Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (20 page)

On September 3, 1997, a procession of Quebec Hells Angels roared into Toronto. At one of the roadside stops Petersen had complained about, the police arrested Sylvain Vachon (one of the brothers who ferried Vallée's drugs into Sudbury) on an outstanding warrant. The rest arrived at the Para-Dice Riders' clubhouse on Eastern Avenue, not far from downtown. The prospects for both clubs waited outside while the full-patches talked inside.

They could only speculate as to what went on inside, but that didn't stop the Toronto media from declaring the Para-Dice Riders the Hells Angels' gateway into Ontario and an all-out biker war a certainty.

But Stadnick wasn't that simple. He had other irons in the fire, other ways to get into Ontario. Remember the Sherbrooke Chapter? The one that had enough juice to opt out of the Nomads' cocaine distribution system? Well, they had a friend from London, Ontario, named John Coates, one of the few English-speaking Hells Angels associates to be successful in Quebec.

He was quite a specimen. At six-foot-seven and at least 300 pounds, he was a huge, intimidating presence. He was well liked by the Sherbrooke Hells Angels and was employed by them frequently.

And he had a brother. Back in London, Jimmy Coates (not quite as big as John, but still a massive man) was a member of the Loners, which still had a fairly active chapter there. The Sherbrooke guys asked John to invite his brother and his friends over. They partied, they got along, they were given drugs to sell.

But they had to do it in secret. The Chatham Loners' most prominent member, chapter president Wayne “Weiner” Kellestine, would never have allowed it. A Loners' purist (even though his old gang, the Annihilators, had patched over to the Loners just a short time before, while Kellestine was in prison), he had no use for Hells Angels. Like Guindon before him, Kellestine didn't like answering to a club based in another country, and he did not like how they treated Raso's Loners. First they backed the enemy, Satan's Choice, then the Loners and when the Loners divided, they went with the Para-Dice Riders, essentially favoring three different clubs in one town over the space of two years.

Kellestine was a man to be feared, even by behemoths like the Coates brothers. He was the biker described by Isnor as looking like Charles Manson. And he reportedly introduced himself to an old friend's brother by saying “Hi, I'm Wayne Kellestine. I sell drugs and kill people.”

Although they are often referred to as the London or St. Thomas Loners, the chapter recognized itself as being from Chatham, a small city on the 401 halfway between Windsor and London. The Loners also had a small chapter in Amherstburg, just south of Windsor, and prospective chapters in Oregon and Southern Italy, where many of the Woodbridge guys had relatives.

They were out in Chatham because London was very much an Outlaws town. At this time, Parente was national president and he and his Hamilton Chapter represented the club's power center in Canada. But the London Chapter could probably have made a very strong case for second place. London's not a tough town by any standards, but it is a very rich territory for drug sales. And it was perfectly situated between the Outlaws' world headquarters in Detroit and its Canadian seat of operations in Hamilton, in an area many cops know as “meth alley” because it's Ontario's most active area for methamphetamine manufacture and use.

Because the area is so very desirable to biker gangs, it had been the site of many increasingly violent turf wars. But the Outlaws had kept it theirs and largely peaceful since they had taken over. That changed in April 1998, when two prominent Outlaws from London — chapter president Jeffrey Labrash and full-patch Jody Hart — were shot and killed in the parking lot outside the downtown Beef Baron strip joint.

Working from eyewitness accounts, police quickly issued warrants for the Lewis brothers, Paul and Duane (no relation to the Hamilton Lewises who so bedeviled Parente). The pair claimed they had no biker connections, and their story was that they had been sent to the Beef Baron to repair a malfunctioning video game. They were, they said, minding their own business when they just happened to get into a fight with the two Outlaws. The melee continued outside the bar and ended with both of the Outlaws being shot with the same handgun.

After the shooting, more questions were raised about biker involvement. A few days later, immediately after the funerals for Labrash and Hart, a bomb exploded at T.J. Baxter's, a bar frequented by local Outlaws. And it was full of them that day. Four people, all with some association with the Outlaws, were hurt, one seriously.

While many people in Southwestern Ontario saw it as the beginning of a biker war, police and media biker experts continued to deny any Hells Angels or Loners (who they still incorrectly identified as Annihilators) involvement.

Nine months later, police found the body of locally notorious millionaire businessman Salvatore Vecchio in a marsh just outside London. He was known to have association with bikers of many different clubs, and to have known and perhaps even to have employed the Lewis brothers under the table. Again, police and media downplayed the idea of a biker war.

At their trial, the Lewises claimed that they had gone to the Beef Baron that day for work. When they got there, they said, one of the Outlaws pulled a gun on them for reasons unknown and marched them out into the parking lot. Then, they said, Labrash fired a shot at one of them at point-blank range, but somehow missed (police found no evidence of this). Then Paul Lewis pulled his own gun and fired. He hit Labrash four times in the chest and Hart once in the head, killing them both.

Clearly, the key piece of evidence was Labrash's alleged gun. It was never found, but the defense pointed out that the bar's DJ was an Outlaws supporter, and they asserted that he had taken the gun and other evidence with him when he left the Beef Baron before the police arrived. Police had been unable to locate him — he had fled the country and was hiding out in the U.K. — but it didn't matter. The shadow of doubt was raised, and the Lewises were acquitted of all counts as the killings were attributed to self-defense.

Years later, the Lewises were caught in an RCMP cocaine sting with loads of drugs and cash, including Mexican currency. A subsequent investigation determined that the Lewises had acquired their cocaine from Hells Angels in Sherbrooke. So, while the police and media denied any biker war, the recent killings and the recent influx of drugs into the London area indicated otherwise.

Many Loners — drawn both by security and financial rewards — sought a closer relationship with the Hells Angels, but not all of them did. Kellestine was still adamantly and vociferously against the idea. He made his point at a party late in 1999 when a young Loner was mouthing off about how much better life would be if they were Hells Angels. Kellestine rebutted the argument by beating the man nearly to death with the handle of a handgun.

Kellestine's reluctance to accept the Hells Angels' looming dominance of Canadian biker culture did not go unnoticed. On a cold Friday, October 22 in 1999, Kellestine packed up his SUV to attend a friend's wedding. As he paused at the stop sign where Regional Road 14 meets Regional Road 13, he was surprised to see pickup trucks pull up beside and in front of him, blocking his path. The passenger window rolled down. One of the two Hells Angels associates inside the pickup — David “Dirty” McLeish or Phil “Philbilly” Gastonguay — opened fire at Kellestine's car. Windows were shattered, but nobody was hurt. Court records didn't make it clear which was the triggerman. When the Hells Angels associate who had the gun ran out of ammo, both vehicles laid rubber and screeched away. The pickup went north to the 401, and Kellestine went south, back home. If there was any chance Kellestine and Hells Angels could have made peace, it was probably killed that day.

To the people of Southwestern Ontario, it looked like Hells Angels had declared war on the Outlaws and the Loners.

Although the assassination attempt on Kellestine failed, it got one desired result: the Hells Angels had come to Ontario. The Coates brothers and their friends were there to stay. “The deal was partly, ‘If you do this you become a member,' ” said a London cop at the time. “There was some oversight from Sherbrooke, and when they got out and opened up their club here, John Coates was running it.”

They didn't have a chapter or a clubhouse yet, but the Hells Angels were already becoming established in London, in Ontario. And they weren't the only ones. In 1999, the Rock Machine surprised everyone in the biker and law enforcement worlds by opening three chapters in Ontario. Despite the fact that their still-bloody war with the Hells Angels was not going in their favor, that most of their leadership was dead or behind bars and despite the language and cultural barriers, the Rock Machine found a way to set up shop in Ontario before Stadnick could.

The Rock Machine — a name that meant only gangland-style shoot-outs and hidden bombs to the people of Ontario — had set up shop in London (a chapter they called Ontario West), Kingston (Ontario East) and Toronto. And as an insult specific to Stadnick, they had changed the bottom rocker of their patch to read “Canada” rather than their individual chapter. The two gangs were officially at peace, but the huge strategic move into Ontario was not greeted without anger by Hells Angels. At the time, though, Rock Machine national president Alain Brunette claimed that his club was “legitimate” and wanted to coexist peacefully with other gangs “for a long time.”

It was a very tense year for the people of Ontario. They had watched their neighbors to the east be terrorized by a biker war that was still raging. Shootings and bombings had killed hundreds of Quebeckers — including innocent bystanders, even children — and the bikers seemed absolutely impervious to conviction. They had boldly and callously attempted to undermine the government's authority by murdering prison guards as a lesson to those who stood in their way.

Now it seemed like only a matter of time until it all broke loose in Ontario. The Rock Machine had arrived. The traditional Ontario gang in charge, the Outlaws, who had also fought a bloody war with the Hells Angels in Quebec, certainly weren't going to stand by and let their territory be stolen again. And the Hells Angels themselves — with chapters in B.C., Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Quebec and Nova Scotia — were threatening to invade the province both from outside and from within.

Hells Angels knew that the Outlaws wouldn't leave Ontario without a fight, and they, too, prepared for war. They had routed the Outlaws before in Montreal, but this was a very different situation. In Montreal, the Outlaws were far outnumbered and far away from help. They had inadequate leaders and little will to fight.

It was different in Ontario, where the Outlaws (and Satan's Choice before them) had been entrenched for decades. Although Hells Angels now had more chapters and official members in Ontario, the Outlaws could probably recruit as many men, most of them of better quality than the also-rans Hells Angels had recently brought into their tent. They also had the potential for top-notch reinforcements — the Outlaws' international headquarters was in Detroit, and they were said to be enraged by the fact that Hells Angels had managed to establish a chapter just a few miles away in Windsor. And they had Mario Parente, who — both police and bikers have told me — was considered the most feared biker on either side of the divide.

But these weren't the same Hells Angels either. While they didn't have a killing machine on par with Yves “Apache” Trudeau anymore, they did have a corps of veterans battle-hardened after winning a much larger and bloodier war against the Rock Machine. And they had dozens of chapters throughout the country. They handled hundreds of millions of dollars of drugs and other products and services every year. They had friends all over the country: in the Mafia, in law enforcement, in the military, in the legal business, on First Nations reserves and in many other places the Outlaws didn't. And they had veteran leadership that included the strategic brilliance of Walter Stadnick.

But it wasn't the Outlaws who attacked. Instead, on the early morning of March 28, 2001, it was more than 200 police officers from more than a dozen forces who descended upon every single one of the Hells Angels and puppet club clubhouses in Quebec, as well as hundreds of homes and businesses of members, prospects and associates.

In all, 142 arrests were made, including 80 of Quebec's 106 full-patch Hells Angels. Though most of the charges were for drug-related offenses, plenty more were for murder, the result of the war against the Rock Machine. Seized were 20 buildings, 41 vehicles (including 13 motorcycles, all but one a Harley), 70 guns, a stick of dynamite, 10 kilograms of cocaine, 120 kilograms of hashish, $12.5 million in Canadian currency and a further $2.6 million in U.S. currency.