We live, thanks to the coronavirus, in the age of the Zoom interview. But not this time. Ken Croke does not want to be on camera so the words “Ken’s iPhone XR” appear on a black background instead. Nor does he disclose where he lives or where he is speaking from today.
Croke has good reason to be discreet. The 56-year-old is online to talk about his new book, Riding with Evil, which chronicles how he became the first federal agent to go undercover and infiltrate the Pagan Motorcycle Club, a white supremacist gang.
The memoir describes how Croke created a fake identity, won the bikers’ confidence, secretly recorded their meetings, witnessed their violent crimes and even spent several days in jail on a gun arrest. Over two years his cover was never blown, though some members were suspicious of his true motivations.
The daring operation paid off with more than 20 Pagans arrested on charges including racketeering, murder conspiracy, extortion, drug trafficking, assault and weapons violations, leading to combined prison sentences of more than a hundred years. But some have since been released and the gang is far from finished.
“They put two contracts out on me shortly after the case and they were investigated,” says Croke, a retired assistant director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). “I’m under the umbrella of ATF: they are constantly monitoring and checking and enquiring and following through on any threats or information related to threats.
“Some years ago people who did these types of investigations would go into hiding – literally they would move away – but in this day and age you can’t hide. Would they want to do harm to me? They could. I’m very self aware of my environment. I always keep an eye out, but I’m not living my life looking over my shoulder.”
Croke began his career in 1990 in Los Angeles, where he infiltrated street gangs and busted drug and gun rings. Over 25 years, he took part in more than a thousand undercover operations including gang, drug and firearms trafficking cases. Married with three young daughters, he was a supervisor who seemed to be cruising to a quiet suburban retirement.
But when a tip about criminal motorcycle gangs came in to the Boston ATF field office in 2008, the experienced Croke was brought in to check out sources and information. Then came a chance encounter with an associate of the Pagans. “One thing led to another,” as he puts it, and he was on the case.
The Pagans are one of America’s most notorious motorcycle gangs along with the Hells Angels, Mongols and Outlaws. Dave Wedge, a journalist who co-authored the book, adds in the same Zoom call: “A lot of these other biker clubs have mainstream members who may have jobs and they’re good members of society.
“That doesn’t really seem to be the case with the Pagans. They’re mostly all outlaws and pretty much everyone that I researched for this book all had felony records. They are definitely a very violent organised crime syndicate.”
Croke gradually earned the trust of the Pagans and became a fully patched member of their chapter in Long Island, New York. He earned the nickname “Slam” after he forcefully subdued a man during a brawl bar. Rarely seeing his family, he had to adapt to a volatile, unpredictable lifestyle where he might be ordered to commit violence or even kill at any moment.
He writes: “Every day living with those guys was a mindfuck, especially when I was a prospect [a prospective member]. Every day I woke up, I wondered what sort of shit was going to happen. Would I have to jump into a barroom brawl? Would I be faced with a pile of coke and a choice? What sort of dumb shit would they ask me to do? I always had to expect the unexpected and could never let my guard down. It was a stressful way to live and my brain was working overtime.”
Croke adds via Zoom: “There’s no planning this out, there’s no script, there is no ‘Oh, today I’m going to do this.’ I can honestly tell you that never did a day go according to plan. The days that nothing happened were just as unsettling because you never knew. You just go there one day and it’s like, ‘OK, this is what’s going to happen, this is what we’re going to do,’ and the next thing you know, you’re off on this completely different tangent doing something totally different.”
On one occasion Croke received a call from a gang member who was unexpectedly and ominously close by and wanted to meet. He scrambled to dress appropriately, drive to a restaurant and play it cool. When Croke went to the toilets, the man followed him to reveal that he had brought a bomb. Croke managed to turn it in to law enforcement while convincing the gang that it had been used to blow up a boat.
Another night, at a Pagan dive bar, Croke saw members of the gang attack a man who had shown “disrespect”. He writes: “As Hogman pounded him, I pretended to join in. I threw glancing blows off the side of his head and shoulder, but really I was punching the cement. My hand got bloodied up pretty good.” When Hogman lifted his huge leg to stomp on the man’s head, which could have broken his neck, Croke swung his own leg in the way.
Croke points out: “There’s certain things that I can’t do. There’s certain things that I can’t be a part of. There’s certain things that I will have to stop. There was a night we went to kill somebody; we were going to stab this person and throw them off a roof. That can’t happen and so how am I going to get out of that?
“There’s a time when we drove to a house to kill or seriously injure this man. It’s like, ‘OK, I cannot participate in this and I can’t allow it to happen. So what am I going to do to stop it?’ There’s a skill that goes to it, a coordination, but there’s also dumb luck. When we got to that house, if this person was there, we were going to have to come out of role and stop it, which would have ended the investigation.”
Croke soon realised that white supremacy was a big part of Pagan culture. “They weren’t burning crosses, but the racism many spewed was persistent, blatant, and strong,” he writes. At first it was uncomfortable to be around, though over time he learned to detach and ignore it. But are there moral dilemmas around how far to go to preserve the cover story?
He says now: “The loyalty within the organisation is a big part of it. You have to be a peer, you have to appear to be loyal because the brotherhood within this organisation is more important than your family or anything else. It’s the highest part of how they view things and so you have to play that part and you can’t violate that.
“You have to go along with these things knowing that at any moment it could be too far and there are limits. There’s legally things that I could not do and I would have to stop it. There’s also morally things: they’re a white supremacist group and I was not going to participate in a lot of their white supremacy activities.”
But spending so much time with the Pagans, did he glimpse humanity beneath the hatred and come to understand why they had fallen into the moral abyss? Did he even come to like some of them in spite of himself?
“Some were entertaining to be around; they weren’t evil all the time. They view everyone who’s not one of them as a subculture and so everywhere they go, that’s their thought: you’re not one of us, you’re less than. They call them ‘civilians’ and that kind of thing.
“But there were some others that I despised much more, the ones who were most violent, the ones that were just sick in what they did and the lack of regard for people. I know friends of mine who have done this and some have been conflicted for different reasons but I was not one of them.”
Once the case wrapped, Croke was required by ATF to see a psychiatrist to make sure had not gone to the “dark side” or become sympathetic to the Pagans’ causes or actions. But the operation had also taken a toll on his family life.
He returned home to a big hug from his wife, Ang (also an ATF agent), and daughters. But then he saw how their lives had moved on and Ang was now “like a single mother”. They decided to start their relationship over and begin “dating” again. Croke is now a security consultant for a global corporation.
Wedge, 51, whose previous books include Hunting Whitey and The Last Days of John Lennon, reflects from Boston: “The work Ken did reverberates today. There’s a lot of cases that continue to come out in New York, Massachusetts and other jurisdictions where some of the people that were involved in the case Ken did may have had links.
“The value of what Ken did defies explanation but the true value is the knowledge going forward for all these other law enforcement agents that are going to be investigating these types of cases. They have a resident expert now that knows this gang better than anyone.”
Riding with Evil is out now
