Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (19 page)

But there were problems just over the horizon. The joint police forces were preparing an immense raid — Operation Dismantle — aimed at arresting every member of Satan's Choice in Ontario and depriving them of their infrastructure and income.

Because they were the newest clubs, Sudbury and Hamilton would have been the hardest to get evidence against had it not been for some bad decisions by the bikers, some good police work by the OPP and a little bit of luck.

Dubé and his guys invited K-9 and his crew — which now included Rich, Noble, Gordie Cunningham and a guy known as Lebanese Joe — up for a get-together. Once the guys from Hamilton had arrived in Sudbury, they started drinking and they all ended up at the Solid Gold, the city's biggest strip joint.

In the spacious parking lot outside the massive, low-slung windowless blue building, the local guys took their jackets off and locked them in the trunks of their cars. K-9 asked what they were doing. One of Dubé's men told him that the club had a strict no-colors policy so they had to take their jackets off before they could go inside. The Hamilton boys laughed derisively. One of them said: “We wear our colors wherever the fuck we want.” And the others agreed. K-9 asked rhetorically who was going to stop them.

After a round of “fuck yeahs,” the Sudbury members proudly re-donned their jackets and the whole group went into the bar. Minutes later, the police showed up in force and turfed them all from the club. Dubé swore revenge.

Not long thereafter, a bomb exploded at the Sudbury police station. Nobody was hurt, but it left a huge hole in the wall. And it spread fear throughout the community. If the police couldn't keep themselves safe, how could they keep the public safe?

It was just about time for the Victoria Day holiday in 1997. Many Canadians refer to the three-day weekend as “May Two-Four” because it usually falls on or about May 24 and the traditional way of celebrating involves buying and consuming a 24-pack of one's favorite beer. It is the traditional kickoff of summer in Canada, and it brings the first wave of tourists from Southern Ontario to the North.

Isnor was up there, but he was working. On the Friday before the big weekend, he got a call from a local drug dealer who can only be called Ed because he, too, is in the witness protection program. He was behind in his payments to the Vachon Brothers, a pair of tough guys from Sherbrooke who worked for Nomad Vallée. He promised to tell Isnor everything in exchange for his safety.

Despite the big weekend, Isnor managed to find a motel room for him in Orillia, a cute little town (and home of the OPP's central headquarters) some four hours' drive southeast of Sudbury.

A couple of days later, Isnor received a call at his office. It was from American Express. Their representative asked him if he was in a Peterborough restaurant. He assured them he wasn't, that he was a six-hour drive away in Sudbury. They told him that someone was attempting to pay for a meal using his card number in Peterborough. They also asked him if he had racked up over $2,000 in charges in the last day and a half. He assured them he hadn't, then he told them who he was and that he'd take care of it. So he called some cops he knew in Peterborough and they scooped Ed up and threw him in the “Barrie Bucket” — a notorious and since-closed maximum-security jail in Barrie, a city halfway between Orillia and Toronto.

As soon as Isnor had left Ed at the Orillia motel, the biker convinced the elderly manager that he was in something of a pickle. He told him that he had just ordered a pizza, but that his “brother” (Isnor, who looked nothing like him) had driven off with his wallet. If he could just get his Amex number from the registry, he could pay for his pizza. The manager believed him and gave him the imprint. Armed with this data, career criminal Ed went on a minor spending spree.

A couple of days after Ed had been dragged to Barrie, he called Isnor. The cop swore at him, told him he had a lot of nerve and was just about to hang up on him when he heard Ed say that his cellmate was bragging about blowing up the Sudbury police station. Isnor told Ed he was re-hired.

The cellmate was someone Isnor had recently put behind bars: Gordie Cunningham, a big and aggressive member of K-9's Satan's Choice crew in Hamilton. Raf Faiella, an undercover agent, had made a deal to buy coke from a Hamilton man, a shoe store owner named Mike Parker. The deal was supposed to go down at the Holiday Inn in Barrie, so Isnor and his team put it under heavy surveillance.

The first thing he noticed was that Parker had brought along Cunningham. “I smelled a rip,” he told me. Isnor is a veteran cop who knows the terrible things that could happen if he didn't intervene. Faiella, his buddy, could easily be dead. “And, sure enough, it was one.” Although he would have rather arrested the men for drug trafficking, he knew it was too dangerous not to intervene on Faiella's behalf. He arrested Cunningham and Parker on possession and threw them into the Barrie Bucket. It was just by pure chance that Cunningham and Ed shared a cell.

Before long, Cunningham made bail and Ed was released after serving a sentence made shorter by his guilty plea and his having made restitution to American Express. The pair had grown quite close in their small cell, and Cunningham had recruited Ed for the Hamilton Chapter. So when he was released, Ed went to Cunningham's house and lived with him.

With Ed wearing a wire, the cops recorded Cunningham making three separate cocaine buys. They had enough evidence to put him away for a very long time. After they put Ed in a safe place (with no access to their credit cards), Isnor, fellow OPP officer Peter Koop and Hamilton biker cop Robert “Biker Bob” MacDonald visited Cunningham at home. Instead of arresting him for the coke buys, they gave him an opportunity to turn on his brothers. He immediately jumped at it and spilled everything he knew.

Apparently, the Hamilton Chapter came up to Sudbury to help their brothers refurbish their clubhouse. When they got bored, they went to Solid Gold. When the cops showed up and kicked them out of Solid Gold, the members of both chapters considered it a major humiliation. Thrown out of the strip joint, the bikers went to the more biker-friendly Coulson Tavern farther downtown.

As the other bikers drank themselves silly, the two presidents walked across Larch Street to an all-night sandwich shop. Dubé told K-9 that he'd do anything to get back at the owner of Solid Gold, the man who ratted him out to the cops simply for wearing his jacket. K-9 told him he knew a guy, Jerry, who could help him out.

Jure “Jerry” Juretta had been in an airborne unit in the Canadian military and knew a lot about explosives. He also happened to be a Hamilton drug dealer and tough guy who worked for K-9's Satan's Choice. Dubé was impressed. He asked K-9 to get his friend to build him a bomb. K-9, always happy to make people happy, smiled and told his colleague that it'd be no problem.

Interestingly, Juretta was an old friend of Parente's. In fact, his sister was married to Marco Roque, a Hamilton Outlaw and even closer friend of Parente's. I asked Isnor about this, especially in light of the fact that I knew that Roque is now a member of the Hamilton Hells Angels. He looked at me with a grin just this side of condescending and said: “I can't believe you still think there's any loyalty among these people.”

A few days later, Juretta and K-9 went up to Sudbury with the bomb. They met Dubé and Brian Davis, his right-hand man, at the Tim Hortons at the corner of Highway 69 and Notre Dame Avenue in the Lockerby neighborhood in South Sudbury. Juretta handed the bomb to a delighted Dubé. The plan was to put it into the men's washroom of the Solid Gold. That would teach that asshole to ban colors and call the cops.

A couple of days later, K-9 got a call in Hamilton telling him that the bomb had been a success. There was now a large, smoking hole in the Sudbury police station. “What do you mean the police station?” he shouted. “It was supposed to be the Solid Gold!”

With Cunningham safely taken out of the picture, Isnor put Ed back to work. He accompanied Russell Martin, another Sudbury Satan's Choice member and Dubé's primary gofer, on a few cocaine buys. Isnor and his men approached Martin and showed him the evidence they had against him. They also told him they were much more interested in his boss than they were in him. He nodded. He understood. He knew that Dubé was capable of killing him, and as angry as he was these days, he just might.

Dubé was angry at Martin because he wouldn't do his job. But his job was to help his boss kill his best friend, Brian Davis.

The first time Dubé tried to kill Davis because he was sure he was gunning for his job, he told Martin to tell Davis that he'd found an undefended Hells Angels cottage full of coke. All they had to do was kick in the doors and fill up their pickup trucks. Davis was in.

Martin didn't have the heart to do it. He drove Davis around back roads for three hours pretending to be lost. The second time Dubé tried to kill Davis, Martin slashed his own tires to get out of it. The third time he was rescued by being caught by the cops.

Isnor knew Martin was nothing more than a tool, so he tracked down Davis. He brought him in. He sat him in the interrogation room chair. He used all the tried-and-true cop tactics. Nothing worked. Davis, a tough guy, wouldn't talk. Isnor looked him in the eye. He told him Dubé was going to kill him. In that most fleeting of moments, everything came together and made perfect sense. Davis's face turned stark white. He averted his eyes and said: “You're absolutely right.”

In exchange for witness protection, Davis spilled. Even though he was the No. 2 guy in Sudbury, he was deathly afraid of No. 1, Dubé. When they received the bomb from the Hamilton guys, Davis asked his boss how they were going to get it into the Solid Gold. Dubé said fuck that, they were going to stick it in the police station. His reasoning was that the police were the real enemy, not some asshole with a phone in the Solid Gold. He also told Davis that his dream, his greatest goal, was to get a tanker truck full of explosives and drive it through the police station, killing everyone inside — and, presumably, himself. Even though he was no schoolboy, Davis found that image chilling.

It was obvious that none of the local guys from Satan's Choice could plant a bomb at either the Solid Gold or the police station without being caught. But Dubé had a friend who could. Neil Passenen was a local drug dealer, but he cleaned up pretty good and could pass for a contributing member of society. Besides, he was one of the few people he knew who weren't immediately identifiable to even the least experienced Sudbury cop. His mom had been dating a guy whose last name was Young, so he was going by the name Neil Young in those days. And he owed Dubé a favor, so Dubé called it in. He had Neil Young place the bomb in the alleyway between the police station and the credit union next door. He was to be sure to leave it leaning up against the police station's wall.

That was enough for Isnor. He arrested the lot of them. In fact, since Operation Dismantle had begun, the fuzz had managed to arrest 109 of the 125 Satan's Choice members and prospects and seize all of their clubhouses. K-9 went down for his involvement in the Sudbury bombing and for trafficking steroids. Dubé killed himself in jail awaiting trial, hanging himself with a twisted bed sheet. I asked Isnor why he thought that happened. “Johnny K-9 was the only friend he had left in the world, and he knew we had him and he was going away forever,” he told me. “Besides the bombing and the trafficking, we probably could have linked him to the [Sudbury coke dealer Michael] Briere murder and then there's Alex Atso, who was Sudbury's No. 1 drug dealer before Satan's Choice took over; I'm sure Dubé killed him, too.”

In effect, the police had managed to do what politicians, rocket launchers and Molotov cocktails never could. They had eliminated Satan's Choice from the competition to see who would be the Hells Angels favorites in Ontario. That honor and responsibility now fell squarely on the shoulders of the Loners.

But Isnor, at least, was pretty sure that's how it would have worked out anyway. “Satan's Choice were never the big guys, they were nickel and dime,” he told me. “The Loners were always Stadnick's favorites.”

But, as always, things were not as easy as they would seem. By the time Satan's Choice was taken out of the picture, things had changed radically for the now financially successful Loners. Two men, Frank Grano and Jimmy Raso, were fighting tooth and nail for leadership of the gang. By the start of 1997, both men had strong factions behind him. And just before Stadnick and Hells Angels were about to give the Loners their blessing as their top puppet gang in Ontario, they split in half.

Grano's half of the Loners showed up at the door of the Para-Dice Riders clubhouse in downtown Toronto, one of the more powerful of the local, non-affiliated gangs. They were welcomed with open arms, opened up a chapter four blocks away from the Loners' clubhouse and called themselves the Para-Dice Riders Woodbridge Chapter. At least two knowledgeable sources told me Stadnick was behind the move, hoping to combine two clubs as a single pro-Hells Angels entity. Raso's Woodbridge Loners stayed where they were and, before long, faded into obscurity. Biker gangs without a steady supply of drugs to sell generally don't make headlines.

The OPP then deduced that the Para-Dice Riders were the entryway the Hells Angels were going to use to get into Ontario and decided to devote most of their energies to them. They were well served to monitor the situation. The Para-Dice Riders were a long-established club, with at least 60 members. The influx of the former Loners had enriched the club in both manpower and finances. And they had a leader. Donny Petersen, though not the president, often spoke eloquently for the club. In the early '90s he had sued the OPP — unsuccessfully, but with a great deal of publicity and public sympathy — over their roadside stop policy for bikers. Not only had it generated a lot of much-needed public sympathy for bikers, but it made him some important friends. He even had the opportunity to address Toronto's prestigious Empire Club, an honor reserved normally for heads of state and titans of industry.