10/01/15 – Nathaniel Penn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up on the show is Nathaniel Penn writing for GQ.
And you can find this story at gq.com, the untold story of the Texas Biker Gang Shootout.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Nathaniel?
I'm very well.
Thanks so much for inviting me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on the show here.
Great piece of journalism you put together.
You know, I was suspicious that the story was something along these lines, although I admit that I've not been keeping up with it very much.
Seems like this is a huge story.
Maybe one of the biggest stories is how little competition you had in writing this.
Would that be fair to say, you think?
I think I was the beneficiary of a little bit of luck.
I finished reporting the story at the end of July, just before a gag order was imposed in the case.
So I sort of had it to myself after that point.
All right.
Well, that's good.
I'm glad you got the work done.
We're talking about the second Waco massacre, basically, at the Twin Peaks Restaurant here.
The Biker Gang Shootout, they called it.
But you kind of dispute that characterization and really just say, mostly, these are biker clubs.
Well, who are they?
What were they doing there?
What is the big deal?
So this was a meeting of an organization called the Confederation of Clubs and Independents, which is a sort of umbrella organization for Texas biker clubs.
It's a motorcycle rights organization.
They lobby on the state and federal level for things like anti-profiling legislation, a whole bunch of motorcycle safety legislation.
They're quite a successful organization.
And they have these meetings bimonthly across the state.
There are nine regions, each with its own COC meeting.
And this was kind of a special meeting.
And that's, in large measure, what led to the incidents that we're going to be talking about today.
This was a special meeting, number one, because there had never been one in Waco before, which means there was no meaningful level of interaction, no meaningful relationship between the bikers and the police in Waco.
The second thing is that this meeting was convened with more people than usual because a sort of key national figure in the biking world was coming back from a big powwow with other similar people at his level and wanted to address as many Texas bikers as possible about these legislative initiatives that they're working on.
So it was a sort of perfect storm, in a sense.
The Waco Police Department did not have experience dealing with bikers.
They had seemingly a lot of preconceptions about bikers.
And rather than wait and see what might happen, they decided that the existence of this meeting, the fact that it's happening with high-value intelligence, even though it was all over the website of this organization that this meeting was taking place, the police treated the news of this meeting as a piece of high-value intelligence.
And in their anxiety, and I would say also opportunism, they were waiting that day.
They got there before the bikers did.
They got there in force.
Many cruisers, a SWAT van, high-caliber rifles, they were ready for something to happen.
And if you believe some of the more paranoid, and I don't mean that in a dismissive way, if you believe some of the more paranoid accounts that I heard when I was interviewing people for this story, the police may have planted undercover agitators, essentially, in one of the two biker clubs that sort of began to fight that day, the Cossacks, may have planted undercover agitators in that group who were there to instigate some sort of fracas.
I don't think that the idea was or could have been for it to turn into a turkey shoot.
I don't think the cops came there thinking, okay, we're going to kill nine people today.
I think they came there thinking there's going to be a fight, there are going to be knives, people are going to be brawling, and we're going to get 30 or 40 people in jail.
And if we're lucky, we're going to get them to rat out their fellow club members on a whole bunch of stuff.
That's what they were thinking, I think.
Yeah, well, and you know, I think you're probably right about that, and that there must be a way to prove that, not that FOIA can pry loose everything, but with, you know, you get Dick DeGarren on this thing or something, one of these, there's some badass Texas lawyers, I would hire Dick DeGarren, man, he's a courageous lawyer, the other Waco master.
Anyway, you get those guys on there, they'll get to the bottom of this, you know, I mean, And in fact, the way you describe the process of how this is taking place there with the grand jury and the rest of it, it seems like some adequate defense lawyers could hand these cops back their ass pretty quickly here with just what you've revealed in your article, never mind what they could get with legal discovery and so forth.
You know, I'd hope so, but the way this case has proceeded is so bizarre.
Every time the law, every time law enforcement has screwed up, they have doubled down on that screw up.
You know, and some people suggested to me that there's a kind of Texas mentality prevailing here that, you know, you commit to something and you don't back down, but the law enforcement has committed to some stuff that's going to be very difficult to prove in court.
That said, you know, and I would like to be optimistic as you are and think that somebody and there actually is a Dallas lawyer who's working for one of the, a very high power Dallas lawyer who's working for one of the men who were arrested, who was arrested in this case.
You probably have heard about this.
I would like to think that they can uncover something, but the way that the Waco justice system works, and that I think is what the story is finally about.
It's not about biker culture, which is what I thought it was about when I started working on it.
That it was about how even in this day and age, you know, 50 years past what maybe a lot of us think is the heyday, the golden age of motorcycle clubs or motorcycle gangs, this stuff still matters so much to members of these clubs that they would, they would shoot each other.
They would brawl over things that seem so ridiculous to us, territorial stuff, et cetera.
I mean, obviously that's not what this case is about.
So it turns out not to be about motorcycle culture.
It turns out to be about the Waco justice system, about the DA's former law partner being the judge in this case, about until he was pushed on it, the person who was going to lead the group, the committee that was going to choose the grand jury being the DA's father and the leader, the foreman of one of the two grand juries being a Waco police detective who is still active, who was sworn in with, who took his place in the courtroom on his first day with his, with his badge and his gun and who appears to have been involved in the case.
Yeah.
He said, they asked him, what was your involvement in the case?
Or were you involved in the case?
Not really, he said.
Yeah.
What does that mean?
He was just passing out the rifles that morning?
The Dallas lawyer I mentioned to you issued, registered a formal complaint with the court about this and he said, it's like that old episode of I Love Lucy where she gets stopped for speeding in this small Southern town and then when she arrives in the courtroom, the judge is the cop who stopped her for speeding.
It's exactly like that.
Yeah.
I mean, it's amazing too.
I mean, in fact, I would think that some people in the audience went, wait, why did you just say that, uh, the judge is the DA's former partner and the guy in charge of picking the grand jury was the DA's father and that the first foreman on the grand jury was an active duty detective from the department who he's investigating and who he's admitted that he was at least somewhat involved in the actual, uh, crime that he's investigating here.
Couldn't be.
It's almost, it's almost a show trial.
I mean, that's absolutely ridiculous.
I'm sorry.
I should have left my microphone off so I wouldn't be laughing all through your explanation of that except that I got burned, leave my mic off on the last guest.
So I didn't want to do that again.
Uh, yeah, absolutely amazing here now.
So I'm sorry, we're almost at the break, but I want to go ahead and cut to this chase real quick before we have to stop for a couple of minutes.
And that is the quote, uh, which I don't have in front of me, so I'll roughly paraphrase it, but it's something to the effect of, Hey, I'm a combat veteran and I know what hand guns sound like.
And I know what rifles sound like.
And what happened was there were a few pop, pop, pops of a handgun that maybe came from bikers.
Uh, but then everything after that was the cops on the perimeter with their AR fifteens, I'm assuming, but whatever rifles, uh, just blowing these guys away.
Yeah.
You know, the, the banditos and the Cossacks are bitter enemies and they agree on very little, but their stories about, about this aspect of what happened that day were extremely consistent.
They, they, they acknowledge by the way that those first few pops were, did come from bikers.
They, they're, they're not denying that, but what they are saying is that the number of shots that were fired by, by, uh, the number of shots that were fired from suppression weapons, if that's the correct terminology, was far, far in excess of what the police are claiming.
The police say they shot 12 rounds.
The bikers say they think it was close to a hundred, uh, in a lawsuit that the nearby Don Carlos restaurant fired about this.
They claim it was thousands of rounds that were fired.
All right, stop right there.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Nathaniel Penn, writer for GQ magazine, about this great piece of journalism that he's put together here, the untold story of the Texas biker gang shootout.
This thing is huge, man.
This ought to be all over the place all the time.
You know, I really made a mistake there, even, well, two mistakes, obviously, one, bringing up who shot who right before the break, but secondly, what I really should have done was brought up the mass arrest, since we had just been talking about the farcical nature of who's who in charge of the process here in Waco.
The next step would have been how they arrested how many people and put what level of bond on them, and where the hell are other judges at higher levels in the state or the federal something to make them stop doing what they're doing, or what is going on with that?
Please explain.
Yeah, they arrested 177 men and women that day.
Originally, they told these people they were going to be witnesses, but as time went on, the tone of the cops who were speaking with them suddenly changed, and they went on this sort of odyssey through the legal system.
They were brought to a local convention center with their hands plastic cuffed behind their backs.
They were fed with their hands plastic cuffed behind their backs.
They were left that way for 18 hours.
They slept with their hands plastic cuffed behind their backs.
Their phones were taken from them and have not yet been returned, allegedly because the cops were trying to figure out what the network of contacts of these guys were in order to potentially build a RICO case against them or support a RICO case against them.
I suspect the phones were also taken because there is bound to be some citizen video of the shootings on those phones.
As you know, there has been precious little video to emerge from this incident.
The cops have suppressed it ever since the incident occurred, which in and of itself does not make them look very good.
So these people who were arrested, these 177 people, were placed under a $1 million bond each, as you mentioned, $1 million bond each, on the grounds that the justice of the peace, who had no legal training but had formerly been an administrator in the law enforcement system, the justice of the peace decided he wanted to send a message, which as you know is unconstitutional.
You don't establish bond based on sending a message.
You establish bond based on the severity of the offense that was committed.
The justice of the peace signed 177 what have been referred to cookie cutter pages of charges against these people.
None of them were specifically tailored to the individual people.
They all said exactly the same thing, that also is apparently illegal.
The people who were in prison were there for, I believe the least number of days was 27 and last I heard there are still two people in prison, one who can't make bail and one whom I think the cops think they can actually establish a link to the shootings for.
There were examining trials a few weeks ago, the first few examining trials, and the idea behind these trials as you may know is to find out what the nature of the charges are against these people and to get them dismissed.
So all the defense lawyers lined up there, basically they're little old ladies.
The bikers who clearly had nothing to do with this had spotless records, there was a chaplain among them, there was a husband and wife from a mom and pop club, people who are blameless and even those people were not able to get their charges dismissed and promptly all the other defense lawyers pulled back their clients from these examining trials because they realized it was going to look worse for them down the line if it was established that there was quote unquote enough evidence to charge them.
So now what we're waiting for is the indictments and the lawyers told me that the city seems to be pushing this back as far as it possibly can, probably for two reasons.
Number one, I think that they're hoping that under pressure because these guys face up to 99 years on the grounds of engaging in criminal activity where murder took place.
So the idea is they want these people either to rat out other gang members, that's one thing that they're hoping will happen as time passes and these people are under the sword of possibly serving 99 years.
That's their number one hope.
Their number two hope is that they'll plead out to lesser charges which will thus prevent them later on from filing suit for wrongful imprisonment because that's sort of what's lingering in the background here.
The city is already threatening them with life and then they'll just sign whatever you say.
And then they can't sue you.
Then they can't sue you.
Exactly.
Right.
Yeah.
Wow.
Absolutely amazing.
So now here was I didn't form my question very well in the beginning, but so now my follow up question to that is and I know lawyer and I don't know if you talked to any about this or what, but there are higher level courts in the state of Texas where it seems like some of these motions could be appealed before this thing goes any further.
Like hey, obviously the justice of the peace didn't know the law and broke it when he did what he did.
So Texas State Supreme Court or somebody else undo it.
No.
On that specific question, a complaint was just filed, I think on the 25th if I'm not mistaken.
So we'll see what happens.
But the lawyers have been trying to get the video made public and the cops have managed to stymie them again and again.
The justice system in Waco does not want this case to be exposed to sunlight.
And they have been very, very successful in preventing that from happening.
All right.
And now.
So back to the shooting real quick.
You got the banditos in the Cossacks and a fistfight breaks out and maybe someone did get shot with a handgun.
You quote some people saying, well, they thought that maybe it was just somebody firing in the air like, hey, everybody quit brawling kind of a thing.
But then.
Well, so go ahead and elaborate.
And if you want, you could go back to the possible provocateurs.
You're saying the guys that that basically revealed their badges that they, you know, who were the undercover guys that maybe they had helped start the fistfight in the first place.
So eyewitnesses have claimed two things, one of which is a little more provable right now.
One claim is that there were two members of the Cossacks inside the restaurant who, when the shooting began, stood up, revealed that they had badges and took their guns and went out and engaged in the fight.
Number two, that there was another undercover officer, perhaps one of these two, it's unclear, was literally moving back and forth between the crime scene and the police side.
And there are actually photographs of this guy.
So it does seem fairly the allegation that there were that there were undercover cops there seems documentable as far as the end incidentally, that in announcing that his cops had only fired 12 rounds, the police chief was careful to say he was talking about the cops in their cruisers, not about undercovers on the scene.
As far as I know, there has been no public acknowledgement that there were undercovers on the scene.
So the first few shots.
It's interesting.
There was also a guy who was there when the first shot who was, you know, five feet away from the guy who fired the first shot.
And it was it was fired at another gang member, another club member.
The guy who saw the shot fired actually wants very badly, has been cooperating with the cops, he wants very badly to try to maintain the good name of these clubs to the extent that he's able.
He said that he has spent many hours looking at mug shots with the police and that he cannot find the face of the person who did this.
There does seem to be, as I mentioned, agreement among the various participants, if there's agreement on anything, on the fact that the first few shots came from bikers, subsequent shots came from cops.
As you know, what little evidence has emerged suggests that at least some of the men who were killed were killed by police bullets.
Yes, you quote guys again, who are invoking their military experience, etc. and saying, hey, look, we're talking headshots and perfect chest shots.
These are not bikers with handguns in the middle of a fistfight with guns going off.
These are shots from distance.
Well aimed.
That's exactly right.
And their military experience is to such an extent that I heard stories about about guys in prison, in jail after afterwards, suffering severe PTSD flashbacks from having been part of this essentially essentially, you know, war zone.
Amazing.
And and just the radio silence on this thing is just incredible.
Or maybe I'm wrong about that.
Maybe conservative talk radio has been covering this somewhat.
I don't know.
It's certainly not on the TV or in much of the Internet.
I read and I read a hell of a lot.
You know, you mentioned that this is an important story, and I kind of wanted to connect the dots a little bit and explain why I think it's an important story.
Sure.
For me, it's very much part of the story that we've been seeing over the last year of of cops who are acting recklessly, overzealously with excess force against young men, predominantly young black men, and in one case, a young black female teenager around the country.
This is yet another instance of overzealous cops overreacting against a stigmatized population because bikers don't have a lot of a lot of friends in as you know, except for other bikers.
And I think that's why it's of urgent importance, because the cops are it seems as though they've sort of moved to a new level here.
They decided they can get away with what they've been doing in the in the black community.
And now they've moved on to this other stigmatized community where they think they can get away with it.
And this kind of behavior has to be has to be reined in.
Yeah.
Well, you're right on target there.
It's the fact that they know that there's no accountability.
The leash is off.
Like, this is Donald Rumsfeld told the Delta Force in 2001 in Afghanistan, grab whom you must do what you want.
There are no rules.
And that goes down to the local sheriff deputy at the side of the road.
And they know the worst trouble they're going to get in two weeks paid vacation and a laugh.
And so it continues on.
And yeah, racism is all tied up in it.
But racism, in a way, it seems almost obscures what's really going on here, right?
It's blue supremacy that we're dealing here, dealing with here more than white supremacy by far.
In fact, as you say in here, some of these guys may have had some SS lightning bolts.
The white supremacists are the victims of the supremacists in this one.
It's true.
Yep.
All right.
Listen, thank you so much for doing this great work and for coming on my show to talk about us.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having me.
All right.
So that is Nathaniel Penn.
You got to read this whole thing.
There's a lot we didn't get to just read it.
It's gq.com.
The untold story of the Texas biker gang shootout.
Right back.
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