Alex Caine - The Fat Mexican. The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

Jamie Flanz was scared, but he didnt stop scraping his broom back and forth across the blood-stained barn floor. His large stomach wobbled from side to side under his black nylon jacket as he worked. Guys had teased him about it before, calling him a beached whale. He had laughed with them, but only because he had wanted to be part of the gang.

He was terrified. He wanted to go home. Not home to his townhouse in Keswickhome to Montreal, where his family lived. He wanted to somehow erase the long trail of greed and misplaced ambition that had brought him to this godforsaken horror show in the middle of nowhere and get himself back to a simpler, safer time in the past.

As Jamie scrubbed he glanced at where his mentor, Boxer, had been sitting until a few minutes ago, down on the cold concrete floor with the rest of the crew. Boxer was an old-school biker, quicker to respond with his fists than his wits, though he was no fool. He was supposed to be in charge. Jamie couldnt understand why he didnt fight back. Now Boxer was dead. Everybody around himat least everybody who was still alivejust seemed to accept their defeat, at the hands of their friends and fellow Bandidos, no less, and were content to watch him sweep away the evidence of the carnage from earlier that nightthough by the looks of it, Jamie and Mikey were really just pushing the puddles of gore back and forth between cracks in the cement.

Jamie had been thinking of Montreal a lot lately. Hed come close to leaving the gang and now realized what a fool hed been to pin his hopes of leaving on one last attempt to profit from it. He was angry, but also angry at the others whod come out on the wrong end of the shootout, and confused by their docile acquiescence. While Jamie was growing up in Montreal, his family had always cried and grieved for the victims of the Holocaust, and it used to upset him. In his young mind, those victims were sheep going to the slaughter; in his imagination, he always fought back. He would not go quietly into the night.

Yet here he was, scrubbing the floor of Wayne Kellestines barn in the middle of his own longand, by the looks of it, lastnight, doing nothing to save himself from what almost certainly lay ahead.

The previous two weeks had been tumultuous for Jamie. He had decided to leave the Bandido club and move away. A recent brush with murder had scared the hell out of him, and just making the decision to quit felt liberating. He had even spoken to his brother about getting back to his roots in Montreal.

He would sell most of his stuff. The money from the drug deal that was supposed to be going down here in Kellestines barn right now might even let him sneak into the States, where his wife and children were. Fallout from a lawsuit brought against him there and his status as a person of interest in a Canadian murder investigation meant he couldnt cross the border easily, at least not through official channels.

The club could trust him not to say anything about the drugs, even about tonight. When theyd killed Shawn Douse in Jamies townhouse, he had never said a word. They should know he was solid. He wasnt a snitch. So why did they have to kill him now? Earlier it had seemed possible that some of them would survive; as the night dragged on and the death toll steadily mounted, any hope of that grew dimmer and dimmer.

Jamie pushed the broom through the muck of his fellow gangsters blood, swirling it back and forth. He figured Wayne Kellestine hated him because he was Jewish. Jamie had gone so far as to tell Frank Bam Bam Salerno, president of the Toronto Bandidos chapter, that he was nervous about coming here tonight. Kellestine was a known white supremacist with a taste for Nazi memorabilia. Normally, Jamie would have been under Boxers wing as his prospect, and safe from Kellestine and his warped views. Tonight Boxer had been forced down at gunpoint, his power gone; shortly after that, he had been taken outside and would not be coming back.

Jamie kept pushing his broom. If only he had said no to George; if only he hadnt towed that car, or had at least just taken it to the pound without searching it. Since that night two weeks ago, any thoughts hed been having of quitting the gang had become both more complicated and more temptingif he could just get his share of this deal, he could get out with some stake money and start a new life. But quitting one of the worlds most ruthless motorcycle clubs was hardly a matter of just packing his bags and walking away.

The George Jamie was thinking about was George Pony Jesso, a tow-truck driver and a full-patch member of the Bandidos, Toronto chapter. Originally from Prince Edward Island, George had come to Ontario some thirty years earlier, and now spent his nights trawling the streets of Rexdale, a suburb north of Toronto, looking for easy pick-ups and abandoned cars. Apparently hed had other plans that night in March 2006 and had asked Jamie Flanz, a Bandidos prospect from Keswick, Ontario, to take his shift. As a prospect, Jamie probably didnt have much choice, but he didnt really mind; anything was better than one more lonely night in an otherwise empty townhouse.

The night had turned out to be uneventful and boring. On his last run through the back streets of Rexdale, Jamie noticed an older Oldsmobile parked on the wrong side of the street. He cruised by slowly and looked for a parking sticker on the windshield: none. But the cars Quebec plates jumped out at him. He pulled a U-turn and stopped next to the offending car. Montreal and Toronto arent really far apart, but lately itd seemed like his hometown, just one province over, might as well have been on the other side of the world. He stared at the plates for a few minutes more, shook off any sentimentality that was stalling him and then got out to hook the car to the tow truck.

Within ten minutes he was heading back to the impound yard. Before he got too close, Jamie pulled over. He checked the safety ties and the hookup, trying to look as if he were up to nothing out of the ordinary, then he quickly searched inside the Oldsmobile. He found nothing. He popped the trunk and walked around back to check it for valuables. Inside he found an old blue sleeping bag and a sports bag with a change of clothes, but nothing of interest.

He was about to slam the trunk shut when the strap of another bag caught his eye. The bag was pushed to the back and was barely visible. He pulled it out, looked inside and almost fell on his ass. There looking back at him were bags and bags of white powder. He had seen enough drugs in his days as a bouncer and a biker to know it was cocaine, in a quantity that had to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.