THE UNDERCOVER LAWMAN WHO WENT HOG WILD

LOS ANGELES -- It is fair to say that outlaw biker Donald "Red Dog"
Jarvis is freaking the squares at his neighborhood Denny's, the moms
and pops with their kids sitting at the nearby tables, suddenly just
staring at their waffles and trying very hard to avoid eye contact
with Jarvis as he explains why it would have been wrong to whack Billy Queen.

"We're not stupid people. We have rules, you know, we have . . ." --
Jarvis searches for the word -- "we have policies."

About killing? "Especially," Jarvis says.

Jarvis is built like a gladiator, straight out of C-Block, his arms
crawling with tattoos, his eyebrow and lip pierced. He just doesn't
seem like the kind of person you ask to lower his voice, especially
when the former sergeant-at-arms of the San Fernando Valley Chapter
of the Mongols, the notorious motorcycle gang, is talking about
Queen, a subject that still seems to agitate him. "I was suspecting
him of being a cop from the very beginning," Jarvis says. "I just knew it."

And as it turns out, Red Dog was right. William Queen was an
undercover agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives (ATF). For two years, he burrowed in, almost as deep as
you could go, becoming, as Queen puts it, "as bad as the baddest of the bad."

The lawman grew a castaway's beard, neglected his personal hygiene,
rode stolen Harleys, got bombed in biker bars and brawled with
Mongols named Lucifer and Bucket Head by his side. He not only hung
with the Mongols, he also formally joined the club, first as a
"prospect" (akin to a pledge in a fraternity from Hell) and then as a
"full-patched" member, eventually rising through the ranks to be
named his chapter's vice president.

The undercover operation, billed by ATF as its most successful
penetration of a motorcycle gang, resulted in dozens of successful
prosecutions of Mongol members -- for dealing drugs, stealing
motorcycles and carrying firearms -- including Jarvis. He pleaded
guilty to being a felon in possession of a gun and spent 30 months at
a federal correctional institution, "the last 90 days," he offers,
"in the hole," also known as administrative isolation. (No big deal,
Jarvis says. "They'd pegged me as a shot-caller.")

It would not be unusual for an outlaw biker such as Red Dog (even one
who now says he is reformed, has kicked his heroin habit, dates an
accountant, listens to Air America talk radio and makes a
middle-class living driving his own 18-wheeler) to dislike the cop
who nailed him, especially an undercover agent and one whom many
Mongols considered a blood brother -- until the day they were taken
down, on May 19, 2000, in scores of raids in four states by more than
675 sheriff's deputies and ATF agents.

But this is L.A., babe, and so naturally this story just gets weirder.

While his former Mongol associates were still in prison, Queen
retired from the ATF and published a book about his adventures called
"Under and Alone: The True Story of the Undercover Agent Who
Infiltrated America's Most Violent Outlaw Motorcycle Gang." It
reached bestseller lists this summer.

The book describes the Mongols as the worst of the worst --
beer-breathed, meth-snorting, misogynist marauders who lived by a
code of fierce loyalty to their brothers -- and to hell with the
rest. Their motto: "Respect few, fear none." In the book, Queen's
chief antagonist is none other than Red Dog.

Guess what? The Mongols dug the book, or at least parts of it. "I
hear they were overjoyed," Queen says. "The more violent and hard and
mean you call them, the happier they are." The subjects themselves
are a bit less effusive. "The book was okay," concedes Richard
"Rancid" Clayton, a talented tattoo artist and a Mongol who went down
on gun charges. "But a lot of it was embellished or switched around
or wrong." (Like him never showering, Rancid says: "We all took
showers. They called me Rancid because I had a dirty mouth. He didn't
know that.")

But wait: It gets better. While the book was still in draft form,
Queen's agent showed it to a pair of screenwriters, who pitched the
idea to Mel Gibson and his company, Icon Productions, whose last big
feature was "The Passion of the Christ." Gibson bit, and Warner Bros.
Pictures bought the rights and will distribute the film; Antoine
Fuqua ("Training Day") is slated to direct.

The role of Billy Queen has not yet been cast (Gibson was initially
going to star, though that now appears unlikely, according to Icon)
nor have the actors who will play the gang members. But one thing
appears certain: The real Mongols want in on the action and have been
taking meetings with the filmmakers. They've been bitten by the bug.

The bikers say they will likely be employed as consultants and will
probably end up in the movie as extras -- or possibly in more
substantial roles. (Fuqua likes the real thing: In "Training Day,"
about a rogue Los Angeles cop played by Denzel Washington, Fuqua
hired actors and extras from the talent agency called Suspect
Entertainment, whose ranks are filled with former gangbangers.) "The
movie people are going to use Mongols," Queen says. "And the Mongols
are as jazzed as they can be."

"We want to use them," says Ned Zeman, a Vanity Fair correspondent
who wrote the screenplay with his writing partner Daniel Barnz.
"There's no reason not to. Only Mongols look like Mongols." Several
of the bikers, fresh out of prison, have been offering their services
and have sat down with Fuqua and the Icon producers. Zeman, who has
met with some of them, says, "We thought the Mongols would be more
reluctant, but they're not." Just the opposite: They're into it.

Ah, Hollywood, where yesterday's Most Wanted by the feds become
tomorrow's Most Wanted by E! Some of the bikers are working on their
own projects and have been seeking agents to represent them. From
three years in the slammer to 15 minutes of fame. The Mongols don't
mind being portrayed as violent and mean, Zeman says. "They said just
don't make us look like wimps."

No worries. In his book, Queen describes the Mongols and their
archrivals the Hells Angels as "sophisticated, calculating, extremely
violent -- nothing less than the insidious new face of global
organized crime." He also asserts that they have begun to resemble
"international terrorist organizations." And clearly, when the ATF
announced Queen's undercover work and the bureau's big bust of the
Mongols, it wanted the public to feel relief that the fiends were off
the streets.

But here's the rub: In both an interview and his book, Queen can't
quite support the premise that the Mongols are al Qaeda on two
wheels. During his time with them, Queen portrays the San Fernando
Valley Chapter of the Mongols as down to its last half-dozen members
(nationwide there were about 300), and overall the Mongols seem to
spend most of their time drinking, fighting, drugging and riding
their motorcycles. They don't really seem like a major threat to
society -- unless a citizen goes to one of their bars and
propositions one of their "old ladies."

True, they stole motorcycles and had a fondness for firearms --
including the odd machine gun. They dealt weed and speed, but it was
nickel-and-dime, and mostly to feed their own appetites, which were
hearty. One of the group was convicted on a murder charge, and at one
point, members were allegedly planning to gang-rape a couple of
strippers (the women, to Queen's great relief, never showed up). So
they were bad men. But the government never did bring federal
racketeering charges against them.

An international cartel? In the San Fernando Valley Chapter, Queen --
whom they knew as Billy St. John -- was the only one who had a credit
card (which he used to rent a truck for them).

"Billy Queen tries to make us seem worse than we are," Jarvis says.
"Like we're domestic terrorists? Come on."

But there is no denying that Queen walked a dangerous line while undercover.

"What sets them apart is their penchant for violence," says Queen,
who survived one knife fight and wicked bar brawls with the Mongols.
"It's always there."

Queen, 55, is now a minor celebrity in law enforcement circles, and
he regularly does the rubber-chicken convention circuit, regaling
prosecutors and cops with his experiences. Although Queen is retired
from the ATF, the feds still remain concerned about his safety and
Queen himself is wary of retribution from the bikers or their
associates -- so much so that he continues to live in an undisclosed
location. When he met a reporter to talk about the Mongols and the
movie, he picked him up at the Van Nuys airport in his small private
plane and flew him to the outskirts of L.A. to have lunch at an
airstrip. Queen brought along a briefcase. Inside? His .45. "Never
leave home without it," he says.

For all the bad the Mongols do, Queen seems to like them. He grew up,
he says, "in a not-so-great neighborhood" in North Carolina. His
father chased moonshiners for the ATF. Young Billy boxed as a kid. A
Special Forces Vietnam vet, Queen has spent his adult life in law
enforcement, first as a city cop, then a Border Patrol officer, and
finally an ATF agent. But he didn't like working cases from his
cubicle and spent long periods as a street agent or undercover,
infiltrating neo-Nazi skinheads, the Aryan Nation and the KKK, and
culminating in his two years riding with the Mongols. He says that if
he had tried to infiltrate NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for
example, "I'd be caught immediately." But the Mongols? Queen says it
got him in touch with his inner Genghis Khan. "Where I feel like I
can be as mean and as violent as anyone."

When relating his stories, Queen often enters a realm of
role-playing, where his eyes get squinty and crazed, and he starts
poking his finger in your chest and threatening you with a string of
obscenities. It is disturbing in that he seems to be able to turn it
on and off, like an actor, which in a sense he is.

To join the Mongols, Queen used a well-developed and deep undercover
identity -- complete with an apartment, a borrowed Harley, a job, a
phony driver's license, a back story and other agents to impersonate
former employers or family members, because the Mongols hired a
private investigator to check Queen out before inviting him to join.
(He also had to fill out an application; it is, after all, a club,
with a constitution, five commandments and a fight song, whose lyrics
can't be printed here.)

Queen got his introduction to the Mongols through a woman, a
200-pound methamphetamine addict and confidential informant with a
grudge against the gang who was looking for some payback. Over the
next year, over many, many beers, Queen moved up in status from
fellow barfly to "hang-around" to prospect and then to member.

As he recalls that time, he describes being the subject of constant
challenge -- that he was either too weak to be a Mongol or he was a
cop. "You have to be able to kill," he says, "in protection of the
pack. That's their bottom line."

At one point, while on a rally to Laughlin, Nev. -- later the scene
of a murderous rumble between Mongols and Angels that left threedead
and the floor of Harrah's casino trashed -- Queen was challenged to
snort a line of speed. As he describes it, the undercover agent was
able to pretend to inhale the powder while he wiped it off the table
onto the motel carpet.

Queen says he is often challenged on this point: How could he have
ridden with these guys for so long and not committed any crimes,
especially involving drugs? Luck and skill, Queen says. He'd beg off
getting high, saying he was already drunk. He'd claim that since his
chapter president was on parole and abstaining, then he, too, would
forgo. Queen says that if his life was in danger, ATF rules would
allow him to do the drugs but then consider it an on-the-job injury.
He'd go to the hospital for treatment. And if he had done drugs and
not told his supervisors? "I was subject to random drug testing like
every other agent, and if I'd been caught, I'd be fired," he says.
The ATF agent who worked most closely with Queen on the investigation
did not return phone calls and ATF supervisors were not available for comment.

One of the themes in the book and in the screenplay is how seductive
Queen found some of the Mongols and their lifestyle. In his telling,
Queen smiles with the memory of a ride across California, with a
hundred Mongols on motorcycles roaring down the road, running through
traffic lights. "It's just an awesome scene," he says, "this show of
raw power. Here are these guys who just scare the living crap out of
everybody."

Queen was struck, too, by their friendship. When his mother dies,
nobody in the ATF does a thing (and Queen uses the book to settle
some scores with his supervisors, whom he considers gutless
bureaucrats), but when his fellow Mongols hear of his loss, "they hug
me. They tell me they love me. They were there."

"As time went by," Jarvis says, "Billy really got into the lifestyle."

Yet Queen says that if he had to do it all over again -- become a
Mongol -- he would pass. His undercover investigation forced his
ex-wife to relocate with his two young sons, who didn't understand
why he was gone so long and looked so weird. The prosecutions were
satisfying, Queen says. But most of the Mongols are out of prison and
back on the street. And because of the book and the prospect of
becoming movie stars, "they're bigger than ever," he says. "This
thing has been like a recruitment tool."