1137: Jay Dobyns | Undercover with the Hells Angels Part Three

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I'm at the Mesa, Arizona clubhouse, beautiful clubhouse, like a Hell's Angels museum. And there's dudes standing around with guns out and pointing guns, asking these questions.
Why are these guys talking shit about you? So I had a shoulder holster that held a pistol on each side. And this one member notices like my hand is starting to make its way towards the pistol.
And he said, Jaybird, let me ask you something. Can you outdraw my trigger squeeze? And I was like...
Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.
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To help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, Jay Dobbins back on the show.
He joined the ATF, that's the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and went undercover in the Hells Angels. Last time we had him on, we talked about undercover operations, prepping for those in general, a few details here and there, but we didn't really get into the weeds on what it's like to go undercover in the Hells Angels, the most notorious biker gang in the world.
In this episode, we're going to do a deep dive on that. I won't spoil it.
Here we go with Jay Dobbins. Hey, man, thanks for coming back on the show.
I know we just had you on, but we had such a good audience response from it. We had a really good, long conversation about your work at the ATF and how you started the undercover operation, but we never actually got into the Hells Angels stuff.
We basically just dipped our toes in it and then bounced off of it. If people haven't heard the first couple episodes I did with you, I recommend they do go back and listen to those just so they get a little bit of a basis for some of this, your work in the ATF, outlaw, biker gangs, how some of them operate, and your undercover work in general.
How did you get started doing undercover work? Because I assume you don't just join the ATF and you're like, okay, so I want to do undercover work. Someone else makes that choice for you probably, right, in the beginning? Well, really not.
That was the beauty of ATF is that, at least initially, they let you chase what your desire is. And then you find out if you're any good at it.
If you're not, move on to something else. Undercover work is nothing more than a tool in an investigator's toolbox.
There's dozens of ways to investigate cases, traditional research-based cases, surveillance cases, wiretap cases, search warrants. We can go on and on of the techniques that are available to us to investigate a case.
Undercover work is just one tool in that toolbox. I'm biased towards it because that's what I spent my life doing, my professional life doing.
All those other techniques do not allow you to place a living, breathing human being, a trained law enforcement officer next to a suspect or inside an organization or inside some crime scheme, and then come out the other side and report to a case agent or a handler, prosecutors, ultimately a judge and a jury, what you saw, what you smelled, what you tasted, what you heard, what you experienced. Those cases, when done right and when properly recorded, typically don't see a courtroom.
We've overcome the entrapment issues. We've shown that our suspects are predisposed to commit crimes.
And so when you have a sworn law enforcement officer raising his right hand in the witness box, that's a compelling element of a prosecution. It's compelling to the jury if he or she's a good witness, and it's compelling to a judge.
So you mentioned in our last episode, your undercover name was Jaybird Davis and you were like a gun runner. I'd love to hear more about the gun running backstory.
I guess you have to draw on previous experiences to paint a convincing story that is kind of true. And I know you were busting some firearms traffickers in a previous case.
Can you tell us about that? Part of my cover story, part of my persona that I recycled over and over again through

multiple cases, an element of that cover story was that I was a gun runner and it made sense

in Arizona, in the West.

I would tell people that were involved in whatever level of criminal activity, I buy

guns cheap.

I obtain guns cheap in Arizona, in the United States, and then I arrange to have them shipped into Mexico where they're sold for 10 times as much. It's reverse drug trafficking.
So if you're a criminal and you're involved in the criminal community, whatever your scheme might be, and I give you my cover story, this is what I do. It makes sense to you.
It's plausible. Yeah, this is interesting.
The margins on trading guns for, let's say, cocaine, street value, I mean, it's just you can really arbitrage that if you have a criminal gang in the United States that can get guns and can distribute cocaine, for example. We're allowing guns to be trafficked.
I'll give you an example. ATF got wrapped up in a past operation.
Your audience might be familiar with it. It was titled Operation Fast and Furious.
Yeah, I remember this. So ATF's jurisdiction is to interrupt and investigate firearms trafficking.
So there was this scheme, these out-of-bounds ATF supervisors and a few employees were allowing guns to be trafficked. And they were doing it with the intent like, hey, we're going to track the end game.
Where are these guns going to land? They knew they were ultimately going to the cartels. They're letting guns go to a drug trafficking organization.
The way it was found out is that one of the guns that was allowed to go into Mexico came back into the United States that was used to arm a ripoff crew. That ripoff crew was confronted by a team of Border Patrol agents, their BORTAC unit, their tactical unit, and they got in a firefight south of Tucson, outside of Rio Rico, Arizona, halfway between Tucson and the Mexican border.
A Border Patrol agent was killed by the name of Brian Terry in this shootout. The gun that was used to kill Brian was a part of the Fast and Furious trafficking operation.
These supervisors who, in my opinion, were not only corrupt, they were criminal in how they were conducting this investigation. Completely, 100% unjustifiable and out of bounds.
They were actually using the body count of violence in Mexico to justify that there were too many firearms in Mexico. They were fueling it.
They were pouring gasoline on their own fire trying to justify their operation.

That is an extreme example of outrageous government conduct, in addition to fraud, waste, and abuse, and corruption and criminal activity. I'm not an ATF hater.
I love agents with their boots on the ground that are out there confronting violent crime and trying to keep bad people from doing bad things to good people. Like I have the most admiration that you can have for those people, but you can't defend that as an ATF agent and as an operation that my agency was a part of and orchestrated and ran.
Like I can't defend that. I remember that mess was so bad that even Barack Obama took a punch for that one, right? People were saying, look, how did this happen under your watch? Look how egregious this is.
And that was kind of the wake up call for everybody realizing that the guns that the cartels get are actually from the United States. I think many people didn't know that before.
Well, and the cartels are sending cartel members, emissaries across the border into the United States to buy guns, what appear to be legally. They're actually filling out the paperwork.
They're going into gun stores. What is this called again? There's a name for this.
It's a straw purchase, straw purchasing firearms. They're not portraying that these purchases are for themselves, but their intent is to go to someone else.
They're landing them someplace else. Now they have the problems of how to smuggle them over the border and all those things.
But the cartels are the greatest contraband smugglers in the history of contraband smuggling. They know how to get contraband back and forth over the border.
They're very good at it. And so in that scheme, person A buys a gun or multiple guns here in the United States, and everything appears to be proper on the surface.
Paperwork's filled out. They pass the background check.
They receive their guns. They land on the other side of the border, and then they're being used in violent narcotics trafficking.
It's our job to disrupt that. It's our job to investigate those schemes.
And then sometimes they get greedy.

You go in and you buy a couple AK-47s and it goes good and you don't have a problem. Then you go back and now you want five AK-47s.
That goes good. And then pretty soon, like you're ordering 15, 20, 25 AK-47s all under the premise that you're buying them for yourself.
Are there gun collectors out there that accumulate massive amounts of weapons and they have more than one of a make and model of a firearm? Of course they are. But you know what? They're not breaking the law.
They're not using them to hurt people. They're gun collectors.
It's part of their hobby. It's part of their lifestyle.
They're not hurting people with them. Yeah, I'm sure I'll get emails from people in the audience.
But is there anyone out there that can justify, hey, I got 25 AK-47s for legitimate personal use? I guess if you own a gun range, you could buy them and say, we rent these to people who come in and they want to shoot them. And we need this for like bachelor parties.
We need 25. But other than that, I cannot think of a person who would need 25 of these unless you just have a lot of properties and you want one in every room and every property that you have.
I don't know that need really comes into play. If I'm abiding by the law and under the Second Amendment, and I'm a supporter of the Second Amendment, our citizens' rights to bear arms, if someone wants 25 of them and they've got the money to them and they've got a gun locker and they've got them stacked up, they get satisfaction from that.
But they're not committing crimes with them and they're not doing anything wrong. And there's people that want exotic machine guns and they want silencers and they want very high end weaponry.
They're exercising their right until they start committing crimes with them. I'm actually not even worried about the people that buy that stuff.
I'm just worried that they're going to get robbed by somebody who wants to commit crimes with those weapons. That's my main worry.
The guy who makes a YouTube channel showing off his silenced 50 caliber or whatever machine gun that he mounted to a truck, like, that's just funny. Well, just like there's been examples of armed robberies, narcotics robberies for drugs or a stash house that has money in it.
There's some massive firearms collection somewhere. That's a target for crime as well.
Yeah, I assume most of these guys, one, you'd have to make sure they're not home because they're certainly armed. But two, I don't know how it works.
But I assume once you start buying weapons like that, don't you have to get a license from the ATF?

Certain kinds of weapons, you have to get some sort of permission, right? Some sort of special permission, yeah. There's an application process that involves a background check and identifying what you intend to purchase.
And only after that background research is done are you then allowed to actually make the purchase to obtain the firearms. like I can't go out and buy a fully automatic Uzi or Mac 10 and then go back to ATF and say, hey, man, I got this Uzi.
I'd like to register this gun. It's all got to be done in advance.
Okay. That seems quite reasonable.
And I know there's people that argue against that, but... There's also an element out there that doesn't want any background checks, any application process.
It should be entirely free trade. I don't agree with that either.
But the people that are law-abiding

citizens that want to accumulate firearms, they're not doing anything wrong. They're exercising their

constitutional rights. Look, I'm a gun owner as well, so I can relate.
There are people that make

reasonable arguments against having any kind of list. I don't want to be on a list.
As a Jewish person, being on lists is never a comfortable thing for us either. So I get it.
I understand not wanting to put your name on a list that makes you a target. I have firearms that even as an ATF agent, I had to apply to ATF to get permission to own those firearms.
That's interesting. That'll kind of make sense.
I wasn't allowed to go out and say, hey, look, I'm an ATF agent. Here's my badge and my credentials.
I'll take one of those and one of those and one of those. I have to go through the process too.
Although you are a federal agent, right? So you have much more leeway about what you can buy and carry, right? Can't you guys carry higher capacity magazines and things like that? Yeah, you know, for our tactical units and in some places, probably uniformed cops that are patrolmen, there's exemptions for them. But there's people that are very passionate about that issue.
There's lots of moving parts to it. I don't think that there's any like super simple explanation to any of it.
There's multiples of millions of firearms in our country, and there's billions of rounds of firearms in our country and there's billions of rounds of ammunition in our country whether you like it or not it's part of what america is this might be a little bit outside of the area of your expertise but what do you think about the cartels being labeled terrorist organizations foreign terrorist organizations i don't know if that actually happened or was just being discussed but what do you think of that sort of change in policy? I'm 100% behind it. How do you argue that with smuggling their product illegally into our country and poisoning our citizenry, that they're not terrorists? Yeah.
As far as cartels being terrorist organizations, I mean, they murder tens of thousands of civilians in their own country and their products products kill hundreds of thousands of people in our country. So I don't have any sympathy.
I'm not some constitutional scholar, but by classifying them as terrorists, I believe an aspect of that is that it now allows us to use the military. Yeah.
And so you know what? You want to play this game? We're the best in the world at playing war games. You do not want to fuck with us.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens because eventually you would think that we're going to end up utilizing the ability to do that. Instead of having Mexican police go and round these guys up and then let them all go because they're on the take, you might see an A-10 just take down an entire plantation of cocaine or manufacturing facility.
I'm curious what the counter arguments are to this. I'm worried about Mexican civilians, obviously, being anywhere near a military operation because being in a war zone is bad.
But you could argue that they're already in a war zone. There's just no control or responsible parties involved.
There's tens of thousands of innocent Mexican civilians who've been caught up in the violence of the drug game and have been killed. Tens of thousands.
That might even be a conservative number that have nothing to do with that game, but they've paid the ultimate price for at least being too close to it or being in the wrong place at the wrong time, because that drug violence, that narcotics violence, cartel violence is indiscriminate. And it's not just firearms.
It's explosive devices. We see these photos online of the CNG cartel, and they've got armored vehicles and all kinds of crazy tactical gear and weapons that you expect to see in Afghanistan or like the Gaza Strip.

And they're just rolling around in these things in Mexico. They must get a lot of that from the United States.
I don't know where they get the armored vehicles or if they make them somehow. I'm not even sure.
That's something you would think you'd be able to figure out how somebody gets an armored personnel carrier into Mexico, but maybe not. One, I think that goes to why they have a need for that weaponry, because it truly is an arms race.
Good luck outgunning the United States military. It's not going to happen.
We have the baddest cats on the planet. We have the best war fighters in history, and they would love nothing more than to get a crack at that.
Yeah, they wouldn't even hear us coming, I think. They would hear a loud jet engine, and that would be the end of that whole convoy that they're taking photos of on Instagram.
It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. So what kind of training do you get to go undercover? Who runs that? I assume the ATF doesn't just throw you into the deep end.
There's got to be some training class run by experienced undercovers, yeah? There is. Like in our new agent academy, you get some very low-level exposure to it just so that you can understand the mechanics of what an undercover operation might look like.
Whether you're on the point or not, you might be on a cover team. You might be on a surveillance team.
So we do advanced training early on in our careers. And then ATF has a program that's called the Enhanced Undercover Program.
Those agents get extensive training. They have the cutting edge equipment available to them as far as electronics and support and all those things.
But there is no replacement for like being in the fire. And you don't just get dumped into those assignments.
You grow. And with experience, you start small.
I'll just speak from my own experiences. You start off buying dime bags and eight balls.
You're not buying cartel level dope. You're getting a feel for the street.
And then for me, every one of those experiences, I learned something from. If I did something right, if I said something right, I learned from that.
That worked. That's a good technique.
If I got something wrong, if I made a mistake, I learned from that too. Don't do or say that again because it didn't work out very good.
How do you approach a gang like the Hells Angels? You can't just walk into a biker bar and be like, yeah, transporting meth and guns sure sounds like a good gig. You got a warm introduction at the very least.
That's a very good question. It was maybe one of the most audacious plays in the history of

investigations. We initially infiltrated a biker gang in Tijuana, Mexico, named the Solo Angels.

They were a standalone outlaw motorcycle gang based in Tijuana. They had members in the United

States as well, in California. We had an informant that gave us an introduction into that group,

But we infiltrated the Solo Angels not to investigate them for their crimes, but simply to be able to wear that Solo Angels patch in Arizona, in the presence of the Hells Angels, and have credibility that we were already part of that culture. There were actually two infiltrations within one case.
We infiltrated one gang in order to have credibility in the eyes of another gang. And nobody in the first gang knew that you guys were law enforcement, I assume? We did a pretty good job of convincing them.
And part of our sales pitch was like, look, you guys are down here in Tijuana. Nobody really knows who you guys are.
We're going to wear your patch and we're going to be solo angel members, but we're in Arizona and we are going to be riding next to the most powerful, the most notorious, the most famous outlaw motorcycle gang in the history of two wheels. We are going to bring credibility to you.
That was part of the sales pitch. We're going to put you on the map.
At least initially, that was appealing to them. That was intriguing because the Hells Angels, there's a lot of motorcycle gangs out there.
There's powerful motorcycle gangs that are international in nature, that are violent, that are dangerous, that are doing all kinds of crazy things, but none of them ever have been or ever will be the king of the mountain like the Hell's Angels. They are the pinnacle of the outlaw biker world.
That's true. It's the Nike, the name brand out there, I suppose.
If you ask some school teacher or some auto mechanic or a used car salesman, what do you think of when you think of outlaw bikers? Their answer is going to be hell's angels. They're part of Americana.
They're part of the crime and punishment stories of America, of the world at this point. They're instantly recognizable.
They're automatically feared. They have an aura of intimidation about them that just the name scares people.
Now, a lot of listeners were asking after our previous conversation, is there some sort of initiation? Is there a ceremony for admittance to the Hells Angels? There's got to be hazing and stuff like that. A lot of people brought up.
There's no way a group or a club like that is organized as they are just lets anybody in, which of course they don't. I assume there's hazing in your prospect phase where you're on probation.
Well, yeah, very much. It's not like you decide that you want to be a Hells Angel, whether it be in an undercover role or just as a common man citizen.
You don't knock on the clubhouse door and ask for an application. The process doesn't work like that.
People start off as an associate. They're just loosely on the perimeter.
They might attend runs. They might openly be supporters of the Hells Angels, buy the t-shirts, buy the hats, put a sticker on their bike.
The associates, if they catch someone's eye, are asked to hang around, which is an official title in the biker world. A hang around is exactly that.
Someone who's hanging around the club and they're deciding, is club life really for me? Can I really do this? And then they're being watched by members and those members are deciding, is this someone that we want to keep around? Is this someone that is showing that they have the right stuff? From the hangaround phase, then you become a prospective member, a prospect. And so with the Hells Angels, I don't know if this is universal, I was told as a prospect, you're a member without his patch.
Like all our rules apply to you, all our bylaws and protocols and policies and all those things and all those standards that we live by, you have to live by them now.

But as a prospect, you're trying to prove yourself.

They're going to tell you where to be, when to be there, how to be there.

And it's non-negotiable.

As a prospect, I was involved in some outrageous, crazy schemes on the high end up to a member

ringing your phone at two o'clock in the morning and saying, I want a vanilla milkshake from McDonald's. Everything in between.
And you better perform because everything you do is a test. Everything you say is a test.
How you walk, how you talk, the motorcycle you ride, the condition it's in, what you know about it, your car, where do you live?

Is there mail with your name at your house? Is there food in the fridge? Is there a half-eaten pizza in the refrigerator? Is there beer in there? Is there garbage in the waste? Is there toothpaste in the bathroom? Is there toilet paper and soap in there? Every single aspect and element of your life is being scrutinized to confirm to them that you're a real person. I don't suppose you can have them take their shoes off when they get in your house.
That would be a deal breaker. My wife would never allow that.
Like, for example, you just set up an undercover house and you got some furniture in there. Like me and you can walk in there and look around and say, no one lives here.
No one's spending any time here. When you live in a place, regardless of how, whatever your standard of cleanliness is or your maintenance is, there's going to be evidence and examples of someone living there.
And so all those little things. Yeah, that makes sense.
Which came back, like, again, I wasn't a biker investigator and I didn't know a whole lot about motorcycles. I still don't, to be quite honest with you, even after spending two years with these guys.
But there was a time when I was having like a mechanical discussion about motorcycles with one of the members. He was getting into the intricate mechanics of how a motor works and what I needed to do to make a tune-up and do those kinds of things.
And I just stopped them. I said, dude, you're talking way above my pay grade.
I roll this grip and it goes forward. I squeeze this handle and step on this pedal and it stops.
When it doesn't do that anymore, I bring it to someone like you to fix it for me. I knew better than to try to fake being some expert in the world of motorcycles because I couldn't.
I would have been found out instantly. They would have called my bluff quicker than you could snap your fingers.
Yeah. So you get ahead of it by just admitting you don't know what you're talking about.
That makes sense. I think like any good cover story stays very close to the truth.
You don't want to invent a lie that's so massive that you're lying to yourself. You want to have a story that in your own mind, you're telling the truth.
And then you take personal events and personal aspects of your life that you can talk about intelligently and in detail and just morph those. So I think in one of our previous interviews, we talked about when I was shot.
So I got shot early on in the job. I took that story and recycled it many times, but I didn't recycle it, obviously, as a drug deal gone bad where I was shot.
But I could talk about all the details in that. I can show them the scars on my chest and on my back.
I can tell them a legitimate, accurate story, but the details have been morphed. Yeah, that makes sense.
That all makes perfect sense. You were undercover for two years, which I think is a pretty long time.
Is that sort of objectively longer than usual? That was a lengthy investigation. There's been others that are successful that are shorter, and there's been others that are longer.
Like I had all I needed after two years on the same case. Like I said, really, that's all I had ever done in my professional life was seek and work in undercover assignments.
But that one case, that Hells Angels case ran from 2001 to 2003. As always, this podcast is sponsored by HydroxyCut and Unfiltered Cigarettes.
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All right, back to Jay

Dobbins. What does a typical day look like when you're undercover? I mean, are you full time

hanging out with these guys and doing stuff? I would imagine so. There's a unique aspect to that as an undercover operator, as an infiltrator.
You're living their lifestyle side-by-side with them. If they have a 14-, 16-, 18-hour day, you have that same day.
If they go for three or four days on end with no break, you go for three or four days on end with no break. The difference is, and the difficulty is, as a law enforcement officer, your day actually starts before their day.
You have to plan and brief and get with your team and set your objectives and set what your mission is for the day. Then there's fluidity within those plans.
You run for as long as they need you to run with them, and then they go home, but your job's not over. Now you have to process evidence and log evidence and write reports and do all the backside of the investigation.
Take your notes and turn them into official police reports. After two years of this, day after day, week after week, month after

month, year after year, at the end of the Hells Angels case, I'll tell you, man, there were nights

where I was just mentally and physically and spiritually exhausted. I would literally cry

myself to sleep like boo-hoo baby cry myself to sleep thinking like, I can't go one more day.

I can't do this anymore. I'm out of gas.
And then I'd get a couple hours sleep and recharge

I'm just myself to sleep, thinking like, I can't go one more day. I can't do this anymore.
I'm out of gas. And then I'd get a couple hours sleep and recharge the battery and wake up in the morning and say like, okay, I'm feeling better.
Let's try again. Jeez.
That must've been a huge challenge because not only are these guys probably largely drugged up or whatever, so they have a little bit of extra fuel, but they don't have to get up at four to start the day at six. You do.
And then you have the additional stress of trying to keep your cover story intact, whereas they're just living their life, even if it is a challenging 18-hour day. Say with regards to the drug use, not every hell's angel out there is a drug addict.
Not every one of them is smoking meth or snorting coke or whatever it is they're doing. There's many of them that are living actually pretty healthy lifestyles, which is against the stereotype.
But there are some that are cocaine methamphetamine fueled. So you got to keep up with everybody, which was a struggle for me.
And I started popping hydroxycut diet pills, the ones that had raw ephedrine in them. They've discontinued the ones that I was taking.
You could buy them over the counter. There was nothing illegal about them.
But the bottle said not to exceed two of these in a 24-hour period, right? So I'd pop a couple hydroxycuts and they'd give me a kick in the ass and I felt pretty good and I could run. But I built a tolerance to that.
So instead of two, now I needed five. And then instead of five, now I needed 10 or 15 to get through the day.
By the end of the day, I was like poisoning myself. I was eating handfuls of hydroxy cuts, smoking three packs of cigarettes a day, drinking Red Bulls, trying to artificially fuel my energy so that I could maintain pace with these guys.
The tempo that they live at is extreme. Yeah.
Oh, that makes me feel a little bit sick just thinking about the amount of stimulants. Coming off of that must have been terrible.
That must have been a hard crash. There was an event in the middle of the case.
I was a full-blown hydroxycut addict trying to keep up. There was a story that came out.
I think it was baseball spring training. And there was a baseball player who was found dead in his hotel room at spring training.
And they concluded that he had overdosed on hydroxycuts. And I heard that story.
I was so bulletproof. I viewed myself as being invincible.
I hear this story of this highly conditioned, fine-tuned professional athlete that went down to hydroxy cuts, taking too much hydroxy cut. I remember I heard that story and my first reaction was, ain't happening to me.
I ain't going down like that. I don't know what the circumstances were around this guy.
Ain't going down like that. And I kept going.
Oh, I thought you were going to say that was your wake-up call, but the opposite. It was your denial.
I'll tell you what my wake-up call was. Sure.
I'm at the undercover house one night and probably three or four in the morning, my eyes pop open and I sit up in bed and I'm drenched in sweat and my heart is beating so fast that like I put my hand on my chest and I couldn't separate the heartbeats. My heart was racing so fast.
I couldn't calm it down. I couldn't settle in.
I got in my car and I drove to the entrance of the emergency room of a hospital in Phoenix. I wasn't coming out of roll.
I was not going to compromise my role or compromise the case. I pulled up as close as I could to the entrance to the emergency room.
I pressed myself into my steering wheel of my car. I pushed my seat back up that would pin me there and hold me there.
And I opened the door. My flawed reasoning, my flawed logic, my solution to this is I was like, if I'm truly having a heart attack, I'll slump forward on my car horn and someone will come out and see what's going on.
Or I'll fall out of this car into the parking lot and someone will say, hey man, we got somebody that's sick out here. But after I went through that experience, I probably had a good full bottle of hydroxycut sitting in my medicine cabinet at home.

I went home and I dumped that whole bottle in the toilet.

Yeah, man, that stuff was dangerous. And I remember taking in college, just,

oh, it's like a vitamin. It can't hurt you.
You can buy it on Amazon or wherever we bought that stuff online. It's like 20 bucks.
You know, you buy it over the counter and you think that,

okay, like, don't worry about the warning label. You can buy it over the counter.
You pick it up

at the drugstore. It can't be that bad.
It's not going to hurt you. Yeah.
It's like Tylenol. Okay.
You take a couple more than they say you should, whatever. No big deal.
You don't think, oh, I'm going to get a heart attack from this. The reason I stopped using, I wasn't using it like that, but I would take it occasionally.
I remember having that in a bunch of soda, which has caffeine in it. And I just went, I got to lay down.
And I could hear my heart in my ears. And I was like, what causes this? I've definitely drank a lot of soda before.
It's not just the soda. And then I thought, oh, I wonder if this hydroxy cut plus the caffeine in the soda is doing something.
And I remember I was probably like 19. I feel like I'm going to die.
My heart is racing. I'm sweating, but I'm cold.
I'm never taking this again. And who knows how close I came? I really don't even know.
I felt like that every day where you can feel your heart beating in your eardrums. Yeah.
And you can feel your heart beating in your eyeballs. It's almost like your eyes are pulsing with your heartbeat.
Oh yeah. That's not a flattering story to tell about yourself.
That's a humiliating story. That's an unprofessional story.
I regret that. It's an embarrassing story.
But as we said earlier, there's an anonymous audience out there that is listening to your show. I don't know who those people are.
I don't know how they feel about me. Some may like me.
Some, I guarantee you, hate me. I get that.
But if I'm not honest with you, if I'm not authentic, if I'm not transparent with you and tell you about my mistakes and some of those failures and regrets and some of those shames, if I don't admit to some of those, then nothing I say is credible. If I just sit here and tell you hero stories when I'm not a hero, let's counterfeit.
Yeah, I think people appreciate that quite a bit. There is no hero aspect to my story.
I'm very much a common man who was placed in uncommon situations and just did the best I could. And there was days when I succeeded and there was days when I failed.
There's days when I got it right. There's days when I made a mistake.
There probably is a hero in my story. It's not me.
I know what a hero looks like. I've worked alongside some that are truly remarkable heroes.
The hero in my story is my wife and my kids. Just the fact that they put up with me, that they tolerated me, that they didn't kick me out of the house when I gave them every reason to kick me out of the house.
Those are my heroes. I know I asked you a little bit about in our previous conversation, but the personal life balance, I always come back to this because you got to be ready to snap back into your personal life when you go home, but also from your personal life.
These guys are dangerous and they're also really creepy. You mentioned in the book guys were introducing you to their 16 year old daughters and you're what, like 30 or something at this point? I was 40.
40? That is beyond gross, man. I mean, nothing personal.
It's just gross to even think about.

I tried to treat people the way I wanted to be treated. I treated them with respect until no respect was extended to me.
I treated people the way I wanted to be treated. I had money in my pocket.
I had my act together. I wasn't a drug addict.
And this guy saw those qualities, although in a very much flawed package,

was trying to introduce me to this underage girl that was his daughter. I'm sure he was thinking like, you know what, this dude will at least treat her right.
This dude will at least take care of her. As messed up as that is, as flawed as that logic and common sense and reasoning is, I'm certain that that was his mindset because he's probably thinking there's a bunch of knuckleheads out here that she could hook up with that are going to give her a miserable life.
Yeah. Drug addicts who beat women, stuff like that.
I guess if you're not doing drugs other than hydroxycut and you're not beating women up in front of other people, you're almost a catch in that particular world. In a very strange way, yes.
Man, what surprised you most about the Hells Angels once you were on the inside? Is it the stuff that surprises me, like they're not just all degenerate drug addicts? That's surprising to hear somehow. I don't know that I was necessarily surprised by that, but I was actually happy about it.
Well, yeah, sure. Not every Hells Angel I've met was committing crimes.
They're not all murderers and rapists and drug dealers and gun runners and extortionists and conducting assaults. And there was some very much common men type mentality within the universe of members that I met.
I'll tell you what caught me off guard is that the Hell's Angels love to portray themselves as these fun-loving rascals who have this common love and brotherhood of riding motorcycles, but they want the freedom of not having to live by society's rules and laws. I get the appeal behind that.
That's not hard to understand. But then when you see behind the curtain, the rules and laws and bylaws that are documented in handbooks of all their protocols go beyond anything that we as common citizens have to live by.
They don't want to live by our rules and laws, but they have their own rules and laws, which are even more detailed and more extensive. It almost sounds like a cult.
There's so many rules. You said it makes a division one football playbook look like a pamphlet for a jacuzzi.
The simplest things that like we in society, that's not the standard we live by, but it's the religion that they live by. And I was learning these things on the fly.
I was being taught these as I progressed. One was I was told, hey, when you shake hands, if you got writing gloves on, better take your glove off.
You don't shake hands with a glove on. You go skin to skin when you shake hands with a hell's angel.
You got your sunglasses on, you better lift your sunglasses off your eyes and let that guy look you in the eyeballs. Man, don't make them look through your sunglasses.
In normal society, we don't live by that rule. Whether it be respectful or polite or proper, that's another story.
But that was a rule that was placed on me that was like, that is how you conduct yourself. It's non-negotiable.
That's how you do it. I'm not even against it.
I'm not even opposed to it. I'm like, man, that's a respectful, honest way to display respect and integrity to someone.
I was cool with it, but I'd never been lectured in my previous 40 years of life. That's how I should introduce myself to someone.
Yeah, it's funny because I remember learning that in high school when I lived in Europe, there was a like a really old fashioned Russian guy. And he was like, oh, you should always take your gloves off when you shake hands.
And especially with a woman or something like that. And then the other one was like, oh, if you meet someone for the first time, you have to take off your sunglasses because you're not supposed to do that.
And this guy was a relic out of 1940 Soviet Union. They're actually pretty good rules.
I'm using them as an example. Yeah.
But I'm not using them as a criticism. They're pretty good rules.
When someone says, hey, when you meet someone for the first time, if you're sitting down, you need to stand up and get on two feet and look them in the eye. That's a pretty good rule.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's a kind of like old chivalry, OG gentleman kind of stuff.
It's funny. I would love to find a book of all these particular old habits.
I think a lot of them are funny. Like when you walk indoors, you got to take your hat off.
This package of bylaws that I received and all these rules and some of them are logical and make sense, not always adhere to. They didn't want any drug use that involved a needle.
So they weren't saying like, don't get high or don't snort a line of Coke or whatever. They didn't want like injecting addicts.
Okay. Pretty good rule.
Probably pretty good rule to keep your membership in line. But they were using steroids, right? That requires needles.
Yeah, and I think that there probably passes to it and exemptions to it. And I never tested the waters on that, so I don't know I have an answer to it.
One of the things that I wouldn't say it shocked me, but I thought it was pretty brazen. It's documented in their bylaws.
And using the most insulting term that can be used for a black man, no fill in the blank with that word in the club. And it was written down.
And I was like, wow, man, it's one thing to have that policy. It's one thing to hold that mentality or that vibe.
Like these guys went as far as to write it down and put it on a piece of paper. Yeah, that's jarring.
I would imagine if you come from any sort of remotely polite society. How do you talk to your family and friends about what you do for work? Obviously, the undercover work is always on the low, but it's got to be so hard to go to some barbecue where people are talking about baseball or their new home stereo system.
And you just came home from a biker party doing all this crazy stuff. And they're like, what are you doing these days? You just got to make up some story.
The humdrum of regular society probably was actually quite welcome after the craziness of your undercover work. Yeah.
Well, with regards to my personal life when I was undercover, I never deep dived on the details. I didn't think that there was any benefit to that, to exposing my family to that.
They knew in the 30,000-foot view, big picture, what I did. Some of the details, some of the experiences, there was no advantage of any type to discuss that with them, which is, again, like one of my mistakes and probably one of my flaws is that when I was socially present with my family, when I was around neighbors or whatever, I may have been physically present, but I was never emotionally or intellectually present.
My brain was always someplace else. It was always thinking about the next move, the next play, the next strategy, and that's not a good way to raise a healthy family.
I was physically present, but I wasn't emotionally present for them. It seems like when you're doing something like this, you have two sides of yourself.
You have the good side, the side that's in the light, and then the dark side, but doesn't the shadow side start to take over slowly? Do you lose control, or even maybe not control, but lose track of who you really are at some point, if your mind isn't even home when you are? These are super good questions. I don't avoid questions.
I try to

address everyone with an honest approach. I feel like I'm beating myself up here a little bit,

but again, I have to be transparent. I have to be honest if I'm going to be credible.

And so one of my flaws, which we could do a whole series if we were just going to talk about the things that were f***ed up about me, we don't have enough time to do it right now. But one of them was that what I did for a living stopped becoming what I did and it became who I was.
And when that happens to you, that's dangerous. That's very unhealthy.
Undercover work, not just the Hells Angels, just the game of undercover, the lifestyle of undercover, it became my heroin. I was addicted to that.
I was addicted to that challenge and that risk and that rush of voluntarily placing yourself in life and death situations. I always justified it to myself because I believed that I had a purpose, that I stood for something, that I was taking a stand for good and innocent people against the predators.
I was always able to justify it to myself, but it got pretty rough. I understand it though man because you're leaning into the shadow side for your own safety so it's

like the incentive to fight it makes you less safe. But then one day you look in the mirror and you see Bird instead of Jay Dobbins and you're like, oh shit, what happened? There was a time I'm out with my family and this was when people were still writing paper checks.
I know that we don't do that anymore. I still do it, man.
But I'm old. I'm 45 now.
Probably people in your audience that are like, they don't even know what that means. What's a paper check? They're Googling it right now.
Yeah. But I remember I signed a check somewhere for something and I signed my undercover name on the check.
I got like my car repaired or something. Yeah.
And I signed my undercover name and then didn't realize it at first and looked down on it and tore the check up and actually signed my real

name. But I was like, come on, dude, get it together.
Yeah. Come on, man.
You know what? Focus. Yeah.
You said in the book, I thought I'd infiltrated them, but in the end they infiltrated me. When you finally realize that's happening, I assume at some point you call your supervisor and you're like, how much longer is this? How much more do we have to do? I'm running out of sanity here.
Yeah, I wrote that in my book years ago, but I still believe that to be true. As I was infiltrating them, they were infiltrating me.
There's a part later in the book where you talk about building the case and you're listening to these wiretaps and you ask, I think her name was JJ, you said, who is this? And she goes, what? That's you. That's your voice.
That's you on the tape. And you didn't recognize your own voice, which is hard to imagine, I think, for most of us.
We were transcribing tapes and trying to pick evidentiary pieces out of the tapes. And I'm listening to it.
And I'm listening to this guy who's talking a million miles an hour and talking shit and laughing and busting balls. And I didn't recognize myself, which was an eye-opening experience just in that little micro story of what was going on.
So there's elements to that past life. There's parts of it that I'm proud of, but there's parts of it that I'm ashamed of too.
I guess that's part of life. I always tell people, wisdom is always something that came to me right after I needed it.

Yeah, I like that, actually.

That's how you build wisdom.

Hopefully, you don't get killed in the process, I suppose.

Well, I just was talking to some people recently, and they were saying, like, what's the key

element to undercover work?

And they came out with, like, complacency was one of the answers.

You can't get complacent.

You can't take things for granted.

I said, really, there's only one big rule that you can't violate. Don't get dead.
Don't get killed. There's no individual.
There's no suspect. There's no target.
There's no scheme. There's no organization that's worth dying for.
If at the end of the day, if everything went wrong, if you made every wrong choice, but you go home at the end of the day, you're okay. You're okay.
You'll have a chance to fix it. What were some of the more risky moments you encountered during those two years? Surely there were some close calls that you faced.
There was an event, just what pops to mind, there was an event when the Solo Angel cover story, our association with the Solo Angels, came under question. again, it came under question like by my mistake, by my error.
We had infiltrated the Solo Angels, as I said earlier, just strictly for credibility in the eyes of the Hells Angels. Once that infiltration was completed and we were wearing the Solo Angels patches in Arizona, I stopped servicing that Solo Angel relationship.
Like I had gotten what I needed from them. I see.
I wasn't continuing to develop that relationship, which in hindsight, I should have been. So members of the solo angels started leaking out to members of the hell's angels.
These dudes came down here and got their patch and we'd never see them. Like they never come down here anymore.
They don't send us money. They don't come to our parties.
They don't come to our events. They don't come to our meetings.
They're invisible to us. You need to keep an eye on these dudes.
I'm not sure that they are who they say they are. That word gets back and I get a call that I have to meet and we got some problems and I'm meeting with a shot caller.
I'm meeting with a bad dude. I get this call so I know that this story's floating around there.
Then I get this 911 page. We were still using pagers at the time, at least for part of our communication.
I get this 911 page from Joe Slotelli's, you need to get out of the house, man. They're coming for you.
They're sending a hit squad to the house. To your house where your family lives? No, our undercover house.
Thank God, but still terrifying. So we gather up and scramble out.
And sure enough, three or four Hells Angels pipe hitters were prowling around the house and they had guns out. One guy had an axe handle.
They were coming to take care of business with us. So I go to this meeting.
I was certain that I was walking into an assassination. I thought like when I started doing my initial research into the Hells Angels, for us, knowledge is power.
The more that we know about something or someone, the better we're able to deal with it. In my initial research into the Hells Angels, one thing kept jumping out at me.
They kill their own. If they feel compromised or betrayed, they had a longstanding history of killing their own members.
And that always stuck in my head. I'm being summoned to this meeting.
I thought, man, I'm walking into an ambush. This is going to be an assassination.
And part of my mindset at that point, which again is people are going to see this and say, man, this dude was the rocker. Like I had stopped being afraid of dying.
I didn't fear dying anymore. I was like, I'm probably going to get smoked here.
Let's see what happens. Let me see if I can save this.
So I go to this meeting and I'm confronted like, hey, these guys in Tijuana are calling you out. They're saying you're counterfeit.
Man, are you a cop? Are you an informant?

And at that point, I fell back on this history of communication and trust and loyalty that I had established. And I used events.
I basically built a case for myself. I took pictures of myself in Tijuana at the Solo Angels clubhouse with Solo Angels members arms around my shoulders at their

parties. And I put physical evidence in this guy's hand and said, do I look counterfeit? Do they look

like they're treating me like I'm counterfeit? Here's what happened. Yes, they're right.
I don't

pay any attention to them. You know why? Because I'm paying all my attention to you.
I'm spending

all my time with you. I'm devoting all my energy to you guys.
They're jealous. They're pissed off.
What I told them was going to happen is not coming true. I'm not taking care of them.
I understand why they're pissed off. They're just pissed off for the wrong reason.
Yeah. And this guy got on the phone and he called off the dogs.
He's like, man, everybody stand down. I believe them.
Oh God, that's terrifying. That's just so stressful to be in that situation.
That wasn't the end of the questioning. That was just that kind of diffused things.
Yeah. You live to fight another day.
There was more questions coming from other members. I hadn't quite satisfied everybody yet.
I'm at the Mesa, Arizona clubhouse, which was a very powerful charter in Arizona. 25 members, beautiful clubhouse, like a Hell's Angels museum.
And there were pipe hitters in there. And there's dudes standing around with guns out and pointing guns at me, asking these questions.
Why are these guys talking shit about you? What's the deal with these solo angels? I wore twin Glocks. I had Glock pistols.
I had a shoulder holster that held a pistol on each side. So I always had these Glock pistols with me.
And this one member notices like my hand is starting to make its way towards the pistol. And he said, Jaybird, let me ask you something.
Can you outdraw my trigger squeeze? And I was like, no, it ain't going down like that. And my female partner leaned into me and she said, if you're going down tonight, I'm going down with you.
She was so fearless. I was scared shitless and she might've been scared too, but she didn't project it, man.
That is something else, man. You guys are just built different.
That's for sure. All right.
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I got to also say like being a female and putting herself in a situation where a lot of just really terrible things can happen to you around guys like this. That is extra fearless.
There's just an extra layer there. I know in the book you say you were anyway in the minority of cops who think that women are just as capable undercover as men.
Am I reading that right? The majority of cops didn't at least at that time think women could do this job? I'm not sure if there's a majority or minority universal position on that. I just know that from my experience, the women that I worked with were absolutely amazing investigators, amazing undercover operatives.
I know that there were circumstances where women would be involved in an undercover operation I was in and the quote-unquote experts were telling them, this is too dangerous for you. This isn't a woman's job.
And the beauty of that is that the women I work with proved those experts wrong. They were intelligent.
They were brilliant investigators. They were street smart.
They were courageous. And in a few instances, absolutely fearless.
So I do law enforcement training. I continue to do that.
I speak at events and conferences, and I make that a point to speak to the women in the audience to tell them, don't listen to the experts. You're every bit as capable as any male operator out there, and in a lot of cases, better.
You have an advantage. I think when a woman's present and you've got all these pipe hitter alpha dogs with their necks bowed and their shoulders back, when a woman is brought into that situation, it almost takes the testosterone out of the air.
It lightens things up a little bit. It changes people's demeanors.
And I think that any of us, regardless of what you're doing, whatever you have that is to your advantage, you should put it in play. And it's not just an undercover work, it's in business or whatever it might be.
And so if you have the ability to de-escalate and to bring comfort and confidence into a situation like a lot of women do, why would you not use that? Why would we not take advantage of it as investigators? It also seems like if cops think that way, maybe criminals also think that way, which

would make women even better for the job.

Because if they're thinking they've never said a woman isn't undercover, that'd be

ridiculous.

Then you have another layer of cover before people start to get suspicious.

Universally, law enforcement is a male-dominated profession.

Of the sworn officers in the United States, 75% are men, 25% are women.

And that's plus or minus. I don't know entirely how accurate that is, but I'm close.
In undercover work, 30% or 40% of the undercover operatives are women. So there becomes a disbalance in that great investigators, great undercovers see the value of having a woman as part of the undercover package.
And we're always looking for our advantage. We're always looking for what can we do to stay a half step ahead of the power curve.
That last story, like the Mesa Clubhouse, where this confrontation was taking place, this questioning was taking place. So she's there with me.
That's the exact same location where a woman named Cynthia Garcia came to the Mesa Clubhouse to socialize and party, got out of line, said the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the wrong people. Basically, she insulted the Hells Angels on their turf, in their house, in the presence of multiple members.
And they boot stomped her to the brink of death. And then they rolled her up in some carpeting and put her in the trunk of a car and took her out to the desert Apache Junction outside of Mesa and they cut her head off.
Oh my God. And we were aware, at least suspicious of who was involved in it.
This female agent was operating in that exact same environment where this woman had been at least pressed to the edge of death. And so when I talked earlier in a flattering way about the value of women and how they can do anything on this job that the men can do, that's an example.
Yeah. God, that's scary, man.
That's so awful. I'm going to lighten it up a little bit if I can.
Yeah, please do. Does the ATF pay for your expenses? Yeah, I'm sure if you buy some food or something, they pay for it.
But you had a bunch of tattoos. Don't they make you or ask you to get tattoos? And it's, I'm not paying 300 bucks for this, this death's head.
The US taxpayer at least has to pay for it if I'm going to get needled up by the hell's angels. Yeah, I had an expense account.
If I was out socializing, if I was out partying, I had an expense account. I could buy beers.
I could buy cigarettes. I could buy food.
My undercover houses were paid for. My vehicles were paid for.
I wasn't incurring personal expense in this operation. My lifestyle was being funded.
With regards to the tattoos, I got a lot of tattoos. I didn't get one tattoo ever for the purposes of undercover work.
I got tattoos because I wanted them. Now, did those tattoos maybe help the aesthetics of my appearance? Make me more believable? Yeah.
Did I have members of the Hells Angels doing the tattooing at times? Yes. You go get a tattoo from a Hells Angels tattoo artist, that's going to give you three, four hours of personal, intimate time to have all kinds of conversations with that person.
I didn't get any tattoos because I was like, oh, I got to get inked up so that I can be believable. I was buying guns and bombs and drugs before I ever had any tattoos.
That's interesting. That's almost a whole sub-conversation because they're going to ask you probably what the tattoo means to you.
You almost need a cover story about that. You can't be like, wow, this one is my son and this one's my daughter and she loves to play the guitar.
You have to be like, yeah, this is something totally different. When the Hells Angels case started, I had a tattoo that was a tribute piece to the four ATF agents who were murdered at the assault and the raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, when the David Koresh investigation.
So ATF tries to hit this compound.

Everything goes terribly, tragically wrong. And we had four agents killed that day.

And I was a young agent and I knew a couple of the guys that were killed.

So I had a little kind of obscure tribute piece to those agents, but it had the date on it, February 28th, 1993, which was the day of that event. Before I started the Hells Angels case, I had that tattoo not covered up, but altered because I thought, man, these guys pay attention to everybody else.
They pay attention to everything. And if they do any research into what February 28th, 1993 means, or what took place in history on that day, I potentially could have some hard questions to answer.
I was ready to dance around it. I was ready to talk around it, but I just figured let's just avoid that problem before it becomes one.
No kidding. Yeah.
Wow. You got to think about all these little tells, man.
Everything. Yeah, that's crazy.
You guys went to some pretty extreme lengths to prove credibility. There's this fake murder of one of the Mongol gangsters.
This kind of got you, what, patched into the angels eventually. This was like your official graduation murder.
I don't know. Yeah, the case was winding down.
They were ready to

start with indictments. We had massive amounts of evidence, guns, bombs, drugs, thousands of hours of recorded criminal conversations.
In my first levels of introduction to the Hells Angels, I asked a very innocent question, and it was in response to the casino riot between the Mongols and the Hells Angels at the Harrahs. Can you tell us briefly what that was? I didn't ask about this yet.
Yeah, there was a big biker run called the Laughlin River Run, which took place in Laughlin, Nevada, which happened to be right across the river from my undercover house in Bullhead City, Arizona, separated by the Colorado River. And I believe April of 2002, the Hells Angels crossed paths with the Mongols at the Harrah's Casino, and there was a massive riot that took place under hundreds of closed-circuit television, shooting, stabbing, people being killed.
It was chaos. Prior to Harrah's, I knew that there had been this long-standing bloodbath war with the Mongols for the Hells Angels, which was a demonstration of it, of how extreme it was.
But I would ask Hells Angels, if I'm going to be with you guys, what are my rules if I cross paths with a Mongol? Like, how am I supposed to react to that? And I was repeatedly told, it's your job to kill Mongols. That's what we do.
And so I put that information in my back pocket, and then we ran for two years with these guys. The case is getting ready to come to an end, and it's wrapping up.
It's running out of gas, to be quite honest with you. It's expensive, right? Isn't that what kind of- Very expensive.
You're funding every aspect of the investigation, the task force. And I should say that like I'm telling these stories, we had an entire task force and every important aspect of a criminal investigation was covered by an expert.
There was a dozen people who were every bit as committed to the case as I was, making all the sacrifices that I was as part of this task force. That's like millions of dollars in payroll over two years.
Yeah. I don't know what the final number was, but it's not a cheap operation to do a long-term deep cover infail case.
So the Hells Angels are essentially correct in that it's just too resource intensive to take them down. This operation, which nabs like a couple of guys in one segment of the organization, costs millions of dollars and takes two years.
Yeah, there's definitely a cost reward algorithm there that people decide far above my pay grade. It is what it's worth.
So I pull this information out of my back pocket, in essence, and tell members of the Skull Valley Hells Angels, where I was prospecting, there's a Mongol in Mexico, and he's running his mouth down there. And he's saying that he kicked our ass at the Laughlin riot, that he's proud of the Hell's Angels that died there, and that he's going to start pushing Mexican methamphetamine right up into Arizona, right into Phoenix, right into Sonny Barger's backyard, and there's nothing that the Hell's Angels can do about it.
And I said, I want to go down there and kill that guy. And I was waiting for the reaction.
If someone tells me or you or any common man that they're plotting a murder, that person's dialing 911 as they're running the other direction. They gave me the pistol to commit the murder with.
They told me how they wanted it done. They're like, man, when you pop this dude, pop him in the mouth, pop him in the eye, pop him in the ear, somewhere where that bullet won't have trouble penetrating his skull and it'll bounce around in his skull, scramble the dude's eggs.
And so it was off that they had shown their willingness, their ability, their predisposition to be involved in this murder. And so what we did is I told them I was going to Mexico to commit this murder.
Actually, what we did in reality is we just went outside a Phoenix. We found a desert area that was nondescript.
We dug a shallow grave. We had a Mongol motorcycle vest that was seized in another investigation.
We put it on the back of one of our task force members. We duct taped his hands behind his back and duct taped his feet and dragged him into a grave.
And then we had a homicide detective that built us a crime scene. He used blood and parts from a butcher shop to create this murder.
How do you pick the guy who has to get covered in pig blood? It's like, oh, you're the new guy, man. Sorry.
Them's the breaks. I told the homicide detective, I said, here's the story I'm going to tell.
I'm going to tell him that I saw this guy coming out of a cantina and I smacked him in the head with my baseball bat and busted his head open. Then we stuffed him in trunk of a car and drove him out to the desert and finished him off with the gun that you gave us.
So the homicide detective who had hundreds and hundreds of homicide investigations under his belt, he built the crime scene to fit my parameters, to fit my story. Yeah, that's kind of fun somehow.
We took pictures of it. I cut the Mongol vest off the back of our quote unquote victim as evidence.
I put it in a FedEx box. I addressed the FedEx box from Mexico to my undercover house, gave it a couple days, and then called the Hells Angels and said, man, we got to talk.
We got to get together. What's up? What's going on? Tell me what happened.
I'm like, I can't talk about it on the phone. All I can say is that Mongol in Mexico blew a head gasket.
That's all I'm going to say. So we meet with the members of the Hells Angels and I hand them a FedEx box.
And like we talked about, like the smallest details needed to be covered, but it was sent, apparently sent out of Mexico to my undercover house. And I handed them the FedEx box.
I said, there's no way I was crossing the border with evidence of a murderer in my trunk. But I knew that if I didn't bring physical evidence of this back, that the story was going to be nearly unbelievable.
I knew I had to show you. And so one of the Hells Angels takes the FedEx box and he's kind of got his back to the rest of us.
He's turned away and he sets the FedEx box down on the couch. First thing he pulls out is the bloody mongrel cut.
And we can't see what he's looking at. I know what he's looking at because I know what's in the box, but no one else does.
And you hear him say, whoa. And then someone says, what is it? And he turns around and he's holding up this mongol cut and there's blood all over it.
And then they start looking at these digital photographs of this guy with his brain scattered in the dirt and duct taped and in the shallow grave. And so everything I told them, I was providing physical evidence.
It was a completely fabricated homicide, but that was probably the most audacious street theater that I've ever heard of. And what made it so audacious was we've bluffed murders and things like that before, but we were selling a murder to murderers who were members of an international Organ crime syndicate, the stakes were extreme.
I had my undercover partner with me, a Phoenix detective who was an amazing undercover operative. And so when we called them to come and talk about the murder, I hear the motorcycles arriving.
Then I hear the boots on the gravel coming closer and closer. I remember I told my partner, I said, dude, do not let these dudes stand behind you.
Do not let them get behind us. They are either going to embrace us because we did what we said we were going to do and we killed one of their rivals, or they're going to kill us because we're implicating them in a homicide.
I don't know which way this is going to go. Gee, so even when you do something that you think is going to be the thing that they like the most, you're like, they might also kill us for doing this.
We are putting them in a compromising situation. We are now making them aware of a murder and showing them evidence of it that they knew internally they had sanctioned.
So we were the weak link in this story. I was joking about how you pick the guy who gets covered in pig blood, but I assume, I don't know, it's a funny role either way.
I am more curious about the FedEx box. So is there somebody who liaises with an office like FedEx and goes, we need a fake package from Mexico that really looks like it's from Mexico? Nobody drives to Mexico with this thing and then mails it FedEx.
We skipped a step. We faked it.
We didn't actually put it through. We made it look believable.
We could have taken extra steps. Like the point you're making is not a bad point.
Yeah. Just, you never want somebody that like, my cousin works for FedEx.
Let me just run this tracking number through her system. Yeah.
You know, this doesn't exist. This is fake.
It's not even the right number of digits. Those are all good points.
And had that happened and had we not covered that base, wouldn't have been a good move.

Yeah, I guess you could just take another package from Mexico and put the label, whatever.

I'm sure you thought of all this.

What ended up happening with the case?

There was some disappointment, I would imagine, with how this shook out.

The ultimate prosecution of the case was very frustrating to me based on the reporting,

based on the testimony that was available, based on hundreds of hours of criminal conversations that were recorded, that case is every bit as prosecutable and winnable today as it was in 2003. With that said, the case goes from ATF to the prosecutor's office.
And then when the attorneys got it, there's all kinds of questions and issues, and they can't settle on how to deliver the case into the courtroom. Plus, there's other ongoing investigations that potentially could have been compromised.
And so rather than compromise other continuing investigations, the prosecutors decided, look, we're going to reduce some of these charges. We're going to try to get some plea deals.
We're going to dismiss some charges. We're going to try to smooth our way through this prosecution, which when you've spent two years of your life, when the blood, sweat, and tears, and risk, and life and death situations that we went in, when the prosecution doesn't have its full chance, that's very frustrating.
But as an undercover agent, you don't get to control everything. I didn't go to law school.
I don't get to control those legal decisions, those prosecution decisions. My opinion may be heard, but I'm not making those choices.
Man, I don't fully understand, of course, what happened there, but I can certainly imagine your frustration. How did your undercover experience in such a dangerous gang change your outlook on life after the experience? I'll tell you what ultimately changed my perspective.
The case ends. And through discovery and through the legal process, the Hells Angels learned that J.
Bird Davis, the gun runner, debt collector, hit man, is actually Jay Dobbins,

an ATF agent. The death and the violence threats start flooding in.
Yeah, of course.

The tiger's not going to change his stripes. These guys are who they are, and they live up to their reputation.
There was a contract put on me. It was farmed out to the MS-13,

to the Aryan Brotherhood, at least exposed to them. There was talk that the 18th Street Gang

in LA was interested in looking at it. There was lone wolf assassins that were popping up.
We ultimately found out about it. There was an MS-13 member that was locked up in Arizona.
He was transferred to a facility in Virginia. When he did his intake interview in Virginia, he told the investigators, you guys better get some help for your boy Dobbins out there in Arizona because they're going to get him.
He's greenlit for a murder and there's a lot of people sniffing around it. So that came out.
There was a series of threats, a series of events that corroborated and validated that there was a murder contract out there. Ultimately, in the summer of 2008, my house was burned to the ground by arsonists.
Wow. I lost everything.
They came to get me and burn my house down. Your family's house? Yes, my personal house.
And what was frustrating about it is that I had this small group of supervisors who were ignoring the threats. They didn't want to react to the threats.
And I never said, look, these threats are valid, credible threats.

I was saying you have an obligation to chase them to the very end.

And if you can't prove the case, you have an obligation to confront people and say, like, dude, our guy's hands off.

Yeah.

You don't get to do this.

By chance, going back early in our conversation, these same supervisors who would not support me when the threats came home were the same supervisors that were running ATF's operation Fast and Furious. These guys were operating with impunity.
They believed that they were above the law. And so ultimately, to give you a long answer to a short question, my perspective changed when not only I was under threat, but my wife was under threat.
There was threats that targeted my wife, targeted my kids. When those people decided that I wasn't worth conducting an investigation for, it caused me to question everything I felt like I stood for.
I felt like I stood for good, and I felt like I stood for truth and justice, and that my purpose to take a stand against the predators. And I realized the

people that I'm working for that are calling shots on what happens with my life, they don't

give two f***s about me or my f***ing family. It caused me to question everything I believed in.

Yeah, rightfully so. I mean, I can completely understand that.
I mean, do you have to worry

about them coming after you now, or is it just too long ago?

I'll say this. I live with concern.
I choose not to live in fear because if I live in fear,

the understand that. I mean, do you have to worry about them coming after you now, or is it just too long ago? I'll say this.
I live with concern. I choose not to live in fear because if I live in fear, they own me.
They control me. But I've seen firsthand what they're capable of.
I know their history. These guys have their PhDs in violence and intimidation.
They're very good at it. They're the masters of it.
So I live with concern. I don't put myself in bad situations.
I don't want a problem. I do everything I can to try to avoid problems.
But I don't hide. I'm doing an interview with you.
But I also know any massive criminal organization, I don't care if it's the mafia. I don't care if it's street gangs.
I don't care if it's Russian organized crime or the triad or whatever. If they want you, they can get you.
You can't hide in today's world. You just can't.
I tried to run from those threats for a while and it was unsuccessful and I was like, dude, you just have to live your life. I know there's people out there that hate me.
I know there's people out there that would love to see me dead. But if I live my life in a fearful way, they continue to own me.

I'll tell you something good that came out of it.

The good thing that came from it is that all these experiences elevated my faith.

They elevated my spirituality.

I realized that I got through this life, I got through this career,

and all these events that we talked about and hundreds more that are just like it, because God had his hand on my shoulder and was controlling the things that happened to me. I'll say this.
I learned the hard way is that if the only time you're talking to God is when you're in trouble, you're in trouble. And my faith has grown and my trust in God has grown.
If that's what it took to get in my faith life to where I am now, then I think it

was a good investment. Thanks for coming back on the show, man.
We had such a good response to the

last one. I know everybody really appreciates it, especially me.
You're a great storyteller,

and you tried to do the right thing. You're continuing to try to do the right thing.
It's

really admirable. It is a shame that you didn't have support when you needed it,

though. I'll tell you that.
That's very disappointing to hear. Jay Dobbins, thank you very much, man.
Right on. Thank you for having me.
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 got a study, 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 that 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? 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, you know, 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. You know, 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.
All things Jay Dobbins will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.
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