Armed and Dangerous: The Hunt for One of America's Most Wanted Criminals - Couverture rigide

Chapter 1

Everyone called him the mountain man. They said he was the most dangerous, gun-crazy renegade seen in the hills and valleys of Southern California since the days of the Wild West outlaws. The local police departments and sheriffs’ offices all said it would be next to impossible for any cop or federal agent to bring him down alive from his mountaintop hideout.

In April 1986, when I first caught wind of Mark Stephens—this “mountain man” terrorizing the Inland Empire communities (those in Riverside and San Bernardino counties)—I was only in my third year as a special agent with the Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. But I’d been a law enforcement officer for over a decade, and I’d made my bones as a local cop in North Carolina and as a federal border patrol agent before becoming an ATF agent—I’d certainly heard my share of war stories. Some so-called badass or another was always being touted as the hardest, most cold- blooded criminal in the county, the scariest dude to make the most- wanted lists. I seen this guy whip a dozen cops, other cops would tell you. This guy, he ain’t gonna be taken alive. He’s crazy. If you try to get cuffs on him, he’ll kill you. Ninety-five percent of the times when I confronted these so-called tough guys, all the fight instantly drained out of them. Their ruthlessness turned out to be nothing more than a front, an actor’s persona. When I cornered them, they folded up, dropped their guns, and surrendered without so much as a peep.

But there are those few criminals out there who are righteously bad. Guys who won’t give up without a fight. And when you do decide to confront them, you’d better be ready to fight for your life.

Mark Stephens was one such criminal. Stephens was the real McCoy, the most brazen and fearless criminal I encountered in my early years with ATF. He proved to be equal parts gunman, mountain man, drug trafficker, and out-and-out thug.

Mark Stephens was a paradox for a criminal investigator. He didn’t fit the stereotype: He didn’t come from the wrong side of the tracks and wasn’t abused as a kid; he wasn’t semiliterate or lacking in career opportunities. His parents were well-educated, fairly affluent people who lived in an upscale neighborhood in Rancho Cucamonga, a city of nearly one hundred thousand, located under the majestic San Gabriel mountain range in the Inland Empire, thirty-seven miles east of my ATF desk in downtown Los Angeles.

Sometimes the path to a criminal personality can’t be easily explained; the factors that determine one’s character defy reason. Mark Stephens wasn’t a typical bully, the kind of person who seemed to get emotional gratification from picking on the weak. It didn’t make any difference to him whether you were male or female, old or young, black or white—if you stood in his way, he was going to hurt you. Stephens was a man who had no conscience when it came to taking what he wanted by force. And he’d learned early on in life that hurting people was the way to get what he wanted. The intelligent man locked inside of him may have known that violence was wrong, that he had an uncontrollable problem. But violence physically possessed him; it was an overwhelming force he simply couldn’t rein in. He understood that it would land him in prison one day, and prison wasn’t an option for Stephens. So he decided to separate himself from society—literally. He headed for the hills, disappearing into the vast, impenetrable San Bernardino Mountains.

Stephens put together a basic plan. He would live off the land. He’d grow marijuana in prodigious quantities, smoke as much of it as he wanted, and sell the excess kilos when he needed cash to buy firearms and explosives. He would be as self-sufficient as a human being could be; he wouldn’t depend on any friends or family. The only people he would interact with would be the small network of low-level drug dealers he would keep in check with constant threats. His only daily companions would be the wild animals in the mountains. It was a near- perfect plan for a lone wolf determined to live outside the borders of civilized society.

I’m something of a lone wolf myself. It’s a character trait that has worked to my advantage during investigations. Special agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are often charged with the task of operating as a one-man law enforcement agency. Our mandate is primarily to enforce violations in firearms and explosives laws, but our jurisdiction in this area encompasses a wide range of criminal types—narcotics traffickers, traditional organized-crime families, outlaw bike gangs, inner-city gangs such as the Bloods and the Crips, and anti-government and hate groups such as the neo-Nazis and Aryan Nations.

Special agents with ATF have two basic options. They can forge a smooth, relatively hassle-free investigator’s career by focusing on background work, running errands for the administrators, and picking up what we call “adoptive cases”—that is, bringing in federal resources and manpower to investigations that were initiated and completed by local law enforcement. Or they can take my career path. Always pushing into overdrive. Making cases against real bad guys. Putting themselves in harm’s way by getting right in the line of fire and, if necessary, going undercover to get the most violent criminals off the street.

Throughout my ATF career, often to the dismay of my supervisors, I took that “put your life on the line” attitude to the limit. In dozens of cases, I went undercover to infiltrate armed organizations such as the Skinheads and the Aryan Nations—and most notably, in the late nineties, near the end of my ATF stint, when I penetrated the Mongols outlaw motorcycle gang in a landmark two-and-a-half-year investigation. During that case, playing the part of a biker badass named Billy St. John, I achieved something nearly unthinkable for a federal agent: I became a “patched-in” member of the club and eventually rose to the position of treasurer and vice president of the Mongols’ San Fernando Valley chapter.

Going deep undercover or running and gunning in the streets always fueled me. I thrived on that high-risk energy. Call it an adrenaline addiction or sheer machismo, but I felt like that was where my investigative talents were best utilized. I wanted to be out on the firing line. Wearing a coat and tie behind my desk at headquarters, typing up the stream of official reports and memoranda, I felt like a fish out of water. My place was in the street, down in the trenches, chewing the same dirt with the state and local cops.

In early 1986 I was a thirty-seven-year-old recently married special agent. My wife at the time and I lived in a peaceful bedroom community called Corona and I commuted to ATF Metro Group headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. Since I lived in the Inland Empire, it was only natural that I’d start poking around the various police departments and sheriffs’ offices, expressing an interest in what criminal cases they saw brewing.

I was looking for the real bad guys. I always tried to do it in

as low-key a manner as I could. Locals often don’t appreciate the unsolicited attention of special agents from the FBI, DEA,

or ATF. They see the feds as being overpaid and self-serving, sweeping in to take the glory of a promising investigation away from blue-collar cops.

I’ve always found that interagency rivalries are most pronounced at a senior management level, where a lot of publicity is at stake; a few headline-grabbing cases can bump an administrator up the Bureau hierarchy pretty damn quick. For rank-and-file ATF agents like me, developing close working relationships with local law enforcement was essential. Many of us started out our careers as local patrolmen, so we knew what made cops tick and could appreciate the nitty-gritty of police work. Though we carried federal badges and credentials, we talked, thought, and did our jobs like cops.

In my day-to-day routine, I would pop in at different agencies around Southern California and make contacts with detectives and patrolmen, the behind-the-scenes guys working dangerous assignments in narcotics and gang units. I told them I was the kind of guy who kept my ear to the pavement. I left them my card and let them know that if they needed federal help, I was the guy at the ATF Metro Group in L.A. to call. If the local guys needed help, I was there. I never stepped in where I wasn’t wanted. And it was completely up to me if I took on a case or not.

In every department I visited, I’d always ask who was the biggest threat in the area in terms of gun crimes. Early in 1986, over and over again, I kept hearing the name Mark Stephens. He either had outstanding warrants or was a prime suspect in felonies in nearly every community from Pomona to San Bernardino.

The boys in the detective division at the Montclair Police Department first briefed me on Stephens. For some months I’d been working closely on a case with a young Montclair detective named Bill Kendrick. In his late twenties and sandy-haired, Kendrick was a straight-shooting, no-nonsense cop; I could quickly see that we shared the same love of street work and the same distaste for hunkering down behind an IBM Selectric to keep our bosses satisfied with the requisite paper trail.

One afternoon over coffee in the squad room, Bill Kendrick began telling me stories about Stephens that sounded so far-fetched, so outlandish, I wondered if he was planning on soon leaving the underpaid cop world to take a stab at a career as a Hollywood screenwriter.

Mark Stephens was unlike any other bad guy Kendrick had encountered. From his hideout in the hills, he had built up a small arsenal of machine guns and hand gre...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Under and Alone comes an intimate and riveting account of federal law-enforcement agent William Queen’s relentless hunt for one of America’s most cold-blooded criminals.

As an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, William Queen must tackle a number of challenging cases, including going undercover to investigate a group of violent skinheads and infiltrating and busting a ring trafficking in high-powered explosives, drugs, and firearms. In the winter of 1985, he faces his toughest mission to date: he must apprehend Mark Stephens, a notorious narcotics trafficker who has been terrorizing the communities around Los Angeles with frequent rampages involving machine guns and hand grenades. A recluse living in the treacherous backwoods outside the city, Stephens is a cunning survivalist. Nobody has been able to catch him, but Queen is determined to take him down. Queen’s unique expertise is not taught in any police academy or ATF training seminar–he honed his outdoorsman abilities as a kid. Stephens may have finally met his match in the unwavering Queen, who is adept at hunting and trapping and living for weeks in the wild. Queen will use these skills–along with surveillance, confidential informants, and intelligence gathering–as he doggedly tracks his dangerous quarry, a chase that culminates in a gripping showdown high in the San Bernardino Mountains.

A fascinating look into the daily life of an ATF agent and a taut portrayal of a monthlong manhunt, Armed and Dangerous depicts a classic race against time–lawman versus outlaw–in a harrowing true story of life-or-death suspense.