We didn’t normally work the bikers. We happened to do this because we wanted to get out of the office.
Retired organized crime cop MARK MURPHY
In January 1975 two Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers in Toronto went out for a cup of coffee. Mark Murphy and his partner Don (Pots) Pospeich of the national Criminal Intelligence Service needed a break from the internecine bickering that often contaminates police departments, just as it does biker clubhouses. The two Mounties were anxious for a big project to get them out of the office for a while. Maybe something involving drugs would do the trick. An investigation into cocaine trafficking in Toronto could turn up big results if they started pulling on strands.
Mother McEwen was caught up in some intense office politics of his own. McEwen had invited some Chicago Outlaws up to Oshawa to meet with Guindon and others in the Choice. McEwen wanted to forge a more formal alliance between the two clubs. Not long after that, as a sign they were making progress, they made up a mini-patch for both clubs to wear: a piston overlapped with a devil’s trident, under “1%” and the word “brotherhood.”
The alliance wasn’t just about the warm and fuzzy possibility of calling more hairy men “bro.” It served a couple of practical purposes. The first was to block the Hells Angels from establishing chapters in Canada. The second was business. Tighter ties between the Choice and the Outlaws opened a ready southern market for Canadian-made speed.
It was around this time that McEwen introduced Guindon to Allan George Templain, who he said was from the Choice’s Kitchener chapter. Templain appeared to have money and also boasted a black belt in karate. He lived in a custom-built, waterfront home in Guindon’s old hometown of Sault Ste. Marie and flew a private aircraft with pontoons, so he could land it on water or land.
During his frequent runs over Lake Superior in the months that followed, Guindon stopped by a few times to see Templain at home. Something about those visits left Guindon with an uneasy feeling. “I said to myself, ‘Stay the fuck away from him.’ Every time I went to Thunder Bay, I’d stop there for something to do. I’d kick my ass. On the surface, he was a good guy.”
Sometimes Templain and Guindon sparred, matching karate against boxing, although it never ended well for Templain. “He never liked it when I jabbed at him,” Guindon said. “When I hit him, he stopped.”
Templain also owned a secluded hunting lodge. Located on an island in the middle of Oba Lake, one hundred miles north of Wawa, it was surrounded by rugged bushland as far as the eye could see. Close to the lodge, hidden in the woods, was a lab he used to make phencyclidine, known on the street as PCP, angel dust, peace pills and hog. The animal tranquilizer and hallucinogen was originally developed as an anaesthetic but was withdrawn for human use because it caused convulsions.
Getting involved in the drug trade was an abrupt change of course for Guindon, who had beaten up club members for using drugs less than a decade before. But the times had changed, and he could use the money.
Bikers like Guindon, McEwen and Templain weren’t yet on Murphy and Pospeich’s radar. Their mandate within the RCMP was to fight organized crime, and they didn’t consider the likes of Satan’s Choice to be real organized crime. Bikers were rough and dangerous, but police still equated organized crime with the Mafia. If the bikers were involved in narcotics trafficking, two officers reasoned, that was an issue for the drug enforcement units.
One day, Murphy and Pospeich sat down with Sergeant Lou Nave of the RCMP drug section. Nave had a lead about someone on Danforth Avenue in Toronto’s Greek neighbourhood who was suspected of delivering a weekly shipment of speed to Oshawa. He knew little about the suspect except that he drove an old white Chrysler.
Nave’s lead held interesting possibilities for Murphy and Pospeich. If the man at the wheel of the old white Chrysler was indeed moving speed, then he most likely was getting his supply from a local lab. In an elevator back at their office, the two Mounties shook hands and agreed to investigate until they found that lab so that they could take out the whole organization. If they only arrested the delivery man, it would be like cutting off the head of a dandelion and then finding the pesky plants sprouting up all over your lawn the next day. They needed to bore right down to the roots and extract the entire weed.
Murphy and Pospeich cruised up and down the Danforth, looking for the Chrysler. They found a 1965 model parked in an alley behind the 2800 block of Danforth Avenue. A licence plate check showed it was owned by a man named Malcolm Raymond Bould. That name meant nothing to them. They arranged for eyeball surveillance on Bould, and also got wiretaps going. They followed him to hockey rinks and shopping centres, observing a few interactions that were clearly drug deals. At one point, the surveillance cops found themselves within a few feet of what appeared to be a drug buy. It wasn’t a problem for Pospeich, in particular, whose resemblance to Hollywood tough guy Charles Bronson made him look more authentic than most bad guys. The cops seemed to go undetected as they followed their targets around Toronto, once even holding a door for one of them. They watched Bould drop packages off beside garbage pails and telephone poles.
One day, they intercepted a call Bould made to a man named Joe Prince. Exactly what they were talking about wasn’t clear, but Prince certainly seemed important. On March 12, Prince led Murphy and Pospeich to the Cambridge Motor Hotel on Dixon Road, where they saw a man who became yet another target, James Mulryan. He wasn’t a member of the Satan’s Choice but he was connected to a few men who were. Both Mounties were surprised to suddenly see bikers entering their investigation.
With their bosses losing patience after months of surveillance and no arrests, Murphy and Pospeich tailed Mulryan to an address on Dundas Street West in Toronto. There, he met with Templain, who was accompanied by a boy who looked about ten and two other males. Mulryan drove them up Dundas Street to the Venus Spa in the downtown tenderloin district. They weren’t there long before they headed to an apartment building in the far north end of the city, at 5949 Yonge Street. Neither of the Mounties knew enough about bikers yet to know they had just seen the downtown rub-and-tug where Guindon worked and the uptown apartment building where he lived.
The next day, the officers watched Templain and a second man leave the apartment building in a silver vehicle. They felt a rush when they recognized the second man as Bernie Guindon, head of the Satan’s Choice and an international amateur boxer. As little as they knew about biker clubs, they knew Guindon to see him. Suddenly, their little probe had big game in its sites, and the OPP biker squad wanted in.
Including the provincial police force in their investigation offered an obvious political advantage for the two Mounties, whose bosses were constantly reminding them of the expense of their operation. If the OPP were involved, it would be a joint forces project and would be in less danger of being shut down due to lack of funds. The OPP volunteered as many as eight officers to help. Guindon was the trophy arrest they craved. Murphy and Pospeich said they only needed two additional officers for the time being. By now, they had wiretaps running on the phones of their key suspects, Guindon included.
Over the next several weeks, surveillance officers followed their targets to meetings in Toronto-area hotels and restaurants. In late March, Templain and the young boy appeared again in Toronto. The surveillance team enjoyed a pleasant night, tagging behind as they went to Maple Leaf Gardens and watched a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. After the game, the job became less enjoyable as they parked outside a restaurant on Yonge Street in the bitter cold, watching Templain dine inside on steak and wine.
The OPP felt it was time to arrest Mulryan, but the two Mounties still wanted to find that meth lab, as they had promised each other when the operation began.
Even while working security at a body-rub parlour to pay his bills, Guindon was pursuing his amateur boxing career with a vengeance. In April 1975, he won the all-Ontario championships at 147 pounds with a decision over Larry Llewellyn of Hamilton. He had also resumed contact with Suzanne Blais, even though they both had other partners yet again. That month, Suzanne was in hospital when she got a surprise visit from Guindon with “the largest flower arrangement I’ve ever received in my life.” Later that month, he paid her another visit at home.
On May 6, 1975, surveillance officers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport watched discreetly as Templain disembarked Air Canada flight 429 from Montreal at 10:05 p.m. He was greeted at the airport by a man police didn’t recognize. The stranger was in his mid-twenties and wore red high-top running shoes and jeans. He was carrying a yellow plastic bag and a brown tote bag.
Police identified the man as twenty-five-year-old Chuck Jones. Officers outside took a quick look in his Dodge van and found twenty thousand dollars in the glove compartment. Surveillance officers followed the van across the north end of town to Highway 404, and north to 130 Don Park Road, an inconsequential-looking industrial mall with several small businesses, including a chemical importation enterprise. The officers felt their pulses quicken. They wondered if this was the lab.
They had barely started sipping their coffee before the two targets were back in the van, this time returning west along Highway 401 to Dixon Road. There was little traffic and the police had only three surveillance cars, making it a challenge not to be noticed. At one point, Murphy pulled directly alongside the van at a red light on Dixon Road. Templain stared down at the officers from the van’s passenger seat. Sensing he had to do something to lose his quarry’s interest, Murphy enthusiastically picked his nose and then looked disgusted as he surveyed his findings on the tip of his finger. That was enough to get Templain to look away until the light finally changed. The officers followed the van all the way to Niagara Street in St. Catharines, nearly an hour away, where Guindon joined their targets.
The next day, at three in the afternoon, surveillance latched on to Templain and Jones at a Yonge Street restaurant not far from Guindon’s apartment building. Soon, the targets collected Guindon and returned with him to the restaurant. The mood was clearly upbeat as others joined in, with plenty of laughter. The officers marvelled that they still hadn’t been spotted.
Guindon’s group now included a man with pumped-up arms who held the door as the others left the restaurant. Police didn’t recognize him, but the gym rat was Satan’s Choice member Cecil Kirby, who was working as a speed courier then. Also present were Ken Goobie, a Para-Dice Rider named John the Hat and a man named Patty LeBlanc, whose body ended up in the trunk of a car in Vancouver years later. There was also a Montreal mobster involved in the pornography business. They were moving ten to twenty-eight pounds of yellow speed a week through the restaurant.
Guindon sometimes wondered if they were being watched, but he often felt that way. “Sometimes you get the feeling that your hair stands up on the back of your neck.
“There’s something happening here. I had a funny feeling. You’re always paranoid. Because you’ve been inside so much. You always think there’s something wrong.”
In May 1975, Guindon scored a technical knockout over Terry Boyd of Montreal and won the Eastern Canadian championship. If all went well, he might soon be fighting again with a Maple Leaf on his chest. The Olympics were just a little over a year away in Montreal. Even with his advancing age, Guindon still had some grim magic in his gloves.
Surveillance continued on him and Jones. In early June 1975, the officers learned that Jimmy Mulryan had built a new house on the Lake Simcoe shore in Keswick. He was living with a schoolteacher and was excited that she was expecting their first child. And Templain, meanwhile, was observed making numerous trips to his home in Sault Ste. Marie and often left packages in a locker at the Toronto airport.
Police with binoculars scanned his Oba lodge from a nearby island on June 11, 1975 and saw Templain and another man hauling garbage cans. The officers suspected the cans were filled with drugs or chemicals for making drugs. They saw men with other containers going by boat from island to island, dropping off more containers. The officers believed they had reached ground zero. This must be the lab.
A pre-dawn raid on the lodge was set for the first weekend of August 1975. Officers checked into the Oba Lake Lodge, posing as hunters. Templain was still in his bunk when the police burst in for what would prove to be the largest drug bust in Canadian history to that date, conducted jointly by the RCMP, OPP, Metro Toronto Police and U.S. DEA. They discovered less than fifty pounds of actual PCP, but 2,300 pounds of the chemicals needed to make the drug. They estimated that if it was all put to use, it would have been worth some $91 million on the street.
Even years later, Murphy insisted that Templain, Jones and Mulryan hadn’t cut deals with investigators. And police simply hadn’t bothered to charge Bould, Prince and Mulryan. Instead, they would be left on the street as starting points for future investigations.
Since he’d come into Murphy and Pospeich’s view, the operation had focused intently on Guindon. Murphy thought he must be the mastermind, although he seemed unusually nice for a biker and was never seen packing a gun. He also didn’t seem to have much money. Still, Guindon presented police with an appealing target. He wasn’t wise to the ways of police surveillance after his prison stint, and he also didn’t seem to appreciate that he was now a major trophy for police. “The cops have always got a police informant working around him,” Kirby said. “It’s a feather in some cops’ hats if they can get a case against Bernie Guindon.”
Police arrested Guindon in Toronto on the assumption that he was using his club to set up a distribution network. Police didn’t find any guns, drugs or money. “I never got caught with any drugs whatsoever,” he reflected. “There was no photo of me being at the property when he [Templain] was making the drugs or selling the drugs,” he added. “He would sell all of the drugs and keep all the money. He didn’t pass any on to me.” When he was taken to the police station, Guindon got a chilling feeling when he saw Templain talking with police in a room. “He was there for a long fucking time.”
Guindon was in the Sault Ste. Marie jail when Kirby and Frank (Cisco) Lenti of the Choice drove up to see him in the wintertime. “We froze our fucking asses off in a Chevy van,” Kirby recalled.
Guindon felt that Kirby owed him money, which Kirby disputed. “I said, ‘When you go to jail, you lose,’ ” Kirby recalled. “He said, ‘We’ll settle it up when I get back out.’ ”
Murphy was shocked to later learn that Mulryan’s lifeless body was found hanging in the basement of his new home. Since he hadn’t been charged, the bikers figured he was an informant. “We never charged Jimmy Mulryan and that is the biggest mistake we ever made,” Murphy said. “They thought Jimmy Mulryan had been the rat in the whole thing.”
Stewing in the Sault Ste. Marie jail, Guindon had problems with Templain, but he didn’t know of anyone going after Mulryan. Thinking back, he didn’t even remember Mulryan. And the only thing he recalled about that stint in jail was its lousy cold grilled cheese sandwiches. “I couldn’t stand the fucking shit. That’s why I don’t eat it now.”
“For the record, Mulryan was not an informant,” Murphy said. Neither, he added, was Kirby.
Not yet.