For more than two decades, Scott Payne lived in the shadows. As an undercover FBI agent, he infiltrated violent biker gangs and white-supremacist networks. These were criminals who trusted him, laughed with him, and would have killed him if they knew his true identity.
Payne joined the FBI in 1998, having worked as a police officer in South Carolina for five years. Over the next 23 years, he built false identities so convincing that criminals treated him as one of their own. He earned invitations to secret gang meetings, shared beers with white supremacists, and watched as men planned murders in front of him.
He said the work demanded patience, confidence, and nerves of steel. It also required luck. Twice, Payne’s cover was nearly blown. Both times, he thought he was about to die.
The night bikers ordered him to strip naked
Courtesy of Scott Payne
In 2005, Payne was deep inside the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in Brockton, Massachusetts. For months, he’d been posing as a tattooed Southerner named “Tex,” slowly winning over members in bars and strip clubs.
Then one night, a gang member led him into a basement during a private meeting with multiple bikers, where he was essentially accused of being a cop.
“They brandished their weapons,” Payne told Business Insider’s Kevin Reilly. One of the men said to him: “It’s my job to protect my brothers. I need you to take all your clothes off. I need you to write down your full name, your address, your kids’ names, your wife’s name.” They used it to cross-check his information online.
As he stripped, Payne handed over his clothes that had a hidden wire. If they found it, he’d be dead.
“Being stripped in a basement at gunpoint is not a big deal if you’re not wired, you’re just naked. It’s uncomfortable. It’s cold. When you’re wired, it’s a big deal,” Payne said.
In the end, the biker who searched his clothes didn’t find the hidden wire, and Payne walked out alive. “A lot of people ask me, ‘What would you have said if he would have found it?’ And to this day, I remember it like it was yesterday. I got two responses,” Payne said.
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One was “I don’t know.” The second was a bluff: “The gig is up. I’m an undercover FBI agent. I can walk out of here, and we can see each other in court.”
The test that could have exposed his FBI cover
Fourteen years later, Payne faced another near miss with death — this time with “The Base,” a violent white-supremacist group operating out of Georgia and founded in 2018.
When Payne arrived for a meeting one day, a young recruit pulled out a handheld scanner that could detect hidden transmitters.
As he waved it over the back of Payne’s truck, the device started shrieking right where the FBI had planted a tracking beacon.
“I thought we were getting ready to throw down,” Payne said. “I’m like, here we go.”
Then, by sheer luck, another member noticed nearby power lines and suggested that’s what may have caused the device to go haywire. The young recruit tested the theory, and the scanner went wild again.
The group blamed the power lines for the interference and moved on. Payne walked away unscathed, again.
Saving lives
Courtesy of Scott Payne
Payne had spent months infiltrating “The Base.” In late 2019, he said he watched its members start planning real killings.
“We uncovered several murder plots that Luke wanted to bring me in on,” Payne said, referring to Luke Lane, a group leader. “They had found a couple that they believed were an Antifa couple in a couple of counties away, and they wanted to murder ’em.”
Payne said he pretended to agree to keep his cover, telling them the Antifa couple plot would be “good practice.”
Then, he helped coordinate the sting that stopped it.
He picked Lane up for what was supposed to be lunch. “I feigned that my truck had had issues and pulled over on the side of the road, got out to work on my truck, and then that’s when another truck came over.”
Meanwhile, the SWAT team was coming over the hill. As they approached, Payne said he jumped in the other truck, which then drove off. “They take down Luke without incident.” The arrests ended the plot before anyone was killed.
Staying calm under pressure
Courtesy of Scott Payne
Payne retired from the FBI in 2021, but he hasn’t stopped trying to help.
He now trains law enforcement teams on domestic terrorism cases and has written a book, “Codename Pale Horse: How I Infiltrated America’s Nazis.”
What saved him during his time undercover, Payne said, is what agents and investigators need now: calm under pressure, patience, and an ability to read people.
For all the dangers he faced, Payne said the work is still worth doing because the threats he once saw face-to-face haven’t gone away.
“Do I believe that white supremacy in the domestic-terrorism realm is probably the most violent and most dangerous? Yes,” he said, adding that the challenge for investigators is identifying threats before they move.
