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

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

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[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:00:01] Jay Dobyns: I'm at the Mesa, Arizona Clubhouse, beautiful clubhouse, like a Hells 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 had 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.

[00:00:33] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional special operator, national security advisor, economic hitman or arms dealer.

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To help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show, just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started today, Jade 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 'em 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 gonna 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 A TF and how you started the undercover operation, but we never actually got into the Hells Angel 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 A TF 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 A TF and you're like, okay, so I wanna do undercover work. Someone else makes that choice for you probably right in the beginning.

[00:02:31] Jay Dobyns: Well, really not. That was the beauty of A TF, 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, like 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

[00:04:15] Jordan Harbinger: to a judge. So you mentioned in our last episode your undercover name was Jaybird Davis and you were a 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

[00:04:34] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:05:15] Jordan Harbinger: 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, they can get guns and can distribute cocaine, for example.

[00:05:31] Jay Dobyns: We're allowing guns to be trafficked.

I'll give you an example. A TF 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 ATFs jurisdiction is to interrupt and investigate firearms trafficking. So there was this scheme, these out of bounds at TF supervisors and a few, uh, employees were allowing guns to be trafficked.

And they were doing it with the intent like, Hey, we're gonna track the end game. Where are these guns gonna 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 bortec 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 A TF 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 A TF agent and as an operation that my agency was a part of and orchestrated and ran,

[00:07:54] Jordan Harbinger: 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 kinda 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.

[00:08:11] Jay Dobyns: 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 'em someplace else.

Now they have the problems of how to smuggle 'em 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 at everything appears to be proper.

On the surface, paperwork's filled out. They passed a 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. Yeah. It's our job to investigate those schemes, and then sometimes they get greedy.

You go in and you buy a couple AK 40 sevens and it goes good, and you don't have a problem. Then you go back and now you want five AK 40 sevens. That goes good, and then pretty soon like you're ordering 15, 20, 25 AK 40 sevens all under the premise that you're buying 'em 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.

[00:09:55] Jordan Harbinger: 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 40 sevens 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 wanna 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.

[00:10:22] Jay Dobyns: 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 'em, and they've got a gun locker and they've got 'em stacked up, they get satisfaction from that, but they're not committing crimes with them, then 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

[00:10:54] Jordan Harbinger: crimes with them. I'm actually not even worried about the people that buy that stuff. I'm just worried that they're gonna 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.

[00:11:12] Jay Dobyns: Well, just like there's been, uh, 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.

[00:11:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I assume most of these guys, one, you'd have to make sure they're not home 'cause 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 A TF certain kinds of weapons.

You have to get some sort of permission. Right? Some sort of special permission. Yeah.

[00:11:43] Jay Dobyns: There's an application process that involves a background check and identifying like 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 a TF and say, Hey man, I got this oozy, I'd like to register this gun. It's all gotta be done in advance. Okay.

[00:12:09] Jordan Harbinger: That seems quite reasonable and I know there's people that argue against that, but

[00:12:12] Jay Dobyns: 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 wanna accumulate firearms. They're not doing anything wrong. They're exercising their constitutional rights.

[00:12:31] Jordan Harbinger: 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 wanna 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.

[00:12:46] Jay Dobyns: I have firearms that even as an A TF agent, I had to apply to a TF to get permission to own those firearms.

That's interesting. That all kinda makes sense. I wasn't allowed to go out and say, Hey look, I'm an A TF 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.

[00:13:03] Jordan Harbinger: 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?

[00:13:13] Jay Dobyns: Yeah. You know, for our tactical units and in some places probably uniform 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 ammunition in our country. Our country. Whether you like it or not, it's part of what America is.

[00:13:46] Jordan Harbinger: 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 if it was just being discussed, but what do you think of that sort of change in policy?

[00:14:01] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:14:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. As far as cartels being terrorist, organizations, I mean, they murder tens of thousands of civilians in their own country and their products kill hundreds of thousands of people in our country.

So I don't have any sympathy.

[00:14:23] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:14:33] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:14:34] Jay Dobyns: And so you know what? You wanna play this game. We're the best in the world at playing war games. You do not wanna fuck with us.

[00:14:41] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what happens, because eventually you would think that we're gonna end up utilizing the ability to do that there 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.

[00:15:15] Jay Dobyns: 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. It's not just firearms, it's explosive devices.

[00:15:49] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:16:18] Jay Dobyns: Well, and I think that goes to why they have a need for that weaponry because it truly is an arms race. Good luck out gunning the United States military.

It's not gonna 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.

[00:16:36] Jordan Harbinger: 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 A TF doesn't just throw you into the deep end. There's gotta be some training class run by experienced undercovers. Yeah,

[00:16:55] Jay Dobyns: 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 a TF has a program that's called the Enhanced Undercover Program. Those agents get extensive training. They have the cutting edge equipment available to 'em 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.

[00:18:02] Jordan Harbinger: How do you approach a gang like the Hells Angels? You can't just walk into a biker bar and be like, eh. Transporting meth and guns. Sure. Sounds like a good gig. You got a warm introduction at the very least.

[00:18:13] Jay Dobyns: That's a very good question. It was maybe one of the most audacious plays in the history of investigations.

I. 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 to 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,

[00:19:08] Jordan Harbinger: and nobody in the first gang knew that you guys were law enforcement, I assume.

[00:19:13] Jay Dobyns: We did a pretty good job of convincing 'em, 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 gonna wear your patch and we're gonna be solo Angel members, but we're in Arizona and we are gonna be riding next to the most powerful, the most notorious, the most famous outlaw motorcycle gang in the history of two wheels. We are gonna bring credibility to you.

That was part of the sales pitch. We're gonna put you on the map, at least initially. That was appealing to them. That was intriguing because the Hell's 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 'em 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.

[00:20:11] Jordan Harbinger: That's true. It's the Nike, the name brand out there. I suppose

[00:20:15] Jay Dobyns: 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 gonna 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 'em that just the name scares people.

[00:20:45] Jordan Harbinger: 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 Hell's Angels? There's gotta 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 let's anybody in which of course they don't. I assume there's hazing in your prospect phase where you're on probation.

[00:21:06] Jay Dobyns: Well, yeah, very much. It's not like you decide that you want to be a Hell's 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 Hell's 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 hang around phase? Then you become a prospective member, a prospect. And so with the Hell's 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 'em now. But as a prospect, you're trying to prove yourself. They're gonna 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 like outrageous, crazy schemes on the high end, up to a member ringing your phone at two o'clock in the morning and saying like, 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? Like every single aspect and element of your life is being scrutinized. To confirm to them that

[00:23:21] Jordan Harbinger: you're a real person. I don't suppose you can have 'em take their shoes off when they get into your house. That would be a deal breaker. My wife would never allow that.

Like for example,

[00:23:28] Jay Dobyns: 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 fucking 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 gonna 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 uh, a motor works. What I needed to do to make a tuneup and do those kinds of things, and I just stopped him. 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've been found out instantly. They would've called my bluff quicker than you could snap your fingers.

[00:24:46] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. So you get ahead of it by just admitting you don't know what you're talking about.

That makes sense. I

[00:24:51] Jay Dobyns: think like any good cover story stays very close to the truth. You don't wanna 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 'em 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.

[00:25:38] Jordan Harbinger: That all makes perfect sense. You were undercover for two years, which I think is a pretty long time. Is that a sort of objectively longer than usual?

[00:25:46] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:26:11] Jordan Harbinger: As always, this podcast is sponsored by Hydroxycut and Unfiltered Cigarettes.

We'll be right back.

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You'll be in smart company where you belong. You can find the course@sixminutenetworking.com. Alright, back to Jade Bins. 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.

[00:29:01] Jay Dobyns: 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 'em 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 Hell's 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 outta 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.

[00:30:28] Jordan Harbinger: Geez, that must've been a huge challenge. 'cause 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,

[00:30:49] Jay Dobyns: 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 'em that are living actually pretty healthy lifestyles, which is against the stereotype. But there are some that are cocaine, methamphetamine fueled. So like you gotta keep up with everybody, which was a struggle for me, and I started popping Hydroxycut diet pills. Yeah. The ones that had raw ephedrine in them, they've discontinued the ones that I was taking.

You could buy 'em over the counter. There was nothing illegal about him, but. The bottle said not to exceed two of these in a 24 hour period. Right. So I'd pop a couple hydroxy cuts 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.

And 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.

[00:32:03] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:32:13] Jay Dobyns: 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 hydroxy cuts.

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 hydroxycut. 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,

[00:33:01] Jordan Harbinger: oh, I thought you were gonna say that was your wake up call. But the opposite. It was your denial.

[00:33:06] Jay Dobyns: 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.

I. 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 outta role. I was not gonna 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 open 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 hydroxy cuts sitting in my medicine cabinet at home.

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

[00:34:22] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, man, that stuff was dangerous. And I remember taking in college just, oh, it's like a vitamin. It can't hurt. You can buy it on Amazon or wherever. We bought that stuff online, it's like 20 bucks.

[00:34:30] Jay Dobyns: 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 gonna hurt you.

[00:34:40] Jordan Harbinger: 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 gonna get a heart attack from this. My, 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 gotta lay down and I could hear my heart and 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

[00:35:18] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:36:51] Jordan Harbinger: 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 gotta 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

[00:37:19] Jay Dobyns: 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 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 gonna give her a miserable life.

[00:38:05] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:38:16] Jay Dobyns: In a very strange way.

[00:38:18] Jordan Harbinger: Yes, man. What surprised you most about the Hell's 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.

[00:38:31] Jay Dobyns: I don't know that I was necessarily surprised by that, but I was actually happy about it.

[00:38:34] Jordan Harbinger: Well, yeah, sure.

[00:38:35] Jay Dobyns: Not every Hell's 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 wanna live by our rules and laws, but they have their own rules and laws, which are even more detailed and more extensive.

[00:39:32] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[00:39:40] Jay Dobyns: 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, you 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 'em 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 like 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.

[00:40:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's funny 'cause 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

[00:41:05] Jay Dobyns: good rules. I'm using them as an example.

Yeah. But I'm not using 'em 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 can just stand up and get on two feet and look 'em in the eye. That's a pretty good rule. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with

[00:41:21] Jordan Harbinger: that. It's a kinda like old chivalry, OG gentleman kinda stuff.

It's funny. I would love to find a book of all these particular old habits. I think a lot of 'em are funny. Like when you walk indoors, you gotta take your hat off.

[00:41:32] Jay Dobyns: This package of bylaws that I received and all these rules. And some of 'em 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

[00:41:58] Jordan Harbinger: were using steroids, right? That requires needles.

[00:42:01] Jay Dobyns: Yeah, and I think that there are 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. I. 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.

[00:42:37] Jordan Harbinger: 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 gotta 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, ah, what are you doing these days?

You just gotta make up some story. The humdrum of regular society probably was actually quite welcome after the craziness of your undercover work.

[00:43:08] Jay Dobyns: 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.

I was never like 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.

[00:43:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[00:43:59] Jay Dobyns: I was physically present, but I wasn't emotionally present for him.

[00:44:02] Jordan Harbinger: It seems like when you're doing something like this, you have two sides of yourself.

You have the good side or 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?

[00:44:19] Jay Dobyns: 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 gonna be credible. And so one of my flaws, which we could do a whole series, if we're just gonna talk about the things that were fucked up about me, we don't have enough time to do it right now.

But one of 'em 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 hell's Angels, just the game of undercover, the lifestyle of undercover. It became my heroine. 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.

[00:45:32] Jordan Harbinger: I understand it though, man. 'cause 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. Jade Dobbins and you're like, oh shit, what happened?

[00:45:48] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:45:55] Jordan Harbinger: I still do it, man. Uh, but I'm old. I'm 45 now.

[00:45:57] Jay Dobyns: Probably. People in your audience that was like, like they don't even know what that means. What's a paper

[00:46:01] Jordan Harbinger: check? They're googling it right now. Yeah, right.

[00:46:03] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:46:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:46:11] Jay Dobyns: And I signed my undercover name and then didn't realize it at first and looked down on it and poured the checkup. Then actually signed my real name, but I was like, come on dude.

[00:46:20] Jordan Harbinger: Get it together. Yeah. Come

[00:46:21] Jay Dobyns: on

[00:46:21] Jordan Harbinger: 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 outta sanity here.

[00:46:39] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[00:46:47] Jordan Harbinger: 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,

[00:47:05] Jay Dobyns: we were transcribing tapes and trying to pick evidentiary pieces outta 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.

[00:47:39] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I like that actually. That's how you build wisdom.

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

[00:47:44] Jay Dobyns: 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 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.

[00:48:01] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[00:48:02] Jay Dobyns: 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,

[00:48:18] Jordan Harbinger: yeah,

[00:48:18] Jay Dobyns: you're okay.

You're okay. You'll have a chance to fix it.

[00:48:21] Jordan Harbinger: What were some of the more risky moments you encountered during those two years? Surely there were some close calls that you faced.

[00:48:29] Jay Dobyns: There was an event, just what pops to mind. There was an event when the solo angel cover story are associated with the Solo Angels came under question, and 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 Hell's 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 'em. 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 like 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 like 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 9 1 1 page. We were still using pagers at the time, at least for part of our communication.

I get this 9 1 1 page from Joe Slot's. You need to get out of the house, man. They're coming for you. They're sending a hit squad to the house.

[00:49:53] Jordan Harbinger: To your house where your family lives.

[00:49:55] Jay Dobyns: No, our undercover house, thank God. But still terrifying. So we gather up and scramble out and sure enough, three or four Hell's Angels pipe hitters were crawling around the house and they had guns out.

One guy had an ax 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 Hell's 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 Hell's 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, like I'm walking into an ambush.

This is gonna be an assassination. And part of my mindset at that point, which again is, you know, people are gonna see this and say like, man, this dude was off the rocker. Like I had stopped being afraid of dying. I didn't fear dying anymore. I was like, I'm probably gonna get smoked here. Let's see what happens.

Lemme 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 'em. You know why? 'cause 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 gonna happen is not coming true. I'm not taking care of 'em.

I understand why they're pissed off. They're just pissed off for the wrong reason.

[00:52:10] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:52:10] Jay Dobyns: And this guy got on the phone and he called off the dogs. He's like, man, everybody stand down. I believe him. Damn

[00:52:16] Jordan Harbinger: God. That's terrifying.

[00:52:18] Jay Dobyns: 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 lived 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, now 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,

[00:53:33] Jordan Harbinger: that is something else man.

You guys are just built different, that's for sure. Alright, it's time to blow my cover as a shameless capitalist and bring you some great deals on the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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You'll be in smart company. Where you now back to J Dobbins. I gotta also say like. Being a female and putting yourself 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, and 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.

[00:57:30] Jay Dobyns: 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 'em, 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 next boat 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 deescalate and to bring comfort and confidence into a situation like a lot of women do, why would you not use that? Yeah. Why would we not take advantage of it as investigators?

[00:59:16] Jordan Harbinger: 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 is an undercover, that'd be ridiculous.

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

[00:59:29] Jay Dobyns: 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 like 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 outta line, said the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the wrong people. Basically, she insulted the hell's angels on their turf in their house in the presence of multiple members, and they boots 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.

[01:00:51] Jordan Harbinger: Oh my God.

[01:00:52] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[01:01:13] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. God,

[01:01:14] Jay Dobyns: that's scary, man. That's so awful.

[01:01:16] Jordan Harbinger: I'm lighten it up a little bit if I can. Yeah, please do. Does the A TF 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 gonna get needled up by the Hell's Angels.

[01:01:36] Jay Dobyns: Yeah. I had an expense account if I was out socializing, if I was out partying, I had an expensive card.

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've got tattoos 'cause I wanted them Now did those tattoos maybe help the aesthetics of my appearance? Oh yeah. Make me more believable. Yeah. Yeah. Did I have members of the Hell's Angels doing the tattooing at times? Yes. You go get a tattoo from a Hell's Angels tattoo artist that's gonna give you three, four hours of like personal intimate time to have all kinds of conversations with that person.

I didn't get any tattoos 'cause I was like, oh, I gotta get inked up so that I can be believable. Like I was buying guns and bombs and drugs before I ever had any tattoos. That's interesting.

[01:02:34] Jordan Harbinger: That's almost a whole sub conversation because they're gonna 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.

[01:02:49] Jay Dobyns: When the Hells Angels case started, I had a tattoo that was. A tribute piece to the four A TF agents who were murdered at the assault and the raid of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas when the David Koresh investigation, so a TF 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 Hell's Angels case.

I had that tattoo not covered up, but altered 'cause 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.

[01:03:57] Jordan Harbinger: No kidding. Yeah. Wow. You gotta 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.

[01:04:16] Jay Dobyns: 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 Hell's Angels, I asked a very innocent question, and it was in response to the Casino Riot between the Mongols and the Hell's Angels at the Harris. Can you tell us briefly

[01:04:42] Jordan Harbinger: what that was?

[01:04:42] Jay Dobyns: I didn't

[01:04:42] Jordan Harbinger: ask about this yet.

[01:04:44] Jay Dobyns: 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 Hell's Angels cross paths with the Mongols at the Harris 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 Harris, I knew that there had been this long standing bloodbath war with the Mongols for the Hell's Angels, which was a demonstration of it, of how extreme it was.

But I would ask Hell's Angels if I'm gonna 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 cases getting ready to come to an end and it's wrapping up. It's running outta 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.

[01:06:19] Jordan Harbinger: That's like millions of dollars in payroll over two years.

[01:06:22] Jay Dobyns: Yeah, I don't know what the final number was, but it's not a cheap operation to do a long-term deep cover infill case.

[01:06:29] Jordan Harbinger: So the Hell's 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.

[01:06:42] Jay Dobyns: 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 outta my back pocket, in essence, and tell members of the Skull Valley, hell's 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 gonna start pushing Mexican methamphetamine right up into Arizona, right into Phoenix, right into Sunny Badger's backyard.

And there's nothing that the Hell's Angels can do about it. And I said, I wanna 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.

[01:07:27] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[01:07:27] Jay Dobyns: that person's dialing 9 1 1 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, scrambled 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 'em I was going to Mexico to commit this murder. Actually, what we did in reality is we just went outside of 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. Then's the brakes. I told the homicide detective, I said, here's the story I'm gonna tell. I'm gonna 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, and 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 Hell's Angels and said, man, we gotta talk. We gotta 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 gonna say. So we meet with the members of the Hell's Angels and I hand him a FedEx box and like we talked about, like the smallest details needed to be covered, that it was sent, apparently sent outta Mexico to my undercover house, and I handed him the FedEx box. I said, there's no way I was crossing the border with evidence of a murder in my trunk, but I knew that if I didn't bring physical evidence of this back, that the story was gonna be nearly unbelievable.

I knew I had to show you. And so one of the Hell's 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 a couch. I. First thing he pulls out is the bloody Mongo cut, and we can't see what he's looking at. I know what he's looking at 'cause 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 Mongo 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 him, 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 organized 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 'em get behind us. They are either going to embrace us because we did what we said we were gonna do, and we killed one of their rivals, or they're gonna kill us because we're implicating them in a homicide. I don't know which way this is gonna go.

[01:11:38] Jordan Harbinger: Geez. So even when you do something that you think is gonna be the thing that they like the most, you're like, they might also kill us for doing this.

[01:11:44] Jay Dobyns: We are putting them in a compromising situation. We are now making 'em 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.

[01:11:54] Jordan Harbinger: 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?

[01:12:12] Jay Dobyns: 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.

[01:12:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, just you never want somebody that, like my cousin works for FedEx, lemme 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.

[01:12:32] Jay Dobyns: Those are all good points. And had that happened and had we not covered that base wouldn't have been a good move.

[01:12:38] Jordan Harbinger: 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.

[01:12:50] Jay Dobyns: 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 a TF 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, and so rather than compromise other continuing investigations, the prosecutors decided, look, we're gonna reduce some of these charges.

We're gonna try to get some plea deals. We're gonna dismiss some charges. We're gonna try to smooth our way through this prosecution, which I. 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.

[01:14:13] Jordan Harbinger: 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?

[01:14:25] Jay Dobyns: I'll tell you what ultimately changed my perspective. The case ends, and through discovery and through the legal process, you know the Hell's Angels learn that. Jay Bird Davis, the gun runner debt collector hitman is actually Jay Dobbins and a TF agents.

The death and the violence threats start flooding in.

[01:14:43] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course the

[01:14:43] Jay Dobyns: tiger's not gonna change his stripes. Like 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 Ian Brotherhood, at least exposed to him. 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 was, did his intake interview in Virginia, he told the investigators, you guys better get some help for your boy Dobbins out there in Arizona.

'cause they're gonna get him. He's green lit 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.

[01:15:39] Jordan Harbinger: Wow.

[01:15:39] Jay Dobyns: I lost everything. They came to get me and burned my house Down.

[01:15:43] Jordan Harbinger: Your family's house?

[01:15:45] Jay Dobyns: 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 'em to the very end. If you can't prove the case, you have an obligation to confront people and say like, dude, our guy's hands off.

[01:16:08] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah,

[01:16:09] Jay Dobyns: 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 ATFs 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 s about me or my family. It caused me to question everything I believed in.

[01:17:11] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, and 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?

[01:17:17] Jay Dobyns: 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 a 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 that good that came out of it, the good thing that came from it is that like 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.

[01:19:02] Jordan Harbinger: 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 a TF agent that infiltrated the infamous Pagans biker gang.

[01:19:32] JHS Clip: Everyone was saying, Hey, motorcycle enthusiasts. Bikers are all bad. So they did this whole study and basically had a study. It came back and said, Hey, listen, 99% of 'em 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 we're 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 game. 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 doubt, dirty work. And so Hellboy, he had approached me, he's like, Hey, they want you to be a part of this.

We were gonna be targeting Hell's Angels and we were gonna 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, you know, maybe some low level members. You are 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've failed if I didn't have some dumb luck on my side, and I had plenty of dumb luck throughout this case.

[01:21:04] Jordan Harbinger: To hear how Ken Cro spent two years risking his life going through initiation in one of the most ruthless biker gangs in the world. Check out episode 6 73 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All Things Jay Dobbins will be in the show notes@jordanharbinger.com.

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