Chapter 25
Bandidos Motorcycle Club Oklahoma
January 2001 To October 2001
When I returned to Tulsa at the end of January everyone in the Oklahoma chapter was immediately summoned to a long overdue meeting which was held on January 25th at Harry"Skip" Hansen's home in Muskogee. I had known Skip since I was a teenager and he had been an original member of the Oklahoma chapter when it was founded, but resigned six months later because of his disdain for Turtle and Joseph"Joe" Kincaid, and a minor conflict with Bandido Earthquake.
We were fairly certain that Joe, the chapter sergeant-at-arms, had been collaborating with the Oklahoma chapter of the Outlaws and his surreptitious activities could no longer be tolerated. We had also heard rumors that he had been manufacturing meth with former Bandido Buddy and was in the illicit drug business with some of the Outlaws.
Now that John “Turtle” Fisher was history and Joe was on his way out, Skip was willing to rejoin the chapter and chapter president Lee “Lee” McArdle had decided while I was in Canada that he would become a probationary member at the next meeting. As soon as it started, before Lee said a word, Joe quit the club. Satisfied that his departure was justified but not having the paperwork to prove our suspicions concerning his extracurricular activities, we voted to let him leave the club in good standings. Joe gave us all of his Bandido property, including his patch, and we said goodbye. Forty-five minutes later Skip was once again a probationary Bandido and the chapter sergeant-at-arms, which was the same position he had held in May of 1997 when the chapter was founded.
Our attention then turned to OK Rider George “George” Schuppan. On January 4th the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) had served a search warrant at George's home where they discovered a machine gun and a small amount of meth. After a short discussion concerning the circumstances surrounding his Caddo County arrest back in September of 2000 and the January 4th federal search warrant, it was decided that George would be expelled from the OK Riders. Bandido Charles “Snake” Rush was ordered to immediately locate George, collect his OK Rider patch and property, and tell him to never associate with anyone from the red and gold world again. He avoided Snake and the rest of us like the plague for the next thirty-three days, and no one was able to get their hands on George.
A few days later OK Rider James “Cub” Oleson's shop in Jones burned to the ground in the middle of the day while no one was home. In the garage were a dozen motorcycles in various stages of repair. One of the bikes was a fairly new Harley Softail that belonged to former OK Rider Edwin “Sixpack” Collins who was residing in the Oklahoma prison system. The majority of the bikes and the building weren’t insured, so the fire had a devastating financial impact. Cub was adamant the fire was arson and the Outlaws were responsible because he had been told that Outlaw Michael “Michael” Roberts had been seen at a local station filling five-gallon cans with gasoline not long before the fire started.
Cub had a strong desire to retaliate and get even with Michael and the Outlaws in whatever way he could as soon as possible, but needed permission from us to do so. Our relationship with the Oklahoma Outlaws at this point was strained to say the least, but no one wanted to start a major war with them unless we could prove the Outlaws were behind it, and a war with the Outlaws couldn’t be started if Michael had burned the garage down for personal reasons. Our investigation ultimately determined that the Outlaws chapter had nothing to do with the fire, but never disproved the theory that Michael had intentionally set the fire as a result of a personal dispute.
In February we hoped that 2001 was going to be a better year, and now that Joe, OK Rider George, and Earl “Buddy” Kirkwood were gone we thought there would be no more problems with the meth bullshit. Once again we grossly underestimated the power of methamphetamine, for we soon learned that George and his girlfriend Jean had been served with another search warrant, this time by an Oklahoma County drug task force. On February 27th at 5AM George had been caught in the act of manufacturing meth when the drug task force discovered a fully functioning lab in one of the bedrooms. During the raid his OK Rider patch was seized as evidence that the club was involved in the purchase, sale and manufacturing of methamphetamine—we were livid.
The most interesting aspect of the incident was that the officers called Delbert Knopp, who was an agent with the ATF, instead of taking him to jail. George told the task force that he was a confidential informant working for the ATF, and was manufacturing meth as part of a federal criminal investigation. Agent Knopp arrived on the scene shortly after daylight, took custody of George, and later that day had the charges dropped that were pending against his girlfriend while she was incarcerated in the Oklahoma County jail. It took us months to determine that George Schuppan was a big rat, and to gather the paperwork necessary to prove that he was cooperating with the federal government, which at the time was building a massive criminal case against the Oklahoma City chapter of the Outlaws.
