46 2.27.22
were fi led with Broden’s motion to disqualify.
In the fi rst, a former county prosecutor, Brittany
Scaramucci, claimed that a client she represent-
ed as a defense attorney had told F.B.I. investiga-
tors he personally delivered cocaine to Reyna.
In the second, a retired Waco police detective,
Sherry Kingrey, said she had told the F.B.I. about
an illegal gambling ring she believed Reyna and
his friends had been operating.
Reyna also had an opponent in the Republican
primary: Barry Johnson, a 61-year-old personal-
injury attorney who had only ever tried a single
felony case before and who had been living in Dal-
las since 1989, returning to Waco, his hometown,
only earlier in 2017 to care for his ailing mother. At
a candidate forum in January, Reyna dismissed the
allegations in the affi davits as ‘‘fake news.’’
Mass arrests of supposed gang members are not
unique to bikers. In April 2016, not quite a year
after Twin Peaks, nearly 700 law-enforcement offi -
cers made a predawn raid in and around a Bronx
housing project called Eastchester Gardens. It was
the largest gang takedown in New York City his-
tory, boasted Preet Bharara, at the time the U.S.
attorney for the Southern District of New York.
But a 2019 report on the mass prosecution
of the so-called Bronx 120 — written by Babe
Howell, a professor at the CUNY School of Law,
and Priscilla Bustamente, a Ph.D. candidate at
CUNY — would undercut this claim. Fifty-one
of the defendants, they noted, were not even
accused of being gang members by the state; only
one-third of those arrested were charged with
a violent or fi rearm- related off ense; of the 117
people ultimately convicted of a crime, 35 were
convicted based on nothing more serious than
selling marijuana. ‘‘Conspiracy has famously been
dubbed ‘the darling of the modern prosecutor’s
nursery,’ ’’ the authors wrote — its use tolerated
‘‘despite warnings relating to the potential for
abuse and unfairness.’’ Conspiracy charges, they
pointed out, did not require proof that someone
was involved in committing a target crime or
even knew about it. All the prosecution needed
to prove was an agreement, even an inferred one,
to commit a target crime, and that ‘‘some party
to the agreement committed an overt act in fur-
therance of the agreement.’’
Given that, Reyna’s decision to pursue a crim-
inal-conspiracy case against two of the most
infamous biker gangs in the state has a certain
logic. It also raises an obvious thought experi-
ment: Would gangs with diff erent demographic
make-ups have been easier to convict? The cod-
ing of the biker as a freedom-loving rebel — as
American as the Harley he rides, as mythic as the
cowboy — may have lessened the eff ectiveness
of a prosecutorial tool built in part on its own
myths about public threats.
Pursuing individual murder charges would
have had its own limitations. Despite the fact
that the shootings took place outside a crowded
restaurant, with numerous witnesses and video
evidence, the chaotic nature of the brawl made
singling out bad actors diffi cult. As Don Tittle, a
Dallas lawyer who specializes in civil rights and
police-misconduct cases, and who is handling a
number of the bikers’ civil lawsuits, pointed out
to me, ‘‘The obvious conundrum for the prose-
cution was that any bikers who fi red shots could
claim self-defense.’’ (Texas has a ‘‘stand your
ground’’ law.) And while the police made a show
of the 151 guns recovered at the scene, bringing
a fi rearm to Sunday brunch isn’t necessarily evi-
dence of much in a permissive open-carry state.
‘‘The media and law enforcement made a big
deal about all these weapons,’’ Avery says. ‘‘Well,
go to another restaurant in Waco that doesn’t
have bikers and ask everybody to throw their
weapons on the ground and see how many you
get. You’re in Texas!’’
Reyna’s charging decisions would come to be
seen as self-evidently disastrous — including for
him personally, once he faced his own legal prob-
lems. Another hearing on the motion to disqual-
ify him was scheduled for February 2018. Nearly
three years after Twin Peaks, the local courthous-
es no longer seemed so congenial. District Judge
Ralph Strother indicated that he would require
Reyna to testify at the new hearing. ‘‘And Clint
was going to be able to ask him, ‘Is it true that
you bought cocaine?’ ’’ Tittle says.
As soon as Reyna faced accusations of cor-
ruption and drug use, Looney says, ‘‘it was in the
nature of a chicken who’s had its neck wrung. Its
legs are still running, but it’s going to fall down.’’
On the day of the hearing, Reyna announced
that he would be dismissing the cases of a hand-
ful of bikers, rendering the motion to disqualify
— and his required testimony — moot. Broden
and Tittle talked afterward and decided to fi le
motions to disqualify Reyna from the cases of
another set of bikers. The same thing happened
again: Reyna dismissed the cases. A few weeks
before the primary, The Waco Tribune-Herald
published an editorial that began, ‘‘With McLen-
nan County District Attorney Abel Reyna des-
perately dumping Twin Peaks biker cases right
and left in recent days, the astonished taxpayer
must demand honesty of himself if not of Reyna:
Does anyone really believe Reyna has suddenly
been struck by an epiphany that has stubbornly
eluded him in the nearly three years since the
May 17, 2015, biker shootout that left nine dead
and 20 wounded?’’
Citing pending civil lawsuits, Reyna declined
to speak on the record for this article, but he
vigorously denied all the charges made in the
affi davits secured by Broden, and he disputed The
Tribune-Herald’s characterization of his actions.
In the end, his primary wasn’t even close: John-
son defeated him by nearly 20 points. Before his
term ended, Reyna would dismiss all but 24 of
the bikers’ cases, with Johnson dismissing the
fi nal two dozen in April 2019. Carrizal was theonly biker to go to trial. Over 130 civil rights law-
suits are still pending against Reyna, the city and
county and law-enforcement offi cers involved in
the arrests. But years after a fi ght that left people
dead, wounded, paralyzed and fl eeing in terror,
nobody at all has been convicted of any crime.Almost a year after the last wave of dismissals, I
met Jerry Pierson, whose case was among them,
at a back-alley dive bar in Dallas. Pierson, whose
road name is Scratch, had a large 1 percent tattoo
on his neck, smoked Marlboros and was missing
a few lower teeth. After joking about how the bar-
tender would charge me double because she was
a blonde, prompting her to roll her eyes, Pierson
explained, ‘‘That’s my old lady.’’ (Later, he would
clarify that she was not ‘‘technically’’ his old lady.)
Pierson, 55, was one of the Bandidos who rode
to Waco with Carrizal. When the fi ght broke out, a
Cossack beat him with a telescoping baton, leading
to a dozen staples in his head. More recently, he had
been forced to step away from the club temporarily,
a condition of the two-year probation he received
for a misdemeanor conviction unrelated to Twin
Peaks. (He insists upon his innocence.) When a
distant police siren sounded outside, Pierson
smiled and said: ‘‘Bandido Uber. My ride’s here.’’
Pierson started riding motorcycles at 15, when
he got a hardship license so he could help sup-
port his mother by working at a Sonic Drive-In.
He remains loyal to his club and won’t speak
about any internal business, except to insist that
the Bandidos are not drug dealers or organized
criminals — back in the early days, maybe things
were diff erent, but now? ‘‘I go to work every day
at 5 a.m.,’’ he said, adding: ‘‘I mean, I’m more
boring than you. They don’t want to hear that.
Nobody wants to hear that.’’ Pierson works as a
diesel-engine technician, though he said the Twin
Peaks arrest and subsequent legal bills forced him
to sideline the business he started and take anoth-
er job for less pay. I heard similar stories from
many bikers: W. said his arrest had cost him his
job, and Ledbetter lost his job as a diesel mechan-
ic. (He has also been diagnosed with PTSD after
witnessing the death of his stepfather, Danny
Boyett, at Twin Peaks.) Harris, the Grim Guardian
who volunteered with the real-life Patch Adams,
was meant to fl y to Mexico City for a clowning
trip, but when he arrived in Guadalajara for his
connecting fl ight, he was sent back to the United
States because, he was told, his name had been
placed in a Texas gang database.
Still, law-enforcement offi cials push back
on the notion of the Bandidos, in particular, as
wronged innocents. The federal investigation
known as Operation Texas Rocker — already
underway when Twin Peaks happened — would
ultimately focus on the president and vice pres-
ident of the Bandidos, Pike and Portillo. They
were arrested in January 2016 and found guilty,
after a three-month trial in 2018, of ‘‘conspiring
to conduct the aff airs of a criminal organization