the conditions of his bond by continuing to associ-
ate with club members. Carrizal also admitted to
fi ring his pistol at someone and lying to the police
by denying he had brought a gun.
The prosecutors showed jurors stickers and
patches on Bandidos’ gear, including one on Car-
rizal’s father’s bike that said ‘‘I Do Gang Things.’’
(‘‘Is that a literal patch,’’ Jarrett asked sarcastically,
‘‘or is that a secret meaning that means the exact
opposite of what it says?’’) The prosecutors also
revealed damaging text messages, including an
exchange between Carrizal and a support-club
member called Jughead, who had texted to say
that Cossacks had tagged the wall of a bar in Dallas
and might still be nearby. ‘‘OK,’’ Carrizal replied.
‘‘I’m not far away if you need me and I’m packing.’’
What was he packing, Jarrett asked — a lunch?
Photograph by Eli Durst for The New York Times The New York Times Magazine 45
PATRICK HARRIS, A GRADUATE STUDENT IN AUSTIN WHO BELONGED TO THE GRIM
GUARDIANS AND IS NOW A MEMBER OF THE PREYTORIANS, WAS SWEPT UP IN THE MASS ARREST.
A TATTOO ON HIS LEFT ARM COMMEMORATES THE NUMBER OF ARRESTS.In the end, though, Carrizal, in his thick black
glasses, soft-spoken and obviously intelligent,
made a surprisingly compelling witness, under-
mining the state’s portrayal of him as a vio-
lent gang leader. He claimed the Cossacks had
ambushed his crew, and he began crying when
talking about his father, Chris Carrizal, who was
known as Shovel, being shot that day. Before Twin
Peaks, he had never been arrested. A Cossack, he
said, threw the fi rst punch, and Carrizal got in a
single punch before being swarmed: ‘‘I remember
they had brass knuckles, and they were trying to
get inside my face shield — they were trying to
hit inside there. I was just kicking and punching.
I remember I had a foldout pocketknife in my
pocket. And I was trying to get that pocketknife
because I wanted to get them off me, and I nevercould.’’ Tommy Witherspoon, who covered the
trial for The Waco Tribune-Herald, told me that
Carrizal was ‘‘the most eff ective defendant I’ve
ever seen take the stand in his own defense, and
I’ve been doing this for 40 years.’’
On Nov. 10, 2017, after deliberating for 14 hours,
the Carrizal jury announced that it could not reach
a verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial.
This was far from the prosecutors’ only setback.
Because Reyna was named in a number of the civil
suits, two defense lawyers — Broden and Abigail
Anastasio, a friend Looney recruited from Houston
— argued that the district attorney had a fi nancial
incentive to bring the cases to trial, and they began
fi ling motions to disqualify him from pending mat-
ters involving their clients. They also accused him
of improperly hijacking the police investigation in,
as Broden wrote, ‘‘an act of political opportunism.’’
At an August 2016 motion hearing, a combative
Reyna took the stand to insist that he wasn’t wor-
ried about lawsuits. There had been a ‘‘huge gaping
hole in information’’ between offi cials at the crime
scene and those at the convention center, Reyna
said, something he tried to rectify. He said he told
Offi cer Chavez, who signed the arrest affi davit,
‘‘Manny, you need to read every single line and
word in this affi davit, and if you cannot swear to it,
then you need to go back out there and get on the
phone.’’ But Chavez testifi ed he didn’t speak with
Reyna that night, and Chief Stroman acknowl-
edged that he could not recall having ever seen
Reyna at a crime scene before. Law enforcement,
Broden argued in a court fi ling, had ignored evi-
dence that didn’t support their narrative, including
video that showed most of the bikers ‘‘running
away from the disturbance, not toward it.’’
The judge ultimately allowed Reyna to remain
in charge. But on the same day that Carrizal’s jury
announced it could not reach a verdict, Broden fi led
a new motion to disqualify, this time making an
even more explosive contention: Reyna, the motion
claimed, was the subject of an F.B.I. investigation.
For months, Broden had been hearing
rumors that a former assistant D.A. in Reyna’s
offi ce, Greg Davis, had left the job in protest.
He would later say, in a sworn affi davit, that he
had gone to the feds, claiming that Reyna had
engaged in a pattern of preferential treatment
for friends, campaign supporters and their rel-
atives, including declining to prosecute D.W.I.
and marijuana-possession cases. When Davis and
Jarrett told Reyna his actions were inappropri-
ate, Reyna ‘‘said words to the eff ect of ‘Never get
in my [expletive] business again,’ ’’ Davis said in
the affi davit, which Broden fi led with his motion.
Davis also said that he, Jarrett and others had
been in contact with an F.B.I. agent regarding a
public-corruption investigation of Reyna.
Five days later, Reyna fi led re-election papers.
But he was running for a third term in a radical-
ly diff erent climate. The price tag for the Twin
Peaks prosecutions was already approaching $1
million. In December 2017, two more affi davits