But this statistic would eventually be turned ‘‘back
on itself,’’ as the biker historian William L. Dulaney
has written, by ‘‘a loose association of truly outlaw
motorcycle clubs known as One Percenters.’’
The best known of the 1 percent clubs, the Hells
Angels, was started in Fontana, Calif., in 1948.
The Bandidos came along 18 years later in 1966,
founded by a 36-year-old Houston dockworker and
Vietnam War veteran named Donald Chambers.
One early member told Skip Hollandsworth of
Texas Monthly that many of them read Hunter
S. Thompson’s just-published ‘‘Hell’s Angels’’ as
a sort of how-to manual. Chambers’s leadership
ended in 1972, when he received two consecutive
life sentences for murdering a pair of drug dealers
who tried to sell him baking soda as meth.
In 1981, an Austin police lieutenant told News-
week that the Bandidos were ‘‘the single greatest
organized-crime problem in Texas.’’ By this point,
some members carried business cards reading,
‘‘We are the people our parents warned us about.’’
Dick Reavis, another Texas Monthly writer, did an
article on the Bandidos in 1979, growing so close to
members of the Fort Worth chapter that they invit-
ed him to prospect with the group. (A prospect
is a probationary member. ‘‘I call them pledges,’’
Avery told me, ‘‘because I’m used to sororities.’’)
Reavis wasn’t so sure how organized the crime
ever became, but he estimated that at least a third
of the Bandidos he knew engaged in some sort of
illegal activity (burglary, selling drugs, ‘‘driving hot
cargo’’), and he found violence endemic to the sub-
culture. The Fort Worth chapter’s president was
killed weeks before Reavis’s arrival; two others fea-
tured in his article would be shot within the year.
The case made by the U.S. Justice Department
in its successful 1988 prosecution of Ronald
Hodge, Chambers’s successor, suggested more
of a top-down structure. Hodge, prosecutors
said, ordered subordinates to collect $100 from
every member of the group to fund an elaborate
revenge plot against a rival club, the Banshees,
meant to include a machine-gun attack on a club-
house in Texarkana and the bombing of homes
and vehicles in Dallas.
Prosecutions of Bandidos leadership would
continue, but the organization expanded. By 2015,
the Justice Department estimated a membership
between 1,500 and 2,000. ‘‘Depending on who you
talked to at that time, they were either the largest
or second-largest outlaw motorcycle organization
in the world, after the Hells Angels,’’ says Eric
Fuchs, the assistant U.S. attorney who headed a
2018 case against the Bandidos’ president, Jeff
Pike, and vice president, John Portillo. The Texas
Department of Public Safety ranks the Bandidos
as a Tier 2 gang, alongside the Crips, Bloods, Latin
Kings and Aryan Brotherhood of Texas. Accord-
ing to the Justice Department, the Bandidos
brokered an agreement with the Texas Mexican
Mafi a to traffi c cocaine and methamphetamine
without paying the typical 10 percent permission
fee. ‘‘I’m not convinced every Bandidos member
The New York Times Magazine 43that say Texas — for Bandidos consider that their
native, exclusive turf.’’
The Cossacks, founded in 1969, were nearly as
old as the Bandidos. The club spent most of its
existence with a much lower profi le, but by 2015,
its membership, and its ambitions, had grown.
Sometime the year before, the Cossacks began
wearing a Texas rocker on the back of their own
vests. Federal investigators have claimed the Cos-
sacks asked the Bandidos for permission fi rst;
according to W., the Cossacks simply went to the
Bandidos and ‘‘told them we were doing it.’’ But in
both accounts, the Cossacks were given a green
light. ‘‘Actually,’’ W. told me, ‘‘their exact words,
because I was sitting at the table that day, were, ‘If
anybody deserves to have a Texas rocker, it would
be the Cossacks, because you’ve been around just
as long, and you’ve earned it.’ ’’At some point in fall 2014, though, Pike, the Ban-
didos’ president, convened a meeting at his home
in Conroe, Texas. His second in command, John
Portillo, and the national sergeant-at-arms, Justin
Forster, attended. It’s unclear what had soured the
relationship with the Cossacks — some believe it
came down to the fact that the Cossacks made
their Texas rocker substantially larger than the
Bandidos’ — but permission to wear the patch
was rescinded. And when the Cossacks refused
to remove it, Fuchs says, ‘‘war was declared.’’
The investigation that would lead to the take-
down of the Bandidos’ national leadership came
to be known as Operation Texas Rocker.In 2015, the district attorney of McLennan Coun-
ty, where Waco is the largest city and county seat,
was an ambitious 43-year-old named Abel Reyna.
His father, Felipe, the son of an undocumented
Mexican immigrant, put himself through law
school while working as a janitor at the McLennan
County courthouse; he, too, served as the county’s
D.A., from 1977 to 1982. Abel initially worked as a
criminal defense lawyer and attributed his success
in part to ignorance: Unaware of how to work the
system to avoid trials, he logged plenty of court-
room hours, developing a fl air for persuading
jurors. An early profi le by Tommy Witherspoon
of The Waco Tribune- Herald noted that, during
jury selection, Reyna would dazzle the room by
quickly memorizing dozens of potential jurors
and calling on them by name.
Even though he worked as a defense lawyer,
Reyna found himself disgusted by the number of
cases the D.A., a fi ve-term Democratic incumbent
named John Segrest, was declining to prosecute.
Reyna contested the seat in 2010, running as a law-
and-order Republican and promising less lenient
plea deals. ‘‘Law enforcement is voting for me,’’ he
said during the campaign; stocky and buzz-cut, he
looked more like a cop than a lawyer. He managed
an upset victory, and by 2015, he had been easily
re-elected to a second term. Despite a prickly
relationship with the press and critiques that he
wasn’t spending as much time personally trying
cases as he had promised, Reyna had fulfi lled his
central campaign pledge, perhaps to a fault — his
offi ce was prosecuting cases to such an aggressive
degree that concerns rose about jail overcrowding.
The weekend of the brawl, Waco’s police chief,
Brent Stroman, was visiting family in Boston. The
acting chief was Robert Lanning, a Waco native
whose father founded the local Dr Pepper Muse-
um. He heard about the shooting around 1:30 p.m.,
after church, and headed to Twin Peaks.
To that point, the police had been proceeding
with a capital murder investigation. The bikers
weren’t being given Miranda warnings because
they were being treated as witnesses. According
to Matthew Clendennen, a member of a Cossacks
support club called the Scimitars, the bikers had
been told that they would be transported to a facil-
ity where offi cers could take statements, and then‘DEPENDING ON
WHO YOU TALKED
T O AT T H AT
TIME, THEY
WERE EITHER THE
LARGEST OR
SECOND-LARGEST
O U T L AW
MOTORCYCLE
ORGANIZATION IN
THE WORLD,
AFTER THE HELLS
ANGELS.’
commits crimes,’’ Fuchs told me. ‘‘But the way
this organization operated had criminal activities
intertwined throughout.’’
In other states, Bandidos shared territory with
other One Percenter outlaw clubs — but Texas,
their motherland, they had always claimed for
themselves. ‘‘Every Bandido in the U.S. has a
Texas fl ag on their vest,’’ Fuchs says. According
to Reavis, Bandidos ignored citizen bikers wear-
ing American Motorcycle Association patch-
es, but when it came to other outlaw clubs in
Texas, ‘‘if you don’t behave like the subject of
their feudal power, you’re going to be in trou-
ble.’’ As he noted in his article, this hegemony
extended to both nomenclature — a Black club
called the African Bandits changed its name to
the Mandinkas to avoid a war — and attire. ‘‘On
the list of prohibited adornments’’ sewn on other
clubs’ jackets, Reavis wrote, ‘‘are rocker patches