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Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
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Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods

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The Hells Angels. The Bandidos. Asian triads. Russian mobsters and corrupt cops. Even the KKK. Just part of a day's work for Alex Caine, an undercover agent who has seen it all.
Alex Caine started life as a working-class boy who always thought he'd end up in a blue-collar job. But after a tour in Vietnam and a stretch in prison on marijuana-possession charges, he fell into the cloak-and-dagger world of a contracted agent or "kite": infiltrating criminal groups that cops across North America and around the globe were unable to penetrate themselves.
Thanks to his quick-wittedness and his tough but unthreatening demeanor, Caine could fit into whatever unsavory situation he found himself. Over twenty-five years, his assignments ran the gamut from bad-ass bikers to triad toughs. When a job was over, he'd slip away to a new part of the continent or world, where he would assume a new identity and then go back to work on another group of bad guys.
Told with page-turning immediacy, Befriend and Betray gives a candid look behind the scenes at some familiar police operations and blows the lid off others that law enforcement would much prefer to keep hidden. And it offers an unvarnished account of the toll such a life takes, one that often left Caine to wonder who he really was, behind those decades of assumed identities. Or whether justice was ever truly served.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateFeb 17, 2009
ISBN9781429965576
Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods
Author

Alex Caine

Alex Caine acts as an adviser on biker investigations and a speaker at police conferences. He is a certified fifth-degree black belt martial artist, recognized by the World Kickboxing Association. His first book was Befriend and Betray.

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    Befriend and Betray - Alex Caine

    PROLOGUE

    ______

    Interstate 8, heading east from San Diego, early May 2002

    Ever since I’d started working the Dago Hells Angels, people I trusted had been counseling me to pack my bags and get out of southern California. Things could only end ugly, they’d said. Now, two years later, I was finally taking their advice. And fast.

    I hadn’t even bothered to pack up my things. I’d just thrown a few clothes, some papers, my computer and some music for the road into my Nissan pickup, called for my dog, Dog, and headed east into the desert.

    Goodbyes with my police handlers had been cursory. They’d wanted me to spend one last night in the San Diego area, give us time for a goodbye dinner. I let them book me a room at a local motel. But once I got in my truck and started driving, I wasn’t about to stop.

    My adieus to my biker buddies had been even ruder: I’d left them in a squeal of tires and a cloud of burned rubber after Bobby Perez, the most volatile and vicious member of the San Diego—or Dago—Hells Angels, made it clear that things were, indeed, about to end ugly.

    A few days earlier, he’d asked me to carry a handgun, a little Bersa .380, back from Laughlin, Nevada, to El Cajon, California, after a shoot-up in a casino had left three bikers dead. I didn’t know whether the .380 had been used in the gunplay or whether Bobby just didn’t want to carry it across state lines himself. He was, after all, on parole and not even supposed to be outside of California, let alone in the company of criminals. Whatever the case, his asking me to drive the gun back to the Dago Hells Angels’ home turf in El Cajon was a major vote of confidence. So when my handlers seized the gun, saying they couldn’t possibly allow me to return it to a known felon, they were blowing a chance for me to work my way even further into the inner sanctum of the gang. Tell Bobby you had to ditch it, they’d said. Or that you lost it. Or whatever. Come up with something.

    It was the stupidest of decisions, all the stupider if they had any idea how important the little gun was to Bobby. When he asked for it back during a late night meeting in an El Cajon parking lot, I put him off, telling him I’d hidden it deep in the engine of my truck and hadn’t yet had a chance to retrieve it.

    That won me a venomous glare and an order: Bring it tomorrow to the bar. Ten o’clock! he spat at me.

    A memorial ride was taking place the next morning, for another biker killed in the previous days. Christian Tate, a member of the Dago Hells Angels, had been shot off his bike from behind as he headed back to California from Laughlin about an hour before the nastiness broke out in the casino. Bobby, it seemed, wanted the .380 for the ride.

    After the scene in the parking lot, I contemplated cashing in the Dago case. It had been going south for a while, from even before the botched—and highly secret—police ambush of a Hells Angels drug run through the California desert had left who knows how many dead. I’d witnessed at least four bikers and two cops bite it before I was dragged out of that particular mess.

    The case had never had a clear objective to begin with. It had begun in 1999 as an investigation into a Quebecer who was suspected of running coke from Colombia to California and then up into Canada with the help of the Dago Hells Angels. But the guy had disappeared into thin air the day before I arrived in California. So the case had turned into a basic intel probe of the Dago Angels—accumulating information without a particular goal of making any arrests and putting bad guys in prison. To get close to the gang I opened a photo studio specializing in strippers’ media kits and bike porn—shots of chromed-up Harleys against a setting sun and that kind of thing. Eventually gang members and associates began inviting me to parties and gatherings to document their fun for posterity (in an uncompromising way, of course—I knew better than to shoot a member with his nose in a big pile of coke).

    After several months I began buying moderate quantities of coke and crystal meth—half a pound, a pound—from criminals affiliated with the gang, along with stolen cars and restricted weapons: fully automatic machine pistols, M-16s, converted SKS carbines, hand grenades and the like. I made myself out to be a criminal middleman interested in pretty much anything that could make me money. Those buys elevated our little intel probe to operational status—our sights set on arrests and convictions.

    Still, the case had no real focus and my handlers tended to proceed in a dangerously ad hoc way. Over two years I gathered dirt on crooked members of the U.S. military selling government-issue guns, Mexican border runners smuggling arms and humans (both of the very dangerous variety), and Russian mobsters—along with my work on the Hells Angels and their friends. And that created a problem: with so many investigative fronts, we never identified an exit strategy, a predetermined point at which we could say, Okay, we’ve got the goods. Time to wind things up.

    To make matters worse, I had a vague suspicion from early on that Operation Five Star—the multi-squad task force I was reporting to, comprising the DEA, the ATF and the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, along with the municipal police departments of San Diego and El Cajon—wasn’t an entirely tight ship. It seemed to me that information was leaking out and finding its way to the wrong people. Initially it was really just a gut feeling with nothing tangible to back it up. But in the fall of 2001, I got a call from an FBI supervisor in San Francisco with a storied career busting bikers asking me to visit him for a chat. It turned out he had the same suspicions.

    Along with the shoot-up in the desert, all of this should, perhaps, have been enough to convince me to bail from the case long before Bobby Perez ordered me to give him back the .380. But I like to finish what I start, and there had never been any sustained or substantial threat to my safety on this case, and the money was good: US$5,000 plus all expenses per month, enough to buy a new house back in Canada for my second wife and daughter.

    The encounter in the parking lot, however, had finally convinced me that the case was almost certainly done for, at least as far as I was concerned. Still, for whatever reason, I thought I might be able to forestall the inevitable with Bobby for at least a day or two. So, the next day at 10:00 a.m. sharp, I drove to the stretch of El Cajon Boulevard that effectively belonged to the Hells Angels: it was home to their club-house, Dumont’s—better known simply as the bar—and Stett’s motorcycle shop.

    When I pulled up, there were already about a hundred bikers hanging around on the sidewalk in front of Dumont’s. Right in the middle stood Bobby. I parked in front of a hydrant and left the motor running.

    As I approached, I could see that Bobby was in a particularly unpleasant mood.

    Did you bring it? he demanded.

    I can’t find it, I replied. It must have fell out on the road on the drive back.

    Bobby started to vibrate. You follow me to the back of the bar, he said. I knew what often happened behind Dumont’s, and it wasn’t a place I was going to visit.

    Sure, I said, turning away. But let me park properly and turn off the truck. I’ll be right there. I got in the Nissan and threw it in gear.

    Bobby turned and yelled to an underling to stop me. The guy lunged for the passenger door, but thankfully it was locked. I floored it and he let go. I wheeled around the corner, raced to my studio for a few essentials and was gone.

    At this point, a bad novel might describe a wave of relief washing over me as I headed into the pure, clean desert, away from the danger and treachery of the past two years. Yeah, right. Whatever relief I felt was more like a trickle than a wave. Sure, leaving El Cajon and the San Diego area felt good, as did the fact that it was me, and me alone, who was now in control; I no longer had handlers or Hells Angels telling me what to do. But all the turf between San Diego and Phoenix, Arizona, three hundred miles to the east, is Hells Angels country. There was a distinct possibility that before jumping on his Harley for Christian Tate’s funeral ride, Bobby had picked up the phone and sent word to the Hells Angels chapters east and north of San Diego to be on the lookout for me. But the last ride for a member—any member, even a relatively unremarkable one like Tate—is mandatory for all Hells Angels in the region, and strongly recommended for all affiliated clubs. I had to hope that everyone who might have a mind to get in my way was already behind me.

    The fact that no one had shown up at my studio as I packed had been a good sign. But if that had quelled my sense of unease somewhat, the desert exacerbated it. While in the San Diego area I’d spent many a Sunday in the desert, walking and exploring, with Dog or alone, the peace and quiet the best therapy available. Now, however, the desert wasn’t offering serenity: I just felt exposed.

    Still, the farther I drove, the farther the mess was behind me and the better I felt. For the first day or two I caught catnaps in rest areas and truck stops and drove all night, trying to put some distance between me and my problems. Later, once into the Midwest and farther east, I slowed down and made regular stops, to see the sights, have a meal or spend the night in a motel.

    All the while I was thinking about the operation that had just ended so unceremoniously and about my whole career as a hired-gun infiltrator.

    For almost twenty-five years, almost half my life, I’d been working for an alphabet soup of police forces—the RCMP, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the RHKP, the RNC—insinuating myself into criminal groups from around the world and then helping police bring them down. Along with outlaw bikers, I’d gone after Asian Triads and Russian mobsters, Pakistani heroin smugglers and garden-variety drug lords, crooked cops and military types. Even the KKK. It had been lucrative, it had been exciting, it had been a job. I may have been doing the work of good, but what had it left me with? Or, more exactly, what had it left of me? Each job required that I create a new persona and inhabit him fully for anywhere from a few months to several years. Sometimes I’d pretend I was all criminal, a border runner, a hit man or a drug dealer. Other times my cover was more complex: a life insurance underwriter also into investment scams and money laundering; an importer who also brought in drugs and sex trade workers and shipped out stolen luxury cars; a concert promoter who was interested in anything that might make a buck.

    I made myself into these people, and any number of other characters, and became them completely, putting the real me on the shelf. Always I thought, when the game was over, I’d be able to take that real person down and become him again. But as time went by, it was clear that whoever the real me was was withering away for lack of sunlight, drying up for lack of nourishment, atrophying for lack of exercise.

    Even between jobs—a period usually lasting several months—I increasingly resisted becoming myself again. If the operation had ended in a major bust, that time would sometimes be taken up with court preparations; other times it was just pure R & R. In either case, resurrecting the real me became a hassle. It would just get in the way of my next assignment.

    I’d thought about retirement on a few occasions during my career. Indeed, until the mid-1980s and my tangle with the KKK, I’d never thought of what I was doing as an actual career, just a series of jobs I’d accidentally fallen into, and which I’d just as suddenly and unwittingly fall out of. But no job had been as unsatisfying as San Diego. None had come up so short of what we could have accomplished. None had left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth.

    And so, never had I contemplated calling it quits as seriously as I did on that highway-hopping drive across the south-central states and then up the eastern seaboard to Maine. There, crossing into New Brunswick and heading home to my family in eastern Canada, the allure of retirement grew. Not only had the game changed from when I first started—and not for the better—but I was becoming too old for it, or at least worn out by it. All that put me in a mind to finally do what cops I’d worked with over the years had constantly urged me to do: sit down and tell my story.

    CHAPTER ONE

    Far from the Tree

    ______

    Lots of people don’t grow up into the life that’s expected of them. Farmers raise children who end up as artists. Factory workers have kids who become research scientists and university professors. Thugs and criminals have grown up in the silver-spoon homes of diplomats, lawyers and doctors. Still, there probably aren’t many apples that fall as far from the tree as I did. I might as well have landed in a completely different orchard.

    I was born into a working-class family in Hull, Quebec, virtually in the shadow of Canada’s Parliament—high on a cliff across the Ottawa River, looking down at us—but a world away. It was a French-speaking lumber- and paper-mill town where the Catholic Church continued to call most of the shots but the brothel and tavern still had their places.

    My dad didn’t work at the mills but at the municipal plant that did double duty as Hull’s water filtration works and a generating station for electricity. He’d got the job a year or two after coming home from World War II and shortly before I was born. Prior to the war, music had been his life, and he’d got by playing banjo and guitar at countless weddings and parties. But he came home from the war with my mother—whom he had met in Halifax, his naval base on his way to and from Europe—and he needed real work. He got the gig thanks to a connection made by his brother Alfred, whom we always knew as mon’onc Fred.

    My family seemed to be set with all the makings for a life of postwar prosperity and happiness—steady employment, family, peace. Except there was one problem, or maybe three: my mother was half Irish, half Indian, and she didn’t speak a word of French.

    In the Québécois world of my father’s family, almost nothing was worse than being English. The English were Protestant conquerors, occupiers and carpetbaggers all rolled into one. They were the bosses, and thus the people who dictated that the French made less money and didn’t get the management or foreman jobs.

    But being Irish or Native—or a combination of the two—was worse than being English. The Irish were seen as bottom-feeders, willing to work for nothing and steal French jobs. The fact that the Irish were Catholic helped a little perhaps, but their church was over in Ottawa—more evidence that they were stooges of the English. Indians, meanwhile, were looked down on by everyone, for whatever reason was handy. They were drunks, or poor or didn’t speak French. And even if many of them were Catholic too, well, they were really still heathens at heart.

    Maybe his eyes had been opened by his time overseas in the navy, because my father was able to see beyond these prejudices. Otherwise he would never have married Mary O’Connor and brought her home. Especially considering she already had a child, James, by a Swedish sailor who had passed through Halifax and shipped out before he knew she was pregnant. Mon’onc Fred, along with his wife, Émilienne, who for us were the very embodiment of class and dignity, also remained above such pettiness.

    But not so my father’s mother and his sisters Cécile, Irène and Laurette. They had all the time in the world and all the room in their hearts for Mary’s half-Swedish son, but none for Mary herself. She was isolated and ostracized, ridiculed and marginalized by the very people whom, in that sort of community, she needed most to look out for her.

    For the first six years of my life, however, this was largely invisible to me. We lived in a little house in a part of town called Wrightville but which the locals knew as Ragville because of the rag recycling factory that employed many local women. In socio-economic terms, it was the wrong side of the tracks, definitely, but in terms of community it was a perfectly fine place for my parents to set about having five kids of their own. I was the third, born on a December evening in 1948 after a snowstorm had buried Hull under a foot of snow.

    By necessity, we spent much of our childhoods outside—the walls of the tiny house were too close together to contain us all except when we were sleeping. There, among other kids, our being half English wasn’t an issue because we spoke French as well as any of them and because there were enough of us and we were tough enough. But since at home we all spoke English with my mother, my dad included, she never learned much French. Not speaking French (and being Irish and Indian) meant she didn’t make any friends. And even if my aunt Cécile spoke good enough English to be employed across the river as a civilian employee of the Royal Canadian Navy, she made no effort to include my mother in the wider family life.

    Cécile lived in the house in which my father had grown up, along with her sisters Irène and Laurette, my father’s youngest brother Laurent and my grandmother. The house was in downtown Hull, and remained the family gathering place. Every Sunday, after Mass and a quick stop at home to change out of our church clothes, we’d head over to the house for a late lunch and a long afternoon of playing. For the first few years of my life my mother dutifully came along, but the tradition must have been not just excruciatingly boring for her but all the more isolating. By the time I was five, she stopped accompanying us on the Sunday outings.

    Not long after, she disappeared for a spell, and then another. In the summer of 1955, when I was six and a half, my mother split for good. We were left entirely in the dark about why she had gone, where, or whether she would ever be coming back. It sounds like a bad cliché, but she went to the movies and never came home—or at least that’s what the adults told us.

    Right from the start we sensed that this time her disappearance might be final. Our aunts started coming over, managing the household and telling us and anyone else who cared to listen bon débarrasgood riddance to bad rubbish. There was no blame placed on my father, even if at the very least he had been blind to my mother’s unhappiness and deaf to her desires to move back east. Instead, my aunts just made it clear to everyone that they were now going to clear up his mess.

    Within a week, all the arrangements had been made. Our house would be sold. My two brothers, Jim and Pete, then aged eleven and nine, would move with my dad into the family home. My two younger sisters, Norma and Pauline, four and three respectively, would go live with a family my dad knew in a small town a few miles away. The middle kids, my sister Louise and I (aged six and seven), would be sent to St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Ottawa.

    I wasn’t told of the arrangements until the morning of the day we were to be shipped off, so I had no time to plan an escape. After my dad took me into the kitchen to tell me what was happening, I just bolted. I headed to a secret hiding place my brother and I had in some nearby woods. I figured I’d wait awhile then sneak back into the house and live there by myself till my mom came to get me. But soon enough my two brothers came and dragged me back home. The orphanage had sent a car to pick up Louise and me. Just before we were driven off, my oldest brother, Jim, gave me his golf ball. I kept it for years.

    Louise and I were just being warehoused at the orphanage; my dad had told the nuns he fully expected to be in a position to take us back in a matter of months. He’d bring us toys on occasion, but most importantly he brought us hope that we’d soon be getting out. In mid-September of our second year, after a week or so of school, my father came and retrieved us—but not to take me home. There still wasn’t room.

    Instead I was sent to live with a colleague of my father’s, Doyle Parent, his wife and their countless kids. Their house had no room for another child—all the boys slept in one room, all the girls in another—but Doyle and his wife were big-hearted and generous. Life there was a chaotic but pleasant adventure after the orphanage.

    The proximity to the rest of my family was also a big relief. I was just a couple of street corners away from the family home. Still, I wasn’t a regular visitor for reasons that would be considered bizarre today: my family’s house was actually in St. Bernadette parish while the Parents’ house was in St. Rédempteur parish. In those years, the parish where you lived dictated more than just what church you went to. For the women, it determined which grocery store they shopped at. For the men, it made the difference between taverns. And for kids, it determined who your friends were, what pool hall you frequented, what girls you could pursue, even what streets you could walk without fear of being harassed and chased back to safe territory.

    So, even if we all went to the same school, as soon as the bell rang at the end of the day we kept within our little tribe.

    Still, if necessary, you could change parishes without much hassle. And the younger you were, the easier it was. So after about a year at the Parents’ I gave up membership in St. Rédempteur parish and joined St. Bernadette.

    Space opened up for me at the Charbonneaus’. They were good friends of the family. They also had a mess of children, but they were older by then and beginning to move out. Which meant that I could move in, as I did in the late summer of 1957, just before I was to enter grade three.

    Once at the Charbonneaus’ I might just as well have been back in the family home, I was there so often. And indeed I did move back in permanently the next summer when my uncle Laurent died.

    I didn’t have any illusions that everything would be splendid once I moved back to the family home. I knew my aunts well enough for that. There were upsides, especially living under the same roof as my brothers and having their friendship and support on the street. But tensions between me and my aunts didn’t take long to grow more pronounced.

    They constantly put down my mother. Any time we did something they didn’t approve of, they would say in a disgusted voice, Mary tout chié—meaning more or less You’re shit just like your mother.

    It was during one tirade that I learned belatedly that my mother was half Irish and half Native. The news had a different effect on me than my aunt intended. All of a sudden I felt special, not English or French but something different.

    We’d got our first television when we were living on Rouville Street. Back then channels used to broadcast an Indian-head test pattern when they had nothing else to air. I was intrigued. I started imitating the stoic look of the TV Indian and would practice my version of it on the grown-ups. Whenever they would come down on me for whatever reason, I would glare at them. R’garde-moi pas avec tes yeux tueurs! my aunt would yell. Don’t look at me with those killer eyes! And then my dad would order me: Pis change ta face!

    My imitation of the Indian head—and the impact it seemed to have on people—got me interested in facial expressions and body language and what effective and subtle ways they were to communicate. This likely had a lot to do with the fact that I had always been short and slight and knew that, if I was going to be noticed, let alone impress people, I would have to do it in a way that didn’t involve puffing out my chest and standing tall. So I began to work on developing my own non-verbal ways of sending a precise message, whether through an almost imperceptible tilt of the head or a small hand gesture. I also started to study everyone I met to read what they were saying through their movements. I wasn’t necessarily seeing things that other people didn’t see, or even picking up non-verbal messages that they were missing, but I was indexing these sorts of subtle cues. Facial expressions and the like became, in that sense, a third language for me, one that everyone spoke but didn’t necessarily understand, one in which very few people could tell a lie, but I certainly could.

    It didn’t, however, help relations with my aunts. I wasn’t any more rebellious or up-to-no-good than Jimmy or Pete, but I was more defiant. Jimmy, when confronted with a misdeed, would fold and apologize profusely; Pete would deny everything. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t speak and just took my licks. After one Friday night blowout Aunt Cécile declared that on the following Monday she would report me to the local priest. Given the weight that the Church swung in Quebec until the late 1960s, the priest was more than just a confessor and sermonizer; he was also an adjudicator and dispenser of community justice. As such, he was only called upon in very serious circumstances. So I knew what Cécile’s threat meant—and it scared me half to death. As an incorrigible I would likely be sent to a reform school such as the notorious Mont St-Antoine in Montreal. The Mont was run by the brothers and the physical and sexual abuse going on there was legendary, even back then. A friend had spent six months there. When he came back, he showed us the scars on his back from being whipped by a motorized contraption the brothers had rigged up to carry out their punishments for them.

    So, the next morning, Saturday, I got up early, went into Cécile’s purse, took forty dollars and left. A friend put me up in his house that night and the next, but on Monday morning his mom forced me to leave. I didn’t have my books and wasn’t in the frame of mind to attend school anyway. So I faked my father’s signature on a note claiming I was sick, met up with Pete on the way to class and had him deliver it. If I hadn’t done that, the truancy cops would have been looking for me and that would have meant the Mont for sure.

    It was February and very cold. My dad had an old car in the backyard that he cannibalized for parts, and after a day of lying low I spent most of the night in there. My father and aunts had to know I was in the car—it was just outside the kitchen window and the kitchen was the busiest room of the house. But they let me sleep there anyway, thinking, I suppose, that it would teach me a lesson. I never forgave them for that.

    The second night, I found two blankets on the back seat. Pete had left them there. The next day we met up and he told me of a rooming house across from the local arena that would rent to anyone. The rooms were furnished and cost ten dollars a week. With some of the money from Cécile’s purse I paid for two weeks and settled in.

    The other tenants were hookers, a couple of old winos and maybe a crook or two. I was the only child. For my first few days there I continued lying low and keeping to myself, venturing out occasionally but spending most of the time in my little room alone. Pete brought me my books and some more clothes, so I was able to get back to school. And after a week or so a friend brought me a bike. He said he’d found it but didn’t really expect me to believe him. Wherever the bike came from, riding it around was better than walking, even in the snow.

    By that time I had got to know many of my neighbors in the boarding house, especially the working girls. They’d leave their doors ajar and go from room to room to socialize. It was a couple of days before I talked to any of them. Then an older woman with puffy, bleached blond hair and far too much makeup knocked on my door. She was tall and very solid—not fat, just solid—and, standing there at the door wearing a floor-length pink bathrobe, she struck me as something between forbidding and outright scary. She held a plate of food in one hand.

    Have you eaten? she asked. I said no and she handed me the plate. My name is Lorraine. I’m in room seven, she said, and left.

    I cleaned the plate and returned it to Lorraine. On her turf she took the opportunity to ask me some questions and I spilled the beans. It felt good to open up to someone, and we talked for what seemed like hours. Beneath her tough, all-business exterior, Lorraine was still tough and no-nonsense. It was clear she’d had a hard life full of betrayal, disappointment and probably violence. But she took me under her wing without expecting a thing in return, and looked out for me as well as any of my various mother figures had up to that point.

    After that first meal she always made sure I was getting enough to eat. Most of the girls, coming home after a long night working, would bring home food. On Lorraine’s instruction—she definitely called the shots, to the extent that in retrospect I think she was more of a madam than a hooker herself—they always brought extra for me. Breakfast was often roast chicken and french fries instead of cereal and toast, but that was fine by me.

    Lorraine also had the girls check in with me before doing laundry, to see if I had any that needed washing. There were jobs that she didn’t delegate, though, in particular ensuring I was up in time for school and had my homework done. She also made sure that none of the other girls—who were all younger and more vivacious and sillier—got too friendly with me. I was, after all, still only eleven or twelve.

    When my two weeks were almost up, I began to get anxious about where my rent would come from. I was enjoying life and the last thing I was going to do was head back home. My father and aunts knew where I was—I was seeing Pete every day—but seemed content to have me out of their hair. I was too proud and defiant to go back to them. I talked the situation over with a friend and he told me how I could steal fifty dollars easily. He worked after school and on weekends as a grease monkey at a garage, and he knew that at the end of each day the boss hid the next day’s float in an empty oil filter box on a shelf behind the cash. I could just smash a window with a rock and help myself. I was prepared to do it, but only as a last resort: it would almost certainly cost my friend his

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