1112: Jay Dobyns | Undercover with the Hells Angels Part Two

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, part two with Jay Dobbins.
If you haven't heard part one, definitely go check that out. We're going undercover in the Hell's Angels, a fascinating episode so far.
All right, let's jump back into it with Jay Dobbins. You mentioned in the book that a small number of outlaw bikers have a lot of influence over the more restrained guys.
There's career criminals that do nothing but drugs and crime, and they have a lot of influence over the other guys who maybe have functional lives outside the gang. And that drives a lot of the violence and crime.
And my very limited experience with, say, Hell's Angels in New York City, there's a headquarters there. And if you go to the convenience store or any of the bars nearby, they're in there and you can say like, oh, Hell's Angels.
Wow. Are you from New York? No, I actually am from California.
I just drove here over the past couple of weeks. Wow.
How long does that take? Now we do it in five days, but it's exhausting. You're small talking with them about something they did, but you're not like, so did you bring meth with you? Like you don't say anything like that.
And they're perfectly friendly. They don't kick you out of the bar or push you off the bar stool.
It's almost confusing. Not every Hells Angels patch that I crossed paths with was a murderer or a rapist or a gun runner or a drug trafficker.
There were plenty of them that I crossed paths with that weren't actively, at least actively, involved in criminal activity. When I crossed paths with those people who weren't actively criminal, I didn't have much interest in them.
Why? Unless that guy could open a door to someone who was involved in that, I didn't have time to waste on those guys. One of the positions they take in their defense is that we're a club.
We're not a gang. There's two different definitions.
They actually fit both. We're not an international organized crime syndicate.
Well, they do fit the definitions of that. But one of their statements is that we're not a criminal organization, an organization that may have criminals within it.
Like the police. There's some accuracy to that, too.
But if you're part of an organization and your organization is saturated with criminals, then, yes, you are part of a criminal organization. Yeah.
You don't get to split the hair on that one. Yeah, that's where the lawyers come and they go, well, we're going to argue this way.
And the prosecutor says, and we're going to argue the other way. Although you mentioned in the book, something interesting that I'd never heard before, which is often undercover police or law enforcement, they end up sympathizing with the gangs or they even form their own motorcycle clubs, like cops having a motorcycle club or gang or something.
What's that all about? What's going on there? I think occasionally there is some Stockholm syndrome that occurs. I was very aware of that.
I worked hard to avoid that. I woke up every day and reminded myself of who I was, what team I was playing for, and that if these guys figure out who I am, I'm not long for this earth.
I reminded myself of that. But there is maybe a sexy, glamorous element to that lifestyle, to the freedom of it.
You walk into a nightclub with a Hells Angels vest on your back, with a Hells Angels patch. Man, in that world, you're a celebrity.
People are stepping out of your way. The Red Sea part lets you go to the front of the line.
And people are buying you drinks and giving you drugs. And women are throwing themselves at you.
Not because of who you are, not because you're charming or handsome or whatever those other variables might be. It's because of that patch on your back and the notoriety it brings and the reputation of violence and intimidation it holds.
Right. So that appeals to a certain type of person who then is maybe willing to defend that, I guess, with their life.
It doesn't seem worth it to me, but I'm also not the target market for that sort of thing. If you take somebody who is an unknown, is invisible in society, when they put that vest on, like I said earlier, they become a celebrity.
And the Hells Angels, unlike any other motorcycle gang, through their history have become beyond mythical. They've become part of Americana.
They are part of American history, of the history of crime and punishment. And so all those events, all those historical events, events like the Altamont Motor Speedway event, where they were bodyguarding and protecting the Rolling Stones at this massive concert, 1969, 300,000 people in attendance.
And they killed a concert goer, like, in front of all these people. Like, events like that? I was crossing paths with guys who weren't even born in 1969 who were riding that reputation.
And then you get the Sons of Anarchy, and it's clearly about them slash all motorcycle clubs. They were consultants for them on the show to make it look more realistic.
And people are obsessed with that. That show ended years ago.
People still talk about it. I watched it.
Like, where are they doing next? Where are the Sons of Anarchy? Where's Jax Teller going next? And Hollywood and television, not just in the motorcycle gang world, but when they're depicting the crime world, be it traditional organized crime or whatever, they portray it in a sexy, glamorous, appealing way. The truth is when you see behind the scenes, it's not sexy.
It's not glamorous. It's a nasty, dirty, bloody, vomit-covered scab of a life.
That's the truth of it. But when I realized that very early on, before the Hells Angels case, just when I began to saturate the crime world as an undercover agent, and when I realized it wasn't glamorous, it wasn't sexy, it was nasty and dirty and bloody and dangerous.
And when I realized Hollywood has lied to me, Hollywood has created this illusion for me that is not true, when I realized the truth, I loved it. I loved every day.
I felt like I had a purpose. I felt like I stood for something.
Like, my job was to get next to bad people who were doing bad things to good people. When I became an ATF agent, I considered that my highest honor to be asked to stand up and defend innocent people against the predators.
If you're infiltrating them, don't they try to do the same thing? I mean, look, they don't have an undercover program, but you know, like their guy's cousin works for the FBI. Are they not? Hey, you got to tell us if you see anything about our club, they must be surely they're doing that.
Absolutely. And they're very good at infiltrating and saturating all these elements of society, including law enforcement to gain intelligence.
Knowledge is power, but knowledge is power on both sides. It's power for them too.
The more they know, the more they know. Yeah, I got a friend who is Canadian, and he was working for the RCMP, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, doing something like processing wiretap transcripts.
And then one day his boss was like, hey, you are on some of our surveillance because your childhood best friend, his dad is a hell's

angel or whatever.

And you are fired, obviously, because you are the one who is processing the wiretaps

of your friend's dad and his associates planning crimes.

We cannot trust you with this information anymore.

But had he actually been a bad actor instead of a kid with a summer job, he could have

probably just said, hey, I can't associate with you guys.

They're going to catch you on surveillance. I know you're on surveillance because I'm reading the transcripts.
Here's what they say. Here's what they know.
Here's what they don't know. Surely they get lucky like that or deliberately put people in those positions.
I was not a part of this investigation, but as an example of what we're talking about, the Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls murders. Death Row Records had hired off-duty LAPD officers to be a part of their security team.
Those LAPD officers were previously Bloods gang members, and so they had insider information. And I can't speak to the details of that.
I know in this 30,000 foot view, looking down historical perspective of that investigation, that was by design. Yikes.
That sounds leaky. It's crazy that cops can come from gangs.
It doesn't make a ton of sense. I assume there's a policy about that now, but who knows? Well, because a kid grows up involved in a gang, does that automatically mean he's not going to be a good policeman? I think it's the other way around.
He's probably going to be a really good street cop because he knows what's going on. It does, but if you hold on to that gang mentality and if you hold on to that loyalty now as a lawman or a lawwoman or a member of our military, you know what? Now your loyalty is divided.
Yeah, it's a question of loyalty. That's a tough thing to test for.
A lot of my friends from law school who wanted to join the FBI, they couldn't do it because they'd smoked weed in college. And I was just thinking, you're going to try to catch the biggest criminals in the country or terrorists, but this guy who's a certified genius is disqualified because he rolled up a bunch of joints freshman year.
Who are you going to hire who's going to understand the mindset of a criminal when you can't even get a pothead past the screening? Well, those standards in today's world have been loosened a little bit just because of culture and society. Sure.
Not entirely, but they've been loosened at least from when I got hired on the job. But like I was one of those guys.
I was one of those guys who got hired who didn't understand the street and had to learn it on the fly to be effective. You said it's important to build trust or at least the illusion of trust.
Tell me about how you do it, but tell me what you mean by illusion as well. I think the illusion of trust comes from our street theater examples of showing them and involving our suspects in crime events and creating an illusion that they ultimately believe to be accurate or true.
I think we're talking about two different things to some extent. But when you're dealing with an informant with a confidential source of information, they have all different motivations.
They're human beings as well.

The first thing is to figure out, what is this person's motivation? Have they just found some integrity and they have knowledge of something that they're uncomfortable with and they want

to do something about it? Maybe. Are they looking for revenge? Maybe.
Are they looking for a payment,

a reward? Maybe. There's a lot of different variables, but part of assessing how much trust you place in a confidential source is identifying what's their motivation to help me.
So some motivations are stronger than others, right? If one guy's like, you're going to go to prison for life for trafficking and weapons and violent crime, that's a pretty strong motivation to help you. But if it's just ego validation, they could maybe get that elsewhere, like by betraying you to the gang.
Someone's trying to work off charges and they're being leveraged into cooperation. Okay, that deserves a certain level of confidence or trust and decided individually versus someone who maybe just

morally and ethically is opposed to the world that they live in and wants to do something about it

versus the guy who's like, I'm neither one of those people. I just want to get paid.

I'm going to help you in return for a paycheck, for a reward. There's so many different motivations that someone might have that's part of the equation, that's part of the trick, figuring it out.
You mentioned riding the motorcycles with these guys is really hard to do. You're not just learning how to ride a motorcycle, you're going really fast and you're in this tight formation.
Tell me a little bit about that because there's rules in the formation too, right? You're not just riding on a highway like a normal cycle.

Like I was in a motorcycle guy.

And so now you're dealing with people

who are motorcycle guys.

Some of these guys have been riding motorcycles

since they could walk and they ride them in daring ways

and they ride fast and they ride hard.

You're riding in formation at times, sometimes 20, 30, 40, 50 people deep, two by two, side by side. You could reach over and touch the handle grip of the motorcycle riding by your side.
You're 18 inches behind the wheel in front of you, stacked up all the way down. If you're a master motorcycle rider, you got to be on your game, but you might be comfortable in that.
I wasn't. I was at a point in the investigation when I felt like I had built some trust and some loyalty and some love.
I was telling Joe Slotel, I was telling my case agent, these guys aren't going to hurt me. They're not going to kill me.
They're going to protect me if we get into a problem. You know how I'm going to die in this case? I'm going to die on this case, running my motorcycle into a telephone pole, trying to keep up with these dudes.
Yeah, that's terrifying. And you're not allowed to pass it.
There's a couple of rules, right? You're not allowed to pass someone's front wheel. How does that work? These guys ride the equivalent of the Blue Angels or the Thunderbirds.
They ride in precision, and they're very good at it.

One of the first times out, I was riding with the Mesa, Arizona Charter, and they were very

good at it.

They rode in a very tight pack.

And I'm at the back of the pack, and the president came up to me and said, keep up.

What he's saying, look, if we blow red lights, you better blow the light. You better lay off the brakes.
Don't embarrass me. Don't be that guy who like hits the brake when the light turns red.
Blow through. I was white knuckling, riding with these guys, at least probably the first half of the investigation.
It was a two-year investigation. Towards the end, I felt pretty confident.
I felt like my skills maybe not had caught up to these guys, but I was competitive. But getting to that point, I was like, man, I would get through at the end of the night, like bar hopping with these guys going from spot to spot.
And I would get back to my undercover house and think only by the grace of God was I not killed on that motorcycle tonight. Wow.
Jeez. That would be as scarier, scarier than dealing with all these people and engaging in undercover work in the first place.
And anybody that's seen a motorcycle accident in real time firsthand, oh my gosh, they're terrible. It's messy.
Yeah, it's messy. Just a meat crayon, even if you have protective gear on.
And that's if you don't smash yourself into some. Terrible.
The aftermath of a bad motorcycle accident is something that once something has been seen, it can never be unseen. You don't want to see it.
First impressions you talk about a lot in the book as well. Super important, especially for undercover.
How do you make a strong first impression specifically in the criminal underworld? You mentioned never take your guns off for anyone or there's things like that, but tell us about this. You know what? I think very much in the criminal world applies to real world, applies to society.
When you treat people respectfully, you can expect or demand to be treated back respectfully. And I tried to do that.
I tried to be very human about it. When I shook hands with someone, when I was being introduced to someone, I would take my sunglasses off or lift my sunglasses up so I could look them in the eye.
If I had riding gloves on, I would take my glove off and shake hands fist to fist, skin to skin. Those little elements of displaying respect and then knowing your place.
Like I was a nobody, man. I was at the bottom of the barrel.
I was the last rung on the ladder. So I wasn't in a place where I could like jump up and go sit down and put my arm around some shot caller.
They'd be looking at me like, dude, punk, who are you, man? Like, I don't know who you are. Get the f*** away from me.
I was respectful of that. I had to earn the ability to speak to people like that.
I suppose you could just show up and do that, but I think you would draw suspicion by doing that. Like this dude's trying too hard.
I had to try hard without giving the impression that I was trying too hard. You know who won't beat you with a lead pipe for accidentally bumping into them at a bar? The amazing sponsors that support this show.
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All right. Back to Jay Dobbins.
You mentioned that real cops don't do drugs unless our lives depend on it. What's up with that rule? It seems like it would be really easy to just do a couple lines of blow here and there, like lawyers do it.
That's not exactly an advanced kind of thing. Why the prohibition on this? Would it make things easier? 100%, obviously.
It goes back to early in our conversation about outrageous government conduct. If ultimately my investigation ends and I am a witness in the witness box and I'm telling a jury and a judge what I experienced, that defense attorney is going to say, you know what? My client that's sitting next to me here is the defendant in this case.
And that agent did everything just as bad, was just as nasty as my client. You can't just nonchalantly violate the law and then expect to not be held accountable for it and then hide behind a badge or hide behind an undercover persona as your excuse.
I suppose there's also a world in which you say, and then what happened? Are you sure about that? Because you were high out of your mind on methamphetamine during that entire evening. And we know that because you're talking 120 words permitted on the tapes, and we have you on video doing it.
That's probably not a good look either. If you were doing that, what kind of credibility would you have as a witness?

Yeah, depends on the crime.

But yeah, it's a tougher argument for sure.

Your kid calls at one point while you're in a meeting with the gang.

How do you deal with something like that?

I'm surprised you answer that.

I guess maybe you didn't have a caller ID on your cell phone at that time, or you're

not sure.

It seems like a call you might want to put to voicemail.

My kids were born into their father being an undercover agent. That's all they've ever known.
We had rules like at my house. We had our own protocols.
It's not like you can never, ever see your kids again. You're out in public.
You're interacting. One of the rules I had with my kids was the equivalent of a traffic light.
If I was with my daughter or my son, and we were approached by a suspect in a case, like I would tell them, think like a traffic light. If it's red, just stop what you're doing.
Hold tight. I will figure this out.
If it's yellow, we need to be cautious. We need to be on guard.
If it's green, we can just go. And so I would tell him like, hey, you know what? If I'm holding your hand and we cross paths with someone, yellow light, that means, hey, we need to be careful now.
We need to pay attention. That did happen to me.
I was with my daughter at one point and I crossed paths with one of the suspects in our case, the Hells Angels case. And it was very matter of fact, hey, who's this? That's my daughter.
It was part of my cover story. I built my cover story very close to the truth.
But I do remember telling her, I see this guy approaching and said, do you remember the traffic light? She's like, daddy, I'm not sure I remember it right now. And I'm like, it's okay.
We got a yellow light right now. Just be cautious.
But then after we separated, I told her, if you ever see that guy again, you run as hard and as fast as you can and don't stop. I will come and find you.
That's a scary person. As an undercover agent or officer, you still have a real life.
You still have families and you have backgrounds and you have all those things

that any normal, real person has. You don't just completely walk away from that.
At least I never

did. There may be stories of where people completely left their family, completely left

that life behind and never touched it. I think Joe Pistone, I think Donnie Brasco, like at least

touched on that to some extent. That's a guy who's on the Mount Rushmore of undercover work.
You know, he's so legendary, but he's still overlapped with his family at times, too. You said, when you become a Hells Angel, everything else about you is now moot.
They have a rule book that makes the Division I football playbook look like a pamphlet on buying a jacuzzi. I'm so curious what kind of rules there are.
We mentioned never passing a full patches front wheel or something when you're driving, but what kind of other rules are there? I know there's rules about girlfriends and wives and things like that. Maybe you can give us some examples of the rules, and especially if they're weird.
There's pages and pages and pages of typewritten bylaws, things that you can and can't do.

One of the things that stunned me in today's world, and now granted we're talking about 20 years ago when this investigation was active, but nonetheless, even 20 years ago,

like written in the bylaws were no fill in the blank with the most offensive, obscene word you can use to

describe a black person.

No fill in the blank in the club.

It was written down.

It was in their bylaws.

And I remember reading that and I was like, man, I get that there's this racist element

to what we're doing, but like you guys wrote it down and made it part of the bylaws. No blank in the club.
I was like, okay, like I'm not making these rules. And that was for me, to a large extent, that was compromising because I wasn't raised that way.
That's not the mentality I had. Like I was an athlete.
Like I had spent my youth and as a young adult in locker rooms and on sports fields with people of all different colors, all different backgrounds to say that there's a rule written down that like I cannot associate or be friends with this person now. It was unsettling to me.
What are some of the weirdest rules that almost don't make any sense until you think about it or until you explain it? One, like a riding rule, and I can't say for certain that this was written down, but it definitely was impressed on me, was that as a prospect at riding with other members, I could not let my front wheel cross that member's back wheel. It was a violation of that delineation of status within the gang, at least not without being invited.
If you're riding behind someone and you're behind a member and you're being respectful and he waves you up, come on. Okay.
Now I've been invited up, but I couldn't do that on my own. I did one time without knowing the rule.
And when we stopped for gas, a member came back and said, next time you do that, when I hit you in the mouth, you'll know why. Yikes.
Yeah. You're assuming a higher status that you didn't earn if you do something like that.
There was a time I wore rings on all my fingers and I had a ring that had the Nazi SS lightning bolts on it. It was a prop.
That wasn't my mindset or my mentality. Yeah, I assume it wasn't part of your police uniform.
It was a prop. And a member of my charter came up and said, you got to take that ring off.
That type of paraphernalia is illegal in Germany. In Germany, you can't display like the SS lightning bolts or a swastika in Germany.
So in support of our German brothers, we no longer have that on our vests. We no longer wear that type of paraphernalia.
So you need to get rid of that ring. And I was like, okay, lesson learned.
A week later, some time passes by and I still hadn't taken that ring off. And the member came up to me and said, remember I told you about that ring? I'm going to tell you one more time to get rid of that ring.
I told you why. If I see you again and you're still wearing that ring, I'm going to take your finger off with a tree proner and I'm taking the ring off.
And I did not doubt that he was being serious. Well, that's how you deal with Nazis anyway.
But yeah, I suppose they, they seem like they were a little bit more sympathetic to some of the shadier. I thought I was like, Hey man, they're going to love this.
This is the vibe that I'm trying to create. And it was like a violation of, you know, that bylaw, that protocol, that rule.
I had to learn a lot on the fly. It was not the world that I lived in.
Every day,

it was trying to get better at it. Yeah, that makes sense.
Are there Jewish Hells Angels, or is it mostly an atheist kind of organization or Christian organization? You know what? I'm going to say yes. I'm going to assume that there are.
I don't know. It's probably not coming up a lot in the meetings.
Hey, it's Hanukkah. I can't ride this week.
your faith level might be, what you might believe in.

With the Hells Angels, the religion, the true religion, the only religion is the religion of the Hells Angels. That name, that death head center patch, they have historically bled and died in defense and fighting for that.
That is their religion. It's more important than their wives or girlfriends, than their kids, than their jobs, than their house, their income.
There's nothing more important to those true believers than that hell's angel's name and that death head logo. And they are very much willing to die for it.
Yeah, I don't even know if it's the underbelly. It's right on the front.
But as much as there's excitement and danger and catching these bad guys, it's the really depressing part in the underbelly of this. You mentioned some of the women that hang around and I'm going to paraphrase, but you say they'd been road hard and put away wet, so so to speak and some of them were attractive and other ones looked like a snowy mud flap and march or something like that the life hasn't been kind of them you said there's little kids around who had the same name as your son and this kid wanted to show you his new toy and it was like a used tire and you just think damn this kid's life around all these degenerates just sucks I found that there's every element of society is also within that gang.
There was affluence. There's people that were wealthy, that had money, that had good jobs, that had nice houses, that had nice cars, all the way down to, I had a neighbor that was a hell's angel that lived near my undercover house that was living in the equivalent of a homemade tent with dirt floors.
He would come to my undercover house and his wife, and they would bring their daughter, who was a little girl, probably six or seven, eight years old at the time. They'd come to my house specifically like once every couple of weeks so they could take a shower.
They'd knock on the door like, hey, bird, can we come in and use your shower, man? It was so sad. They were dirty.
They didn't have any accommodations. And I'm like, man, of course, what am I going to do? Say, no, you can't come in my house to take a shower.
I'm not going to let this little girl get cleaned up? It's so depressing that anybody lives like that, especially children. That's got to be tough to see.
This was a very well-respected Hells Angel in Arizona, like an old-school Hells Angel. And man, he was struggling to survive.
Is he not making money from doing what they do, trafficking things and people and guns

and drugs? Apparently not. Or whatever he was making definitely wasn't going to improving their living conditions.
I'll tell you that. Yeah.
You mentioned you said something along the lines of an undercover constantly trades his ethics for the greater good of the case. And I think the example was you wanted to arrest all these degenerates who were doing drugs around their kids and they weren't feeding their kids.
But if I don't arrest them, I can maybe arrest the people who are running these guys in charge of these guys or arrest all of them or more of them. What other kind of trade-offs do you have to make in this line of work? You know what? It's a constant challenge.
I'll give you a story unrelated to the Hells Angels. Let me back up a little bit.
The way that that question was characterized, it made it sound like every Hells Angel and every family and every kid was being abused. That was not the case.
I saw families being treated respectfully and women being treated respectfully. I saw some being treated very much disrespectfully.
Typically, the women that were being disrespected volunteered themselves into that. They were more than willing to be participants in whatever it was that was going on.
There was others that were treated with huge dignity and huge respect. And I don't want to put them all, from my experience, into one lump.
But I'll tell you a case from outside the Hells Angels case. I had bought some bombs from some suspects.
And so I meet them at a hotel room and I go in and mom and dad are the ones selling the bombs. And there's a little girl that's probably five years old sitting right there on the floor of this hotel, terribly dirty floor.
She had like one of those onesie pajamas on that's got like the bottoms and the tops all in one piece with the zipper in front. Filthy.
Watching cartoons. I do this bomb deal with mom and dad, and I leave with my bombs.
And this little girl was like, obviously not a participant in it, but there was no effort made to remove her from the presence of this explosive transaction. I'm walking back to my car.
I've got these bombs and an ice cream truck is coming down the street. And I put my bombs in the trunk of my car and I told my partner like, hey man, hold on a second.
We got to do something kind here. So I bought an ice cream cone and I went back to the hotel room and the door was slightly ajar and I pushed the door open.
Mom and dad likely automatically think I'm coming back to rip them back off for my payment for the bombs. Pistols come up like instantly on me.
And I'm like, man, time out. Easy, man.
I got an ice cream cone for your kid. I just wanted to bring a little bit of kindness, a little bit of happiness, like into that kid's life.
If it was only for the five minutes it took to eat that ice cream cone, I wanted that kid to be treated like a kid for a minute instead of being present and in essence a victim as part of an explosives transaction. That is horrifying, especially as a parent.
You had to just be like, man, that kid was dealt a crappy hand of cards to have those parents. When you witness something like that, it's not hard to try to imagine what are this kid's chances? Could this kid end up going to medical school and being a brilliant surgeon? Maybe.
The intelligence could maybe be there. But like, how can that ever happen? How does this kid ever have a chance to escape this? The best case scenario is they get taken away from the parents when they go to prison or die or something, and they end up in a better home.
Even if they are a certified genius with influences like that, they're just going to misuse that intelligence and end up in prison or something like that. The opportunity, if they were some type of savant, the opportunity to ever put it on display is next to nothing.
If you're wearing dirty onesie pajamas with your bomb dealing parents, you're probably not in school, right? No one's paying attention to your education. It's just what a mess.
It's just that is so sad. We made pretty quick work of that case and child protective services came in and intervened.
I can't tell you what the result of that was. I can't tell you if the kid was ultimately like taken into protective custody or separated from mom or dad.
That was not even my objective. Any of these cases, from the Hells Angels case to the hundreds of other I worked, it was never personal for me.

I never set out to ruin anybody's life.

I never set out to, like, destroy a family.

I never said to myself, I'm going to make sure this guy spends the rest of his life in prison.

That was not my job. My job was to infiltrate criminals and crime schemes and then gather evidence, gather intelligence, bring that back out, report that to a case agent who would then take it to a prosecutor and then present it into a courtroom.
My job wasn't to try to ruin people's lives or make sure that anybody paid the price that justice decided to be paid was. It was never personal for me.
I had a job to do. I did it the best I could.
People don't like it. People don't like undercover work.
They don't like the use of deception by the police. I get that.
No one wants to be betrayed. Any adult, by the time you reach adulthood, you've been betrayed at some point.
Like a boyfriend or a girlfriend has broken your heart or a friend has left you, whatever. It sucks.
It sucks living through that. It's a terrible feeling.
I never got any joy from that. I never danced on anybody's grave and said, ha ha, I got you.
I always like post arrest when people that I had investigated and when I had the opportunity were like in their lowest moment, I always tried to like display some kindness to them because I didn't get any satisfaction from seeing them broken. You know what's better than meth smuggled cross country in the sweaty assless chaps of a criminal biker gang? The fine products and services that support this show.
We'll be right back. All the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and clickable at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.
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Thank you for supporting those who make the show possible. Now for the rest of my conversation with Jay Dobbins.
I can't remember who this was on my show, a UK undercover drug scop. And he had said something like one of his most horrific moments of his job was there was a guy that he busted for drugs.
And the guy at the end was like, man, I can't believe it was you. I really thought you were my friend.
And this guy was like a loser, right? He wasn't like a drug kingpin. He was just so hurt because he'd never had a real friend in his whole life.
You know,

terrible parents, terrible upbringing. This cop had made friends with him and he said he really

just kind of regretted that. Jordan, I'll tell you a very similar story.
I have a very similar

experience. During the Hells Angels investigation, post-arrest, people are in handcuffs now.
They're

being processed. And one of the suspects, the interviewer, tells him, hey hey, Jay Bird Davis, the gunrunner, debt collector, hitman is actually Jay Dobbins, an ATF agent.
And the guy says, I don't believe that. I won't believe it until I hear it come out of his own mouth.
So they bring me in and I'm standing there and I've got raid gear on now. And I'm like, I'm not getting any satisfaction from this, but I'm an ATF agent.
And he looked at me and he said, I've known you for two years. And that's the first true thing you've ever said to me.
Huh? Wow. I didn't feel good about that.
No, even though these people are criminals and scumbags, like you're still actually making friends them. One thing that the people that dislike me, dislike what I do for a living,

probably don't want to hear and don't understand is that you can never undercover out the human

factor. You don't work undercover and then lose your humanity.
There's people that you see

redeeming qualities in them. You're investigating and you see them commit a crime and it's heartbreaking because you know they're better than that.
You've seen them be better than that. I don't get satisfaction.
I didn't get satisfaction out of saying, ha ha, I caught you. There was times when my heart was broken because I was like, man, you're better than this.
You're a better person than this. You can do better.
Man, it all goes back to those people's parents too, right? And their childhood. And you just think, man, this guy, there's got to be moments where you go, this guy would have been a really special high achiever, but his parents were pieces of crap.
And here we are. There were times when I'm working undercover and you're saturating an investigation.
Events occur that lead to someone being incarcerated, sometimes for a long period of time. There was times when I literally felt like God had lost my phone number.
Is this what God wants you doing? I had this mentality that I was trying to protect people. Sometimes I convinced myself I was trying to save the world, which I never did, but I led myself to believe that.
But then you see people broken by your action and by your hand and by your interaction. And there was times when I felt like, man, God's lost my phone number, man.
I'm not sure that this is what he wants me to be doing. I'll shift gears a little bit.
You mentioned buying bombs from that couple with the kid. How do you know when you're buying a stack of bombs that those things aren't just going to blow up in the trunk of your car.
I mean, I think that is where maybe the courage element comes in. Like I had probably gotten to a point where my ability to assess risk was not very good on a separate occasion.
Like I bought a lot of bombs over the course of my career. Surely they train you to look at the thing and go, maybe I'll pull the detonator out of this thing before I throw it in the backseat.
Well, you know, without like that very precise training, that in itself could be very dangerous, trying to manipulate a device, right? Without being a bomb tech or without being a hurt locker guy. But there was one explosives deal that I bought bombs, put them in the trunk of my car, and I delivered them to the bomb squad to process, to properly handle.
And I come out of my trunk of my car holding these bombs, and the bomb squad guys are walking towards me with full bomb squad, the Hurt Locker suits on. And you're wearing a pair of Oakleys and a jacket.
And then they take them and put them in the containment vessel. And they're looking at me like, dude, you know what? You shouldn't be doing this.
Yeah. I was going to ask how you deliver those.
Surely there's a special vehicle, a room, a place. It's like, no, I just parked in the lot and then grabbed them all and walked towards the guys.
They're like, whoa, put those things down. Well, it's one thing, you know, if you buy a pipe bomb and it's got a fuse glued in the end of it, you don't know what's inside of there, but okay.
I bought bombs that were pretty technical, that had timers on them and different switches and wires and stuff. And I'm like, man, it's going to take someone way smarter than me to figure out how this thing works.
This is it. I know this is a bomb.
You take it apart because I don't know how. Yeah.
When I was younger, I thought it would be fun to be a bomb tech. But then you think you're disarming bombs.
You forget about the fact that those sometimes blow up while you're snooping around. Oh, heaven forbid.
God, how do you compartmentalize this stuff and keep it away from your home life? There's a spot in the book where I think you're going home and you're playing with your kids in the pool and running the barbecue and talking to your parents.

And like the next day,

you're hanging out with these murderer guys

who are shoveling meth into their noses

and they're talking about killing people.

How do you keep that toxic sludge of the criminal life

out of your family life?

Because it's still in your brain when you go home.

How do you wash that off in the shower

and just go play Legos?

That's a good question.

It's a fair question.

Prior to our interview, we had the conversation.

I said, there's nothing that's off-limit. You can ask me anything you want to ask.
So I agree that that is a fair question. If I don't answer you honestly and transparently, then nothing I've said previous has any credibility.
To that question, I failed, and I failed miserably. I put a huge amount of battle damage on my family.
I was selfish. I served my own motivations, my own goals.
I made decisions for myself, not many times considered how they were going to impact my wife or my kids. There's one example.
I'd been gone for an extended period of time and I came home and my wife cut me off and she said, you can't be gone and then walk in this house and talk to me and the kids like we're gangsters, like we're street people. And I tried to defend myself.
I said, I'm not a light switch. I can't turn this on and off.
I have to be on all the time. People that treat what I do for a living like a hobby end up dead.
And then her response was, I understand that. But when you come to this house, you better install a dimmer switch and dial that attitude down.
Because if you can't do that, you're not welcome here. Don't come home.
I had worked undercover for so long that persona stopped being what I did and it became who I was. That's probably my ultimate regret.
To answer your question, I was a failure at insulating my wife and my kids from that undercover life. I crashed bad.
That's a humiliating statement to make about yourself, your audience out there. I don't know who's going to listen to this, but it's a truthful statement.
And if I'm not truthful, then like I said, everything else I say doesn't have any credibility either. I think it's important.
I think a lot of people are going to really appreciate your honesty here because it would be really easy to say, oh, you know what? I just come home, I take a shower and I remember I've got a wife and kids and then I flip on Netflix and it's like, well, that's a bunch of BS. And there's definitely undercover law enforcement listening right now who are thinking, oh, I'm really almost glad to hear this because it means that I'm not the only one who's screwing up my home life or maybe dancing a little bit too close with the devil.
My son was, I don't know, he was probably eight or 10 years old at the time. I would come home from these operations and I would do the bare minimum I had to do to keep my family functioning.
I'd pay the bills, mow the grass, pat the kids on the head, have a cup of coffee with my wife. I didn't want to be at home.
I didn't want to be with my family. I wanted to be out smoking and joking with gangsters because I felt like I was changing the world.
And so every time I'd leave, my son would run out in the yard and say, I don't go yet. And he'd give me a rock.
He'd put a little stone out of the yard. For years, I'd collected these stones and I kept one in my back pocket all the time.
I had them in my undercover car, the saddlebags, my motorcycle, my undercover house. I was handing them out to my task force partners saying like, I don't know what kind of blessing Jackie's putting on these rocks, but we're thriving and surviving amidst all this murder and violence.
Like, these good luck charms are special. So one of the last operations, same routine.
I'm getting ready to leave. Jackie goes through the same routine.
God, don't leave yet. And he brings me this rock.
And he's like, I've been saving this one for you. It's special.
It's shaped like a heart. And hearts mean love.
And so I'm a 40-year-old father. I'm trying to comfort my son.
And I said, you know what? All those things that I haven't been doing, I'm almost done. Like, we're going to play catch, and we're going to ride bikes, and we're going to wrestle and go to the movies and swim.
And I'm almost done. And it's all because of your rocks.
It's all because of these good luck charms. These things work so good.
I've been handing them out to all my partners. And my little boy's in the driveway and he starts crying and tears are coming down his cheeks.
And he said, dad, those weren't for good luck. And you shouldn't have given them to anybody else.
They were just for you. And my brain stopped.
For years, I thought he'd been giving me good luck charms. And he's like, that was for you to put in your pocket.
And every time someone's going to hurt you, you could put your hand in there and touch that rock. And that's like me being there to help you fight back against them.
That's what I had done to my family in exchange for trying to be Donnie Brosco Part 2 and some superhero. I completely failed my family.
And so I'm ashamed of that. I'm humiliated by that.
That's, wow. And even I need to regain a little bit of my composure hearing that because of course I'm imagining my own kids who are young right now as well.
When I would leave, that's what he was thinking. That's what was in my boy's mind.
Like, I never thought about that. I just wanted to go work and go change the world and go be amazing and put my dent in the universe.
I never thought that this little boy was worried that his dad was going to get hurt and he wasn't going to be there to help him or do anything about it. Never thought.
Yeah, it must have been a real sobering realization that your son realized your life was in danger. You probably assumed he didn't really get it, but he did.
I will say this. Of all these stories we told, the best thing that has come to me is like I've become more spiritual and God didn't lose my phone number.
I'll say this in relation to that last story. I've made a million mistakes in my life.
I've done a million things wrong that I regret and that I'm ashamed of. But between God and my wife and my kids, they've given me a million and one second chances to try to recover from it.
That's truly been my blessing. Man, I have so many more notes, but I kind of want it.
That was such a perfect place, I think, to put this down. I would love to have you back on.
You did a really great job. A lot of the questions you asked have been asked and answered, but the way you ask them, you ask questions in a way that allow me or your guest to maybe go beyond that standard answer.
So I thought you did a great job. Well, I appreciate that.
Thank you. I would love to have you back on.
We barely talked about the actual Hells Angels undercover operation. I have a ton of notes.
I would love to have you back on at some point. Anytime.
Anytime. It's been an honor to speak to you and to communicate with your audience.
Thank you. Thank you.
You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with former mafia underboss, Sammy the Bull Gravano. My mother and father bought me a bike.
They were broke. It was a Schwinn.
I had to take care of it. Fucking first day out, somebody stole it.
My friends come running to me. Sammy, the bike, your bike is down the block near the fruit and vegetable store.
I go running down there. The bar is right across the street where the wise guys hung out.
So I grabbed the bike. These kids were older than me, bigger than me.
And they started fighting. I was fighting the two of them.
I was crying.

I was getting beat up a little bit,

but I was fighting like a bastard.

One of them guys from across the street

walked over.

Hey, come here.

What's your name?

Sammy.

Another guy from across the street

yelled to him, what's going on?

He said, no, this kid Sammy, you see him?

He was fighting these fucking kids.

You see the way he was fighting?

He's like a little fucking bull. A friend of mine, Tommy Sparrow, his uncle, Shorty Sparrow, he wanted to see me.
He made an appointment. I went and see him.
But he was good. He said, listen, Sammy, you got to hook up.
You're a tough kid. You're in fights.
You know what's going to happen. Someday you're going to hit the wrong guy.
They're going to find you in the truck. Whatever I ask you to do, I've done and I will

do it with you. And I knew exactly what he was talking about.
And I shook his hand at 23. I was an associate in the Colombo family.
I think a piece of me died on every one of those murders. It's a scar in my body.
I feel it. When I talk about it in my podcast, maybe I'm getting old.
I actually become emotional.

I'm not a person who normally cries, but it brings me closer. To hear more about how Sammy rose in the ranks to become one of the most notorious gangsters of all time, check out episode 587 and 588 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.
Wow, this undercover stuff never ceases to amaze me. I wonder if I'd have done something like this when I was younger.
I definitely do not have the stones for it. Now, once you have kids, man, you just can't be doing this stuff.
Although he did it with kids. I don't know.
He's definitely built different. I'll tell you that.
There's definitely a follow-up show happening. I've got him on the books for a round two.
There's much more in my notes about biker gangs and the Hells Angels undercover operation and the other operations that he was on. More undercover ATF agents going into biker gangs with Ken Croak.
If you haven't heard that episode yet, that's episode 673. That was one of, and still is, one of our most popular episodes of the show, and it's one of the ones that you listeners are constantly surfacing to me.
Episode 673 with Ken Croak. Similar to this one, a lot of good stories.
Ken's just a great speaker as well, so definitely check that episode out if you haven't done so yet. All things Jay Dobbins will be in the show notes on the website.
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You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one.
My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. We rise by lifting others.
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