I’ve heard about you.
Mafia leader JUAN RAMON FERNANDEZ PAZ
A personal drama played out quietly behind locked doors in Penetanguishene. At the Oak Ridge mental health facility, former Richmond Hill Satan’s Choice member and convicted rapist Gerald Michael Vaughan began a series of treatment programs after being diagnosed with “narcissistic, antisocial and paranoid traits, and paraphilia [psychosexual disorder].” At first he co-operated, then after a few years in custody, he began refusing all forms of rehabilitation. His counsellors considered his growing obstinacy a psychological battle for control. Instead of trying to get better, he set out to better conditions for himself.
Vaughan wrote to his Member of Provincial Parliament, complaining that he should have the right to smoke and watch cable TV in his room. He already had a computer with Internet access. He also demanded privacy from female staff while in the shower and began to sponge-bathe himself using a bucket in his own cell. Then on July 14, 2004, Vaughan tried to kill a fifty-nine-year-old employee by clubbing him with a pot. The attack was nothing personal. Vaughan just reasoned it would get him transferred to a prison, where he would have more rights.
Vaughan learned he was suffering from more than psychosexual disorders. He was diagnosed with colon cancer and was often out of the facility for medical treatment. He began requesting a change of doctors, often with no apparent reason or warning. Cecil Kirby wondered if he was just scoping out the security of various medical offices. “He might have been looking for an escape route,” Kirby said. “That’s a game we all play.”
Colon cancer killed Vaughan on May 5, 2008, at the age of fifty-seven, before he could make his escape bid. He drew his final breath in the Huronia District Hospital in Midland. The man who was perhaps the least stable, least known and most dangerous member of Guindon’s old gang had been in maximum-security custody for twenty-eight years.
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Harley Guindon was released to a Hamilton community residential facility two years after he was sent to prison. His limited freedom didn’t last long. Hamilton police called him a key suspect in a June 2009 stabbing and also believed he was trafficking drugs. He was returned to Collins Bay later that month on a parole violation, and that’s where he was on November 18, 2009, when his son was born.
The birth announcement read: “Our dear ‘Junior’ came out punchin’ on Nov 18th, 2009 at 5:39 pm weighing 7 lbs 15ozs, 21 inches tall with an 8 inch reach.” Harley appealed to prison authorities to give him an open visit, so he could hold his boy. He couldn’t stand the idea of seeing him for the first time while behind a thick wall of Plexiglas. They refused.
“After this, I went haywire, punched a few guys out and went to the hole for being a threat to the safety and security of the institution. I spent six months in the hole and requested to be sent to Millhaven maximum penitentiary.” His parole file states he was placed in administrative segregation for what authorities called “the safety and security of the institution.” The experience made him despise the parole officer who yanked his freedom in the first place. “I still have dreams about that woman and they’re not healthy,” he said.
Harley’s next stop was Millhaven’s ultra-tough J-Unit. A lot had changed there in the few decades since his father had helped tear apart the walls between cells in a riot, but an inmate could still kill his time with a game of bridge.
To play bridge well, you have to be able to count cards. Strong bridge players often graduate from the ranks of lesser skilled games like cribbage and bid whist. “Bridge is the game for focus and concentration,” Harley explained. “You don’t play cribbage when you know how to play bridge.”
In Millhaven, serious bridge players sweetened the pot by playing for money. Putting actual money on the table wasn’t possible, but prisoners could arrange for friends and family on the outside to make bank deposits and settle debts. “I made lots,” Harley said. “You just play with the people who have money.” Bridge meant Harley could pay for a 1999 Harley-Davidson Softail custom ride that his father was building for him. “I gave him $10,500 while I was in custody because I always wanted a bike built by my father.”
Harley was winning at more than bridge. He fought in cramped cells and he fought in wide-open hallways. Fighting in a cell meant close quarters combat, which favoured strength. Harley had that. Fighting in the open rewarded speed, and Harley had that too. “In a cell, you’re using the wall, you’re using everything,” Harley said. “In the open, you can dance. You’re not tripping over chairs.” In both cases, most prison fights were settled quickly. “It’s pretty well a hockey fight,” Harley said. And when it came to “hockey fights,” Harley quickly distinguished himself from the hated “cell warriors.” A cell warrior is comfortable shouting out tough statements from his cell, knowing the steel bars and the guards are there to protect him. If confronted, he screams early and loudly, knowing this will summon the guards to save him.
Some of Harley’s fights were over money. Others were over curiosity about who was the better fighter or because of an inflammatory comment. Sometimes it seemed as though guards enjoyed the fights as much as the inmates. “I’ve had a lot of them [guards] watch. A lot of them walk away.”
As Harley’s prison fight record improved, he decided to celebrate it with tattoos. Prison tattoos are etched onto an inmate’s skin by using the “e” string of a guitar as a needle and the motor from a radio or an old Walkman cassette player. Getting a tattoo is a time-consuming affair, sometimes softened with prison moonshine. One of Harley’s new tattoos read, “Before I PC I’ll die in the yard.” It took eighteen hours for Harley to have “GLADIATOR” etched across his shoulders. It was a reference to Millhaven as “gladiator school.” His next tattoo was “2005–2009” and his fight record of 41-0. The thick needle left a ridge of scar tissue, an unspoken challenge to other prisoners. “It didn’t make life easy for me,” he said.
Harley was in the weightlifting pit at Millhaven in 2010 when a heavily built Hispanic man walked up to him.
“Hi. I’ve heard about you,” the man said, his face betraying no sign of whether this was a friendly approach. “My name is Ray.”
“Ray Fernandez?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve heard about you,” Harley replied.
Fernandez was the right-hand man in the Toronto area for Montreal Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto.
Harley and Fernandez were soon getting along well, and Harley also became friends with Fernandez’s associate Daniel Ranieri. “He was my workout partner, him and Danny. We walked a lot of miles around the yard. He was a gentleman. He didn’t carry himself like a gangster.”
Harley and Fernandez talked of plans for business once they were free again. Harley had every confidence they would become reality. “Ray’s not a storyteller. If he says he’s going to do something, he does it.”
Harley also met up with Gregory Woolley from Montreal. The Haitian-born gangster ran Montreal street gangs and also had tight ties to the Hells Angels and Vito Rizzuto. “He was always smiling,” Harley said. “He was always laughing. He was the best chess player I’ve ever played.” When Harley wasn’t working on vehicles destined for the army, physical training and school work, he was facing Woolley across a chessboard. Over a four-year stretch, Harley estimated that he and Woolley played 2,500 games. Harley also estimated that he won one of them. “We’d play all day, every day, for four years,” he said.
As Harley sat in prison, he thought about how many people blamed his father for the time Harley was doing. He took this as an insult to his father and himself. His father wasn’t a puppet master. Harley wasn’t a puppet. “I chose my own path of life, one I never witnessed from under my father’s thumb,” Harley said.
Guindon couldn’t tell his son what to do as a kid, and he couldn’t tell him much of anything now. Harley was incensed that he couldn’t have visits from his father because of an order barring him from connecting with criminal associates. Harley grieved this, and eventually he was granted a ten-minute phone call every second week with his dad. It wasn’t much time, but enough for Harley to realize that despite his father’s age, Bernie Guindon hadn’t much changed.