Free Under and Alone by William Queen Page B

no way that the deputy and I could win a fight here—we’d both end up dead. I saw a phone booth with a light directly over it near the basketball area. Maybe I could make it to the phone. I could call Ciccone and have him call the sheriff’s department. Then they could radio the deputy and tell him to get the hell out of there. I felt the sweat beading up on my forehead. If was going to make a move, I had to do it now, before the deputy got out of his car.
    I had started to move toward the phone when the deputy’s car began to roll.
God, make him stay in the car; don’t let him get out,
I kept saying to myself.
    The patrol car kept moving, continued on out of the park. I just stood there, stunned. I regained my composure and stumbled back to my campsite. The party was over for me. I lay down on my sleeping bag and stared up the black sky, which now matched my mood. I was painfully aware that I was an ATF agent surrounded by outlaws.
    I couldn’t get the image of the Mongols planning the murder of a deputy out of my head. I knew that if these guys learned the truth—that I was not Billy St. John but Bill Queen, special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms—they wouldn’t hesitate one millisecond to put a bullet between my eyes.

6

    Deep-undercover assignments are always going to wreak havoc on an agent’s nerves. But there are many undercover roles—even working inside such organizations as the Mafia or the Aryan Nations—where violent criminal activity is going to come in spurts. The undercover is inevitably going to have a few days or weeks of downtime, some moments when the criminality takes a backseat. Not with the Mongols. I quickly saw that their entire lives were a blur of potential rapes, beatings, extortion, even murder.
    Unlike the Mafia, gangs like the Mongols do not exist for profit. They have various illegal moneymaking activities, ranging from drug dealing to armed robbery to trafficking in illegal guns and stolen motorcycles, but the criminal enterprise is not the glue holding the organization together. For gangsters like the Mongols, membership means a twenty-four-hour-a-day commitment to The Life. They despise legitimacy and have no desire to look like anything other than what they are.
    Women play a complex role in these bikers’ lives. They’re called “mamas” and “sheep” and “ol’ ladies” and are designated the sexual “property” either of an individual member or of the gang collectively. Women like Vicky, Rocky’s legal wife and the mother of his children, were granted a measure of respect within the gang, meaning no one would dare disrespect her or put a hand on her. Rocky, on the other hand, could beat the hell out of Vicky and no one would think to say a word to him about it.
    Probably the most infamous example of this twisted male-female dynamic, reported in
Newsweek
in 1967, was the case of an eighteen-year-old named Christine Deese, the girlfriend of a member of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club named Norman “Spider” Risinger. For violating the rule of not giving her ol’ man all her money, Christine was sentenced to a “punishment ceremony.” She was publicly crucified by Spider and his Outlaw brothers. According to
Newsweek,
she stood passively and “didn’t scream” as the bikers nailed her to a tree and left her there for several hours. When they finally brought her down and dropped her off at a West Palm Beach emergency room, she told the incredulous doctors that she’d fallen on a board with exposed rusty nails. The horrifying incident led to a national manhunt to capture the gang members involved and prompted a dire warning to both the bikers and their women from Florida governor Claude Kirk: “This bunch of bums has got the word they’re not welcome in Florida. . . . I hope young, thrill-seeking girls who go with them know they can get their fingers burned—or in this case, their hands nailed.” But after recovering from her wounds,