The Great Biker Bust : How a Cool Detective, Her Veteran Partner and a Charming Felon Chased the Hells Angels Right Out of Orange County

It’s 1970, white eye shadow is still in, and you’ve just graduated from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department academy, first in your class.

Fast forward to 1976. After a rapid rise through the ranks, it’s time to transfer to an undercover drug detail.

Meet your new partner, one Wayne Carlander. He’s a sunflower-seed-chomping, clever veteran who has talked robbers into surrendering and turning over the loot, all without moving his 300-pound, 6-foot-6 body from his desk.

Your first assignment: Pose as the biker girlfriend of a real convicted robber and infiltrate the Hells Angels. This means riding around all day on the back of a Harley-Davidson, even though you are petrified of motorcycles, hanging out in scuddy biker dens with guys named Bruno and Butch, buying drugs and hoping nobody recognizes you for the cool blonde detective that you are.

“Yeah,” says a laughing Veronica Seele, now a happily married out-of-state suburban mom and businesswoman who hasn’t packed a gun in a decade. “I was pretty young and naive and adventurous to do all that, wasn’t I?”

Clinging to the waist of an undercover informant, with Carlander trailing in a surveillance vehicle, she helped pull off the biggest undercover operation of the time against outlaw bikers.

And the Hells Angels haven’t been back to Orange County since.

So says “Chain of Evidence” (Dutton, 1994), a book out this month by a first-time author who uses the pseudonym Michael Detroit “because the Hells Angels might not like some of what I wrote about them.”

He tells the story of how Seele posed as the rich girlfriend of undercover informant Cliff Mowery, a parolee enlisted to help infiltrate a fledgling Hells Angels chapter in Orange County.

Carlander, the low-key mastermind of the operation, convinced Sheriff Brad Gates that a violent convict could be trusted and that the trio could kick some biker butt.

When the end came eight months later, 125 officers from Orange, Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties simultaneously arrested 77 suspects, most of them bikers, 19 of them Hells Angels. The police also netted a cache of club financial records and membership lists.

So many cases were scheduled during seven months of trials that judges throughout Orange County volunteered to increase their workloads. All but one of the 77 defendants were convicted and sentenced to prison.

“Police penetration of the gang,” says the book’s prologue, “was accomplished by three extraordinary people who paid prices too high. One would die, one would flee the state under a different name, and the other would become a reluctant hero.”

*

Already, one of the ex-partners is doing national daytime shows. Seele (a pseudonym) altered her looks to wing it last week with Joan Lunden on “Good Morning America.”

Although the book says the Hells Angels circulated posters promising a $25,000 reward to killers of the trio, she is no longer skittish about retribution. Carlander never did worry much and remains a sergeant with the department.

A self-effacing investigator, he figures the TV types will be more interested in Seele’s juicy details. She is, after all, the one who entrusted her life to a criminal and partied convincingly with the Angels for eight months.

“I’m certainly not doing this for the money,” Seele says of her public appearances. “It’s certainly not worth compromising yourself in even this small way for the money. But this whole (publicity) thing is to give some insight into the book, and have some fun. After all, this is entertaining. It’s a kick! How many people can say that they’ve done something that turned into a book?”

That Seele went undetected for so long is impressive, authorities say.

“(Biker clubs) are very tough to infiltrate,” says Ralph Lochridge, spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Los Angeles and a former undercover agent. “And it’s pretty risky to be found working as an informant (against) the Hells Angels. You could get tortured, mutilated, killed. . . .

“That is a remarkable story,” Lochridge says, adding that the person who introduced Seele to the club deserves a lot of the credit. “To come in cold is unheard of.”

Enter Mowery.

When Carlander first approached him at the Orange County Jail, he looked as tough as his rap sheet suggested. A muscular 6-foot-4, with 32 tattoos including a hangman’s noose on his chest, he was on parole for armed robbery when a CHP officer arrested him for carrying a gun. Facing a return trip to Soledad state prison, Mowery agreed to Carlander’s plot to infiltrate the local Hells Angels.

For eight months, he was kept in a motel--now called the Key Inn--visible from the Santa Ana Freeway in Tustin. Most nights, Carlander and other detectives would eyeball his room from a parked car, making sure he did not venture out into trouble. If charm were a felony, Mowery would be doing life without parole. That and his good looks made him a magnet for women. At one point, an undercover detective caught sneaking out of Mowery’s room was fired.

He had no such effect on Seele, who saw his drunken meanness and capacity for violence. Besides, she was happily married to a supportive electrical contractor.

Holding it all together was Carlander.

“I owe him my life,” Seele says in a two-hour telephone interview. “I would never have involved myself if it wasn’t for (him). Wayne has this incredible skill with people. He can sit down and talk to people . . . especially convicts, felons. He knew how to deal with them, give them the degree of respect that’s important to them, and he has perfect timing. He knew when to back off, when to apply pressure, when to call their bluff.”

One night when Mowery was acting up, Carlander defused him by suggesting a contest to see who could hit a power pole with a rock. And he won.

“That’s Wayne,” Seele says, laughing. “He handled that so quick. I would have pulled out my gun and shot (him).”

As she and Mowery ingratiated themselves with bikers, the book says: “They made buys in various parts of the county on a daily basis. They would do a deal for a gram of meth in Fullerton, ride the chopper to Stanton for three balloons of heroin, go to Garden Grove for two grams of cocaine, then take another ride to San Bernardino for more meth and a conversation about guns. Or stolen cars. . . . (They) would attend parties at bikers’ houses or simply hang out in their favorite bars.”

Seele posed as Mowery’s girlfriend, a rich woman who was selling drugs to her homemaker girlfriends until her divorce settlement. The cover story helped her retain her innate gentility, although she had to defer to her sidekick around others.

To the undercover team’s surprise, Mowery became protective of Seele and made it clear that, unlike many of the bikers, he would not be sharing his woman.

Seele says she even enjoyed a big bar party where she won the wet T-shirt contest after some Hells Angels soaked her top.

“I was young, I was naive, what can I say? I would never do it again today,” she says with a sigh.

*

The undercover team knew the operation would end when they suspected someone was on to them. That happened one night while Seele and Mowery were buying drugs in a couple’s home. She was sure the woman, who had once been in jail, recognized her from a past encounter. The operation was over.

Seele slept for long periods and did not leave her house. Days later, the sweep began.

On April 14, 1977, then-deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Kreber (now a judge) took his evidence to an Orange County grand jury, which returned 57 indictments against 77 suspects. All but one of the Hells Angels made bail, and he was extradited to Connecticut on a fugitive warrant for murder.

According to the book, among those arrested was Michael Lee (Bruno) Mason, owner of a Santa Ana motorcycle shop where the undercover officer bought drugs. The secretary-treasurer of the L.A. chapter, Mason was reportedly the leader of the budding Orange County chapter.

On the day that suspect Ray Glore, sergeant-at-arms of the L.A. club and the original target of the investigation, got out on bail, his bullet-riddled body was found in the home where he kept files of every Hells Angel in the United States and Europe. Police took records that, the book says, were “a huge windfall of otherwise impossible-to-get information about the inside operations of a secret criminal enterprise.”

The Angels allegedly brought out a New York hit man to take out the cops and Mowery, who was hidden in a series of motel rooms until he bravely stared down the accused and testified against them.

Seele did not testify, and the media helped protect her identity by never using her or Carlander’s real name or photographs.

Only nine months ago, Carlander transferred to a lower-profile job as sergeant of inmate transportation. The father of two girls and a son, he is looking forward next year to a life of golf, betting the ponies and playing with his grandchildren.

The book, he says, will in some small way give them a legacy. “Can’t ask for more than that,” he adds.

After two months off to recuperate and consider her future, Seele realized that she could continue to move up in the department. Gates, the sheriff, told the “Chain of Evidence” author that had Seele stayed with the department, she’d be running it today.

But Seele had no interest in being at a desk, being a boss. And she believed she had already cheated fate on the streets.

“I thought, ‘Let’s not push the odds.’ I made it through this. I learned that I had some abilities under pressure that I in no way knew I was capable of. I had received a tremendous gift and opportunity from the department, but I couldn’t really use it at the department.”

So Seele quit and changed her name, moving with her husband to another state. Just as she launched a “risk management and consulting” business, she discovered she was pregnant with the first of three children. After a seven-year break, she has returned to her business.

For months after the busts, she kept her .38 revolver on the shower ledge. Once, she almost drew down on her husband when he surprised her in the tub. She locks away the guns now.

Her kids know Mom was a cop, but they’ll have to wait to see her videotaped TV appearances, or to read “Chain of Evidence.”

“They won’t be reading the book for at least a couple more years,” she says. “Oh, Lord, no. But I’ll save an autographed book for them. Autographed, ‘From Mom.’ ”

As for Cliff Mowery, he left too, bound for a job in the Oklahoma oil fields. But he later returned and “died in a mysterious motorcycle accident,” the book’s publicist says in a dramatic whisper.

“Chain of Evidence” ends with Mowery’s death in an apparent freeway motorcycle crash, but the implication is clear: It might have been a hit on an informant. But there is no proof of that.