‘I infiltrated LA’s most violent biker gang the ‘Vagos’ — the case nearly got me killed’
Ex-undercover agent Darrin Kozlowski had multiple brushes with death when he spent seven months infiltrating the Vagos, a vicious biker gang involved in ‘guns, drugs, and death’
By Reanna SmithUS News Reporter Daily Star
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/us-news/i-infiltrated-las-most-violent-31939255
A former undercover agent has detailed his time infiltrating one of Los Angeles’ most ruthless biker gangs, revealing the case “nearly got him killed”.
Darrin Kozlowski, also known as Koz, worked with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for nearly three decades before retiring in 2017. His covert operations resulted in 157 federal arrests over the years. He still can’t talk about a lot of the cases he was involved in due to safety concerns for other agents, but there is one he can talk about — his very first long-term undercover case in the Vagos Motorcycle Club.
As a rookie undercover agent in 1997, Darrin spent seven months climbing up the ranks of the notorious biker gang, including being beaten up during initiation, and exposing their involvement in “guns, drugs, and death”. That was until his cover was blown and he came face to face with the fuming leader of the infamous gang.
His wild story is now being told in a new scripted Audible Original podcast titled, KOZ, which stars Taylor Kitsch and Kate Mara as the lead voiceover actors while combining real-life interviews with Darrin. The Vagos, which is Spanish slang for “vagrant” or “Vagabond”, were formed in San Bernardino, California in 1965.
The infamous biker gang “were a tight-knit brotherhood known for their wild parties, drinking, prostitution, counterfeiting, drugs, you name an illegal activity and they’re probably doing it,” Darrin told LA Magazine in 2018. Today, they have 200 chapters across the US and more than 4,000 members.
At the time of Darrin’s operation, working undercover in biker gangs was still a fledgling program at the ATF, which meant there wasn’t a lot of protocol for him to follow and he had just a small cover team to protect him. So Darrin had to figure out how to successfully infiltrate the gang himself and it wasn’t an easy feat.
The first step was to look the part. Darrin said: “I learned to ride on a friend’s Honda, then managed to get a Harley that ATF had seized, a Fat Boy with straight handlebars, no windshield, no saddlebags. I rode to biker bars and events. I let my hair grow, dressed the part, tried to understand the scene.”
The biker gang also had a uniform, a denim or leather vest with a patch featuring Loki, the Norse god of mischief as well as another patch that reads “1%”. Explaining the meaning behind this in the new podcast, Darrin said it’s to advertise “that they don’t live like the other 99% of all motorcycle enthusiasts.”
He added: “They’re telling everyone that they don’t follow the rules of society and that’s why they embrace the term outlaw. They do that for a reason, they want everyone to know that they don’t give a f*** about what you think.”
But to wear the Loki patch you have to be a fully-fledged member of the Vagos and Darrin had to go through a gruelling process to get patched. He started by introducing himself to the Hollywood chapter of the gang by his real nickname, Koz because he wanted a name he responded to “instinctively.”
The chapter had a clubhouse in the heart of Hollywood where they threw “Green Hell” parties from 2am to 6am.
“If they liked you, you could ride with them sometimes,” Darrin said in the podcast. If you earn your keep, the gang will eventually promote you to a “prospect”, which Darrin claims essentially means “they own you”.
As a prospect you get the “bottom rocker”, the first of three patches worn on your biker vest. “If you survive that, they take a vote and if you measured up, you get promoted to full patch,” Darrin added.
He revealed this is when you’re finally allowed to attend “church” which is what the outlaw group call their weekly chapter meetings and where they discuss all the inner workings of the club. Darrin had a major setback at the first hurdle of the process when an informant named Junior, who he planned on getting to vouch for him, was killed in a brutal hit-and-run.
He didn’t know it at the time, but Darrin’s association with Junior would later result in his downfall in the gang. But after four months, Darrin got his first invite to an officers meeting in Las Vegas, where he was invited to apply to be a prospect and asked: “Are you willing to kill for the club?”
After a thorough background check, he was given his bottom rocker patch and was told he had 30 minutes to sew it into his vest. Later, Darrin was ordered to carry a sewing kit with him at all times.
“I think one-percenters are the only outlaws on the planet who keep a needle and thread handy,” he said. As a prospect, Darrin went through an extreme hazing process.
“They’re gonna push you to the limit of you what you could and would not do,” he said. He added: “They called me a lot. It could be anything from, ‘Hey, prospect, cut my grass,’ or ‘Hey, prospect, take this package over to Big Rick’s place. Saying ‘no’ wasn’t an option.”
Darrin claimed that every time he was with the Vagos he “could have wound up dead” and on several occasions he nearly did. He recalled one incident while working the door at a Green Hell party when he came to blows with a rival member of an Armenian Power gang who put up a fight when they tried to throw him out of the clubhouse.
Darrin escorted the man to the street with a couple of other Vagos members to “smash” his head into a car. “I knew I had to put hands on him to avoid blowing my cover,” he said.
Just days later he had another close call when outside a chapter meeting when stray bullets whizzed past his head from a drive-by shooting. “There are too many scary moments to list, but almost getting shot was one of the scariest,” he told the Daily Mail.
When Darrin first started investigating the Vagos, he suspected the outlaw gang could be behind a string of unsolved murders but he soon discovered they were also involved in a slew of other criminal activity, including racketeering, meth distribution, buying and selling illegal weapons, laundering and counterfeiting. Most of his undercover work with the gang saw him delivering packages containing illegal guns or drugs and he took mental notes of all the movements, conversations, addresses and license plates he witnessed.
At one point, Darrin even got arrested by the LAPD for getting into trouble at a local hangout of a rival gang and was only able to reveal his true identity to officers once he’d been locked up in a jail cell. Seven months into the operation his work paid off when he became a fully patched member of the gang in a process he recalled started with him being ambushed and beat up by the gang before being handed the patch.
But two weeks later, the club president, a menacing man named Lars, turned up at Darrin’s door asked him to return his patch and vest and demanded answers. Darrin immediately called his cover team who extradited him from his apartment.
His cover had been blown and the operation was over. It turned out that the girlfriend of Darrin’s former informant Junior had told some Vagos members he’d been working with the ATF and gave them a card with Agent Kozlowski’s information on it.
In the two months that followed his operation, Darrin put together evidence that eventually led to more than a dozen arrests. Federal officers also carried out raids on the gang and during one of them, they discovered a human skull wrapped in plastic.
“It was a real human skull. It wasn’t some fake souvenir-type skull that you could buy in a shop, it was fresh. There was still material on it, some bits of maybe hair and flesh,” Darrin revealed in the podcast.
After infiltrating the Vagos, Darrin thought he wouldn’t be taking on any other similar cases but he was wrong. He went on to help the ATF create an enhanced undercover program and infiltrated three more motorcycle gangs during his time as an agent.
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