I knew that a skin beef made a guy undesirable in the general population.
BERNIE GUINDON talks of prison
Guindon, not to be slowed down by the fact that he was a young father with three daughters from two marriages, hooked up routinely with random women. He wasn’t sure why some of the women were attracted to him, and he didn’t waste much time trying to figure it out. Certainly, many of them seemed drawn to anyone wearing a biker patch, and it didn’t hurt that Guindon ran the club. “Maybe they like the wild side. He’s not straight up and down like her father was. Who knows?” Certainly, Guindon didn’t have any illusions that he was a great lover, but he was happy to oblige them. “They called me needle dick, the big flea fucker. Hung like a stud field mouse.”
Guindon was at the Choice’s Ottawa clubhouse in October 1968 when he met a fifteen-year-old girl who was hanging around with members. That day, she went to the house of a man who hung around the Choice. At one point Guindon joined them. There was group sex and then things got particularly ugly when the man’s wife showed up unexpectedly and phoned the police. “The concocted story was that they saved her from being raped and beaten at the Satan’s Choice clubhouse,” Guindon said. Using the call and accusation of rape against a minor as a reason, police raided the Ottawa clubhouse.
Transcripts of the case don’t exist and accounts are widely divergent. There was violence as well as group sex, although Guindon was not himself accused of hitting anyone.
As the indecent assault trial began, the girl described being confined for three days and forced to have sex with five men. Guindon’s mother wanted to attend the trial but he didn’t want her to see her boy in court facing such sordid charges. He assured her he wasn’t guilty, but he also knew that that didn’t really matter. “You know you’re getting fucked, no matter how you look at it…You look at the jury. You can’t blame them for judging you the way they judge you. I had a good idea we were going to get it.”
In May 1969, the bottom fell out of Guindon’s world. He was twenty-five and in his athletic prime when he was sentenced to five years in prison—what criminals call a “solid nickel.” Four other club members were also sent to prison, while a woman who associated with the club was sentenced to two years in reformatory for assault after she admitted she kicked the girl with steel-tipped cowboy boots. Their one small relief came when the judge denied a Crown submission that Guindon’s punishment should also include lashing.
Criminals locked up for “skin beefs” are considered the dregs of prison society and fair game for anyone with a shank, a nasty attitude and an urge to make a name for himself. In the Ottawa jail, Guindon got into a fight with a prisoner whom he considered mouthy, and cut him with his fists for eleven stitches. But he knew far worse lay ahead when he got to Kingston Penitentiary, the place his father had once told him he was going to end up.
The Choice at that point had chapters in Hamilton, Oshawa, Guelph, St. Catharines, Preston, Peterborough, Ottawa, Kingston, Windsor, Montreal and Vancouver and about three hundred members. All of that muscle on the streets would do Guindon no good as he headed alone behind the infamous prison’s thick limestone walls.
“When they closed those gates, it was just boom,” Guindon recalled. “Big steel gates closing. You just have shivers going down your spine. You sure knew you’re in jail when those fucking gates closed.” Long-time inmate Paul Gravelle has been locked inside plenty of prisons and jails and said there was an especially harsh feeling when he heard himself locked inside Kingston. “It was like going into a dungeon,” Gravelle said. “It was something else. You knew your place.”
New prisoners at the Kingston Penitentiary were marched through a shower, like a car wash for humans. Staff then covered the newcomers with a disinfectant powder and hosed them down again.
Guindon arrived at Kingston at a time when conversations among inmates were forbidden. So were radios and televisions in their cells. Guindon found the penitentiary oddly silent. “We weren’t supposed to talk to anybody,” he said. “We used to send messages to the guys who were doing the cleaning.” Prisoners would whisper messages to the cleaners to pass on to other prisoners, also in whispers. There was great power in controlling the flow of information in the prison ranges. “I used to try to get out on the cleaning job quite a bit,” Guindon said.
None of the other Satan’s Choice members who were convicted with Guindon went to Kingston. Their club president was isolated and vulnerable. “It’s scary…A lot of them don’t like bikers. You have problems, you don’t know who the hell is going to back you up.”
One of the first prisoners Guindon befriended cautioned him that he should tell fellow prisoners he was locked up for armed robbery rather than indecent assault. Armed robbery is a socially acceptable, suitably tough crime among inmates. Guindon argued that he was in custody on a bogus beef and he shouldn’t have to hide anything or lie. The prisoner was just trying to be helpful and told him that there were a lot of prisoners who would rather “off a skinner” than have to look at him every day.
“You just give them the number of my house [prison cell], okay?” Guindon answered back.
He had the chilling feeling that he was being set up for attack, but he refused to go into the special protective unit. That area was known as the “skinner range,” and Guindon would rather risk death on the main range than set foot there. That would look like an admission of guilt. “I knew that a skin beef made a guy undesirable in the general population.”
There was no mercy in the pen for undesirables. “When I got in there, they gave me the room of the guy who got thrown off the tier. And that was the third floor at Kingston. He was right beside me when he got thrown off.” Guindon kept his mouth shut about seeing the forced three-storey death dive and moved into the victim’s six-by-ten-foot cell. “I was minding my own business. You don’t ask questions. You save a lot of goddamn problems.”
The railing outside his cell was a constant reminder of how quickly his life could end. Guindon later saw an inmate hanging on to that railing for dear life to prevent a fatal plunge onto the concrete below. “I was in the cell. I couldn’t get out of the cell.” It was after lockdown and Guindon could only watch as guards pulled the inmate to safety.
Fellow inmate Paul Gravelle said he once saw an inmate preparing to throw himself to his death when a guard rushed onto the scene. The incident cleared up any uncertainty about the value of an inmate’s life. The guard’s first instinct wasn’t to halt the suicide. Instead, he tossed down a blanket so that the mess wouldn’t be too difficult to clean. “The guy jumped on the blanket: ‘Boom!’” Gravelle said.
Not long into his stay, Guindon also saw a prisoner stabbed repeatedly. He recognized the victim as the same guy who had mouthed off to him in the Ottawa jail cell. This time, the inmate was killed. Guindon was now in a world where sticking someone in the thigh or shoulder with a homemade knife—or shank or shiv—was a routine way of telling him to smarten up. In his new home, white wooden wheelbarrows with red crosses painted on them were at the ready for collecting the bodies of victims of stabbings and forced tumbles from the third floor.
Shanks were plentiful but seldom seen. To make one, yard workers and cleaners would gather little pieces of metal and quietly bring them inside. “You’d have to depend on a lot of guys,” Guindon said. The deadliest shanks were fashioned from flattened pieces of metal that were easy to conceal. “You can hide that in your mattress with no problem,” he said. They would be rolled tight, like straws, and inserted into a piece of wood, which acted as a handle. The shank would be driven hard into the heart of an enemy. “The handle comes off, so you’ve got no prints. You walk away with the handle, leave the blade there.”
Shanks didn’t have to be elaborate. “It wouldn’t take much. Guys used to make shivs in the machine shops. Welding shops. Machine shop. It would have to be long enough to go in the heart.”
Guards looked down constantly from towers when prisoners were outside. It was hard for them to see exactly what was happening when prisoners stood in close quarters in a line, waiting to be marched back to their cells. “A lot of guys get shanked going to your room,” Guindon said. “In the yard, you’d have to line up. Sometimes that’s where a guy gets stabbed. Smack! That’s all you hear.”
Inmate Richard Mallory said the shanks also often came out at Friday movie night. “When the show was over and you walked out, most of the time, there was one or two people who weren’t moving. You’d hear uh, uh [a moaning sound]. You have to know what was going on. You didn’t know nothing. It could happen right in front of you.”
Gravelle also saw zip guns, which resemble ballpoint pens. “You can build them in the machine shop,” he said. “All you need is the bullets…Sometimes it’s kill or be killed.” Guindon preferred to stay away from shanks and zip guns. “I used my hands. Much faster.”
He soon learned the hard and fast rules to survive Kingston. “Keep your mouth shut,” Guindon said. “You don’t snitch and you don’t steal off of inmates. For me, that’s when you get a beating. That’s when you get stabbed. If somebody finds out you’re a rat, that’s when you get a blade or a beating or thrown off the tier. And you mind your own goddamn business.” That includes not asking a prisoner why he is serving time. If he wants to tell you, he’ll tell you. “Mind your business and do your own time.” Put another way, don’t meddle. “Do your own time and try not to get involved in the politics. A lot of guys got involved with somebody. A guy’s got a problem and they get you to solve their problem, then where are you? You’re in shit. All of a sudden, you’ve got four or five guys on your case,” Guindon said.
Words travel fast in a prison, and sometimes those words hang in the air like a toxic cloud until they are addressed. One inmate said he didn’t like bikers and bragged that he was going to kill Guindon. When he heard about it, Guindon put a beating on him and the comments stopped.
Paul Henry was a young prison psychologist when Guindon arrived in Kingston, and he was quickly impressed with the boxer and how well he adapted to the prison culture. “He was a man’s man,” Henry said. “There’s nothing I didn’t like about him.” He said the other prisoners didn’t see Guindon as a skinner, once they got to know him. “He never needed a psychologist. He was too solid. Rock solid.”
Henry noticed that Guindon quickly became friends with George Bradley, a smallish, intense man who looked like he had walked off the set of a 1940s George Raft gangster movie. Other prisoners treated Bradley like he was a somebody, in part because he was considered one of the youngest fugitives ever to be on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. “George was a wheel,” Henry said.
“George was a smart guy,” Guindon recalled. “He wasn’t very big. I think he was trying to be one of those big bad bandits…He was serious. I don’t think he was a tough guy. His mind was always rolling. He was a very likeable person. George was all right…He was smart. He was always wheeling and dealing in his mind. Always used to come up with different things for me. I didn’t want nothing to do with it…Otherwise, I’d be doing life. Either that or dead.”
In July 1969, Bradley was just twenty-one when he was sentenced to nineteen years for a near-fatal shooting during a bank holdup in Toronto. He was also convicted of two other armed robberies and a break-in and was said to have spent much of his total take, estimated at fifty thousand dollars. But for all of his criminally industrious ways, Bradley still exaggerated his accomplishments.
Bradley’s appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list was a notable achievement in Guindon’s prison circles, akin to the Dean’s Honour List in straight society. In truth, the bank-robbing George Bradley on the FBI’s most-wanted list wasn’t the George Bradley that Guindon knew. George Bradley had started robbing banks in the 1950s, when the Kingston Penitentiary George Bradley was still in diapers.
It was an easy enough lie to tell, though, and Bradley lapped up the enhanced status. Hanging around with Guindon also helped his image. “Nobody ever had any issue with Bernie,” Henry said. “He was A1 in the hierarchy.
“He just had leadership oozing out of him—and good leadership, not bad ideas,” Henry continued. “He used his time properly…He was a strongly positive influence on many, many experienced people. He wanted fairness.” Henry appreciated Guindon’s straightforward nature. “When you work with these guys, you can tell who’s straight and who’s not.”
Despite all of the bravado and respect, Guindon’s mind found plenty of depressing things to think about. There was the future of his club without him to guide it, and the fact that he had already burned through two marriages. There was the ever present threat of the lash from guards or a shiv from inmates. His body bloated up and he had to begin taking medication to still his nerves.
Further, he felt abandoned. Within weeks of Guindon going to prison, his second wife, Barbara Ann, left for the West Coast with their two daughters and a former clubmate called Two-Stroke. Guindon suspected Two-Stroke got out of the province fast to avoid retribution from Guindon’s friends. If he did harbour any bad feelings, they didn’t linger. “He probably did me a favour.”
Guindon hadn’t exactly been faithful himself. While behind bars, he got the news that his daughter Debbie was born on November 28, 1969, to Marlene Anne Donovan, a friend since his early teens. Marlene had grown up near his old boxing club. Her mother was an Oshawa bootlegger.
Prisoners often received sexually explicit letters from women who wanted their very own captive bad boy. Typically, they would describe how many tattoos and children they had, as well as their dreams of finding a strong, protective man. “I think we all got a lot of crazy fucking letters,” Guindon said. But one such letter arrived that was several cuts above the usual missive.
The woman wrote to introduce herself and then followed with more letters. She clearly had options but her attraction for Guindon was undeniable. Soon Jack was driving her to Kingston for visits, which were precious, since his brother was allowed visitors only once a month, for an hour. “I used to take all of his friends down there,” Jack said. “If it wasn’t for me, there wouldn’t have been any visitors.”
Prisoners have been known to hurt themselves, just to get a change of scenery through a few nights in the infirmary. They’ve also switched religions so they can add more fish or fruit to their diets. And they’ve gotten married just for the prospect of a wedding night. Guindon insisted he cared for this woman enough to make her his third wife. At the ceremony, inside the limestone prison walls, there was only the bride, groom, best man and minister present. At the end of the ceremony, she was allowed to stay overnight. Their visits continued, and she soon gave birth to twins. One died in infancy on Christmas Eve, the other on Christmas Day.
A year after their wedding, the marriage was annulled, at her request. That gave Guindon a divorce, an annulment and three new children while behind bars on his indecent assault stint. The last he heard of his third ex-wife, she had achieved a university degree of some sort. Guindon seldom spoke of her. In the 1970s, a woman’s reputation could be tarred forever by an association with a convicted felon and biker like Guindon, and he exercised the utmost of discretion, keeping a respectful silence about her. “I was fond of her,” he said.
Eventually, Guindon was transferred to nearby Joyceville, a minimum and medium security institution. There, he spent time with Gravelle, who said Guindon’s reputation as a boxer meant more to fellow inmates than the fact he ran a biker gang. “A lot of people don’t like [biker] club guys,” Gravelle said. They also didn’t consider him a real sex offender. He didn’t fit the mould, to their minds. “He was surrounded by a whole bunch of people. He had a very good reputation.”
Gravelle was an authority of sorts about prison life. He was in just his early twenties when he met Guindon, but he already had a considerable criminal resumé. He was glib about his frequent trips into custody, saying they reminded him of homecomings. “It’s just like going to a summer camp, when you meet all of your old buddies.”
When he met Guindon in Joyceville, Gravelle was doing time for bank robbery and running a seven-step program for rehabilitation. It was aimed at hardened criminals. Sex offenders and stool pigeons need not apply. In the program, inmates were supposed to tell the truth about themselves, and Gravelle would generally talk tough and advise them to pursue an honest trade. This often led to what Lorne Campbell of the Choice called “snotting and bawling.” Campbell did plenty of time of his own, and he witnessed several prisoners cry until they could cry no more and then vow to do far better with their lives in the future.
For those inmates with no remorse or desire to change, Gravelle provided other options. They were the prisoners he really wanted. He counselled them to become better criminals. That included helping a Hamilton man who killed a gay man learn to become a safecracker. “He said, ‘I wish I was in here for bank robbery like you,’ ” Gravelle said. “I taught him the trade.”
Certainly, the seven-step program had no cleansing effect on Gravelle himself. “It never straightened me out,” he said. “I’m a criminal at heart. I think it’s not as boring as the other way around. There’s never a dull moment.”
Guindon, on the other hand, struck Gravelle more as a criminal of consequence than intent. He had a reputation as basically an honest person who did the best he could for his friends, even when he knew it might come back to bite him. “He’s always trying to help people, and those are the guys that go to jail,” Gravelle said. “He’d give you the shirt off of his back. He wasn’t a heavy-duty criminal. They [the police] tried to just get him because he was the leader of the gang. He’s a trophy fish.”
Inside Joyceville, Guindon worked in the kitchen and occasionally snuck out to go fishing for trout. He adopted a baby raccoon as a pet and kept him in a yard shack. His furry new friend would sometimes sit on his shoulder and nibble on his ear. “We’d be playing around and he’d bite me and I’d bite him back on his paw. He’d squeal and he’d quit biting me.” After a few months, he heard some guards had plans to kill the pet, and so he gave him away to a friendly guard, who said he’d turn him over to a family.
Of all the marriages and girlfriends that Guindon had burned through, one of the first women in his life never disappeared for long, even if she had long been just a friend. Suzanne Blais was still married, but she and Guindon often thought of each other fondly. Guindon wrote her from Joyceville:
Dear Suznn:
Hi Beautiful so how’s life treating you of late? Sure hope this letter finds yourself & family in the very best of health & in fine spirits. Finally got some good news this afternoon & like I promise you’re the first one I let know. Yes, the Parole Board finally sent me the other votes I needed. It looks like I’ll be out on my pass (3 days) the second week in Sept if all goes well. My C.D. [case director] also asked me if I wanted to see my father for Xmas & he’d give me an extra day or two for travelling as long as I pay for the whole trip. He’s also going to put me in for Bath Farm annex & hopefully they’ll get me out by the end of Sept. Also Teresa finally wrote yesterday & she even let my youngest sign the card. I’ve asked her to attend Family Day on Sept 6…she said “let bygones be bygones.” Real busy of late & getting way behind. Maybe this will put me in a much better mood. Give my very best to your mom & as always I’m thinking of you. Sorry if I don’t answer all your notes.
Love & Respect Bernie No #1 Frog
XXXXXOOOOOSWAELKAHF.
“SWAELKAHF” stands for “Sealed with an Everlasting Kiss and Hug Forever.”
Guindon’s mind also often drifted to memories of the open road. When he was in the yard, he could hear motorcycles passing by, gearing up and down, and he would try to determine which ones were Japanese or Triumphs or Harleys. “You’d hear the bikes go by when you were in the yard, or the guards would ride them in.”
There was some peace in knowing that someday his time would be served, and he would be free and back on his Harley too.