Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (13 page)

Harris knew Parente had probably gone to a friend's house in St. Catharines, so he alerted the Niagara Regional Police. Their biker officer, Larry Schwedic, put the house under surveillance and, when he saw Parente with another Outlaw named Darrell Sampson, he negotiated a quiet surrender. Parente rode back to Hamilton in an unmarked car and was surprised and dismayed to see that the local cops had made a huge deal of it, putting up a roadblock and escorting the car he was in all the way downtown with flashing lights.

The Crown prosecutor, Tony Skarica, argued for a five-year sentence. But the defense countered that Parente was merely acting in self-defense. Noting that Parente was “not exactly a choirboy,” Justice Thomas Callon determined that he “reacted to a serious threat of personal harm to him that included the possibility of death. Parente was sentenced to 30 months for the death of Jimmy Lewis. He was said to have breathed a sigh of relief.

Interestingly, the other Lewises also met violent ends. Tim died in a car crash. And Brian, consumed by thoughts of revenge, years later confronted Parente in a bar. Parente, seriously fearing for his life, turfed the young man again. He told me that he found out that there were two undercover cops in the bar who saw the whole thing, and that he was appalled that they didn't intervene. But Parente didn't kill Brian. Brian killed Brian. He got drunk at a party and held a handgun to his temple. He kept screaming “you wanna know what I'm gonna do to Mike the Wop? This is what I'm gonna do to Mike the Wop!” Then, he slipped or twitched or flinched or something and pulled the trigger. Blew his own brains out.

After the trial in Hamilton, Parente went back to Sault Ste. Marie to answer the illegal possession of a weapon charge resulting from the bus shoot-up in Wawa. He pleaded guilty and received six years. He was shocked, dumbfounded, expecting a couple of months at most. The judge explained that since he was a killer now, he had no choice but to throw the book at him.

Without Parente, the Outlaws' fortunes in Ontario changed, particularly in the Steel City. Stadnick, who had become a full-patch member of the Hells Angels Montreal South (Sorel) Chapter, became much more open about his operations in Hamilton, often wearing his full colors. He operated out of a bar (he didn't officially own it, but everybody knew it was his) called Rebel's Roadhouse at the corner of Upper Ottawa and Fennell on the Mountain.

Roland Harper then told Harris about a plan the Outlaws had to assassinate Stadnick. The Hamilton Outlaws had acquired a pair of LAW (light anti-tank weapon) rocket launchers from connections in the Canadian military, and the plan was to blast Stadnick at the front door as he entered or exited the club. The other LAW was made available just in case the first malfunctioned (they are, after all, single-shot devices). Harris, acting on Harper's tip, found the two bazookas buried in a nearby conservation area. “They didn't have the heart to pull that kind of thing off with Parente out of the picture,” Harris said. “Maybe if he was still there, they might have gone through with it, but there was no way without him.”

When I asked Parente about the incident years later, he grinned, shrugged and told me, “I don't know anything about any rocket launchers.”

Things were about as bad or worse for Stadnick over the same period. He and his friend (and translator) Noël “Frenchy” Mailloux came home to Hamilton from Montreal for Christmas 1982. Realizing he was far outnumbered by Outlaws — the same guys who had killed his friends and colleagues in the Wild Ones simply for meeting with Hells Angels — in his hometown, he decided to lay low. Staying mostly with family and friends, he ventured out rarely and advised Mailloux to do the same.

Instead, Mailloux and his girlfriend, stripper Connie Augustin, went on a two-month-long cocaine binge. It culminated on February 17, 1983 when he murdered Augustin's friend, 18-year-old fellow stripper Cindy Lee Thompson, and Augustin's son, four-year-old Stewart Hawley. He also shot Augustin several times, failing to kill her, and was finally apprehended in a nearby park babbling incoherently and still attempting to shoot the police with an empty handgun who had surrounded him.

Not only did Stadnick lose a close friend, but it set the Hells Angels campaign for Ontario back years. Outlaw motorcycle gangs rely on at least some measure of public support to survive, and need to find new members, associates and business connections from the local population. Mailloux's actions made Hells Angels look wild and out of control. But Stadnick's ability to keep it together and remove any incriminating evidence from Mailloux's house impressed his brothers in Sorel.

While all of this was going on in Ontario, the war between Hells Angels and the Outlaws was still raging in Quebec, but generally at a low level. And Hells Angels were dominating, with psychopathic Montreal North (Laval) member Yves “Apache” Trudeau killing Outlaws and their associates at a sickening rate of more than one a week.

But the Outlaws managed one big blow on September 8, 1983. A small man with a rat-like face, Gino Goudreau, was eager to become an Outlaw like his older brother. He could hardly have impressed them more.

At a nice little bar and restaurant in suburban Longueuil called Le Petit Bourg, Buteau and his friend Rene Lamoureaux were entertaining a guest from Ontario. Guy “Frenchie” Gilbert was an emissary from the Kitchener Chapter of Satan's Choice — one of the few chapters that did not patch over to the Outlaws and still held a grudge against their former brothers in Hamilton — and they were discussing an alliance between the two clubs.

As the three bikers walked outside for a smoke, Goudreau parked his bike, leaving his girlfriend still sitting on the back seat. Then he pulled a .38 from under his jacket and pulled the trigger until the magazine was empty. Buteau died immediately, Gilbert succumbed a few minutes later. Lamoureaux survived with major injuries.

To many, it looked like it would be a huge blow to Stadnick's status. Buteau was his biggest supporter and universally respected. Without him, it looked like Stadnick (who still hadn't mastered much French) would be sidelined or perhaps disposed of.

Because there was nobody else who approached his status, Buteau's job was divided between two men. Rejean “Zig Zag” Lessard, who earned his nickname from his close resemblance to the guy on the Zig Zag rolling papers package, was named president of the Montreal South (Sorel) Chapter and Michel “Sky” Langlois was named the Hells Angels national president for Canada. Langlois's duties were primarily to communicate with other chapters and to recruit bikers and gangs when possible. Lessard, on the other hand, ran the daily operations of the only genuinely important chapter in the country.

And, as luck would have it, both of them liked and appreciated Stadnick. He was, by that time, bringing significant revenue into the club, had great connections in Ontario and had also earned his “Filthy Few” patch. There are different opinions about how bikers earn that particular patch. Barger's own autobiography claims it's for the club's hardest partiers. Law enforcement says it's reserved for those who have murdered for the club. Either way, Stadnick started wearing it about the time Buteau was killed.

At the time, there was a lot of talk about the Outlaws taking Stadnick out. It made perfect sense: They would have gotten rid of the biggest hope for Hells Angels in Ontario and re-established themselves as top dogs in the province. But while he did once have to fight his way out of a Downtown kidnapping attempt, Stadnick could generally move unharmed in Hamilton. Isnor recalled wondering how unlikely it was that Stadnick could stay alive in a city teeming with people like the Outlaws, the Musitanos, the Luppinos and the Hells Angels-hating Papalias. But he later learned, he told me, that Stadnick was smart enough to either cooperate with or to avoid all of them.

But if the Outlaws had really wanted to assassinate Stadnick, they could hardly have done a better job than was accomplished by an absentminded priest on his way to see the Pope in Montreal. At the same time thousands of the faithful were streaming into Montreal to see the pontiff, the Hells Angels were riding out of town for their own event. On their way to a memorial service in the Eastern Townships town of Drummondville to observe the first anniversary of the murder of Stadnick's mentor and friend, Buteau, the priest missed a stop sign and plowed into the procession of bikers.

The biker in line in front of Stadnick — prospect Daniel Matthieu — took the bulk of the impact and was killed immediately. Stadnick crashed into the priest's car. The forks of his bike were driven into his gas tank and the bike exploded into flames.

Stadnick was airlifted to a Montreal hospital. He was barely recognizable. He'd been burned over most of his body and had lost two and a half fingers and the tip of his nose. “He wasn't good looking before the accident,” Harris said. “But he was downright ugly after.”

Stadnick's common-law wife, Kathi Anderson, and his lawyer, Stephan Frankel, came to visit him. Anderson was appalled at the care he was getting from the nurses — none of whom spoke English with any degree of fluency — and negotiated with Lessard and Langlois to get him moved to Hamilton.

But there was one big problem: Hamilton was teeming with Outlaws and others who weren't crazy about the idea of a full-patch Hells Angel in their town, and they would not mind seeing Ontario's most prominent one erased completely. The Montreal Hells Angels had a plan; the 13
^th
Tribe — a Halifax, Nova Scotia gang that desperately wanted to become Hells Angels — would stand guard outside his room in the hospital. While that was fine during visiting hours, there wasn't much to keep an Outlaw from sneaking into Hamilton General and holding a pillow over Stadnick's face until he stopped breathing.

So Anderson — out of options — called Harris. She asked him to protect her man. At first, Harris thought it was hilarious. But after some thought and consultation with his chief, Harris agreed. So when the 13
^th
Tribe left at the end of visiting hours, the Hamilton cops took over. It was an uneasy relationship. The 13
^th
Tribe tried to act tough, but they were not prepared for the Hamilton cops who had seen dozens of tougher gangs. And at least one Outlaws associate has assured me that at least one Hamilton cop let it be known exactly which room the helpless Stadnick was staying in.

But the unlikely, mutually suspicious tag team managed to keep the man safe, and when Stadnick was finally released from Hamilton General, the 13
^th
Tribe became the Hells Angels Halifax Chapter. At the same time, the Sherbrooke-based Gitans (Gypsies) became Hells Angels as well.

And that's how 1984 ended and 1985 began. Hells Angels now dominated Quebec, particularly Montreal, and had a small, fledgling chapter in Halifax to go along with three, small, isolated and suspicious chapters on the Pacific coast. The Outlaws had been virtually exterminated in Montreal, but were the most powerful of the many gangs that controlled the drug trade in Ontario. Their primary rivals were their former brothers in what remained of Satan's Choice.

But nobody was particularly strong in Ontario. Hells Angels — with Stadnick lying at home in bed nursing his horrific wounds — had lost their only hope. The Outlaws — with Parente lifting weights in prison — had lost their heart and soul.

As 1985 dawned in cold, snowy Montreal it looked like the war had been won. The few Outlaws who hadn't been killed, injured or who hadn't quit never wore their colors in public anymore. Some even refused to come out of their houses.

But that doesn't mean things were going easily for the still-fledgling Canadian Hells Angels. There was an immense amount of tension between the two chapters in Montreal. And the addition of two new chapters — the 13
^th
Tribe, who had become Halifax Chapter, and the Gitans (Gypsies), who had become the Sherbrooke Chapter — gave Hells Angels more manpower and more territory, but also more responsibility.

The two Montreal chapters had developed very different cultures. The Montreal North (Laval) Chapter were the old Popeyes and a few like-minded newcomers. They were old-school bikers who wanted to ride, fight and party. They were responsible for almost all the firepower in the war against the Outlaws, with Yves “Apache” Trudeau claiming 18 of the 23 total victims by himself. Without the discipline that had been enforced by murdered president Yves “Le Boss” Buteau, they fell into disarray. They took their lead from new chapter president Laurent “L'Anglais” Viau, a free-wheeling, cocaine-using man-about-town who used violence when he deemed necessary or simply felt like it. Buteau's group of largely clean-shaven, well-dressed men barely recognizable as bikers had morphed into Viau's sloppy, hairy, hard-partying gang of stereotypical Hells Angels.

They could hardly have been more different from their cross-town brothers, the Montreal South (Sorel) Chapter. Manned by newer members and a few older guys who were put off by the excesses of their brothers in Laval, the Sorel Chapter was more disciplined and business-like. Its president, Rejean “Zig Zag” Lessard, kept up the rules established in the club's better days under Buteau. He forbade the use of stimulant or injected drugs and he was very serious about bikers paying their debts promptly. But, unlike his predecessor, he let the members look and dress however they wanted.

In the winter of 1984/85, Laval's sloppy and costly behavior caused a great deal of friction with the other chapters, particularly Sorel, and Lessard felt he had to do something. Not only were the members of the Laval Chapter consuming a great deal of the drugs they should have been selling, but they were also skimming from payments intended for other chapters. Officially, they owed at least $60,000, but nobody knew how much they had really taken from the organization. And their bad habit of getting arrested for small or unnecessary offenses — often unprovoked acts of violence — put the entire organization in jeopardy.