Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (56 page)

In August, the next time Stadnick was back in Winnipeg, he was entertaining a few Los Brovos, Spartans and local call girls in a downtown rock 'n' roll bar called the Rolling Stone Cabaret. The drinks and conversation were flowing and everyone was having a good time, when a pair of unwelcome guests dropped in. Two off-duty Winnipeg cops, already drunk, sauntered into the bar and took a table near Stadnick's. As soon as they sat down, they started in on the assault. Making fun of Stadnick's height, clothes and scars and questioning his relationship with the ever-present Magnussen, the cops probably intended to raise doubt about the Hells Angels, but only managed to make themselves and their employers look bad. When they finally became frustrated at the lack of reaction they were getting, the two cops stumbled out of the bar, still flinging insults and accusations. Outside the bar, the cops got a bit bolder. No longer content with calling the bikers names, they started pushing them around and slapping them. There was no reaction until one of the cops mounted a Los Brovos' Harley. In an instant he and the other officer were leapt upon by the bikers and beaten badly. Both officers wound up in local emergency rooms, treated for a variety of injuries. Stadnick, Magnussen and another biker were arrested.

Police nationwide rejoiced as they finally had the elusive Walter Stadnick. Not only had he been arrested for assault—and on a police officer yet—but it had happened when he was out on bail. “I couldn't believe it,” said Harris. “It was like Walter, who was so careful here at home and in Montreal, went crazy out west.”

But their celebration was short-lived. On October 4, 1993, Stadnick came to trial for the airport arrest. His lawyer argued for a stay on the grounds that the
Winnipeg Sun
had run an article about Stadnick's career with the Hells Angels, which he maintained would jeopardize his client's chances of getting a fair trial. He also questioned the accuracy of the article, and he argued to get the reporter to reveal her sources. Before the trial, the woman who wrote the story, Melanie Verhaeghe, noticed she was being followed by a large man with long blond hair in a Jeep (he was later identified as Magnussen), and she told Stadnick's lawyer, Sheldon Pinx. She expected him to be surprised and helpful, but actually found him quite threatening. He pointed out that he had a thick file on her and had had her followed by a private investigator who had shot some pretty interesting videotape of her daily life. The judge didn't agree that the article would make a difference and the trial went on as planned. Despite hours of testimony, the prosecution could prove nothing. Although there are laws against earning money selling drugs, there is no law against having $81,000 in cash, and, since it could not be linked to any criminal act, Stadnick was free to go.

A few weeks later, Stadnick was back in Winnipeg for the inquest for the assault trial. No sooner had the judge read the charges than he, chuckling, dismissed the case. Clearly, he pointed out, the drunken off-duty police officers had provoked the bikers. Again, Stadnick was free.

While the Hells Angels still had no official presence in Manitoba, Stadnick considered his work there successful, despite his run-ins with the police and the press. He had Los Brovos and the Spartans not only talking, but partying together. He had, according to police, good business relationships with both gangs, with the Hells Angels supplying drugs, prostitutes and strippers, which the local clubs marketed to hungry Winnipeggers.

The situation in Ontario was far less welcoming. The Outlaws were the dominant gang, so Stadnick courted the next biggest, Satan's Choice. He could often be seen escorting Bernie “the Frog” Guindon, national president of Satan's Choice, to Oshawa strip joints and even fine Toronto restaurants. “He'd make a round trip of it,” said one OPP officer. He'd see Guindon in Oshawa, take him out for the night, drive over to Hamilton to take his folks to church and then fly off to Winnipeg.” Satan's Choice was one of many different biker gangs to emerge from Southern Ontario in the middle 1960s. The key difference was the leadership of Guindon, who assumed club presidency in 1965. While not major players in organized crime, the gang made a name for itself by fighting, and sometimes destroying, neighboring gangs. Rumbling with clubs like the Golden Hawks, the Fourth Reich, the Chain Men and others, Satan's Choice became the most feared and respected bikers in the province.

And, as the gang grew, it added chapters. Every summer, Guindon hosted an all-members meeting and party in the resort town of Wasaga Beach, about 75 miles northwest of Toronto. It was a habit that didn't always go down well with other vacationers, but rarely led to any legal trouble. “Oh yeah, it was awful when they came,” said Ian, who had a cottage in Wasaga Beach in the '60s and '70s. “They'd camp out right in your front yard without asking and throw garbage and bottles around—and some of them just smelled awful.” Intrusive and obnoxious as they may have been, the bikers had little to fear from the cottagers. “There's no way we would have called the cops; there were just too many of them and they were mean-looking—real thugs,” said Ian. “We just stepped around them and went about our business as best we could.”

That tolerance was tested in August 1968 when a
Globe and Mail
photographer infiltrated the party and took pictures of one of their games, in which a live chicken was placed in a ring with about two dozen bikers, who quickly tore it to pieces. The winner of the competition was the biker with the biggest chunk of flesh. When the photos ran, the public was outraged. The Ontario Humane Society even offered a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone involved in the game. Nobody came forward.

A few arrests for animal cruelty wouldn't have made a difference anyway. Satan's Choice was big and rapidly getting bigger. At its peak in the early 1970s, Satan's Choice was the second-biggest biker gang in the world—far bigger than the Outlaws and second only to the Hells Angels—with chapters in Hamilton, Oshawa, Guelph, St. Catharines, Preston (now part of Cambridge), Peterborough, Ottawa, Kingston, Windsor, Montreal and Vancouver. The primary reason for the club's success was the leadership of its national president, or “supreme commander,” as he preferred to be called.

A former Canadian amateur light-middleweight boxing champion, Bernie Guindon was a smart man and a natural leader. He became Satan's Choice president at the age of 22 and recruited area clubs in much the same way Stadnick would decades later—wining, dining and using force when necessary. Satan's Choice became so impressive that emissaries from the Outlaws and Hells Angels came to Canada and attempted to recruit them, only to be turned down without specific reasons. Guindon was also known for quelling dissension within the club. In 1973, a fight at a strip joint caused the Toronto Satan's Choice chapter to become enraged and declare war on two major independents, the Vagabonds and the Black Diamond Riders. When Guindon heard, he called a summit meeting with the presidents of both clubs and negotiated a peace treaty without informing the Toronto chapter until afterward. They accepted their commander's decision without question.

The success of his mutual tolerance pact gave Guindon an idea. Aware that the Hells Angels were hungry for a foothold in Ontario, he played one superpower against the other. He called his contacts in the Outlaws and they jumped at the chance to form an alliance that eventually also included the Vagabonds and Toronto's biggest independent club, the Para-Dice Riders.

Arrested in 1973 for aggravated sexual assault, Guindon went to prison and worked on his boxing. Although he was a model prisoner, claiming that he wanted to represent Canada in the 1976 Olympics or teach kids how to box and avoid the mistakes he'd made, he had a hard time with the parole board. The sticking point was always the same: they wouldn't release him unless he stayed away from unsavory characters, and the other members of Satan's Choice fell under that definition. “They're the only friends I have,” he told a
Toronto Star
reporter. “I'm not going to give them up.” He served his full sentence.

The Chicago-based Outlaws saw their opening. Almost as soon as Guindon was behind bars, they sent a group of emissaries with a tempting offer. In exchange for marketing their drugs in Ontario—an attractive proposition in and of itself—the Outlaws offered to treat Satan's Choice members as equals, and Outlaws chapters in border states even promised to alter their patch to include a maple leaf and a tongue of flame in honor of the Canadian club. Within two months of the alliance being formed, two U.S.-based Outlaws were arrested attempting to re-start their lives under different names in a different country. James “Blue” Starrett, who was running a successful business called Charlie Brown Painting Contractors in St. Catharines, was arrested and deported for escaping a Florida prison, where he was serving time for the shotgun murder of a woman at an Outlaws party. Five weeks later, William “Gatemouth” Edson was caught leaving a Kitchener Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) store. As an Outlaw in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, he'd murdered three Hells Angels, beaten the girlfriend of a Bandidos member and tortured a woman with heated spoons and lit cigarettes because he saw her wearing an Outlaws T-shirt. His fake Ontario driver's license identified him as Dennis Lupo. Similarly, the most wanted member of Satan's Choice, a murderer named Howard “Pigpen” Barry was arrested in North Carolina with a Florida driver's license claiming his name was Tim Jones. He was wearing Outlaws colors at the time.

Despite the increased trouble with the law, Guindon honored the alliance when he came out of prison, reasoning that it was better to work with the Outlaws than to be at war with them. He was also impressed by the efficient, almost corporate, way they ran their drug business and he certainly didn't mind the sudden wealth it brought. But it was that industrial style of drug manufacturing that eventually brought down Guindon and his independent biker gang. It happened where the bikers considered themselves most safe. Oba Lake is a remote fishing and hunting spot about 150 miles northeast of Sault Ste. Marie, accessible only by train or floatplane. There were only two buildings on the lake. Next to the train tracks was a lodge where wealthy, mostly American, sportsmen stayed when they were after walleye or moose. The lodge was owned by Alain Templain, an important member of the Oshawa chapter of Satan's Choice, who flew his own floatplane up north every summer. The other building was much smaller and newer. On an island in the middle of the lake, the Outlaws built a sophisticated drug lab and staffed it with members of Satan's Choice. Guindon and Templain were there on August 6, 1975, when the island was raided by OPP officers who were posing as fishermen and staying at Templain's lodge. Caught with nine pounds of PCP and 236 pounds of unfinished PCP with a total value of $6 million, Guindon and Templain went away for 17 years.

Almost as soon as the commander was in prison, his hand-picked successor, Garnet “Mother” McEwen from the St. Catharines chapter, called a summit meeting. That night he convinced the presidents of the Montreal, Windsor and Ottawa chapters to burn their colors and join the Outlaws. Dissenting members were to be forcibly retired. For the summer of 1977, the party moved from Wasaga Beach to Crystal Beach, just ten miles from the U.S. border, where it became a massive patching-over ceremony.

When Guindon found out, he offered $10,000 of his own cash for McEwen's head. But it was too late; the onslaught of giant American super-gangs had begun. The Outlaws had established a massive presence in Ontario and a beachhead in Quebec. The remaining chapters of Satan's Choice eventually either joined the Outlaws or, without Guindon's guidance, faded into relative obscurity while he was behind bars. Nobody ever collected on Guindon's reward. McEwen was eventually exiled by the Outlaws for embezzling $30,000 and fled to Alberta, where he tried to go straight with a job at a hotel. He last showed up in the public eye in 1990 when a biker—unaware of his identity—beat him severely with his own artificial leg.

An alliance of major independents kept the Outlaws out of Toronto until the summer of 1984, when the local drug supply dried up. Outlaws leaned heavily on local dealers and suppliers to keep any drugs from getting into the hands of area bikers. The siege broke in September when Robert “Pumpkin” Marsh convinced his fellow Iron Hogs to patch over and become the Outlaws Toronto chapter. “They were a bunch of idiots,” said Harris. “But it got the Outlaws into Toronto.” And it also helped form a new anti-Hells Angels alliance, including the Outlaws, the Para-Dice Riders, the Vagabonds and even the Satan's Choice, minus Guindon.

By 1986, when they patched over the Holocaust motocycle gang based in London (formerly the Queensmen), the Outlaws had become the dominant biker gang in Ontario, with other chapters in Toronto, Hamilton, Windsor, St. Catharines, Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Kingston. The Kingston chapter was especially successful, as it was very close to the U.S. border and even closer to Canada's largest prison population, an excellent market for drugs. Their success frustrated the Hells Angels, who were established in Quebec, Nova Scotia and British Columbia, but were hungry for a chance at richer markets. They were forced to audition clubs that the Outlaws had passed over, like Sudbury's Coffin Wheelers, Kitchener's Henchmen and until they fell apart, Stadnick's own old gang, the Wild Ones of Hamilton.