The Undercover Lawman Who Went Hog Wild

For all the bad the Mongols do, Queen seems to like them. He grew up, he says, "in a not-so-great neighborhood" in North Carolina. His father chased moonshiners for the ATF. Young Billy boxed as a kid. A Special Forces Vietnam vet, Queen has spent his adult life in law enforcement, first as a city cop, then a Border Patrol officer, and finally an ATF agent. But he didn't like working cases from his cubicle and spent long periods as a street agent or undercover, infiltrating neo-Nazi skinheads, the Aryan Nation and the KKK, and culminating in his two years riding with the Mongols. He says that if he had tried to infiltrate NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, "I'd be caught immediately." But the Mongols? Queen says it got him in touch with his inner Genghis Khan. "Where I feel like I can be as mean and as violent as anyone."

When relating his stories, Queen often enters a realm of role-playing, where his eyes get squinty and crazed, and he starts poking his finger in your chest and threatening you with a string of obscenities. It is disturbing in that he seems to be able to turn it on and off, like an actor, which in a sense he is.

To join the Mongols, Queen used a well-developed and deep undercover identity -- complete with an apartment, a borrowed Harley, a job, a phony driver's license, a back story and other agents to impersonate former employers or family members, because the Mongols hired a private investigator to check Queen out before inviting him to join. (He also had to fill out an application; it is, after all, a club, with a constitution, five commandments and a fight song, whose lyrics can't be printed here.)

Queen got his introduction to the Mongols through a woman, a 200-pound methamphetamine addict and confidential informant with a grudge against the gang who was looking for some payback. Over the next year, over many, many beers, Queen moved up in status from fellow barfly to "hang-around" to prospect and then to member.

As he recalls that time, he describes being the subject of constant challenge -- that he was either too weak to be a Mongol or he was a cop. "You have to be able to kill," he says, "in protection of the pack. That's their bottom line."

At one point, while on a rally to Laughlin, Nev. -- later the scene of a murderous rumble between Mongols and Angels that left threedead and the floor of Harrah's casino trashed -- Queen was challenged to snort a line of speed. As he describes it, the undercover agent was able to pretend to inhale the powder while he wiped it off the table onto the motel carpet.

Queen says he is often challenged on this point: How could he have ridden with these guys for so long and not committed any crimes, especially involving drugs? Luck and skill, Queen says. He'd beg off getting high, saying he was already drunk. He'd claim that since his chapter president was on parole and abstaining, then he, too, would forgo. Queen says that if his life was in danger, ATF rules would allow him to do the drugs but then consider it an on-the-job injury. He'd go to the hospital for treatment. And if he had done drugs and not told his supervisors? "I was subject to random drug testing like every other agent, and if I'd been caught, I'd be fired," he says. The ATF agent who worked most closely with Queen on the investigation did not return phone calls and ATF supervisors were not available for comment.

One of the themes in the book and in the screenplay is how seductive Queen found some of the Mongols and their lifestyle. In his telling, Queen smiles with the memory of a ride across California, with a hundred Mongols on motorcycles roaring down the road, running through traffic lights. "It's just an awesome scene," he says, "this show of raw power. Here are these guys who just scare the living crap out of everybody."

Queen was struck, too, by their friendship. When his mother dies, nobody in the ATF does a thing (and Queen uses the book to settle some scores with his supervisors, whom he considers gutless bureaucrats), but when his fellow Mongols hear of his loss, "they hug me. They tell me they love me. They were there."

"As time went by," Jarvis says, "Billy really got into the lifestyle."

Yet Queen says that if he had to do it all over again -- become a Mongol -- he would pass. His undercover investigation forced his ex-wife to relocate with his two young sons, who didn't understand why he was gone so long and looked so weird. The prosecutions were satisfying, Queen says. But most of the Mongols are out of prison and back on the street. And because of the book and the prospect of becoming movie stars, "they're bigger than ever," he says. "This thing has been like a recruitment tool."