New York Times by Mark Binelli 2/23/2022
How 177 arrests led to no convictions — a tangled, seven-year tale of prosecutorial hubris and tenacious defense.
If you ask Paul Looney, a Houston defense attorney, about the Twin Peaks biker case, he’ll tell you there’s one person who knows more about it than anyone else alive: his trial-preparation specialist, Roxanne Avery. An entire wall of her home office in Norman, Okla., is covered with wallet-size mug shots of the nearly 200 bikers arrested, as well as photographs of the nine men who died that day, seven years ago, after a violent brawl in a Waco parking lot. Each picture is layered with Post-it Notes and details about the subjects: ages, road names (Cheech, Chain, Drama, Sidetrack, Saint, Mad Dog, Pee Paw, Bubba, Bubba Earl, Bashful, Yogi, Reno, Creeper, Grumpy Dan), club affiliations, ranks, descriptions of injuries (“Bullet entered neck, partially exited”; “Paralyzed from the waist down”; “DEAD”) and any other pertinent information (“I met him March 2018”; “9mm Glock”; “U.S. Army — 2 tours Iraq”; “Convicted felon”; “Shot dog?”; “Did not see anything”; “Graduate Baylor University w/ English degree”). Point to a random photograph, and Avery will generally be able to squint and tell you something about the biker in question.
“There’s a rumor that he killed somebody,” she said one morning two years ago, tapping a face. “I don’t think it’s true. I know these guys.” She wore a large black onyx ring and brilliant cherry red lipstick; one of her Chihuahuas, Bonnie, padded by in a white dress with a red bow. Moving to a large computer monitor, Avery began to click through crime-scene photographs, many of them graphic close-ups of dead bodies. “So he’s got a gunshot wound that you see is in his face and his eye,” she noted, pausing at a particularly grisly image. “The other one entered through his back and exited out.”
In Avery’s home office.
Avery and her boss make a colorful duo. Looney speaks in a mellifluous Texas drawl, wears bolo ties and cowboy boots and pilots his own plane to court hearings outside Houston. “I’ve always been this close to being a criminal myself,” he told me. “I could have either become a Mafioso don or a criminal defense lawyer, but there was no place that I could apply my personality effectively except those two places.” Looney has appeared before courts in 41 states; he has done “a whole bunch of work” for drug cartels, he explained, and their people get arrested all over the country. Avery likes to make “Better Call Paul” jokes.
They met in 2002, when Avery needed a lawyer herself. After her husband, an OB-GYN, died of a heart attack, she hired other doctors and continued to own and operate his clinic — until a competitor reported her to local authorities for practicing medicine without a license. Her best friend put her in touch with Looney, who flew out and cleared up the matter. Avery began to work for him in 2013, writing news releases and sitting second chair at trial as his discovery expert. She was initially put off by the idea of defending people who might well be guilty. But she had always been drawn to true-crime stories — her grandparents’ farm in Kansas wasn’t far from the Clutters’, made infamous by “In Cold Blood,” and her mother used to tell her stories about how nobody in town liked Truman Capote — so the job wound up suiting her.
She was the one who told Looney about the Waco brawl in the first place. In May 2015, the bikers were gathering for a meeting of the Texas Confederation of Clubs and Independents, a coalition of motorcycle enthusiasts that lobbies the state government over things like helmet laws. These meetings were typically low-key affairs; the Waco event was planned for 1 p.m. on a Sunday, at a Hooters-style chain restaurant called Twin Peaks, where the waitresses wear lumberjack-plaid halter tops. But this meeting was preceded by rumblings of an escalating feud between two of the state’s biggest “outlaw” motorcycle clubs, the Cossacks and the Bandidos.
Moments after the Bandidos arrived at Twin Peaks, a fistfight broke out, followed by gunfire, then utter havoc. One Waco police officer described the aftermath as looking like something “out of a video game.” Bloodstained concrete. Guns, knives, brass knuckles and batons scattered across the scene. Nine dead, 20 wounded. “In 34 years of law enforcement,” a spokesperson for the Waco Police Department told reporters, it was “the most violent crime scene I have ever been involved in.” The police ended up arresting 177 bikers, an event described in this newspaper as “what appears to be the largest roundup and mass arrest of bikers in recent American history.”
The event quickly became a national story. Like the average news consumer, Looney first reacted to all this with astonishment: Sunday afternoon, gunfire everywhere, nine dead?
But as he followed the narrative over the next week, he became suspicious. The 177 arrests seemed awfully high, and all the bikers, regardless of the evidence against them, were slapped with identical felony charges and million-dollar bonds. “I just couldn’t believe it,” Looney told me. “It defied credibility.” While the D.A.’s office issued news releases and mug shots of the bikers were splashed across newspapers throughout the state, Looney said he “saw nobody stepping forward to counter the narrative,” one that was “completely damning” the accused. “And I just felt like somebody needed to get in there with a bunch of resources and change the narrative and get to the bottom of what’s happening.”
The following weekend, Houston experienced catastrophic flooding, which closed the courthouses and suddenly freed up Looney’s schedule. “So I gathered up Roxanne and told her: ‘Let’s go to Waco. We’ve got to find a client,’” Looney recalled. Avery, who remembers herself being the instigator of the trip, worked her phone over the course of the three-hour drive, eventually making contact with the mother of a man named William English, who was arrested in the roundup along with his wife, Morgan. William was 33, a laid-off welder and Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq. His motorcycle club, the Distorted, had seven total members. His only previous arrest was for driving under the influence; Morgan had no criminal record. Because of bad weather, they drove to the C.O.C. meeting in a Nissan Sentra. They hadn’t even put their names on the restaurant wait-list yet when the shooting started.
More:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/magazine/waco-biker-shootout.html
