Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America’s Nazis by Scott Payne (Review)
Although flawed in two significant respects, Code Name: Pale Horse is overall a thrilling and inspiring tale of a man who risked his life to put dozens of violent criminals behind bars.
Written by Scott Payne with Michelle Shephard
Narrated by Scott Payne
New York: Simon & Schuster, 2025
6 hrs 55 mins (audio), $14.99
Scott Payne (aka “the hillbilly Donnie Brasco”) is one of the most well-known and respected undercover law enforcement officers of his generation. When Payne retired in 2021—which meant that he no longer had to conceal his true identity—he finally was free to write his memoir, Code Name: Pale Horse: How I Went Undercover to Expose America’s Nazis. The book, although flawed in two significant respects, is overall a thrilling and inspiring tale of a man who risked his life to put dozens of violent criminals behind bars.
After a few minutes of listening to Payne speak, one realizes that he is a remarkable storyteller. His charismatic and easygoing personality, combined with his soothing baritone voice and flair for drama, made him a natural choice to narrate the audio version of his book. The book opens with selected stories from Payne’s youth that demonstrate his ability to quickly endear himself to nearly anyone—an ability that would later serve him well as an undercover detective.
The book has two significant flaws, one of which manifests in the first chapter and recurs consistently throughout the remainder. Payne is a devout Christian—which, in and of itself, doesn’t necessitate any negative evaluation of the book—but he injects his religious views into the story often enough to annoy some listeners. However, the stories he tells are usually more interesting than his religious soapboxing is distracting. In one especially memorable and impactful tale, a seventeen-year-old Payne is recruited by his high-school principal to discover who among the student body is routinely vandalizing the principal’s house and car. Payne recalls:
I guess he saw something in me beyond my ability to share a joke. . . . I wouldn’t say I was what you would call a popular kid at the school, but I moved around effortlessly, getting along with any group: the jocks, the musicians, the potheads, the smokers—hell, I could even talk to the Beta Club. I didn’t realize it in the moment—how could I?—but Mr. Walker had just given me my first undercover gig (ch. 1, 3:56).
Payne correctly identified the vandal and even managed to elicit a confession, setting him on the path to become one of the FBI’s most successful undercover agents.
During Payne’s first major undercover investigation, roughly twenty years later, he was tasked with infiltrating a motorcycle gang in Brockton, Massachusetts; this operation was dubbed Operation Roadkill. Throughout this investigation, Payne and his case team took daring, calculated risks time and again, valiantly placing themselves in situations in which a single wrong word or gesture could have subjected them to the immediate wrath of more than two dozen armed and violent gangsters. Especially admirable in this section are Payne’s frankness regarding his own mistakes and his willingness to correct them. He acknowledges that he made many tactical errors and that his family life suffered greatly during the investigation, but he learned from these experiences such that he was able to conduct future operations with less risk to himself and fewer negative impacts on his loved ones.
In this portion of the book, the second of its significant flaws starts to become prominent: Payne’s willingness to arrest and charge people whose only crimes were drug use and/or small-scale distribution of drugs to consenting adults. In a free society, drug use by adults would be legal; although usually unhealthy and irrational, it violates no one’s rights and is therefore not properly a crime. Granted, in most of the cases recounted in the book, Payne arrests people for drug use in addition to other activities that properly are crimes, such as assault, theft, and murder; this makes Payne’s complicity in enforcing improper laws less severe but not entirely forgivable. In a few instances, though, he admits to arresting people solely for drug use or possession. These sections would have been stronger had Payne wrestled with a difficult moral calculation with respect to his obligations as a law enforcement officer, but he discusses no such inner conflict in the book.
One of the book’s most fascinating and suspenseful stories concerns the approximate midpoint of Operation Roadkill. Eighteen months into the investigation of the motorcycle gang, Payne found himself cornered in a dingy basement by two armed bikers whose past crimes included assault and murder. Suspecting a “rat,” they informed Payne that he would be strip-searched. He writes:
I was equipped with my standard video and [audio] recording devices, as usual. As I’ve said previously, I can’t go into detail about exactly where they were on my body or what they looked like, but let’s just say a strip search definitely risked my cover. . . . Clothesline was kneading my jacket, running his hands up and down the sleeves, the buttons. If he had felt anything and asked, “What is this?,” I only had two responses. “I don’t know. Naked pictures of your old lady?” If that didn’t work, I only had one option left: “The gig’s up. I’m an undercover FBI agent. I can walk out of here and we can see each other in court, or all hell’s gonna break loose.” . . . Then he handed [my jacket] back, and just like that, it was over (ch. 5, 17:10).
Against the odds, Payne survived the strip search with his cover intact. The following year, Payne and his team successfully wrapped up Operation Roadkill, which culminated in a coordinated takedown in which fifteen members of the Outlaws motorcycle gang were arrested while trying to purchase illegal weapons and drugs from a Mexican cocaine cartel. Such large, complex takedown operations are exceptionally dangerous and difficult, but no one was injured or killed during the arrests, which speaks volumes to the professionalism, tactical intelligence, and overall competence of the agents involved. Many of the bikers were charged with assault, grand larceny, and/or conspiracy to commit murder. All fifteen pleaded guilty and received sentences of seven to twenty-one years.
Overall, the section of the book that covers Operation Roadkill is suspenseful and gripping despite being somewhat longer and more detailed than necessary; Payne clearly is a skilled detective, actor, and narrator. However, it also contains a few short stories that warrant further moral criticism of Payne to some extent. In two of these stories, Payne says that he genuinely befriended criminals he was investigating and regretted having to arrest them. These were not men whose only crime was drug use—both had numerous past criminal convictions for assault, theft, and conspiracy, and in both cases Payne knew that all along. Justice demands that those who initiate force (especially violence) against others be unequivocally condemned and punished, not befriended. Payne’s admission that he considered these men his friends is concerning and damages his character, although he ultimately did his job by arresting and charging them.
The final section of Code Name: Pale Horse, which concerns the operation that inspired the book’s title, is the shortest. Its brevity is somewhat disappointing because it is the most interesting section of an overall captivating book. In the final case of Payne’s career, he infiltrated The Base, to date one of the most violent and dangerous neo-Nazi groups of the 21st century. Whereas most neo-Nazi groups merely spout hateful rhetoric online, The Base is a small but well-armed group of militant insurrectionists with cells in many countries, and many of its members have committed violent crimes. Payne infiltrated an American cell of The Base whose members fully intended to commit mass murder—and almost certainly would have done so had Payne and his team not stopped them. He recounts a chilling tale of a “camping trip” (a code phrase for a planned double murder that would act as a “dry run” for a subsequent murder of dozens or hundreds of people):
[HelterBrand] had a few [operational security] questions about whether the couple had a security system and noted how loud pistols could be, offering to bring solvent traps to act as a silencer. Then he asked if the couple had children. Lane confessed that he didn’t know but added that, if there were [children], he would probably just leave them. “I mean,” HelterBrand responded, “I’ve got no problem killing a commie kid” (ch. 15, 19:30).
Fortunately, FBI agents were able to arrest six Base members in three states before any of the planned murders could take place, again valorously concluding the investigation without a single shot fired.
Although Code Name: Pale Horse is flawed in several ways that undermine both Payne’s character and the effectiveness of his storytelling to some extent, it would be unfair to level more than light criticism at him or at the book. He put dozens of murderers, would-be murderers, thieves, fraudsters, and rapists behind bars—undoubtedly saving many lives in the process—and these heroic achievements of justice far outweigh his shortcomings. Overall, the book is well-written, and many of Payne’s stories are both fascinating and inspiring. (Because of Payne’s engaging narration, I highly recommend the audiobook in particular.) Crime drama fans will appreciate Code Name: Pale Horse, as will anyone who values justice, heroism, and thrilling storytelling.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.