Wheeling & Dealing: Former Outlaws MC Boss ‘Mad’ Yager Accepts Plea, Avoids Life In Prison

One-time Midwest biker boss Randy (Mad Dog) Yager of the Outlaws has foregone his long-awaited RICO trial in Milwaukee federal court, instead choosing to plead guilty to the array of racketeering charges against him in return for the promise of a 15-year term behind bars. The menacing-looking Yager, the former president of the Outlaws’ Gary, Indiana chapter and man in charge of the club’s entire “Windy City Region,” which included Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin, was apprehended in Mexico in late 2014 after 17 years on the run dodging a federal indictment.

Yager was facing life in prison if he had gone to trial and was convicted. Previously, he had served prison time for a pair of assaults (one on a cop) committed in the 1980s. His sentencing hearing in his current racketeering case is scheduled for August.

Back in the 1990s, Yager, 60, was a top-ranking national administrator, considered a trusted confidant and enforcer for the club’s then-international president Harry (Taco) Bowman, the iconic American biker luminary locked up for the better half of the last two decades. According to court records, in 1994 in a meeting at Bowman’s fortified Outlaws compound in Michigan, Bowman personally assigned Yager the duty of launching and leading a firebombing campaign against the Hell’s Henchmen, a’ “sub-club” of bitter-rival the Hells Angels trying to establish inroads in Chicago.

That same year, Bowman and Yager were involved in what turned out to be a fatal brawl between Outlaws and Hells Angels erupting at an upstate New York race track and leaving members of each club dead: Hells Angel Michael (Mad Mike) Quale was stabbed to death, Outlaws’ Western New York leader Walter (Buffalo Wally) Posnjak was shot to death. Yager was pulled over by New York State Police in the minutes following the melee and found Quade’s blood-stained Hells Angel vest in the backseat of Yager’s vehicle. Yager’s bodyguard and passenger that day in September 1994, Donald (Big Don) Fogg, was slain months later, allegedly for bragging about stabbing Quale.

Both “Mad” Yager – his nickname was often shortened by club members – and the Detroit-headquartered Taco Bowman were indicted in 1997 and fled. Bowman was caught in the summer of 1999 hiding in an east side suburban Detroit residence, turned in by a girlfriend of his. Yager alluded authorities until October 2014 when he was arrested at a bar in Rosarito, Mexico, a beach community in the country’s Baja region he had been living with his common-law wife Margie Jelovic for the previous dozen years or so.

Jelovic was killed in a high-speed car chase with police the same day Yager was taken into custody. Yager’s older brother and fellow Northwest Indiana Outlaw MC member Gerald was murdered last June, discovered in his set-ablaze Gary, Indiana home handcuffed to a bed post, badly beaten and his throat slit.

Multiple sources in law enforcement peg Mad Yager as a suspect in his big brother’s murder conspiracy. One source said Mad Yager had told people he believed his 68-year old brother might have tipped the FBI as to where in Mexico he was hiding.