Life as Hells Angel a perilous existence for ex-UA receiver

By Greg Hansen
 Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona
05.02.2006

The last time I talked to Jay Dobyns, maybe 1998, a chance meeting at McKale Center, he told me he was "neck deep in violent crime'' and someday I should write a book about it.
His arms were covered with menacing tattoos, one of them a skull. His head was shaved. He wore two earrings.

It was not the Jay Dobyns pictured on the cover of Arizona's 1984 football media guide.

I saw him four or five years later, idling on a very large, very loud motorcycle near Speedway and Craycroft. He had a pistol tucked into the back of his black leather pants. I could clearly see the gun as he sat at the stoplight. I looked away, hopeful he would not recognize me.

He looked more like a Hells Angel than a Hells Angel himself. I drove away thinking that someday soon I would be reading Jay Dobyns' obituary.

This was not the same man who once was pictured in 12-foot-high billboards all over Tucson, a marketing vehicle for the 1984 UA football season.

Upon graduation from Sahuaro High School in 1980, Dobyns caught 103 passes for the Wildcats. He was a personable and approachable athlete, an epitome of the toughness that defined Larry Smith's UA football teams. The latter-day Dobyns did not suggest toughness. He suggested violence.

Dobyns had been shot in the back at point-blank range in 1987, a hostage while on a Tucson undercover assignment for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It was his first week as an ATF agent. He should have died. It was in all the local papers.

But I naively assumed he would be given a nice settlement, a monthly disability check and go into something that did not involve bleeding.

Now we know that getting shot did nothing to change Dobyns' career plans. He is one of the lead subjects of a recently released book, "Angels of Death - Inside the Biker Gangs' Crime Empire." I read it over the weekend. It all but made me ill. Whatever the ATF pays Dobyns, it cannot possibly be enough.

The book's authors, Julian Sher and William Marsden, quote Dobyns as saying, "I'm not a worrier; it's not my thing.''

This from a man who, after recovering from his gunshot wound in 1988, was transferred to Chicago. In his first assignment, he was hit by a car; the man driving the car was shooting at Dobyns with a machine gun. After that, Dobyns successfully infiltrated the Calabrese organized-crime family.
Sher and Marsden write that both the Hells Angels and the Aryan Brotherhood have enlisted hit men to find and kill Dobyns. They write that Dobyns and his family have moved repeatedly, from safe house to safe house, from state to state, to dodge revenge-bent biker gangs that Dobyns infiltrated and the government indicted in 2004-05.

"The ATF would've had to look long and hard to find a better candidate than Jay Dobyns to penetrate the Hells Angels," Sher and Marsden write. "Everything about him was pure outlaw biker. His tall, lean, muscular body and his fiery, challenging eyes seem to warn you to keep back, this guy could explode. He had rings on every finger and chains around his neck."
Tom Mangan, public information officer of the Phoenix office of ATF, on Monday declined to comment on Dobyns and the book.

For several years, Dobyns was a Hells Angel. He lived their life. He attended their weddings and their birthday celebrations. Sometimes he would be gone from his wife and two children for a month at a time, all to gather evidence that would someday put a biker in jail.

"I could see my family slipping away," he says in the book. "My kids don't care that I'm trying to be a Hells Angel. My kids don't care that I was trying to impact crime in the community. All they want is for Dad to come home, to be there and love them. This kind of work eats families alive."

While a UA football player, Dobyns was a possession receiver. That is another way of saying he was willing to go across the middle and get hit. At the time, I thought the toughness thing was related strictly to Dobyns' zeal to be a football player. Now, upon reading "Angels of Death," I understand that the toughness thing is part of his being.

His obsession with catching footballs is probably unprecedented at the UA. He once estimated he had caught more than 10,000 passes as a young ballplayer, all so that he would be prepared for the Big Moment, such as his last-minute, game-winning catch to beat UCLA 27-24 in 1983.

His life as an ATF agent has a similar theme. He is obsessed not with catching footballs but with catching felons. The big difference for Dobyns is that this pursuit might never end.