Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (24 page)

Maguire was dumped from the case. Parente, who considered her beneath contempt, was delighted. He still has outstanding suits against her that he can't talk about because they are still active. In her place, the Attorney General's office named Alex Smith — a capable and respected prosecutor but one who was taking over a very flawed and now heavily scrutinized case — to lead the Crown's argument.

Even outside the case things were not going well for the few remaining Outlaws in Ontario. The Black Pistons puppet gang had been reduced to 15 members in two chapters (Simcoe County and London) when their most senior member was arrested on November 10, 2006. Greg Brown — who lived in Ottawa and belonged to the Simcoe County Chapter three hours' drive away — was charged with eight offenses, including possession of a loaded firearm, possession of a weapon obtained by crime and unauthorized possession of a restricted firearm.

On the night of April 15, 2007, Marcus Cornelisse — who had done his time for the Egerton Avenue shoot-out after plea bargaining down to one count of aggravated assault and one of illegal firearms possession — was working at the Solid Gold, a London strip joint not affiliated with similar bars in Sudbury and Burlington that shared the same name. Shortly after 1 p.m., a pair of cops approached Cornelisse and started asking him a few questions. The big biker punched one of the cops in the face. Before they could act, he punched the other cop in the face, knocking him down. He took a moment to kick the prone officer in the head and back and then fled out the front door. The cops gave chase. One caught up to Cornelisse and grabbed him, but the Outlaw punched him again and broke free. He suddenly turned around and ran back into the Solid Gold. The cops followed him in, but lost him in the dark, cluttered bar and he slipped out a hidden exit. He was arrested the next day and, in yet another plea agreement, was sentenced to a year in prison. He was released after seven months.

Cornelisse was hardly the only Outlaw arrested in Project Retire to be back on the streets. Although 56 men were arrested on September 25, 2002, by the autumn of 2008 only three men remained accused. The trial had crawled through the courts as the Crown and the accused were continually wheeling and dealing with charges and potential punishments. It was also slowed down considerably by the Maguire incident. All of the others had made deals, and 16 of them — much to Parente's chagrin — admitted they were members of a criminal organization.

On October 18, 2008, the number of accused fell to two. William Mellow — a full-patch member of the London Chapter and a former national secretary-treasurer of the club — had been arrested in Project Retire and charged with a number of offenses. Police had searched his farm just outside Bolton and found a loaded 10-mm handgun and 50 rounds of ammunition in a bedroom. Handguns of that caliber are rare and extremely powerful. Also in his bedroom, the police uncovered some hash oil, steroids and a syringe. In his garage, they discovered an unloaded 12-gauge shotgun wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. The shotgun's barrel had been sawed off. And in his Cadillac, they found $11,065 in cash.

After more than six years of severe bail restrictions, Mellow was ready to deal. He had his load of charges reduced to one simple count of possession of a handgun without a license. He was sentenced to a year's probation.

While that punishment seems remarkably lenient in light of what the cops had against Mellow, it also came down with a court order that he may not be in possession of a firearm or be in association or communication with any members of the Outlaws, Hells Angels, Bandidos or Black Pistons. Any violation would earn him a long prison stay.

And it was typical of the deals the other Outlaws arrested in Project Retire had made. In exchange for very light sentences, the guilty were subject to court orders prohiting them from keeping company with each other or any other bikers. Clearly, it was far more important to the Attorney General's office to break up the Outlaws as an organization than it was to put individual members out of commission. Take Cornelisse for example. He shot another biker in the abdomen with what appeared to be intent to kill and beat up two cops before escaping — and he spent just a few months behind bars and was forbidden to be a biker anymore.

Two Outlaws held out. One, to nobody's surprise, was Parente, and the other was also from Hamilton. His name was Luis Ferreira. A much younger man (33 to Parente's 60), nobody I spoke with considered Ferreira to be a big-time biker. “He was a local bad guy, a buddy of Parente's,” recalled Hamilton biker cop Sergeant John Harris, who knew them both well. “He became an Outlaw, but was never a major guy. Nobody ever really knew what he did to deserve membership, but he was always a loyal guy.”

The primary evidence against Parente came from a Sault Ste. Marie Outlaw who had turned informant. Parente told me that he did not know the man very well, that the man in question was made a member when Parente was in prison, so he had no opportunity to check him out, so he had little to do with him on purpose. But OPP investigator Len Isnor told me that the pair were in frequent contact and that he'd seen “at least three [cocaine] buys” occur between the two.

And on March 12, 2009 — just a few days less than six and a half years after the arrests — it was his turn to talk. But to everyone's surprise, he wasn't in court that morning. Instead, Alex Smith, the Crown prosecutor told the Justice Lynda Templeton that he was withdrawing all charges due to a lack of evidence. The informant, he said, had changed his mind; without him, the Crown had “no reasonable prospect of conviction.”

Thinking quickly, Jack Pinkofsky, Parente's lawyer, asked Templeton to make it part of the public record that the informant declined to testify of his own free will, not because of any threat from Parente, Ferreira or anyone else. Templeton asked Smith if he had any objection to that. He said he didn't. Parente and Ferreira were free to go. Pinkofsky later said he had “a hunch” the trial would end that way.

I asked Parente why he thought the informant declined to testify. He told me that it was because the informant didn't actually have anything on him, he just wanted to get paid. When I asked Isnor the same question, he answered with a different opinion. “After six and a half years, he was tired, not as sure he could provide accurate evidence,” he said. “I've got to hand it to Pinkofsky for dragging the trial on that long.”

“Sometimes true justice takes that kind of course,” Pinkofsky said. “Sometimes it takes a long time for justice to be done.”

After he left the courtroom a free man, Parente stopped to talk with reporters. “I'm just glad everything is over after all this time,” he said. “It's been a long, long road; and I never had any doubts that the matters were going to turn out the way they did.”

It had indeed been a long, long road for him. Arrested in 2002, he was held in jail until Justice Getliffe dropped the criminal organization charges against all the accused. He was then released on $250,000 bail. Then when Maguire won her preferred indictment, he was thrown back in jail. When that was overturned and she was dismissed from the case, Parente was offered bail once again, only this time for $400,000. He was forced to find work immediately, had a strict sundown curfew and was required to check in with London police — even though he lived and worked on the other side of Hamilton, at least three hours' drive away — three times a week.

And it wasn't just him. Parente's girlfriend, Nadia Kosta, and a common friend, Silvana DiMartino, lost their security clearance at Toronto's Pearson International Airport where they both worked as passenger-information representatives. Without it, they were as good as fired. The reason, their superiors gave, was that they had put up surety for Parente. Kosta was shocked. She had put up surety for Parente once before in 1996, and had acquired her security clearance in 2001. Kosta was adamant in the media that she had made no secret about her relationship with Parente, and she felt that changing the rules on her now was petty and unnecessarily punitive.

An inquiry noted that Kosta had been in court with Parente and had been rude and combative with court officers. They also claimed DiMartino and her boyfriend were both good friends of Parente's and knew about his criminal record. They even brought up the fact that a deck of playing cards with a “Support Your Local Outlaws” logo on them was found in DiMartino's purse. Kosta said they were hers. The women later regained their right to work at the airport, but had been suspended without pay and were dragged through hours of inquiries and other proceedings.

In all, Parente spent about 30 months behind bars, had turned over hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own and his friends' money and had his life held hostage for 42 long months. Always jovial, he had taken to calling himself and Ferreira “the last men standing” and — in protest of his treatment by the legal system — refused to shave for the last six months of the trial. By the time he was freed, his beard flowed long, white — almost Santa Claus-like — down his chest. “I was prepared to sit in there forever if I had to,” he said. “As far as we're concerned, we fought this to the bitter end; I was prepared to go on as long as I had to to prove otherwise.”

He was free and he was, he said, proven right. He had managed to get off when so many other prominent bikers — Stadnick, Boucher, the Cazzettas, the Vachons and countless others — had gone down.

But unlike Stadnick and Boucher, he didn't have a club to go back to when he was finally free. When the entire organization was arrested in 2002, he told them to stay firm, to stick together and that they would all get out of it as a unit. Other than Ferreira, a small-timer, none of them did. In fact, more than a dozen of them pleaded guilty to being members of a criminal organization, a move that endangered the very existence of the club. Particularly galling to Parente, members of law enforcement have told me, was the betrayal of the man they identified as his No. 2, Woodstock Chapter president Kevin Legere. He pleaded guilty in February 2005.

And, when Parente needed cash for bail, none of his so-called brothers came to his aid. “The club has never donated a nickel,” he said. “So that's how much of a criminal organization this club in Canada is.” He had to sell virtually everything that he owned that hadn't already been confiscated by police. When last I heard from him, he was still trying to get thousands of dollars' worth of property back from the government. They claim that it's theirs because he was a member of a criminal organization, even though he personally beat that charge. But they maintain that because others in the same organization pleaded guilty, his stuff is now theirs.

So he publicly quit the Outlaws. He gave a three-hour interview to reporter Peter Edwards explaining why. “I'm disgusted with everybody,” Parente told him. “I wash my hands of them all.” He later explained that by “everybody,” he meant the legal system, law enforcement and his former fellow Outlaws.

He made it clear that he was shocked and still bitterly disappointed by the fact that the other Outlaws did not support his defense, which, he maintained, would have helped them all. “They were out partying and didn't donate a dime to help out,” he said. “I [didn't] get a nickel of support from anybody to fight something that implicates everybody.”

He acknowledged that some of the Canadian Outlaws were criminals, but that since they acted individually within the organization, it didn't make the Outlaws a criminal organization. “If someone was dealing coke, he wouldn't tell me about it, it wasn't my business,” he told me at one of our meetings. Then he gave me an example of how the Outlaws worked. “One time a guy comes up to me and tells me he is selling a trailer full of chickens — didn't tell me where or how he got it, and I didn't ask. All I said to him was, ‘What the hell am I going to do with a trailer full of chickens?'”

Had the Outlaws gone ahead with it, Parente's plan may well have worked. In fact, Hells Angels had used that very defense against similar anti-racketeering laws in the United States and won.

But it didn't happen, and Parente summed up his opinion of the Outlaws in his typical wry style: “With brothers like that, who needs enemies?”

Soon thereafter, Parente — through his friend Luther — approached me about writing his life story.

Many people have said that the charges being withdrawn against Parente were a huge victory for the bikers in Ontario. Isnor disagrees. “My job was not to put Mario Parente behind bars,” he told me. “It was to put the Outlaws out of business in Ontario.”

And he certainly did manage that.

With all the Outlaws behind bars, it looked like Hells Angels controlled organized crime in all of Canada. After all, the Walter Stadnick-led expansion had established chapters from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island to Halifax, more than 3,500 miles away. And he and his gang had finally invaded Ontario where the last holdouts had held sway. His patch-over of hundreds of bikers on December 29, 2000 was just the beginning. With all of the Outlaws behind bars because of Project Retire and the Mafia in complete disarray, Hells Angels were virtually unopposed in Ontario, unless of course you include law enforcement.

But there were some remaining pockets of resistance: the holdouts, rejects and odds and ends Hells Angels couldn't account for. Most of them, after Project Retire, were located in the Southwestern part of Ontario.

One very important one was in Windsor. Just a mile south of Detroit, Windsor is almost as tied to the auto industry as the Motor City. These days, of course, that's bad news, but in the 1960s and 1970s, it meant jobs for everyone. It attracted all kinds of people, including a Calabrian family called the Muscederes.