I don’t think I’m a fucking idiot. I’ve done some things in my life. I’ve had a big club myself.
BERNIE GUINDON
Police surveillance officers shivered outside the Hells Angels clubhouse in Sorel, Quebec, on the night of Friday, December 29, 2000. Inside, Guindon and three hundred or so others attended what many thought was the biggest party in Canadian outlaw biker history. Despite the magnitude of the event, just outside Montreal, Guindon wasn’t particularly excited to be there on that bitterly cold night.
They were gathered on hallowed ground, as far as outlaw bikers went. The Sorel clubhouse was home to the first Canadian Hells Angels charter. It was here that the Hells Angels took root in Canada on December 5, 1977. Now, almost a quarter-century later, the Angels’ winged death head flag flew over the clubhouse’s roof as the club swallowed up members of well-established Ontario clubs like the Lobos, Last Chance, Para-Dice Riders and Satan’s Choice. The Vagabonds in Toronto and the Hamilton-based Red Devils remained intact; they were considered friendly enough to the Angels not to be a threat and were not vital to the mass expansion.
The Ontario bikers inside the Sorel clubhouse were allowed to join the Hells Angels without having to go through any initiation process. For many of them, getting an Angels winged death head patch was a dream come true. Guindon’s feelings were more complicated. Diehard Satan’s Choice members had bitterly resisted the American-based Outlaws, and now they were joining another international club. Guindon was going in as president of the new Hells Angels Oshawa charter. Nationalistic feelings ran particularly strong in the Oshawa chapter of the Choice, and they had been the last to concede to the Angels. Guindon had been pulled out of retirement for the patchover, likely averting a war between the Angels and diehards in his old club.
The mass patchover to the Angels bolstered their Canadian position against the Outlaws, but it was more immediately a response to sudden moves made in Quebec by the Rock Machine, a rival club that had already folded into the larger, U.S.-based Bandidos Motorcycle Club. Just four weeks before the Sorel patchover, the Bandidos had shocked the biker world by expanding en masse into Ontario, giving forty-five members of the Ontario Rock Machine probationary Bandidos status at a ceremony in a banquet hall in Vaughan, north of Toronto.
The Angels’ response in Sorel gave the club instant charters on both coasts and throughout much of the country in between, the Prairies excepted. There were three new Hells Angels charters in Toronto, and one each in Woodbridge, Kitchener, Sudbury, Oshawa, Thunder Bay, Windsor, Lanark County, Keswick and Simcoe County, as well as a probationary charter in the Niagara region. With one bold move the Hells Angels could boast 110 members in the Greater Toronto Area alone, the highest concentration in the world. Canada was now home to some 550 Hells Angels, which accounted for about a fifth of the membership of the world’s largest outlaw motorcycle club. Angels’ founder Sonny Barger liked to say that the sun never set on his Hells Angels, and now Guindon’s old empire helped him solidify his boast.
If Guindon was going to wear the patch, he decided he’d live it as well. In 2003, he made a pilgrimage, riding down to Arizona to meet Barger for his sixty-fifth birthday on October 13. Barger ran the Cave Creek charter of the Angels and lived on a small ranch near Phoenix. It was familiar territory for him, not that far from where he’d served four years of federal prison time for conspiring to blow up the Outlaws’ clubhouse in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1980s.
The year 2003 hadn’t been a good one for Barger. That was the year he learned that his third wife had been a paid police informant. Also that year, someone put an up-close bullet between the eyes of Dan (Hoover) Seybert, president of Barger’s Cave Creek chapter.
Not surprisingly, Guindon rode his Harley into a high-security environment in Cave Creek. Barger seemed uncomfortable, and not just because he spoke through a stent in his throat after a bout with cancer. His attitude, as Guindon summed it up, was one of “Yeah, okay, you’re here. I have to put up with you.” Guindon was particularly sensitive to the perceived snub: “I don’t think I’m a fucking idiot. I’ve done some things in my life. I’ve had a big club myself.”
Barger once had a bodyguard who drilled horns into his head to give himself an extra-intimidating appearance. That guard wasn’t on duty when Guindon arrived, and he wasn’t happy with the replacement.
“I wasn’t impressed with his bodyguard or whatever they call him. Had this attitude. The guy had a fuck-you attitude. Things he’d say, like a rude remark all the time. I came all the way from Canada. I didn’t stay long.” With the Arizona desert beckoning, Guindon did what he always did when he didn’t want to sit still. “I went riding…Got better out on the bike.”