Free Gods of Mischief by George Rowe Page A

kept secret was between me, John Carr and Kevin Duffy. Every precaution had been taken to safeguard my identity. Regardless, the word was out there now. North had started the rumor mill grinding. And once that snitch jacketgets hung on a man, it’s damn hard to remove. This was the worst possible start for someone in my situation, and my only defense was calling North out as a “fat, lying bastard” and demanding proof of my infidelity. The sergeant at arms promised he had a reliable source and would show his hand soon enough.
    â€œIf I find out this is true,” Big Roy warned me, “if it turns out you’re a rat, I will personally fuck you up, George.”
    Yup. North was going to be a problem.
    I’d been hanging around the Vagos about a week when I finally told my buddy Old Joe that I was thinking about joining the Hemet chapter. The conversation came up during one of our early-morning chats on the drive out to a tree-trimming job.
    â€œI don’t get it,” said Joe. “You’ve been doing nothing but bitchin’ and complaining about those people.”
    â€œJust gonna try it. See where it goes,” I said.
    â€œBut why? Why would you do that? They’re like a bunch of kids who never grew up. Why the devil would you want to hang out in bars and get into fights and all that other childish stuff?”
    Fact was, there was no rational explanation. Nothing I could say would make a damn bit of sense, so I shut my buddy off with, “Don’t worry about it.”
    End of conversation.
    Freight Train, who I’d stayed in contact with over the years, was even more upset—and that big Hells Angel didn’t mince words telling me so. Both he and his brother Donny, who was a full-patch Vagos one generation ahead of Big Roy and the Hemet boys, unanimously agreed I was a “dumb motherfucker.”
    Of course, they didn’t know my true motive for hooking up with the Vagos. Nor would I have shared it with them. Regardless of our past history, there was zero tolerance for snitches among outlaws of any generation. Had the brothers known I was working on behalf of the feds, they would have tag-teamed my ass and kicked it from one end of Riverside County to the other.
    Not long after I first started hanging with the Hemet Vagos, I went on my first official “run” with Green Nation—the annual New Year’s Run to Buffalo Bill’s casino on the California-Nevada state line. Club runs—always a good excuse to gather members in one location—were usually organized at the chapter level, but the largest, like the New Year’s Run, were handled by national and its top dog, Terry the Tramp.
    Tramp was best known for plotting runs to a biker bar north of San Bernardino called The Screaming Chicken or farther south to Mexican border towns for cerveza and señoritas. But because the Vagos’ international president had a hard-on for the slots, the largest runs were usually reserved for the Nevada casinos.
    By New Year’s 2003, the year of my first Vagos run, Tramp had reigned over Green Nation for seventeen years, governing his minions from his ranch-style home in Hesperia, a High Desert city in the Mojave. As testament to the devotion their international P inspired, many a Vago would have taken a bullet for Tramp. In fact, in their own way, many already had. Men had gone to jail on their leader’s behalf. It was telling that the rank and file had a pet name of their own for the man.
    They called Tramp “God.”
    The fact that their supreme being had clung to power for nearly two decades was no small feat and certainly no accident. Terry Lee Orendorff was a survivor, bred with street smarts, a criminal’s cunning and a gift for manipulation. Born in 1947, he was raised in El Monte, California, by his alcoholic stepfather, kept in a one-car garage like a caged dog. When Dad let little Terry out for some fresh air, the budding