1111: Jay Dobyns | Undercover with the Hells Angels Part One

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Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. Those groups are inherently paranoid.
They're paranoid for a reason. That paranoia keeps them out of prison.
They're traditionally untrusting groups of people. So how do you build that trust? For me, I was a salesman.
That's the way I looked at my job. I was a salesman.
My product was me. Welcome to the show.
I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.
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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. My guest today joined the ATF, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
A lot of you haven't heard of that, I noticed. And he went undercover in the Hell's Angels, the most notorious biker gang in the world.
In this episode, we'll discuss what it takes to go undercover, especially in such a dangerous organized crime organization. We'll discover why it's so hard to dismantle an organization like the Hells Angels or any biker gang.
We'll also learn about the customs and culture of the Hells Angels. They have a lot of rules.
It's actually quite complicated and surprising. Of course, I also wanted to know how to build an undercover identity, stay safe while hanging out and partying and engaging in criminal activity with ultra-violent criminal bikers, and how you build a case against such a powerful crime organization as a cop, as an undercover officer trying to take down the Hells Angels.
Here we go with Jay Dobbins. Do you know Ken Croak? I do.
Yeah, he was on here a couple of years ago. That was a super interesting episode.

A lot of people really liked it.

Were you before or after or at the same time as him?

Before.

Before.

Okay.

Before.

Yeah.

My operation was before Kenny's.

Yeah.

So in his book, he mentions other undercover operations.

He's probably talking about yours, right?

Because there's not tons of undercover biker gang.

There's not.

But there's some other operations of significance that he might be referencing. I see.
Okay. Yeah, I wasn't sure because he specifically didn't talk about them very much, probably for good reasons.
Look, I mean, the book starts with you getting shot. So this stuff is dangerous.
And I'd love to start with that story because frankly, it sounds like a good reason not to join the ATF in the first place. You know, it actually reinforced my reason to join, to be honest with you.
I got hired on a Monday. I didn't have any law enforcement experience.
Four days later, I was a very much remote part of the arrest scenario. As the main team, as the raid team approached the suspect, he took off running.
I gave chase from way in the back and ended up catching up and the suspect disappeared into his neighborhood. It was a pretty rough neighborhood and had just vanished.
In the search for him, he was hiding and I ended up getting isolated and he popped up and had a gun on me, put the gun to my head, was holding me hostage, walked me towards one of our vehicles, one of the law enforcement vehicles that was there, intending to use that as his escape with me driving, pushed me in the front seat, was behind me with the gun held to my head. The other agents, now realizing what happened, began to surround the car, and he's screaming at me to drive, to get him out of there, to help him make his escape.
Like I said, I didn't have any experience, but I knew better than to drive off with this guy holding a gun to my head. I knew that there was a bad end game to this scenario.
I wanted that end game to take place while I had some partners around versus 20 miles down the road, kneeling in some ditch, being executed by this guy. My initial plan, there was a telephone pole probably 30 yards in front of us.
And I was like, I'm going to run us into this telephone pole as hard as I can, as fast as I can get this car going. I'm going to hit this telephone pole.
And I went to turn the ignition and then plan B hit my brain. And I pulled the keys out of the ignition and dropped them to the floorboard.
And I told him, I said, dude, I dropped the keys. And as I leaned forward to grab the keys, the gun rolled off my head, and he ended up pressing it into my back.
And then my partners that were surrounding the vehicle, they lit him up from every direction, both the passenger side window, the driver's side window, the rear window. They ventilated this dude.
It was a five or 10 second lead and glass storm like you would see in a Quentin Tarantino movie. That's what it was like.
And in the process, the suspect shot me in the back. The bullet went in my back.
It went through my lung. It narrowly missed my heart.
It exited the left side of my chest. Four days on the job, I'm bleeding to death in this trailer park with blood coming out of my chest like you're holding your thumb over the end of a garden hose.
This giant pool of blood was growing around me. And I was like, man, I haven't even gotten a paycheck yet and I'm dying.
You haven't gotten your key card. Exactly.
Wow. So that's a hell of a first week on the job.
You're still here. So you survived that clearly.
I'm guessing he didn't. Yeah, he didn't make it.
The agents, after the shooting takes place, he was in the backseat of this car, pull him out of the backseat. It was a two-door Monte Carlo and pushed me into the backseat where he was at to make the trip or try to find a hospital, try to find some help.
We were in a pretty remote area. But the truth of it is, after having survived that, one of the very best things, maybe the best thing that ever happened to me on the job was that event.
It taught me how quickly things can go bad, how quickly things get violent. I wasn't brought up like that.
I was brought up like in the happy days, a Ritchie Cunningham, white picket fence, both parents, family. So to learn the law enforcement game, like I had to learn it on the job.

I wasn't born into that kind of life.

And so the doors that opened, contacts it created in a weird way, the credibility it created, because I couldn't wait to come back to work.

I think everybody was waiting for me to retire, to resign, to use that as an excuse to get out.

Thank you. wait to come back to work.
I think everybody was waiting for me to retire, to resign, to use that as an excuse to get out. It was my excuse to try again and see if I could get it right.
All the dumb rookie jokes probably stop if you've gotten shot during an arrest, even if it was your first week. Oh, trust me.
I still got them. I still get them.
Dude, you're the guy who got shot four days on the job. You're that guy? How'd you manage that? Yeah.
Like I still get them. I deserve them.
I earned it to be mocked and to be made fun of, especially having survived it. And hopefully I tried to survive it with a good, positive attitude, always looking forward.
This is life. Trying to take a bad situation and make something out of it.
I truly believe life is 10% of what happens to us and 90% how we react to it. Sure.
You were married at this point, right? Already? I was. Did your wife think like, oh, okay, he's going to resign and become a science teacher now? 100%.
When I was confronted with that, like, okay, well, what are you going to do now? And I'm like, what I'm going to do now is try to recover, try to heal and go back to work and see if I can do this right. I'm guessing that wasn't the answer she was hoping to hear.
No, that didn't go over real well. Did getting shot so early in your career, did that change how you approached the job afterward? Yeah.
So prior to being involved in law enforcement, I was an athlete. I played college football.
I had a very successful college football career. But it wasn't because I was an amazing athlete, a great performer.
I was constantly surrounded by people who were bigger, stronger, faster, more athletic than me. The way I was able to compete as an athlete was to outwork my competition and play the game as recklessly as I could play it.
That translated to law enforcement. Outwork the competition, outwork your peers, and be reckless about how you approach the job.
I'm not sure that's the advice that I would give to a young officer, like, quote, unquote, be reckless about it. But I am who I am.
The tiger doesn't change his stripes. That's what my personality was.
That was my character tree. And so I just applied that to now coming off a football field to a law enforcement career.
how did you end up becoming an undercover? It's just you have to lean in to do that, right? Because it's a 24-7 kind of version of the job. Absolutely.
I was an ATF agent. And with ATF, they do a pretty good job of kind of letting you find your own way.
And undercover work is truly nothing more than a tool in an investigator's toolbox. There's dozens, if not hundreds of ways to investigate a case.
Undercover work is one of those ways, but it's where my interests lie. I didn't know if I would find any success, but I wanted to try.
That's actually why I came to ATF, because the ATF undercover program and historically our operatives were the king of the mountain.

They were some of the legendary figures in law enforcement.

I've always said, if you're a baseball player and you play shortstop, you want to play for the New York Yankees.

You want to be Derek Jeter. As an undercover agent, if you wanted to play with the big boys, you wanted to be an undercover agent in ATF's program.
Why do we have a separate bureau for alcohol, tobacco, and firearms specifically? Is that a prohibition thing? Because can't the FBI handle that? I don't understand why those things are separate. I think in today's world and in today's political world, that's the debate.
Like, why do we need ATF? ATF grew from prohibition, the Elliot Ness, quote unquote, untouchable stories, as they were investigating prohibition, illegal liquor and liquor trafficking. Those gangsters in the 30s used guns, machine guns, Tommy guns, Thompson machine guns, which led to some of the gun laws when a still was discovered out in the wilderness.
It was nearly impossible to dismantle that and bring it back to civilization. So they'd blow them up.
So ATF kind of naturally inherited the firearms laws, naturally inherited the explosives laws. Then in 1968, the Gun Control Act is put in place, which elevated the gun laws after Dr.
King was assassinated, after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, which led to the Gun Control Act that enhanced regulation of firearms. ATF didn't actually become its own bureau until historically, I believe, like 1972.
It's not an old agency. It's not a big agency.
There's probably more FBI agents in New York City than there are ATF agents across the country. Most people don't even know, like they maybe have heard of it.

And internationally, people have no idea what it is generally.

But everyone's heard of the FBI because it's in movies.

If it's in the movies, it's like there's a guy from the ATF who's like a weird foil

character for somebody else, right?

Like The Rock or whatever shows up in Fast and Furious.

I don't even know if that's part of it.

But yeah, it's rare.

You guys don't get a lot of front page media. I'll tell you a funny backstory that plays into that.
There was a Tony Scott movie years ago titled Deja Vu that starred Denzel Washington. That story originally, Denzel is an FBI agent and he is investigating this bombing of a tour boat, which kind of leads to this big, massive destruction.
There's some ATF people that consulted on that film and said, this would be much more authentic if this was an ATF agent investigating this crime. It fits ATF's jurisdiction.
And Tony Scott flipped that character from an FBI agent to an ATF agent. And people were like, oh, what are you doing? Like, no one knows who these guys are.
But Tony was big on authenticity and being accurate and trying to be historically accurate. So I'm agreeing with your point.
Not a lot of people know who ATF is. Ultimately, ATF, because of the gun laws, because of the arson laws, we have some narcotics jurisdiction.
Ultimately, ATF became the equivalent of the federal violent crime police, which led to our ability to investigate narcotics robberies, home invasion crews, murder for hire cases, those types of cases that have a gun or bomb element to them that give us jurisdiction. And then we became very good at investigating those types of crimes.
Going back to your undercover skill set, this seems like almost like the ATF's bread and butter, at least according to some of the books, or maybe these books are just focused on undercover operations. And maybe that's why it seems like that.
But you mentioned earlier, if you want to do undercover, you want to be in the ATF. Why are undercover operations so popular is not quite the right word, prolific maybe? And why is this one of the main things that the ATF does? Is it because organized crime is usually associated with alcohol, tobacco, and firearms, and that's what you need in order to break these rings up? Well, I think that our jurisdiction lent itself to undercover work in a lot of ways.
Firearms jurisdiction, explosives jurisdiction, we overlapped into the narcotics world. But why has ATF gained notoriety or become prolific at undercover work? It's because that program was supported and encouraged.
And then when I came on the job, I got hired in 1987.

The other federal agencies were looking for very specialized skill sets in the people that they hired. Like the FBI, for example, was looking for people with legal backgrounds, counting backgrounds, chemistry backgrounds, all those kinds of things.
ATF was recruiting from police departments, state and local police departments. So they were hiring agents, new agents that understood the process of investigating a case and how to work informants and how to develop information and all those things.
So the core of ATF's agent padre were like true criminal investigators who wanted to get down in the weeds. They wanted to get dirt underneath their fingernails.
They weren't specialists. And then you take that with some of the people that came on with that courageous mindset of saying, not only let me investigate this case, let me insert myself.
Let me put myself in the middle of a crime event. And like now I'm biased to the undercover technique.
I'm biased to it because that's what I did for 27 years. But my bias is based in there's really no better way to investigate a case because you're taking a living, breathing, trained law enforcement officer, inserting him into a crime scheme or a crime event or a crime group, and then that person

is reporting back out real time to a case agent, a handler, ultimately to a jury and to a judge

and to prosecutors what he or she saw and smelled and touched and heard. And so to present a case becomes overwhelmingly favorable behind an undercover investigation.
It's not based on a wiretap and trying to decipher what you think you heard or a surveillance or recovered evidence or historical investigation. You're right in the middle of it.
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Now, back to Jay Dobbins. How do you gain the criminal's trust? That's got to be tricky isn't even quite the word, right? I mean, you show up, you got to be friends with somebody initiated into this thing.
And you don't just knock on the door of the Hells Angels and say like, hey, I'd love to traffic some of those drugs you guys keep running back and forth across the country. That's not going to fly.
So where do you begin? No, Jordan, that's the trick. And that's where the skill set, the character and the personality of the ones that do it that are successful truly comes out, is that not only the Hells Angels, any criminal organization, any unit that has spent time together, there's loyalty there.
And those groups are inherently paranoid. And they're paranoid for a reason.
That paranoia keeps them out of prison. They're traditionally untrusting groups of people.

So how do you build that trust? For me, I was a salesman. That's the way I looked at my job.
I was a salesman. My product was me.
So I had to figure out what are my suspects looking for? What do they value? And can I craft a false persona that fits that, that allows me to approach them, spend time with them, ultimately gain trust? When you gain trust, you build loyalty. Sometimes you build love in some cases when you have enough time to spend with someone, but you do it with the known intention that ultimately you're going to betray all those things.
The human factor, it's strange. It's odd because God didn't build us that way.
To intentionally build someone's trust and love and loyalty with the opening intent, I'm going to betray this at some point. It's unnatural.
And you've got to bury that, right? Because if you go into it thinking, I got to keep these guys at arm's length because eventually I'm going to throw them all in prison, you're tying a weight around your leg. So as you're building trust and trying to build credibility in the eyes of the suspects, for me, I had to constantly remind myself that this character I'm portraying, this false persona that I've inherited, if they find out the truth, they're not going to ask me not to come around.
I'm going to get a straight razor drag across my throat or a baseball bat on the back of my head. That's going to be the reaction to it.
So you basically have to keep that fear of they're going to murder me if they figure out that this is BS. And that outweighs whatever other psychological protections you're maybe subconsciously running in your head.
As I was researching the Hells Angels and when I was asked to participate and lead that undercover operation, I wasn't a biker investigator. There were dozens of agents that I felt would have served that role better

than I did. But knowledge is power for law enforcement.
The more we know about whatever our suspect or crime scene is, the better we're able to investigate it. So in doing my research in the Hells Angels, trying to figure out who's who in the zoo, like who exactly am I dealing with? I learned all those obvious public things that are easy to find out.
They're classified as an international organized crime syndicate. 5,000 members, 500 charters.
They're in 60 different countries all over the world. But the one thing that kept jumping out at me is that they're willing to kill their own.
They had a historical track record of murdering their own members if they felt betrayed or compromised. And so that was always in the back of my head.
These dudes will kill you. Yeah.
God, the Hells Angels, especially, it's just an understatement to say they're a rough bunch. But tell us what one percenters are, right? Because I think this kind of goes to it, right? They're proud of being these one percenters.
Tell us what this means. That's a term that's used in the outlaw biker community, which says that we are the 1% of this world that are outlaws, that are criminals.
And they're proud of it. They advertise it.
They're not shy about it. It's a badge of honor for them.
There's millions and millions of people out there and that ride motorcycles in groups and for all the joy of it, the brotherhood of it or sisterhood of it, not just the Hells Angels, but all these outlaw motorcycle gangs truly pride themselves in being that 1% that is outside the law.

Like in the Hells Angels world, they portray themselves publicly as being like these fun-loving rascals who have this common love of riding motorcycles together.

They just don't want to live by society's rules and society's laws. They want the freedom to do and go and be who they want to be, which there's not many people that will argue with that mentality on the surface.
But when you see behind the curtain, they have pages and pages, volumes, almost books worth of rules and policies and procedures and protocols that you have to live by to exist in that gang, far beyond what any of us as a common citizen or common man have to live by. Yeah, it's a fascinating subculture that someone normal would not want to be a part of this.
In the book, you discuss you're hanging around these guys before you go undercover or try to even get in the gang. You're hanging around and guys are asking you for favors.
Hey, can you kill this guy for money? And you can't be like, no, I don't do that sort of thing. Right.
So you have to say yes, but then you can't actually do it because you're a cop. So how does all this work? Right.
How do you say, sure, I'll shoot that guy in the back of the head for $1,200 or $20,000, whatever it is, but then not actually do it, but somehow that still builds your credibility. They don't think you chickened out.
How do you do something like that? For me and for my career, which like everybody's got their own approach and their own techniques and their own styles and strategies, it's very individual. And I'll preface it by saying this, I was never the best undercover agent out there.
I've never said that publicly or privately. There's dozens of people that I admire who I think were better at the job than I was.
What I was good at was creating what we call street theater. And street theater is inaccurate conclusions based on accurate observations.
So I would accurately let suspects see me. I would let

them see me buy drugs, buy guns, be involved in beatings, doing debt collections, selling stolen

vehicles, whatever you name it. I could create that scenario.
What they didn't know, the inaccurate

part of it, is those scenarios were staffed and manned and acted out by other undercover operators. They were skits.
They were hoaxes. Jordan, if you're my suspect and you see me buy machine guns and pay for machine guns or receive machine guns, and you're there and I put them in the trunk of my, and you're handling them.
You've just witnessed what you believe to be machine gun trafficking, firearms trafficking. That's way better than me telling you some story about what I do.
I've involved you in it. I paid you.
I gave you some cash for watching my back on a debt collection. And now you tell your friends, hey, you know what this guy, what he says, he's legit.
I was there. I experienced it.
Meanwhile, you bought the guns from a cop, from an ATF agent who seized him from somebody else three months ago. From another undercover who had a script.
It's almost like a play or a movie, almost knowing what the dialogue is going to be, let alone like what their actions and what marks they have to hit. It was very much like a play or a film.
So do you just sit in an office and meet up with the other guy and go, okay, you're going to bring this and we got to get the judge to sign off on that and got to get the boss to sign off on this. And you say, hey, aren't you the guy that killed Tony? And then I say, yeah, what's it to you? And then we do this gun transact.

Like you're sitting there discussing this, right?

And drinking coffee and you do it the next week.

How do you plan something like this?

For me personally, I had the equivalent of a playbook that I could put into play that had some loose scripts we could use.

It was almost like, hey, look, today we're going to do a debt collection.

Everybody turn to page 17 of our playbook. These are the roles we need filled.
This is how we're going to do a debt collection. Everybody, turn to page 17 of our

playbook. These are the roles we need filled.
This is how we're going to portray it. This is how it's going to look to the suspect that we introduce into this debt collection.
This is the vibe we want to create for this guy. By the time the Hells Angels case was presented to me, I already had 15 years of undercover experience.
I'd bought guns hundreds of times, from street guns, from pea shooters, handguns, to shoulder-launched rockets. I'd bought bombs from PVC homemade pipe bombs to servo-activated remote-controlled C4 devices.
I'd bought dope from dime bags and eight balls to cartel- level dope. I'd been involved in infiltrating home invasion crews and schemes, portraying myself as a contract killer in murder for hire cases.
I never considered myself an expert in anything, but I had spent 15 years building and developing the tradecraft of undercover work. So when that opportunity was presented, I was pretty confident, even though I was entering a world that I probably didn't fully understand, that I could sell them that I was a gangster.
Who is selling shoulder-fired rockets in the United States? You know what? You'd be shocked. Really? You'd be shocked.
We did a case where a home invasion crew, they were doing narcotics robberies. They wanted an RPG for use in their scheme.
This is what you're looking for? Guess what? I know what the black market is. So it sounds outrageous.
It does. It sounds crazy, but it's all crazy.
Every bit of it. When someone's hiring you and you're going to play God with someone's life and someone approaches me and says, hey, I want to hire you to go kill Jordan.
Okay, I can do that. And then I approach Jordan and say, dude, today's your lucky day.
Someone wants you killed. How am I lucky? They've involved the cops.
They've involved the police. So if you will cooperate with me, if you will play your part in this scheme, you are going to help me catch the person that is contracted to have you murdered.
So I vanished for a couple of months, right? Because you killed me. Is that how it works? And even before that, I'm going to take you and I'm going to use makeup and Hollywood theatrics, and I'm going to take pictures and videos of you being murdered.
And then I'm going to take those pictures back to the suspect as evidence, as proof that you're dead. I never crossed paths with anybody who said, man, I'm not willing to play.
I'm not willing to help you find and capture and investigate and charge and prosecute and convict the person that has hired someone to murder me. Yeah, it seems like that's a pretty easy decision.
I'm sorry, I'm stuck on this. Why does a home invasion crew need an RPG? What good could that possibly do? If you're breaking into someone's home, even if you're stealing drugs, why do you want a grenade launcher? That just seems like the loudest, least covert thing that you could use.
These crews were building and selling and buying explosive devices as well. It's such an intimidating tool.
A bomb is such an intimidating tool. It's so indiscriminate.
If you have a gun and you point it at someone, plus or minus, you're going to be at least close to your intended target. A bomb is indiscriminate.
That's intimidating. Just to find a bomb, if you found a bomb on your car, like that in itself and the indiscriminate nature of it and what your imagination of what that could have created is massively intimidating.
I see. So it's almost for show because I'm imagining this home invasion cruise not blowing someone's door off with an RPG.
That's insane. No, but you also look at how the cartels conduct their business.
They're shooting RPGs, they're shooting rockets to each other and some very exotic weaponry is being used. If you're on the other side of that battle, and hey, these guys got shoulder launched rockets, and you're going to think twice before you jump into that fight.
Yeah, that's a good point. Okay.
And how much does it cost to have someone killed? I'm obviously not going to do this, but I'm curious what someone says, hey, go kill Jordan. Are you like, it's $1,500 or is it $15,000 or is it $150,000? Like what is the price range of a murder for hire? I have no idea.
That's a great question. And it's all of the above.
There's no bottom line to do it. It is the solicitor's interest and willingness to participate in the scheme.
If someone says, I'm going to give you a thousand dollars to go kill

this guy as an undercover or just as a hitman, you could say, you know what? I ain't doing it for a thousand dollars. It's 10 times that it's $10,000.
If I'm being solicited to commit a murder and I decline, if I blow through what they can financially afford, like how do I now walk away from you knowing that you want someone killed and now I'm just going to walk away from it because we can't agree on the price? Yeah, now you're a liability, right? So you basically have to agree to it. I was involved in a home invasion investigation.
I'm leaving a meeting. I'm at a Waffle House parking lot and I'm leaving a meeting with an armful of pipe bombs from a young man.

And as I'm leaving, he says to me, hey, I need some help tightening somebody up tonight, man.

Are you willing to come with me?

I need some backup.

Like, I've accomplished my mission.

I have a handful of pipe bombs that I just purchased from him.

I wasn't interested in being involved in whatever his personal life dispute was.

So I declined.

That night, he goes out and commits a murder.

He kills the guy.

I wasn't fully understanding what he was asking me to participate in.

I was sued civilly.

Me and my partner were sued civilly by the murder victim's family saying that we should

have known, we should have anticipated what this guy intended. There was no indications that he was going to become that violent or that's what his intent were.
Now, the civil suit was ultimately dismissed, and it was partly dismissed by testimony saying, like, do you think, knowing what I do for a living, that if I thought this guy wanted assistance in a murder, that I would have stepped away from that and just stood back and let him commit that without intervening? I would not have done that. I didn't understand what his intentions were.
But nonetheless, once you become involved in a murder fryer case, everything else comes to a stop. It's almost like the hands on the clock stop moving because everything in your personal life, in your professional life, now has to be put on hold because you have to see this through.
If I've been solicited to commit a murder and I'm not quick enough or I'm not good enough at what I'm doing and the solicitor goes outside of me? And what happens if he crossed paths with a real hitman who's really going to do it? Can't take the risk. Right, right.
So you have to put everything on hold and go fake murder somebody because if they need him killed fast and they do it because you were too slow or tomorrow was your day off, then that person's dead and it's kind of your fault. You can't drag your feet because you have to be proactive now because waiting is dangerous.
Don't be ashamed of who you are. That's your parents' job.
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So you're involved in some of these home invasion crew stuff. Robbing a normal person would be just a weirdly distressing event.
Maybe I just don't have a good idea of what this is all about, and maybe I'm naive, but it seems like it would be weirdly thrilling to go in with a group of criminals and rob a drug dealer because you're not robbing somebody who's like a hardworking person. You're not robbing a normal person who's trashing their kids' rooms.
You're robbing a drug dealer. So I'm with scumbags robbing a scumbag.
Is there an element of, you're not going to get in trouble for it. It's part of your job.
You're getting paid. If there were suspects involved as a narcotics robbery crew, a home invasion crew, I had a common theme, a common line that I used universally in those cases.
And I would always tell the suspects, I'm not looking for robbers who are willing to murder. I'm looking for murderers who are willing to rob.
That is the mentality I need. Because exactly as you said, someone has either a stash of cash or a big load of narcotics that I'm going to bring your crew, your robbery crew in to help me steal.
And it was simple. I would say, look, this isn't going to be easy work.
We're not snatching grandma's purse off her shoulder and running down the alley. These dudes are going to be armed up.
They're guarding their product. You have to be ready to go to war to do this, to participate in this.
And then when these crews show up with guns and ski masks and rubber gloves and bulletproof vests, their intention is clear. Yeah, it's a good conspiracy charge.
As a prosecutor- They know what they're getting into. I made it a point to make sure that they knew what they were getting into.
And if someone didn't have the balls for it, if this is not what you do, get out now, because this could get nasty. Yeah, I would imagine prosecutors love this, right? Because when they go, oh, I thought we were just going to go in and steal the television.
So you brought automatic weapons, explosives, body armor, and 15 dudes to go steal televisions out of this person's house? I don't think so. Oh, and we have you on tape talking about robbing the kilos of cocaine that this guy stashed in the safe.
If you're the defendant in that case, how do you decide that you're going to go into a courtroom, try to convince a jury and a judge? That wasn't your intention. When I've laid out the scheme to you and it's all audio and video recorded and you show up with tools of the trade to commit an armed robbery, good luck talking yourself through that one.
Good luck convincing a jury. That wasn't your intention.
Right. Now, at that point, your defense is these other guys made me do it and I feared for my life and I couldn't say no or whatever.
And you plea it out. Which is one of the problems, entrapment.
As an undercover agent, officer, you always have entrapment in the back of your mind. You can't create a scheme that is so wildly attractive to someone that a common person couldn't say no to it.
You can't make it so lucrative, so easy, so glamorous that someone who's down on their luck saying like, look, I don't want to do this. I haven't done this before, but I have to take this risk.
You can't entrap people into those crimes, but part of building the case is showing and proving through their own words and actions that they are predisposed to do this. They've done it before.

Right. Entrapment.
Let me see here. I'm going to look up the standards because it's been a while since law school, but it's basically when a law enforcement official or their agent.
So somebody who's working with you like an informant induces a person to commit a crime that they otherwise would not have committed.

Government inducement, coercion, extraordinary promises, and like you said, lack of predisposition. So the defendant was not already inclined or prepared to commit the crime before law enforcement's involvement.
And there are other tests depending on the state, like what you say to the person. If you come to me and you say, let's go rob a drug dealer.
And I say, no way. And you say, come on, man, there's no one there.
I know that your mom has cancer and you have no income. And all you have to do is help me carry this stuff.
And I trust you. You don't even have to carry a gun.
That might rise to the standard of entrapment. And if you don't do it, I have to kill you because you know about this operation.
That's likely entrapment. But if you come to me and you say, let's go rob a drug dealer.
And I say, great, that's my favorite hobby. Let's shoot them while we go in there too, because I hate these guys in the way that they look and split the money with me.
That's not likely entrapment. If I'm out there convincing people to commit crimes that they haven't done, they're not predisposed to do, not willing to do, shame on me.
That's bad policing. If I'm not any better at it than that, then I shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
Basically, entrapment is, are you making criminals out of people that wouldn't otherwise commit those particular crimes. Entrapment is always in the

back of your mind, avoiding it, overcoming entrapment, making sure that we're not creating criminals. We don't have to create criminals.
There's plenty of them out there. Another element is outrageous government conduct.
Whereas an agent of the government, you're so outrageous in your character, you're so outrageous in your role that you overwhelm the suspect. Those are the two most common defenses that we face, my client was entrapped.

You lured him into something that he wasn't willing to do. Or you and your character were so over the top that my client was intimidated or afraid to say no.
That's tough. That's got to be tough, right? You have to argue that you are convincing and really good at your job as a hitman.
And then on the other hand, you also have to argue, but this person wouldn't have been afraid of me. Why? You kill people for money.
Like, why wouldn't he be afraid of you? That's a decent defense. I would imagine that's effective.
Yeah. And there's always problems to overcome, regardless of who you are, not only what you do for a living.
The greatest achievers in life are problem solvers. I don't care if you're operating on someone's brain, if you're flying the space shuttle, if you're an undercover agent, if you're running a business, if you're running a family.
Every day we're confronted with problems. The people that achieve are the ones that are great at solving and handling problems.
You had some pretty convincing, I don't know what you call it, backstopping. You had all this crap in your house, so it would look like you were going to go down in a shootout with the police if it came down to it.
Tell us about that, because it sounds like you basically had some crazy prepper-looking stash and a bunch of booze. In essence, it was part of an earlier element to our conversation of street theater, inaccurate conclusions from accurate observations.
So in my undercover house, I had bulletproof vests. They were laying around.
I carried a baseball bat with me all the time. I didn't really talk about it.
It was just a prop that I used that I held on to. I had a plumber's wrench hanging on a nail at the door of my house.
So at the front door of my house, there's a nail in the wall and there's a pipe wrench hanging there. All those things, I didn't have to speak to those things.
Like when you come to someone's house, if you came to my house to socialize or to visit me or see me or come to a party and you bulletproof vests laying around, you're going to form in your own mind a conclusion as to what that means. If you're dealing with me and I'm portraying myself in this gangster role and I'm swinging a baseball bat around with me, that's so uncommon.
It's so unusual. You're going to decide for yourself what that means.
If you came to my house and you see a plumber's wrench hanging at the back door, I don't have to say a word about it. Your automatic conclusion is going to be, if someone rings his doorbell at three o'clock in the morning and he doesn't have a gun in his hand, before he opens that door, he can grab that plumber's wrench off that nail and have a weapon in his hand.

Those were all elements of the street theater, the inaccurate conclusions from accurate observations that all the totality of those things, starting with those little tiny things, led to credibility. That makes sense, right? People fill in the blanks.
I used to talk about this when I talked about dating, but it was like, if you tell somebody something, let's say it's a level one credibility, right? Like, okay, he says this about himself. It may be true.
It may not be true. If they hear about it from one of your friends, that's more credible because it's not coming from you, but it's still coming from one of your friends.
So like maybe there's a 20%, 30% level of doubt. But if they think they figured it out on their own without anybody saying anything, that's almost 100 percent level of credibility.
Right. And people think, oh, I know this because of my observational skills.
And what they don't know is that you are manipulating their observational skills. If I tell you that I'm a debt collector and I give you glamorous historical stories of debt collections that I've been a part of.
Yeah, you're bragging. You're going to put your own level of value on those.
But if you're standing at my shoulder and I do a debt collection and I've paid you to be there to watch my back and then we get done and I take some of that money that I just collected and put it in your pocket. I would historically tell people, hey, you just participate in this.
You saw behind the curtain. You saw what I'm about.
Do not open your mouth. Do not put my business out on the street.
They can't help themselves. They had to tell other people.
I was there. I saw it.
I touched it. I witnessed it.
I participated in it. And then all those

things you previously mentioned start to come true. From what I understand from the book,

you don't even like motorcycles that much from what I read. So how did it end up that you are

the guy who gets picked to infiltrate the Hells Angels? How did that happen?

The Hells Angels in Arizona were operating violently and with impunity. No one was really checking them.
And so I was approached by a case agent, an H-A-S-A-C-A-C-A-, complex case investigator that I ever crossed paths with. The guy's brilliant.
He's a savant. He's one of those guys who had the ability to assess and hold and process vast amounts of intelligence and information and reference it instantly, mentally.
He was a savage of an investigator. So Joe wants to take a run at the Hells Angels, and he approaches me.
We are friends. We were peers.
I love Joe. I respected him.
We'd worked together in the past. And he says, I want you to lead this undercover investigation, and we're going to get side by side, not infiltrate the Hells Angels.
We're going to try to get side by side with the Hells Angels. My first reaction was like I said earlier, I'm not the right guy.
I can name a dozen guys who will fill the role that you need served in this case better than I can.

Guys who have studied this world, this culture, who are comfortable with it, who are familiar with it. He said, you know what, here's why I want you to lead this is you have a head start.
I'd already been working a case that had been based in Bullhead City, Arizona, which was right across the Colorado River from Laughlin, Nevada. I had been working a case on some bounty hunters that were getting out of hand.
They were like beating people. They were taking like murder for hire contracts.
They were way off the rails. In this bounty hunter investigation, I had already started crossing paths with members of the Hells Angels, not as targets, just in the criminal community, in that society.
He's like, dude, you got a head start. You always figure it out.
You'll figure this out. You'll figure out how to play the game, but you got a head start.
They already know who you are. We don't have to start from scratch.
You know, I jumped in and my mentality on this job was always dangerous boys go to dangerous places. The ATF didn't hire me to sit at a desk and do a computer investigation.
They hired me to get out and like I said earlier, get in the weeds and get down and dirty. And I'll say this, we never accomplished anything in the world of law enforcement alone.
We had a fully staffed task force. We had every job and every element of an investigation covered by professionals who were experts at whatever it is that their assignment was.
So in the end of an investigation, any investigation, there's typically someone left who either gets the credit, sometimes takes the blame, but there's someone left on the point who ends up, when something gets publicity, speaking about it. That happened to be me in this Hells Angels infiltration.
But I had dozens of people around me who made every bit the sacrifice and suffered and put the amount of time and blood, sweat, and tears into the case that I did. Okay.
So at first you're posing as, is it fair to say a petty criminal or maybe not a petty criminal, but just a regular criminal at this point? You're not like, hey, want to join your gang? It was just like, hey, I want to do criminal activity for money. What I was known as was a gun runner, a debt collector, ultimately like a quasi kind of unprofessional hitman.
And so my cover story wasn't one that I invented or just used for the Hells Angels case. It had been one I had developed and perfected over years and years and years of undercover operations, and I just recycled it.
I had become comfortable in playing that character. I had become comfortable in being J.
Bird Davis, the gun runner. I could talk about the nuances and the tradecraft of firearms trafficking, explosives trafficking.
I could talk about debt collections with a level of expertise, having studied it, having talked to people that did it for real, defend its criminal suspects. So when I presented that persona, I was presenting with a high level of confidence.
Right. High level of authority as well.
Yeah. Why specifically is it hard for a bureaucracy like law enforcement to go after motorcycle clubs like the Hells Angels from the book? Not that law enforcement isn't up to the challenge, but it's almost like a design flaw.
It's more fashionable maybe to go after one or two big volume drug dealers or gun dealers. Or if you want to make a ton of cases, you just go after small timers and you just rack them up one guy per week.
But going after a big organization seems really difficult, takes too much time and resources and then maybe a questionable result. Yeah, that's a good question.
I'm not sure that I've got at least the perfect answer for it. The outlaw motorcycle gangs, to some extent, operate in obscurity.
It's not like we see them every day. When we see them, they allow themselves to be seen.
They advertise who they are with the cuts, with the vests they wear. They're advertising their membership.
typically, and I'm going to speak to the Hells Angels, like I can't speak in this big picture

that encompasses all motorcycle gangs with the Hells Angels. If you're not crossing business with them, if you're not involved in the operations of their gang, many times they're typically not hard to get along with.
It's not like these guys wake up in the morning and say like, who are we going to go beat up today? They do what they do. If you cross paths with them and then get sideways with them, they're some of the baddest cats on the planet.
But I didn't find them to be getting up in the morning and pouring themselves a bowl of Cheerios and then saying, who am I going to beat up today? Who am I going to shoot today? Who am I going to rob today? Those things that I was involved in were all elements that were part of their lifestyle well before I ever arrived on the scene. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with an undercover ATF agent that infiltrated the infamous Pagans biker gang.
Everyone was saying, hey, motorcycle enthusiasts, bikers are all bad. So they did this whole study and basically out of the study, it came back and said, hey, listen, 99% of them aren't.
You know, 1% of these bikers might be problematic or gang members or what have you, but the rest aren't. Well, then the bikers, the real bikers, the outlaw bikers were like, hey, this is great.
We are the 1%. We're proud of being the 1%.
I mean, you know, people think these are just a bunch of morons running around partying and they're not. They're very sophisticated in how they move their money.
They're very sophisticated in their structure. And they're also very sophisticated in what they do.
People are always like, oh, whatever made you decide to do a two-year undercover? And listen, I didn't sign up for a two-year undercover deal. That's just what it turned into.
Very few of these run for two years. You're always kind of just seeing how it's going to play out.
And that's where some of this dumb luck comes into it. They assigned me to this hit squad inside the gang.
Most of the gang members don't even know that this group exists, but it's selected by Mother Club members of what they consider to be their heavy hitters, the ones that can do the real down and dirty work. And so Hellboy, he had approached me.
He's like, hey, they want you to be a part of this. We were going to be targeting Hell's Angels, and we were going to be killing them.
You have to be very quick in thinking. The reason why to go undercover is from the outside, you can deal with maybe some low-level members.
You're never getting anywhere near the leadership. The only way to do that is to go undercover in the club and go up into the ranks.
I would have failed if I didn't have some dumb luck on my side, and I had plenty of dumb luck throughout this case. To hear how Ken Croak spent two years risking his life going through initiation in one of the most ruthless biker gangs in the world, check out episode 673 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.
That's the end of part one, part two out in just a few days. All things Jay Dobbins will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com.
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