by Jay Dobyns
Words were spoken. Pete Eunice from Dago, the one who’d been so nice and charming to us, tried to broker a truce. He didn’t try too hard.
The Hells Angels instinctively understand things other clubs don’t. They know that action is character. You can stitch all the patches you want and paste your chest high and low with them—telling the world you’ve killed for your club, you’ve eaten menstruating pussy, you’re a rapist and a gangbanger, you’re a sergeant, a president, someone who’s taken a bullet or a beating for the club, someone who’s been given the opportunity to rat and hasn’t, someone who’s kicked the shit out of a cop—but those little pieces of rectangular flash don’t mean a thing if you don’t know how—or when—to kick, shoot, stab, or swing.
The first guy to make a move, an Angel named Ray Ray Foakes, kicked a Mongol in the chest. A large group of people clung to these two as they fell away from the bar. People moved toward or away from the melee based on their allegiance: to themselves, away; to their brothers, toward. The fanned-out Angels converged. Mongols got blindsided by hammers and Mag-Lites. The hammers took cheeks and ears. The lights took necks and knees.
Knives were pulled and re-sheathed through the ragged layers of bikers’ sides and legs, only to be pulled back out into the recycled casino air, dripping with blood. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Guns were drawn and fired.
The place danced. Concerned faces looked in every direction. Some Mongols got truly scared. They inched to the periphery, trying to avoid an Angel-in-waiting, and hunkered by a twinkling slot. Most avoided contact. Once a safe distance was reached, some Mongols turned and ran. Others, fearing a larger assault, stripped their cuts and stuffed them into garbage cans and the spaces in between the game machines.
The Angels stood their ground.
More shots were fired.
The gunplay created random spaces around the shooters. Pete Eunice was no longer trying to make truces. He was firing away. Smitty didn’t have a gun, but he covered Pete. Another shooter was the Angel named Cal Schaefer. No one covered him. When firing, he stabbed the gun into the air, as if his target was within arm’s reach. The flare lit up the muzzle and the slug let fly. He twirled around, looking for another target, then twirled around again. The barrel sang.
No Angel removed his cut. Not one. Especially not those killed. The Nestlé’s Quik Rabbit tried to revive one of his fallen brothers and gave him mouth-to-mouth on the casino floor. It didn’t work. He hid his gun under the body of his fallen brother.
The riot took less than two minutes, and it was there for all to see on video surveillance. Watching it later, I was struck by the hapless choreography of it. People moved together as if attached with invisible strings. Hands moved up at the same time, faces turned to the same spot, shoulders inched in the same direction. There was no sound on the tapes, which made the reactions all the more surreal. Everyone moved like a dumb organism, like a cell drifting through a teeming medium of life and liquid. It was very strange and even beautiful.
But it was not beautiful. Three were killed—two Angels and one Mongol—and dozens were hospitalized. Later that night, another Angel was gunned down on a dark desert highway outside town. Average tourists and workers were traumatized but miraculously uninjured. The Laughlin riot remains the worst case of casino violence in Nevada history, a brazen act completely disrespectful of authority or the threat of death or imprisonment; a challenge to us, the people who are supposed to protect the public; a challenge to me, who felt even more compelled to use Bird against some truly violent sons of bitches.
5
BLACK BISCUIT BBQ
APRIL–MAY 2002
AT THE END of April, I went to Tucson to be with my family for a few days. Jack’s T-ball team was doing well and having fun, Gwen was running the house like an easygoing quartermaster, and Dale played her used guitar. She wanted a new one. I told her to keep at it a little longer. I said that when Gwen and I thought she was dedicated, we’d get it for her—a Gibson or whatever was best. She said OK. Daisy, our lazy hound dog, alternated between sleeping on a pad under the veranda and barking into the desert bush, warning rattlers, gila monsters, and roadrunners to keep their distance. I did yard work, cleaned the pool, and patched a spot on the roof. It was warm enough to be outside at night, and we ate dinner on the back porch.
A week later I headed back to Phoenix to meet with Joseph “Slats” Slatalla. He’d called to ask if I’d be interested in joining him on his Hells Angels case. We’d never worked together, but our wives were friends, so we knew each other socially. Where I was regarded as an accomplished undercover, Slats was renowned as a major-case guru. He’d worked in Detroit in the eighties and nineties—the Vietnam of federal law enforcement—and Phoenix and Miami after that. He’d recently returned to Phoenix and had been looking for a challenge commensurate with his drive and skills.
We met at the Waffle House at Baseline and I-10. We both had pecan waffles with fried eggs and sausage and hot coffee. The place smelled like a tar pit brimming with bacon drippings, syrup, and industrial-strength cleaners.
He said he’d been keeping tabs on Operation Riverside, that Sugarbear and I were doing good work. I said his case in Phoenix sounded promising.
He bit into a juicy sausage. Grease dripped down his fork and chin. “Just got a hell of a lot more promising. Those fucks fucked up at Laughlin.” I sopped up egg yolks with a wedge of waffle. He drank his coffee and continued, saying the Hells Angels had played their hand and played it wrong, that they’d practically forced us to step up to the plate and take a swing at the world’s baddest, most infamous OMG.
I put down my coffee mug. I knew he was right. I said, “So?”
“So.”
“So what are we talking about here?”
“You’re in a unique position.” He took a forkful of hash browns and swirled them in a pile of ketchup and Tabasco sauce. “Riverside is on autopilot. You’re gonna make a good case there. I’d love to have both of you come on. You’d be the lead UC for the whole thing, and Sugarbear could run the northern end of the op.”
“I can only speak for myself, but that sounds damn tempting.”
He stuffed the hash browns into his mouth. He spoke before swallowing. “So you’ll do it? You’ll come on board with me?”
“Dude, say the word and I’m there.” I could hardly believe I was about to be working with Joseph Slatalla. I wasn’t so much starstruck as I was excited. I knew that if we put in the hours, we’d have a legacy-maker of a case.
“Good.” He signaled to the waitress, who looked like she’d rather be playing pinochle.
I asked, “What’s the plan?”
Before answering, Slats asked the waitress for a Diet Coke with lemon. He watched her walk away. Then he turned to me with a wise smile and said, “Oh. Don’t worry. You’ll love it.”
* * *
SLATS PUT THE team together and we got under way in late May. Working undercover with me would be ATF special agent Carlos Canino, an old friend and partner we got on loan from the Miami field office, and veteran Phoenix police detective Billy “Timmy” Long. In addition, two very different informants would work with us. The first was Rudy Kramer, a confidential informant Slats had flipped. The second was a man simply known as Pops, a fifty-something paid informant and ex–street hustler who I’d worked with many times.
I’d met Pops in 1996 through investigators working with the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI). Pops worked as a traditional confidential informant in those days, exchanging legal leniency for information. Pops helped the OSI with a home invasion crew—a band of robbers who targeted residential homes—that included an Air-Force officer. At the time Pops was heavily involved in meth. He was a tweaker whose life could’ve easily ended in prison or a ditch. The OSI case went well, and after he took care of his legal problems, never having to serve any time, Pops started doing informant-for-hire work for the Arizona Department of Public Safety. His work was good, but he was inc
onsistent and he had trouble staying clean. He was recommended to me, but before we could work together I had to lay down the law. I told him I wouldn’t tolerate drug use and that if I found out he’d lied to me about anything, I’d cut him loose. He agreed to the terms, and it was the start of a unique relationship.
Over the course of several cases, I groomed Pops into a skilled operative. He learned to remember license plates, addresses, gun serial numbers, and names from utility bills. He became an excellent note-taker, emptying his brain of details as soon as the opportunity arose. He was as good at these aspects of the job—if not better—than most agents. He worked entirely for money, and initially money was his sole motivation. But over time he grew to enjoy working for the good guys. He dug the jazz and rush of running a good scam on bad people. Eventually I came to trust him as much as I trusted any of the other men or women I worked with. I introduced him around, and he got hired onto other investigations, always coming away with high praise and improved skills. By the time I’d asked him to join me on Black Biscuit, he was making a living working exclusively as a paid informant.
When I told Slats I wanted Pops, he asked why. I said, “This guy knows the meth game from the street up. He’s not a One Percenter, but he knows these guys in ways we simply can’t. He wouldn’t be faking.”
“Do you trust him?”
“Enough to let him carry a piece. Yes, I trust him like he’s one of us.”
“I’ll have to meet him, but OK. Go talk to him.”
I did. I went to Pops’s place in Tucson—he lived there with his wife and two whip-smart girls—and asked him if he wanted to work a big case for me. “Hell yes,” he said. I gave him the details. He said he was game to play a big role. I told him I couldn’t give him that, that he’d just be an associate. I didn’t make any bones about it: “You’ll get five hundred a week, no overtime, plus expenses. You’re going to make runs to Mexico for us. Agents can’t go down there. You’ll be traveling with another, less trusted informant—make sure he stays in line. As always, you’re our drug guy. You know the shit better than we do, and if there ever comes a time when one of us needs to take a bump or a puff, when we got no dodge or escapes left, then you gotta come to the rescue and be that guy.”
“All right.”
“Think you can handle that? Without getting hooked again?”
“Jay, I hook that shit again, I’m telling you now to go ahead and arrest me when it happens. That or shoot me. It won’t happen.”
“Good.”
In addition to the undercover crew, Slats put together a stellar task force staff of cops from a broad spectrum of agencies: ATF; the Phoenix, Glendale, and Tempe police departments; the Arizona Department of Public Safety; the Maricopa County sheriff’s office; and the Drug Enforcement Agency all contributed. Put together, the task-force members had over two hundred years of law-enforcement or military training and experience. Slats couldn’t persuade Sugarbear to come on board. He opted to see the Riverside case to the end. He eventually arrested all of the guys in that case and sent them each away for quite a while.
Every case gets a code name. We wanted something mysterious—“The Sonny Barger Investigation” or “The Arizona Hells Angels” didn’t have any pop. We also needed a name that would help keep the case hush-hush. Undercover work cuts both ways—we try to get in on them and, one way or another, they try to get in on us. There are plenty of cops who are buddy-buddy with Angels or Angel associates, and the Angels have plenty of friends, usually wives or girlfriends, who work for state or municipal offices. For those reasons we needed to keep our case on the down-low. Slats was a huge Detroit Red Wings fan, so he decided to call our case Black Biscuit, which is slang for hockey puck.
We were ready to go.
The Saturday before the day-to-day operations were to commence, Slats had a barbecue at his place. His wife cooked up a feast. Everyone was invited, including wives and kids. Making a weekend of it, Gwen and I checked into a hotel and left the kids with the grandparents. At the party we laughed and drank beer and sweated in the Slatallas’ backyard. It was a blissful state of communal denial.
At the height of the party, Slats made his way through the crowd, asking people to come inside. Gwen and I were chatting with Carlos, who was there alone, when Slats came up to us. We followed him, and on the way he threw out an empty beer can, grabbed a dripping fresh one out of an ice bucket, and snapped it open.
Once inside, he took his wife by the arm and climbed a few steps leading to the bedrooms upstairs. He turned around.
“Friends. Everyone. Please. You may think otherwise, but I’m not much for speeches. I just wanted to thank you all for coming. This meal we’ve made for you is a very small token of appreciation for what you are about to undertake. This is gonna be a long haul. It’ll take nearly all our time and energy. Make no mistake, no one has done what we’re about to do in the way we intend to do it. It’s going to take all the brains and balls and heart that each of us has.” He paused to take a long swig of beer. “I gotta warn all of you: This is going to be a shit detail.” Slats’s wife nudged him for cussing with kids around. He continued, “The work will be big and good, but the demand will be high. So I’m here to say now that if you or any of your families have any reservations about being involved, then, please, with my blessing and understanding, say so now and walk away.”
He paused. Silence.
I raised my hand. “Fuck it, Joe, I’m out.”
Everyone laughed.
Joe said, “All right, then, I’ll see you on Monday. Enjoy the last free Sunday of your foreseeable futures.”
6
RUDY WANTED TO KNOW WHERE I DID MY TIME
MAY 2002
OUR CI, RUDY Kramer, was a longtime biker and repeat offender. His rap sheet revolved around meth, which he had cooked, dealt, and used, thereby violating rule number one of the Successful Drug Dealer’s Handbook. He’d been pinched on a felon in possession of a firearm, which was made worse by the fact that the weapon in question was a machine gun. Given the alternative of turning informant versus going away for a very long time, he wisely chose to cooperate.
Rudy was not a Hells Angel, but he could name an impressive number of them from mug shots and claimed to be on speaking terms with at least three prominent Arizona Hells Angels: Mesa charter president Robert “Bad Bob” Johnston, Cave Creek charter president Daniel “Hoover” Seybert, and Sonny Barger himself. He told us Sonny had exchanged alcohol and drugs for the pleasures of Pepsis and ice cream. He also said that Sonny rode with a windshield to protect the tracheostomy hole he’d received as a result of laryngeal cancer.
Rudy also knew a guy named Tony Cruze, a greedy drug user who dealt openly in guns and narcotics. Cruze was the president of the Tucson Red Devils, a Hells Angels support club. Support clubs are distinct from their superiors—they have their own member rolls, clubhouses, and officers—but they operate with the official sanction of their parent clubs and do basically whatever’s asked of them. Other Hells Angels support clubs in Arizona at the time included the Spartans and the Lost Dutchmen, but the Red Devils were the largest and most dangerous. They mainly provided muscle to the Angels for enforcement, collection, and extortion jobs.
This was all great, but Rudy had one more box in his checkered past that sealed his importance to us. He was an inactive member of a Mexican OMG called the Solo Angeles, based in Tijuana, Mexico. The Solos had about a hundred total members, with minor representation in the San Diego–Los Angeles area.
We knew the Hells Angels were paranoid, but we also knew they weren’t insecure in the ways the smaller clubs were. If we’d run straight at the Hells Angels as average Larry Bad Guys, they would’ve ignored us or, at the most, handled us with extreme caution. We had to be invited into their house. It was an issue of respect. In biker circles this was universally understood, just like it’s understood that the sky is blue.
The plan was to have Rudy ask the HA permission to set up an Arizona No
mads charter of the Solo Angeles, and then we’d tell them we were Rudy’s crew. The fact that this club was Mexican dovetailed perfectly with my established claim that I ran guns south of the border. Being Solo Angeles Nomads, we wouldn’t need affiliation with an established charter, so existing members wouldn’t have an opportunity to get in our way. It also set the stage for RICO charges, since it would establish that the Angels controlled the outlaw clubs in Arizona. It was pluses all around. Rudy would be our president. Carlos would be a full patch. My trusted informant, Pops, would be a prospect, as would Billy “Timmy” Long. And I, Jay “Bird” Dobyns, would be the Solo Nomads’ vice president.
BEFORE WE GOT started, I had to meet Rudy. Slats set up a date at the Embassy Suites near the Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix.
Rudy knew practically nothing about me. By design, Slats hadn’t told him I was a fed. We wanted his first impression of me to be formed with as little prejudice as possible.
I rode my ’63 Harley-Davidson Panhead to the hotel. Slats’s car was out front. I was dressed in my usual. I wasn’t openly armed.
I knocked on the door of room 11. Footsteps came to the door and it opened, streaming sunlight into the otherwise dim room. Slats held the doorknob and waved me in.
Seated at a round table to the right of the door was a thick man with close-cropped brown hair who wore wraparound sunglasses. He kept a tidy mustache he was obviously very proud of, and a triangular tuft of brown hair was tucked below his lower lip. He had a deep, horizontal worry line on his forehead. He wore a black tank top. His entire upper body—arms and neck included—was covered in tattoos.
I turned to him and stuffed an unlit cigarette in my mouth. He pushed his seat back and stood up. A couple of seconds passed while we sized each other up.
“I’m Bird.”
“Rudy.”
I stuck out my hand and he took it. It was a knuckler of a handshake. He looked at my shoulders and chest, checking out my ink. He didn’t let go of my hand. I didn’t let go of his.
