like being called a boy, I was twenty-six. He said he’d heard good things about me, and that if I played my cards right I could have his job one day. He told me to get well soon and get back on the job, that they needed more guys like me in ATF. I thanked him and hung up.
At night I’d wake up from time to time. I had a funny feeling. The lights were low, the machines beep-beeped. As I got better, there were fewer and fewer of them in the room. A good sign. The feeling I got was a new one. It was a rush I’d never known. On the football field, I’d been hit a thousand times by hundreds of guys my size or bigger. I’d taken some real kill shots and always tried to get back up right away. It was a pride thing. When they dragged me out of the car, my chest spurting and gurgling, I actually pulled myself into a sitting position. It was the best I could do. The new feeling was this: I couldn’t be stopped. After being shot, I began to feel the first pangs of invincibility. The rush of near-death did something dangerous to me, though I couldn’t see it at the time. I didn’t want to get shot ever again, but I wanted to get as close to that flying bullet as I possibly could. Getting cheered by eighty thousand football fans was an incredible feeling, but it didn’t even register when compared with the rush of walking the line between life and death when no one was watching.
I’d taken the prescribed amount of painkillers, but that didn’t change the fact that when I left the hospital I felt like a full-blown junkie. I had black circles under my eyes and puked brown tar for a week. No appetite for anything but the smack I couldn’t have. I cleaned up: shakes, sweats, tears, the whole thing.
My wife at the time wanted to know if that was it for me. She wanted me to get out. I couldn’t blame her. I said this was why I was in it. She asked, “To get shot?” I said, “No, to go toe-to-toe with these guys. I lost this time, but I won’t lose again.” Not long after that, we got divorced.
The director’s words rang in my ears: I could have his job. His job involved a large slab of wood and an executive-style telephone with lots of buttons and lights. Shoot, in that year, 1987, he probably even had his own computer. It didn’t appeal to me. The bullet put the rush of the streets in me and through me. It guaranteed I’d never direct anything but myself, and convinced me that large desks were for castrated dummies. I thought, Fuck that, I’m gonna be an undercover.
3
“YOU’RE LOOKING AT THE LOVES OF MY LIFE IS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING AT.”
AUGUST 2001–JANUARY 2002
IF ANYTHING, THE shooting proved that my job, and therefore my life, was not glamorous in any way. Pathetically, I’d imagined that undercover life would be like Miami Vice—full of cigarette boats, fast cars, expensive clothes, and perfect tens in bikinis sitting in my lap while I negotiated with drug kingpins. Instead, I confronted toothless strippers and disgruntled Vietnam vets, and did deals with jonesing tweakers in trailer parks while getting shot by a broke-dick ex-con who lived with his mom.
Still, I loved the job. After the shooting, I went back to the academy to complete my training. Upon graduation, they sent me to Chicago, where I learned my new job with another young agent, Chris Bayless, a dynamic and intelligent undercover operative who remains one of my best friends.
And what a job! In the years between the shooting and the summer of 2001, I’d done and seen things that citizens simply don’t do or see. I’d been in another shoot-out, I’d had an inhuman number of guns shoved in my face, I’d bought and sold tons of drugs, and I’d made hundreds of solid collars. I’d worked African-American gangbangers and Italian mobsters with Chris; the Aryan Brotherhood with Special Agent Louis Quiñonez; and bikers from Georgia to Colorado with a bunch of different partners, including one of my ATF mentors, Vincent Cefalu. By 2001, I thought I’d seen it all.
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 outfi
ts: 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.
