Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (47 page)

With six bikers dead, Lessard, Pelletier, Michaud and Genest in prison and Trudeau, Coulombe and Lachance in protective custody, the people of Quebec thought the Hells Angels were a spent force. They were dead wrong. After an aggressive recruiting drive and the patching over of a number of small, rural clubs, the Hells Angels were replenished with eager young men ready to make money from drugs and show off their death's heads. In fact, one Hells Angels veteran told a Montreal paper that he was grateful to the cops for cleaning out the club's deadwood.

Sonny Barger and his Bay Area buddies defined the Hells Angels through rules, rites and uniformity. They put together a self-sustaining entity that attracted new members who were willing to die for their brothers simply because of what they believed in. Years later, men like Lessard, Trudeau and Lachance set a precedent for Canadian Hells Angels that would be repeated again and again. Brotherhood has its place, but not if it gets in the way of money or the drug trade. The penalty for going against the club is a bullet in the head and a trip to the bottom of the St. Lawrence. The life of a Canadian Hells Angel isn't about the thrill of the open road or the company of a club of freedom-loving brothers. Instead, it's a sleazy, low-rent existence in which members must sell drugs, plant bombs, hire themselves out as muscle and commit other crimes without knowing if, when or why they could end up facing the small end of a shotgun.

Kelly has driven over the Skyway Bridge twice a day for 12 years but she still looks every time. And she always looks on the same side. Lake Ontario is just another big lake, but Hamilton Harbour has some real character. Even from a quarter mile away, the water looks greasy. On the south side of the harbour, the Hamilton side, there are sinister-looking steel factories from one end to the other. On most days, it's hard to see much of them through the smoke and fog. But the fires are always visible. Sometimes red, purple or even bright blue, the tongues of flame reach three or four storeys into the air. They are there to burn off poisonous gases, but their smell remains. Almost as tall and just as imposing stands another by-product of steelmaking, slag, which shows up as hundred-foot high piles of gray stones. Much of what you see of Hamilton from the Skyway is actually built on slag dumped into the harbour to make more room for even more factories. If you look closely enough, Kelly pointed out, you can see a junk-yard with a fence made of old buses turned on their sides, their windows now shattered and their tops and sides covered with threatening graffiti. It's not a pretty sight.

“It's like a bad car wreck, isn't it?” she said as her silver Toyota Echo swayed in the high winds over the bridge. “Just can't take your eyes off it, eh?” Like most people from Hamilton with any ambition, she got out of town as soon as she could. “To tell you the truth, I don't even know many people back there any more,” she said. “I was one of the last of my friends to move out.” She now lives in Oakville and commutes to her job with an insurance company in the city. Even though she's abandoned her home town and freely speaks derisively of it, Kelly still considers herself a Hamiltonian at heart. After all, there is no Oakville in Oakville. As she says: “It's really just a few thousand nearly identical houses, a gas station and a 7-Eleven.” Hamilton may be smelly and ugly, but at least it's a city with a culture and an identity. She's proud to be from Hamilton and finds herself defending it at dinner parties. “Besides, it's way better than it used to be,” she said. “Back when I was in high school, Hamilton was a very different place—dirtier, smellier, nastier and more violent.”

Kelly grew up in Birdland. Tucked away on the mountain in the southwest corner of Hamilton, as far away from the factories of the northeast as possible, Birdland is more like the suburbs than part of a major city. Originally called Cardinal Heights, the planned community of look-alike houses and identical cul-de-sacs got its more popular name from the fact that all the streets are named after species of birds. The neighborhood joke is that the residents of Titmouse Court wanted to change their street's name because property values might be affected by the mention of mice. Away from busy streets, Birdland was a quiet, well-treed neighborhood where most people knew each other and generally got along. Barbecues and pool parties were commonplace and there were always kids playing some sort of sport in the round part of the cul-de-sacs, while watchful parents worked, relaxed or socialized. Growing up on Bobolink Road, Kelly went to Hill Park High School.

She was even prettier then. It was 1970 and she was a long-legged blonde who got good marks and kept mainly to herself and a few good friends. Since she spent a lot of time with Rodney, her boyfriend, who was already in college at Mohawk, she didn't socialize much with other students after class. But after three years at Hill Park, she basically knew who everybody was.

Even if she had been more outgoing, she probably wouldn't have spent much time with Walter Stadnik. He wasn't really her kind of guy. Born 18 years earlier, on August 3, 1952, at St. Joseph's Hospital at the base of the mountain, Wolodumyr Stadnik was the third son of Andrew and Valentina Stadnik. Living at 98 East 16th Street, a few blocks north of Birdland, he grew up around a different set of kids. Consisting of smaller, less attractive houses filled with scores of immigrant and transplanted farmer families—most of whom had found work in the city's factories, although Andrew Stadnik was a tree surgeon employed by the city—Stadnik's neighborhood was entirely less friendly than Kelly's. It was a place where people generally kept to themselves, preferring to socialize with extended families instead of neighbors. It was nothing like inner-city Hamilton for violence and squalor, but it bred a more rough and tumble kind of kid than Birdland.

But Stadnik—soon called Walter or Wally by everyone but his parents and beginning to spell his last name “Stadnick”—hardly fit the mold of a juvenile delinquent. People who remember him as a child uniformly report that he was intelligent, quiet, polite and generally well behaved. He went to church every Sunday with his parents and seemed to be a pretty good kid. As happens with so many other boys, though, Stadnick changed when he hit puberty. Although he was one of the first kids in his class to clear 5 feet, he soon grew to 5-feet 4-inches and never got much taller. As the shortest boy in class by grade 11, he had to try harder and would often act out in school—and not in ways that educators would approve of in the late 1960s. “He clearly had a great deal of natural intelligence, but he was impossible to motivate,” said a former teacher who didn't want to be named but couldn't hide his frustration. “It was almost like he didn't want to succeed.” Stadnick's marks were good enough to get by, but no better. His best marks came from auto shop, where he showed a great deal of mechanical inclination and an organized mind well-suited to solving complex problems.

While no academic, Stadnick did find some success in the school's social circles. He had an undeniable charm and was very popular with a small segment of the school population and was well known by the rest of it. “Of course I knew Wally, everyone did,” Kelly recalled. “It's not like we were best friends or anything like that; but I knew him well enough to say ‘hi'—although I don't think I would have unless he did first.” But they traveled in different circles. Kelly, quiet, studious and ambitious, spent all her time in class or the library. Walter, on the other hand, could almost always be found in the smoking area if he wasn't in class and often when he was supposed to be. “He was what we used to call an ‘occie'—someone who only took courses that prepare you for a specific occupation, like auto mechanics, electrical or metal shop,” she said. “But he was better than the rest of them; he never called me names or tried to grab my rear end or anything; he seemed nice enough.”

And there was more; Stadnick had even more reason to be popular. According to most people who knew him in high school, he made friends by selling drugs. It was the '70s and drugs were everywhere. High school kids had grown up with almost heroic stories of drug use in the '60s and were anxious to try them out. “I never took drugs myself, so I can't really say,” said Kelly. “But I had lots of friends who did, and they told me they always got them from Wally.”

It wasn't just fellow students who knew about Stadnick. The police were aware of him, but not because they ever caught him doing much. “It was hard in the '70s,” said a Hamilton police officer who was very familiar with the Hill Park students of the era and wanted to be identified simply as “Bob the cop.” “Before that, and again afterwards, it was easy to tell the bad boys from the good boys, but in the '70s, they all looked alike—skinny kids with long hair and denim jackets.” But a dedicated officer could tell the difference by driving the streets, seeing who had an improbably affordable new bike or car, by looking into the faces to see who was putting on a tough-guy attitude or by talking to principals and vice-principals. “Of course we knew who Stadnick was,” he said. “We were sure he was distributing hash, but unless you see him doing it or someone tells on him, there's nothing you can do about it.” Stadnick was arrested once in 1971 for possession of a small amount of hashish. He spent four months in the old Hamilton jail and was put on two years' probation.

Hashish is a dark, putty-like substance made from resin collected from the cannabis plant. It contains the same active ingredient (tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC) as marijuana, but in far lower quantities. It is often smoked in pipes, but younger and/or poorer users tend to inhale the smoke of hash burned on the end of a needle or on the blade of a heated knife. While marijuana is stronger, easier to smoke and less likely to be contaminated with impurities, hash is popular in places where cannabis is hard to grow because it can be molded into almost any shape and is very easy to smuggle over borders. Back in 1970, before the days of hydroponics and grow-lights, growing cannabis in Eastern Canada was virtually impossible and hash was king. Cheaper and easier to conceal than weed, it was the perfect drug for high-schoolers. In the 1970s, big pieces of hash were called cakes and smaller ones were called nuggets.

By 1970, people who knew Stadnick well were calling him “Nurget.” Although this nickname has mystified police and journalists for years, its origin is pretty clear to some. “People in Hamilton have a funny way of talking; they like to play with words,” said Bob the cop. “They'll call Tim Horton's ‘Horny Tim's' or they'll call a bargain a ‘bargoon'—they're not trying to be funny or anything, it's just the way they speak.” After Stadnick was arrested in Jamaica a quarter century later, confused Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers and lawyers asked him why the other Hells Angels called him “Nurget.” He simply smiled and kept quiet, helping further a reputation he had for being secretive and mysterious. They should have asked Bob the cop. “That's an easy one,” he said. “He was called ‘Nurget' because he always had a nugget—or, as the kids in Hamilton would say, a ‘nurget'—of hash on him.” Others say his name had nothing to do with hash but that it actually stemmed from his small size.

Whether he was dealing hash or just carrying it for a friend, as he maintained in his 1971 trial, he certainly appeared to have lots more spending cash than the other kids in the neighborhood. Looking for something more thrilling than a ten-speed or the old man's Delta 88, Stadnick bought a motorcycle. It was old and needed work—that was no problem for a mind like his—but it was really something. A few of the kids at Hill Park had cars, mostly junkers, but nobody else had a motorcycle. Even though the Canadian climate makes motorcycles useless for about six months a year and the summer vacation means that you can only ride to school for a few weeks, a motorcycle can turn an otherwise forgettable guy into a big man on campus. Stadnick's star was clearly rising.

The start of the '70s was a hard time to be coming of age. After Altamont, the hippies, with their peace and love, were beginning to be seen as ridiculous. It was a cynical and pessimistic time. More important for teenagers in Hamilton, the Canadian economy was suffering through the beginning of its worst period since the Depression. For the first time since then—and in defiance of basic economic law—it was undergoing a combination of stagnant growth combined with runaway inflation. While retail prices were getting higher, wages were not keeping up and the level of unemployment was staggering. Hamilton was hit particularly hard. After years of feasting on the success of the auto, aerospace and military goods industries as a primary supplier of steel, Hamilton's economy took a nosedive as those businesses slowed down considerably. With fewer users and plunging prices, the market was flooded with cheaper steel from places like Japan, Iran and Taiwan. Layoffs were the only way to keep the factories alive, but it put hundreds of men out of work and effectively closed off the only natural employment opportunity for many young people.

“The days when they opened their doors to anyone who showed up were long gone,” said Justin Pietzcerak, whose dad had worked at Stelco and brought his sons up to believe they would too. “Even when they weren't laying people off, you had to have an ‘in'—someone like a father or uncle who already worked there—just to push a broom.” Frustrated by the lack of factory work, young people in Hamilton looked to other industries and other places where the recession hadn't hit as hard. Thousands sought work in Toronto or the United States and even more, like Pietzcerak, went to Alberta. “At the time, it seemed like the thing to do,” he said. “While the steel and car factories back East were getting rid of people, the oil and gas drillers in Alberta were hiring all the time.”

For those who stayed behind, real opportunities were scarce. College and university graduates were having trouble finding work and those who had banked on a guaranteed factory job or just hadn't planned ahead were in a far worse state. A city that was built around and dependent on a single industry, Hamilton suffered a domino effect when the steel factories were idled. Stores, restaurants and other services that were accustomed to a steady stream of customers now had to make do with long stretches of inactivity and minor spikes in business twice a month when government assistance checks arrived. “It was a joke at the time that the biggest employer in Hamilton wasn't Stelco or Dofasco, but the Unemployment Insurance Commission,” said Bob the cop. “It wasn't far from true.”