Original subtitles

[ Dramatic music plays ]

-The Hells Angels were masters at having

their own built-in defense against law enforcement.

They were always one step ahead.

-It is a game of cat-and-mouse,

and you had to be on your toes.

-Law enforcement needed somebody to get inside.

They needed to get close up and personal with the Hells Angels.

And so Tony Tait was put in there.

-The reason that I wanted

to penetrate into the motorcycle gang

was to completely destroy the Hells Angels.

-This was the first time they had a live asset

inside the organization.

-The operation was to take out the people

that were running the Hells Angel motorcycle gang.

We went after Sonny Barger.

-Sonny Barger was always, in my time,

the acknowledged leader of the Hells Angel.

-I did become friends with Sonny.

I didn't feel bad. I knew what my job was.

-What law enforcement was attempting to do

is to cut the head off the snake.

[ Gunshot ]

-Over and over, they say they are not criminals,

they're rebels rebelling against a society

for which they have no respect.

♪

-We never gave a [Bleep] what anybody else thought.

♪♪

-We're mostly a bunch of happy-go-lucky guys

trying to make it in this world, you know?

-They're misfits, they're outlaws,

and they defy the laws of attraction.

-You know, I like them, I adore them.

They're my whole life.

♪♪

-"Angels forever; forever Angels."

Speaks for itself.

♪

-The Hells Angels are not a criminal organization.

-Why don't you people go home?!

-It's an organization with criminals in it.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

-The Hells Angels run a massive propaganda scheme,

and the unknowing gulp down

that Hells Angels Kool-Aid.

-Everybody, just cool out!

Hells Angels, everybody.

-That is all designed to hide murder, rape, drug trafficking,

gunrunning, extortion, assault, arson.

♪

-I'm not trying to glorify my life,

but I'm certainly not gonna apologize for it.

-I'm doing extreme stuff.

For what?

-I'm telling it the way it really happened.

I never thought I'd be talking openly about this stuff.

-Ready for this? -I'm ready.

♪

-[ Speaking indistinctly ]

-My name is George Gus Christie Jr.

I'm a former member of the Hells Angels motorcycle club.

I rode with the Hells Angels for 40 years.

There is not one definite leader in the Hells Angels,

but there are different people

that have become de facto leaders.

I think Sonny Barger is a perfect example.

-This man probably knows more about the Hells Angels

than anyone. He is Sonny Barger,

who helped organize the group 21 years ago

and is considered by many to be

the most powerful man in the Hells Angels.

-Have I told you about the the nude hot tub party

I was at with Sonny Barger?

[ Laughter ]

[ Laughs ]

Honestly, when I look at him,

law enforcement thought he was stupid.

He acted like a hick, talked like a hick.

Man, he was smart.

-Sonny -- I've never seen him drunk,

I've never seen him do drugs.

His focus was being a Hells Angel

and being the best Hells Angel he could.

-Sonny was really instrumental

in giving the purpose to the Hells Angels.

And the purpose was, he started to get into a business,

and his business was the drug trade.

-Why is the government going after you?

-Well, they claim that I am the leader of the Hells Angels,

and as such, they don't want to let me out.

The only thing they allege against me in this case is, uh,

involvement with an ounce and three quarters of dope.

♪

Look, you don't become the leader

of a multinational organized-crime group

without being smart, without being cunning,

and without being deadly.

Sonny Barger took care of business,

and he had a look in his eyes that terrified people,

and they respected him.

♪

-Largely under the tutelage of Mr. Barger,

the Oakland Hells Angels

became the dominant chapter throughout California,

throughout the United States, and then worldwide.

In part, this was because the Oakland chapter

was more involved in narcotics than many other chapters,

and it gave them a lot of influence.

-They had huge amounts of money from the drug trade,

and some of this money was going into a Freedom Defense Fund,

which was specifically designed

so that they could hire the best lawyers,

have the best defense against law enforcement.

-The authorities were always trying

to bring the Hells Angels down,

and you had to be on your toes.

And it was like the movie "Heat."

-Police! Don't move! Freeze! Police!

Down on the ground now!

Now!

On the ground!

♪♪

♪

-In San Francisco,

The second racketeering and conspiracy trial

of members of the Hells Angels motorcycle club

has been declared a mistrial.

♪

-The Hells Angels were masters

at having their own built-in defense.

They were always savvy to law enforcement

trying to infiltrate them

or trying to bring charges against them.

-I had worked in other investigations,

and we were able to establish a wiretap into telephones

from the clubhouse.

But on the 12th or 13th day,

the call volume dropped substantially.

-A key thing in the Hells Angels is there's a rule

that you don't talk on the phone just in case that's a wiretap.

So there was a sticker on the clubhouse phone

that says, "This phone is bugged."

-They had us under surveillance.

Well, we had them under counter-surveillance.

We had private investigators working for us,

and I had a whole file on the police.

♪

-They were always one step ahead.

Every agency, the FBI included,

had problems with penetration by the Hells Angels.

I got to the point where I knew we were leaking like a sieve.

You go and you serve the search warrants,

and the Hells Angel is wearing his pressed Levi's

and his newly shined cowboy boots

at 6:30 in the morning.

Because they know you're coming.

♪

-There is no one organized-crime group

that's ever been exterminated on this planet,

partly because criminals work 24 hours a day,

365 days a year.

Cops work shifts.

Whereas the bikers, they just keep rolling.

[ Engine revving ]

♪

-Conventional investigative methods -- they're simply

unavailable against any organized-crime group.

So we had to use more intrusive techniques.

♪

I joined the FBI in 1975.

The then-director ordered the FBI

to investigate the so-called Big Four motorcycle gangs,

of which the Hells Angels were,

and still are, the predominant gang.

In attempting to do that investigation,

you're just gonna do everything you can

to leave your ego at home.

You just want the [Bleep] in jail.

♪

-I was working undercover narcotics.

Methamphetamine first came into fashion

in the mid-'70s,

really centered on the biker culture.

[ Engine revs ]

-When 1980 rolled around, the Hells Angels were

well entrenched in drug business.

-The Hells Angels are no different than the Mafia.

They're no different than a Mexican drug cartel.

These guys were harming hundreds and hundreds of people.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

I was definitely looking for new strategies,

particularly something that would focus

on the major drug trafficking within the Hells Angels.

The other part was to take out the leadership.

Do I think Barger was involved in the drug business?

Yes, I think he was.

I think that's where he derived the bulk of his income,

but very much in an executive role.

♪

[ Engine revs ]

-They had that theory -- if you eliminate Sonny Barger,

the rest of the club is gonna fall by the wayside.

But it never would.

♪

-When we were involved in investigations,

at some point, we started to identify

what we felt were the cooks -- that is, the individuals

that were making the methamphetamine.

The top of that list was Kenny Owen.

-Kenny Owen became probably the most valuable player

in this whole enterprise.

He was like the Walter White of the Hells Angels.

-You look at Kenny Owen's high school picture

and you see the All-American boy.

Great smile, good-looking guy.

The Kenny Owen I knew was driven and very focused

on the production of wealth and willing to take risks.

-He became a key target, in terms

of any methamphetamine production investigation.

-If you want to call Sonny the brains of the operation,

Kenny was the muscle behind the operation,

so the two of them went hand-in-hand.

The Hells Angels were very masterful

at being secretive about what they did,

which is what made them so dangerous to law enforcement.

It was becoming really sort of a brick wall.

They needed a real insider, somebody that could get close

to these key players, to befriend them,

to gather intelligence, and they needed real results.

And that's, in fact, exactly what the Feds did.

They used an informant to infiltrate the Hells Angels,

so he became invaluable to law enforcement.

♪

-My name is Anthony Tait.

I penetrated into the Hells Angels motorcycle gang

in the mid-'80s.

♪

-I was an undercover operative.

I was doing a job.

I feel some of the skills needed to do undercover work

and intelligence work is, you need a calm demeanor.

♪

My dad was in the British Army, working in intelligence,

and during his time in the Middle East,

there had been a contract placed on him.

♪

We moved to a small town in Alaska,

and my father taught me about observation and reconnaissance

and intelligence work. I wanted to be in the military,

and I wanted to do long-range reconnaissance.

♪

The late '70s,

I started bouncing in a group of night clubs

in downtown Anchorage.

While I was working, I got to know

some of the motorcycle gang members.

They would come into a club, brutalize customers,

brutalize the dancers.

I didn't like what was going on.

♪

I was having dinner

with a couple of police officer friends,

and I said, "You know, you guys have had ample opportunity

to investigate these bikers, and you haven't done anything."

And so I literally put myself on the line and said,

"I bet that I could get into the Anchorage Hells Angels."

They said, "I'll bet you can't."

And I was taken up on the bet.

The wager was a bottle of Scotch whiskey.

Once I got involved with the motorcycle gang,

one of their officers said,

"We'd like you to start hanging around with us."

I needed to get closer to them

and make them comfortable with me.

And about 6 to 7 months later, they made me a prospect.

♪

[ Indistinct shouting ]

While I was a prospective member,

you're essentially on 24-hour call.

You're doing everything from partying

to witness intimidation.

[ Engine revving ]

In July of 1983,

they made me a Hells Angel member.

Essentially, we just started gathering information

for my law enforcement friends.

On day-to-day basis,

I would see everything from drug dealing,

stolen motorcycles, abuse, beatings.

It was a lot larger than I had ever bargained for.

-Within a very short period of time,

he was a Hells Angel.

He had the mentality. He had everything.

It's just that he was ratting them out.

♪♪

-I used a lot of the training that I learned from my father

about gathering intelligence.

I would take everything that I got,

and then I'd sit down with one or both of the P.D. officers

and we'd discuss what had happened.

There was just so much intelligence

that we actually agreed

that we needed to get the FBI involved.

-I did become aware

that in Anchorage, Alaska, chapter, a Hells Angel

had agreed to cooperate with the government,

and that was where I got involved.

[ Music plays on slot machine ]

We met in a hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada.

He answered the door in a suit and tie.

-The first time I met Tim McKinley,

he seemed to be a lot more on the ball

than the agents that I had been talking to.

He had a sense of humor I liked,

and I thought I could work with him

and it would be a good match.

-One of the things that got explained to him was,

"We're going to be recording everything you do,

to the extent that it is humanly possible."

-Obviously, the interest was, who could he infiltrate

and what could he tell us about the club...

-And whether that was something that he was interested in.

He said, absolutely, that he wanted

to put as many of them in prison as he could.

We settled on that he would get paid $1,500 a month.

-Tony Tait was a bit obsessed, actually,

with wanting to be a police officer,

wanting to do good.

And it sort of, like, dovetailed into his passion/obsession

with helping law enforcement.

-I knew that if they were gone, there would be a lot less crime.

That was my motive,

was to put them completely out of business.

♪

-The investigation using tape is codenamed Operation CACUS.

Everything was kept very close to the vest.

-The operation was to take out the major manufacturers

and the people that were running

the Hells Angels motorcycle gang.

We went after Sonny Barger, we went after Kenny Owen.

-Kenny had been taught how to manufacture methamphetamine

by a Shell Oil chemist, so he knew very well

how to manufacture methamphetamine.

-His meth was -- you know, people always say "pure."

It's pretty hard to get 100%. But that was the rumor,

that his meth was the best.

♪

In Oakland, they set up labs, and they got really cautious.

Kenny Owen was the most cautious of them all.

They had labs all over the place.

Kenny Owen had equipment downtown in his warehouse,

but it was built behind a secret wall.

No one had ever seen it.

-The Kenny Owen group was the predominant source of cash

to the Hells Angels Oakland chapter

and to several other chapters.

So that if you removed that availability of ready cash,

then you could put them in a vise

and squeeze real, real hard.

That was part of the goal.

♪

♪

-The initial concept was that Tait was going to go

and make controlled purchases of methamphetamine.

♪

-Kenny Owen would only sell

to people that he knew on the street.

And so it was very, very difficult

for law enforcement to penetrate that.

-Part of the architecture was

to promote him as a significant drug dealer,

someone who could buy weight and distribute it.

And so you learn to have a story

on what would make sense to a dealer.

-The first thing that we had to do was

for me to get around and get known amongst people.

[ Engine revs ]

The persona we created was a high-roller drug dealer.

-You have to give the Hells Angels

something they expect to see.

We weren't buying street-level drugs,

so, you know, street knowledge wasn't gonna cut it.

He had to know the mid- to upper-level range of

transactions dealing in multi pounds and multi kilos.

The Bureau of Narcotics agents had the current prices

and the current slang words, and they shared that with Tait.

-There were people behind him who fed him scripts.

Every time he talked to someone, it was scripted,

so the agents controlled him completely.

-I get invited

to go out to dinner with the Oakland Charter,

but I'd order like 3 or 4 entrees

and take a bite or two out of each one

and then pass it around.

Or if wine came and I didn't like it,

I'd order 2 or 3 bottles of another type of wine.

I was the high-rolling guy

that didn't do drugs and took care of myself.

That garnered a lot of trust and a lot of confidence.

♪

-You become one of them.

And so they like you more. They trust you more.

They're okay with selling you drugs.

-Tony Tait was the first active Hells Angel

to be an informant for law enforcement.

This was the first time that they had a live asset

inside the organization.

-To try to make recordings on these guys,

to make buys from them,

you're double-dealing them the whole time.

So if Tony Tait gets found out,

he's dead out in the wilderness in Alaska,

he's bear food.

-Tim McKinley's ultimate goal in Operation CACUS

was to topple the main players.

He wanted to go after Sonny,

he wanted to go after Kenny Owen.

He thought if he could get rid of that leadership,

of the money supply,

he could topple the whole organization.

-We needed to have high-quality electronic recordings

of the ultimate defendant saying,

"I've either done this crime or I'm gonna do this crime."

♪

When you're trying to put a transmitting device

into a meeting, it needs to be camouflaged

so that it's not readily apparent

as a transmitting device.

At the time, cellphones weren't really readily available yet,

so, instead, people had Telepagers.

The Telepager worked as a pager,

but it also concealed a very small transmitter.

-It takes an incredible amount of guts

for an individual to not only walk into

a roomful of Hells Angels, but to go in wired.

♪

-Tait was going to his first meeting

at the Oakland Clubhouse,

and we're hoping for the best.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

-It can't get any better than that,

where you're going to be at meetings

where all your fellow officers

of all the different chapters on the West Coast are there.

-The agents put him in situations,

and he's a tool. An informant is a tool.

-Law enforcement was gonna have to protect Tony Tait

so that he didn't get himself killed.

It was a pretty risky operation.

-The first time I went to the Oakland Clubhouse

wearing a transmitter, I was slightly concerned.

-I would not bet on Tony getting out of anywhere alive

if they discovered it.

He was walking the tightrope as high as you can.

♪

-The code word for "I need help" was "My mother won't like this."

And that was the time for everybody to get their skates on

and get to it.

-Tait went into the meeting.

You could hear him having conversation

with the people up front, and as the door shut,

it was like the cone of silence came down.

♪

No signal at all,

like it had been turned off.

♪♪

He was essentially all cut off and on his own.

He didn't know that he had no backup all of a sudden.

I was scared to death

that they were in there killing him.

♪

Eventually, he came out and I told him,

"Well, a big problem with the transmitter."

And he explained, "Well, maybe that's because

the place is lined with quarter-inch steel plate."

♪

It was just another obstacle to be overcome.

♪

-The Oakland Clubhouse had steel walls.

The steel walls were to protect from drive-by shootings,

but ultimately, it served two purposes.

It stopped any stray bullets,

it stopped any grenades getting thrown through a window,

and it also stopped any type of interception of conversations.

I don't know how well it would have worked

against a drive-by shooting,

but it worked real well against an FBI transmitter.

♪

I realized that the clubhouse,

while it was armored on the front,

wasn't armored on the back and sides.

So some surveillance was done from the trunk of an automobile,

where you put the agent -- typically, me -- in the trunk.

You'd be in the trunk for hours.

You'd have to get in there before the meeting started.

You'd have to stay in there until the meeting ended.

If the call of nature occurred, you'd have to have

a bleach bottle to take care of things.

It was miserable.

About the third meeting that he went to,

we had resolved the technical issues

and could real-time-monitor what was occurring.

[ Click ]

-Going to the Oakland Clubhouse for a weekly meeting,

usually there's just generic topics brought up --

everything from T-shirts and sticker sales

to problems with females in particular

that had 2 or 3 boyfriends in the same charter,

that was causing friction.

So... [ Chuckles ]

There's a lot of business

that is not discussed at a meeting, period,

because it's, uh -- it's criminal in nature,

and they don't want everybody in the room

to know exactly what's going on.

I would hear something in a meeting,

and then I would go and approach that one person

a day or two later.

And a lot of times, they would flat open up

and give me every single detail about it.

[ Indistinct conversations ]

-We all felt, "There is real opportunity here."

We had somebody who could tell us

what was the truth about what was going on.

-I never liked Tony Tait from the beginning,

with one of my closest brothers in the club.

Thought he was a stand-up guy,

and I tried to go into it with an open mind.

-We were making really good progress.

I learned more about their illegal activities

and their illegal businesses.

The Hells Angels had no clue I was undercover.

[ Clatter ]

-With Kenny Owen, he was not somebody

that I could have approached at the beginning of the operation

and told, "Hey, I need a pound of meth."

I couldn't have done that. That would have been impossible.

[ Engine revs ]

I would try to pre-arrange the drug deals

so that I would spend as little time as possible with them.

So I'd do what was called a bounce.

I'd roll in, buy the stuff, and back out in another five

with the product.

The most I did in one day was four separate pound buys

in the San Francisco Bay area

from four different members in different charters.

So I burned out surveillance teams.

They just couldn't keep up.

And after a bit,

everybody I approached and tried to buy drugs from

sold them to me. No one ever said no.

-As more and more individuals sort of stepped up

and started flirting with Tait about drugs,

then they'd get added to the list,

all the time, working toward Kenny Owen.

♪

There certainly is a time pressure

on any operation and any investigation.

You have the pressures from the higher-ups

to wrap this thing up.

That starts the day after you start the case.

We conducted 'round-the-clock, seven-day-a-week,

24-hour-a-day surveillance through Thanksgiving,

through Christmas, through New Year's.

The people who are actively involved in the case,

their lives start to fall apart.

I had a couple of small kids at the time.

After I finished getting the kids homeworked

and bathed and fed and into bed, then I'd go back to work.

It was difficult.

When you have someone working like Tait,

where he was in constant, almost-24-hour-a-day,

seven-day-a-week,

week-after-week-after-week- after-week contact

with the bad guys, very few people can handle

more than 2 or 3 or 4 months of it.

-I had a place where they knew that I lived --

law enforcement and the Hells Angels.

Then, I had a secret apartment

that only law enforcement knew about.

I had another place that nobody knew about.

So when I wanted to get away from absolutely everything,

I could go and I could hang there by myself if I needed to.

Quite frankly, I was getting a little bit tired.

I was starting to feel the pressure.

I was having more and more demand placed upon me,

and I was trying to keep everything afloat,

all at the same time, so I was pretty stressed.

I was averaging about 4 to 5 days a month at home.

The rest of the time, I was on the road.

[ Telephone rings ]

Whenever I was home, the phone was always ringing.

It was a lot of work.

♪

-He was in the club, a member.

He couldn't make a mistake. He was never really off.

♪

-Had they found out that I was undercover,

they would have killed me.

♪

Picture the most graphic scene you could of human torture,

and that would be it.

♪♪

-Tait was assessed every time I talked to him.

Every single time,

I'm looking at him, I'm taking his pulse.

He's under a lot of pressure.

"Is he gonna crack up?"

He started saying, "We need to wrap this thing up."

I was pressuring Tait, keep up with his role.

We needed more done and more done.

-It's just too much going on and too many moving parts.

We were getting deeper and deeper and deeper.

♪

-As time passed,

yeah, we were making steps in this investigation.

Within about a year after we started Operation CACUS,

I was nominated for the position

of West Coast Sergeant of Arms.

Sergeant of arms --

you're maintaining order and discipline.

If there was something of violence

that was involving your chapter or another chapter,

you would be part and parcel of the retaliation.

[ Indistinct shouting ]

-Tait, as the sergeant at arms of the West Coast,

was the fourth most powerful Hells Angel on the West Coast.

That gave him access to the world,

and also Sonny Barger.

♪

-Tony Tait did rise up through the ranks

by kissing everybody's [Bleep].

People perceived Tony Tait as a brother.

That's what he used. He used the brotherhood.

-I wasn't sure how I could get closer to Sonny,

other than let him approach me.

And that's what happened. He came to me.

♪

Sonny came to me one day. He said, "You know, Tony,

you're what every Hells Angel ought to be.

You're clean-cut, you're articulate,

you take care of club business."

And that was all recorded.

So the two agents just couldn't believe what they were hearing.

-And we started laughing.

"Yeah, you're a government agent."

♪

It's 10:00 at night,

and I get this 911 page from Tait's pager,

which is not going to be good news.

So I go off in my robe and bunny slippers,

get to a payphone, call Tait.

Tait tells me a Hells Angel

has been murdered in Kentucky by Outlaws

and that everybody's going nuts.

♪♪

♪

-As a government informant, he cannot commit murder.

And so it became imperative

that the Feds extricate him out

before his whole cover is blown,

because he can't tell Sonny, "I'm not gonna kill for you."

-The whole timeline sped up.

It went from 35 miles an hour to about 80 overnight.

-You want to make sure that you have a fileable case.

If there's a hole in something that you need to go clean up,

or you need to get some more conversation

about something, you know, you want to do

all those things before you pull the plug.

-Tait didn't have much time left.

He needed to get the evidence from Kenny Owen

to get him on the wire selling meth.

-Kenny had become comfortable with Tait.

He had seen how he acted.

He'd heard about other people selling him drugs.

So Tait was instructed it was Kenny's turn.

-I dropped by his house at about 1:00 in the afternoon.

I called him from the street. He came down, unlocked the gate.

We went in and had some coffee,

and then I started talking to him,

and I asked him straight up.

I said, "Hey, man, you wouldn't happen

to have an elbow with you?"

An elbow was just street slang for an "lb," a pound.

He said, "Oh, yeah, yeah. I got one for you."

And I said, "Oh, okay."

And I said, "Hey, man, I don't have the cash right now."

And he said, "Oh, don't worry about it.

Pay me later tonight." It was $10,000 a pound.

I actually was pretty amazed for me to walk in

and get a pound fronted to me on the first deal.

I thought that was pretty good,

so my credibility spoke for itself.

I got the pound, go to the car,

and then drive back to the hotel.

Agents came, we sat there and debriefed,

and it was a done deal.

-We got the tape, and that's a pretty good case.

Juries can get that.

♪

Tait was the pointy end of the spear.

Where Barger and other people were conspiring to kill Outlaws,

Barger's becoming more involved in this,

and the conspiracy is getting larger.

That changed things.

♪

But the case that I had constructed

was never built to investigate a murder conspiracy.

-For Sonny to be convicted of conspiracy to commit murder,

they needed to get him on the wire

conspiring to murder Outlaws.

-If you don't lock it down tight

and make sure that there is no reasonable doubt there,

then Sonny's gonna walk again.

The jury needed to hear words the Hells Angels don't ever use,

"kill," "murder," that sort of thing.

The level of difficulty was going to increase

by at least a factor of 10, and the level of danger

was going to go right through the roof.

-I needed Barger to unequivocally say

that he was in favor of Tait killing people.

Tait and I had had a meeting and I had said,

"I need you to say this, this, this, and this."

And he said, "I just can't use the K-word.

I can't say 'kill.' I just can't do it."

And literally, had to pour two shots of whiskey into him

to get him to agree to do it.

-[ Chuckles ]

That may be.

There was a lot of times where

I just wouldn't want to do a damn thing

or I didn't feel comfortable in doing it.

I went to Sonny Barger's house

and we talked about the retaliation against the Outlaws,

and I showed him some pictures

of the Outlaws clubhouse in Chicago,

and how I was going to place a bomb on the side

and a bomb on the front.

The first bomb would blow up on the side of the building

and the second bomb would kill all the survivors

and their associates.

Sonny replied, "Is this building they're building the tall one?"

I said, "Yes, the brick one." Sunny told me, "That's great.

That's exactly what we want. That's great."

So he had given me his blessing

to blow up the Chicago clubhouse.

-So we get Barger to acknowledge

that it's definitely a conspiracy

to commit murder via bombing.

And at that point, I thought any jury in the world

is going to convict on that.

♪

I pulled Tait out of the field,

because the danger of him getting identified

and executed was just unacceptable.

Tait went into the Witness Security program.

-As soon as they went over,

the FBI went to the condo I was living in and cleared it out,

put everything into storage on the Air Force base.

-We had a 4:00 in the morning meeting at a military facility

where he had all these law enforcement officers show up,

and everyone was told, there will be no phone calls.

We weren't going to have any leaks.

We weren't going to get compromised again.

-12 members of the Hells Angels

were picked up in 26 raids in the Bay area.

-We used more than 1,000 law enforcement officers

to execute the search and arrest warrants.

-Don't move, police! Police! Get on the ground!

-Three suspected methamphetamine laboratories

were raided today, including what sources describe

as the biggest, most active one inside

a place right across from club headquarters.

-That was a moment of elation,

when Kenny Owen irrevocably stepped over the line.

The search warrant got executed.

There's 30 pounds of dope in a red, painted metal foot locker,

and there was a bank currency-counting machine

flipping through a stack of hundreds,

going wicketa-wicketa-wicketa.

The agents just kept coming up with more money and more money

and more money and more money.

All in all, $2.499 million in cash.

He had chemicals to make $22 million worth of dope.

You know, how many lives have you just saved?

We were all elated that we had Kenny,

because we knew that that taking him off

was going to be financially devastating to the Hells Angels

and was going to knock them back decades,

in terms of their criminal progress.

-On the day that we took Operation CACUS over,

I had to sit at a telephone for the entire day

so I could be contacted and asked questions by agents

all over the country.

Someone came in and said, "You need to see this.

There's a TV report."

And then I saw a picture of Sonny

being taken out of his house.

-And in jail tonight

is the Hells Angel godfather, Ralph "Sonny" Barger.

-I felt a pretty big sense of accomplishment.

-And 37 other Angels.

-And I'm thinking, you know what?

How did a [bleep] member get to Sonny like that?

You know, he should have been safeguarded.

-Sonny trusted him because of their common bond,

that patch that's on his back.

He's a traitor.

♪

♪

♪

-Tait was, without a doubt,

the best undercover I have ever worked with.

-It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

No one else will ever be able to do it.

I have a lot of respect for Tony.

-I'm sure he's reviled in the Hells Angels.

-The Hells Angels knew

I was working undercover the minute they were arrested.

-He's always going to have a bounty on his head.

-If Tony Tait was here right now,

I think what you'd see is one old man, being me,

beating up another old man.

I figure [bleep] what he's got coming,

he's got coming.

[ Chuckles ] There it is.

-Was it worth it to me?

Years ago, I would say, yeah, every bit of it was.

Now, not so much.

I do feel that for what I put into it and what I sacrificed,

they merely got slaps on the wrist.

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