The Gang’s All Here

When a beloved brother died last summer, more than four hundred bikers thundered into San Antonio for his funeral. As they swapped stories about the old days and guzzled beer, one message could be heard over the roar of their Harleys: Bandidos forever.

by Skip Hollandsworth

April 2007

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Furious, law enforcement agencies redoubled their efforts to bring the club down. Some police departments formed motorcycle gang task forces. The FBI went so far as to buy a biker bar in Dallas, bringing in as the “owner” a New York agent who tried to find out what the Bandidos were up to.

In 1985, after a long undercover investigation, hundreds of federal agents and local police officers in eight states arrested nearly one hundred Bandidos and their associates on charges of narcotics trafficking. (To round up the Bandidos in Lubbock, the police used an armored personnel carrier to bust into their fenced compound.) And in 1988 almost all the Bandidos’ national officers, including Ronnie Hodge and Stubs Schmick, who was then a national vice president, were arrested by federal agencies for conspiring to bomb homes and automobiles belonging to members of the Banshees, an upstart Dallas motorcycle club.

“The feds thought that they finally had us with that one, that there would be no one left to run the club,” chuckled Schmick, who, along with Hodge, was given a five-year sentence. “But by the time we headed off to prison, we already had the next group of leaders ready to go. That’s the Bandido way.”

IN 1998 THERE WAS TALK ONCE AGAIN that the Bandidos had suffered a fatal blow: Craig “Jaws” Johnston, who was then the Bandidos’ president, and other leaders pleaded guilty in federal court to charges that they had conspired to manufacture and sell as much as a thousand pounds of methamphetamine. But the Bandidos kept right on growing, opening new chapters throughout the country. The club also continued expanding into Canada, Australia, and Europe, where young motorcyclists were enamored of the Bandidos after reading about their exploits in biker magazines. The European Bandidos proved themselves to be just as aggressive as their American counterparts, setting off a turf war with Europe’s Hells Angels and at one point firing anti-tank grenades at two Hells Angels clubhouses in Denmark.

The Bandidos were so brazen that they even started their own Web site. It contained a list of all the Bandidos’ chapters, photos of famous dead Bandidos such as Chambers (who died of cancer in 1999) and Hodge (who died of heart disease in 1992), and a page where supporters and wannabes could purchase Bandidos T-shirts, clocks, coffee cups, tote bags, calendars, and thong panties. (Written on the front of the panties was the phrase “Support Your Local Bandidos.”)

In 2005 the feds made their next assault on the Bandidos’ empire. They hit Johnston’s successor, George Wegers, who lived in Washington State, and 27 other Bandidos and their associates in that area with a RICO indictment. The specific charges were hardly flashy: Wegers and the others were accused of such varied crimes as stealing motorcycles, kidnapping a rival motorcycle club member (the kidnapping lasted a day), and conspiring to kill a disloyal Bandido associate who was suspected of meeting with federal agents (the killing never took place). Defense attorneys criticized federal prosecutors for stitching together a racketeering case based on minor felonies and misdemeanors. Still, the evidence was strong enough that 18 of the Bandidos, including Wegers, agreed to plea deals in return for short prison sentences.

And as soon as Wegers was gone, the feds quickly began circling his successor, Jeff Pike, who lives just north of Houston. “It’s only a matter of time,” a highly placed Texas law enforcement official told me last spring. “Every man who’s ever been president of the Bandidos has been brought down, and it’s only a matter of time before Mr. Pike gets brought down too.”

On an impulse, I sent an e-mail to the Web site, asking if the 51-year-old Pike would agree to an interview. I figured I wouldn’t hear from him. A couple of undercover police officers who follow the club had told me that Bandidos officers never discuss anything with “citizens.” “They’re not going to be real receptive to a reporter showing up,” one officer said. “You ask one wrong question, and you could be in for an ass-kicking.”

But a couple of weeks later, Pike called. “I hope you don’t believe all that bullshit the feds are feeding you,” he said in a surprisingly cheerful voice. “I’m just a clean-cut American guy who loves riding his motorcycle. You’d be surprised. I’m almost always in bed by ten p.m. Come on down, I’ll talk to you.”

For a second, I didn’t know what to say. “You’re going to let me come to your house—the head of the Bandidos?” I asked.

Pike laughed out loud. “Oh, hell, it’s not like it’s any secret where I live. The cops drive by here just about every day just to see what I’m up to. The Houston FBI agent who investigates us has called me so many times that I’ve got his number on my speed dial. We’ve gotten to know each other so well that I once met him at a Denny’s for a cup of coffee to answer his questions.”

A few days later I drove into a well-kept neighborhood near the Woodlands residential community. I headed down a street containing mostly sprawling ranch-style homes on large lots, at least a couple of acres in size. Toward the end of the road was Pike’s property.

I assumed I would be met by one of his sergeants at arms, eyeing me suspiciously, maybe with a handgun sticking out of the back of his pants. There was a tall front gate with a “Go Away” sign attached to it, but it was wide open. I headed down a dirt road, drove past a stand of trees, and saw an unfinished two-story frame home, about 3,500 square feet. Standing before the home was a handsome, strapping man. He had no visible tattoos and no facial hair except for a neatly groomed goatee, and his crew cut was flecked with gray. He was dressed in blue denim shorts, a white T-shirt, and tennis shoes with white socks. He looked like just another middle-aged man who had spent the morning working in the yard.

“You’re Jeff Pike?” I asked.

“You got him,” he said, shaking my hand and giving me a confident grin.

For a while, we admired his house, which he was building himself; one side of the upstairs had floor-to-ceiling windows and a long balcony. Pike, who’s divorced, told me that although he would be living in it alone, he wanted it to be big enough that his two kids would have a place to stay when they came to visit him from college.

I stared at him. “Kids in college?”

“They’re at a major university right here in Texas,” he said, grinning again. (To protect their privacy, Pike asked me not to name the school.) “You know, we’re not all that different than anyone else. We have families. We take our clothes to the dry cleaners. And we all go to work. We’ve got guys who own their own businesses, guys who work for oil companies, guys who are in the computer industry. Up in Washington, one of our Bandidos is an engineer at Microsoft.”

He showed me his bicycle, which he rides eleven miles a day to stay in shape, and then he led me into the first floor of his house, which was basically a garage containing a couple of vintage automobiles and motorcycles that he was restoring. A few years ago, Pike owned a large street-rod shop in Tomball. Now, he said, he works here alone, restoring and customizing vehicles for select customers—“including a local constable, who knows I do good work,” he said with a smirk.

In one corner of the garage were his Harley-Davidsons. One was a black 1988 Softail Custom. The other he had built himself to look just like a chopper out of the seventies, complete with an elongated Springer front end, high handle bars, and chrome pipes. Next to the Harleys was his Bandidos vest, hanging from a coat rack.

“There’s my stuff,” he said, handing me a bottle of water.

Pike told me that he had been an altar boy at a Catholic church in California, where he was born and raised. But by his teenage years, he had discovered “cigarettes and girls,” and he also became fascinated with motorcycles when he saw a pack of Hells Angels flying down a road. “It was all chrome and noise,” he said. “It was just something you don’t forget, like a cowboy seeing his first train.”

He dropped out of high school, and in 1973 he moved with a buddy to Texas—“partly because the drinking age was eighteen.” A couple of years later, when he was twenty years old, he bought a big Harley Panhead. “Everyone said to me, ‘Lock it up. The Bandidos live here, and they love to steal motorcycles.’ ”

Eventually, Pike met some Bandidos at a Harley shop in Houston and at the strip joints on Gessner Road, and in 1979 he became a “prospect.” He quickly moved his way up in the club, becoming president of one of Houston’s chapters in 1988 at the age of 33 and a national vice president eleven years later. For a Bandido, he was relatively clean, his rap sheet consisting of just two crimes: In 1987 he paid an $800 fine after pleading guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge (he admitted stabbing a man who was arguing with him at a party), and in 1992 he received twenty months deferred adjudication after being charged with illegally wiring his house in order to steal electricity from the city of Houston.

But the fact was that few of the new Bandidos were compiling spectacular rap sheets. “These are not your father’s Bandidos,” said Kent Schaffer, a well-known Houston attorney who has been defending the club for 23 years. “Yes, they love riding fast. They love the tough biker persona. They are not Boy Scouts, but they are not outlaws. They are not getting on their bikes and looking to commit crimes. About the only thing they get these days are speeding tickets.”

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