Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast
Inside Outlaw Biker Gangs | ATF Agent Shares Insane Stories
Sat, 22 Feb 2025
ATF agent Ignacio J. Esteban investigated and made cases against international drug cartels and outlaw biker clubs. Now he's an author and writes books about gangs and organized crime.Ignacios Books https://www.amazon.com/stores/Ignacio-J.-Esteban/author/B09NCKP6F8?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=trueFollow me on all socials!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/insidetruecrime/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@mattcoxtruecrimeDo you want to be a guest? Fill out the form https://forms.gle/5H7FnhvMHKtUnq7k7Send me an email here: [email protected] you want a custom "con man" painting to shown up at your doorstep every month? Subscribe to my Patreon: https: //www.patreon.com/insidetruecrimeDo you want a custom painting done by me? Check out my Etsy Store: https://www.etsy.com/shop/coxpopartListen to my True Crime Podcasts anywhere: https://anchor.fm/mattcox Check out my true crime books! Shark in the Housing Pool: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0851KBYCFBent: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BV4GC7TMIt's Insanity: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08KFYXKK8Devil Exposed: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08TH1WT5GDevil Exposed (The Abridgment): https://www.amazon.com/dp/1070682438The Program: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0858W4G3KBailout: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/bailout-matthew-cox/1142275402Dude, Where's My Hand-Grenade?: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BXNFHBDF/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1678623676&sr=1-1Checkout my disturbingly twisted satiric novel!Stranger Danger: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BSWQP3WXIf you would like to support me directly, I accept donations here:Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/MattCox69Cashapp: $coxcon69
Chapter 1: What are the origins of outlaw biker gangs?
Third party cooperation, maybe for himself. I don't know. Because for a year, people couldn't figure out why Sonny Barger hadn't been arrested. He would become, he gets acquitted, by the way, for this murder trial. He was looking at the death penalty to find the time he had the death penalty. Then it would change. It would not. Now it's back again.
He gets acquitted and he would be dubbed, in my opinion, he would become the Teflon Don for the biker world because he escapes a death penalty case, which people thought was a slam dunk. Right. And I think that kind of helped him there. He later gets popped for some other things for drug charges later.
He does a little bit of time in California and then the feds bring in this massive racketeering case. Right. In the early eighties in San Francisco, spends millions of dollars and he walks. And he walks on that. A lot of his guys walked on that one. So later it would change. Racketeering case would get better and stronger, but this was a testing ground, and he walks on that one there.
So what happens in the late 80s, one of his guys gets murdered by the outlaws in Louisville, who was the chapter president out of Anchorage. They were in a bar fight, and the outlaws kill one of his guys.
I think there's a video of the bar fight, isn't there? Is that the one there's like a massive biker fight?
No, that's a different one. These guys are involved in so many, it's unbelievable. But this one here, he gets murdered. And unfortunately, he doesn't realize that the sergeant of arms from Anchorage is working with the feds. Okay. And he comes down there because they're meeting how to get back, how to plot, how to kill these guys, right, out of Kentucky.
So they get charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with explosives to kill these bikers, these outlaws who killed one of theirs. He gets them off four years. So that's the most time he gets. Some of the other guys, Taco Bowman got two life sentences, right? I'm not bouncing. Something's a little better when I have a little bit. Yeah.
Taco Bowman gets two life sentences, right, for his case out of Tampa. Okay. And that's not far from here. I knew the prosecutor of that case, and one of the prosecutors, and they hammered him. Sonny Barger dies a free man. A lot of these guys don't die free men. They die incarcerated for life. Long, long stints out there. So he gets hit with that. He comes out. He's changed a little bit.
He changes a lot. And he ends up getting involved with this show, Sons of Anarchy. He writes a lot of books. He's a show consultant. He's even in the show. His character is Lenny the Pimp. If you haven't seen an FX, ever see Sons of Anarchy? I've seen bits and pieces of it, but I don't remember Lenny the Pimp. Very popular show. Yeah. And it changes his persona. Obviously, he has cancer issues.
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Chapter 2: How did the Hells Angels become iconic?
Chapter 3: What were some key events in biker gang history?
So one of his buddies, who's probably five or six years older than him, said, look, and these are all rich kids. Well, not Pete, but all of his buddies were rich kids. Sure, that's a good client. His buddy's 25 years old, and he's driving like a Ferrari. So he ends up finding a retired chemistry professor from like UCLA. and convinces him to train Pete on how to make ecstasy.
So they, they keep Pete, they figure it out. They go back and forth. They reverse engineer the, the, the entire process. He figures it out. Well, that eventually that, you know, then the, it became illegal. Then the precursor materials became like illegal. Illegal too, yeah.
So then, you know, he's like, but the problem is you can continue to, it just gets harder and harder to make it, but you can continue to break it down through other things. Well, there was some kind of an oil or something that they needed to, you know, extrapolate this certain chemical. And it turns out that the Hell's Angels had like two 50 gallon drums of it. And they said, look, we need that.
We'll pay you this much. And they said, no, no, no, no. We'll give it to you. We need you to manufacture this into ice. So Pete's like, well, that shouldn't be too hard. So he goes to the library and they figure out how to manufacture methamphetamine. So now we're manufacturing methamphetamine for the Hells Angels. And this is back in the mid to late 80s. Oh, yeah. They're big into meth.
Anyway, what happens is he this is continuing to happen. Right. He's doing this for years. Maybe they're doing it larger. I don't know. But anyway, he ended up doing it in like a penthouses and there's like some famous buildings. He was doing it out of like the penthouse. And what so here's what happens is, you know, they're having trouble, of course, getting the precursor, the materials. Right.
And at some point they find out like they get Sudafed or something from Mexico through the cartel. Well, the cartel after he gets it and then they're trading with the cartel, they're trading the product through the cartel. The cartel comes to comes to Pete and says, look. come to Mexico. We'll set you up with a lab. We'll set you up.
And, you know, he's like, they're trying to convince me to do this. He goes, and all I kept thinking is, no, they'll get me down there. They'll kill you. And I'll be a hostage. Like I'll train their guys and they'll just, they're not going to let me go. So he was terrified to deal with, with, he's like, cause you know, they, they, they are ruthless. He said, there's so much money.
No, and even if you have El Chapo now, he's in prison, right? He's looking at life. And that's, I mean, I don't know if we talked about this. He already get life. Yeah, he's got life, but I mean, he should have been, Mexico should have handled their problem, right? They tried. They let us, not once, not twice, but three times. You can't keep the guy in?
And the last one was in the Supermax where he builds, if you haven't seen this video, folks, look at this video in here where they have the underground tunnel with a little moped. They even put him there. And he even says, he's even yelling. There have been documented reports. They said, you guys are too damn loud. Everybody's going to hear you, right? Everybody can, but he bought everybody.
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Chapter 4: How does drug trafficking intersect with biker gangs?
Spreading and spreading. That's what happens. You keep on fracturing these cartel groups, which I see in history. They just spread and spread and spread and they don't go away. They splinter groups after splinter group after splinter group, and they just keep on splintering. I mean, the Zetas are a perfect example. I mean, they were hit hard, but they kept on splintering and splintering.
Golf cartels are getting hit hard now. They're splintering. These guys are splintering because CJNG was partisan and low with Millennium. They all splinter, and they grow, and they get stronger. So instead of having five, six big ones, you may have 50 or 100 little ones. Same problems. Harder to deal with. Corruption.
So I know we got off topic a little bit with the cartels, but all these guys end up working one way or the other, either with the, used to be the Italians, they're not, or they used to be, they're almost done, gone. Racketeering cases destroyed them. The bikers, going back with them. All the big faces, all the big names are pretty much done. New generation, nobody wants to do 30 years, right?
Right. They're going to all cooperate. You got RICO charges? People cooperate with RICO charges, RICO cases. So that's the end of these groups as we're going to know it. Then why do the cartels can do that? Because they're in Mexico. It's hard to grab them. If they were in the US, I think that'd be different.
Now, the only thing I can say is my experience in doing a lot of cases of street gangs, it seems we have a problem with this cycle of violence that continues with these kids that we have to get them out of the street gang culture. You can't continue to have, you know, the grandfather was in the gang, the father's in the gang. We have to remove them from that culture.
Because it seems like, and I'm seeing it, oh, the father was ahead of this group. Now Junior's ahead of his group. Now this kid's, it's just, you've got to get that generational cycle out. I mean, I look at L.A. I worked in L.A. for almost a year, and it was generational. These guys were generational. And they love it.
That's a problem we have in our country that we have to deal with is the violence of street gangs that we have to remove and give them hope. Because we saw with the Mexican mafia, I'm sorry, with the Italian mafia is that the guys in the mafia didn't want their kids involved. They went to school. Some of them became doctors and lawyers. They didn't want their kids involved in this culture.
They knew this is no end, this is zero, right? But you don't have that mentality with the street gangs. They take a lot of pride. Like, you know, they have that blue collar. I think education is also a big part. You have to help get education to these people where they realize, you know, this is no future for you.
It's going to end up, you say, you know, one of two ways, death or imprisonment, right? So I think there's a lot of things to be looked at. We have a lot of problems. I've studied it for almost 30 years, 26 years, right, in this country. Some things are getting worse. Some things are getting better. I've written a lot about them.
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Chapter 5: What is the significance of Sonny Barger in biker culture?
Chapter 6: How are modern biker gangs structured?
Yeah.
I mean, it's just horrific. Like, what does she do? She's dating a lawyer. That's all she knows. And they know that. They know she has nothing to do with it. She's nobody. We're just going to grab this or You know, if you don't have kids, I mean, if you have kids, they'll grab your kids.
They do. That's all well documented. These assassins are horrible. And they start at a young age. These sicarios start at a young age. You know, like some of these serial killers, psychopaths, they're taught to be desensitized early, and you kill.
That's what Guzman, I think we said on one of the shows, when Chapo Guzman was interviewed by Sean Penn and Kate Garcia in the mountains after he escaped the second time, He said he himself had killed over 2,000 people to climb up the food chain, right? So you get respect. That's not counting all the ones he gave the orders to kill, right? Because life is no value. No value at all.
You know what's funny? I wrote a story about a guy named Kerry Woolsey. And he has a buddy named Danny Sweet. Anyway, when they first met their cartel contact, they're just selling pot. They're like, you know, no big deal. We're just selling pot. And it's funny because he buys like half a pound or something.
And then the guy that is selling him the weed ends up connecting him with the guy he buys it from, which is a Mexican guy. He said, so one day he shows up, he gives me like five pounds or something like that. I don't know what it was exactly, but it was a lot. He was like, wow, it is a lot of weed. He said, I sell it right away.
He said, then the guy says, hey, I'm going to come and I'm going to drop off like 50 pounds or was it like whatever, 10 pounds or 20 pounds. He shows up in an RV and he said, you know, we go in the RV and it The back of the RV, he said he like hit something on the dash and its little panel comes up in the middle of the floor. And he reaches under there and they start pulling out one pound.
He said, they're just, they're tied together. He said, he just keeps pulling them and pulling them and pulling them. Got to, I forget how many, if it was like a thousand pounds or something like that of marijuana. Yeah. And he just like, he's like, we were freaking out. But what was funny, I was like, he just gave you the weed like that, like on consignment.
And he said, well, he said, I didn't realize it at the time, but when I first met him, He said he could give it to me on consignment. And he said, but you know, I want to get to know you. Like, do you have good credit? What's your credit like? And he was like, this Mexican guy, he could barely speak English. And he was like, my credit, I have perfect credit. I have like 700 credit scores.
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Chapter 7: What are the major biker wars and their impacts?
Chapter 8: How does the law enforcement view outlaw biker gangs?
People say, what's a 1%-er? Maybe some of you guys don't know what a 1%-er is and the history of the biker world. 1%-er was the term given by the AMA, the American Motorcycle Association, for those who are, it said 99% of those who ride their bikes are law-abiding citizens. They're good people, right? It's that 1% because they're always in mailies and brawls and everything else.
And these outlaws pretty much took it to heart and put the patch on it. This is one percenter. They like to be outsiders. They like to be outlaws. They like to be hell raisers. It's the 1% that make the 99% look bad. Exactly. The bad apples. They love being the bad apple of the bunch. They really enjoy doing that.
And the big five and the big six, if you don't know, which are like, let's just say the major leagues, right? And then there's a lot of minor league clubs out there. Eventually, they recruit and they become the big leagues. You have Hell's Angels, right? You have the Outlaws. You have the Bandidos. You have the Vagos. You have the Mongols, right? And the Pagans.
Those are considered the big six because they really divide the country in regions and they fight within themselves to take over. And what are they fighting for? It's all about local drug areas, drug territories where they can sell and make money. The bikers really is an American phenomenon that started in this country after the Second World War. We have World War II veterans.
We're looking at a way to express in... Because you're in combats against the Nazis or Japanese, right? You come back to the US and you say, you can't just go back to normal life when you did that for five, four years or what have you, right? You want to have some excitement. So it starts that way and then it builds out and gets bigger.
And then the Vietnam War veterans and it turns to something else with the 1% of groups. They involve a lot of violence, a lot of drug trafficking, armed drug trafficking, extortion, murder, and other killings are within or against rivals. And I'll talk about some of that there. And I can talk about the Hells Angels. But there in Florida, you have the outlaws there. It wasn't an outlaw state.
They have the lower rocker. This is Florida, right? Because the lower rocker says, that's my area. So if a rival biker says they have their lower rocker in the back and says that state, that's a problem. That's going to be a big fight that's going to go on there because you see that in California with the Hells Angels and the Mongols.
Both of them claim California for their state and that's where they're always fighting and they're going at each other and it's really nasty, nasty battles. And I'll talk a little about that and the history there. So let me start with the most popular and probably the face of the Hells Angels, if not of the biker world, Sonny Barger, right? A lot of people say, what's Sonny Barger?
He just passed away last summer, by the way. He was a big name that passed away. He had cancer and so did Mom Boucher, who was the face of the Hells Angels from Canada. Both of those guys really have an atrocious criminal history of these guys. And a lot of people, they have the facade also. This is me in law enforcement, ATF. We've done the big cases.
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