I have five bouts lined up. But when you’re in maximum security, it’s tough getting away.
BERNIE GUINDON
Guindon was a favourite to qualify for Canada’s boxing team at the 1972 Summer Olympics, right up until he heard the jail doors close behind him for violating his parole. As the Canadian team prepped to compete in Munich, Germany, Guindon settled into Stony Mountain Institution in Manitoba, a forbidding fortress on a slight hill on the plains. The prison didn’t appear to have changed for the better since it housed Big Bear and other prisoners from the North-West Rebellion back in the 1880s. “You look outside and it’s just fields. When guys got out of there [escaped], and they did, they’d always get them in a couple of days. They didn’t know where to go.”
Guindon tried to keep himself busy and not get sucked down into the historically proportioned morass of negativity permeating the building’s stone walls. He felt awkward but appreciated the effort his mother made in venturing west on the train to visit him. “She came a long way. She didn’t speak English. She couldn’t read. That was hard. That was very hard for her to manage.” Guindon got a day pass, borrowed a buddy’s motorcycle and took his mother out for a spin that she would fondly remember for years. The ride was fun but there wasn’t too much they could say. “What are you going to say to your mother when you’re in jail, doing time? She’s trying to get you to go the straight and narrow because you’re a dirty biker.”
Guindon did have a sharp message for his mother’s boyfriend, who came along for the trip. He told him to treat his mother right, or “I’ll come back and put you in a hole.”
Back behind bars, Guindon seethed with aggression and the urge to work out, but there were no sparring partners of his own size and ability. There was also precious little in the way of equipment. For hand wraps, a prisoner stole bandages for him from the medical area. He also sometimes trained in leather work gloves. Guindon befriended a massive Native inmate who he knew as “Big Indian.” His enormous new friend shadow-boxed with him and sacrificed his own body so that Guindon could get a proper workout. “Nice guy. He was an old pro. He used to let me use his body as a heavy bag. I would love to say thank you.” Guindon never did learn why his new friend was in prison.
The spartan training paid off. Guindon won the Manitoba light-middleweight title on a pass and was eventually allowed night passes to train at a real gym, with real sparring partners. When his request for a transfer back to Ontario was granted, he was housed in the maximum-security prison Millhaven Institution (“The Haven”) in Bath, Ontario, near Kingston. Millhaven had been built to replace the aging Kingston Penitentiary and had opened early because of the Kingston riot.
One of the workers preparing Millhaven was Frank Hobson. His employers didn’t know that he had ridden with the Choice back in the 1960s and had sold drugs and pimped out his girlfriend in Yorkville under the name “Hippy.” His biker days were behind him when he was hired to lay sod on the Millhaven grounds. He hatched the idea to plant a loaded Beretta 9 mm pistol somewhere inside the facility to help out bikers like Guindon and John Dunbar of the Lobos Motorcycle Club of Windsor. Perhaps the gun could be hidden under the sod of the new courtyard. “There was a park bench there, and I seriously considered wrapping a gun up and burying it there by the bench!” Hobson later said.
Or perhaps the best hiding spot would be somewhere in the prison’s massive new heating system. It was a walk-in unit, big enough for Hobson to wander about in it, looking for a good spot to stash the Beretta. “I searched for a good place to put the gun I had brought in with me in my lunch box. Nobody was there! No guards! Nothing.” He discovered a spot in the duct work that looked perfect, but he hesitated. “I had second thoughts. I thought about my wife and three children and the harm that could come to them. I put it back in my lunch box and…took it home.” Hobson never told Guindon about his plan to stash a gun in the prison.
Guindon was housed on the fourth floor, which put him in danger of a thirty-foot drop over the railings if he angered the wrong inmate. He kept his eyes open around the “muscle guys,” prisoners who would do the dirty work of other inmates for a fee. “I don’t like muscle guys. Everybody’s having a hard enough time doing their time.” The muscle guys just amped up the tension, which was already considerable. Ten days could feel as bad as ten years if a prisoner wasn’t mentally ready. There were so many nasty places for an inmate’s mind to go if he let it. “Is somebody fucking my wife? Is somebody stealing this off me? Your mind is rotating, just rotating. Every person’s time is different. They’re all the same and all different.”
Guindon quickly befriended Lauchlan (Lockey) MacDonald of the 13th Tribe Motorcycle Club in Nova Scotia. MacDonald and three others from the club were convicted of statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old in a highly publicized trial. Guindon didn’t believe the news reports. “He was an okay guy. Didn’t bother nobody. Just that he was in on that charge—sexual charge—and so was I. He was kind of quiet. Minded his own business. He could look after himself if he had to. He was nervous inside. That’s why they shipped him out west, because he would have gotten killed out east.”
MacDonald was stabbed inside Millhaven by a muscle guy he didn’t know. He managed to drag his attacker into his cell, where he forced the assailant to admit that some mobsters from Hamilton had put him up to it.
Guindon stormed up to the Hamiltonians in the common room.
“Last time I seen you, Guindon, you was in PC in Kingston,” one of them said.
That was exactly the wrong thing to say. Guindon had never agreed to protective custody, with the snitches and child molesters.
What happened next was the stuff of prison legend, and bikers talked about it with a touch of awe and gratitude decades later. It started with a crisp left hook to the jaw of the smart-mouthed mobster. Then the mobster’s buddy stopped another punch and shared space on the floor. “He knocked two of them out,” Satan’s Choice member Lorne Campbell said. “Said, ‘Anybody else got a problem with me and Lockey?’ ”
It was relatively easy work for Guindon to starch a non-boxer with a shot or two, and he certainly had enough practice doing it behind bars. “A lot of times, I didn’t hit them in the chin. I hit them in the stomach first. Slow them down. Depends on my mood.” In the case of the mobsters, it was their attitude that brought them in contact with Guindon’s knuckles. “I remember they were just rapping away. I hooked a guy. I gave him a hooking and straightened ’em out. Usually, I gave a guy a left hook. Then if he mouths off, I gave him a right hand.”
Guindon said the shots were meant as a clear message about MacDonald and himself. “Leave the guy alone. We don’t bug you. Leave him alone.”
Campbell went to prison himself a decade later for an assortment of assault and drug charges and said he and other bikers continued to benefit from Guindon’s tough line. “That was what paved the way for every other biker who went to the pen after that,” Campbell said. “I was glad I went in after Bernie.”
Ottawa-area bouncer and armed robber Richard Mallory first met Guindon while crossing the Millhaven exercise yard and instantly knew this wasn’t someone to be trifled with. “If you were smart, you didn’t say anything about him,” Mallory said. He had done time in Kingston in the late 1960s, when inmates still weren’t allowed to talk to each other. He appreciated the reforms that followed the riot, like increased exercise and socializing time, but he was also cautious. When strangers tried to strike up a conversation, Mallory refused with a standard response: “Do I know you? No? Then go away.”
Mallory described Guindon as a “little guy, pretty friendly. He wasn’t ignorant.” But Guindon hung around with bikers and Mallory spent his time with weightlifters, and the two groups generally kept a respectful distance. “You hung around with your own,” Mallory said. “You don’t get friendly with people you don’t know right away. You don’t know who’s who.”
Guindon was in charge of running the prison’s sports shack, where equipment was stored. That made him visible to guys like Mallory. Like Guindon, Mallory was using his time behind bars to build himself up physically. “You’ve got nothing else to do in there,” he said. “You’ve got proper nutrition, proper rest. I did it [weights] seven days a week.”
He thrived physically while inside Millhaven, which had impressive new fitness facilities. He went into prison with a solid three-hundred-pound bench press but soon wanted better. “I seen a guy doing four hundred. I said, ‘I want to beat that.’ ” Within a few years, he was able to push up a staggering 550 pounds. “I had a whole bunch of guys around me, cheering me on,” he recalled of the day of his big lift. “The guys were all cheering me on. A lot of them were doing life. They had never seen that.”
Mallory got up to twelve reps with a four-hundred-pound bench press. He could also dead-lift a thousand pounds, which is about the weight of a thoroughbred horse. Like Guindon, he was obsessed with planning his workouts. “You only had a couple hours in the yard. Two hours, seven days a week…Snow on the ground, I’d go out. Seven days a week. Parkas, mitts, I’d go out.”
Guindon was allowed passes to compete in boxing and was a Canadian amateur champion again in 1972, but he wasn’t surprised when the Canadian Olympic Association didn’t send him to the Summer Olympic Games in Munich. He knew the association was against him representing the country, even when he’d been a free man. So at a time when he could have been heading overseas to fight in the Olympics, he was once almost killed during a high-spirited wrestling match on the second tier, when he nearly took a deadly tumble through the railing. “You do stupid things in stupid times.”
The prison was now pushing more structured combative pursuits. A recreation officer occasionally brought in a former pro boxer to train with Guindon. He was also allowed out to Toronto to fight Bob Proulx, the former Canadian junior welterweight champion. Guindon had to drop ten pounds in two days to qualify. He lost the weight and took the decision against Proulx.
There were also matches in Kitchener, Guelph and Windsor. It didn’t have the cachet of an international boxing tour or the Olympics, but it still felt good to rack up a win against an American Golden Gloves champion. Competition brought perks that went beyond the thrill of victory. Before starting the drive back from a bout in Windsor, Guindon persuaded his guards to stop over at the local Satan’s Choice clubhouse. The guards were thanked with a party featuring plenty of booze and female companionship. Guindon passed on the liquor but indulged with the women. “We were there for three hours, then another clubhouse for another hour. We got lucky down there in Windsor.” The guards were too hungover and exhausted to drive, so Guindon took the wheel himself and drove them all back to prison.
During a bout at the Cabbagetown Boxing Club in Toronto, Guindon caught the eye of Toronto Daily Star reporter Arlie Keller. “All I can do up there is hit the heavy bag, do lots of leg exercises, work with the weights and do exercises to strengthen my stomach,” he told Keller. “There are no ropes which I can use to skip or mirrors to look into to check my style. Nothing resembling a weapon is allowed.”
“I have five bouts lined up,” Guindon continued. “But when you’re in maximum security, it’s tough getting away.” He told the reporter that he refused to step away from his biker friends, even though he knew that would irritate the parole board. “I’ve been a biker since I was fifteen,” he said. “They are the only friends I have. I’m not going to give them up.”
It was while he was in Millhaven that he got a phone call from his brother, Jack, telling him that their father had died of lung cancer. The news didn’t come as a shock and Guindon processed it coolly. “I knew he wasn’t well. You gotta accept the fact that it’s over.”
There was a small ceremony in Thunder Bay, and then Guindon was allowed to ride with his father’s body on the train to attend the funeral in Buckingham, Quebec. There weren’t many people at either ceremony and there didn’t seem to be much to say. Guindon’s mother didn’t show up at all. Few tears were shed and that seemed okay. His father hadn’t been big on tears anyway, although Guindon could recall his father crying at the funerals of his own parents in the same town. Once the funeral was over, Guindon got on a plane and returned to his cell.
For all of its dangers, prison could be deadly boring. Many prisoners tried to find a hobby. “You’re in a cell that’s twelve by eight; you can’t do much in there. You’ve got to think, What am I going to do to keep myself busy? Make myself some money?” Guindon said.
His mother and brother sent him some cash to buy a stash of supplies such as all-purpose cement, a cutting block and assorted dyes. He also stocked up on stamping tools, leather lace, screwdrivers, magic markers, hole punches, edge cutters, a utility knife, rawhide mallets, a book on Indian lore, and patterns for moccasins, purses and wallets. He used these to make clutch purses, wallets and a tan holster, for which he had no gun. He poured his energy into his projects, creating a petit point picture of a fist on a motorcycle throttle, in which the knuckles were a skull, snake, witch and devil. That project took three and a half months, with him sometimes working six hours a day. He made an estimated 88,000 stitches with single strands of thread to complete the image. “Many a time I had to cut the thread,” he said. He also made a plaque with the Serenity Prayer adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, a group he joined in prison to strengthen his resolve against drinking. The plaque read, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
He specialized in leather and copper. He created a series of decorative wallets and plaques of boxers, birds and sad clowns, which had the face of his mother’s boyfriend. His mother liked the clowns, and she hung one on her wall.
Guindon hadn’t done any artwork before he went to prison, and neither of his parents was particularly artistic. So he was surprised at how the work consumed him, how much pride he felt in his creations, and how closely he guarded his freedom to continue making them. As a serious hobbyist, he was allowed to use glue that was coveted by addicts, and X-Acto knives, which were valued by almost everyone. Guindon guarded his glue and his knives, not wanting to lose his crafting privileges. “That’s what gets you in shit. Guys sell their glue to glue sniffers. I would never loan my knives to anybody. My razors. I had little X-Acto knives. They can do a lot of damage.”
He made a leather picture of a cougar in a tree for Suzanne Blais. She was still married, but her feelings for him hadn’t died. When she received his gift, she cried.