Under and Alone Read Online Free PDF Page B

tailback position in football or learning to play jazz piano. An instructor can give you the basics, but it really comes down to your natural inclination, wit, temperament, and gift for improvisation. Undercover life is more art than science. You eventually learn the tricks of your trade on the street, as I did over some twenty years.
    By the time I embarked on my undercover role in the Mongols, I had gone UC on so many operations that I didn’t have to fashion a new identity out of whole cloth: Over the past decade I had developed a deep-undercover identity as Billy St. John, an alias I had used when infiltrating various violent far-right groups across the United States—the KKK, neo-Nazis, skinheads, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance—making undercover purchases of some serious heavy-duty weaponry, from M-16s to 30mm military cannons. In one investigation I’d gotten so deep inside the National Alliance—the largest and most active neo-Nazi organization in the United States—that I had not only become a member but had been invited to stay and work at the national headquarters in West Virginia. There I befriended the National Alliance’s founder and leader, Dr. William Pierce, author of
The Turner Diaries,
the apocalyptic white-supremacist novel later made infamous by Oklahoma City terror bomber Timothy McVeigh, who viewed Pierce as a kind of prophet of the coming racial war. In my personal copy of
The Turner Diaries,
William Pierce himself penned an inscription:

    Revolutionary regards
    To Bill St. John,
    A real Comrade
    Wm Pierce
    7/17/94

    But by January 1998, I was no longer doing neo-Nazi investigations; I was now riding a Harley around the biker underworld of Southern California.
    That’s the one thing I didn’t need to fake about my undercover persona: a genuine love affair with motorcycles. I’ve ridden bikes my whole adult life. I have a brother who bought a bike before me, when I was sixteen years old, a Triumph 650cc high-compression piece of crap. Somehow we got the thing running, but my brother was almost killed riding it. After I got out of the army and became a police officer in North Carolina, I bought my first Harley-Davidson. I was twenty-four. I’ve owned Harleys ever since, from hot-rod choppers to straight-off-the-showroom-floor stockers.
    Since the beginning of the year, playing my Billy St. John role, I’d been riding an ATF-owned Harley-Davidson and hanging out with some Hells Angels in the San Fernando Valley, trying to gather intelligence for an investigation being run as a joint effort between ATF, the IRS, and the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. Mostly I hung out at a dump of a strip bar called the Candy Cat in Chatsworth. The San Fernando Valley, made nationally famous by the LAPD beating of Rodney King and the Northridge earthquake three years later, was a Hells Angels stronghold.
    Working deep undercover requires a tempered adoption of the maxim “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Hanging with the Angels, I’d grown my hair long and wild. My blond-gray beard was raggedy, and to be perfectly honest, I think a few people were questioning my personal-hygiene habits. The rub, of course, was that my appearance had come to the attention of the ATF group supervisor and had started to piss him off. As the stereotypical paper-pusher, he had his own idea of what an ATF agent should look like—deep undercover or not.
    I had the Harley, I had the look, I had the undercover years and background in place. But I had something even more valuable: the benefit of learning from Darrin Kozlowski’s experience.
    We’d both been assigned to the Van Nuys ATF office, and I’d been able to watch Koz during his undercover operation in the Vagos just a year before. I was amazed that he’d actually been able to patch in. It’s no small feat to become a bona fide member of an outlaw motorcycle gang; it entails tests of loyalty, fortitude, stamina, and physical prowess. And that’s