He sold bodies and information to the cops so he could get higher up…That’s how I got nailed.
BERNIE GUINDON on Garnet (Mother) McEwen
Guindon’s mother didn’t go to his trial and that’s what he wanted. She didn’t need to see her boy sitting in court as a prisoner or hear prosecutors say how he was part of a massive drug ring that stretched down to Florida.
Special Crown prosecutor Frank Caputo characterized the ring as “a marriage of chemical expertise and a distribution system in both Canada and the United States.”
The jury heard how U.S. Special Agent Kenneth Paterson of Buffalo infiltrated the group, and his description of how Templain brought drugs to Wisconsin several times.
Templain’s lawyer Roy Youngson said his client “was nowhere near the top of the ladder in this system,” even though the lab was on his island property and he travelled to the United States, Toronto and Montreal to distribute the drugs. “He is a self-styled big shot, a con man who has a broken-down airplane and who had the gall to tell a special U.S. narcotics agent he could deliver drugs anywhere in the world,” Youngson said. “He was not the foundation of this thing but was a man who liked money and was a hopeful participant.”
Without actually saying Guindon’s name, Youngson pointed a finger in his direction, contending it would have taken a large group with the muscle and reach of the Satan’s Choice to run the drug channel. Youngson also argued that the drugs were worth $63,000, not the mega-millions stated by police and splashed across headlines. In the end, Judge William Fitzgerald sentenced Templain to twelve years after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic in narcotics.
Guindon wasn’t about to cut a deal. Like the fighter he was, he would tough it out in court and see where that left him. As he awaited trial, he didn’t help his case when authorities intercepted a letter he wrote from behind bars, suggesting that his fortunes would improve if something happened to silence an American DEA agent who was key to the case. The fact that Guindon was the leader of one of the world’s largest outlaw motorcycle gangs further tainted the court’s impression of him. Police assumed that his status was proof enough that he was setting up a drug distribution network. “Guindon was the overall coordinator of everything,” Murphy said, still convinced forty years later. “He was the overall boss of everything.”
Guindon didn’t believe the case against him was particularly strong, especially compared to the one against Templain. “I never got fuck all. That sonofabitch got everything. If he gave me anything, it wouldn’t be more than a thousand bucks,” said Guindon.
He was convinced he could also smell a sellout from Mother McEwen, somewhere in the background of the mess: “He sold bodies and information to the cops so he could get higher up…That’s how I got nailed. He introduced me to Allan Templain.” Whatever the case, Guindon bore the brunt of the operation. Ironically, the man who helped set and enforce the Choice’s policy against hard drug use took the hardest fall in a major drug bust. In May 1976, he was sentenced to seventeen years for conspiracy to traffic in phencyclidine, five years longer than Templain, the man who drew him into the scheme.
Two months after Guindon’s return to prison, Canada hosted its first-ever Summer Olympic Games. Without the drug beef, Guindon could well have starred on the Canadian boxing team. He would be into his forties or possibly even fifties by the time he got out of prison, depending on the parole board. His Olympic dream was effectively snuffed out. A tougher fight was just beginning.
In July 1976, Guindon returned to Millhaven. He didn’t even bother watching the Olympics on television. It was as if the Games were in a far-flung place, in a faraway, inaccessible world, and not just a few hours down Highway 401, in Montreal.
Inside, time seemed to have stood still since Guindon’s last mandatory visit. He was quickly reacquainted with his old cronies.
“It was like old home week,” he said. A lot of the men were lifers, and some of them didn’t really know how to survive on the streets, where they weren’t provided with wake-up calls, meals, clothing, a job and a certain level of security. “You get fed, you get clothed and you’ve got a little money for canteen. You get institutionalized and they’re bums on the street. They steal irons and toasters and televisions.” The regimented life of a penitentiary suited them. “They’ve got three meals a day. They’ve got a roof over their heads.”
Guindon didn’t want his mother to visit him in prison, just as he didn’t want her at his trials. “What are you going to say to her? She worked all of her life hoping you wouldn’t go to jail.” He focused instead on what was essential for his survival, like quickly determining whom he could trust. He heard that one of the Millhaven guards was a striker for the Choice chapter in Kingston. That broke the rules of both the bikers and the authorities. The guard clearly wanted to talk but Guindon wondered if he was working undercover against the club. Talking with any guard was always dangerous anyway, so he steered clear of the man. “You’ve got to be careful how you’re talking to a guard. An inmate who might not like you might say, ‘Look at him. He might be squealing.’ ”
During the first year of his sentence, Guindon heard that his former sidekick Big Jack (Bear) Olliffe had been shot dead. Big Jack had been working as a bouncer at the Cadillac Hotel, the notorious bucket of blood on Simcoe Street South in Oshawa where Guindon’s father had once bounced and hung out.
On the last evening of his life, Big Jack made a fatal mistake. He tried to eject long-time Choice member Terry Siblock from the Cadillac for drunkenness. Siblock was the same man Big Jack had wrongly called a stool pigeon repeatedly over the past ten years. Such words aren’t easily forgiven or forgotten on Simcoe Street South, and Siblock decided he had been hearing the insult long enough. He left the bar to pick up a .306 rifle, returned, and silenced Big Jack’s slanderous lie forever. There were plenty of witnesses, but that just didn’t matter to Siblock. As everyone there could plainly see, he wasn’t willing to hear Big Jack badmouth him one more time. Guindon understood Siblock’s feelings, even though he liked Big Jack well enough. “I don’t know how the guy put up with it. He finally snapped. Said, ‘Enough of this shit. Enough is enough.’ ”
Big Jack’s death wasn’t a total surprise to Guindon, even without the Siblock situation. “I figured that was coming sooner or later. He was acting as national president. It was going to his head. Nobody paid much respect to him.”
—
Looking across the Detroit River from Windsor, Ontario, it’s hard to imagine the Detroit cityscape is any more than a strong swim away, let alone in another country. In early 1977, the Outlaws and the Satan’s Choice met secretly in Windsor to put even less distance between them.
On the Canadian side, only Satan’s Choice chapters believed to be loyal to Mother McEwen were invited. As the Outlaws’ war with the Angels raged on in the United States, the American club needed to boost its ranks, and it wanted to fill them with members of the Satan’s Choice—and not the ones preoccupied with keeping their club Canadian.
Thunder Bay members took notice that bonds between clubs solidified when their old friend Howard (Pigpen) Berry hooked up with the Outlaws in the United States. “After Howard went to the OLs [Outlaws], it opened the door for even more association/biz,” Verg Erslavas wrote in his reflections on the era. “By the mid-70s, we were tight with the OLs in many ways.”
Not all Choice members had agreed to wear the Outlaw-Choice brotherhood patch, a sign that tensions were building within the Canadian club. “A lot of the guys were patriotic, surprisingly,” Erslavas said. “ ‘No Yankee shit on my colours.’ ”
There was a lot more to joining the Outlaws than just switching patches. For a biker, patching over to another club meant a profound culture shift. The Americans even rode a different model of Harley. Everything about the Outlaws was more rigid, aggressive, loud and in your face. “They were a different kind of club than the Choice. Some of the guys I met were from Detroit, Carolinas, Florida, Tennessee and other states. A lot of them rode rigid-framed choppers with open primary chains, which was a statement in itself by the mid-70s.”
Behind bars, Guindon was livid when he heard about the meeting—and what happened next. In March 1977, the St. Catharines and Windsor chapters of the Choice joined the Outlaws, with Hamilton, Montreal and Ottawa following shortly afterwards. Toronto, Oshawa, Kitchener, Peterborough and Kingston remained loyal to Guindon’s vision of an independent Canadian club. With that, the Outlaws beat the Hells Angels across the border and became the first international outlaw motorcycle club with Canadian chapters.
In the summer of 1977 the new Canadian Outlaws gathered to party with their American brothers at Crystal Beach, near Buffalo. They burned their Satan’s Choice grinning devil patches and accepted the skull and crossed pistons patch of the Outlaws. They also adopted smaller patches that read, “RIP Satan’s Choice MC.”
Guindon fumed about Mother McEwen’s betrayal. Frustrated at his own helplessness, he sat in his cell and pounded out leather craft with a little hammer. “I couldn’t do nothing about it. Fuck was I mad. Especially at him. Stool pigeon motherfucker.”
Guindon thought about his discomfort around McEwen since the first time they’d met in St. Catharines. “I had a negative feeling. I always get these feelings with some people. Maybe it’s a natural feeling. Be careful. Be cautious.” Part of the reason was that McEwen didn’t even look like a real biker. “He looked like a fucking hippie. I thought, What’s this guy looking for? He had a head shop.”
The Hells Angels responded quickly to the Outlaws’ expansion. On December 5, 1977, the Angels landed in Montreal. They patched over thirty-five members of the Popeyes, whose ranks included killers like Yves (Apache) Trudeau. The Popeyes had travelled south to party with Angels charters (the Hells Angels are divided into local charters, not chapters as other clubs are) on the Eastern Seaboard for years. Now they were part of something much bigger. They could dream now about expansion, not just survival.
The Satan’s Choice had been the mightiest of the Canadian clubs when there were no international clubs in the country. Now, within only months of each other, the two most powerful American-based clubs had set up shop on Canadian soil, and the Choice’s very survival was threatened. The dam was bursting and Guindon couldn’t do a thing but tap away at his leather craft and hope the remnants of his club had the nerve to stand their ground.