He [mobster Frank Cotroni] should have gone into the club [where the bikers hung out], clients or no clients, lined everybody against the wall and rat-a-tat-tat.
Montreal Mafia boss PAOLO VIOLI
The young man’s body washed ashore at Curtis Point on Rice Lake, about eighteen miles south of Pigpen Berry’s hometown, Peterborough, in the spring of 1973. He was wearing jeans and a denim jacket. In his left ear was a gold earring, and his mouth and hands were bound.
Forensic testing determined he had drowned. A Toronto Transit Commission subway transfer on his body indicated he had been in Toronto on March 9. Further testing revealed that the body was that of twenty-one-year-old William Lee Graham of Oakview Beach near Collingwood, several hours north of Toronto. During his final days alive, Graham had been a minor witness in a drug trial against the Satan’s Choice.
What happened between the time of Graham’s testimony and the discovery of his body in the water was later described by Cecil Kirby. After his court appearance, Graham had been spotted by bikers at a custom motorcycle shop in Toronto’s west end and was taken to a Choice clubhouse at Woodbine Avenue and Highway 7, where he was beaten and bound. Among those who dumped his still breathing body into the lake was Armand (In the Trunk) Sanguigni. “I was told of it later by Armand himself,” Kirby said.
If the weights had been properly applied to the body, he would never have surfaced.
On May 27, 1973, two badly decomposed bodies were found by a farmer in a ditch between two isolated fields about twenty-five miles east of Windsor. Dental records revealed that one of the bodies was eighteen-year-old Cathryn Hulko, wife of William (Wild Bill) Hulko, the president of the local Satan’s Choice chapter. The other body was that of her fifteen-year-old friend Lynn Campeau. They had each been shot in the head at least four times.
The teenagers had vanished on January 31, 1972, the night Wild Bill and seven others with the Windsor Choice chapter were charged with the murder of twenty-three-year-old Leonard Craig, a fellow member of the local Choice. Craig was severely beaten inside the Windsor clubhouse during a party. He staggered outside, collapsed, then died in hospital.
Hulko was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the Craig killing. Kirby said it was rumoured that Hulko’s wife and Campeau had co-operated with police to put him behind bars. As in the death of Graham, no charges were ever laid for their murders, which served as reminders that it was dangerous to stand up to the Choice in court.
The Satan’s Choice was reaching out and trying to expand, even as Guindon was bunkered away in prison with his workouts and crafts. They had some success in Winnipeg, where the Spartans club decided to patchover to the Choice. Then came word that someone had torn the Choice patch off the back of one of the new members. This was taken as an attack on the honour of each and every member and it merited a group response. Fifteen Ontario members drove up to Winnipeg with their trunks full of guns. Pigpen was among them. Once there, they learned that they had been duped. The member had simply handed in his patch to a rival Los Bravo. “That guy got a helluva beating,” Kirby said.
Things only got worse: the remaining members of the new Winnipeg Choice chapter decided they wanted to become Spartans again. Behind bars, there wasn’t much Guindon could do but wonder about the often low quality of leadership in the club. “That’s the way it goes. You wonder who’s leading the pack. The club’s only as good as its officers.”
The expansion effort was also crumbling on the West Coast. Some of the Vancouver members were becoming an embarrassment with their out-of-control drug use. Ken Goobie, John Harvey and a member called “Rabbit” headed west with the hopes of cleaning up the chapter and establishing a viable drug pipeline. If that meant shutting down the existing Vancouver Satan’s Choice chapter, then so be it.
Goobie was a different sort of biker. He was tall, lanky, and tough as beef jerky. He had boxed as an amateur and once fought bare-knuckles with former pro heavyweight boxer Joe (Ironman) Dinardo. That tussle ended in a draw. Certainly, that was impressive, but what set Goobie apart was his appearance, especially his fondness for business apparel. Goobie was the only club member known to wear his grinning devil patch on a three-piece suit.
The club’s western front collapsed, as Goobie and his crew didn’t have enough backing to take on existing clubs like the Satan’s Slaves. That was the end of the coast-to-coast dream, at least for the time being. Hearing the news from behind bars, Guindon was disappointed but not heartbroken. “They’ve got so many clubs out there.” It would have been too expensive for Vancouver members to make it over the Rocky Mountains for national meetings anyway. Keeping an eye on them would have been tough, and unsupervised chapters increased the chance of police infiltration. “The communication is too hard,” Guindon added. “If we can’t get everybody working together, you’re never going to make it.”
Toronto remained solid for the Choice. Despite his dust-up with Goobie, Dinardo was a friend and business partner with some of the members there. Dinardo offered them a sort of one-stop shopping. His criminal record included robbery, arson, theft, passing forged documents and counterfeit money, and weapons and parole violations. He provided Sanguigni and Kirby with targets for lucrative jobs. “Joe had all kinds of connections with people,” Kirby said. “Break-and-enters. Armed robberies.” While he was good with his fists, he always seemed to carry a gun. That came in handy when someone pulled a knife on him at Wasaga Beach. One wave of the handgun and the man ran away while Dinardo strolled along. “Joe just walked down the beach, buried the gun in the sand and kept on walking,” Kirby said.
Toronto-area police could be forgiven in the early 1970s if they pined for the heyday of Johnny Sombrero and his street rumbles. Over the past decade, bikers had moved from being a rowdy nuisance to something much more menacing.
In 1970, the Ontario Police Commission started an intelligence unit that focused on bikers. In mid-June 1973, the Ministry of the Solicitor General of Ontario reported that motorcycle gangs were pushing to entrench themselves as the main suppliers of illegal narcotics in Ontario, with the primary street drug at the time being amphetamines, or speed. Police estimated at the time that there were six hundred outlaw bikers in Ontario, including two hundred members of the Satan’s Choice. The Vagabonds and Para-Dice Riders remained important forces. Police didn’t count the Black Diamond Riders among the six hundred because they were not believed to be in the drug trade.
Sombrero still lumbered about but he had become a quaint relic of another era, and the Battle of Pebblestone seemed like a Sunday school sack race compared to what Pigpen, Sanguigni and Kirby were doing. “So I broke a couple of arms and split some guy’s skull from here to there,” Sombrero told the Globe and Mail, running a finger down his head. As Sombrero held forth with the reporter, Black Diamond Riders splashed about in a pool at their clubhouse like kids on summer break.
Sombrero held on to delusions of grandeur and sipped champagne from his own personal silver goblet, which was refilled by members. “I’m a Liberal-monarchist. I feel like shooting some of those people the way they talk against the Queen.”
He explained how one of his many brawls was handled by the courts, when he said he reached for a fence rail to dispense with a group he called “seven of the bastards.”
“Judge was a great old guy. Said, ‘Whatever happened to the old rules of one against one?’ He convicted me of assault, but sentenced me to one day in jail and then told me to serve it in his chambers. Let me go about an hour later.”
Sombrero was married now, with three children, but he still called his clubmates “my boys.” He revelled in being a father figure of sorts. “I don’t know what my boys do at home or someplace. You know, grass and stuff. Who knows? But nobody in this club’s gonna get into the real drug thing.”
“Look, this is going to sound corny, but I’m a nationalist, see,” he told the Globe and Mail. “I believe in a strong Canada. You gonna have a strong country, you gotta have strong young men. And any guy gets on dope won’t make it.”
He spoke of his weariness of paying fines and court costs, like the time he was docked money for knocking someone’s eye out of its socket. “When I go with one or two of my boys, to visit any other club, I let ’em know I’m coming. They clean the place out, tell their guys, ‘Johnny Sombrero’s coming,’ and they get rid of any of that kind of stuff they have. They know me.” He was proud that he hadn’t changed with the times and that his members had a certain uniformity as well as club uniform shirts. Some bikers spoke of rugged individualism, but not Sombrero. “One guy leaves, another just exactly like him comes in.”
While Sombrero didn’t venture far from his Toronto home, in 1973, the Satan’s Choice was pushing into Crescent Street in Montreal’s downtown, home to a lively collection of bars and restaurants close to McGill University and the Sainte-Catherine Street tourist drag. Also trying to gain the upper hand on the Crescent Street drug trade was the Popeyes Motorcycle Club.
The police responded with a special squad of a dozen or so members to keep an eye on them. Leaders of the local Mafia favoured a more direct approach. After hearing that three members of the Cotroni crime family were killed by bikers in September 1973, Mafiosi Paolo Violi called for blood, according to a police bug planted at the ice cream shop on Jean-Talon East that doubled as his headquarters: “He [Frank Cotroni] should have gone into the club [where the bikers hung out], clients or no clients, lined everybody against the wall and rat-a-tat-tat.”
It was around this time that a former Maritimer entered Guindon’s world as quietly as a thief in the night. Garnet Douglas (Mother) McEwen was the hippie-ish proprietor of a head shop in St. Catharines, Ontario, having worked his way up from selling pencils on street corners. Mother hobbled about with the aid of an artificial leg after a nasty motorcycle accident. He sometimes altered tattoos, but he was not a tattoo artist by any stretch. Lorne Campbell of the Choice covered his arms with tattoos and felt the worst of the bunch were the ones inked by Mother. “He was just a fat, stinky guy,” Campbell said. “That’s all he was. He was just a dirty guy who looked like a 1950s biker. He was filthy.” No doubt Mother was not amused when Campbell quipped that he didn’t have a leg to stand on. Campbell threatened to tear off Mother’s wooden leg so that he could beat him with it.
Niagara region motorcycle painter Mark DeMarco didn’t like McEwen either, and he also didn’t trust him. Mother borrowed DeMarco’s dark blue Cadillac DeVille when he was getting married, saying it would be a great car for the occasion. In return, he loaned DeMarco his custom Harley. DeMarco found it odd that the pearl-white Super Glide had “SCMC” (Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club) on the sissy bar. Only club members could have club gear or markings like that. McEwen was late returning the Cadillac, and DeMarco was troubled by what he discovered when he finally got it back: three hidden recording devices. Two were on the inside and another was on the outside mirror, to catch conversations on the street. “That was my first giveaway that he was a rat,” DeMarco said.
By 1974, McEwen was frequently associating with members of the Outlaws on the American side of the border, around Niagara Falls. McEwen, Kirby and a Kitchener member named Drago flew to Florida to visit with the Outlaws for two weeks. That trip was the start of a chain of events that would dramatically remake Guindon’s world, with no shortage of blood spilled in the process.
The Outlaws were extremely territorial. Florida had become a cash cow and a rough playground for them since their South Florida chapter was founded in 1967. The state offered all-year bike riding, as well as proximity to South American drug routes and several military bases, which were prime spots for recruiting members. The Hells Angels held a firm grip on the West Coast and the Bandidos controlled Texas, but Florida belonged to the Outlaws.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the Outlaws and Hells Angels would butt up against each other in Florida. When an Outlaw raped the wife of a Hells Angel in 1969, it set off a chain of attacks and counterattacks that echoed for years. The woman’s husband and other Hells Angels beat the rapist to death. In retaliation, three visiting Massachusetts Hells Angels were kidnapped in April 1974 and shot execution-style with shotguns. Their bodies were tied to cinder blocks and dumped off a cliff into a quarry in southwest Broward County. Violence bred more violence with no end in sight.
Upon their arrival in Florida, McEwen and Drago were grilled by airport security officers, but Kirby, a gym rat who was more clean-cut-looking, passed through unhassled.
Many of the Outlaws Kirby encountered in Fort Lauderdale were ex-servicemen, numb from the carnage of Vietnam, and their headquarters was a bungalow with gun ports instead of windows. “Their clubhouse was like a fortress,” he said. “They put a chill in my spine.”
McEwen had made several trips south already, and he owned a couple of body-rub parlours in the area. During the visit, one of them caught fire and a woman inside died. Kirby wondered if she had been murdered. McEwen’s grief over her death seemed real to his clubmate.
Wherever McEwen went in the years to come, whoever’s lives he touched, pain would follow, for them and the biker with the bugs in his car. But few would feel it as keenly as Guindon.