Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (41 page)

While the logical answer is crime, the legal answer is more complex. Or at least more elusive. When asked what his client did for a living, Stadnick's high-priced lawyer Stephan Frankel said: “I don't know, I really don't know.” After a long, uncomfortable silence, he said: “It wasn't something that would generally come up; it wasn't really something that I needed to know . . . I don't know if it's strange necessarily—Walter is a really private person.” Too private, apparently, to tell his lawyer what he does for a living.

Though his lawyer was oblivious, the police weren't. Although he was opaque in his business dealings, Stadnick wore his Hells Angels colours proudly, and always seemed to be at least on the periphery of trouble. A paid informant embedded close to the Hells Angels elite Nomads Chapter told his Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) handlers that Stadnick was not only deeply involved in the lucrative Southern Ontario drug trade, but that he was also making strategic alliances with biker gangs in Ontario and Western Canada in an effort to win them over from the Hells Angels' rivals, the Outlaws. Although cops in urban centers like Hamilton may view drug dealing as an unavoidable part of urban life—throw a Hells Angel in jail and someone else will take his place—the rumblings of a potential gang war were particularly worrisome. At least 157 people were murdered in the Hells Angels-Rock Machine conflict in Quebec and, when the Hells Angels rose from the battle victorious, they turned their homicidal attention to the government, killing two prison guards and threatening the lives of every guard, cop, prosecutor and judge in the province. Quebec was teetering on the edge of a Colombia-style government-gangster stalemate. “No, we don't need that here in Ontario,” said another Hamilton cop.

Farther north in Montreal it was bitterly cold, one of those days that makes you wonder if winter will ever end. At 4:00 a.m., RCMP Sergeant Tom O'Neill arrived at the headquarters of the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) with armloads of coffee and doughnuts. He wasn't complaining about the cold or the early start or the long day he knew he had ahead of him—if anything, he was eager to get started. As NCO of Operation Printemps (Springtime) 2001, it was his job to coordinate a joint police task force consisting of 2,000 officers poised to pounce on 142 bikers.

Of them, two stood out in particular. Stadnick and Donald “Pup” Stockford were friends who grew up on the rough-and-tumble streets of Hamilton and, despite starting with no French skills and a pronounced size disadvantage, somehow managed to join the traditionally francophone Canadian arm of the Hells Angels; Stockford became president and Stadnick's right-hand man. At the top of the Canadian Hells Angels are the Nomads, an elite chapter of the Hells Angels founded, sources say, by Stadnick himself.

Stadnick and Stockford, along with such Montreal-based luminaries as Maurice “Mom” Boucher and David “Wolf ” Carroll were among the Nomads management team who controlled not only the other Hells Angels, but associated gangs as well. A secret RCMP report read: “They'll have about a dozen members and will control all of Quebec as their territory. They'll put pressure on clubs that aren't doing a good job selling drugs.” “Pressure” in Hells Angels' terms usually means violence. According to police, Stadnick's primary mandate was to recruit established biker gangs from Ontario and Western Canada into the Hells Angels family by any means necessary.

O'Neill knew that if the task force could put Stadnick and Stockford behind bars for a long time, they stood a very good chance of stopping or at least slowing down the gang's rapid and vicious western expansion.

In densely populated areas, and Ontario is no exception, the sex and drug trades are controlled by a number of organized crime groups. In approximate order of influence, they include the Italian and Irish mafias at the top, the biker gangs, Asian gangs, Jamaican gangs, and at the bottom the independent operators and other bottom-feeders. All of them live in a sort of uneasy tolerance of one another, with only the occasional head kicked in to maintain order. That hierarchy, as the authorities in Quebec found out, gets blown away when the Hells Angels arrive. Like a cunning retailer intent on eliminating the competition, the Hells Angels use their name and reputation, combined with smart marketing like cut-rate prices, free samples and other incentives to establish themselves as the dominant, if not only, dog in the yard. Unlike the Wal-Marts of the world, though, the Hells Angels reserve the right to kill whoever stands in their way. Competition becomes fierce; rival biker gangs often increase their activity in an attempt to show the Hells Angels they are worthy of membership or that they are powerful enough to remain independent. The Hells Angels can patch them in (give them membership), keep them as vassals or try to eliminate them. No matter which happens, the level of street crime and violence escalates.

Before the RCMP, the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) and individual police forces in Quebec started rounding up bikers in unprecedented numbers, O'Neill wanted to take down Stadnick and Stockford. On March 25, he set up a conference call with Pacey and a crew of eager young Hamilton police officers, telling them for the first time what the RCMP knew about the Hells Angels and particularly Stadnick and Stockford. The excitement was palpable. The Hamilton cops had been trying to bring down Stadnick for years, but the most they'd been able to nail him with were traffic tickets. “I could hear a lull,” O'Neill said. “They'd obviously been trying to get him for years.”

After O'Neill finished, one of the excited Hamilton cops asked: “You say there are murder charges—is that first degree or second?”

“First degree,” O'Neill said with some satisfaction. Then he went on to read them the details of all 13 murder-one counts against Stadnick.

Another long silence. O'Neill wondered how his team in Hamilton was taking the news, until one of them couldn't help it any longer and shouted: “Oh man, we love you guys, you're the best!”

Stockford was easy. Ancaster is considered by many to be the nicest, certainly the most bucolic, of Hamilton's suburbs. Up on the mountain and far away from the smoke-belching factories of the city's North and East Ends, Ancaster is quiet, relaxed and safely removed from the squalor and poverty of inner-city Hamilton. When you see a police car up here you figure some kids got hold of some beer or something equally innocent. On the morning of March 26, however, a heavily armed SWAT team, complete with body armor and assault rifles, descended upon the Stockford residence. Taking no chances, the cops called to Stockford from a truck-mounted loudspeaker, informing him that they had a warrant for his arrest and a warrant to search his home. Almost immediately, Stockford came out of the house with his hands on the back of his head. Shivering in just jeans and a T-shirt, he was immediately whisked into a police car and taken to Hamilton for questioning. Inside, the cops found a treasure trove of evidence—everything from laminated index cards with the names, addresses and phone numbers of Nomads members, prospects and hangarounds to minutes of gang meetings to a tax return for Nomads Quebec Inc., and even a list of the bikers' favorite restaurants in Montreal. The police were surprised by how much incriminating material they carted away. For all his skill as an organizer, Stockford made a pretty lousy gangster.

Stadnick proved more difficult. Cloverhill Road is two blocks long and surrounded on two sides by a 90-degree turn in the forested cliff that separates Upper Hamilton from Lower Hamilton. It is about as isolated as you can get in a major city. That facade of calm was shattered on the morning of March 26 when eager police came racing down the street. Suddenly, they stopped in front of Stadnick's unassuming red brick house. There seemed to be some confusion. “Nothing happened for a few minutes,” said one eyewitness. “Then a news van—with all the dishes on top—arrived and it all started going down.” The police started blaring orders at Stadnick's house. Other than the light rustling of neighbors stirring and the white noise of police radios, there was silence. Again they pleaded for Stadnick to come out without violence. Nothing. Suddenly six large officers in full body armor came running out of a truck with what looked to one witness like “a log with handles.” Two hits and the door was down. Two officers with their backs to the house each threw something into the opening where the door had been. Immediately there was a sound like twin thunderclaps and the inside of the house lit up “like it was daylight inside.” Still nothing moved. One of the men who had thrown in a percussion grenade shouted “GO! GO! GO!” while windmilling his left arm. Armored men with assault rifles and shotguns stormed the house. Despite the fact that 24 hours of surveillance had shown no movement in or around the house, the police seemed surprised to find nobody at home.

Perhaps disappointed that their quarry had eluded them, they tore the place apart. After the raid, Stadnick's common-law wife, Kathi Anderson, complained that the house had suffered extensive damage from the grenades and that, even years later, the police were holding on to her computer and her “printer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, scanner and CDs and laptop.” “They took my fax machine, my telephone, every VHS tape I owned, pictures right off the wall, dozens of photo albums . . . ” and more. Complaining that the police had shown perhaps more zeal than efficiency, Anderson went on to say, “They also smashed the front and side doors in (although they are within 8 to 10 feet of each other) and left my home unwatched and open for five days.” She also pointed out that in the Quebec arrests, police knocked on the front door.

Stadnick proved more discreet than his partner Stockford just up the road in Ancaster. The police found little in Stadnick's house that had any value in a courtroom aside from photos and a Valentine's card from a 10-year-old niece that asked “Uncle Wally” if he was “still in charge of the Hells Angels.”

Pacey wasn't pleased. He called O'Neill in Montreal. “We haven't seen him around,” he said. “Do you guys have any intelligence that he's away?”

O'Neill didn't know. He called RCMP intelligence and asked them to run a check on exit points. He was in luck. A few hours later, the phone rang. Stadnick and Anderson had flown from Toronto's Pearson Airport to Montego Bay in Jamaica. The cops even knew what hotel they were staying in.

It took the RCMP's Jamaica liaison officer, Richard Sauvé, six hours to drive from his office in Kingston to the Wyndham just outside Montego Bay. O'Neill's luck held. Sauvé spotted Stadnick in minutes. But then, there weren't too many longhaired, 5-foot 4-inch vacationers covered in tattoos and burn scars. “I saw him—he's sitting by the pool,” Sauvé told O'Neill. “He's with his girlfriend.”

O'Neill told Sauvé to sit tight and keep an eye on the suspect. With Stadnick in Jamaica, the arrest became an international operation. O'Neill was wise enough to make sure all his paperwork was in order before he made his move.

On the morning of March 28, the same day the Quebec arrests went down, Stadnick and Anderson moved from the Wyndham to the Ritz. The papers at the time, especially the vulgar Montreal tabloids, claimed that the couple had heard about the first few Quebec arrests by telephone or e-mail and were on the run, but Anderson says that they had dropped by the Ritz—the hotel they originally tried to book—the night before and asked if any rooms were available. When one was, they switched.

After settling in at the Ritz, the couple decided to relax by the pool. Stadnick knew instinctively from the sound of boots on pavement and the gasps of the vacationers that something was going down. When he looked up, he was staring at the hole in the end of an assault rifle. There were many of them, in fact, and they were all pointed at him and his wife. He said nothing. “Mr. Walter Stadnick?” asked a tall man with a prominently decorated uniform, even though it was clear he knew whom he was talking to. Walter nodded.

Sauvé stepped forward from behind the SWAT team and identified himself. “Mr. Stadnick, you are under arrest for 13 counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder, two counts of narcotics trafficking and two counts of attempting to smuggle narcotics.” Stadnick went peacefully.

After a night in a tiny Montego Bay cell Anderson described as a “hell hole,” Stadnick was transported to Jamaica's National Remand Centre in Kingston. Surrounded by razor wire and a 24-hour armed guard and obliged to use a communal toilet bucket, Stadnick waited patiently for his time in court. On April 2, he was led into Kingston's Half-Way-Tree Courthouse, where he confidently told resident magistrate Martin Gayle that he had no idea why the charges were being leveled against him and that he would readily waive his right to an extradition process so he could fight them. Granted.

The paperwork wouldn't be completed until April 10. When O'Neill and a partner from the Montreal Police arrived in Kingston, they were shocked at the atrocious conditions at the Remand Centre. Describing the scene as “a bit like [the 1978 prison movie]
Midnight Express
,” O'Neill thought he'd find Stadnick desperate to get back to the relatively posh conditions of a Canadian jail. He was surprised by what he found. Sitting on the floor, chatting and laughing with some friends, Stadnick made O'Neill wait until he was finished his sentence before acknowledging him. Unruffled, O'Neill decided to play with Stadnick a bit. “So, Walter, how'd you like to stay here for a couple more weeks?” he asked. “It can be arranged.”