______
The first Canadian Hells Angels chapter opened in Montreal in 1977, and the gang has dominated the province’s biker scene ever since. By the early 1990s, however, domination was no longer enough—they wanted to be the only game in town. At least in Montreal, the province’s biggest city and home to pretty much half its population. So, with several puppet gangs as their foot soldiers, les Hells, as they’re known, began a brutal campaign to monopolize the drugs business, especially the big money-maker: cocaine.
Other organized crime groups, most of which were French-Canadian family mobs based in the various working-class neighborhoods around Montreal, first tried to accommodate the ambitions of les Hells and work with them. When that didn’t work, the families began resisting. To little effect. Finally, in 1993, they banded together and started to fight back, under the banner first of the Alliance and eventually of the Rock Machine, a biker gang created for the exclusive purpose of resisting the Hells Angels’ predations.
Initially, police didn’t much mind criminals taking out criminals—it made for fewer bad guys to deal with. But as 1994 turned into 1995, bombs increasingly became les Hells’ weapon of choice. A successful explosion could accomplish three goals: kill their enemies, destroy a place of business (and point of sale) and send a very strong message.
Then, in August 1995, a piece of shrapnel struck and killed an eleven-year-old boy when a booby-trapped Jeep exploded across the street from where he was playing. Police suddenly were forced to jump to it. So was born l’Escouade Carcajou— the Wolverine Squad—a special task force uniting the RCMP, the Quebec provincial police (known as the SQ after its name in French, the Sûreté du Québec) and various municipal police forces, principally Montreal’s. To accomplish its work, Carcajou was handed what amounted to a blank check from the Quebec government.
I didn’t know any of this when I got a call from Larry Ricketts in October 1995 asking me to speak to Corporal Pierre Verdon, a Mountie colleague of his from Quebec. After a brief conversation, during which I said little more than that I was interested in going back to work, I was on a plane for Montreal. There, in a hotel room on the South Shore, Verdon and a colleague of his from Ottawa, Staff Sergeant Jean-Pierre (J.P.) Lévesque, gave me the details of the job.
They wanted me to penetrate the Sherbrooke chapter of the Hells Angels. It wasn’t deeply involved in what Quebecers were already calling la guerre des motards— the Biker War; that was really in the hands of the Montreal chapter, the recently formed Nomads and the Montreal-area puppet clubs. Instead, the Sherbrooke chapter was considered to be the money chapter, and that’s what the Mounties wanted me to focus on. Rather than nail the members in drug buys or other front-end illegal activity, they hoped I would find out where their money was going and maybe get them to invest in a scheme I came up with.
I liked that angle, and the job appealed to me on several other levels as well. Sherbrooke was not unlike Hull in many ways: neither small town nor big city; mostly French but with a solid English minority; blue-collar. I was also up for an adventure. I’d not done an infiltration job for a decade and had been totally immersed in my martial arts club for five years. Now, with the business effectively running itself thanks to our two talented and dependable instructors, taking time away was conceivable.
Natalie and I had had a child of our own about six months earlier, so I didn’t expect her to much like the idea of me returning to my old job, which I’d told her about after we got together. Her reaction surprised me. If it meant we might have a chance of moving back east, she was all for it. The new baby had reminded her how much she missed her other children, whom she hadn’t seen—or been allowed to see—for five years now. Heading back east wouldn’t get her access—only lawyers could do that—but she’d at least be closer. So, with her blessing, I accepted the gig on the understanding that I’d initially commit to only a three-month probe, and then she and I would decide whether moving east made sense or not.
I flew back to Montreal a week or two after that first visit, this time to get to work. There I had a day of meetings with Carcajou squad members and got outfitted with a credit card with a $25,000 limit.
“Don’t use it!” said the SQ sergeant, Guy Ouellette, who gave it to me. He then lectured me as if I were a criminal who had just agreed to become an informant. “You do anything illegal—anything—we’ll find out about it and you can expect to be charged.”
After that, he repeated the same message about five times, but using different words.
“I know my fucking job,” I finally said aggressively, just to shut him up. Speaking French again—and swearing in it—was a pleasure.
The next day, Pierre Verdon drove me the ninety miles or so from Montreal to Sherbrooke. We didn’t talk that much on the way and the silence gave me time to plan my entry into the world of Sherbrooke’s Hells. This time, I decided, I’d come in seriously crooked. I had with me an eight-by-ten glossy studio portrait of a girl called Rachel, who had been one of the Élite team, a short-lived escort agency I had set up way back when for the Thai pilots case. I made up a story in which she was a stripper-turned-snitch due to testify at an upcoming trial; I was the guy charged with taking care of her. Exactly what that meant, I’d leave up to the imaginations of the people I spoke to. If they thought “hit man” or “contract killer,” I’d be doing my job. Of course, I wouldn’t be stopping people on the sidewalk to ask if they had seen the woman. Instead, I would concentrate on three bars and a motel, all of which I knew to be biker-owned.
On my second visit to the main biker bar, a strip club called Barbie on Wellington Street, I confided in the doorman. He wasn’t being too discreet about his affiliations: he was wearing a Hells Angels T-shirt.
“Listen, out of respect for you guys, I should tell you what I’m here for,” I said, before pulling out a shrunken-down copy of the photo and giving him the CliffNotes of my interest in her. “C’est un rat,” I said, adding, “She’s from here and word is she’s coming back here.”
I counted on him not to ask too many questions, and he didn’t. Instead, he just took a long look at the photo, said she wasn’t working there and hadn’t been around, and promised he’d keep his eye out for her. “Check in occasionally,” he said.
I went back a few nights later, only to find a different doorman out front. But things looked positive when I went to order a drink—the barman brought me a Pepsi without my having to ask, and when I went to pay he just waved me off. I guessed they had been talking about me and regarded me favorably.
Like the doorman, the barman turned out to be a patched member of les Hells, and I spent a bit of time chatting with him that night. Again I flashed the photo, and he, of course, said he hadn’t seen her. It wasn’t much, but still, things were looking good. I had made contact.
Then the jerk from the SQ, who was his force’s main expert on bikers and had never met a microphone he didn’t fall for, decided to mouth off at a press conference about Carcajou’s goal in the Sherbrooke area. He said the task force had a comprehensive plan to crack down on the illegal activities of the Hells Angels, their puppet clubs and associates and to go after them ruthlessly. Then he added, “And we’ve recently inserted an agent in place for that very purpose.”
That was it—in one sentence the goofball had torpedoed the whole project. I called Verdon as soon as I saw the item on the evening news. “I’m out of here,” I said.
He fully understood. If anything, he was angrier than I was. While I packed my bags and got the hell out of Sherbrooke, Verdon went on the warpath within Carcajou.
I initially thought it had just been a combination of stupidity and motor mouth that had led the cop—who went on to become a successful provincial politician—to make his blunder. Later, though, I came to suspect otherwise. For years, the ill will between the RCMP and the SQ had been pretty much as bad as that between the Hells Angels and their criminal rivals. The creation of Carcajou didn’t make things any better, at least not initially. The police seemed to be investing as much effort in undermining their rivals within the task force as in going after the bad guys. And since I was brought in by the RCMP and was clearly their infiltrator, I’d been a target of the SQ.
I headed home to Vancouver, the family and the club with one thing clear in my mind: the investigation may have ended as prematurely and as unsuccessfully as any I’d been involved in, but that was the work I wanted to be doing. Another thing became clear during the following weeks: it was back east that we should be living. Natalie would be closer to her kids; I would be near to Verdon, who seemed as likely a source of future employment as any of my police contacts. Scott Paterson had retired by then to set up his own security company, and Ricketts’s new job was in uniform and administrative; it didn’t put him in a position to require my services.
We moved early in 1996. The car was just as overloaded on this trip as it had been coming the other direction five years earlier. The occupants, however, were different. My son, who had come back to live with us after the year with his mother, was thirteen now and was a passenger. But my daughter, who was fifteen, had decided she didn’t want to go through the pains of moving and making new friends all over again, and she opted to stay with her mom’s sister and her family. Then, of course, we had the baby. Of the animals, only the cat made the return trip. Thumper had had to be put down because of hip problems and Teela, the female Rottie that Larry had given me, turned out not to be very good with young children, so I’d passed her on to someone else. I’d also given the club to the two instructors who, by that time, had been effectively running it for several months anyway.
Our plan was to spend a month or so in the Ottawa-Hull region and then move on to Saint John. The time in Hull didn’t have anything to do with nostalgia on my part—I was over that. Rather, I’d spend it building a bit of verifiable background for use in future infiltration assignments. In particular, in consultation with my new Mountie friends, I’d get involved in a business that had been known to attract organized crime in the past: I’d promote a concert or two. How hard could it be?
My brother Pete, who had recovered enough to go back to Hull and back to playing music, provided an entree and the Mounties covered a few expenses—a car and a cellphone, for instance. Since I wasn’t an RCMP employee, I got to keep any profits I made from my ventures. (There weren’t many, but I didn’t lose my shirt either.)
Of course, that sort of background-building ended up taking more than a month. I eventually stayed six months in the region, while Natalie and the kids went on to Saint John ahead of me. During my time in Ottawa, I quickly realized that Verdon wouldn’t replace Scott Paterson in my life. He was too wrapped up in Carcajou, the escalating biker war in Quebec and handling a Hells Angels informer in Montreal. Instead, my new conduit to infiltration jobs would be Verdon’s good friend J.P. Lévesque. He was based in Ottawa and was the national coordinator for what’s called the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada—a Mountie-run outfit that tries to get those most secretive of organizations, police forces, to share organized crime information with each other. He was as much diplomat as cop, and had endless contacts in Canada and internationally.
Whereas Scott had done little more than give me phone numbers with the message, “This person wants to talk to you,” J.P. played a much larger role. He gave advice, sifted out those jobs that he felt weren’t appropriate, and seemed to be actually concerned with the impact of the work in general, and of specific assignments in particular, on me, my family and my career. That’s why I began to refer to him as my rabbi—law enforcement slang for a superior who watches out, formally and otherwise, for an underling. In return for the guidance and protection, rabbis tend to be rewarded with the most precious currency among police the world over: intelligence, some of which the undercover agent might not even share with his handlers, depending on his relationship with them.
The first official job I did for J.P. was a joint RCMP–Interpol operation involving a dozen police forces from half as many countries. Because of national security considerations, the details fall under the Official Secrets Act, making it a criminal offense to discuss them. Suffice it to say, the assignment took me out of Canada barely a week or two after I got to Saint John and kept me out of the country for eighteen months. My absence would have gone over worse with Natalie had she not been back near her family (although she still didn’t have access to her kids; she wouldn’t get that until the summer of 1998) and had she not understood that this wasn’t a regular assignment. It went well beyond the scope of good guy/bad guy, catch-the-speed-dealing-biker.
I found myself back in Saint John in early 1998, and very happy to be home. Despite the long time away, the reintegration to family life was easier than it had ever been before. One reason was that the job I was coming off hadn’t required me to be a completely different person; another was that I was older, more mature and more capable of keeping what I’d come to call church and state—the personal and the professional—apart.
A period of relative serenity on the home front helped also. My son was a teenager at the time, but an easy one. He had a great relationship with Natalie and an even better one with his younger half-sister. She worshipped him, all the more so because I wasn’t around much in her early years, and he loved her back just as much. Natalie was also in good spirits. Shortly after her return to Saint John we’d begun legal proceedings to obtain her access to her older children again, and even if it was slow going, and even if her ex’s family fought us every step of the way, by early 1998 we were clearly winning.
Needless to say, the legal action was expensive. So when J.P. Lévesque called me in March with another job, I nibbled. It led to a meeting in Kingston, Ontario, with some special squad investigators from the Ontario Provincial Police; that encounter led to me moving to Toronto on May 5. The assignment involved infiltrating the Para-Dice Riders biker club—the main gang in Toronto but by no means the only one—and gathering intelligence on, among other things, its relationship with the Quebec Hells Angels.
The biker war was still raging in that province and outlaw motorcycle gangs had come to be recognized as the most serious organized crime threat across the country as a whole. The buffer treaty I’d witnessed being negotiated in Sturgis more than a decade earlier had led to a global shakeout of the biker world during the 1980s and 1990s. There had been a huge expansion in the number of members and chapters of the Hells Angels and Bandidos; meanwhile, independents had gone extinct by the dozen. Toronto, however, resisted the trend, and remained misleadingly calm. Its biker scene was still diverse and dynamic, with a handful of independent gangs—the Para-Dice Riders (known as the PDR), the Loners, Satan’s Choice, the Vagabonds, the Last Chance—all coexisting more or less happily. It was a rich market, and the bikers seemed to recognize that the pie was big enough for all of them.
The police knew that this could change very quickly. The HA were increasingly putting pressure—with both carrot and stick—on the PDR and the other gangs active in what’s known as the Golden Horseshoe, an economically thriving area that begins east of Toronto and wraps westward around the tip of Lake Ontario toward the U.S. border at Niagara Falls. In addition to developing an accurate picture of the interaction between the PDR, the other Ontario gangs and the expansion-minded Quebec Hells, I was to collect any evidence I could of drug, gun and explosives trafficking between the provinces and among members.
To gain an in with the gang, I decided to use the concert-promoter background I had established in Ottawa-Hull a couple of years earlier. It worked like a charm. I’d perused the PDR’s website to get a feel for my new target and noted that they were suing police for illegal harassment on their way to and from club events. The case had been going on for a while, with the PDR usually losing and always appealing when they did. To pay their legal bills, the gang was soliciting for donations. All bikers know that their mystique can charm the stupid and that sometimes the stupid have money to throw away. But the gang didn’t really need the cash; rather, they needed a way to legitimize some of the cash they already had. With police specialized in tracking and identifying proceeds of crime keeping a vigilant eye on them, the PDR regarded donations as a perfect vehicle to launder illegal money.
So I opened an email account with a Boston Internet service—in order to minimize the possibility of my messages being traced—and sent the following to the PDR website:
I’m with “National Concerts” (Action West Talent Group). I have read with great interest about your ongoing fight for your rights. As you say, the cost of getting justice is very high ($300,000 by your own estimates). We are prepared to assist you throughout the summer to achieve that goal, along with maximum exposure of your cause. I will be in Toronto next week and would like the opportunity to discuss our ideas with you. If you can email me a name and number to contact I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m in town.
Within twenty-four hours I had received a terse reply: “Call Mark” along with a Toronto phone number.
My contact turned out to be Mark Staples, a patched member of the PDR who the police told me was both plugged into the music scene and a martial arts enthusiast—he even had his own club. He could be the PDR’s Gunk, I surmised initially, the guy who uses his key to the club to open all its doors for me. There was a crucial difference, however, one that almost brought the operation to a premature end: Staples was extremely street-smart and suspicious, and immediately very wary of me.
Our first meeting was at a restaurant called Taro on Queen Street West, the bohemian part of Toronto. Staples came in covered in plaster dust; he’d been doing renovations on his dojo across the street. I came straight to the point: I was a Canadian promoter relocating to the Toronto area from the States and looking to get established.
“You have a cause and I want to do a show,” I said. “I’ll tell you right up front, I don’t give a shit about this ‘right to ride’ stuff. I don’t ride, but I will do a great show and we’ll all make money.”
“Money’s good,” he said.
“My goal is to have a few small shows over the summer and go for a big one in September,” I continued.
The meeting went well. He told me about other promoters who tended to look unkindly upon upstarts—just before squashing them. We talked martial arts and he even invited me to teach a class in his studio. We blue-skied all the business we might do together and made plans to meet again soon.
But I left there a bit nervous. We had too much in common and he was clearly too smart. That made the likelihood of his figuring me out just too high. Especially since I never really planned to put on a show; I just wanted to talk about it for a while before segueing into criminal activity.
Over the next few weeks I saw Staples every couple of days, usually dropping by his club and just hanging around. I knew I was going too often, but he was pretty much all I had. In retrospect, I was probably generating activity for the file, as much to show I wasn’t slacking off as anything. I tried to avoid concert talk and asked too many questions. For instance, if he told me he was going to the States for a few days, I’d ask where or whether it was business or pleasure. That probably sharpened his natural suspicion.
He’d dropped the names of a couple of his PDR brothers who might be interested in coming in on my concert plans, including one, Paul “Sunny” Braybrook, who ran an annual bike show in the Toronto area: custom bike contests, live music, wet T-shirt contests, the works. I’d spoken with Sunny, but hardly in circumstances that would allow me to broach illegal activities—he was doing a short stretch in Mimico Correctional Center on a coke charge. As for giving me the phone numbers or an intro to any other members, Staples was clearly in no rush.
One afternoon in late June, I had a meeting set up with Staples at his studio. When I showed up at the appointed hour, however, an underling told me he wasn’t there. I left, got back in the Intrepid the police had provided me with and used my cellphone to call my handler, Detective Constable George Cousens, who was in position and probably had a visual on me at that very moment.
George told me where to meet. But, being directionally dysfunctional, I soon got confused, pulled over and got out of the car. Before too long, George and his partner, who were following me at a distance, joined me. After being shown which way to go on a map, I got back into my Intrepid and we duly met at the safe location, which that day was the public parking lot in High Park. No big deal, I thought.
Two days later, however, after I’d taught a class at his studio, Staples came up to me and got straight to the point.
“Who were those guys you were talking to Tuesday?” he demanded.
“Where?” I asked, genuinely confused.
“Down on King. You had pulled over on the side of the road and were talking to two guys in a beige car. They looked like cops. Standing there stoic like cops. One had brown hair and mustache.”
It all became clear in an instant: Staples had set me up. Called me to a meeting, had his grunt tell me he wasn’t there and then followed me when I left. Well, time to get my back up, I decided. After all, as I knew from past experience, the best defense is a good offense.
“What are you saying here?” I asked, staring hard at him.
“I’m saying that I don’t really know you and then I see you talking to those guys, it gets me thinking.”
“Are you saying I’m a cop?”
Staples backed off a bit, but not much. “I’m not accusing you of anything, but something was going down.”
“Maybe I had a deal going down? Anyway, who I was talking to is really none of your business.”
“It’s my business if you’re coming in and out of here.”
“Rest assured they’re not cops,” I said. “In fact, they’re about as opposite of that as you can get.”
“Either scenario is not good for me,” Staples said. “If it’s cops, I don’t want you around, and if it’s the other, then I don’t need the heat. There is some of my brothers that I’ve asked not to come here ’cause of the things they’re involved in. I was planning to introduce you to my other brother who wants to get into shows, but now I have to be careful—I don’t want to be doing the wrong thing. I’m going to have to check you out a lot more now.”
“You should have done that from jump, man. I’m easy to check up on. And look, if you feel uncomfortable, I can get in my car, forget this place exists and just be out of your life. Just say the word, right now, and I’m gone. How’s that?”
That backed him off some more. “No, that’s not it. I just don’t want any heat on this place. If you’re doing stuff, that’s your business. But keep it away from here.”
I’d dodged that bullet—but just barely. And it didn’t bode well. Staples would be watching me extra-closely now and, as he’d said, wouldn’t be introducing me to any other PDR.
After that incident, I saw a lot less of Staples. I would have cut him off completely, but it would have looked too suspicious. Instead, I focused my attention on Braybrook and, since contact with him was limited, his wife, Alana. I’d met her a couple of times prior to meeting Sunny in jail and it had been immediately apparent she had seen better days. She was in her mid-forties with dyed black hair and had that hard look of someone who’s been struggling for way too long and doing too much coke to cope with it all. With Sunny in jail, she was left way out of her depth trying to get the bike show together. To boot, she was obviously broke, or as good as. That was clear not just from the chaotic state of her home, her wreck of a car, her swarming brood of kids and their clothes, but from the almost endearingly small-time maneuvers she used to get me to foot some of her bills.
On my way to talk to her about Sunny one day at her house in Barrie, fifty miles north of the city, I phoned to say I’d be there in an hour.
“Well, if you’re going to be here that soon, can you pick up something for me on the way?” she asked. Sure, I said, and she proceeded to give me a long grocery list. Needless to say, she neglected to reimburse me.
Another time, her son wanted a dollar to buy something from the corner store.
“Do you have change for a five?” she asked me. I did and gave her a handful of dollar coins. She gave one to her son, put the remaining four in her pocket and left it at that.
It was one of Alana’s less modest requests that finally got me an in with an influential (and not very cautious) member of the gang. By then I’d visited Sunny a couple of times in jail and become pretty tight with him—as much by convincing him we’d once run into each other during one of his many stretches in prison as by the fact that I wanted to do business with him. He also appreciated that I was helping out Alana and their kids, or at least that I had no problem with her hitting me up for cash on occasion.
One day Alana phoned me in a state from a clothes store at Danforth and Victoria Park in Toronto’s east end. “I owe someone fifteen hundred bucks and only have thirteen hundred. Can you please, please help me out?” she begged.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I answered. “Phone me back in half an hour or so.”
I immediately called George, my handler, and asked his opinion on bailing out Alana. I gave him all the details I had—that Alana was at a place called the Jeans Store with a woman called Brenda—and he said he’d have to consult his own bosses. But he wasn’t optimistic. “She’s just trying to rip us off. Take you for as much as she can.”
“Of course she is,” I said. “But it might just pay off.”
He said he doubted it and promised to call me back in the next few minutes, after going upstairs.
As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. I expected it to be Alana again. It wasn’t. It was Sunny from jail.
“Listen, you help my old lady out now and I’ll make it up to you as soon as I’m out,” he said. Hearing a biker ass-licking rather than ass-kicking was novel, and further convinced me that bailing out Alana was a smart move. Still, I didn’t commit myself.
“I’ll go over there and check it out,” I said. “Do what I can.”
After getting off the line with Sunny, I phoned George back. He made it sound as if the issue was already resolved—that I wasn’t going to give Alana the two hundred dollars. I told him about Sunny’s call. “That’s what bad guys do—they help out the families of their friends who are in prison,” I said. “This could score us some serious points. It’s not easy for him to ask me, you know. And it’s only two hundred fucking dollars.”
“It’s not a question of two hundred dollars,” George said. “It’s a question of him leeching on you. You give it to him now, he’ll keep coming.”
“Well, I don’t really care. He comes to me again, I’ll just say no. So today, I’m going to go and give her the money—even if it comes out of my own pocket.”
George, who would turn out to be the best handler I ever had, was smart enough to recognize that I wasn’t going to be swayed, and he relented. He didn’t promise to reimburse me, but he and the team would cover me when I went to meet Alana.
“Just to give you a heads-up,” he added, “Brenda is a friend of Brett Toms and he’s a real target of ours.”
If I’d heard his name earlier in the investigation, I’d forgotten it. But Toms, it seems, was a high-ranking member of the PDR. He was sergeant-at-arms and considered by the police to be one of the smarter and more dangerous members. One member of the police team had been trying to nail Toms for more than a decade, to no avail. If a measly two hundred bucks could perhaps buy me an audience with him, it was all the more worth it, I thought.
I took all the cash I had available—about two thousand dollars—made a roll so I’d look like a crook of substance, and headed over to the Jeans Store. There, I peeled off the two hundred and put it on the counter in front of Alana. She pushed it over to Brenda, who folded and pocketed it. Alana was groveling in her thankfulness and promised to pay me back.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll deal with Sunny for it.”
I had no doubt that I was paying off a drug bill for Alana; she had cokehead written all over her, and the $1,500 she’d owed suggested she’d bought an ounce. She soon left the store and I hung out for a while, chatting with Brenda. Brenda was a whole lot smarter than Alana—she ran the Jeans Store and clearly had a mind for business—but she wasn’t nearly as smart as she thought she was. Brenda was so intent on making money, and therefore so focused on how she might make money off of me, that she was oblivious to any danger I might have represented. I told her about my concert plans—which she had already heard about from Alana—while admiring the clothes she was selling. All of the clothing, it turned out, had come from stolen shipments.
“You should meet my friend Brett,” she said as I was finally preparing to leave.
“I’d like to very much,” I replied.
“Well, come on by tomorrow and we’ll grab a beer next door.”
Brett didn’t show the next day, but we met soon enough at a steakhouse in Scarborough. He was a tallish, heavyset man of about forty with what people call hockey hair: business on top, party at the back. To draw more attention to it, the business part was bleached blond. He opened up immediately, telling me he owned through a proxy the shop Brenda sold the hot clothes from and that he worked for the city driving a snowplow in winter and other vehicles the rest of the year. At our first meeting I ordered from Brett a bunch of T-shirts with SECURITY written on them in big letters. He had a contact from the Last Chance motorcycle gang who had a silkscreening shop, and I told him I needed the shirts for the concert I was putting on.
Later I got the green light to buy $10,000 worth of stolen clothes from him on the pretext that I wanted to open my own clothes store in Niagara Falls, Ontario, as a front business. By then I’d hinted to both Sunny and Brett that one of my criminal activities was smuggling, so Niagara Falls, right on the U.S.–Canada border, was a logical place for me to set up.
However, once I told Brett that I was in for $10,000 in clothes, the OPP brass informed me that I only had $5,000 to spend. I revised the order, saying I didn’t want to tie up too much cash in something that wouldn’t bring much, if any, profit. Brett wasn’t thrilled, but he was cool with it. Then, when I was meeting George minutes before I was to connect with Brett at his house to inspect the clothes, he told me they only had $500 for me. I lost it.
“You’re fucking me up totally,” I said, adding a few more choice words for the police bureaucrats and bean counters. This was our first buy of any kind in the case and for a while I thought it would be the last. I was convinced that that would be it for my relationship with Brett—anyone who does business with bikers and doesn’t make good on his word can expect to be cut off, perhaps even cut up. And after the close call with Staples, I figured we might as well fold up the investigation then and there.
“Just work your magic,” George said, as if nothing was the matter. With no real options, all I could do was cool down and continue over to Brett’s place.
In their basement I started picking through the clothes thoroughly. I’d looked them over briefly before, but this time I played the discriminating customer and after a while started shaking my head. Inside, however, I was smiling: the clothes were obviously second-rate and that might save the day.
“I have to be honest with you, man,” I finally said. “This is not the type of clothes I want to have in the store. I was hoping for something more in boutique style. This is too Kmart.”
Luckily for me, Brett knew I was right and showed a reasonable side. “Ah, well. I’ll line up better stuff for you.”
“I feel bad, so I’ll tell you what,” I went on, trying to make it easier for both of us. “I can use a few sweaters, so I’ll give you five bills for these.”
I grabbed a handful of clothes, he took the five hundred dollars, and everybody left happy.
A couple of weeks later, Brett accompanied me down to Niagara Falls to introduce me to another PDR member who lived down there. I had mistakenly thought that the orbit of the gang didn’t extend so far from Toronto, and had chosen the Falls as the location for my store expecting that the distance would spare me a certain scrutiny. But as soon as I’d mentioned setting up there, Brett had said I’d have to meet “Hollywood”—Jason Bedborough—who was the PDR delegate in the diverse and active criminal community in Niagara Falls. So much for my staying under the radar.
By then I was fairly tight with Brett and Sunny, as well as Psycho Dave, a tattoo artist, his business partner Dirtbag and a couple of other members. I was gathering relatively good intelligence on the gang’s relationship with les Hells and other criminal groups, but hadn’t got anywhere in our secondary goal: making drug buys. The PDR were well aware that the cops were on their case. The Quebec biker war had opened the taps across the country for the funding of police operations targeting bikers, and the PDR knew it. They also knew that police expected Ontario—in particular Toronto—to be the next battleground, and so were watching bikers there very closely.
Still, I expected to be able to make a drug buy soon enough. After all, it was late October by now and I had been consorting with these guys for almost six months.
Hollywood certainly seemed like the guy to know in Niagara Falls. Tall and tattooed and in his late twenties, with long black hair rather than the blond mane his name might suggest, he ran a bunch of clubs in town. He didn’t own them, but he controlled what bands played where and, of course, the drugs sales therein.
“I know a guy with a building downtown that has a storefront we can get for next to nothing,” Hollywood said after Brett and I told him of my plans. His use of “we” confused me at first, but that was cleared up quickly. “You sell your clothes out the front, I can run my bands from the office. And whatever else either of us wants to move through the back door, well, that’s what it’s there for.”
Brett had been very open and lacking in the usual criminal caution when it came to new faces, but Hollywood was completely off the charts. Sure, I came to him with the blessing of Brett; still, he seemed too forward, too fast—if I’d been a woman I figured he’d already have asked me to marry him. And his recklessness went even further: when we went down to the basement of his home, there was a bag with what I calculated to be about an ounce of coke lying on a table. Hollywood just idly cleared it away, not making any effort to shield it from me.
Perhaps encouraged by Hollywood’s openness, on our drive back to Toronto I pulled a small glass coke vial from my pocket and gave Brett an interrogative look. Brett simply nodded and said, “Because of the heat on me and the guys I may have to go outside the club for it.”
“I don’t care if you go to Nebraska for it. It’s just between me and you.”
He asked me how much I wanted. I said I wanted to stay small to see how the thing worked out—a quarter or half a pound, see how it goes. I asked him how he wanted to play it.
“Straight across,” he said, meaning it would be simple: I’d give him the money, he’d give me the coke. There would be no half up front or running around picking up keys to bus station lockers. His terms sent the message that he had no doubts about me.
Some of that was probably thanks to Sunny, who by that time was telling anyone who cared to listen that he knew me from way back, that we’d served time together, and that I was connected to the “Red and White,” the Hells Angels.
A week or so later, in the middle of the day, I got the call from Brett. “You have one hour to get here.”
A little late but not much—and all wired up and with a full undercover backup nearby—I knocked on his door. After a bit of small talk, Brett said, “I got what you wanted.”
“Four.”
“How much?”
“Fifty-eight should do it.”
I counted out fifty-eight $100 bills onto a coffee table while he got up from the couch, went to the sideboard and took down a small brown paper bag. He handed the bag to me when he came back to sit down. Inside was a zip-lock-type bag with what appeared to be four ounces of cocaine.
“Great,” I said. “You’ve saved me a trip to Montreal.”
“No problem,” said Brett. “Now that we got this out of the way, the next time we can do a bigger deal.”
“No doubt.” I got up to leave.
“Don’t you want to test it?” asked Brett.
“Why?” I asked in return. “Is there something wrong with it?”
“No. It’s great!”
“That’s good enough for me. Anyway, I know where you live.” I smiled with this last sentence, but it wasn’t entirely a joke.
“That’s true,” said Brett.
We shook hands and he walked me out. I got into my car and went directly to the Howard Johnson’s on Keele Street, where the police were set up in room 909. Following OPP protocol, I was strip-searched by my handlers. It allowed the police to be absolutely certain that I wasn’t holding back a gram or an ounce. It also infuriated me big time—even in prison I’d never been strip-searched. And this was by my colleagues, who had neglected to tell me that I should expect such treatment.
I went home fuming. We had to meet the next day at the same hotel. I had calmed down considerably by then, but was still upset. My anger dissipated immediately, however, when I walked into room 909 again. All the guys were in their underwear. George was sitting at the desk writing in his Fruit of the Looms. Craig Pulfrey, a top-notch undercover agent who would become my Niagara Falls sidekick, was standing in the middle of the room reading a paper as good as naked. It made it all all right again.
I arranged a secondary buy from Brett a couple of weeks later—one that made him look especially bad in court. It was for a slightly larger amount—half a pound—and lining up the deal took a few days, during which time his dad had a series of heart attacks. That made Brett cancel a weekend of partying with Hollywood down in Niagara Falls; it didn’t, however, change his business plans. Even after his dad died on the Sunday evening, Brett said that doing the deal on Monday wouldn’t be a problem. “Everything’s still a go,” he told me. The only difference was that since his mother was at his house, we had to do the transaction in his pickup truck.
The buys multiplied once the ice had been broken. Hollywood was next, just two days later. I met up with him at a peeler bar, Features, in Toronto’s west end after he’d called to get together to discuss our business in the Falls. The place was a PDR haunt and, looking around, I recognized some members, including Psycho Dave. Hollywood introduced me to others, referring to me as his partner.
“So what’s up?” he asked me when we were alone. Earlier, on the phone, I’d told him I was in a bind and I now gave him the details: I’d bought eleven thousand dollars’ worth of coke for some clients in Montreal and the stuff had turned out to be crap. Now I needed to buy some better-quality coke to kick up the purity or else I’d have trouble, I said.
At first Hollywood wanted to go get the guy who had sold me the weak coke, but I discouraged him. “It’s not that he ripped me off, it’s just that the stuff is not good enough to do anything with.”
I added that I liked the guy and that was another reason I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. That led him to ask who had sold me the lame product. I told him I wasn’t one to name names, but I let him jump to his own conclusions.
“How close is this guy to us?” he asked.
“Real close.”
“That what I thought. Anyway, I’ll take care of you. I’ll give you a couple of o-z’s for fourteen each and that’ll take care of me too. This stuff will be so clean, you’ll be able to cut it fifty percent and it’ll still go. We’ll do it Monday. After that, if you need more, you’ll know who to come and see first.”
His only problem was the small amount. “I’ll have to tell the people I get my shit from that you just want a sample. They’re big-time. I’m not kidding you, man, fifty pounds is nothing to them.”
All investigations, and especially longer ones, take on a life of their own. Invariably, new avenues of pursuit will open up thanks to an introduction to a previously unknown bad guy or an unexpected tidbit of intelligence. Sometimes the whole probe will veer off into a completely new direction; usually the new information just adds value.
In the case of the PDR investigation, the openness of Hollywood—combined with Mark Staples’s suspiciousness and the fact I had no plans to actually put on the show that had got me in with him and Sunny Braybrook—meant that shifting our focus to Niagara Falls would probably produce more results. The gang was moving into the area, laying the way for their increasingly close allies the Hells Angels, so I could monitor that activity. And Niagara Falls was just over an hour from Toronto, and all the town’s hoods tended to go back and forth regularly; keeping track of Angels activity in the big city—the main goal of the investigation—would thus be no problem from the Falls.
So, after three weeks back in Saint John for the Christmas holidays, I moved from the house I’d rented in Richmond Hill, north of Toronto, to a small apartment building near Niagara Falls’ downtown.
Shortly after settling in, I fell in with an older biker type by the name of Joe Toth. He was a mechanic in the orbit of the Outlaws, but had never been a member of the gang or of any other major club. Still, he was very well plugged in to the town’s criminal community, to the point that every week during the summer he held a barbecue at his house that amounted really to a networking event for the town’s crooks.
I met him well before I attended one of these, however. One day I had planned to meet Hollywood at our shop and, as always, he was late. As I waited outside, two men pulled up in a van. One was Toth. He quickly proved to be as open and forthcoming as Hollywood: he told me readily that he was there to deliver 3,800 Percodans, prescription painkillers popular on the street. We had a pleasant chat that only ended when Hollywood arrived, handed Toth a pile of bills and was given a paper bag in return.
I barely recognized Toth the next time I ran into him, a couple of months later. One of the principal hangouts for hoods in Niagara Falls wasn’t too subtle in its choice of name: Goodfellows. I went in there one evening and as I was talking with the bartender a guy beside me said, “Hey, how’s it going?” It was Toth, looking much the worse for wear. It turned out that shortly after our first meeting he had been jumped in another bar, beaten to within an inch of his life and left for dead beside a Dumpster. He’d spent weeks in hospital but now was back in business.
“Next time you get some Percodans, put some aside for me,” I said after we’d talked for a while, and I gave him two hundred dollars as a deposit.
I saw Toth regularly after that and, once the weather got warm, started going to his weekly barbecues. It was at one of these that Freddie Campisano, an Italian mobster I knew from Goodfellows, offered to sell me four hundred pounds of plastic explosives. After getting the green light from my handlers, I told him I was interested. By then, however, only 330 pounds remained.
“Who took the other seventy pounds?” I asked.
“Some crazy fuckers from Quebec,” Freddie answered.
“Hey, that’s where my buyers are from,” I told him. “But they’re not so much crazy fuckers as dangerous fuckers.”
A couple of days later we did the deal for $30,000—$26,000 for the explosives, $2,000 each in middleman fees for both Freddie and me, all very up front. I’d already introduced Craig Pulfrey—whose happy disposition prompted his colleagues to nickname him Barney, after the cartoon dinosaur—as my runner, and the buyers’ rep was an OPP sergeant named Randy Kreiger, an explosives expert who, with his long hair, well-worn Hells Angels support shirt and beat-up pickup truck, played the biker role to a T. It was an act he had to reprise a month later when Freddie came through with another five hundred pounds for $45,000.
The barbecues and the people I met at them also led to a flurry of drug deals, almost exclusively coke, during the summer of 1999. Craig and I bought from at least a dozen different people, most of them bikers, and from a variety of gangs: Outlaws, Vagabonds, even old members of a defunct gang called the Breed, as well as the PDR, of course. Sometimes it was just an ounce, sometimes as much as five pounds. But quantity wasn’t a big consideration; the brass actually preferred a small or mid-sized buy to a large one. It cost them less.
Even so, the investigation was memorable as much for its missed opportunities as for its successes. In June, an Italian mobster I’d initially met through Sunny in Toronto and then bumped into at the barbecue told me he had two million dollars in counterfeit twenty-dollar bills. The quality of the funny money was excellent, but there was one problem: there were only eleven serial numbers. So a condition of the sale would be that any buyer agreed to only start passing the money on the July 1 to 4 weekend. That would ensure the longest possible time before banks on either side of the border would be open and possibly notice the phony money and raise the alarm.
The mobster offered me $500,000 in the counterfeit bills for forty-five cents on the dollar to distribute through Niagara Falls. The rest of the load would hit the streets through Toronto and other cities. George, my handler, took the idea of buying the counterfeit cash to his bosses, but it was just “nice to know” information to them. They had no appetite for dropping $225,000 in real money on a bunch of fancy paper.
At another barbecue, this one at Freddie’s in a nice suburb on the south side of Niagara Falls, our host showed us boxes and boxes of traveler’s checks. They were from partially used packs—ones that had been sold to people and then returned to the bank. Protocol required that the checks be shipped back to a depository to be destroyed. Somewhere along the line, however, a bunch had been waylaid. Again, however, there was no interest from above in moving to acquire the checks or to prevent their circulation.
It’s easy enough to speculate on the OPP’s priorities in light of these decisions. They wanted to prevent violence, so they didn’t hesitate in pulling out the checkbook to buy the explosives. When it came to the counterfeit twenties and the stolen traveler’s checks, the only real damage would be to the bank accounts of the unlucky stiffs, most of them merchants, who accepted the worthless paper. I think, however, that there was probably another agenda at play. Moving on the counterfeit cash and the traveler’s checks would have instantly brought in the RCMP. That wasn’t something anyone in OPP biker squad was particularly interested in.
The bosses also seemed less than interested in having me pursue a contract to kill an informant that was indirectly offered to me by a mobster. At least a decade earlier, the informant had ratted out the mobster and some of his friends, who had an interest in a chain of restaurants, East Side Mario’s, out of which they moved drugs. A handful of the men had ended up in prison; the informant was given a new identity and relocated to British Columbia. Now the mobsters were out and the informant had been tracked down—a task that was made easier by the fact that he apparently had a head that was much, much too large for his body, earning him the nickname Melonhead.
Considering that the scheme indicated a breach in the witness protection program, I naturally assumed the bosses would be interested. They weren’t. They didn’t even ask me to meet the mobster to discuss the job, as he was requesting. If I had, I could have worn a wire; we could at least have got the guy on conspiracy. Again, I think the provincial police weren’t interested because it would have brought in the Mounties.
The OPP did move, and fast, when Moby, another mob acquaintance from the barbecues, announced that his wife had been accepted into the OPP. Even if she wasn’t due to begin training until November 1999, he and the rest of his crew were already gloating in July over the fact that they would soon have “our own undercover agent,” as Freddie put it.
“But we’ll have to be patient until she moves into an area that concerns us,” cautioned Moby. “Like drugs.”
Drugs certainly concerned Moby—both Pulfrey and I had bought from him. In fact, I’d scored my biggest buy of the case, five pounds of coke, from Moby.
“Still, she’ll be able to run people through the system for us before then,” Moby added.
“And she knows this plan, or will she need convincing?” I asked him.
“Know about it?! She’s looking forward to it.”
After the bust—and after Moby was charged—the woman was promptly told thanks but no thanks by the OPP. But that wasn’t the end of the story, according to George and Barney. They told me she sued and ended up eventually being given a post with the force—after she divorced Moby. And it was nowhere near Niagara Falls—somewhere up in northern Ontario, I understand, in what’s called a “non-sensitive” position.
Speaking of the bust, it came a whole lot sooner than it should have as far as I was concerned. Not that I particularly enjoyed living in Niagara Falls or spending all my time with hoods, my family almost a thousand miles away. But Barney and I had got in very tight with the entire criminal elite of the Falls, and it was a highly criminalized town.
That, in fact, is one reason I think the brass decided to call for the takedown: they were shocked at just how much we were digging up. Sometimes police would rather not be told about crimes they feel they can’t do anything about. Still, I was quite convinced that we could have made a clean sweep of the criminal element in the Falls. We were in with and accepted by everybody.
It was a very different story with the PDR in Toronto. We had drifted away from them—the initial targets of the investigation—and were continuing to drift ever further. Most of the people I was doing deals with in Niagara Falls were more Mafia than biker, though a few crossed over quite happily between the two. At the same time, relations with my PDR pals had deteriorated. Mark Staples, whom I hadn’t seen in months, had never got over his suspicions of me. That didn’t affect the investigation until Mark started telling his PDR brothers about the time he saw me talking to a couple of guys who looked like cops.
He mentioned it to Brett that summer, and suddenly Brett stopped returning my calls or talking to me. When I finally went by his house, Brett assured me he didn’t believe I was working for the cops. Nevertheless, he ran his hand down my chest as if searching for a wire. He narrowly missed the one I was wearing.
“Still, I’m fucking pissed off that I only hear this story after I do deals with you,” Brett fumed. “And I’m also fucking pissed off that Hollywood has been greedy and started selling to you. He’s a fucking jerk-off for doing that to me.”
Needless to say, I didn’t point out the contradiction to Brett. Instead, I reassured him I wasn’t a cop and told him about the counterfeit twenties deal, which distracted him.
Hollywood had also heard from Staples about the incident on King Street. He had even got his own glimpse of me with the biker squad one day as he drove along an overpass and looked down to see us all meeting behind an industrial building. Bizarrely, it didn’t seem to faze him. He told people about seeing me with the cops—one of whom, Reg Smith, he actually recognized—but at the same time didn’t seem to believe it was possible I might be working for them. So he simply chose not to believe what he had seen. He was far more concerned that I wasn’t doing much business with him anymore and had, in some ways, usurped him in the Niagara Falls criminal community. After all, he’d never been invited to Joe Toth’s barbecues.
Even Sunny Braybrook, who was about as low on the PDR totem pole as you could get (a fact suggested by his club nickname, Zero), and certainly no great confidant of Staples, had heard the story of me talking to the cops the summer before.
“Of course, I don’t believe a fucking word of it,” he said one day when we were in a cafeteria at the Canadian National Exhibition fairgrounds in Toronto. “All the same, I don’t want to do any more deals with you. Just to be on the safe side.”
I wasn’t doing any deals with Sunny anyway in those days, but had kept seeing him on occasion. I could always count on him to run off at the mouth if he knew anything worth talking about. First Brett and now Sunny—my credibility with the PDR was definitely at an all-time low.
“Well, go fuck yourself then,” I said to Sunny, and got up and left. I wasn’t in the mood to be told by a guy called Zero that I was above suspicion in one breath but then questionable in the next.
All that being said, the real catalyst for the bust wasn’t a deliberate, rational analysis of the state of the investigation and a cost-benefit evaluation of continuing it or not. Instead, it was a showdown between me and a staff sergeant in the OPP, Steve Rooke, a man I knew as Mouse even if he was George’s boss’s boss.
The PDR owned a nice piece of property near the town of Caesarea on Lake Scugog, barely an hour northeast of Toronto, on which they would hold a big weekend party every August. It was a mandatory run for all the members of the PDR and also drew a good crowd from other gangs, including all the Last Chance, a few Vagabonds and Loners, and, of most interest to us, a good sample of Quebec Hells Angels, including Walter Stadnick, who was in charge of the Angels’ expansion into Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.
The year before, in the summer of 1998, I had been invited to attend by Staples and Psycho Dave. Even so, I’d had to go through three lines of biker security just to get in. It might have been worth it had there been some payoff, but there wasn’t. All I really did was spend an afternoon sitting around being ignored. It was like going to a picnic for a company I didn’t work for.
In the summer of 1999, I wasn’t invited. Whatever the reason for not being on the guest list—my relocation to Niagara Falls, my dicey relations with various members of the club, simple oversight—I was perfectly happy being snubbed. I’d been getting signals from various members in the days previous that I was on the outs, not least an instruction from Sunny not to talk to any other club members except in his presence.
Mouse, however, was intent that I go to the Caesarea party, as much, I think, to show his own bosses that we were still in tight with the PDR as for any intelligence purposes. After I’d told George I wasn’t going to the gathering that year, Mouse appeared at one of our regular meetings at the Keele Street HoJo.
“What’s this about you not wanting to go to Caesarea?” he asked me straight out.
“Well, first of all I wasn’t invited, and second of all I don’t think it’s secure,” I told him.
“You went last year and there were no problems. I’m sure if you just show up, they’ll let you in. Or call up one of the guys and get yourself invited.”
I didn’t much like the direction this was going but still tried to be reasonable. “There aren’t very many left who are talking to me right now. Anyway, we’ve moved on since then—getting into the Falls and so forth. It’s a step backward, I think. Circumstances just aren’t the same.”
Mouse didn’t like that at all. I suppose he felt that I was trying to tell him what direction the investigation should be going, so he decided to get alpha male on me.
“Well, make the circumstances the same,” he ordered. “I want you there, so you’re going.”
“No, I’m not,” I insisted, getting alpha right back at him. “I don’t think it’s safe, so I’m not going.”
That brought out the trained interrogator in him. There was the textbook transition pause—no less than ten seconds, no more than fifteen. Then the sigh. Then the calm voice and the false paternalism.
“Listen, I’ll tell you what. If it’s a security concern, there’s nothing to worry about. The guys will be out there covering you. It’ll be safe.”
“It’s not safe,” I said, seeing right through his technique. “There are three checkpoints and they’re setting off fireworks in there all the time. How you going to tell a gunshot from all those? How you even going to get the boys in there in a hurry? I tell you, I’m not going.”
That set him off again—he wasn’t backing down. “Sounds to me like you’re just scared to go,” he sneered.
“Yeah, I am—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” I shouted.
“You either go or I pull this investigation.”
“Then pull it.”
“Okay, then, that’s it,” he said, and left.
And that was it. Two days later we were all summoned to a meeting to plan the takedown. Lining up all the affidavits and warrants would take time, as would mobilizing the tactical squads, so brass chose September 9 for the bust. Ten a.m., to be precise.
In the meantime I didn’t have a great deal to do, other than putting in orders to buy as much product as possible that day—after all, it would all be free. I sent out some feelers, sounding out various bad guys on buying drugs, guns, even grenades. Then I went home to visit the family in New Brunswick for a week or so while the OPP got ready.
Back in Niagara Falls in the last week of August and first week of September, things didn’t fall into place as we’d hoped. It might have been expected, I suppose—all of a sudden we were asking that everyone be ready to deal at a precise time on a precise date. The deals for the guns and grenades fell apart in the days before the takedown. We had taken too long. Someone got to the Uzi and other handguns ahead of us; the grenades never seemed to materialize.
But we did have two firm orders for five kilos of coke from two different sources. Neither source, however, understood our timetable or felt particularly obliged to play by it. So to get them onside we decided to flash some cash, showing them each the $225,000 we had for the purchase (we’d also agreed to pay top dollar, $45,000 per kilo).
That seemed to do the trick. Then, on September 7 or 8, a classic police blunder screwed up one of the deals. The Niagara Regional Police were doing backup for the operation but were still using open radio channels—frequencies that could be picked up on a simple scanner. One of their jobs was to follow Freddie, our source for one of the buys. The problem was that he didn’t yet have the drugs—and his own source had a scanner. The source heard the chatter from the police tail on Freddie as Freddie approached the bar where the drugs were stored, and greeted him at the door saying the deal was off.
The other deal vaporized because of the OPP brass’s, or perhaps just Mouse’s, fixation on everyone—everyone—kicking in the doors at precisely 10:00 a.m. on September 9. That was also the time Barney and I had arranged to buy five kilos from Moby and an associate of his. We were to do the deal at Joe Toth’s place on Taylor Street, and we arrived there around quarter to ten. We’d already phoned to say we were on the way, had the money and that everything was cool. Joe relayed the message to Moby and he got his people and the drugs moving. But not fast enough. Joe had encouraged us to come inside, but Barney and I told him we wanted to wait in my car in the driveway. As the seconds and minutes ticked down, there was no sign of Moby et al., although they were probably only a few streets away.
We were under strict orders to get out of there at 10:00 a.m. sharp—even if we were in the middle of doing the deal. So when the clock struck (we’d gone so far as to synchronize watches earlier), we started the car and pulled out.
“Where you going?” shouted Toth, sticking his head out the screen door. “They’re on their way!”
“Just going to Tim Hortons,” I said from my red Sebring convertible. “We’ll be back.”
Of course, I was really just giving up my parking space to the tac squad. Moby arrived in the midst of it all and was arrested on the spot. His associate, however, had the drugs and got away.
So, because of police obsession with punctuality (something I usually share) and a radio scanner, we didn’t get the ten kilos of free coke and a few bad guys we might otherwise have busted slipped away. Still, the investigation landed more than a dozen PDR and other mobsters in prison.
The court proceedings that resulted from the PDR investigation dragged on for twice as long as the operation itself—thirty-two months. The reason was simple: all the accused pleaded not guilty, at least to begin with. For me it meant regular trips to Toronto, where I was greeted at the airport by a tactical team, hustled off to a secure hotel room and kept there until it was time to testify. Then I was bundled into one of three black SUVs with tinted windows and driven to court, sometimes in Toronto, sometimes in Welland, a small town nearer to Niagara Falls. I’d be on the stand for a day or two, maybe even a week, and then I’d be sped back to the airport again, having seen nothing much beyond the inside of the hotel room, the SUV and the courthouse. It wasn’t much fun, but there was a definite financial upside: I received $4,400 per month for as long as the cases dragged on, plus any expenses incurred on those days when I was actually in court (which maybe totaled a month to six weeks).
There was also a certain satisfaction in seeing all the bad guys sent off to prison, even if the stretches most pulled weren’t very long. Hollywood was one of three or four who changed their plea to guilty after being shown all the evidence against them in the preliminary hearings. He got eighteen months or so for selling me cocaine. Not long after he was released, he headed out west to try his luck as a B.C. biker. He didn’t find much: someone put two bullets in his head, killing him.
Sunny also ended up pleading guilty, getting a short sentence and having things end badly. While he was in jail, his son was killed in a traffic accident. A year to the day afterward, Sunny, by then released, was riding his Harley near Alliston, Ontario, when a pickup truck ran a stop sign and hit him broadside. That was it for him.
Death also got in the way of Freddie Campisano, who might have expected the stiffest sentence for his role in selling me the explosives. I testified against him and he was found guilty, but, with money to spare, he’d managed to get out on bail while awaiting sentencing. During that time, he got sick—with what I’m not sure—and underwent surgery. Within days of his release from hospital, however, he was finding convalescence a bore, so he went downtown and started partying with some friends. A bit too heavily, it seems. After a lot of booze and coke, he collapsed from a heart attack. This time he left the hospital via the morgue.
Joe Toth was the one bad guy from the operation whom I felt kind of sorry about putting away. He was a very pleasant and friendly fellow, but he just couldn’t not be a crook. Not violent, not nasty—just a guy who wanted to make it in his ill-chosen field. He got provincial time, so not more than a couple of years.
Brett Toms got the longest sentence—three years—but beat it on appeal. The judge, it was decided, had erred in his instruction to the jury. By the time the appeal court ruling came in, Brett’s time was as good as served, so the prosecution didn’t challenge it. The net difference was that he didn’t have the conviction in his record and was allowed to own a gun again.
When, in December 2000, the inevitable occurred and the PDR patched over to the Hells Angels—along with the Satan’s Choice, the Last Chance, the Annihilators, some Loners and a couple of Outlaws, somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred Ontario bikers in total—Brett was among them. He remains a member in good standing.
Mark Staples and Psycho Dave, neither of whom were charged as a result of the investigation I took part in, also became full-patch Hells Angels when the PDR finally succumbed to the bigger club’s wooing.
In that respect, if part of my assignment was to prevent the Hells from moving into Ontario, I suppose our investigation was a spectacular failure. But I never heard it described that way. By 1998 everyone already considered the Hells’ conquest of Ontario a foregone conclusion; the police just wanted intelligence on how it was proceeding and whether it was likely to be bloody. I was really just supposed to be a bystander, reporting back on the Hells Angels action, and of course the PDR reaction.
The next job would be very different. It involved going into the belly of the beast.