You’ve got to be on top to survive.
BERNIE GUINDON
The Choice weren’t yet dominant, but they knew what it took to survive, a skill sometimes exercised in small cruelties. Motorcycle clubs kept testing each other in a two-wheeled version of Darwinism in which the weakest clubs became extinct. At a Thanksgiving weekend hill climb attended by six thousand people in the village of Heidelberg, nine miles west of Kitchener, four Toronto Choice members used a jackknife to trim off the patch of a member of the London Road Runners Motorcycle Club. The Road Runners soon lost respect and were no more. One less rival who couldn’t stand up or get in their way.
Sometimes Guindon’s club was tested by its rivals too, like when someone in May 1968 torched the rundown Scarborough barn on Finch Avenue East that the Choice had most recently adopted as a clubhouse. There was also what police called a “no-holds-barred rumble” between more than two dozen men from the Satan’s Choice, Chainsmen, Henchmen and Fourth Reich in a downtown Kitchener garage.
As the Choice ascended the biker food chain, a potential rival in the Cross Breeds of Niagara Falls posed unique challenges. The Cross Breeds looked like a throwback to the early biker club days, wearing black and white shirts rather than leather jackets or vests. More importantly, their clubhouse was an easy stone’s throw from the Niagara Falls police station, making it virtually impossible to attack them and not be seen by police.
Perhaps most significantly, some members of the Cross Breeds felt they had the local mob on their side. While the club had only one chapter with no more than fifteen members, they appeared to be well connected with the local underworld. Some members stood guard in the parking lot outside the high-stakes gambling game of Louis Iannuzzelli, whose family owned a hotel and the House of Frankenstein on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls’ touristy downtown. Iannuzzelli also had mob money on the street as a loan shark.
The Cross Breeds didn’t want to expand or be absorbed into a larger club like the Satan’s Choice, Outlaws or Red Devils. “They didn’t want to cross over to anything,” said Mark DeMarco, a long-time Niagara Falls resident who did custom painting on club members’ bikes as well as stock cars. “They figured Niagara Falls, the border town, they were in with the Italians. They didn’t want anybody to interfere with their Italian association.”
That made the Satan’s Choice attack on the Cross Breeds on Sunday, June 1, 1968, all the more audacious and satisfying for Guindon and his club. They trashed bikes and beat Breeds members, then jumped on their own bikes and raced away. “They never thought we’d be there,” Guindon said. The Cross Breeds’ black and white club shirts soon went the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. “I think we told them to either take [the club shirts] off or else,” Guindon said.
Guindon didn’t quote Charles Darwin exactly, but he alluded to his theory of evolution when explaining the necessity of such violence, even if it looked wild from the outside. “You’ve got to be on top to survive.”
In Toronto, high-spirited Choice members managed to rile up both the Vagabonds and the Black Diamond Riders, and they expected their Choice brothers from other chapters to rally behind them. That was a problem. The Vagabonds had plenty of friends in the Choice outside Toronto, and a solid reputation in the biker world. Choice in Oshawa, Kingston, Ottawa, Kitchener and Brampton scoffed at the idea of a war with the Vagabonds. Meanwhile, the Choice from Hamilton, Montreal and Brantford were spoiling to jump into the tensions, just for the sake of a good fight, while St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Peterborough and Richmond Hill didn’t know what to do. Guindon enjoyed a rumble as much as anyone, but he had no beef with the Vagabonds and realized that an escalation of hostilities with them could irreparably split his own club.
The Vagabonds invited Guindon to a meeting on Hamilton Mountain. He didn’t want a war, but he couldn’t appear soft. More than a hundred Choice members accompanied him. They were still outnumbered. Guindon approached the Vagabonds’ leader, Edjo, to tell him: “Let’s you and I get it on and we’ll solve the problem.”
The Vagabond leader declined and, for the time being, the threat of war was averted.
A year after joining the Satan’s Choice, the former Canadian Lancers and Wild Ones decided to quit and resume riding under their old colours. The split was friendly enough—it was against Guindon’s nature to beg anyone to keep his company. Besides, life was getting more hardcore in the outlaw biker world and not everyone liked it.
Others in his circle were feeling pressure to trade on their associations with him. Mark DeMarco was building a thriving business, painting bikes and race cars, and he was always welcome at field days in Oshawa, Kitchener, Niagara and Kingston. One day, two police officers visited him at his shop in St. Catharines. He recalled the conversation going like this: “You paint motorcycles, right?”
“We paint everything. What are you here for?”
DeMarco remembered being quite hot-tempered and impatient in those days.
The officers showed a series of photos of bikers and their wives and girlfriends. DeMarco knew all of them.
“What did they say to you?”
“They said thank you after I painted their motorcycles.”
At this point, DeMarco recalled, the officers became testy. One of them commented, “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. If you’re part of the problem, we’ll dog you every day and visit you every day.”
“That ain’t going to work.”
“That means you’re not going to co-operate.”
“I’m not going to do your work for you.”
Over the next few weeks, DeMarco said, he was pulled over almost twenty times by officers. There was also a police visit to his house, which rattled his wife. He said officers pointed out that his uncle Hap had connections to mobster Johnny (Pops) Papalia of Hamilton. This came as no shock to DeMarco, who had a Johnny Pops association of his own. DeMarco used to bring old jukeboxes and slot machines over to Monarch Vending on Railway Street in downtown Hamilton, where Papalia spent much of his time. Papalia fixed the machines gratis, but asked DeMarco to keep an eye out for interesting clocks for him. The mobster had a fascination with timepieces. “Mark, if you ever get any old clocks…,” Papalia would say.
DeMarco didn’t rat, and the police continued to dog him: “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution. To this point, we think you’re not part of the solution.”
“You’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not going to do your work for you.”
Things were heating up around Guindon. Just being his friend was enough to put someone on the police radar.
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Fire trucks were back at the Satan’s Choice Scarborough clubhouse on Thursday, August 1, 1968. This time, firefighters couldn’t contain a blaze that consumed the farmhouse on the same property where the barn had burned to the ground earlier in the year.
“I’m glad,” a middle-aged woman near the scene told Don Dutton of the Toronto Daily Star. “They used to come here, hundreds of them—dirty bears and those stinking motorcycles—just about every weekend. They called them conventions and they came from Ottawa and Hamilton and all over with their girls, and the parties went on all night.”
As she spoke, a couple of teenaged girls picked up broken glass from an abandoned hearse with a crudely labelled sign on it reading “Danger—Keep Out.” They took the glass away as a souvenir.
The first weekend of August 1968 was a big one on the social calendar for the Choice. There was a field day in a pasture near Nestleton, north of Oshawa. Toronto Daily Star readers were mortified as they read of bikers “lightly whipping” a teenaged girl who had reportedly got out of hand. One biker told a reporter that she was punished “as an example” to others. The reporter also noted that the girl resumed socializing with the bikers that evening.
Shocking as the public found the bikers’ treatment of the young woman, the biggest outrage was reserved for the chicken race. As grand marshal of the weekend, Guindon threw a live chicken into the air so that bikers could race to it and fight for it. Whoever emerged with the biggest chunk of chicken was declared the winner. “I bet the Humane Society doesn’t like it, but it was a lot of fun,” Guindon told a reporter.
As the party pushed on into the weekend, police had to block off two highways as fifteen chapters of the Choice and their friends showed up on some five hundred motorcycles. There were the obligatory stare downs between the bikers and police. Some of the OPP even drew batons.
Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, published some serious tut-tutting about the chicken incident and mocked a Satan’s Choice member who wore war medals that were not his own:
Obviously, he was an admirer of gallantry in the field. Let no one accuse the Satan’s Choice members of running away from danger, however. Why, only the other day, 60 of them stood their ground against a savage attack by a single chicken. In a breathtaking display of fearlessness, they rode it down and tore it apart before the ferocious fowl could harm anyone.
The Humane Society offered a reward to any member of the public who could bring the bikers to justice for the chicken race, but no one obliged. “They had a thousand-dollar reward for anybody who’d put me away regarding the chicken,” Guindon recalled. “A thousand dollars for anybody that would squeal on me. That was a lot of money in those days.”
Guindon hadn’t expected anything like the reaction the chicken story brought, and he remained absolutely unapologetic decades later. “I didn’t give a shit,” he said. “Farmers kill chickens any time they want. Thousands of chickens get killed every day to feed people. How are they killed? We don’t know.”
The unwelcome attention Guindon was drawing extended beyond his associates in the biker world.
Teresa Guindon was thrilled to become the proud owner of a bicycle with high handlebars and a banana seat. She was just six or seven years old and thrilled when her uncle Jack painted it a metallic purple. “It looked like there were diamonds in the paint,” Teresa said.
Then one day, it was gone and little Teresa was distraught. Veronica still lived in Oshawa but had cut off any contact with Bernie. She took the problem to the local police, and officers took her daughter into a station room alone, ostensibly to identify bicycles. Once she was separated from her mother, the conversation quickly became about her father, not bicycles, Teresa later said. “They’re scaring the crap out of me. Telling me how evil my dad is. That they’re going to rub him out. They’re trying to get information out of me. I’m a little girl. I don’t know.”
Teresa was in tears when she returned to her mother. Naturally, Veronica wanted to know why her little girl was crying. Teresa recalled an officer replying, “She’s just upset we couldn’t get her bike.”
Just sharing Bernie Guindon’s last name was now a liability.