Kerrie Droban
2007
The Lyons Press
215 pages
Ahoy out there in the matrixnet. I borrowed Running with the Devil: The True Story of the ATF's Infiltration of the Hells Angels from the Toronto Public Library.
Kerrie Droban is a Phoenix AZ based criminal defense attorney turned true crime and suspense fiction author. Her 2007 book, Running with the Devil, explores the events of the Black Biscuits investigative operation undertaken by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to infiltrate the inner-workings of the Hells Angels in Arizona. The publication of Droban’s book precedes the book No Angel, by Jay Dobyns, who was the lead agent of the operation, and ultimately became an unofficial full patch member of the Hells Angels Skull Valley AZ chapter. Droban was thus the first to tell the story of Operation Black Biscuits.
Droban tells the story of Black Biscuits from the perspective of an external viewer to the scene, with an emphasis on the perspectives of the ATF undercover agents, undoubtedly because Droban had access to ATF documentation pertaining to the case. Droban structures the text as a continuous narrative, and as such it creates questions as to how the narrative as its constructed by Droban is actually manifest in the documents that ground it. For example, when Droban referrs to operative Bird’s state of mind, is that actually represented in the documents in some way? Did Droban confer with Dobyns to accurately represent an inner-state or was she deploying artistic licence? This isn’t to say that a reader has to take Jay Dobyn/Bird’s word for it when they’re reading No Angel, but No Angel does have a greater legitimacy on such matters as its told from an individual who was directly involved.
The story of Running with the Devil is that Dobyns, referred to only as Bird through the text, goes undercover with a team of ATF agents as a chapter of the Solo Angeles outlaw motorcycle club in Arizona, and ingratiates himself with the Skull Valley chapter of the Hells Angels. The operation lasts from 2002 to 2003, during which time Dobyns et. al. go from being Solo Angeles to becoming Hells Angels hangarounds, then prospects, then after staging the murder of a Mongol (a rival biker gang to the Angels) became full patch members. Much of the book describes the delicate acting Bird and his associates perform to insert themselves into the world of Outlaw bikers and maintain their cover without actually committing crimes themselves. The focus of the text is on Bird, his close calls with exposure, his relationship with his family, his relationship with the ATF, and his drive to go as deep as he can into the biker world.
Droban frames undercover work as a form of theatre, a mode of thought about such police-work that is, if I recall correctly, absent from Dobyn’s book, and also from William Queen’s Under and Alone, a 2002 memoir about infiltrating the Mongols Motorcycle Club. Considering undercover policing to be theatre raises questions about the stage, where it ends, what are its limits. Clearly, performing as a Hells Angel while actually employed as a federal agent has an intrinsic conflict embedded into it. The question that can never be satisfactorily answered by these kinds of texts is whether or not, and how, was that conflict preserved. The conflict within, the biker who knows that he or she is a federal agent is necessary. An actor on a space designated as stage does not have to worry about preserving the parts of themselves that are not the characters they play. Droban manages to scratch at this inner conflict by representing scenes of strained interaction between Bird (in biker appearance) and his family, but also in portraying Bird’s drive, to go as far as he can with his Biker persona, as an ideal for ATF success.
There was one particularly important aspect of Droban’s text that I thought was underdeveloped. Pretty well every figure depicted is little more than a one-dimensional tough guy with a nickname. Kerrie Droban was a lawyer prior to becoming a true crime and suspense author. I assumed, due to her experience as a defense attorney, that she would give the individual members of the Hells Angels a sense of humanity, however what she actually presents the reader with is a collection of mean men who say and do mean things. Dobyns and Queen create a greater degree of depth for the outlaws in their portrayals. Droban conveys the human in Bird and many of his law enforcement associates, however the other side are not given the same treatment.
Drogan’s text was an interesting although somewhat shallow portrayal of the events of Operation Black Biscuit. This shallowness may perhaps be a reflection of the materials she worked from; and while Jay ‘Bird’ Dobyns could speak from direct experience for his book, Drogan had to spark life to dry case documentation. One area where Drogan’s telling of the events is superior to Dobyn’s is in regards to the practical matter of the investigations carried out by other Motorcycle gangs into the roots of the Solo Angeles MC. Solo Angeles are a real MC based in Mexico, and Bird and associates were playing a dangerous game pretending to be a far-flung chapter of the club. Furthermore, once they staged the murder of a Mongol, they knew they couldn’t perpetuate the ruse much longer, the Mongols would have to look for their lost member, and the lack of a lost member would be a suspicious thing. Drogan considered a wide and interconnected world of biker clubs who keep tabs on one another. Dobyns, by contrast, constructs the situation as himself in the middle of an Arizona Hells Angels vs Mongols rivalry.
There are a number of these books about federal investigations into outlaw motorcycle clubs, and the result is that they only focus on these clubs as criminal enterprises. These books highlight the criminal side of the clubs although when they are read carefully a reader may notice that many of the club members are petty criminals at most. The worst of them (Hells Angels members with the ‘Filthy Few’ patch on their cut) are experienced killers, or are habitually engaged in an illegal trade of some kind, but the clubs do not seem to have a systematic, organizational interest in any particular criminal enterprise. There is no question that violence seems to occur wherever outlaw bikers are present, and that many bikers are indeed criminals, but many members are just weird guys who like that lifestyle. They may be tough and willing to do violence, but there’s not any particular criminal commitment made by individual Hells Angels when they join the club. William Queen, for example, noted that the Mongols chapter he infiltrated was constantly short of money, and always trying to come up with criminal to find cash but often fell through. Much of the Hells Angels’ income has come from merchandising their deaths’ head logo. They have even brought lawsuits against companies who have infringed on their trademark. Droban’s final chapter, listing the charges against the Angels who were indicted as a result of Operation Black Biscuit, noted that while several of the Angels were handed prison terms, the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) charges were dropped against everyone. This was not the first time Hells Angels were unsuccessfully charged under RICO, as the US government has consistently been unable to prove that the Hells Angels have an organization-wide commitment to any particular criminal enterprise, despite counting many experienced criminals among their members.
Yesterday, in fact, the president of the Toronto chapter of the Hells Angels was sentenced to six years in prison for drug charges. According to the Toronto Star, "last month a jury found the bikers guilty of those charges but not guilty of belonging to a criminal organization."
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