Man injured in raid targeting gun, drug trafficking and worse

PHOENIX -- More than 500 federal, state and local law enforcement officers armed with 40 search warrants and 36 arrest warrants fanned out across Arizona Tuesday .

Tom Mangan, spokeman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said the raids are the culmination of a two-year undercover investigation targeting firearms trafficking, drug trafficking, bomb-making and murder-for-hire.

Mangan says officers intended to seize machine guns, bombs, bomb-making materials and drugs during the raids, which focused in part on outlaw motorcycle gangs.

One man was shot during one of the raids. It happened at a north Phoenix residence identified as the Cave Creek clubhouse of the Hells Angels.

The clubhouse was no secret to local residents. They've know about it for some time.

"That's where they party and have a good time," said Harry Crugar, a resident of the Sunnyslope neighborhood. "That's their house. They built it for that purpose."

Tuesday morning's shooting happened after the tactical team that was part of the raid went inside.

"Upon entry," said Brian Wilkens of the Glendale Police Depatment, "they ran into a lone person inside the house who then posed a threat to the officers by pointing a gun at them. Officers returned fire, striking him a couple of times."

The man was taken to the hospital. His identity has not been released and there's been no word yet on his condition.

Similar raids, most of which went off without a hitch, took place in Tucson, Marana, Flagstaff, Prescott, Chino Valley, Kingman and Bullhead City.

PHOENIX -- More than 500 federal, state and local law enforcement officers armed with 40 search warrants and 36 arrest warrants fanned out across Arizona Tuesday .
Tom Mangan, spokeman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said the raids are the culmination of a two-year undercover investigation targeting firearms trafficking, drug trafficking, bomb-making and murder-for-hire.
Mangan says officers intended to seize machine guns, bombs, bomb-making materials and drugs during the raids, which focused in part on outlaw motorcycle gangs.

Sounds like the BATFEes are still upset about the bikers blowing the whistle on feds trying to use them for political conteract killings.... And of course if the Phoenix BATF doesn't get some results to show for their *investigation* over the last several years, somebody might begin to question why they let their *Dutchboy* investigation informant get away with a murder in California....

The second Big Mistake of Altamont was the hiring of Ralph "Sonny" Barger and a contingent of Hell's Angels to keep the peace.

Barger, it has since been divulged, was an informant and hit man on the payroll of the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). When Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver fled the country for Algeria, the ATF negotiated with Barger to "bring Cleaver home in a box." He often made deals with law enforcement in exchange for dismissal of charges against fellow Angeles. Barger was even hired by federal agents to kill immigrant farm labor activist Cesar Chavez, and may well have if Barger hadn't first been arrested by police into the Bay area on a prior homicide charges. 7

The accusation arose in the death of Servios Winston Agero, a drug dealer. In a surprise courtroom maneuver, Sonny took the witness stand and confessed to his arrangement with local police and federal agents. Over a period of several years, he testified, he had brokered deals with Oakland authorities to give up the location of hidden cache's of automatic weapons, mortars and dynamite in exchange for the dismissal of all charges against member of his motorcycle gang. This was a deal he had brokered with Edward Hilliard, then a sergeant at the Oakland Police Department's vice squad. Hilliard refused to comment when questioned by reporters. The defendant admitted for the record that he sold narcotics for a living, forged IDs, and slept with a pistol under his pillow. On several occasions, though, Barger refused to respond to questioning and was fined $3,000 by Judge William J. Hayes for each demurral.

Deputy prosecutor Donald Whyte asked the "spiritual" leader of the Hell's Angeles, an admitted federal operative, to name officers who asked him to "kill someone." Barger squired and claimed that he could not recall, exactly, but att5empted several phonetic variations of a possible name. 8 Even in the courtroom, it seems, he was not about to risk retaliation by government contacts.

But the deal was exposed anyway by ATF whistle-blower Larry Shears. The agent told his story to narcotics agents, and they gathered evidence on the murder plan before talking to the press. Shears announced that Barger had been contracted to kill Chavez, an assassination ordered by agribusiness magnates in the San Joaquin Valley. Chavez was only alive, Shears reported, because there had been delays. The first came when AFT agents insisted that certain files first be stolen from the farm union. The arson of union offices was attempted by hired hands, another delay. Confirmation of these allegations came three weeks later when union officials complained to reporters that there had been recent "arson attempts against [farm] union offices. Others have been riddle with bullet holes, and on at least two occasions, attempts were made to steal records in the union offices."

The next glitch in the Chavez assassination, Shears said, came when the hit man, Sonny Barger, was arrested for the Agero murder. To support his statements, Shears waved a federal voucher at reporters signed by Senator Edward Kennedy, a payment of $10,000 to Shears for services rendered as an informant to narcotics agents and the IRS." 9

In March 1989, according to wire releases, Sonny Barger was convicted with four other Angels for conspiracy to violate federal firearms and explosives laws in a variety of plots to kill members of rival motorcycle clubs. Barger and Michael Vincent O'Farrell were sentenced in US District Court, Louisville, Kentucky, for their part in the transport of explosives with intent to kill. Barger and three others were slapped with additional counts for "dealing with a stolen government manual." Barger was freed on parole three years later. The mystery of his early release was dispelled by the Tucson Weekly in 1996--it seems Barger had a political guardian: "You can talk about the biker tradition," a law enforcement source explained, "the Harley, the patch that they've killed for, but in the end, what's most important is money. Hell's Angeles is represented in 18 countries now. They're probably the largest organized crime family that we export from the US. At the center of this global expansion is Oakland-based International President "Sonny" Barger, who's had his hand on the throttle of Hells Angels' money and mayhem machine since the late '50s, despite occasional prison stints. When Barger was released from prison in 1992, an estimated 3,000 people attended his party.... Some influential people might get bought. I can't tell you that Colorado Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell received any money.... I do know that he used his influence to try to get Sonny Barger out of prison." 10

Barger's booze-swaggling, two-wheeling entourage were paid killers. And since the carnage at Altamont, the Hell's Angels have twice attempted to kill the Rolling Stones. In March, 1983, a witness called himself "Butch," his true identity protected by the federal witness program, testified before a Senate Judiciary Committee about plots to kill the Stones. "There's always been a contract on the band," he admitted under questioning. There were "two attempts to kill them that I know about. They will some day. They wear they will do it." The vendetta, Butch said, originated with the killing at the Speedway concert, and was motivated by the failure of the Stones to back the Angel prosecuted for the killing. The first attempt to assassinate the entire band took place in the mid-'70s. "They sent a member with a gun and a silencer" to a hotel where the Stones were staying. The hit-man "staked out the hotel, but [the Stones] never showed up," said the government informant. And in 1979, the Angels' New York chapter "were going to put a bomb in the house and blow everybody up and kill everybody at the party." But this conspiracy sank with a cache of plastic explosives, accidentally dropped overboard from a rubber raft. Killing the Stones, he testified, was an "obsession" with the bike gang." 11

Here's the news, archy:
United States Senators do not make out the vouchers for paid informants.

That one statement turns the whole screed to sh!t.

Here's the news for you: they do when the informants are providing information to senate select subcomittees, which often have FBI agents assigned to them as investigator/researchers, and who often utilize the services of informants used in other criminal investigations. And former BATF agent Larry Shears was smart enough to keep the documentary evidence once he realized that the day was going to come when it'd be his word against that of his BATF supervisors.

The methodology was particularly commonplace with Bobby Kennedy's *Get Hoffa* squad of federal agents, congressional investigators and paid private investigators, and continued in other Senate committees and subcommittees, most notably in the Senate select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Judiciary Committee. See also the Justice Department's De Feo report on *fraud, irregularity and misconduct in the DEA* run by then Justice Department investigator Michael DeFeo, who later went on to prosecute CIA spook Edwin Wilson for his dealings with Libya's Moamar Kadaffi and Panama's Noriega...and according to that 1975 report, Noriega was under consideration for assassination by the DEA [though his name was misspelled as *Noryago* in the DEA documents] before the Panama canal treaties had been signed. In May of 1978, the matter was taken under consideration by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, one of the congressmen tape recorded discussing the price for U.S. congressional support for the treaties via wiretaps made by the U.S. Army's 470th Military Intelligence Detatchment in Panama. Bayh lost his seat in the following election to a newcomer named Dan Quayle.

See the Operation Canton Song reports of the *Singing Sergeants* of the 470th, on Noriega's payroll, and the contents of FBI report IP-7 1690. You'll also find that some of those same informants also worked for the Navy's undercover Task Force 157, as well as the *seven sisters* of the Justice Department.

-archy-/-

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