He’d be in the far corner. Staying away from everybody. Make sure his back was to the wall.
BERNIE GUINDON on Montreal hitman Yves (Apache) Trudeau
Guindon wasn’t much concerned about his club’s local rivals as the 1970s approached. His focus was on Montreal. The Satan’s Choice had more than outgrown its Toronto peers, it had grown into the second-largest outlaw biker club in the world—behind only the Hells Angels. Now Guindon wanted to expand coast to coast. To do so, he needed to build on his toehold in Montreal, which at that time was Canada’s largest city.
Rod MacLeod’s Montreal chapter was tough but threadbare. They didn’t have the money for a clubhouse and often hung out at Joe’s Snack Bar in the Saint-Henri district. They met every Tuesday night, paying weekly membership dues of two bucks. The dues buttressed an emergency fund, from which members could borrow for repairs to their bikes or for bail.
When in Montreal, Guindon stayed with MacLeod and noted that he didn’t live lavishly by any stretch, but that he also didn’t seem to need work. “He had a bunch of guys working for him. He had something going. I don’t remember him having a job.” It was all quite modest stuff, especially since MacLeod’s bunch was playing in a very rough league.
Montreal’s geography ordained it would be a hot spot for Canadian organized crime. The long St. Lawrence River shoreline and access to the Atlantic Ocean made it a natural for drug smuggling. It was also less than four hundred miles by highway to New York City, the continent’s richest drug market. The violence in Montreal intensified as drug use inside and outside the city’s many clubs increased.
MacLeod gave Guindon a guided tour of various rival clubhouses in Montreal. Guindon still wasn’t comfortable with guns, which made him stand out in Montreal’s underworld like a vegetarian at a pig roast, even within his own club. “There were a few guys in the Montreal chapter you had to be careful with. They were notorious. You knew they would shoot you.” The more Guindon saw of Montreal, the more he realized how competitive its streets were. “They did a lot of killing there in Montreal. Montreal is a rough, tough town.”
He found one slender, smallish Montreal biker particularly chilling. Even his fellow members in the Popeyes were creeped out by Yves (Apache) Trudeau’s habit of just staring into space as they partied. Perhaps he had horrific things on his mind, or maybe his head was as empty as his stare—or his soul. Nicknamed “The Mad Bomber” and “The Mad Bumper,” Trudeau once worked for Canadian Industries Limited, which manufactured dynamite and detonator caps. That early training proved useful in his current job: making people disappear.
When Guindon met him, Trudeau was on his way to becoming one of the most prolific killers in Canadian history, responsible for an estimated forty-three murders. “He’d be in the far corner. Staying away from everybody. Make sure his back was to the wall. He only paid attention to his own close friends. He tried to stay away from everybody.” Trudeau’s Popeyes were a particularly dangerous club, despite their cartoonish name. “When they had wars, they really had wars,” Guindon said. “No hesitation to bring out the shotguns and the machine guns.”
Among the frequent visitors to the Choice’s Montreal chapter was Pigpen Berry, who was affectionately known in some rough Montreal circles as “Piggy.” Pigpen also did enforcement work for the West End Gang, or Irish mob. This involved spending time in Pointe-Saint-Charles, a community along the St. Lawrence River southwest of the downtown, built by a broad range of European immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, when it became one of Canada’s first industrial slums.
The Pointe had been home to an early incarnation of the West End Gang since the early 1900s. By the 1960s, they worked mostly in truck hijackings, home invasions, kidnapping, protection rackets, drug trafficking, extortion and armed robbery. They moved heavily into hashish and cocaine importation in the 1970s, developing links to the Mafia, Hells Angels and Colombian cartels.
“I had the Irish mafia behind me,” Pigpen recalled.
The Irish mob wanted Pigpen to help in their war against the Dubois, a clan of nine brothers with interests in prostitution, loan sharking, extortion and dealing cocaine and a host of other narcotics. That said, members of the Irish mob weren’t always amused by Pigpen’s eccentric nature: “On one hand, they wanted to kill me. On the other, they wanted to keep me on,” Pigpen later said. Some of Pigpen’s Quebec time was spent in the Bordeaux jail, where he was sent to the hole and taunted: “Hey English, when you come out in the yard, we’ll fuck you in the ass.”
By this time, Pigpen had befriended Armand (In the Trunk) Sanguigni of the Toronto Choice chapter. Sanguigni was a smallish man with the empty eyes of a heroin user and a reputation as someone who handled murder contracts for the Montreal mob. “He was a good guy,” Pigpen later said of Sanguigni. “I got along with him good…I don’t agree with the homicide part.”
Guindon also found Sanguigni to be okay, although he added that he didn’t know him or his side business well. Even if he had, the club didn’t have rules against killing for money or to eliminate witnesses. “I didn’t have much to do with those guys,” Guindon said. “I was from Oshawa. They were trying to make a living as well.”
It was hard to stay on the sidelines in Montreal, and Guindon’s Choice was drawn into the Devil’s Disciples’ conflict with the Dubois. Pigpen was particularly in demand, and Cecil Kirby, the former biker and mob enforcer, explained why: “If there was trouble somewhere, they’d send Howard Berry out to take care of it. He was the Choice hitman and everybody knew it.” Pigpen said that wasn’t exactly correct; he shot people but never killed anyone.
Kirby said he was in Montreal when Pigpen opened fire on the Popeyes’ clubhouse with a sawed-off .303 with a ten-round clip. “It was like a cannon going off,” Kirby said.
Closer to home, the Satan’s Choice clashed with the Chosen Few, Saddletramps, Chairmen, Fourth Reich, Devil’s Law, Coffin Wheelers, Plague, Wild Breed, Los Santos, Outlawed Morticians and, most notably, the Henchmen Motorcycle Clubs. The Henchmen even outnumbered the Choice in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, but the Choice had more members throughout the province. Any rival could pose a threat, but none of the smaller clubs could take Guindon’s down.
The violence was escalating, though, and it took very little to incite it. On one occasion, a Choice member attended a party with the Cross Breeds in Niagara Falls. He and a member of the Para-Dice Riders were thrown out for bad behaviour. They returned with a bomb and blew up part of the house. That understandably angered everyone still inside, including members of the Wild Ones and Vagabonds. A wave of violent retribution hit the Choice, which hit back even harder, blowing up other clubhouses. A Wild One was shot in front of his house in Hamilton. Shooting and bombing continued, but somehow no one was killed. Even the tiny Fourth Reich and Chainmen joined in against the Choice.
But for all this heat in Ontario, nowhere was hotter than Montreal. The city’s underworld was expanding as demand for drugs increased. The bigger business got, the closer the turf was to exploding. “You used to see Montreal guys disappear just like that,” Guindon said. “You wonder, ‘When is my trip up?’ ”
Ultimately, it wasn’t another motorcycle club that struck the hardest blow against Guindon and his Satan’s Choice.