Jay Dobyns interview: To hell and back

It was a brave gesture, and it was comforting not to have to face his demons alone. But against the sort of Uzi-toting assassins Jay Dobyns knew were out there, it was about as much use as, well, as an old fella trying to make a stand against a pack of Hells Angels. That's who was trying to kill him. He knew their faces, knew their names: the undercover cop had spent 21 months befriending them, drinking with them, running with them, wheedling his way into their organisation. Then he betrayed them. No one had ever got inside the Brotherhood before, and they took it personally.

By the time the men from the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives), the organisation in the front line of America's fight against organised crime and Dobyns' employer, finally turned up, it was all over. It was always the same: they'd show up late and then all they could offer was to relocate their agent's family yet again. But Dobyns wasn't for running any more. The Angels would always find him anyway. This time he was going to confront them, was going to hide in plain sight and call them out. He was, in short, going to write a book.

If the agency was no longer riveted by Dobyns' story, the American public have lapped it up. No Angel: My Undercover Journey to the Dark Heart of the Hells Angels has been the surprise literary hit of 2008 across the pond, becoming a fixture in the New York Times bestseller list and topping the non-fiction category. But his snappily written, high-octane account of the way in which he assumed his alter ego 'Bird' and became a fully patched member of the Hells Angels wasn't so popular elsewhere. The publicity-shy ATF hated it, and it just made his former friends in the Brotherhood madder than ever. If such a thing was possible.

JAY DOBYNS started life in a very ordinary middle-class home in Tucson, Arizona. Not that he was ever very ordinary himself. He was an athlete, and a pretty good one too, but mostly he was a football player. American football is a religion in the south, and Dobyns wasn't just good, he was great. In a country where college sport really means something, his status as a University of Arizona Wildcats hall of famer and an All-Pacific wide receiver bestows genuine sporting kudos.

But Dobyns wanted more. He wanted to make it in the big league, and he thought that if he tried hard enough he could make the grade. It didn't take long at National Football League camp before he was disabused of that notion. As one coach told him, "I can coach the other guys to catch like you, but I can't teach you how to run faster." His dream was over.

For a young man who had watched his fair share of TV cop shows, and who was used to regular injections of adrenaline on the football field, a career in the ATF seemed like the perfect answer. Or at least it did until ten days into his new life, when his first raid went horribly wrong.

Picking up minor crook Brent Provestgaard for possession of an unlicensed gun should have been routine, but Dobyns was taken hostage by the 24-year-old felon. It didn't end well: Provestgaard died in a hail of bullets in the back of a car, but not before he had unloaded the .38 he had been holding to Dobyns' head into the rookie agent's chest. With blood pumping out of him like a crimson geyser, he should have died. When he finally regained consciousness the doctors told him that most men wouldn't have made it.

This was a bad mistake: it made Dobyns feel invulnerable, untouchable, literally bulletproof. He was hooked. His wife wanted him to get out. He told her that this is why he was in it. She asked, "To get shot?" and he said, "No, to go toe-to-toe with the bad guys. I lost this time but I won't lose again." That's when the first Mrs Dobyns became the former Mrs Dobyns.

WHEN JAY DOBYNS walks into the room people look up and stare. You don't find many folk looking like him in Leith. Actually, you don't find many people looking like him anywhere. His nut-brown head is completely bald, and he has a grey goatee beard. He wears orange-tinted Rayban Aviators and an embroidered silk shirt that wouldn't look out of place on the cover of Attitude.

But mostly it's the rings and the tattoos that you notice. The big, gaudy, silver rings are a hangover from his days in the Hells Angels: there's one on each finger and they're a mixture of death-head skulls and pagan symbols. The tattoos aren't on show but they are unmistakable even under his shirt. They stretch the whole length of his arms, poking out from underneath his cuffs. You occasionally get glimpses of the gothic writing on his chest, just below the chunky silver chain around his neck.

He looks every inch the bad-ass biker, but then it's this persona that has allowed him to prosper for almost 20 years as an undercover agent working on everything from drugs busts to organised crime. He has worked hard at developing the instinctive swagger of the career hardman, but then he's had little choice. "Being an undercover officer is not a hobby, it's not something you dabble in," he explains. "If you don't do it with all your heart, with all your passion, if you don't throw yourself into it 100 per cent, then you're going to get hurt or killed, and so is your partner. You have to do it all the way – or just don't do it at all."

Dobyns is now living with the consequences of going all the way. He runs the ATF's ballistics programme, as his role in the trials of Arizona's notorious Hells Angels chapters means he can no longer work undercover. But every night that world enters his mind unbidden. The dream is always the same: his Hells Angel bogeyman, Bad Bob, drives his Harley into Dobyns' bedroom, dismounts and drives the butt-end of a piece of two-by-four into his head. When he comes to, he's in the Skull Valley Clubhouse, and another Hells Angel adversary, Teddy, is there holding a set of pliers in one hand and a blood-spattered Chucky doll in the other. It ends when he wakes just as Teddy is pulling his tongue out with the pliers and Bad Bob is lunging towards him with a buck knife.

It's little wonder that Dobyns is on edge. From the moment when he watched footage of 9/11 on the television and one of his new 'friends' joked that the war in Afghanistan was a great opportunity to market guns to the Taliban, who would use them to kill American troops, he knew what he was dealing with. "Hells Angels qualify as domestic terrorists," he says. "They're involved in every type of profitable crime: drug-dealing, gun-running, extortion, prostitution, assaults, intimidations, debt-collections. If there's a dollar to be made, they'll take a shot at it. The Hells Angels are smart, not university-smart, but intelligent. They run their organisation like a business.

"They're modelled on traditional organised crime. They're not the old-school, stereotypical biker thugs riding around on their bikes and crashing into bars, intimidating people. They're organised, structured and disciplined, and the shot-callers are very insulated from what goes down on the street, which is how the Mob organises itself. That's what sets the Hells Angels apart, where some of the other clubs are just dirty rotten thugs."

The Hells Angels are so successful because they demand complete subjugation of your character, supplemented by unswerving loyalty. That's why no outsider ever managed to infiltrate them until Dobyns' character Bird, a debt-collecting hitman, came along.

He has always appreciated just how dangerous their devotion to the group makes them. "The Hells Angels are misunderstood losers held together by hate and money," he says. "Everything revolved around money-hustling and protecting the club against those we hated. We hated all the other (motorcycle] clubs, the public, the police. We hated work, our wives, our girlfriends, our kids. Occasionally we hated ourselves. We hated everybody that wasn't a Hells Angel, and even then we often hated each other. I say 'we' because these were the people and things I had come to hate too."

If Dobyns had thrived on previous assignments, Operation Black Biscuit – named after the slang for an ice hockey puck – was of a different magnitude altogether. Having to drink, ride and fraternise 24/7 for nearly two years with men who would kill him without thinking twice tested him in ways he could only imagined before the case began. By the end of it, he was strung out on Hydroxycut diet pills, popping them to keep himself going. Mentally, he was at his wits' end. "This was 21 months of daily, non-stop undercover work. The most damaging element of this case – physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually – was the day-in, day-out challenge of playing that persona, pretending to be someone you're not. There's no second take; if I say something wrong or do something wrong I'm going to get a bullet in the brain or a ball-bat in the back of my head."

The Angels spend so much time around violence, drugs and criminality that Dobyns found himself becoming inured to routine savagery. There is one moment that sticks in his mind, an image he can't shake. "I'm in this house waiting for some dope to be delivered, and there's this little girl, seven or eight years old, cute little thing but dirty – just not taken care of. She bends over and has a scar of a clothes iron burn on her back," he says. "I asked her about it. She just shrugged and said, 'My dad got mad at me once because he said I was causing too much problems for him so he hit me with the iron'."

Eventually, Bird began to take over. The demands of being in character gradually changed him, brought him to a tipping point where he almost went native. Once, when the Angels were leaving to hijack a meeting of a rival crew, the Banditos, they piled knives, guns and sawn-offs in the boot of a car and were told, "Expect to kill tonight. Expect to shoot. Expect to die, go to jail or skip country." One of the Angels told Dobyns, "Remember, Bird, a Hells Angel may not always be right, but he is always your brother". "Their words made sense," says Dobyns. "Even though I'd sworn an oath to fight guys like these, I'd bought into some of the credo. I knew that any of these guys, and more than a few others across the state, would gladly take a bullet for me. In that instant I believed in what some of the Angels stood for. I was genuinely touched."

Dobyns was amazed at the way the American public treated the Hells Angels. When they went to clubs, drinks were on the house and the best tables cleared. While the Mob is Italian or Russian, and gangs come from Hong Kong or Europe, the Hells Angels are a genuine piece of Americana celebrated in films and feted everywhere. There's even a tribute biker gang made up of cops called the Wild Pigs.

The Hells Angels play on that image, making millions from selling T-shirts and merchandise. Dobyns pleads guilty to the charge of intensifying the mystique. "I absolutely glorified the Hells Angels, there's no debate on that. For every kid who reads that book and wants to become an ATF agent, there's another who reads it who wants to become a Hells Angel. My mission wasn't to run down the Hells Angels, it was to tell a true and honest story.

"Not every one of the Hells Angels who crossed my path was a demon, not everyone was a murderer and rapist. There were some good guys, guys that I drank beer with and shot pool with. Hells Angels lived at my house. I held their babies, spent holidays with them, and when I was with them, for the most part, I enjoyed it because it was generally on a friendly level. But you must never forget that these guys may not have university degrees but they do have PhDs in violence and intimidation, and heaven forbid that you insult them or the name of their club or the death-head patch they wear. Cynthia Garcia is proof that you'll pay a brutal, lethal, violent price for that. She insulted them in their own house and they were her judge, jury and executioner."

Garcia was one of the poor white trash girls who hang around the bikers, taking part in gang-bangs at their clubhouses and pandering to their every whims. Only Garcia didn't like the way she was being treated, and told them so. Three Angels beat her unconscious. When she came round and gave them more abuse, they kicked, punched and stabbed her before rolling her in a carpet and driving the barely alive mother of two into the desert, where they stabbed her to death, cut off her head with a knife and stuck it on a fencepost. "Six weeks later those same guys were at a Hells Angels toy ride with teddy bears strapped to their motorcycles, to be delivered to kids in hospital. The public doesn't see Cynthia Garcia being stomped to death, they just see Hells Angels delivering gifts to sick kids at Christmas. They are very good at propaganda."

SEVERAL times during the investigation, his whole cover story of being a debt-collecting bad ass for a casino owner came close to unravelling. Running into Bad Bob while engaging in the very ungangsterly pursuit of surfing was something he could talk himself out of, as was running into the brother who did his tattoos while wandering along the road hand-in-hand with his little daughter on the way to buy her a guitar. There were other times when things got hairier. The Angels maintain a high state of paranoia, and in the early days of the investigation his pristinely clean cut-off denim jacket and patch almost gave him away. Worse, a Hells Angel from another chapter, Chico, almost fingered him as an imposter. Only his close relationship with chapter leader Bad Bob saved him, and things got so bad that he was forced to stage the videotaped 'execution' of a rival Mongols gang leader to establish his bona fides.

By the time Dobyns was called to answer charges that he wasn't Bird, he was close to unravelling. "After I'd been confronted by Chico, I was convinced they were gonna execute me," he says. "The odd part is that I was so tired and frustrated that I wanted them to. I was like, 'I will never quit, but if you guys would just put a bullet in my head then all of this could just stop'. I'd lost perspective. It was an illogical position but my personal life was ruined, I was exhausted, I was eating diet pills by the dozen, I was overwhelmed and helpless. I didn't want to die, I didn't have a death wish, but I thought they'd be doing me a favour."

If Dobyns was finding it hard going, he wasn't the only one. His wife Gwen, daughter Dale and son Jack found it so tough that the marriage almost imploded. His son gave him little stones each time he left on assignment so that his dad could "touch them whenever you are in trouble and know that I'm there with you", but his wife gradually became less understanding. So exhausted he could no longer function sexually or emotionally, and becoming more and more like Bird, Dobyns came home on his increasingly irregular visits to find an alienated wife. Eventually he came home to find no wife and no kids. There's a passage in his book where he downloads a fortnight's messages from his phone. He knows Gwen is upset but ignores the calls.

It's Gwen. Your wife. Listen, the sprinkler system is broken and I need you to either come fix it or take care of it. I got my hands full with the kids. Give me a call soon. Um, that's it I guess. We miss you, Jack especially. Bye.

Beep

It's Gwen again. Jack got in a fight at school yesterday and since you're his dad I thought you should know about it. Can you please call us?

Beep

It's me. Are you alive? For most wives I know, this is a rhetorical question, but in our case… Please call.

Beep

You're being a real jerk, Jay. I called Joe so I know you're still breathing. Jack's fight was about him standing up for a mentally retarded girl with glasses. So in spite of the fact that his father is pretending to be a criminal, you must have done something right. The sprinkler is still busted. The lawn is going to die. It's on you. Don't bother calling.

I ask Dobyns whether Gwen or the kids will ever forgive him. He thinks for a while and then says quietly, "No. Too much battle damage. It takes time to repair that damage; you don't go into that life for 20 years or into a case like this one, and then when it ends you go back home and click your fingers and say, 'Hey honey, I'm back and everything's okay', because you know what the people at home are saying? They're saying, 'F*** you! You've been gone acting like an asshole for 20 years and now you want us to come running to you like you're the world's hero? What about us? Do you wanna hear about us, because we don't care who you saved out there, because you f***ing turned your back on us.' That takes a long time to fix.

"Throughout my career I said the same prayer every day: please find the nastiest, dirtiest, most violent person you can find and put them in my way today, because dealing with them is my contribution to society. My prayer was answered thousands of times. My family had a different prayer…"

The nightmare hasn't finished. Dobyns had counselling and has found a form of catharsis in writing the book, but he knows that the Angels won't rest until he and his family are murdered, preferably painfully. He knows that because a letter from one of the Angels who killed Cynthia Garcia, written from jail, was intercepted. In it the prisoner suggested sticking a needle contaminated with Aids into Dobyns "so that it'll be a miserable f***ing death". As an afterthought, he says, "Before Dobyns dies we should kidnap his wife and videotape all the brothers raping her and make him watch that f***ing video."

Dobyns is beside himself that the ATF didn't investigate the fire in his home further than establishing that it was caused by arson. Their answer to the welter of death threats he has received over the past five years – the Angels are understood to have subcontracted his killing to the Aryan Brotherhood and the fearsome Salvadorian mafia MS13 – is to continually move him and his family. "They're scared of these guys (the Hells Angels]," he concludes. "They've abandoned me, and it stinks."

Nor is he impressed that infighting between the ATF and prosecuting attorneys meant that most of the Hells Angels plea-bargained their way to vastly reduced sentences or got off altogether. Despite finding everything from machine guns, Semtex and rocket-propelled grenade-launchers to drugs and bundles of cash, despite the wire-tap evidence, the sanctions on the men of violence were minimal.

But at least the book has given him a platform to ensure that if he is murdered, the ATF will be held to account. He has no idea whether this survival strategy will work. In fact, the publicity is about to be ramped up yet more. As well as two novels based on Operation Black Biscuit, Ridley Scott's brother Tony is making a big-budget film of the book. Dobyns would like to see himself played by his favourite actor, Denzel Washington, but the avowedly racist nature of the Angels means it's unlikely. Instead, the names of Russell Crowe, Johnny Depp, Ed Norton, Mickey Rourke and Mark Wahlberg have all been floated.

Dobyns knows the film will get "the Hollywood makeover", and seems resigned to that. He has just one request: please don't transform him into a heroic figure. "I was nobody's knight in shining armour," he says. "I wasn't a hero and I didn't want to write a book that created the illusion that I was. I wasn't trying to create a monument to Jay Dobyns, I was trying to tell a story as honestly as I could. I've been brutally honest with myself about the mistakes I made, and the best I can offer is that I didn't do everything right. I'm not perfect, but I did the best I could."

It's a chilling thought that if his former pals in the Hells Angels get their way, those sentiments may one day be etched on his gravestone, and that day may come sooner rather than later.

• No Angel, by Jay Dobyns (12.99, Canongate) is out on Thursday