Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (6 page)

But Satan's Choice certainly didn't mind doing business with Americans or any other nationality. By the early 1970s, members of Satan's Choice were distributing and even manufacturing drugs intended primarily for the U.S. market. Remote Canadian locations made drug manufacturing harder to detect, and Americans paid much more for the same drugs than Canadians would.

The two primary products were “Canadian blue,” a cheap imitation Valium, and PCP, a powerful hallucinogen the cops tell us is called “angel dust.”

Alain Templain was a member of the Oshawa Chapter of Satan's Choice, and a very rich one. He owned his own floatplane, which he regularly flew up to the luxurious Northern Ontario fishing resort he also owned, catering mainly to well-heeled Americans looking for monster-sized walleyes and pikes.

Guindon had flown up to Templain's lodge on Oba Lake at least once. In Algoma District, about 200 miles north of Sault Ste. Marie, the resort was accessible only by plane and surrounded by miles and miles of rough, rocky forests.

And the cops had a suspicion that Templain was doing more than just guiding vacationers to the best fishing holes and cutting bait. They were right.

In 1976, about a dozen cops from the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) posing as rich American businessmen stayed at Templain's lodge. In the middle of the night, just before they were scheduled to leave, they raided a shack on a small island in the middle of the lake. Inside, they found Templain and Guindon surrounded by more than $6 million in PCP and PCP-making chemicals and equipment.

Both were sentenced to 17 years.

Without their “Supreme Commander,” the individual chapters of Satan's Choice began to grow apart. It happened in a large part because of the nature of the cities they were in. In Toronto, it was all about retailing drugs to kids. In St. Catharines, the focus was on getting product over the border. In Niagara Falls, it was strippers and escorts. Kingston's specialty was supplying the prisons and college kids.

Two cities, in particular, stood out — Montreal and Hamilton. The violent ones. That's because they were both still Mafia towns. In most of the other places Satan's Choice existed, they were the big dogs, but in Montreal and Hamilton, they still answered to the dons.

You have to realize that the Montreal of 1977 was a very different place than it is today. The separatist Parti Québécois had just been elected and had not yet gotten very far with their subtle form of ethnic cleansing. Montreal was still Canada's biggest, richest and most cosmopolitan city. English was widely spoken, and in the west end of the island, French was rarely heard unless some city workers were fixing a road or maybe a bridge.

The common perception at the time was that all anglophones in Montreal were rich and cultured, but it's not true. There were actually plenty of poor and middle-class English-speakers and some of them became involved in crime. Montreal had two branches of the traditional Mafia — the Sicilian Rizzuto Family and the Irish West End Gang. Both conducted business in English and they worked very closely with the area's bikers. Too smart to rely on just one source of tough-guy labor, both families employed a variety of bikers. The most prominent ones were Satan's Choice in the west end, and the fiercely violent Popeyes in Laval, just north of the city. Satan's Choice generally spoke English; the Popeyes were completely francophone.

There was lots of work to go around. In a city teeming with hipsters and wannabe jet-setters, cocaine was king — and the profits were huge. Heroin was a steady and lucrative business. Prostitution in Montreal succeeded like in no other city. Marijuana was popular, but the profit margins were so low, compared to other drugs, that the trade was dominated by small-timers.

The bikers did some of the cannabis trade. But, primarily, they supported Mafia activities. They sold coke, they imported firearms, they collected debts and they acted as bodyguards for the bosses. It was a very lucrative time to be a biker and recruits were lining up for a chance to get their patch.

Hamilton was — as it always seems to be — another story. The Mafia wasn't there because the city was rich and cosmopolitan. In fact, it was the opposite. But the Mafia was strong there anyway.

It happened naturally. In the early part of the 20
^th
century, a number of small local foundries merged and attracted more business. Hamilton became Steeltown. Although other places in Canada made steel, for most of the century, the lion's share of the country's steel — anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters at any given time — came from Hamilton.

As the auto industry expanded by leaps and bounds and the world's militaries became increasingly mechanized, the worldwide demand for steel skyrocketed. Hamilton's economy boomed. But while American factories found labor in failed Midwestern farmers and displaced southern blacks, the steel factories in Hamilton had to rely on immigration.

Canada wasn't really comfortable with the thought of people of color quite yet, so its doors were thrown open to Europeans. They came in droves as the steel companies were hiring pretty well any warm male body — as long as he was white.

The steel workers came mostly from Scotland, Ireland and Eastern Europe. But the houses they lived in, the streets they drove on and the markets they bought food in came courtesy of a different group.

Italians — virtually all of them from Racalmuto, a town near the southern shore of Sicily — streamed into Hamilton. Few of them worked in the steel plants, where a workforce with strong English-language skills helped avoid serious accidents, but they found work in other industries.

Racalmuto is a little different from what most of us think of when we think of Italy. Closer to Africa than it is to Rome, Racalmuto gets its name from the Arabic phrase
rahal maut
, which means “dead village.” Its history is that of defeat, and the anger that comes with it. Recorded history shows that the area has been invaded and occupied by the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards, Austrians and, most recently, Italians.

While we in North America generally think of Sicily as part of Italy because it says so on a map, the Sicilians don't always agree. Although similar, what people in Sicily spoke before the Italians took over was not really Italian; and many people on the island would have as hard a time understanding a Milanese as they would a Parisian.

They were a deeply religious and superstitious people. They had a great belief in
mal'uocchiu
— the evil eye. Revenge was a significant part of their culture.

In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi conquered Sicily and made it part of the new Italian state. Soon thereafter, the Mafia was born.

These days, we think of the Mafia as a group of criminals out to make a quick buck off the common man. But that's not how it began. The Italians ruled Sicily no better than the Austrian princes they deposed. While the Sicilians languished in poverty, the Italians did little more than impose taxes and take young men off to war. There was basically no government in Sicily. No police, no infrastructure, no nothing.

So they made one themselves. The Mafia began as a secret government, a group of local men who could get things done. They were seen as a godsend by the locals who hated the oppressive, distant government who officially ruled them.

But the Mafia — the name actually comes from the Arabic word for bragging — was far from perfect. They were very much what you would expect from a group of rural, uneducated men who had a great deal of power and were accountable to nobody but themselves. They killed their enemies. They settled disputes with bullets and they enriched themselves whenever and however they could. They particularly targeted what they considered foreigners — anyone but Sicilians.

And they came to Hamilton basically intact. There they saw a place that was pretty much what they saw in Sicily, although colder and full of non-Sicilians. The government and the mainstream community, who spoke another language, didn't care for them. Generally, the only contact they had with the state were the cops, most of whom were Irish or Scottish and seemed little different from the Italian military that had kept an eye on them back home. The cops were hard on the Sicilians, with a standing order to break up any group of more than three of them.

When World War II erupted, the Canadian government rounded up many Sicilian men and sent them to internment camps simply for being Italian. It did not build a great deal of trust in the community.

These immigrants established their own territory — north of Barton Street and west of Sherman Avenue — and their own shadow government. The Mafia began in Hamilton minutes after the first boat from Racalmuto landed. They were joined soon thereafter by the Calabrians — people from the toe of the boot Italy is often likened to — who had their own culture and organized crime traditions.

While the Mafia in Hamilton did do some benevolent work, it became involved in criminal activity right away. Protection rackets, kidnapping and loan-sharking were translated directly from the old country. When prohibition hit Canada first and then the U.S., the Hamilton Mafia got rich running booze both ways — first in and then out of the country. When that ended, they moved into drugs. That expanded to other illegal operations, including prostitution.

And it caught the public's attention. Hamilton Mafiosi became notorious and sometimes even beloved celebrities. The first was suave Rocco Perri, who was called “King of the Bootleggers” and “Canada's Al Capone.” The exploits of Perri and his outspoken wife, Besha Starkman, were followed by thousands until he was murdered. Perri was followed by decidedly more down-market types like Dominic Musitano, a stone-cold killer who once shot a man for honking his car horn in front of his house. At about the same time, the charismatic John “Johnny Pops” Papalia emerged. When I was growing up in Hamilton, those names were as well known around town as any ballplayers' names would be in another city. The Hamilton Mafia was everywhere in the city and made little effort to hide its existence.

The Mafia had a long history of hiring non-Italians to work for them, often to do the dirty work. Pat Musitano had hired Ken Murdock to murder Johnny Pops and Carmen Barillaro, but smarter Mafiosi knew better than to trust guys like Murdock. The very reason the Mafia works is because of discipline and mutual respect. And that's why Mafia outfits around the world like to hire bikers. Outlaw motorcycle gangs — especially the big ones — have an organizational structure that shares a great deal of similarity to the Mafia's own. Would-be members — usually very young — start out very low on the org chart. They do simple tasks, with limited responsibility and little knowledge of the big picture. Their rewards are small if they exist at all, and the risk of being caught is high.

They do it readily because they can see the payoff. They ride a bike. Their boss has a Chevy. Their bosses' boss has a Cadillac.
His
boss has a Ferrari. They endure the long hours, the low pay, the intense danger of being arrested, assaulted or killed because they believe that some day it will be them cruising around in the luxury car, squiring a couple of beauties and having the whole world at their fingertips.

But there was a problem in Ontario, particularly in Hamilton. Papalia was running most of the province until he was murdered. And of the many things he didn't like (and there were a lot), one of the most prominent was bikers. He found them stupid and without culture, prone to get caught and prone to rat each other out. He didn't like their habit of getting addicted to drugs and he hated the fact that they openly courted police attention with their loud exhaust pipes and their colorful uniforms.

Papalia was smart enough to know that he couldn't rid his province or his city of bikers any more than he could the cops. He reluctantly allowed his own men — and those of his associates — to hire them from time to time, for certain dirty jobs. But he drew the line at Hells Angels. He'd seen what they were capable of in Montreal and he wanted no part of them. As long as he was in charge, Papalia vowed, there would be no Hells Angels' presence in Ontario. At least not officially.

Two and a half years after Papalia's death, that all changed with the Hells Angels mass patch-over in Sorel.

You could hardly make a more perfect breeding ground for biker gangs than Southwestern Ontario, even if you tried. Stretching from Windsor (a declining auto-making town that had pinned much of its economic hopes on a casino and bars and strip joints with laxer laws than those in Detroit, directly across the river) to London (a more economically diverse, but similarly declining city that was also relying on slot machines to attract revenue), Southwestern Ontario is a small, but densely populated region.

The two cities are connected by the MacDonald-Cartier Freeway — called Highway 401 in Ontario and Autoroute 20 in Quebec — that starts in Windsor and ends in Quebec City. London is located where Highway 402 meets the 401. Highway 402 begins at Sarnia, another blighted border city, only this one has traditionally been tied to petrochemicals instead of manufacturing.

The rest of the area is mostly farmland disrupted by a few small cities and towns. With more in common with the Great Plains in a topographical sense than the rest of the Great Lakes Region, Southwestern Ontario is overwhelmingly flat and dry. It's a place where it's hard not to be bored. Motorcycles are a distraction, so are social clubs and drugs, especially stimulants like methamphetamine.

It's a place tailor-made to incubate motorcycle gangs. And it has. Dozens of gangs came out of the area in the 1960s, all basically looking and acting like one another. They were all small-time. And they were, for the most part, absolutely unready when the bigger, more powerful and more aggressive gangs from south of the border came looking for their territory.