Jay Dobyns

The writers of Sons of Anarchy directly used some of the characters from this book. The Hells Angels look like a bunch of bungling bandits in this memoir from an ATF agent who infiltrated the biker gang.

The agent puffs himself up to be awesome but you never feel like you are really inside of it all. It's mostly a tale of how the agent lost himself in the world of undercover policing and Serpico was so much better for that kind of tale. The agent, Jay, is self important and at the end of it, I had no empathy for his job or what he did. Just another glory hound living on tales from the past under the guise of a patriotic cop...blah.

Although they got a lot of guns and a few drugs and touched lightly on the seedy parts of that world, watch Sons of Anarchy if you want to feel like you are more in depth.… (más)

The infiltration of the Hells Angels by undercover cop and author Jay Dobyns is as interesting from the point of view of the very real deterioration of the character Jay and metamorphosis into his alterego 'Bird' as it is from the hows and wheres of how law enforcement can run such an operation.

The book's writing is unusual in that where Jay is an involved family man and serious cop, the writing reads as measured and logical. But as his real life crumbles and he feels most alive as an (otc) drug-wired gang member, so does the writing become frenetic and disorganised. Only the impossibly unsatisfying denoument, forseeable but unexpected, saves the man, but not, sadly, the operation.

I later read Hunter S. Thompson's masterpiece Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga which was written 40 years earlier and involved some of the same characters. This was very enjoyable seeing the young guns turn into old reprobrates. They must live on adrenaline running from the law all that time. I wonder what path their children will choose?… (más)