Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

“I'm really sorry I have to miss our ball game tonight,” I told my nine-year-old son. “I have to take a biker out to dinner.”

Aware of what I do to make a living, that made perfect sense to him. For as long as my son could remember, his dad had been an author who wrote about crime, particularly bikers. Actually, he thought it was pretty cool. Immediately, he asked me if the biker had ever killed anyone. Yes, I told him, he had.

So I called up Nick, my assistant coach, to take over the game for me, and made plans to meet one of the most important and influential figures in the history of Canadian outlaw motorcycle gangs.

It had all started with an e-mail about a week earlier. It read: “I've got your next bestseller.”

Ever since I started writing books, I've gotten a lot of e-mails like that, so I was prepared to ignore it. I didn't recognize the name of the person who sent it, so I was within a second of hitting the delete button when I read further and saw that the person in question was promising to get me in contact with Mario “The Wop” Parente. That really caught my eye.

If the subject of my first book — super-secretive and incredibly powerful former Hells Angels national president Walter Stadnick — represents the Holy Grail of Canadian bikers from a reporter's standpoint, Parente is at least the Ark of the Covenant.

While Stadnick's Hells Angels were building a coast-to-coast organization that dominated the drug and vice trades from Halifax to Vancouver, they were, for the most part, stopped at the Ontario line.

While it was well established and common knowledge that Ontario is by far the most lucrative market in Canada for organized crime, Hells Angels just couldn't make anything substantial happen there for a very long time. After fighting and winning two bloody wars to conquer Quebec's underworld, leaving hundreds of people — some of them totally innocent, one of them an 11-year-old boy — dead, they swept through B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Atlantic provinces with relative ease. But, even after that, the mighty Hells Angels couldn't do a thing in Ontario.

According to many people on every side of the situation, the main reason was Parente. He grew up in the same place as Stadnick — my own hometown; a decaying former industrial hub called Hamilton, Ontario — and they weren't very far apart in age. They both became bikers in high school. In fact, they even sort of ran together in the 1970s when Parente was a member of Satan's Choice, and Stadnick was in charge of a gang called the Wild Ones who worked off and on for the Choice, among others. Stadnick, according to many sources, desperately wanted to become a member of the Choice (or any other major gang), but they wouldn't have him.

It wasn't because he wasn't a good biker. He was tough and smart and — from what I've been told repeatedly — extremely talented at selling drugs. But he had one serious shortcoming in the eyes of Satan's Choice. He was just five-foot-four. Because of his height, or lack of it, lots of people — bikers, cops, Mafia, media — disrespected him. And they totally underestimated him.

But few who knew Parente withheld their respect. He's not really tall, but he's rock solid. While nobody has ever tracked down a legitimate job held down by Stadnick (and I have spent many hours trying), Parente had worked in construction and welding and regularly served as a bouncer at some of Hamilton's most notorious bars and strip joints. It was a profession that put him head-to-head with Hamilton's street toughs and members of such esteemed local organizations as the Ball-Peen Hammer Boys. And he always came out on top.

The dude was, indeed, hardcore. He'd taken a bullet for the club and had more than once fired one. In a city and a province (and a country for that matter) in which bikers were eclipsing the traditional Italian and Irish Mafias for organized crime supremacy, Parente held considerable sway. And when the Outlaws — the oldest and second-most powerful motorcycle gang in the United States — came north to expand, they spoke with him.

The Hamilton Chapter of Satan's Choice became the Outlaws, and Parente was their president. The affiliation with the giant American organization only added to his power.

And it's not like Stadnick disappeared, either. Eschewed by the Ontario bikers, he was, ironically, accepted by the more powerful, more established Hells Angels in Quebec. Despite his size and utter lack of French-language skills, he was so well liked by them, that he eventually became the Hells Angels' national president — a post far above the dreams of the hardscrabble Hamilton bikers who wouldn't let him into their clubs.

And he did it, some say, without firing a shot or even throwing a punch. While it's unlikely that Stadnick rose to such prominence in the world of outlaw bikers completely without violence (and a great deal of evidence contradicts that theory), there is consensus among bikers and cops alike that he was extraordinarily nonviolent for a biker chieftain. He managed to build a Hells Angels empire stretching from Vancouver Island to Halifax with very little bloodshed. And he stayed well under the radar while doing it. Rarely arrested and never convicted of anything worse than a traffic ticket during his reign, he refused to speak to the media and was monosyllabic with the police, never giving them anything they could use against him or anyone else.

He was a new kind of biker — national president as stoic, secretive, outlaw CEO. Stadnick built the Canadian Hells Angels as a giant corporation with mergers, acquisitions and the occasional hostile takeover. He had strategic alliances, franchises, branch offices and even subsidiaries.

But he was stopped in Ontario. The Ontario bikers — an uneasy alliance between the Outlaws, the Para-Dice Riders, the Vagabonds, what remained of Satan's Choice after the Hamilton merger and others — knew Stadnick had his eyes on their province. Not only was it Canada's richest market for drugs and vice, it was where he was from. Imagine how galling it must have been for him to control a mighty nationwide criminal organization, but not be able to walk the streets of his own hometown without bodyguards. It was so bad for him that, when he was in hospital in Hamilton recovering from severe burns received in a motorcycle accident, Hells Angels actually sought and received police protection for him. Significantly, even though Parente was behind bars at the time, his name came up in a phone conversation between Stadnick's common-law wife and police.

And that's how it stood for many years: Hells Angels reigning basically unopposed — after putting down the Rock Machine rebellion in Quebec — throughout Canada. Except Ontario. While the Outlaws stood at the top of a multi-headed monster that ruled that richest and most desirable of provinces.

But things changed. And years later, I'm taking Parente out for a bite to get his side of the story.

I make the plans with Luther, the guy who e-mailed me in the first place. He suggests we meet in Burlington. Since they both live east of Hamilton and I'm in downtown Toronto, Luther says they are “meeting me half way.” I tell him I'm looking forward to it. He describes a restaurant located opposite the gas station across from Spencer Smith Park. He can't remember the name, but his directions are succinct. I know the area well. My wife's from Burlington, and we were married in a church about three blocks away from the restaurant. I ask how I'll recognize them. “Well, I'm about six-foot-four ...” says Luther.

In the days before the meeting, some of my friends joked about how dangerous they thought the whole thing was. I laughed it off, pointing out that Parente would have no reason to want to harm me. But when I got stuck in traffic, I was careful to call Luther to let him know I'd be a couple of minutes late. Certainly wouldn't want to be rude. Luther laughed and said it'd be fine.

Some creative highway driving got me there before them. There are actually two restaurants at the place Luther described, but one's kind of a cafeteria, so I ignored it. I looked inside the better place. I waited out front. Ten minutes passed. I called my brother; he kept me loose. I looked over my shoulder and saw two big, tough-looking guys sitting at a table on the patio outside the cafeteria.

“Luther?” I asked the huge guy. He shook my hand and grinned. It was a sincere smile. He introduced me to Mario, but called him Mike. I wasn't surprised. Before the meeting, I called up veteran Hamilton biker cop Sergeant John Harris and asked him about meeting up with Parente. He told me: “If you want to get on his good side, call him Mike; he hates being called Mario.”