Alex Caine, before he became a best-selling author, used to wake up every morning and dress himself in lies. And then he would venture out into a day that, every day, had a better-than-average chance of being his last. Caine used to be what is known as a contracted agent. A professional infiltrator. An inside man. Not the line of work most would choose if they actually expected to, one day, enjoy their RRSPs. To hear him tell it, he didn't have much in the way of choice.

Though a Canadian originally from Hull, Quebec, Alex Caine (almost certainly not his real name) served with U.S. Forces in Vietnam. His experience there would prove to be the start of a 30-year journey as a contracted agent. "I was in the Marine Corps," Caine told me at a downtown Montreal coffee shop last week, "and when I got out I was kind of messed up and ended up coming back to Vancouver and getting into a bit of trouble, because it was 1971... everybody was getting in trouble. So I ended up going to jail."

Caine found himself in a federal penitentiary serving 20 months for marijuana possession. "But I did well in jail because it's a male, macho environment. And because I had just come out of the service, I fit in like a glove." Upon his release, Caine was approached by former fellow inmates with Asian gang connections to help them develop heroin distribution centres eastward, into Quebec, where Caine's facility with French, as well as his loyalty while incarcerated, made him a valuable asset.

He worked as an enforcer until he found himself dragged ever deeper into their crew, their world. Caine, who had now returned to university, wanted out. They made it clear they wanted him in, and it was not an option. Long story short, Caine contacted police and was eventually convinced to work as a paid agent, supplying information that would two years later hamstring the distribution network and lead to the seizure of $14-million worth of heroin, a record at the time. "That's a lot of junk, eh?" Caine quips.

Caine suddenly found his services in (very lucrative) demand by a wide variety of law enforcement agencies in need of a capable inside man, and he subsequently took a three-month general identification job infiltrating "these bad guys called the Bandidos" while he awaited the go-ahead on a longer-term case in Bangkok relative to his Asian expertise.

Despite the fact that "I'd never been on a bike in my life," as Caine recounts, three months turned into three years, during which time Caine became not only a full-patch member, but also the national secretary treasurer and, somewhat hilariously, official photographer of the world's second largest outlaw motorcycle club. "I took their pictures and I kept their books," Caine says with a chuckle. "Can you imagine? So we knew exactly how much money they had and who was moving it because I took their pictures. It worked really well!"

When the Bangkok case was finally ready to proceed, Caine was too entrenched in the Bandidos to take the job. "The funny thing is, the guy they sent to replace me [in Bangkok] ended up getting killed. Somebody blew his cover and they shot him and threw him off the back of a truck in the middle of traffic."

The aforementioned history is chronicled in Caine's critically acclaimed first novel, 2008's Befriend and Betray: Infiltrating the Hells Angels, Bandidos and Other Criminal Brotherhoods (Random House). Prior to the publishing of Befriend and Betray, however, Caine was already well into work on a comprehensive history of the Bandidos, an endeavour that was hijacked after eight members of the Toronto chapter of the Bandidos were executed on a farm just outside London, Ontario, on April 7, 2006, by fellow Bandidos from Winnipeg. It remains the largest mass murder in Ontario history.

As it happens, Caine got hired to work as the sole investigator for the London Legal Aid defence team of the six accused in the deaths of their former compatriots. What Caine discovered comprises the bulk of his surprising, occasionally stomach-turning and hugely readable new release, The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club (Random House).

"I started finding out all kinds of stuff, but the Crown didn't want to hear it and the cops didn't want to hear it," says Caine. "It would have gotten so complicated that the jury would have been a mess. [The prosecution] wanted to stay focused on eight dead guys, six accused. The rest didn't matter."

As opposed to the Crown, which claimed Canadian Bandidos infighting as the sole motivation for the slaughter, Caine convincingly posits that the eight deaths were the result of an initial, inadvertent drug rip-off (with a huge Montreal hook), complicated by internecine conflict within the Bandidos, and an angry Hells Angels organization, with the tacit approval of an acquiescent American Bandidos, only too happy to engineer the elimination of their primary competition in Canada. And how all parties went about it, as Caine explains, was sheer evil genius (sorry, you're going to have to read the book).

Suffice it to say, according to Caine, "Guys are still dying over the [London] thing - two were killed last week, and one was killed the week before for having said the wrong things about all this trial stuff. So it still has far-reaching ramifications."

If Caine is nervous about his own personal "ramifications," after writing two tell-all novels about one of the world's most powerful criminal organizations, he doesn't let on.

"I'm not nervous about anything. If they find me, they find me. If I see them first, I'm fine. And if I don't, it won't matter, right? You're security conscious, but not security obsessed. Like, I'm here today, doing this interview, but by tonight I'll be gone and nobody knows where I'll be."

http://www.hour.ca/news/babylonpq.aspx?iIDArticle=18731