I went to give him a hook. He moved. I hit him with the right.
BERNIE GUINDON on troubles with a motorcycle painter
Guindon was at a bike show called Classy Chassis in the Kawarthas, north of Oshawa, in 2012, when he heard a familiar gruff voice.
“Hey buddy, come over here.”
Guindon turned to see none other than Johnny Sombrero looking at him. His long-time nemesis was selling antique guns from a booth. Neither man was tempted to exchange punches for old time’s sake. “That’s past tense,” Guindon said. Instead, they swapped business cards and then, later in the year, sent each other Christmas cards.
“I never disliked him, ever,” Sombrero said of Guindon. There was absolutely no hint of apology from either side, just memories that somehow seemed good. “He wasn’t the one who shot me,” Sombrero said. “He’s a good guy. He’s a good kid. I don’t look at him like the enemy anymore.”
Sombrero said he always looked forward to getting Guindon’s annual Christmas card with smiling photos of him and Suzanne wearing Santa hats. “It was always the first one to come.”
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Back in custody, Harley was anything but a model inmate. On December 14, 2012, a security intelligence officer at Collins Bay penitentiary wrote:
Overall while in institutional custody GUINDON’s conduct can be described as very poor, and he was noted to be heavily entrenched in the criminal, gang and drug subculture of the institution, with ongoing connections to these elements in the community. It is noted that this behaviour continued despite the highest routine security controls available to an incarcerated offender, present in a maximum security environment. GUINDON established himself as a key figure in the institution, and relied on violence and intimidation to conduct his business and garner status. Numerous reports from his CASE Management teams throughout his period of incarceration note anti-social tendencies, and that his ties to organized crime and gangs served as reinforcement of his image and character. In preparation for GUINDON’s release to the community on Statutory Release, his Parole Officer at the time noted: “He appears to regard this lifestyle with some degree of reverence…”
In the spring of 2013, Harley learned that his Millhaven prison friend Ray Fernandez had been murdered by a Mafia hit team outside Palermo, Sicily. At the time, Fernandez had fallen into disfavour with his boss, Vito Rizzuto, for not taking sides in a Montreal underworld war that had killed Rizzuto’s father and eldest son. Harley said the news upset him. “I had a lot of plans with Ray. For him to get taken out, it kind of hit home.”
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Guindon was getting frustrated. He’d been waiting months for a custom paint job on Harley’s white 1999 Softail. It was the motorcycle Harley had financed with his prison bridge earnings, and Guindon was impatient to get it ready for his son, should he get out on parole.
The painter and tattoo artist was six-foot-five, 235 pounds and in his thirties. Guindon was about ten inches shorter, more than sixty pounds lighter and in his early seventies. As Guindon described it, “I went to give him a hook. He moved. I hit him with the right.” That punch dropped the younger, bigger man, who later apologized for the delay.
Guindon’s old friends from his club days were dropping from natural causes, like long-time Toronto biker Larry McIlroy, who passed away in October 2013 after a long bout with cancer. The sixty-seven-year-old had been a member of the Road Runners club back in the 1960s before joining the Satan’s Choice, and he was an East Toronto Hells Angel at the time of his death.
Guindon’s fearless nature didn’t always help him, as it had with the bike painter. He got into trouble in the biker community for an interview he gave to the History channel, in which he said that the Hells Angels had absorbed some members from “Mickey Mouse” clubs in the 2000 patchover. Feelings were still raw when he and Suzanne drove to McIlroy’s funeral to pay their respects. “A guy came up to me, probably one of the heavies, said, ‘You’re not wanted here,’ ” Guindon recalled.
Fighting at a funeral would only make an ugly day even uglier, so Guindon and Suzanne left, fuming. “I felt sorry for Bernie and Suzanne,” Steve (Slick) McQueen said. “To me, I thought that was in bad taste. A funeral is not exactly the place to start bringing up stuff like that.
“I was saddened for Bernie. That a guy who played such an important role in the whole biker growth or development in Canada was forbidden from paying his respects. I just don’t understand that…I saw him trying to leave. He had a hard time navigating his car through the traffic of Harleys.”
Soon, Guindon was told he was “out bad” from the club, the biker equivalent of banishment.
The History channel broadcast didn’t help Guindon’s eldest child, Teresa, either. She was living in Windsor now, away from the Oshawa crowd. A pastor’s wife approached her with a concerned face and mentioned the broadcast. “Is that your father? I feel so sorry for you. I will keep you in prayer.”
“I just can’t get away from it,” Teresa said.
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The world was also closing in on Cecil Kirby. The former Richmond Hill sergeant-at-arms had been living under assumed identities for more than three decades. Kirby confided in an interview for this book that he thought the end was drawing near for him. “I’m still waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. I’m just waiting for it. It’s going to happen. I’ve got a bad feeling about it. Something should have happened by now.” Kirby also had lots to say about the RCMP and none of it sounded positive. “I wish I would have taken a bullet in the head instead of cooperating with those bastards.”
Kirby complained that it was increasingly hard to hide out in a world of instant messaging, digital photography and social networks. “It’s a small world, believe me.” As his physical strength waned, he came to regard anyone with a cellphone and a Facebook account as a potential threat.
“All of a sudden, I heard this click.” He was in public one day and startled to realize that a woman he didn’t know had just snapped a cellphone photo of him. “I flipped on her,” he said. “I said, ‘You’re invading my privacy.’ ” He demanded that she immediately delete the photo and she balked. The man she was with could see that Kirby was deadly serious and his insistence was on the verge of turning ugly. The photo was erased.
Kirby makes a point of covering up the camera of any computer he uses before signing on. “I put a piece of paper over it [the lens], just in case. You never know. You gotta always be careful.”
From his hiding spot, Kirby spoke well of Guindon, although they hadn’t interacted in decades. “Bernie Guindon was pretty well known all over the place. Like the Sonny Barger of Canada. Really well known and really well liked.”
For his part, Guindon didn’t worry about cyber security or much else. He didn’t have a smart phone or computer and had stayed off the Internet after a brief foray into online card games. “I used to play solitaire on the Internet and quit.”
Like others of their generation, Harley and his friends treated the Internet as a natural part of life. Some of them had secretly videoed Constable James Ebdon’s threat to frame Bradley Cox for assault and cocaine possession, and that video had gained more than a million YouTube views by September 15, 2015, when Harley was scheduled to stand trial on Project Kingfisher, the massive drug bust targeting cocaine and heroin trafficking.
Just weeks before his trial date, Superior Court Justice Laura Bird released a ruling that changed everything about Harley’s situation. After viewing the video, she concluded that the police officer had “committed several criminal offences in the course of his duties” and dismissed him as “not a credible or reliable witness.”
With that, the Crown stayed all of the charges against Harley and several of his co-accused. After facing the possibility of several decades in prison, Harley walked free.