CHAPTER 1: Beginnings
Bernie Guindon was interviewed repeatedly for this book. His brother, Jack Guindon, helped here too.
CHAPTER 2: Local Celebrity
Suzanne Blais spoke at length and in detail about her life, including her early years.
After World War II, the southern area of Oshawa where Guindon’s family settled was a magnet for thousands of workers from Europe and economically depressed areas of Canada, such as the Maritimes, rural Quebec and Northern Ontario.
Suzanne Blais came to the Oshawa street corner where Guindon worked with a tangled backstory that rivalled that of Guindon. Her father had been a draft dodger who changed his identity to avoid conscription into the Canadian military. She said she had two sets of identification papers after she was born on September 6, 1946, in the former gold rush town of Kirkland Lake in Northeastern Ontario, 440 miles from the Quebec border. Her father was Reo Blais and her mother was the former Juliette Neveu, and Suzanne was a “Blais” for Ontario and a “Lacasse” for Quebec.
Suzanne’s father worked for a time in the gold mines of Kirkland Lake, and then as a bouncer and bartender at a local hotel. In the early years of her marriage, Suzanne’s mother waited on tables in the nearby mill town of Iroquois Falls and its scruffy neighbour, Ansonville. Ansonville was a poorly planned sprawl of cabins and shacks with no water or electricity, and attracted many French-Canadians, as well as Russians and Ukrainians. Ansonville was roundly condemned by many of the inhabitants of Iroquois Falls as a dark den of foreigners preoccupied with brawling, boozing and God knows what else.
The description of Ansonville “as a dark den of foreigners engaged in regular street brawls, illegal alcohol consumption, and other unsavoury activities” is from a report quoted by Kerry M. Abel in Changing Places: History, Community, and Identity in Northeastern Ontario, McGill-Queen’s University Press (Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON, 2006).
Suzanne’s mother left her with Suzanne’s grandfather for a time, while she cooked in a bush camp in Temiskaming. Suzanne was the apple of her grandfather’s eye, and he was a tough man to please. She would ride on his lap on the tractor like a little princess. “I was spoiled. I got on my grandfather’s knee.” She would play him like a Stradivarius, asking, “Are you sure you love me?”
Suzanne sorely needed to be loved and her grandfather appreciated that. He would always reply with words to the effect of, “Of course, Suzanne. You’re my favourite little girl.”
So strong was the spell that little Suzanne cast over her grandfather that her aunt and uncle would ask her to approach him when they needed two dollars for the movies. She would then ask her grandfather, who would invariably give them the cash.
Boxing bouts in Oshawa were held at the former Avalon Dance Hall on King Street West, the former Community Recreation Association building on Gibb Street, the United Auto Workers hall and the Civic Auditorium.
CHAPTER 4: Supreme Commander
I interviewed Harry (Johnny Sombrero) Barnes on June 22, 2015. He was cheerful and proud and didn’t let on that he was suffering from diabetes and heart disease. He died of those conditions in November 2016 at the age of eighty-one, leaving behind five children and seven grandchildren. He had been married for fifty-eight years. Long-time clubmates wore black and white club shirts to his funeral at the Ward Funeral Home on Weston Road, near his old stomping grounds. His casket was draped in the Union Jack, as befitted his pro-monarchist views.
Sombrero’s Black Diamond Riders weren’t officially an outlaw club like the Hells Angels and Outlaws, as they didn’t have a diamond patch on the left breast with “1%” on it, signifying they were the 1 percent of bikers who go by their own rules. Still, diamond patch or no diamond patch, Johnny Sombrero did pack a wallop for any new clubs on what he considered his turf.
In July 1963, Sombrero announced in a Toronto courtroom that he was shutting down his Black Diamond Riders. With a dramatic flair for words, Sombrero told Magistrate Joseph Addison that he was tearing apart the Riders’ clubhouse in Davisville and disbanding the club because “the papers have massacred us.”
He made his statement after being charged at the time with threatening the wife of a club member, which he dismissed as an unfortunate misunderstanding.
“Are you breaking up the club?” Addison asked.
“Yes,” Sombrero replied.
With that, Addison gave Sombrero a compliment of sorts, saying that club members are “a pretty crummy bunch and you appear to be the only man of intelligence among them.
“You’re the obvious leader and you cut quite a figure as you drive down the street in your big Cadillac, sometimes with a big beard, sometimes without it.
“There’s not much doubt that you’re using this group of illiterate, smelly-looking people.”
Sombrero reassured the judge that he planned to spend his free time with his wife and three children, and that he realized now that he had been playing a dangerous game.
With that, the magistrate set him free on two hundred dollars’ bail despite howls of protest from the Crown attorney. Perhaps the judge believed Sombrero when he said he was disbanding the Black Diamond Riders, but no one in Guindon’s world believed him for a second.
During the Black Diamond Riders’ ride down the Gardiner, a rider in the front had a club flag flying high above his bike. They all wore matching black shirts, looking like cleaned-up cowboys in the Rose Parade. Sombrero chose cotton for the club’s black and white dress shirts, a break from the garb of the Humber Valley Riders. “I didn’t want to get into this silk bullshit.”
CHAPTER 5: Fight Club
I benefited here from interviews with Bernie Guindon, Jack Guindon, Spider Jones and George Chuvalo.
Chuvalo was impressed with Guindon’s attitude, as well as his ring skills. Chuvalo understood heart and boxing, as he earned a 79-15-2 career record as a pro and managed to stay on his feet in bouts with heavyweight champions Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Floyd Patterson.
The late Daniel R. Wolf, a sociologist and motorcycle enthusiast, did an excellent job of making sense of why people choose to be bikers in The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, 1991).
Yorkville during the hippie days is analyzed at length in “Making the Scene: Yorkville and Hip Toronto, 1960–1970” by Stuart Robert Henderson, a thesis submitted to the Department of History in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, October 2007.
CHAPTER 6: Expansion
I benefited from an interview with Don Shebib and greatly appreciate his insights.
There’s a police history of biker gangs in Canada in The Gazette, Vol. 65, Nos. 7–12, 1999, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police publication. It’s a good look at the situation as it stood just before the Hells Angels patchover.
The original Satan’s Choice included Don Norris and others named Spaceman, El-Pot Hole and Black Pete. The club was started in 1957 by teenagers and men who hung out at the Army Navy Club on Spadina Avenue in Toronto. The first members were called Sharkey, Jim Corbett, Frank Donnelly, Scotty, Big Ted and Red, according to Norris, with Sharkey acting as president. They later shifted their hangout to Aida’s Restaurant at St. Clair and Stop 17 on Kingston Road.
When the Choice was forced to fold, Spaceman started a club called the Nomads in Highland Creek.
In the 1950s, the Black Diamond Riders hung out at a Queen Street restaurant. The BDR had a clubhouse on Steeles Avenue near Bathurst Street in northwest Toronto.
The Para-Dice Riders appeared around 1961, wearing a crest with a pair of dice. It was black and white and looked a lot like the BDR crest, which angered the BDR.
Another club of the late-1950s was called the Beanery Gang.
Lots of information about the Montreal chapter of the Satan’s Choice can be found in Bill Trent’s article “Riding Against the Square World,” in Weekend Magazine, No. 38, 1967, with photos by Ronald Labelle.
Information about the Satan’s Choice while Guindon was in prison the first time was provided by the Toronto Daily Star, Canadian Magazine, Paul King’s “Chicklet Gets By with the Help of His Friends—Satan’s Choice,” (January 2, 1971.)
The rude ending to the first Satan’s Choice convention is described in Eddy Roworth’s “85 policemen break up ‘convention,’ nab 64 motorcyclists in farmhouse,” Toronto Daily Star, September 25, 1967: 1.
CHAPTER 7: National President
Guindon guesses that it was his attitude that caused him to be locked up a couple of hours down the road in Guelph rather than close to home. He said he was told to expect a rough time, but it wasn’t so bad. “Everybody said they would attack me down there. I had a couple of fights in there. I held my own.”
Guindon was fired from General Motors in 1966 after refusing to stop riding his motorcycle to work. It didn’t help that he wore his club colours on the assembly line.
Guindon said that biker club election campaigns generally lasted about a week and weren’t a particularly big deal. There were secret ballots.
Carmen Neal once ran against Guindon for president. When he lost, he wasn’t particularly upset, Guindon said. “I tried to run it as straight as I could,” Guindon said. “Everybody has an opinion. If they think he’s better, let him run it.”
The leaping left hook was a punch to be used sparingly, especially against an experienced fighter like Gray. “You’ve got to be careful that the guy don’t hit you with a right when you’re leaping,” Guindon said. “It’s not one that I could use three or four times. The only time you’d use it is if you know the other guy…You’ve got to be careful of the right hand. If you’re dropping your left hook, your hand goes down so you’re leaving your head open to a right hand.”
CHAPTER 8: Pigpen
I had a series of interviews with Howard (Pigpen) Berry and Cecil Kirby. They were conducted separately and not in the same area.
Baldy Chard is remembered in Paul Rimstead’s “Tough Guy with a Heart of Gold,” Toronto Sun, April 17, 1983, Jim Kernaghan’s “Parker’s Death Recalls Another Era,” London Free Press, June 27, 2006, and Nicki Cruickshank’s “ ‘Barrie Bomber’ James Parker Moved to City in 1930s,” Barrie Examiner, September 28, 2012.
Chard lost thirteen fights as a pro heavyweight, although he did once level the third-ranked heavyweight in the world. There was also a fight against James J. Parker, who had a title bout against Archie Moore. That fight between Chard and Parker was the stuff of underworld legend, when the two men went bare knuckles in a closed-off ring in west-end Toronto, until Chard won in forty-eight minutes. That brawl was almost stopped when a friend of Moore’s pulled a gun, only to be overpowered by the ringside mob and hustled out the back door.
Nazi Martin Weiche is described in Jennifer O’Brien’s “Infamous Ontario Neo-Nazi Dies,” The London Free Press, September 6, 2011, and also in Jane Sims’s “The Last Stand of an Old Nazi,” The London Free Press, January 11, 2014.
Cecil Kirby is described in “How Does a Hitman Say He’s Sorry?” by Cal Millar and Peter Edwards, Toronto Star, September 22, 1991, D1. He is also co-author of Mafia Assassin: The Inside Story of a Canadian Biker, Hitman, and Police Informer with Thomas C. Renner, Methuen (Toronto, 1986).
In the years after he was released from prison in the 1980s, Howard (Pigpen) Berry became increasingly reclusive, vanishing from the biker landscape. There were stories that he had glued a jewel to the middle of his forehead and was wandering about telling people he was from India. Other stories had him living out of a small truck, or living off the land in the woods, occasionally foraging for food like a feral cat. The least probable of the rumours came from Lorne Campbell, who jokingly suggested he had married and was quietly running a charming bed and breakfast back in his hometown of Peterborough. I met with him and he had no jewel on his forehead. Out of respect, I won’t say where we met, except that he was not running a bed and breakfast, charming or otherwise.
CHAPTER 9: Yorkville
The comment about Harley-Davidson having a trademark growling sound is from “Harley-Davidson Declares Victory in the Court of Public Opinion—Drops Federal Trademark Application,” Business Wire, June 20, 2000.
Frank (Hippy) Hobson (he spelled his nickname with a y and not ie) and I corresponded on and off for several months. He graciously allowed me to quote from his unpublished writings on his life. He had gotten into the Satan’s Choice through friends in the Kingston chapter, including Charles (Chuck) Grey and Wally High. One night in the summer of 1968, they went to a field meet, where there were also members from the Para-Dice Riders and Vagabonds, as well as Rod MacLeod from Montreal. This is how Hippy described it:
There were two Ontario Police Officers sitting in one car watching everything we did. It was a hot day and I recall one of the Choice going over to the car and offering the officers a cold coke. About ½ hour later I remember seeing those police with their sirens roaring and doing donuts. Apparently there was a hit of acid in each coke. We were hysterical watching them carry on.
It was particularly steaming weather, underscored by the hit song on the radio by the Doors, “Light My Fire.” He said that the song, with its line, “Gonna set the night on fire,” was playing in his ears as he watched from across the river the city of Detroit go up in flames during race riots. He wrote:
I had a front seat row view of Detroit from a park bench in Windsor. The Detroit River separates Windsor and Detroit it is not that wide. It was nighttime and you could hear gun shots echo through the smoke from the fires. Both the bridge and the tunnel to Detroit were closed to the public. Tanks were clanking up Woodward Avenue as the National Guard had been called to help crack down on the rioting.
CHAPTER 10: Darwinism
In February 1968, Satan’s Choice biker Michael George Nichols, twenty-one, of Toronto was convicted of common assault for using a jackknife to cut off the shoulder crest of a jacket worn by a member of the London Road Runners Motorcycle Club at a Thanksgiving weekend biker hill climb attended by six thousand people at the village of Heidelberg, ten miles west of Kitchener. Three other Choice members held the Road Runner relatively still as the crest was cut off.
I interviewed Mark DeMarco on July 5, 2015.
The Cross Breeds survived in Niagara Falls until the mid-1970s.
The family of Louis Iannuzzelli owned the House of Frankenstein wax museum on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls. Iannuzzelli had ties to the California mobster Dominic Longo, who had been close to Hamilton mobster John (Pops) Papalia’s father. He infuriated Papalia by putting money out on the streets to loan. Papalia didn’t do anything about it while Longo was alive, but when he died in the fall of 1985, his protection evaporated. Iannuzzelli disappeared. There was a widespread belief that he was killed by Carmen Barillaro and an associate and that his remains were deposited in the foundation of a building in Welland. Barillaro was murdered in July 1997.
The Vagabonds and Black Diamond Riders were both long-established motorcycle clubs, although neither was an outlaw club in the strictest sense of the term. Members of these clubs did not wear the diamond-shaped patch with “1%” on it over their hearts, in the fashion of true one percenter clubs. (That “1%” stood for the 1 percent of bikers that the American Motorcycle Association would not admit.) The Vagabonds did something unique instead: they wore a patch with “100%” for 100 percent biker.
The convention weekend also included a “memorial service” for Guindon’s long-time associate Carmen Neal, who was killed in an industrial accident at age twenty-six in western Canada the previous summer.
CHAPTER 11: Shock Value
Again, I benefited from interviews with Howard (Pigpen) Berry.
CHAPTER 12: Big Apple
I benefited from interviews with Frank (Hippy) Hobson and portions of an unpublished manuscript he provided to me.
There were happy times in the Guindon household when his father and mother danced. Guindon liked doing waltzes and imitating Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis.
CHAPTER 13: Ring Wars
Walter Henry was kind enough to give me an interview.
The Hells Angels had a head start on the Satan’s Choice, starting in San Bernardino, California, on March 17, 1948, and moving to San Francisco in 1954 and Oakland in 1957.
CHAPTER 14: Eye on Montreal
The Satan’s Choice had a clubhouse in the 400 block of King Street East in Kitchener, while the Henchmen gathered inside a clubhouse on Highland Road in Kitchener.
The Dubois brothers rose up in the hardscrabble Saint-Henri district amidst rail yards and factories. They later bitterly recalled how they had been mocked by other children because they wore second-hand clothing and sometimes had to skip meals or eat molasses sandwiches. By the time they reached adulthood, the sons of Napoleon (Paulo) Dubois were feared by the Cotroni mob family and biker gangs alike.
The Devil’s Disciples controlled the emerging crystal meth business around Saint-Louis Square in Montreal. What had once been magnificent Victorian manors had been converted into boarding houses as it became a hippie haven in the 1960s, with students, flower children and the trendy offering a potential customer base for the growing drug trade.
Allegiances constantly shifted in Montreal. In time, the Montreal chapter of the Choice lined up with the Devil’s Disciples against the Popeyes. The Popeyes sold drugs, stole cars and broke into houses on a regular basis and used knives, guns and fists to get their way. But that didn’t make them unusual. What made the Popeyes really stand out was their ability to use explosives against their enemies, who now included Guindon.
CHAPTER 15: Skin Beef
Armed robber Richard Mallory was a massively powerful 275-pound man who sometimes collected drug debts in the Ottawa area. He recalled how powerless he felt when he heard the Kingston Penitentiary gates slam shut behind him in 1968. “I was scared. That was my first prison bit. You hear the big gates close behind you. When the first gate closes, you hear the bang! I said, ‘What did I get myself into?’ ”
Mallory quickly learned why gangsters in old movies often talk funny, as if their lips are stapled shut. That was because conversations were often forbidden in the old prisons like Kingston Penitentiary. “You couldn’t even talk,” Mallory said. “You had to talk out of the side of your mouth.”
There actually was an official club position for someone who hung around a club but wasn’t a full member. The position was called “hang-around” and is a common one for outlaw motorcycle clubs.
Another rule for prisoners is not to check yourself into segregation to dodge a beef or a debt to someone. Don’t ask to be transferred, saying you are in danger, when you really want to move because you owe money. And don’t peek into a cell when you’re walking down a corridor. Prisoners don’t like to be snooped on, like they’re nothing more than animals in a cage.
Toronto Star writer Paul Hunter wrote an e-book for the newspaper called Life after Life, which tells of prison justice and the unsettling use of wheelbarrows.
Paul Gravelle gave me an interview for this chapter, as did Paul Henry.
Born on March 15, 1947, in North Bay, Gravelle was the eldest of twelve siblings, half boys and half girls. “I had to set the example,” he said.
Gravelle had been a jailhouse and prison inmate for some time. At sixteen, he was arrested for car theft, break-and-enters, joyriding and weapons possession. “I was amassing a collection of guns,” Gravelle said. “When they caught me, I had about thirty or forty guns in the crawl space of my house.
“I used to carry one all of the time—a .357 Magnum. When I was sixteen.”
Gravelle’s views about how he actually enjoys crime seem to fit into the thesis of Nicole E. Ruedy, Celia Moore, Francesca Gino and Maurice E. Schweitzer’s “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 105, No. 4 (2013): 531–48.
There are family connections between the Gravelle family and the Guindons in the Buckingham, Quebec, area, as one of Guindon’s uncles married a Gravelle.
CHAPTER 16: Proud Riders
Paul King wrote the article “Chicklet Gets By with the Help of His Friends—Satan’s Choice” for the January 2, 1971, issue of The Canadian Magazine, while Marci McDonald covered the filming for the Saturday, October 3, 1970, Toronto Daily Star.
CHAPTER 17: Thunder Bay I
Verg Erslavas was extremely helpful here. He even went to the great trouble of writing out his memories as well as speaking about them on the phone.
There had been a club called the Road Agents in Thunder Bay before Guindon showed up. The Road Agents were based in Minnesota and weren’t a one percenter club. They also had a chapter in Duluth. They left Thunder Bay about a year before Guindon’s arrival.
Erslavas hadn’t been a Road Agent.
CHAPTER 18: Riot
A commission of inquiry was set up in an attempt to make sense of the madness. Even before it concluded its hearings, Solicitor-General Jean-Pierre Goyer announced on July 20, 1971, that reforms for prisoners’ living conditions were underway. Now, reforms included the new right for prisoners to elect committees and take part in work programs. Convicts would be given work clothing with their numbers on the inside and not the outside. Inmate committees would have a voice on treatment, training, recreation and community service projects. These reforms would apply to all thirty-two federal prisons, and not just the Kingston Penitentiary.
CHAPTER 19: Olympic Contender
Frank (Hippy) Hobson and John Dunbar lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Windsor and worked together at Chrysler.
Richard Mallory was in Millhaven in 1973 for the armed robbery of a Dominion store in Ottawa. “It was a folly of errors. We held up the place. We didn’t get no money…They caught me under a porch somewhere. They said I never seen a big guy clear a fence like that.”
Mallory knew future biker Brian Leslie Beaucage of London, Ontario, well and considered him a good lifter.
George Bradley was transferred in June 1972 to the maximum-security mental hospital in Penetanguishene for a psychiatric assessment. On June 28, 1972, a man who said he was Bradley’s brother paid him a visit. They held a gun on an attendant and fled. Police suspected a third man acted as driver and lookout.
Banks and trust companies in the Toronto area were placed on special alert for the next few months, until Bradley was re-arrested at gunpoint in Toronto.
Richard Mallory was convicted in 2000 of being one of four men involved in the 1990 shotgun slayings of twenty-four-year-old Michel Giroux of Ottawa and his pregnant, common-law wife, Manon Bourdeau, twenty-seven. Mallory was arrested in 1990 and held in an Ottawa jail for almost ten years before the conviction. The case became known as the “Cumberland murders.”
Mallory won a new trial on appeal after the original trial judge was criticized for not properly cautioning the jury about “disreputable witnesses” and certain “hearsay evidence.” Mallory and his co-accused argued the Crown and police knew they were relying on “false evidence” from key witnesses, including a drug dealer, who received more than $400,000 from the Crown. That witness demanded more money if there was a new trial.
Charges were stayed in 2007 instead of having a new trial. The trial had cost more than $30 million and was called in the press the longest and most expensive trial in Ottawa history.
CHAPTER 20: Expansion Troubles
Joe Dinardo’s real name was Gabor Magasztovics and his parents had brought him to Canada when he was twelve, in the aftermath of the 1957 Hungarian Revolution. His troubles with the law in his new country began almost immediately. Dinardo made national headlines in 1974 when he was a central character in the murder trial of millionaire Mississauga developer Peter Demeter, who was charged with hiring someone to beat his wife, Christine, to death in the garage of their home. Dinardo testified that he declined when Christine Demeter offered him ten thousand dollars to break her husband’s legs and arms a week before her murder. Demeter was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill his wife, but the identity of that killer for hire was never determined.
I interviewed Cecil Kirby several times for this book in the spring and summer of 2015.
By 1974, the border chapters of the Satan’s Choice associating with the Outlaws included Windsor and St. Catharines.
Kirby told of a trip in the winter of 1975, when about twenty Satan’s Choice members were guests of the Detroit Outlaws on a bus travelling from Dayton to Georgia, with plenty of Coors, dope and women.
In 1976, there was a formalization of the association between the Outlaws and Satan’s Choice with the creation of a patch showing a Choice pitchfork and an Outlaws piston.
According to the online obituary of Garnet Douglas McEwen, he was born on September 25, 1945, in Campbellton, New Brunswick, and died in hospital on Friday, January 27, 2012, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
CHAPTER 21: Thunder Bay II
The late Daniel R. Wolf, who rode as an outlaw biker as part of his research, explained the difference between extreme recklessness and suicide on pages 216 to 217 of The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, 1991). Raleigh’s death wasn’t suicide, although it was obviously behaviour that tempted death. Bikers hate the very mention of suicide and tend to shun the funerals of its victims. While Raleigh’s death definitely was reckless, bikers often celebrate recklessness.
Wolf started his study while a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Alberta in the mid-1970s, and his work captures the mindset of Canadian bikers during that time period. He went on to become a psychological anthropologist at the University of Prince Edward Island. The Rebels nicknamed him “Coyote” because he wore a coyote skin on his helmet.
Wolf explained how bikers react when a member dies while pushing life’s limits:
Members who die by vigilantism, riding hard or law enforcement have a good chance of becoming martyrs. Rather than take the death as a warning that they should change their ways, and start riding safer or living more peacefully, instead the death is taken as a reaffirmation of their lives, as if there is a point to running head on into a truck while high on speed. Running smack into a truck while high on speed isn’t taken as something cautionary, but rather as a romantic expression of life on the edge, where the ultimate epitaph is: “He lived and died like a biker.”
Funerals for men who die in such ways are emotional, sometimes grandiose affairs. Wolf continued:
Such funeral runs are often accompanied by acts of defiance, like ignoring helmet laws, firing weapons at the graveside and draping a casket in the club’s colours. In such a way, the surviving members don’t become demoralized. Instead, they see their rebel values celebrated. The Choice would doff their helmets, daring the police to do something about it. Giving way to good sense, officers would instead accompany the bikers to the gravesite to make sure nothing worse happened.
CHAPTER 22: Pigpen Goes South
Regarding Florida, articles that helped include Michael Griffin and Jim Leusner’s “Woman Recalls Life as ‘Property’ of Outlaw Enforcer,” Orlando Sentinel, December 17, 1995.
There’s something paradoxical at play about outlaw bikers and the military. While bikers love the outlaw image, they also see themselves as genuine patriots and the embodiment of freedom, and each wave of military service provides a fresh jump to biker ranks, from World War II to the present.
Rod MacLeod was close with Jacques (Sonny) Lacombe of the Choice, a well-off biker with a big estate, Bouvier guard dogs and a chemical factory. They made enough money that they would take vacations in the Caribbean together. “They’d ship their bikes down,” Kirby said. “That was expensive.”
Stairway Harry Henderson’s obituary reads:
HENDERSON, Harold ‘Stairway Harry’ Age 64 of Dayton passed away Saturday Jan. 3, 2009. He was a 42-year member of the Dayton Outlaws. Survived by his wife, Sandy, 3 brothers Robert, Michael and Danny Henderson, and one sister Helen Caudle. There will be a viewing at the Outlaws Clubhouse Friday Jan. 9, 2009 starting at 6:00 PM. The funeral will begin at the clubhouse Saturday at 12:00 PM followed by the procession to Woodland Cemetery. If desired, donations can be made to ‘Stairway’s’ wife Sandy in care of the Dayton Outlaws 272 N. Lansdowne Ave. Dayton, OH 45427. Condolences can be sent online at www.RogersFuneralHomes.com
CHAPTER 23: Last Olympic Hope
Lorne Campbell, Bernie and Jack Guindon described the UAW hall fight.
CHAPTER 24: Strange Clubmate
One of the more frightening Montreal Satan’s Choice members was Mike French, who was born in 1950. French, who was nicknamed “Crazy Mike,” was a product of the Queen’s School in lower Westmount and the Weredale House boys’ home in west-end Montreal. The boys’ home was closed in 1977.
French was very active in the biker wars against the Popeyes. He was found murdered in November 1982 in Kahnawake. He was said to have boasted about killing Sharron Prior in Pointe-Saint-Charles seven years earlier.
Sharron Prior was sixteen and pretty. She disappeared from her home on March 29, 1975, after going to meet a friend at a Pointe-Saint-Charles pizzeria, a five-minute walk from her home. She was found four days later in a Longueuil apiary. She had been raped and beaten repeatedly and suffocated on her own blood.
French’s suspected killer was a hitman in the West End Gang, but the murder was never solved. The killing was considered by many to be “sort of community service.”
CHAPTER 25: Mountie Radar
Retired RCMP officer Mark Murphy was great here, as was his book, Police Undercover. The True Story of the Biker, the Mafia & the Mountie, Hushion House (East York, 1999).
The police operation was confused when a caterer named Tony was found in the hallway of the Venus Spa, with a .22 calibre bullet hole in his head. That murder was never solved.
CHAPTER 26: Body Seller
Guindon later heard that the Outlaws wanted to take his life around this time, even though he was off the streets anyway. “They were quite pissed off about what was going on. They thought we might be going HA [Hells Angels]. There were rumours to the fact that they weren’t really pleased.”
CHAPTER 27: The Big Split
Cecil Kirby said he quit the Satan’s Choice in March 1976.
Kirby had been active in the mid-1970s with Duke in robberies, including one of a Willowdale gambler’s house. By that point, they had things down to a science of sorts. They would phone the house and if no one answered, the plan was afoot. “You can go through a milk box if you know how to do it,” Kirby said, describing how a smallish and flexible man like Duke could tuck his right arm on an angle and wiggle in.
The plan was to go into the gambler’s home and get what they could in twenty minutes or so. The gambler kept about $15,000 in a wad in his jacket pocket, which was convenient. They had heard he sometimes kept $100,000 in the trunk of his car.
Later, when Kirby hooked up with the Commisso crime family, he said he was asked, “Did you do a house?”
He answered, “Oh yeah,” but no money was returned.
By 1977, the Hells Angels had already expanded out of the United States into Australia and England. Now, they had their first francophone charter and the promise of more expansion, as they were close to other small but tough Quebec clubs like the Missiles in Saguenay, the Sex Fox in Chibougamau and the Marauders of Asbestos.
On the night of Saturday, June 8, 1999, a police tactical team moved in on a house in the upscale Detroit suburb of Sterling Heights and arrested Outlaws leader Harry (Taco) Bowman on multiple charges of murder, murder conspiracy and drug dealing. He had been on the run for two years and was on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list.
He was accused of the 1982 murder of a member of his club and the 1991 murder of the president of a rival club, the Warlocks, in Orlando, Florida, as well as plotting to kill officers and members of Hells Angels.
On Friday, July 27, 2001, in Florida, Bowman was sentenced to two concurrent life prison terms plus eighty-three years for ordering the murder of rival gang members, drug trafficking and fire bombings. Jurors concluded that Bowman used Outlaws clubs in Tampa, St. Petersburg, Orlando, Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale to further his racketeering.
CHAPTER 28: Prison Blues
George McIntyre of Hamilton’s Parkdale Gang helped here. He was sent to prison on October 27, 1983—his twenty-fifth birthday—when Guindon was finally preparing to come out. McIntyre was heading for a three- to five-year manslaughter stretch. Since he originally faced the possibility of a life sentence for murder, the manslaughter term looked pretty good in comparison.
His legal troubles came when his buddy Mike Watson was trying to defend his title in the Canadian Amateur Bodybuilding Championships in their hometown of Hamilton on August 16, 1980. When Watson was ranked in second place, the hometown crowd erupted.
McIntyre quickly heard about Guindon from other prisoners. “He had a ridiculous reputation in Collins Bay,” said McIntyre, who used the word “ridiculous” as a compliment. He said Guindon earned respect by stepping up and pleading guilty to misdeeds that other club members had actually committed. “Anytime he did, it was because he decided to. Sometimes he made sacrifices for his brothers. Sometimes shit happens and that’s just the way it was.”
McIntyre replaced Guindon on the inmate committee, where his responsibilities included settling conflicts between inmates and the system, picking movies and organizing social events. There were some drugs then, but not nearly the level there would be decades later. There was also some general feeling about what was right and what wasn’t. “The prison is a totally different place now,” McIntyre said. “The rules of the street had some bearing then. It’s not like that in prison now. They don’t have the ethics. It sounds silly to talk about ethics, but they did have them then.”
McIntyre recalled some soldiers coming by once to play floor hockey with the inmates in Collins Bay. “They quit halfway through.” The problem was the inmates were bodychecking everyone, not just the opponent with the puck. “They said, ‘We can’t do this. If they think the puck’s going to you, they hit you.’ ”
He also recalled a prisoner bringing a knife with him to play prison hockey. “He didn’t use it, though. I said, ‘What are you trying to prove? We’ll never get hockey again if you pull a knife. If you want to beat the guy over the head with your stick, that’s fine, but don’t use a goddamn knife.’ ”
That said, it was tough to put fear into some inmates to watch their behaviour. “They don’t care,” McIntyre said. “They are doing life anyway. They’re not going to get out.”
Brian Leslie Beaucage, one of the wilder prisoners in the Kingston Penitentiary riots, was also in Millhaven. “Brian was well liked in jail. A pretty solid individual. He didn’t back down from nobody,” said Guindon. “He was an all-round good guy, as far as I was concerned.”
CHAPTER 29: Quiet Expansion
A youthful Walter Stadnick showed ability in auto shop at Hill Park Secondary on Hamilton Mountain and hung around the Cardinal variety store in the city’s Birdland district. He and some teenaged friends rode Triumphs and BSAs and formed the Cossacks, a youthful Hamilton biker gang. Their most notable feature was the tufts of hair sticking up out of their helmets, which was an effort to give them a Cossack-warrior look. Stadnick’s Cossack club of Hamilton had no connection to the Cossacks Motorcycle Club of Texas or a club by the same name in the former Soviet Union.
By 1978, Stadnick had graduated from the Cossacks to the Wild Ones, who had a clubhouse on Hamilton Mountain on West Avenue. The local Satan’s Choice chapter had just patched over to the Outlaws, much to Guindon’s chagrin. There were no Hells Angels in Ontario, and it was a lonely time to be part of a smaller club like the Wild Ones, even with their serious mob ties. Stadnick and two Wild Ones rode off to Montreal, hoping to attract Angels support. Only one of them would ride out of Montreal alive.
At the time, the Montreal Hells Angels chapter president was Yves (Le Boss) Buteau, the former Popeyes boss. He was seeking allies like Stadnick to counter the Outlaws expansion.
Stadnick knew he was riding into a war zone. In March 1978, Montreal Outlaw Gilles Cadorette was killed instantly when a bomb was placed under his car while it was parked at a Bordeaux Street bar. In April, Athanasios (Tom Thumb) Markopoulos of the Outlaws was slain by two hitmen.
The Outlaws caught wind of Stadnick’s trip, and a pair of killers from Detroit and Miami tagged along behind them to Le Tourbillon bar in the east end, near Jarry Park, on October 12, 1978.
Stadnick settled into a booth with fellow Hamilton Wild Ones Guy (Gator) Davies and George (Chico) Mousseau. Sitting with them were Hells Angels Louis (Ti-Oui) Lapierre, Bruno Coulombe and Jean Brochu. Two clean-cut men who looked like cops approached them. Cops are generally annoying for bikers, but even they can have their uses. Sometimes, their very presence makes things safer. Who’s going to attack while two members of the Sûreté du Québec are in the room? There was no great concern about the two strangers walking toward them until one of them pulled out a sawed-off shotgun and the other drew a pistol. Within minutes, Davies and Mousseau were dead while Lapierre and Coulombe were injured. Stadnick was able to slide under the table and was the only target left unscathed.
Stadnick was now in the Hells Angels fold and in the centre of a war. Soon, Guindon would hear of Stadnick’s rise, but he was in no position to actually meet him. “I didn’t see too much of Stadnick…You knew of him.”
The wrongful conviction of the Satan’s Choice bikers is described in detail in the excellent book Conspiracy of Brothers: A True Story of Bikers, Murder, and the Law by Mick Lowe, Random House Canada (Toronto, 2013), and in a chapter of my own book with Lorne Campbell, Unrepentant: The Strange and (Sometimes) Terrible Life of Lorne Campbell, Satan’s Choice and Hells Angels Biker, Random House Canada (Toronto, 2013).
CHAPTER 30: Reunited
Some of the violence involving the Wild Ones was from their own hands, like when Derek Thistlewaite and Peter Michael Urech blew themselves up in a quiet residential neighbourhood early in the morning of Wednesday, May 23, 1979, in a botched attempt to intimidate a woman who was scheduled to testify that she had been gang-raped. Pieces of their van ended up on a rooftop three houses away, and others flew two hundred to three hundred feet.
A week later, on Wednesday, May 30, 1979, more than sixty police officers from five forces raided twenty Hamilton homes and clubhouses connected to the Outlaws, Wild Ones and Red Devils. They didn’t come up with much, as charges ranged from unpaid parking fines to possession of explosives and restricted weapons. Some of the bikers taunted the police that they should have come earlier in the week, when they might have gotten more of what they were seeking.
Goobie was in Collins Bay in 1975, where he was reunited with bikers. Regarding the prison cafeteria attack, the same kitchen helper who almost beheaded a disgruntled diner also brained a suspected human rat with a putter taken from the mini-putt range.
CHAPTER 31: Reconnecting
After his son Jesse’s suicide, George Chuvalo told CBC Television: “It’s like everything you breathe in is grief [and] you just can’t believe your son is dead. You just can’t believe your son has died.” Things only got worse for Chuvalo. In 1993, another son, George Lee, was found dead in a hotel room with a needle in his arm. Two days after his funeral, Chuvalo’s wife, Lynn, committed suicide with a pill overdose.
Teresa Guindon-Mader’s website is www.mountainofhopefoundation.com.
CHAPTER 33: Hospitality Industry
They chose a different spelling for their camp than “Shan-gri-law,” the spelling used in the James Hilton novel Lost Horizon.
Harley Davidson Guindon is a strong writer and many of his comments quoted here were written by him. I think he has the potential to be the next Roger Caron, writing-wise.
CHAPTER 34: Nightmares
Harley Guindon was a huge help here. The woman he considers his real mother (not his biological mother) helped a great deal too. She did not want her name made public and I have respected this. Also helping me was Maggie Pearce-O’Shea, a former friend of Guindon, and Angel from Oshawa.
CHAPTER 35: Big Brother
The biker world had forged more links with the mob since Guindon went behind bars in 1975. The family of Vito Rizzuto had replaced the Cotronis and Violis in Montreal, while in the Greater Toronto Area, power was shared between seven ’Ndrangheta, or Calabrian Mafia, families, although there was still a Sicilian Mafia influence. Hells Angels in the Montreal area were now off-loading planes carrying drugs for Colombian cartels. Some bikers were working toward building their own direct drug connections with South American suppliers.
Organized Crime Committee Reports, 1989 and 1990, Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, gave general descriptions of numbers and growth during those time periods.
The Canadian chapters of Outlaws were a fresh force for Guindon to consider. On January 22, 1985, there were mass Outlaws arrests across Ontario. Ninety members were arrested and houses and clubhouses were hit. Guindon’s old friend Sonny Lacombe was in the Outlaws now, and he was indignant the day of his arrest. Suspicions were everywhere, and a rival club was thought to be behind any misfortune except rain.
“The Hells Angels should be proud of you,” Lacombe chided a police officer as he was taken into custody.
Maggie Pearce-O’Shea helped again here.
CHAPTER 38: Moving On
Guindon’s sympathetic side also came out when he heard reports that an Oshawa Christmas toy fund had been robbed. Guindon and the club dipped into the bail fund box to make up the difference, but the charity turned down their offer, fearing it would be bad optics with the general public.
One year around 1990, Guindon rode 25,000 to 30,000 miles through Canada and the United States.
CHAPTER 39: Unwelcome Guests
Several articles provided information about the David Boyko murder. They include Paul Wiecek’s “They’ll Come to Bury a Biker: Real ‘Dog’s Breakfast’ Expected in City,” Winnipeg Free Press, May 15, 1996, A5; Tony Davis’s “Biker’s Funeral Draws Crowd,” Winnipeg Free Press, May 19, 1996, A5; Doug Nairne’s “ ‘Vicious’ City Biker Found Slain in Halifax,” Winnipeg Free Press, May 14, 1996, A1; and “Establishment of Hells Angels a Bloody Tale,” Winnipeg Free Press, March 15, 2005, B6.
CHAPTER 40: Biggest Party Ever
The Hamilton Red Devils were Canada’s oldest outlaw motorcycle club when they suddenly gave up their name in November 2014. Their history could be traced back to 1949. They had thirty-one members and chapters in Hamilton, Chatham and Sudbury when they suddenly bcame members of the Maritime-based Bacchus Motorcycle Club. The move came as the Hells Angels ushered their support club—also named the Red Devils—into Ontario.
Guindon was with Suzanne Blais that spring at a Friday the 13th biker run in Port Dover, Ontario, when weekend riders and members of established clubs all take to the road and congregate in the Lake Ontario fishing town. Suzanne later recalled: “As I was being introduced to his friends, he said, ‘Meet my lady friend Suzanne, who is my oldest friend. I’m going to give her a trophy one of these days. She was the only girl I knew while a teenager who managed to escape my clutches and keep her virginity.’ At which point I piped up with, ‘Yes, but I had to move to Toronto to do it.’ ”
On September 13, 2006, Mr. Bill was laid to rest in his Hells Angels leather vest in Peterborough after a fatal motorcycle collision with a truck. Guindon’s suspicions about him being a rat were never proven, and some one hundred bikers gathered to pay their last respects.
Mr. Bill was sixty at the time of his death and had been saying some strange things in his final days, including that Gault was a police informer. Gault was among the mourners at the funeral, and would later deny in court that, after he filed by the open casket, he said to a fellow member, “He’s never smelled better.” If he did make the remark, it would have been one time when he actually spoke the truth. Mr. Bill in life had been an assault to the senses. Guindon recalled his horror when Mr. Bill would peel off his socks. “Holy fuck. Jesus Christ. His nails had to be that much larger and they’re black. Jesus Christ, this guy! Have you ever had a bath?…I almost got sick watching his feet.”
Guindon was a little surprised by the turnout at Mr. Bill’s send-off. “There was not as many people as I thought would show up.” Perhaps the reason was the rumour circulating that he had been a rat. Guindon said, “If I would have known earlier, I would have done something about it…He didn’t do drug transactions and he didn’t work, but he always had money.”
CHAPTER 42: Culture Shock
Harley left school after Grade 10 and then got his diploma as an adult.
Paul Gravelle was in a higher economic bracket than Guindon, and was of higher interest to the police. Gravelle pled guilty to a multi-million-dollar marijuana importation scheme but said he stayed away from moving what he considered to be hard drugs. He denied a role in the November 16, 1998, shotgun murders of Ancaster lawyer Lynn Gilbank and her husband. Gravelle told The Hamilton Spectator there was no truth to allegations his family took part in the murders to silence an informant working with Gilbank. “No,” he said. “That’s not true. Our family is not killers…That’s beyond us to do a thing like that. That’s a despicable act. That’s a cowardly act.”
Gravelle lived for five years in Mexico, where he said he performed magic tricks on the street for large crowds. He came home in 2010, once the murder beef had gone away. He leased a BMW X5, and not long after that, found some strange wiring under the hood. He took it back to the dealer, who responded with fear and called the Niagara Regional Police. When the bomb squad checked it out, they saw it was a hidden recording device, installed by Peel Regional Police.
CHAPTER 49: Fathers and Sons
Harley-Davidson motorcycles were under attack by demographics at the same time that Harley riding clubs were struggling to stay relevant. Articles on the aging of the Harley market include James B. Kelleher’s “As Boomers Age, Harley Hunts for Younger Riders,” Reuters.com, June 21, 2013; James R. Hagerty’s “Harley-Davidson to Ramp Up Marketing, as Sales Skid,” WSJ.com, October 20, 2015; and Trefis Team’s “Harley-Davidson’s European Fate Could Turn Around This Year,” Forbes.com, April 1, 2014.