Damon, men of mayhem hit the road

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basically stay high for the whole time. So, he started out cooking two weeks a year and then taking the rest of the year off. He would literally have a posse of people that he would make enough money off, during the two weeks of cooking. He was making about $300 000 a year and would hang out in Vegas for the rest of the year and live a normal life.

Then he got involved with this cocaine dealer and they took it to another level. I think he was cooking six to 10 months of the year. So, he was basically high the whole time and then he started getting paranoid.”

He continues: “I read everything I could possibly read on motorcycle gangs and informants. It really freaked me out, actually.

“During that research process, I got my agent to confirm with him what type of risk we were going to have. You could see how someone, who infiltrated three biker gangs, might have a bounty on him somewhere.

“I thought that if you were going out there and making fun of this or, not making fun of it, or representing it in a light that they didn’t approve of, was there any risk to you?

“Then I had around four or five conversations with the man himself before we started our first episode and, when we went to Arizona to shoot all the outdoor sequences, he came and met us. I got to hang out with him so it definitely informed the story in terms of the heightened awareness that he had, or the suspicion that he had of everyone.” What was the hardest scene to film? “Definitely the solitary,” he reveals. “We had a 50ft (15.2m) wooden wheel that was on railroad tracks and they set it up so that the solitary cell was within that wheel. So, it was built to be almost like a Salvador Dali painting. I would slide along the wall, then I would envision myself from different angles, haunting myself with different characters and what not.

“You basically had to play his whole story with nothing, with just yourself, while you were spinning or sliding along those cement walls. Emotionally, it was facing your darkest fears and also calling yourself to task.”

Gangland Undercover 2 airs on History (DStv channel 186) on Mondays at 9.20pm.