Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (8 page)

Nolan and three others were arrested. The president was acquitted, but at a later trial (this one for racketeering) another member testified that he fabricated evidence to help free Nolan of the murders.

After that, it was clear that the Outlaws and Hells Angels were at war. In fact, at a November 1978 summit in Rochester, New York, the presidents of various chapters of Hells Angels officially declared war on the Outlaws.

Although there were many skirmishes — most notably on the Outlaws' turf of Rockford, Illinois, and South Bend, Indiana — it was largely a cold war. The detente that followed it worked out so that Hells Angels controlled New York City, New England and everything west of the Mississippi, while the Outlaws were left in charge of the Midwest and the Southeast and were particularly strong in Chicago and Detroit, as well as Florida.

With the United States effectively carved up, the two outlaw superpowers turned their eyes to Canada.Which brings us back to the hot, angry Canadian summer of 1977.

When Guindon went to prison, he anointed his old buddy Garnet “Mother” McEwen (president of the St. Catharines Chapter) to be national president of Satan's Choice. He would live to regret it.

At its peak under Guindon's reign, Satan's Choice was the second-biggest and second-most powerful biker gang in the world, surpassed only by Hells Angels and outstripping the Outlaws. But with Guindon behind bars, they had slipped significantly.

McEwen called a secret meeting with some of the Satan's Choice chapters he trusted. At it, he convinced Windsor's William “King” O'Reilly and Ottawa's John “Doctor John” Arksey to patch over to the Outlaws. Montreal's Joseph “Sonny” Lacombe also attended, but made no solid commitment at the time.

If he had known, Guindon would have been enraged. Not only was McEwen compromising the very existence of the club, but he was basically handing it over to foreigners — which the fiercely xenophobic Guindon would have abhorred. McEwen then announced that the club's annual party would be moved three hours down the road from Wasaga Beach on Georgian Bay to Crystal Beach on Lake Erie, less than a ten-minute ride down Highway 3 from the U.S. border. He also announced that it would be a patch-over ceremony. Any chapters or individual members of Satan's Choice who did not want to become Outlaws were advised not to attend. About half the members of the Montreal Chapter — which was still on the fence — showed up. Wisely, McEwen invited a substantial number of American Outlaws and some smaller but ambitious Ontario clubs to serve as reinforcements.

Although the party went off without a hitch, things got ugly soon thereafter. Many of the reluctant members of the chapters that had patched over were chased off. Within days, the once-mighty Satan's Choice was reduced to about 45 members spread between Toronto, Oshawa, Peterborough, Kitchener, Thunder Bay and one very divided clubhouse in Montreal. Making matters worse, the police arrested 40 members and associates of Satan's Choice on 191 charges in August. They were almost totally broken.

Of course, when Guindon found out his empire had been sacked, he was enraged. Effectively powerless behind bars, he issued a $10,000 reward for McEwen's head. It went uncollected.

But that doesn't mean McEwen succeeded with his plan. His bosses from the U.S. caught him skimming $30,000 from club coffers, stripped him of his Outlaws membership and exiled him from Ontario. He later emerged in Calgary, working at a menial job at a hotel.

The local bikers, a gang called the Chosen Few, recognized him, but they didn't know about the bounty on his head and accused him of trying to recruit local bikers for the Outlaws. He assured them he wasn't, using his lowbrow circumstances as a dishwasher to indicate his lack of power, and so they let him be. But McEwen wasn't done. He was caught stealing again, and one of the Chosen Few beat him nearly to death with his own artificial leg. Tail between his real and prosthetic legs, he limped back to Ontario in 1980 and never did anything of note again.

Although broken by a hostile takeover, defections and arrests, the essentially leaderless Satan's Choice was not quite dead.

On October 18, 1978, a fat man named Bill Matiyek sat at a table in the bar at the Queen's Hotel in Port Hope, Ontario, a quiet and twee little town just east of Toronto. With him at the small, circular table were two other men — a local kid named Richard Sauve and a seasoned Toronto tough guy named Gary Comeau. Matiyek was both drunk and stoned on a combination of marijuana and amphetamines. He had two guns. One was pointed at Sauve's head. The other was stuffed into his left boot.

Comeau was a member of Satan's Choice, Sauve was a prospect. Matiyek was a member of the Golden Hawks, a club many thought had been forcibly disbanded. Further complicating matters was the fact that some representatives from the Outlaws (now the sworn enemies of Satan's Choice) had told Matiyek earlier that day that they were very interested in patching over the remaining Golden Hawks and making him president — if he could get the club back together.

But unbeknownst to Matiyek, the bar was full of armed members of Satan's Choice who had been tipped off by Sauve earlier that day. One of them, a man named Lorne Campbell, had obtained a .38-caliber handgun when he was going through the belongings of Sauve's boarder, Gordon van Harlem, who was away on a big-time bender in nearby Peterborough.

Comeau had originally campaigned to be the one who carried it, but his friends considered him too hotheaded. Campbell, older and more experienced, was chosen instead.

Realizing how serious the situation was, Campbell sent trusted lieutenant Michael Everett over to sort things out. Everett was a big strong man, but he was shocked by what he saw. Matiyek was sloppy drunk and holding a gun on Sauve and Comeau. In his opinion, they were about to die. Instead of talking to Matiyek, he turned around and returned to Campbell, informing him of his view of the situation.

Campbell passed the table and surveyed the situation himself. Matiyek recognized him and the danger he presented and instinctively tried to hide his weapon. As his handgun got caught in his jacket, Campbell (now closer to the bar's exit than he was to Matiyek) drew his gun and fired three shots.

The first passed through Matiyek's thick neck, took a chunk out of his jaw, grazed his left arm and eventually lodged in Sauve's arm. The second penetrated Matiyek's skull and bounced around inside his cranium, killing him. The third also hit him in the head, but he was already dead.

Pandemonium. Everyone who could, stampeded out of the bar. Somebody stopped to relieve Matiyek's body of the cash and drugs stuffed in his pockets.

Police arrived eventually, but not before the bar had been revisited and, according to the guys associated with Satan's Choice, “cleaned up a little.” The body was removed by authorities, but not before the crime scene had been grossly contaminated.

The trial was just as comical. Several witnesses changed their testimony three and even four times. One witness's car was shot full of holes while parked in front of his house. The cops were confused. Nobody could explain why Matiyek's gun was never fingerprinted. Much of the Crown's evidence contradicted itself. The forensics were questioned.

But it didn't matter in the end. Six of the eight members of Satan's Choice accused were found guilty of first- or second-degree murder. They received sentences ranging from 25 to 10 years. Campbell was not one of them. Sauve and Comeau each received twenty-five to life.

But the pathetic spiral into oblivion the once-mighty Satan's Choice went through was all just a sideshow to the real attraction. When the Outlaws patched over at least some of Satan's Choice, it was a bold strategic and the first step in what would eventually become a war for organized crime supremacy in Canada fought between two rival American motorcycle gangs.

The Outlaws had gotten there first and they eventually succeeded in Toronto. Almost as soon as McEwen announced that the 1977 edition of the Satan's Choice annual party would be a patch-over ceremony, anti-Outlaws forces in the city mobilized. The members of the Toronto Satan's Choice who did not want to become Outlaws teamed with other established gangs — most notably the Para-Dice Riders and the Vagabonds — to help keep the Outlaws out of their territories.

It worked for a while. By the summer of 1984, both big American clubs had put a virtual embargo on drugs imported into Ontario. Through intimidation, they prevented the normal suppliers from selling to the Toronto clubs. Most of them — especially the Para-Dice Riders — began to feel a significant financial strain.

One Toronto club, though, was enjoying business as usual. The Iron Hawgs, a large club with more than 30 full-patch members, were selling as much as they had before the big clubs put the hammer down. They had been handpicked a year earlier by the Outlaws to be their beachhead in Toronto. The Outlaws in Detroit supplied the Iron Hawgs with a decent supply of drugs when the rest of the city was practically dry.

They were a wise choice. They were sworn enemies of the Para-Dice Riders because of a 1979 bar fight that got out of hand and ended when an innocent woman was injured when a Para-Dice Rider was beating the Iron Hawgs' president with a loaded shotgun and it discharged. The perception at the time was that the Iron Hawgs were less cohesive and more easily led than many of the other local gangs.

That summer, newly elected Iron Hawgs president Robert “Pumpkin” Marsh put the concept of a patch-over to the Outlaws before his collected club. Unlike McEwen's dictatorial approach, he opened the prospect up to discussion.

As with countless other clubs, the crowd quickly split into two factions. The younger, more ambitious Iron Hawgs were all for it. They had gotten used to the income from drug sales and were looking forward to getting far more once they were Outlaws. Besides, having that well-known and respected patch on their back meant a lot more respect than the comical one they sported now. The Outlaws were the big time, and they wanted to be part of it.

But many of the gang's veteran members were against the merger for exactly the same reasons. Increased sales and increased visibility meant more attention from cops — potentially a different kind of cop, like the RCMP — and other bikers. Those old guys, those who joined the club to ride and party, didn't mind making a few bucks off weed or whatever, but most of them had real jobs and families, they didn't want to become full-time gangsters.

Marsh's guest — Stanley “Beamer” McConnery, a full-patch member of McEwen's old St. Catharines Chapter of the Outlaws — delivered the hard sell. He warned that without a concrete deal with the Outlaws, the Iron Hawgs could see their drug supply dwindle down to the same pathetic level as the Para-Dice Riders had. For those still unconvinced, Marsh reminded them that full-patch members of Hells Angels had been seen partying in Toronto with the Para-Dice Riders for the last year or so. Everybody in Canada knew they had their eye on Ontario. If they were to patch over the much-loathed Para-Dice Riders — and it looked likely — the Iron Hawgs would have to be well armed and well allied.

That was the clincher. The Iron Hawgs became the Outlaws Toronto. It was one of many occasions in which the fear of a biker war in Ontario forced a decision.

It wasn't the Outlaws' first success in Ontario after the Satan's Choice patch-over. In 1982, they negotiated to have one of Ontario's oldest clubs — the Queensmen of Amherstburg, just across the river from Detroit — change their name to the Holocaust, relocate up the 401 to London and serve as a puppet gang.

Meanwhile the Outlaws were facing serious competition on other fronts, namely Quebec. They were not the only ones who came to Montreal in 1977. And while the Outlaws' presence in the city was simply a fortuitous outgrowth of the club's general desire to establish itself in Canada, Hells Angels targeted Montreal specifically.

While the city fathers would probably prefer to be known for hosting the 1976 Summer Olympics, late '70s Montreal was also well known for being a hotbed of organized crime, racketeering, loan-sharking, smuggling, drug sales and prostitution.

And it was a town full of Mafia. The Cotroni, Violi and Rizzuto families represented the Italians, and the less organized, but still plenty powerful West End Gang represented the Irish. Among them, they controlled most of the crime in town, with an uneasy equilibrium occasionally interrupted by violence.

As in many other places, the gangsters tended to use bikers to do their toughest jobs. It made sense — there were dozens of biker gangs in and around the city looking for easy money, and their presence allowed the gangsters a layer of protection from law enforcement. None of them was especially dominant or all that organized, so if things didn't work out with one club, they could easily switch to another. The almost unlimited supply of competing labor also kept prices down.