Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (26 page)

And on Saturday, January 6, 2001, a banquet hall in Kingston was the site of a huge party. At it, what remained of the Rock Machine in Ontario and Quebec patched over to Bandidos as a prospective chapter. While it was the Scandinavian Bandidos who sponsored the Canadians and were considered responsible for them, the Americans were ultimately in charge.

Soon the Canadian Bandidos went looking for other gangs to recruit. A group of American Bandidos — led by Oklahoman Edward Winterhalder, who had been assigned the task of patching over the Rock Machine and getting them up to speed in Bandidos' rules and philosophy — visited the Woodbridge Loners in February. Although he was very impressed by Pietro Barilla, their leader, Winterhalder didn't have much hope of patching them over. The Loners they met indicated they didn't hate Hells Angels — usually a prerequisite for Bandidos membership — and had, in fact, just kicked out a promising and prominent member for being “too anti-Hells Angels.”

While the Woodbridge Loners didn't patch over to Bandidos, the others — including Kellestine's Chatham Chapter — did. It happened while Kellestine was in prison and Muscedere was acting in his place. Muscedere was made president (el presidente in Bandidos' parlance) of Ontario and vice-president of Canada, second in rank behind national president Alain Brunette (who had replaced the recently convicted Faucher).

Soon thereafter, in 2002, the combined forces of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), OPP and Sûreté du Québec (SQ) launched Project Amigo, which was originally aimed at eliminating the Rock Machine from Canada. Since the club's name had changed, but its membership by and large had not, it was now aimed at Bandidos. And they cops did a pretty good job, using evidence gathered during the Hells Angels-Rock Machine war, they arrested almost every single Bandido in the country. By Winterhalder's own admission:

Bandidos actually issued a media release that admitted that the club was dead in Quebec, but survived in Ontario and was planning to expand into Western Canada. Since the evidence was gathered against the original Rock Machine, the more recent patch-overs — including Muscedere's and Kellestine's former Loners — were not part of the raid.

Years later, in 2003, they found themselves as the only Bandidos chapter in Canada. After the arrests from Project Amigo left the Canadian club with barely more than a dozen members, all in three distant Ontario chapters, they were consolidated into one chapter based in Toronto. Muscedere was their president and, with Brunette behind bars for a long time, found himself as national president as well.

The few remaining Canadian Bandidos didn't have a clubhouse, but instead met in a run-down bar in Toronto's notorious Parkdale neighborhood. Few of them lived in Toronto, though, and many of them had long commutes to their meetings.

Faced with the prospect of having just one small, loose-knit chapter in the whole country, Bandidos went on a major recruiting drive. They established probationary chapters in Winnipeg and Edmonton — two cities that had been particularly receptive to Stadnick's Hells Angels sales pitch — with bikers who had become disillusioned with or passed over by the big guys.

The Edmonton experiment ended on January 30, 2004. Two men from the Rebels, the club charged with leading the Bandidos expansion into Edmonton, went for a night out on the town. Joey Morin and Robert Charles Simpson were just getting out of Morin's car when they were approached by some other men. Morin was somewhat famous in the city after he pulled three men from a blazing truck as a teenager in 1989. But because he avoided media coverage and award ceremonies — including the Governor General's Award for Bravery and the St. John's Ambulance Award of Merit — he was known throughout the city as the “Shy Hero.”

But there was little heroic about what he was doing that night. He and Simpson were headed into Saint Pete's Mens Club, a large and popular strip joint in the northwest section of the city. Although owner Peter Bodenberger claimed his club had no affiliations with any particular gang, people in the area knew it as a Rebels' hangout. Neither Morin nor Simpson were wearing colors when they arrived. Just as they slammed the doors of Morin's car, the men who had approached pulled their guns and started firing.

The police never said how many shots were fired (or even how many shooters there were), but there was enough hot lead in the air to nearly sever Morin's arm. The police did admit that both men had been shot in “nearly every part of their bodies.”

Simpson died at the scene. Morin was rushed to Royal Alexandra Hospital where he lingered a few hours and died in the arms of his mother, Sharon Trottier.

Although some Ontario Bandidos attended the funerals, what was left of the Rebels — who had gained a great deal of notoriety in 1991 when a member named Daniel R. “Coyote” Wolf wrote a PhD thesis about life in the club that was later published as a book — renounced their Bandidos membership, and threw their lot in with Hells Angels.

It was during this period — just after Project Amigo and the demise of the club's hopes in Edmonton — that Kellestine got out of prison. He went in a Loners chapter president and came out a Bandido. The bosses in Texas made it clear that they did not want Kellestine in charge, so Muscedere did not step down for him to return as president when he was released in August 2004. Instead he offered him the position of sargento de armas (sergeant-at-arms). Kellestine accepted, but was well known to be angry at the fact that he was now taking orders from his old flunky.

The Bandidos gained some traction in Winnipeg, a city with a long tradition of rival biker gangs and strong-willed factions. Their recruiting took off when a small, anti-Hells Angels gang signed on. They had been called Los Montoneros. Police recognized them as a Bandidos puppet gang when some were arrested and on their crest was the acronym SYLB — “Support Your Local Bandidos.” They also had a yellow-on-red patch, the reverse of the Bandidos red on yellow. It's commonplace for puppet gangs to wear the reverse of their parent club's colors, such as the Black Pistons' black-on-white patch which indicates their relationship with the Outlaws, who wear white on black.

The media often reports that the name Los Montoneros means “the Wolf Pack” (and the Montoneros may well have believed that themselves), but it actually has a more complex meaning. In Spanish, the suffix “-ero” means someone who does something, like a profession, much like the English “-er.” And “monton,” depending on where you are in Latin America, can mean to pile or stack or it can simply mean a lot of something. The name Montoneros originally came into use in the 1960s when the left-wing Argentine guerrilla group Movimentos Peronista Montoneros fought against that country's right-wing dictatorship. Basically, it means “the workers” or “the masses.”

Before long, Los Montoneros started wearing a new patch, the familiar “fat Mexican” of Bandidos. And under the logo was a rocker that read “probationary.”

Their leader, Michael “Taz” Sandham, was a big tough guy who had been an auxiliary police officer in Ste. Anne, Manitoba, and a full constable in East St. Paul, Manitoba. Both of those communities are small and relatively affluent suburbs of Winnipeg. He worked very, very hard to keep his law enforcement past a secret from his fellow bikers.

Michael “Taz” Sandham

Sandham had spent a lot of time communicating with the Toronto Chapter, eventually coming to a party on Kellestine's farm. His aim, he told the guys back home, was to get Winnipeg elevated from a probationary chapter to a full chapter (or at least to get a timetable on when they could expect that to happen). But he went home disappointed. Muscedere had little to say on the matter, and Kellestine kept telling him that they just didn't know enough about him or his guys to move forward.

There are lots of different opinions and even a few fabrications about what happened next. But what we do know is that, by early 2006, the Canadian Bandidos were a gang very much divided.

In December 2005, the Bandidos leadership in Texas officially revoked the membership of the only remaining official Canadian chapter. Most sources said that the Americans felt that the Canadians were not pulling their weight financially, and others indicated that the Americans were unnerved by how sloppily the Canadians went about their business, believing they were flagrantly courting prosecution.

While those concerns may have been valid, the Bandidos' Texas leadership's major complaint was that the Canadians wouldn't communicate with them, a matter made worse by the fact that none of the American Bandidos with any authority to check up on them could cross the border because of felony convictions and/or outstanding warrants. Bill “Bandido Bill” Sartelle, the Houston-based national secretary boss, wrote an e-mail to every Bandido chapter in the world indicating the Texans' official position:

The Toronto/Canada president, Muscedere, responded by sending increasingly pleading e-mails back to Texas in an attempt to get them to reconsider. He wrote to Sartelle:

That rubbed the Texans the wrong way; they clearly wanted a less philosophical and more practical discussion. “You can't come here, we can't come there, but you do not want to answer any questions,” Sartelle wrote. “There are issues that need to be resolved. I have made attempts to get these answers, but have not gotten fuck all.”

Sandham had a different, and very telling response. He wrote to Sartelle: “I am just hearing about this problem with Toronto. I hope this does not reflect on us [the probationary chapter in Winnipeg] ... Also, Bandido Wayne ‘W' would like someone their to call him. He is in London, Ontario [Kellestine's home phone number].”

When Muscedere's e-mail exchanges with the Texans failed to move anything forward, another Toronto Bandido named George “Crash” Kriarakis tried his hand at convincing the Americans to reverse their decision and let them stay in the club. He wrote on international guestbooks and forums that “Ontario is standing tall,” indicating they were refusing the Texans' orders to give up their patches.

When Sartelle repeated his demands, Kriarakis confronted him directly. “Give us a fair and reasonable chance,” he implored, then changed tack and insulted Sartelle, calling him “a peace of work.”

Sartelle, clearly a more careful speller but still not a consummate grammarian, wrote back: “Yes, I am a piece of work, and proud of who I am.” His demand stood.

George “Crash” Kriarakis