I knocked out two of them. I started with the sergeant-at-arms and knocked him out, and then Johnny Sombrero chased me down the field with a log.
BERNIE GUINDON
Canada’s best-known biker in the early 1960s was a square-shaped man from Toronto named Harry Barnes, who demanded that people call him “Johnny Sombrero,” “Chief,” “Boss,” “Supreme Commander” or, if they were in his inner circle, “Sombrero.” He’d grown up in the Junction area of west Toronto. He recalled his childhood as “violent, very violent,” even in preschool. “I nailed my first customer when I was four years old,” Sombrero said. “I was in kindergarten, making a little castle with my blocks. He kept pushing them over. They were little maple blocks with ABCs on them. I picked one up and conked the kid over the head with it.”
In the Barnes household, Harry’s mother was the one to be feared. She was a member of the Italian Commisso clan. Many of their relatives were active in organized crime. Harry’s father, an Englishman from the North Country, was more restrained. He was socially isolated after marrying into his wife’s tightly knit family. She lived to be a hundred while his father didn’t make it to retirement age before falling dead from asthma over his morning newspaper.
When Harry’s kindergarten teacher called, his mother immediately took charge, lecturing the teacher on the proper way to handle her boy: “You can’t touch his toys when he’s playing with something. You leave him alone.” Then she dealt with Harry. “My mother was very violent,” Sombrero recalled. “She used to beat the shit out of me. She told me every day of my life she was going to kill me…She hit me with her hand and hurt her hand. Kicked me and hurt her foot. Then she went for the rolling pin.”
Years later, a judge asked Sombrero, “Do you fear any man?”
“I fear no man and only one woman,” he replied.
Sombrero was just entering puberty when the soldiers returned from World War II. The thought of men bonding over violence appealed to him. Highways were becoming a big thing and he wanted to be a part of that action too. He and a group of his teen buddies joined a bike club called the Humber Valley Riders, despite a serious age gap between Sombrero’s friends and the club’s leaders. “We were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. They were forty-four, forty-five.”
All of the Riders wore matching silk shirts while on public runs. In the right light, they looked a bit like cowboys riding together in the Rose Parade. In the wrong light, they looked like they got lost on their way to a square dance.
When the club set up a branch called the women’s auxiliary to allow the wives of its middle-aged members to meet, Sombrero couldn’t stomach it any longer. He led a splinter group of a dozen or so teens into a new club he called the Black Diamond Riders. Sombrero also took to calling himself the “Supreme Commander,” a reference to Dwight D. Eisenhower and his role as supreme commander of Allied forces at the end of World War II. As it was in the military, Sombrero had no desire to make his club democratic. “I don’t care what you say,” he told members. “It’s done my way or it’s not done.”
Powerfully built, Sombrero stood around five foot ten and carried 245 pounds on a barrel-shaped frame (“I’ve got muscles bulging out of me everywhere”). He rode a Harley chopper with squared-off, galvanized sheet metal mufflers that obviously didn’t come from a dealership.
When he wasn’t riding his chopper, Sombrero cruised behind the wheel of a Cadillac. Sometimes he could be found living in a hotel, like a celebrity on tour. He brawled like a petulant star, too. He fought hard and dirty and often, but he prided himself on fighting only other bikers.
Some fights were so ferocious that Queen Street in Toronto had to be blocked off to accommodate the young thugs. When police intervened, Sombrero and his gang jumped on their bikes and barrelled away. Outrunning cops was exhilarating but no great challenge. The Toronto area was home to thirteen separate police forces who generally didn’t cross into each other’s jurisdictions. “The police forces couldn’t follow us. They had no power in those days…We used to outrun them.”
In 1956, Sombrero took notice when a new club called the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club appeared on Niagara Street in downtown Toronto. “The first time I invaded their clubhouse, I had to. They were invading our property.” That’s when the “beer bounties” began. Sombrero gave a case of brew to any member who could strip a Satan’s Choice member of his club crest, the “colours” on the back of his vest. “The guys used to go hunt them down like animals.”
In time, Sombrero forced the Satan’s Choice off the road. Then Sombrero reconsidered and let them return, reasoning that they would distract the police and make life easier. “If the cops bother them, they are not bothering us.”
Sombrero often travelled with a goon or two by his side. They sometimes carried violin and guitar cases, although these hadn’t been recruited from any music conservatory. The cases, he said, held Thompson submachine guns from his private collection, since he was a licensed gunsmith with a legal stash of military firearms. As if the goons and violin cases weren’t unsettling enough, Sombrero adopted an unlikely club mascot: a fluffy white bunny rabbit. The club’s five-acre property at Steeles Avenue and Dufferin Street in north Toronto was complete with a swimming pool and groundhog burial site. “We had five acres of land. We had rabbits, foxes, pheasants by the dozens, groundhogs.”
When Sombrero first met Guindon, he was freshly inducted into the Golden Hawks. Sombrero announced to the teenager that he expected to be called “Supreme Commander.” Sombrero later admitted that this was a tad provocative. “The word ‘supreme’ is a little heavy,” he allowed.
Guindon declined and told Sombrero to get fucked instead. Not surprisingly, things between them went immediately downhill.
Guindon had an uneasy feeling when Sombrero and his “BDR” arrived in force at a field day in 1961. Beside the Pebblestone Golf Course, in what is now the village of Courtice, east of Oshawa, the Golden Hawks had turned a barn into their clubhouse and invited a number of other clubs to the field day. Among them were the Para-Dice Riders from Toronto, the Canadian Lancers from Scarborough, the Vagabonds from Toronto, and local car clubs like the Spacemen and Nomads.
Sombrero recalled his club winning a lot of motorcycle skills events and expected to be rewarded accordingly. Then they realized what kind of prizes were up for grabs. “They didn’t have a trophy for us. They wanted to give us a can of Castrol 50.” The master of ceremonies wasn’t helping. “Son of a bitch swung a chord at me with a microphone on it.”
Guindon was already nursing two black eyes and a broken nose from a beating he took the previous week in Grand Bend when he tried to punch his way through three guys. As the Black Diamond Riders got angrier, Guindon pulled on his helmet, anticipating the worst. Then he warned the president of the Oshawa chapter of the Golden Hawks that things were going to get nasty. “Bill wouldn’t listen to me,” Guindon recalled. “He said they wouldn’t do that in a field day.” Guindon was astonished at the senior biker’s naïveté. “They were out in the bush cutting trees and branches and whatever they could use to beat us with!”
Once they had gathered sufficient lumber, Sombrero’s men attacked. “I knocked out two of them,” Guindon said. “I started with the sergeant-at-arms and knocked him out, and then Johnny Sombrero chased me down the field with a log. I wasn’t going to stand around waiting until he hit me. I ran.”
Armed as they were with branches and tree trunks, the Black Diamond Riders were in the minority that day, while the Golden Hawks had plenty of Oshawa auto workers on their side. “There was about sixteen of us there plus a few Vagabonds, who were always on our side,” Sombrero recalled. “We were fighting half of GM.”
Sombrero remembered the enemy coming in waves. “They were up on a hill. They kept sending down fifteen at a time to fight us. We were polishing them all off.” Then skinny, teenaged Guindon reappeared, carrying a massive pile of lumber he had torn off the barn. “This kid came up on me with half a barn,” Sombrero said. The planks teetered and then fell onto the Black Diamond Riders. “He almost suffocated us all,” Sombrero said. “He turned around and he ran like a deer…I thought, That’s good. I don’t have to kill that little kid.”
The melee became known in biker circles as the “Battle of Pebblestone.” One of the Hawks suffered a broken arm while another was treated in hospital for a blow-induced blood clot on his brain. Sombrero followed up the beating by bashing the Golden Hawks’ bikes and burning down the barn. They were all lucky no one was killed.
The victory made Sombrero even more arrogant and harder for his rivals to take. In 1962, he led the Black Diamond Riders down the western end of Toronto’s brand new Gardiner Expressway in formation, two abreast, heading the wrong way, which seemed wholly appropriate. The Gardiner hadn’t opened yet, so there was no traffic to spoil the rough pageantry.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Pebblestone, the Golden Hawks, Canadian Lancers, Nomads and Para-Dice Riders struck an alliance. They grandly called it the Amalgamated Riders Association, and under the terms of their mutual defence pact, all of the clubs kept their old colours and structure but now also wore two-inch round patches over their hearts with the letters “AR.”
Then Sombrero made what appeared to be a friendly overture to the local club with the coolest name, the Satan’s Choice, whose members included characters like Black Peter and Spaceman. They were all invited by the Riders to a party in their honour. Instead of offering cake and beer, however, the Riders pulled out guns and stripped them of their patches. It was the second time Sombrero forced the Satan’s Choice off the road in just a few years. “We took all their crests and told them they couldn’t exist any longer,” Sombrero said. “I wiped them out twice, the Choice.”
When the other clubs heard the news, they hung back and cringed, thankful they weren’t the ones suffering the humiliation. A surge of disgust cut through Guindon. He was eighteen and impatient for action. When none came, he quit the Golden Hawks and began calling them the “Chicken Hawks.” He washed his hands of the whole scene, moving to Quebec for a short time, where he competed in motorcycle ice racing and stunt riding.
Quebec was fun but Guindon couldn’t ignore a sense of responsibility toward his mother, who still couldn’t read or write in English. Oshawa was inevitable. When he returned, he took up with an attractive, religious teenager named Veronica, who lived in an area of the city where Guindon used to deliver newspapers. In short order, he got her pregnant. In November 1961, true to the practice of the time, he married her and then continued to have sex with any woman who would accommodate him. Their daughter was named Teresa.
Guindon’s mother told Suzanne Blais about the marriage, and Bernie’s old girlfriend saw it in a flattering light for him. “I wasn’t surprised. She was pregnant. He wanted to honour it. A lot of guys wouldn’t.”
Suzanne had plenty of her own problems. She underwent back surgery in December 1962 at Toronto General Hospital. The eight-hour operation to fuse her spine went horribly wrong. She was later told that her heart had stopped and she had to be revived during the operation. “I could hear the priest giving me the prayers,” she said. “My mom was crying.”
Five months later, in April 1963, Suzanne got married in Toronto. She and Guindon hadn’t seen each other since the previous year, just before he missed their date because of car trouble. If his car had stayed on the road that day, they might have married each other. Instead, they were each newly married to someone else. But Guindon was consumed not with thoughts of romance, but revenge.