Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (23 page)

The police involved were uncharacteristically vocal about their success that day. Don Bell, head of the OPP-led joint-forces Biker Enforcement Unit (BEU), was particularly prominent in the press, telling reporters: “We've been able to seize their clubhouses; we've been able to hit them where it hurts.” He told them that his crew had been working with Ontario Justice Minister Robert Runciman for three years on Project Retire, the plan to literally put the Outlaws out of business.

Bell also took a moment to dis the Outlaws. “These guys are street punks,” he told reporters. “They are involved in an array of criminality.”

At that, the reporters began to ask about Hells Angels. Although the Outlaws — and Satan's Choice before them — had dominated the outlaw biker world in London and the surrounding area for decades, the press really wanted to know about Hells Angels. The more informed ones among them knew that Hells Angels dominated organized crime in most of the country, but were just getting established in Ontario. They knew that Hells Angels had fought bloody wars not just with the Rock Machine in Quebec, but also the Outlaws. And they knew that there had been an escalation in biker violence in their own area in the last two years, especially since national president Walter Stadnick had established a toehold for Hells Angels in Ontario. The media wanted to know why the police had targeted just the Outlaws, and not Hells Angels as well.

“The Outlaws were chosen based on priority and opportunity,” Bell responded, pointing out that when Project Retire was instigated in June 1999, Hells Angels had not established any official presence in the province yet. “Certainly we were aware of the Hells Angels, but they were not part of Ontario's landscape.” Then he issued them something of an ambiguous warning. “We've got lots of officers,” he said. “This [Project Retire] may not be the only thing we're up to.” When pressed, he stayed oblique. “Everybody has their day,” he said. “Who's to say the Outlaws are our only target?”

McGowan was a little more forceful and specific. “I don't know if the Hells Angels will be celebrating in regards to their rivals, the Outlaws, because they know they're next,” he said.

But that wasn't how the bikers saw it. One London-area Hells Angels associate who didn't want his name used said: “The Hells Angels are ecstatic; this couldn't happen to a better bunch.” He also pointed out that things might not be so nice for the Outlaws behind bars, as the Hells Angels generally hold sway in Canadian jails and prisons. “The Hells Angels are going to welcome their brothers in arms,” he joked. “And the Outlaws won't have the Bandidos to back them up,” a reference to the Bandidos show of solidarity earlier that year at Larry Pooler's motorcycle show.

By 2002, Bandidos had already eclipsed the Outlaws as the world's second largest and most powerful outlaw motorcycle gang. Based in Texas, Bandidos dominated the American Southwest and had made significant inroads in Europe. In fact, they had battled Hells Angels there — sometimes winning, sometimes losing and sometimes coming to a standoff. And, because they shared a common enemy, Bandidos and the Outlaws had a strong international working alliance.

But they were never very strong in Canada, and by the time of Project Retire, they were just limping by. It all started after the Rock Machine had been beaten in Quebec. They sought an alliance with Bandidos, but the American Bandidos weren't really interested. Instead they allowed the Scandinavian Bandidos to sponsor a patch-over in Canada and, in January 2001, what remained of the Rock Machine became Bandidos.

But a joint police task force led by the Sûreté du Québec had been targeting the Rock Machine for a while, and struck in June 2002 after they had become Bandidos. More than 60 arrests were made. Since almost all of the evidence came from the Rock Machine days, most of the arrests came in Quebec (in fact, every single one of Quebec's Bandidos was put behind bars). Although a number of arrests were made in Ontario, there were still at least a dozen members at large. None of them had come from the Rock Machine, and none were considered big-time players.

Faced with the Hells Angels' prospects in an Ontario that was now devoid of Outlaws and had no real Bandidos' presence, Bell admitted: “Certainly, things are going to be more open for them [Hells Angels] than in the past.”

To counter the idea that the cops were making things easy for the Hells Angels, Bell also pointed out that area police had arrested a number of other bikers that year, including some Hells Angels.

In truth, it was one Hells Angel, but it was one of London's most well-known bikers since the Coates brothers had moved on. Marty Zager had worked as a bouncer at the Beef Baron, but left when it started to become an Outlaws place. He didn't like the Outlaws. But he and his wife became very successful in other businesses.

Zager owned Hardcore Tattoos & Piercing (with locations in London and the nearby resort town of Port Stanley) and, allegedly, a number of rub 'n' tug parlors in the London area. A low-level form of prostitution that begins with a massage, rub 'n' tug parlors are targeted at truck drivers and office workers, both of which London has in abundance.

It was those successful businesses, sources say, that caught the eyes of the Hells Angels. Zager quickly became a member. And he was a very visible one, wearing his colors every chance he got, even at events where he knew Outlaws and/or Bandidos would be present.

Although he was a valuable member, Zager's absence didn't do much to hurt Hells Angels in Ontario. They were solidly at the top of the food chain. The Mafia was all but extinct, most of the other biker gangs had been absorbed or sidelined. The Rock Machine-turned-Bandidos were few in number and not very well organized. If there was any organization that could prevent the Hells Angels hegemony, it had been the Outlaws. And now, thanks to Project Retire, they were all gone.

“Once we had it all wrapped up, a bunch of us were sitting around and the subject came up that without the Bandidos and the Outlaws, there wasn't much to keep the Hells Angels from taking over,” a cop who was involved told me. “Everybody just kind of said ‘yeah.' ”

Elizabeth Maguire was in a familiar place, but in an unfamiliar position. The well-known and highly successful Crown attorney was in a building she felt comfortable in — the London courthouse — but she didn't look comfortable at all. She looked shaken and about to cry. She was being questioned about potential wrongdoing, or at least incompetence, in one of the most important biker trials in Canadian history.

It had started almost seven years earlier, in 2002 when Project Retire arrested all of the Outlaws in Ontario. Most of them made deals right away and were back on the streets, but with so many court-appointed restrictions that they could not operate as a viable organization. But 10 of them, including national president Mario “The Wop” Parente, remained on trial.

At a preliminary inquiry, Justice John Getliffe saw Maguire in a courthouse hallway and asked her to speak with him in his chambers. Once inside, the pair had a conversation that led Maguire to believe that Getliffe had already made up his mind to convict the Outlaws. A few days later, they had another private conversation that Maguire later said further convinced her that Getliffe meant to convict the Outlaws as a criminal organization.

Assuming she already had the case in the bag, Maguire decided against calling in a number of witnesses who had a great deal of evidence against the individuals and the organization. Her logic at the time was that exposing some of these witnesses to cross-examination, especially from Parente's legendarily sharp defense attorney Jack Pinkofsky, could lead to a mistrial or jeopardize Getliffe's ability to give the ruling she was sure they both wanted.

So it came as a tremendous shock when, on June 30, 2004, Getliffe discharged all criminal organization charges against the bikers. In his summation, he mentioned that what convinced him to drop the charge was the fact that Maguire failed to call enough witnesses.

Enraged, Maguire took the rare and fairly drastic step of preferring an indictment. In effect, she went over Getliffe's head to ask the Attorney General to reinstate the charges. A four-person panel (including Deputy Attorney General Murray Segal) considered the case and the evidence already presented. Citing the importance of the case and its likelihood to set an important precedent, they ruled that Getliffe was wrong. The charges were relayed upon the accused.

Years later, Parente told me that he was frequently offered deals under which all other charges would be dropped if he agreed to plead guilty to being a member of a criminal organization. He always refused. That didn't surprise anyone who knew Parente. He was true to his club and its members and made it known that he believed they should sink or swim together. His pride would not have let him be known in history as the man who sold out the Outlaws for a few dropped charges.

It was clearly important to prosecutors all over the country to get someone to admit they were members of a criminal organization. That fixation started during the Hells Angels-Rock Machine war in Quebec. Under a great deal of public pressure, the federal government passed Bill C-95 in 1997. It read, in part, “every one who ... participates in or substantially contributes to the activities of a criminal organization knowing that any or all of the members of the organization engage in or have, within the preceding five years, engaged in the commission of a series of indictable offences ... of which the maximum punishment is imprisonment for five years or more ... is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.” So if the Crown could prove that, for example, Hells Angels are a criminal organization, then simply being a member of the club could make someone liable to 14 years behind bars. It would, essentially, outlaw the club.

But it hadn't really seen any real success. The Crown failed to win a single C-95 conviction in the Hells Angels' megatrials primarily because the individual bikers maintained that they were doing business independent of one another, despite the proven existence of the Nomads and their drug distribution organization, which they called The Table.

The next time it was invoked was against the Rock Machine's Peter Paradis, but he turned informant and the charge was dropped. It finally won convictions in 2001 when Philippe Côté, Mario Filion, Eric LeClerc and Simon Lambert were found guilty of operating a drug ring for the Rock Machine. But, by that time, the Rock Machine had ceased to exist, having been patched over by Bandidos.

It finally made some headway in September 2004, when two Hells Angels were found guilty of extorting a huge sum of money from a cocaine-addicted black-market satellite TV equipment dealer in Barrie. Steven “Tiger” Lindsay and Raymond Bonner showed up at the man's house in full colors and demanded $75,000. He refused and called police as soon as they left. They convinced the man to meet with them again in a nearby restaurant. He wore a wire.

According to court records: Lindsay wore boots with the words ‘Hells Angels North Toronto' and the death head logo, a belt bearing the words ‘Hells Angels' embroidered on it and a death head on its buckle, a T-shirt bearing the death head logo and the words ‘Hells Angels Singen [a chapter in Germany],' and a necklace with a pendant of the Hells Angels death head logo and Bonner wore a jacket bearing the Hells Angels death head logo and the words ‘Hells Angels East End' and a black T-shirt bearing two death heads and the words ‘Hells Angels First Anniversary.'”

The police recorded Lindsay warning the victim that he would send people to his house, and that the money belonged to him and “five other guys that are fucking the same kind of motherfucker as I am.”

Judge Michelle Fuerst found them not just guilty of extortion, but also of being members of a criminal organization. “Both Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Bonner went to [the victim's] house wearing jackets bearing the primary symbols of the HAMC [Hells Angels Motorcycle Club], the name ‘Hells Angels' and the death head logo,” she said in her ruling. “In so doing, they presented themselves not as individuals, but as members of a group with a reputation for violence and intimidation. They deliberately invoked their membership in the HAMC with the intent to inspire fear in their victim. They committed extortion with the intent to do so in association with a criminal organization, the HAMC to which they belonged.”

But since Lindsay and Bonner both immediately appealed the ruling — and their appeal wouldn't be heard until 2009 — C-95 was still without precedent.

And Maguire — who had missed a similar opportunity at the 2001 extortion trial of Douglas Johnstone, Tom Walkinshaw and Jimmy Coates — wanted to be the first to bring down an entire biker gang. But while Maguire would get another chance to convince a judge that the Outlaws were indeed a criminal organization, her explanation of why she lost the preliminary inquiry, why she hadn't called on her legion of witnesses revealed something worth investigating. And in June 2005, Pinkofsky filed an abuse of process motion against her.

As a result, Maguire's boss — Senior Assistant Crown Attorney John Hanbidge — ordered her to explain exactly why she behaved the way she did in the preliminary inquiry. Her reaction was immediate and revealing. “Are you nuts?” she shouted. “You're giving my head to Jack on a platter!” It would come back to embarrass her.

At the abuse of power hearing, Justice Lynda Templeton ruled that it didn't matter what Getliffe said to her or whether he had gone back on a deal or not. Clearly she didn't like how he behaved. “For a presiding judge in an ongoing preliminary inquiry to have unnecessarily called the Crown into chambers, and to have proceeded to discuss the case to any extent at all in the absence of opposing counsel was, in my view, entirely inappropriate,” she told Maguire. But Pinkofsky hadn't filed against Getliffe, he had filed against Maguire, and so it was incumbent upon her to answer any and all questions about backroom dealings and subsequent cover-ups. And Templeton made sure that Maguire knew that any sort of meeting she had with a judge at which the defense was not present and not even informed of later was not the kind of action that could be tolerated from a Crown attorney. “It is incomprehensible to me that ... Ms. Maguire did not disclose this meeting to defense counsel,” she said. “Her obligation to do so was unequivocal; her failure to do so was a breach of duty.” And when she heard what Maguire had said to Hanbidge when he asked her to come clean, Templeton said she was shocked that Maguire cared more about “her own status, sense of professionalism and protection from scrutiny” than she was about justice for the accused. She further went on to say that her behavior “sullied” the reputation of the entire Ontario legal system.