Waco melee probe falters
Three years later, cases against bikers go nowhere
WACO — It’s been three years since the bloodiest motorcycle gunbattle in Texas history — a melee at high noon featuring guns, chains, knives and even machetes — left nine bikers dead, 18 injured and 177 in jail.
There are still few answers about what happened on May 17, 2015, or why the Bandidos Motorcycle Club and the rival Cossacks went to war at a Twin Peaks restaurant in Waco as local and state police watched nearby.
But as Thursday’s deadline approaches for new charges, the aggressive law enforcement effort once billed as a crackdown on biker violence has instead devolved into a struggling investigation marred by lack of evidence, prosecutorial overreach and a lame-
duck district attorney’s office hobbled by unrelated allegations of corruption.
So far, not a single biker has been convicted of a crime. The only trial so far ended in December in a hung jury, with 10 jurors voting for dismissal of the conspiracy case against a Bandidos chieftain from Dallas.
And more than 150 criminal cases have been dismissed outright, including more than 60 just last week. A growing number of civil lawsuits seek millions of dollars in damages for bikers who lost their lives, their jobs or their resources.
Today, the beleaguered district attorney’s office is left with just two dozen criminal cases, including new charges of causing injury while inciting a riot, a far simpler crime to prove than the conspiracy to commit murder charges that were initially filed against so many. Several bikers also are charged with murder and tampering with evidence.
“They jailed them first and investigated second,” said Houston attorney Paul Looney, whose clients’ cases are among those dismissed. “They never had any evidence. There’s a handful of people who should have been jailed, but way over 100 shouldn’t have been handled as anything other than witnesses.”
The shootout continues to rock the criminal justice system and Central Texas politics. Republican District Attorney Abelino “Abel” Reyna, 45, who was admonished by a judge for using photographs of slain bikers in his re-election campaign, was easily defeated in the March primary by a Waco lawyer.
Reyna declined to comment about Twin Peaks or the recent charges. But defense attorneys say they will fight for more dismissals.
“Three years later the truth has come out,” said Dallas attorney Clint Broden, whose client’s case was shuffled to a special prosecutor and then dismissed. “The way this case was handled is a true tragedy from so many perspectives.”
Bloody Sunday
The saga began on a rainy spring Sunday with a gathering billed as an informational session on motorcycle safety and legislation.
Unknown to the public, however, law enforcement feared that two of the largest motorcycle gangs in Texas were about to settle up after more than a year of skirmishes and roadside fights. As nearly 300 bikers converged at the franchise restaurant near the Baylor University campus, law enforcement officers — including an 11-member SWAT team — waited nearby in 10 police vehicles.
The Bandidos are considered one of the largest biker groups in the United States, and Texas is their home turf. But in recent years, the Cossacks, a smaller club with origins in East Texas, had been challenging that authority, according to an affidavit by Waco police officer Vincent Glenn.
“Cossacks threatened that Waco was a ‘Cossack’s town’ and nobody else could ride there,” Glenn said.
Some believe the confrontation stemmed from a simmering dispute over the right to display the word “Texas” on their leather jackets and vests. The Bandidos attempt to control which clubs can use a “Texas” patch on the back of their leathers, and the Cossacks were wearing it without approval.
Others say the gunfight may have started as a fracas in the bathroom. Some say it erupted after a biker drove over a rival’s foot. However it began, surveillance video shows a gun battle that raged from the parking lot onto the wide porches of the restaurant.
Bikers weren’t the only ones shooting, however. Ballistics would later show that four of the nine were slain by weapons fired by Waco police officers. Seven of the dead were members of the Cossacks, one was a Bandido and the ninth was unaffiliated.
Waco police were quick to characterize the bikers as out-of-towners up to no good.
“This isn’t your churchgoing crowd that came out to have dinner with the family,” said Waco Police Sgt. Patrick Swanton, days after the shootout. “This is a gang-oriented criminal element that was in our city to conduct criminal activity.”
Eyewitness or shooter?
Cody Ledbetter, 29, a former member of the Cossacks gang who lives near Waco, rented a car and drove to the Twin Peaks meeting that day because his arm was in a sling. His stepfather, a Cossacks leader named Daniel “Diesel” Boyett, 44, met him there.
He says the fight began as members of the Bandidos and Cossacks began taunting each other in the parking lot.
“Next thing I know, a punch gets thrown, and then I hear a pop and everyone just kind of stopped and looked around,” Ledbetter said recently, standing in the parking lot for the first time since that day. “And then I heard another one. And another one. And we all literally ran toward the wall and there was a pile-up.”
As bullets zinged past, he looked back to see his stepfather drop among the rows of parked motorcycles.
“I thought he took cover,” he said.
Ledbetter got inside the restaurant and crouched next to a steel cooler.
“All you hear is shot after shot after shot, and you see people dropping, you see people falling over,” he said. “Then it all stopped. Cops came with suppressed weapons, with suppressed AR-15s, with tactical scopes.”
He said police rounded everyone up, put most in zip ties and sat them on tailgates of pickup trucks at the rear of Twin Peaks.
“When they walked us out the front door, I saw my dad, he was laying on the concrete,” Ledbetter recalled. “There was blood running down the parking lot.”
Ledbetter eventually was transported with more than 100 other bikers to the county’s convention center where they waited overnight to be processed into jail cells. Ledbetter said he spent more than 24 hours bound, his hands secured with plastic zip ties.
His stepfather was among those shot by police, he said. The officers were cleared of wrongdoing.
Ledbetter returned to the same parking lot in April and sat on the curb next to the parking space where he last saw his dad. He quietly wiped his eyes, hidden behind mirrored sunglasses.
“That where my dad’s body was,” he said. “I just had to see it.”
After the shooting, Ledbetter quit the Cossacks, the club that his dad helped lead. He said he was shaken by what happened.
Reyna’s office dismissed criminal charges against him in March.
Questions raised
Defense attorneys are not the only ones raising questions about the Waco prosecution. Johnny Holmes, the no-nonsense Harris County district attorney for two decades, was sharply critical of how the Waco case has been handled.
“You’ve got to prove who the bad egg is,” Holmes said. “You can’t just say I’m going to put all the chickens in jail.”
And while Holmes said he had not studied the case, he said the recent flood of dismissals tells him the initial arrests were likely an overreach.
“It’s not about the numbers. If you can prove that 177 people committed crimes, you don’t dismiss them because of the numbers. Or, at least, I wouldn’t,” Holmes said. “The truth is, they probably didn’t commit a crime.”
Reyna defended the charges even after dismissing an initial group of cases in February.
“These dismissals should not be considered an exoneration of the individual defendants or the gangs they belong to,” he said.
Reyna oversaw the only case that has has gone to trial, a $680,000 affair that ended with Dallas Bandido Jake Carrizal walking out of the courthouse after 10 out of 12 jurors said he was not guilty, resulting in a mistrial. He was re-indicted last week on a first-degree riot charge, which carries a maximum punishment of life in prison.
Defense attorney Casie Gotro, who represented Carrizal, said Reyna remains under a cloud of suspicion on unrelated allegations he fixed cases for friends and political supporters.
“It just stinks,” Gotro said. “Reyna is dismissing cases to avoid any hearing where his former assistant and former assistant DA were going to testify against him. He doesn’t want that to happen. They are going to testify that justice was for sale.”
Lame-duck prosecutor
Reyna, a 45-year-old Republican, was elected in 2010 after defeating longtime incumbent Democrat John Segrest.
A Waco native who earned his law degree from hometown Baylor University, Reyna worked as a defense attorney and law partner with Judge Matt Johnson, now one of the two district judges presiding over the Twin Peaks cases. The judge recused himself from one of the biker cases in October, but continues to preside over others.
Reyna has a notable legal lineage and is the son of retired Justice Felipe Reyna. The elder Reyna also was district attorney of McLennan County before serving on the 10th Court of Appeals.
Reyna has denied any wrongdoing. Before the election, Reyna held a press conference saying “motorcycle gang defense attorneys” were blaming him for delays and unrelated allegations of case fixing.
Critics, however, say that in the crucial hours immediately after the biker shootout, Reyna instructed Waco police to not only question but arrest nearly everyone at the scene.
Reyna was trounced in the March GOP primary by attorney Barry Johnson. The Democrat who filed for the position has suspended his campaign, but another attorney is hoping to make an independent bid for the seat in November.
Johnson said the investigation was botched.
“The investigation was hijacked from the experts, the crime scene investigators,” Johnson said. ‘Bikers aren’t lowlifes’
At a biker bar 90 miles south of Waco, Cyndi Smith is tired of hearing the stereotypes about bikers.
“There were some bad people out there that day, but not the majority of them,” she said on a recent Thursday afternoon, lighting a Carnival cigarette after opening Cyndi’s Hawg Hangout, a bar she established a decade ago.
“Bikers aren’t lowlifes. They aren’t high school dropouts. There were engineers there,” she said. “You can’t be a bum and live this lifestyle. I have a $38,000 bike.”
The smoky hall has a horseshoe bar and exposed wooden rafters adorned with biker flags. It is at the bottom of a steep slope off the side of Highway 21, between Bastrop and BryanCollege Station.
Smith has been a member of the Line Riders, an independent club, since 2005. She looks at the inked sleeve of tattoos on her left arm to double-check the date she joined.
Her husband, who joined three years after she did, is the current president and was at the shootout. He was arrested and bailed out after several weeks. His case has been dismissed.
Smith was not at Twin Peaks because her bar holds church services every Sunday at 11 a.m.
“No alcohol is served,” she laughed.
Looking ahead
The legal wrangling is likely to continue for years as civil lawsuits wind through the system.
Dallas attorney Don Tittle, who represents about 115 of the Twin Peaks plaintiffs, said the county’s liability is “astronomical.”
“Their lives were turned completely upside down, lost jobs, paid tons of money to lawyers, bail bondsmen, you name it,” Tittle said. “Having a murder charge where you could go to prison for the rest of your life hanging over your head for three years, that never should have been filed, is the real damage.”
The problem, he said, was that officials saw that the bikers were mostly from out of town and treated them like criminals.
McLennan County Judge Scott Felton, the county’s chief financial officer, said he hopes the wave of criminal dismissals will nullify most of the lawsuits.
“A lot of these cases are being dismissed by the DA, which could hopefully eliminate the risk of a civil case being tried,” Felton said. “So, we’re not sure what our liability may be.”
He believes the county’s insurance and “strong financial state” will mitigate the risk of a massive hit to the county’s coffers.
Felton said the enormous tab from Carrizal’s trial for security, indigent defense and other costs was largely picked up by a “county essentials grant” from the state. He said fears of biker protests drove costs up for the first trial. Any subsequent trials would cost less.
“I guess it’s unfortunate that we’re in the central location on I-35 that made it accommodating for a meeting of statewide groups,” he said. “While we work hard to do the hotel and visitor marketing to get people to come here and meet, that’s one group we weren’t marketing to, I can promise you that.”