Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (5 page)

The following day, Hells Angels had chapters in Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Simcoe County, Keswick, Kitchener, Oshawa and Toronto East that had formerly been Satan's Choice. The former Para-Dice Riders clubhouses in Toronto Center and Woodbridge now sported the winged skull. Last Chance gave them a small operation in Toronto West that was still looking for a clubhouse and the Lobos entrenched them in Windsor, an important border crossing. The former Bandidos provided more strength in Toronto (the members there were absorbed by the former Para-Dice Riders in Woodbridge) and Kingston. As a tip of the hat to Porter's weighty status, the Kingston Bandidos were given the Hells Angels' elite “Nomads” title, even though they contravened the original Nomads requirement by having a clubhouse. In this case, the title referred to their powerful status. The Hells Angels who had been operating in London quickly set up a clubhouse and chapter there. And from a strategic, financial and (at least for Stadnick) personal standpoint, Ward and his friends in Niagara Falls were persuaded to buy motorcycles and leather jackets and become the Hells Angels Niagara Chapter. They were to share Hamilton's rich drug market with Watteel's Kitchener Chapter.

That was a total of 13 Hells Angels chapters — admittedly of varying quality — in a province that had had none a day earlier. In fact, Toronto had a greater concentration of Hells Angels than any other city in the world.

Opposing them were largely dispirited Outlaw chapters in London, Sault Ste. Marie, Simcoe County, St. Catharines, Toronto, Windsor, Woodstock and, at least in theory, Montreal. The only club even close to being their allies were the last remaining Bandidos just outside of London. And they were hardly organized or trustworthy enough to make much of a difference.

It was a tense time. Hells Angels had invaded Ontario and were determined to make it theirs. The Outlaws had an even stronger desire to hold onto the province that had been theirs for a very long time. Many of them prepared for the war that, despite the promise of peace, seemed inevitable.

It's 1977. A very different time. All of the post-World War II euphoria has been used up. Years of Vietnam, Watergate, unemployment, recession, inflation and labor unrest have exposed some nerves. It's an angry, violent time — a ridiculously hot summer that sees strikes, recession, riots and serial killers dominating headlines. Crime rates are skyrocketing. Punk rock is emerging. It's ugly. It seethes.

Crime in Canada is burgeoning. The Mafia — usually Italian, sometimes Irish — supplies the goods. They take care of the drugs, the girls, the guns and everything else. But they are facing a big manpower problem. It's becoming increasingly clear that the Mafia members' kids are way more interested in spending their dads' dirty money than they are in making more of it.

While a generation earlier, there was a surfeit of good Catholic boys ready to lay their lives down for the family, by the late '70s that supply had dried up. The sons of those same Catholic boys were now running real estate offices and car dealerships in the suburbs, getting clean money from businesses their dads had paid to start up.

Their mass exodus left the Mafia largely bereft of talent. The foot soldiers that remained were generally old, psychotic, stupid or some combination of all of those things.

But drugs still needed to be sold, strippers still needed agents, prostitutes still needed to be driven around and recalcitrant debtors still needed to be punished. So the Canadian Mafia started to turn to other workers.

It's 1977. It's Canada. White trash abounds. And over the last couple of decades, when white men started considering a life outside the legal norms, they began to grow their hair long, wear leather jackets and start riding motorcycles.

Starting in earnest in the mid-'60s, outlaw motorcycle gangs emerged all over Canada. Although they all had different names, they all basically looked and worked exactly the same way. They had been doing the tough jobs for the Mafia for years, and in many places they had even eclipsed their former masters and had become the dominant crime organizations.

A few years earlier, Quebec alone had, by police estimates, no fewer than 350 motorcycle gangs. But the big boys saw there was lots of money to be made, so they had consolidated down to no more than a couple of dozen.

The rest of Canada had a similar environment — lots of little biker gangs engaging in small-time crime, but none with any kind of real dominance.

Except in Ontario. In the mid-1960s, a charismatic young man from the Oshawa area named Bernie Guindon started a new gang. A championship-quality boxer and a natural leader, Guindon (known as “the Frog” to his friends, associates and enemies) and Satan's Choice quickly began to dominate Southern Ontario's motorcycle gang milieu.

They were actually the second club in Ontario to be called Satan's Choice. But the first version was a very different kind of organization. Don Norris, one of the early members who joined the club after buying a 1952 Triumph from the Saddle Tramps, another Scarborough club, described it in his book,
Riding with Attitude
:

He described the life of the club:

They disbanded in 1963. Norris, like most former members, drifted in and out of various Toronto-area clubs. He was approached one day in 1965 by an old friend, Guindon, who was by then president of an Oshawa club called the Phantom Riders, to see if he wanted to be part of a newer, bigger club. He had gotten some other area gangs — the Canadian Lancers, the Throttle Twisters and the Wild Ones (not to be confused with the later Hamilton gang of the same name) — to join his club. This new superclub, he said, would be called Satan's Choice. Norris thought it was cool, but decided not to join because of his family.

This second incarnation of Satan's Choice was much rougher. They rode Harleys and wore leather jackets and fought with, chased off or forcibly retired gangs like the Golden Hawks, the Chainmen and the Fourth Reich.

They became notorious nationwide in August 1968, when an undercover reporter from the
Globe and Mail
infiltrated a Satan's Choice party at a resort town called Wasaga Beach. He watched them party and he took pictures. The event that caught the nation's attention and outrage was a game in which a live chicken was set loose in a mob of bikers. They tore the terrified bird to shreds, and a prize was awarded to the participant who emerged with the biggest piece. It caused widespread scorn and outrage, but no criminal charges.

That's pretty well what Satan's Choice was like in the early years. They liked to ride, they liked to fight and they liked to party. They did stupid things. When they fought other gangs, it was with baseball bats and brass knuckles; sure people got hurt, but they didn't die.

They were what bikers always claim to be — a bunch of guys out to have fun, and if they hurt a few people (or animals) or made a mess, that was just too bad. “They were rough guys, for sure,” said a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer who had many run-ins with the Choice over the years. “But they weren't gangsters; we'd pick them up for little things — simple assault, vandalism, trespassing, public drunkenness, that sort of thing.”

But Sergeant John Harris of the Hamilton police, who investigated bikers for much of their rise to prominence, disagreed. “Guindon had a right-hand man named Arnold Kelly, who was never a member, never wanted to be,” he told me. “He made his money in construction and owned a resort north of Orillia.” Kelly was not physically imposing. “Believe it or not, he was actually smaller than Stadnick,” he said, laughing about his old adversary Walter Stadnick, the biker chieftain who was no fewer than 15 inches shorter than him. “But he arranged everything — drug deals, beatings, shootings — he was probably more dangerous than Guindon himself.”

And Satan's Choice, especially Guindon, found themselves drawn to Toronto. Particularly the city's Yorkville district. Back then, it was the polar opposite of the chichi wine bar and gourmet chocolate shop strip it is now. At the time, it was notorious as a hippie ghetto and open-air drug market.

Originally, the bikers were attracted by the freer lifestyle and the girls, but they came to realize that they could make huge profits selling drugs to the itinerant youth culture. They probably didn't realize it, but they made the same discoveries and decisions in Yorkville that the American Hells Angels had in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury. Drawn to the hippies for esoteric reasons, they evolved into a drug-dealing organization simply because the opportunity was just too good to pass up.

Maybe it was Guindon, maybe it was the lifestyle, the
Globe
article or maybe just the cool name, but Satan's Choice really took off. By 1970, Satan's Choice had 13 chapters, all of them in Ontario except for one in the then-mostly anglophone west end of Montreal.

But with expansion came tension, especially from the Toronto Chapter. By 1970, they were getting bigheaded. Making huge amounts of cash on drug sales and regularly getting away with gang rapes — they called them “splashes” — convinced them they were above any law, including their own club's. They thought they should be running the town, the whole show.

The problem was that two other big-time biker gangs were already established in Hogtown and, although they were prepared to share the city with Satan's Choice, they weren't quite ready to hand it over. When the Toronto Chapter of Satan's Choice began to overstep its boundaries, the Vagabonds and Black Diamond Riders began to rattle their swords. History had proven that neither crew would back down from a fight. An all-out war seemed imminent.

That pissed off the rest of Satan's Choice. “The Toronto Chapter did most of the shit disturbing. Now they start a small war with two of the heaviest clubs going and they're asking us to come in and bail them out,” said the road captain of the Brampton Chapter of Satan's Choice at the time, a man who would only consent to be known by the name “Gypsy.” “This caused a lot of friction between the other chapters.”

That friction wasn't only because the Toronto Chapter came begging for help, but because most of the guys in the other chapters had as much respect for their would-be enemies as they did for their “brothers” in Toronto. “The Vags were a solid club,” continued Gypsy. “I knew Edjo, their president; and the BDRs had been around forever.”

The potential for war in Toronto divided the club. “The Oshawa, Kingston, Ottawa and Kitchener Chapters and us [Brampton] wanted nothing to do with Toronto's mess,” Gypsy said. “Montreal, Hamilton and Brantford were all for it — the other guys [chapters in Richmond Hill, Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and Peterborough] didn't know whether they were coming or going.”

Guindon stepped in. It's rare for a national president of any biker gang to intervene and interfere with the goings-on of one chapter, but this was important. Not only was the Toronto Chapter biting off way more than it could chew, it was making decisions that threatened to tear Satan's Choice apart. The undisputed boss called a meeting of all the officers of all the chapters.

“It was a fucking heavy meeting.” Gypsy said years later. “Some of the officers were called cowards, others were called fight-crazy idiots.” It devolved into a shouting match. Hamilton and Montreal were screaming “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and the other chapters were preaching common sense. Guindon, seconds from losing control of the proceedings, issued an ultimatum. If they decided to go ahead with the war, they would lose him as president. That quieted things down.

Ottawa and Brampton came up with an idea. Why not just dump the Toronto Chapter? Guindon wasn't that stupid. Besides, he really liked Toronto; he enjoyed partying with the hipsters in Yorkville, which was officially Vagabond territory, but where he and his friends could act with impunity. And he knew that even a one-third share of Ontario's biggest drug market was better than none. He suggested another idea. Instead of fighting the Vags and the BDRs, the collected chapters of Satan's Choice would descend upon Toronto. They would remove the “fight-crazy bastards” who were causing all the problems, and make good with their would-be enemies.

On the same night the foot soldiers of the Choice went to Toronto to get rid of the troublemaking members there, Gypsy took Edjo out for dinner and drinks. Peace was established in Toronto. And a precedent was set in Ontario.

Under Guindon's now-totalitarian leadership — he gave himself the title “Supreme Commander” to go along with National President — Satan's Choice flourished. They were so powerful that, in 1973, Hells Angels (at the time the only motorcycle gang in the world bigger than Satan's Choice) sent an emissary from California to discuss a merger (what the bikers call a “patch-over”) or at least a working agreement between the two clubs. A few of the top members of Satan's Choice — though, notably, not Guindon — met the Hells Angel at the Toronto airport and sent him home. He never even left the terminal. Clearly, Satan's Choice felt they didn't need Hells Angels.

Guindon, as fiercely xenophobic as the Californians who started Hells Angels twenty-some years earlier, had no intention of working with what he considered a “foreign” club. He worked very hard to ensure that Satan's Choice remained “proudly Canadian” — never mind that the bikes their club was centered upon all came from Milwaukee, and their look, language, mannerisms and organization were stolen directly from San Bernardino.