I remember my mother saying, “Get under the bed. Dad’s got the shotgun again.”
HOWARD DOYLE (PIGPEN) BERRY
In the summer of 1967, Canada’s celebratory centennial year, a biker named Rod MacLeod rode north to Wasaga Beach and announced himself to the Ontario biker world. The resort town on Georgian Bay, a two-hour ride north of Toronto, was a favourite summer spot. Another was Grand Bend on Lake Huron, less than an hour northwest of London. Married bikers tended to keep their wives away from both locales. “A lot of the girls would be there for summer holidays, weekend holidays,” Guindon said. “You’d pick up all the girls and take them riding on your bike.”
MacLeod impressed Guindon immediately for several reasons. There was his aura of leadership, easy sense of humour and willingness to scrap, even though he wasn’t much bigger than Guindon. His motorcycle chain wrapped around the front forks of his bike in a way that made it easy to detach and call into service—a biker had to be prepared to mix it up in MacLeod’s native Quebec, then home to some 350 clubs. The newcomer struck Guindon as the kind of guy he wanted beside him in a brawl. “He was solid,” Guindon said. “Didn’t take shit from nobody.”
However, the qualities that Guindon admired in MacLeod weren’t what most bikers first noticed about him. “He was the only black guy I ever saw riding a bike in those days,” Guindon said. “He rode a motorcycle and he liked the idea of a motorcycle club. There were clubs in Montreal, but they wouldn’t let him go because he was black.” MacLeod had clearly been riding for a while and knew what he was doing atop a Harley. “He liked pulling wheelies. He rode a Sportster. Rod was a good rider.”
MacLeod had a black friend from Montreal called “Jono.” Jono was a bank robber and an enthusiastic one at that. He once robbed two neigh-bouring banks on the same day. As investigators were checking out the first bank, Jono was just down the street, sticking up the second one.
Guindon was amused when MacLeod would tear into Jono verbally. “He would say, ‘Shut up, you fucking nigger!’ He wasn’t joking.”
MacLeod told Guindon that he wanted to start a Satan’s Choice chapter in Montreal, and Guindon thought he would be a good addition to the club. MacLeod brought with him twenty-five members who were black and white, French and English. Most of them were in their late teens and early twenties, and a few had jobs as electricians or truck drivers. Some of their girlfriends worked in factories or offices. For his part, MacLeod was an unemployed mechanic who lived in a garage with his dog, Satan.
Up to that point, all outlaw biker gang members in Canada had been white, and several clubs had specific policies that barred anyone of colour. Guindon sensed an opportunity to scoop up some overlooked talent.
Like other outlaw bike clubs, members of the Satan’s Choice often tattooed swastikas onto their flesh and wore Nazi helmets and Third Reich memorabilia like Iron Crosses. It wasn’t meant as a political comment. “We just wore that to blow peoples’ minds,” Guindon said. Some people, however, read a little more into the rude fashion statement. One was Martin Weiche, head of Canada’s National Socialist Party—or Nazis.
Weiche was a wealthy London, Ontario, real estate developer, white supremacist and friend of the Ku Klux Klan, and he liked to burn crosses with like-minded friends. During his youth in Germany, he belonged to the National Socialist Power Drivers Corps, a Nazi bike gang. After fighting for Germany in World War II as a pilot and a soldier, he immigrated to Canada in 1951 and amassed a small fortune in real estate. That gave him the funds to offer Guindon’s Satan’s Choice ten acres of land in an undisclosed location, in exchange for acting as the Canadian Nazi party’s bodyguards.
Guindon quickly squashed that idea. His Choice members might wear Nazi gear for shock value, but they still considered themselves Canadian patriots.
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On Labour Day weekend in September 1967, Guindon decided to hold what he grandly billed as the first annual Satan’s Choice national convention. The event site was a ramshackle farmhouse in Markham, north of Toronto, and more than three hundred delegates rode in from the club’s chapters in Windsor, Montreal, Preston, Kingston, Ottawa, Peterborough, Hamilton, St. Catharines, Guelph and Oshawa. Guindon’s mother attended and danced with members along to the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elvis and whatever else was filling the airwaves on popular radio.
On the Saturday night of the convention, the Vagabonds rode in as guests of honour. The clubs had made plans for a football game to take place the next day in Toronto’s Riverdale Park. Then, shortly before midnight, a couple dozen Markham police officers stormed the farmhouse. Officers were punched, kicked, spat upon and hit with flying beer bottles. After a “tactical withdrawal,” Markham deputy police chief Robert Hood called on the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) for reinforcements. Officers from Stouffville, Markham Village, Whitchurch, Vaughan, East Gwillimbury, Richmond Hill and Metro Toronto hastily assembled at the local police office in Buttonville. Then they drove down darkened country roads, with their lights out, to the farmhouse. Once assembled outside, Hood turned on his loudspeaker.
“This is the police,” he announced. “You are surrounded. Come out with your hands in the air.”
No one came out.
Then officers smashed through the farmhouse’s front and rear doors. Bikers leapt through windows to escape. One punched a cop hard and fled across a field. Others crawled on their bellies to freedom. Another curled up in an unlit basement furnace and waited for three hours until police left. Four bikers piled into a Cadillac before realizing that none of them had the keys. A cop coaxed them out by brandishing a tear gas grenade next to a cracked window and announcing, “Come out, or I’ll pull the pin and this comes in.” Other cops took billy clubs to bike lights and deliberately scraped custom paint jobs.
The evening could have gone far worse for the Choice. Fewer than a hundred delegates were at the farmhouse when police arrived. “Most had driven to Yorkville to get something to eat and pick up some fresh girls,” a biker later told the Toronto Daily Star.
Police confiscated marijuana, two hundred dollars and a hundred cases of beer, a sawed-off shotgun, baseball bats, spike-studded belts, bicycle and saw chains, axe handles, knives, brass knuckles, a whip, switchblades and a .32 revolver, which was found hidden inside a television console. They also scooped up a price list that stated potato chips and pop were fifteen cents, while beer and condoms cost twenty-five cents.
Among those arrested were Guindon, then twenty-five, and his nineteen-year-old second wife, Barbara Ann. Also arrested were Reg Hawke, thirty-four, of Oshawa (he of the dangerous canes), and Howard Doyle Berry, twenty-six, of Peterborough. Berry would later become infamous under his biker name of “Pigpen.” In a world that celebrated uniqueness and living life on its own terms, Pigpen was already something of a legend.
Few bikers knew that Pigpen had once been a successful Buddy Holly impersonator or that he had worked as a chef at Toronto’s posh Royal York hotel. Fewer still knew of his horrific upbringing. “I remember my mother saying, ‘Get under the bed. Dad’s got the shotgun again,’ ” he later said.
Pigpen’s dad never did blow off anyone’s head, but his parents inflicted emotional damage on him that psychologists and psychiatrists would struggle to repair in later years. By the time he was five years old, his father had moved out of their Peterborough-area home, and for several years, Pigpen was the only boy in a family of girls and women with plenty of grudges against men. He was often confined to the basement, where he spent his nights in fear of demons that might discover and torture him. Real-life people weren’t much better. “I lived half the time in the basement on a dirt floor and a rubber sheet. I got scared that the bogeyman would get me. She [my mother] used to make me go to church all of the time. I used to piss the bed scared.”
Pigpen became quick with his fists, and refined his fighting style by boxing as an amateur at the Peterborough Boxing Club and East City Bowl Boxing Club. He grew to be solidly built, carrying about 245 pounds on a six-foot frame. His most memorable organized fights were settled far from referees, including one that spilled onto a major Toronto street against George Clark of the Vagabonds. The punches and bloodshed weren’t necessarily started in anger but they weren’t meaningless either, and spectators could sense they were witnessing something truly epic. “They blocked off Avenue Road—the cops—for an hour,” Pigpen said. “They didn’t want to stop it. They had bets on it. I wore him down.” Neither man was knocked out, but Clark later said he had never been hit so hard in his life.
A six-foot-seven Vagabond named Igor provided Berry with a much easier test than Clark. “I knocked him out,” Pigpen recalled. There was also a dust-up with the formidable Howard (Baldy) Chard, “King of the Bouncers,” a five-foot-eight, barrel-chested 280 pounds. Chard fought with professional cool, as befitted someone who collected debts for the likes of mob boss John (Pops) Papalia of Hamilton. “He never lost a street fight, a fight in reform school, in reformatory or in the pen,” Paul Rimstead of the Toronto Sun wrote of Chard (though he wasn’t counting a less-successful tussle in which Chard was pitted against seven men).
Pigpen’s self-defence tactics went far beyond weathering and throwing punches. Bikers liked to reminisce about a time when Pigpen was arrested with a pack of outlaw bikers. One by one, the bikers were led outside by police, who put a hurt on them to teach them a lesson. “He shit his underwear and covered his face in shit,” former Choice member Cecil Kirby recalled. “It worked. Better than getting a phone book against your head.” Police wouldn’t touch Pigpen in that condition.
“There are guys who would start fights and then they’d say, ‘Come and help me.’ I can’t stand people like that. Be a stand-up guy,” Kirby said, with Pigpen in mind. “He was a stand-up guy. That’s what I liked about him.”
The Markham police raid made the front page of the Toronto Daily Star. “If they don’t get a fair shake in court, we’ll tear that place apart and then come into Toronto,” a biker vowed to the newspaper’s Eddy Roworth. The bikers were indignant at having to spend a night in the Don Jail, as well as at their mangled bikes. None of their rides was in worse shape than the Wild Thing, whose three-foot-long front forks had been ruined by the tires of a police cruiser. “Just horseshit,” Guindon later said. “It was worth good money. It was a show bike.”
“We’ll get even,” a biker said at the time. “When the guys that own these machines get out, you’re going to see a lot of cops with scars. We know who they are. We’ve got names and addresses.” Someone called Scarborough police to say, “Let the guys out or we’ll blow up that hellhole.”
Some of the bikers sounded surprised and even a little offended that police had crashed their party. They had already retreated from the city after police had made them feel unwelcome. “We got out of the plazas because of them,” one told the newspaper. “Now they follow us out here. We don’t want trouble. We moved out here so we could have our blowouts without bothering anyone. And we’re going to blow, man, no matter what. Maybe they’d like it if we went back to the plazas.”
From a police van outside the courthouse, Guindon called out to reporters that police had deliberately ruined their bikes. “The bikes were right underneath a light,” Guindon shouted. “The police car ran right over them on purpose. Thirty guys lost their jobs over this. They wouldn’t let us make phone calls.” Another biker who had attended the party with his wife shouted about not being allowed to phone their babysitter.
“Hey, Bernie,” one biker piped in. “Tell them how they made us take a shower.”
“Yeah, that’s police brutality,” Guindon said, warming up to the press attention. “We’re only supposed to do that once a year.”
Markham deputy police chief Robert Hood said some bikes were damaged but much of it was “the doing of the motorcycle gang members themselves.” Hood added that he couldn’t understand the accusation that his men ruined the farmhouse, since it was “a pigsty to begin with.”
In the end, Guindon and the other bikers got off with a series of one-hundred-dollar fines. They didn’t have to follow through on their threat to ride three hundred bikes into the heart of Toronto on a rampage, which was just as well since they didn’t have anything close to that number of roadworthy bikes to rampage with. That weekend, Guindon said goodbye to the Wild Thing. He swapped its mangled remains for a 1947 Knucklehead. Guindon could measure phases of his life by the bikes he had ridden. After the Matchless G80, he had owned a Triumph Bonneville, then a Norton 750 twin and then a series of Harleys, the official ride of true outlaw bikers. He had ridden them all hard, sometimes with painful consequences. The worst mishaps were when he scraped off skin during a slide. “Road rashes, they’re the worst,” he said. “I’d rather have a broken leg than a road rash.”
Guindon lost some heavy-duty support in December 1967, when his right-hand man, Big Jack Olliffe, was packed off to prison. The charges came from a beating that Big Jack and a biker named “Tank” had laid upon a junior member from Kitchener named Arnold Bilitz at a party the previous year. Bilitz had come on to another guy’s old lady. A member named Terry Siblock had thrown in a kick for good measure.
They’d meant the beating to be a harsh lesson, but Bilitz died and Big Jack and Tank ended up with prison time. Siblock was allowed to walk free as he had only struck one blow, which wasn’t likely the fatal one.
Wondering at Siblock’s freedom, Big Jack couldn’t resist calling him a stool pigeon, even though Siblock was a solid member and no police informant. For a biker like Siblock, whose dad was an ex-con and had raised his son to hate stool pigeons, Big Jack’s insult was the type that festers, threatening to one day explode.