Fallen Angel? : Motorcycle Gang Leader Faces Trial on Murder-for-Hire Charge

The prison warden had ordered the dormitory roll call, and Thomas Chaney was missing.

There was a sudden commotion in a side room, the pop of flashbulbs, a body hauled out under a blanket and pushed into a station wagon that sped off into the night.

Within hours, the word was out that someone from the Safford, Ariz., prison was looking for Chaney’s parents. A cryptic note arrived at the Hell’s Angels clubhouse in Ventura: “The body work has been taken care of.” It looked like Chaney was dead.

But the one-time Hell’s Angel confederate, described by a defense lawyer as an “arrogant, brutal, dope-dealing bully,” a man who once held a suspected government informant’s face over a gas burner, a man the lawyer said “the entire population of Ventura County” would like to see dead, was, in fact, very much alive.

An Elaborate Hoax

The murder had been an elaborate hoax staged by the FBI.

And George Christie Jr., Hell’s Angel leader who brought a brief dose of respectability to the motorcycle club three years ago when he carried the Olympic torch through the streets of Point Mugu, went on trial last week in a Los Angeles federal courtroom for hiring Chaney’s murder.

Prosecutors contend that Christie, who has a clean criminal record, a wife of 20 years, two teen-age children and a job making self-defense films for rape victims, gave a government informant $500 and a 1973 Pontiac when he heard of Chaney’s supposed fate.

Christie’s lawyers argue that the federal charges are the government’s way of getting back at a man who has been a thorn in the side of law and order since he gained attention in the Olympic Torch Relay, and then took to the national media with his bitter criticism of the alleged harassment and abuse his compatriots had suffered at the hands of law enforcement.

“It’s un-American for a Hell’s Angel to be in the Olympic torch run,” Christie’s attorney, Barry Tarlow, told a federal court jury last week, as nearly a dozen bearded bikers wearing the familiar winged skull glowered from the back of the courtroom.

‘Wanted to Get Him’

“George Christie has been targeted by law enforcement for a long, long time” Tarlow said. “They wanted to get him and they wanted to put him away.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. J. Stephen Czuleger calls it a “straight case of murder-for-hire, very simple, very clean.”

Christie, he said, with co-defendant Daniel Joe Fabricant as an intermediary, hired former Mexican Mafia member Michael Mulhern to persuade friends at the Federal Correctional Institute at Safford to kill Chaney. According to Mulhern, Christie believed that Chaney had provided the government with damaging evidence about alleged drug-dealing activities by the Hell’s Angels.

One of the cornerstones of the government’s case is a series of secretly taped conversations between Mulhern, Christie and Fabricant in which the contract is allegedly agreed upon.

“They said, ‘Yeah, as long as it’s a for-sure, they’ll whack him and it’s, it’s gone,” Mulhern told Christie in one of their first conversations in August, 1986.

‘Gonna Leave Him Dead’

“I’d do it myself if he was here. . . . That guy is a (expletive deleted) trouble maker,” Christie replied.

Mulhern: “In this case, the people that are gonna get him, they’re gonna leave him dead, dude.”

Christie: “Yeah.”

Although admitting that the tapes are potentially damaging, defense lawyers contend that it is a series of unrecorded, unmonitored meetings that took place between Mulhern and Christie that tell the real story.

For their own reasons, Tarlow argues, members of the Mexican Mafia were seeking to kill Chaney, but feared retribution from Hell’s Angels in the prison because of Chaney’s past ties to the motorcycle gang.

In earlier conversations, he said, Mulhern informed Christie of the murder plan and sought his promise that there would not be trouble.

A key issue in the case is the credibility of the government’s informant, Mulhern, a founding member of the Mexican Mafia, a down-on-his-luck father of four who, defense lawyers say, was dependent on the estimated $20,000 he has gotten from the government since 1983 to feed his heroin habit.

“Mr. Mulhern is a one-man crime wave,” Tarlow told the jury. “He’s a pathological liar who would sell out his own mother. . . . He’ll show you the desperation of what somebody will do to get money to stick a needle in his arm.”

But government prosecutors say the tapes do not lie.

In the final one, recorded Sept. 25, 1986, Christie had stopped at Mulhern’s motel room and handed him an envelope containing five $100 bills and title to the car.

“I imagine, you know, when the word gets out that, you know, the cops will probably follow me around a little bit, maybe see who I’m hanging out with,” Christie told Mulhern on the tape.

“Yeah, well, just keep your head down,” Mulhern advised him.

“I’m not worried about that. I just, what I’m telling you is, I’m sure like in a, a week or so everything will, will be mellowed out again and uh, I got something else will be real easy for you, right out here.”

‘Somebody Else to Be Hit’

At this point, Mulhern testified, Christie held out his thumb and forefinger as if cocking a gun. “He meant he had somebody else to be hit,” this time in the Southern California area, Mulhern said.

“Well, it’s been nice doin’ business with ya, dude,” Mulhern said, and Christie walked out of the motel room. There was a phone call from an FBI agent next door, then Christie’s voice from outside the room:

“Hey, Mike?” he called back. “Let, let, let me have that, that envelope, all right?”

Federal prosecutors theorize that Christie must have seen the agents waiting outside. Mulhern said he moved to return the envelope, but before he could, Christie was under arrest. A federal grand jury indicted him and Fabricant 11 days later on one count of conspiracy to murder and one count of solicitation to murder.

For the trial, expected to last nearly three weeks, Hell’s Angels from as far away as Oakland have sat quietly in the back of the courtroom, their headbands, patches and tattoos contrasting sharply with the business suits of the assistant U.S. attorneys who drop in frequently to watch the proceedings.

Judge Alerted

During the second day of trial, U.S. District Judge Dickran Tevrizian reported that he had been alerted by one of the marshals that a member of the motorcycle gang had approached him during a lunch break. The man, the marshal said, wanted to know where the judge lived, where he ate lunch and how often he ate there.

“The people that are here today absolutely flatly deny that anything like that happened,” Tarlow said later.

“We’re here because we’re his fans,” Jim Clark said of Christie, a leading candidate to take over statewide leadership of the outlaw motorcycle gang before his arrest.

But mostly, said Joe Angel, a San Bernardino chapter member, it is a sense of outrage.

Christie’s finest hour, they say, was the time in 1985 when he took on Kennedy family heiress Eunice Shriver over whether the $3,000 gathered from his biker buddies during the Olympics was going to go to a program for mentally retarded youngsters in Pottstown, Pa., as promised.

File a Lawsuit

Shriver, chairwoman of the board of Special Olympics Inc., claimed that it was the organization’s longstanding policy to divide funds between Washington headquarters and state chapters, rather than disbursing them to local programs. Christie, buoyed by letters of appreciation from Pottstown parents, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court that is still pending.

“That’s one of the reasons George (Christie) is here,” Angel said. “We wanna see what they’re going to do to him. They’re gettin’ down to goin’ after somebody who doesn’t even have a record.”

In an interview with The Times several years ago, Christie, even then one of the most powerful members of the organization, said he was an ordinary family man trying to raise his children to lead “normal” lives.

“I’m a strict father,” he said. “I don’t want them to be negative, but I want them to see the world for what it is. The world hit me in the face like a pie.”