Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (64 page)

Overwhelmed by the amount of evidence against him, Lajoie-Smith later pleaded guilty to the Cadieux beating. Using the proceeds-of-crime law, Carcajou seized his residence, Cadillac and two Harleys. A week before the government was to auction off his 13-room house, it mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground. With Lajoie-Smith out of commission, the Hells Angels sent the still-ambitious Steinert north to act as the Death Riders' godfather.

While Carcajou was seeing some success putting Hells Angels and members of the Alliance behind bars, three men had managed to remain remarkably unscathed. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also happened to be the three highest-ranking Anglophone Hells Angels in Quebec, all of them Nomads. Stadnick, who had never been convicted, and Stockford, who had never even been arrested, approached their old friend Carroll to help them with their ultimate goal: Ontario. On February 20, 1996, Stockford met Carroll at a chalet in the Laurentian ski resort town of St-Sauveur. Despite the hospitable surroundings, it was primarily a business meeting. Under what Kane told police was Stadnick's direction, Stockford purchased a large quantity of drugs from Carroll and arranged for them to be shipped back to Montreal. From there a courier took 4 kilos of hash to a contact at Toronto's Union Station and then rented a car for the big deal.

A little more than halfway down the Queen Elizabeth Way from Toronto to Hamilton, the courier turned off onto Bronte Road and stopped at a Tim Horton's. Once inside the familiar brown-on-brown doughnut shop, he met a contact: Stockford's cousin. The two men then walked out to the parking lot and, in the rental car, they exchanged a bag full of cash for a bag containing a kilogram of cocaine and 1,000 hits of ecstasy destined for the Hamilton market. According to what Kane told the RCMP, it was the first of many such shipments to the area. Although the Hells Angels had no official presence in Ontario, they didn't have any problem selling drugs there.

Just a few miles away, a fledgling biker gang got a big break and helped contribute to the anti-Hells Angels forces in Ontario. When Johnny Sombrero took over the presidency of the Black Diamond Riders, a small but well-established Toronto gang, he threw out all the members with criminal records. He just wasn't interested in going to prison when one of his men slipped up. There was no argument. None of the exiled members would challenge Sombrero, an all-time tough guy, and they left without incident. Instead, six of them formed a new club in Milton, the hometown of two of them. They gave it a rather defeatist name: The Lost Souls.

Just north of Burlington, Milton had been a sleepy farm town until people started moving out of Hamilton in droves. As the standard of life rapidly declined in the city, those who could afford it moved to suburbs like Milton, Waterdown and Ancaster. With their rapidly swelling populations of displaced urbanites, the towns surrounding Hamilton became very profitable markets for drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. On April 13, 1996, Satan's Choice, clearly not as choosy as Sombrero and the Black Diamond Riders, approached the Lost Souls with an offer. If they would sell Satan's Choice drugs in the area and kick 10 percent of proceeds back to the nearby Kitchener chapter, they would become a prospective chapter.

The imbalance didn't last long. On May 4, all 20 members of the Loners showed up at the headquarters of the Para-Dice Riders, Toronto's biggest independent club. Despite having flirted with Satan's Choice after the Diablos went down, the Loners showed up with an offer: they wanted to be a Para-Dice Riders chapter. The Loners offered the bigger club a presence in North Toronto and access to some of the Italian mafia's biggest names. The reason they wanted to join, they said, was that Satan's Choice, particularly president Andre Wateel, were out for their heads, but would never touch them if they were Para-Dice Riders. The response was immediate and positive. First came the beer and then came the patches. Not expecting visitors, the Para-Dice Riders didn't have enough patches to go around, but promised they'd have some more made. What the gracious hosts didn't know, and wouldn't find out until it was too late, was that it wasn't fear of Wateel that sent the Loners downtown. Instead, Stadnick had convinced them to infiltrate the Para-Dice Riders by dangling a Hells Angels prospective membership in the event they managed to take over.

Despite years of peaceful coexistence, there was very little affection between the Para-Dice Riders and Satan's Choice. The two big clubs, which had aligned mostly to present a united front to the Hells Angels, had grown suspicious of each other once large-scale patch-overs had begun. And when they met at a Victoria Day protest over police roadside stops, insults and threats started flying. Ironically, the presence of many uniformed and mounted Toronto police officers prevented any actual violence. Although no shots were fired and no punches were thrown, a different kind of war had begun in Ontario: a cold war in which the Para-Dice Riders and Satan's Choice scrambled for new members and new chapters in an effort to retain their chunk of the Ontario pie.

Farther down the road in Hamilton, Ion William Croitoru had no idea of what was going on, but soon became a major player. A hardcore Hamilton boy who carried 285 solid pounds on his 6-foot frame, Croitoru was famous in some quarters, but it hadn't made him particularly wealthy. When the World Wrestling Foundation hit its peak in the late 1980s, they needed guys for their stars to beat up on, and Croitoru fit the description. He was big, funny looking and ethnic (Romanian, but he generally ended up playing, in the long tradition of wrestling villains, a Turk). Even better, he had the ability to act like a fool in front of millions of people. While the likes of Hulk Hogan were throwing him around, Croitoru—who wrestled under the name Johnny K-9—enthralled audiences with his silent-picture actor-style theatrics.

But he didn't impress the people who ran the WWF. He got fewer and fewer assignments and got none after a 1991 conviction for assault and cocaine trafficking sent him to prison for six months. When he emerged, he signed up with Middle Tennessee Wrestling, a much smaller organization, and wrestled under the name Taras Bulba, after the greatest hero in Cossack history. Before long, he moved up to Jim Cornette's Smokey Mountain Wrestling, where he became a champion under the name Bruiser Bedlam. But it didn't matter how well he did in the minor leagues, when he walked around the streets of Hamilton, when people asked him for his autograph, when they bought him a beer at the Running Pump, he was Johnny K-9.

By the time Cornette's league ran out of money, Croitoru had assumed the Johnny K-9 personality outside the ring and even managed to get a bank account under that name. In the spring of 1996, he didn't have a job but continued to lift weights daily just in case a wrestling promoter called. Before long, he found some workout partners. One of them, a man police will identify only by the pseudonym Jimmy Rich, suggested that he, K-9 and another friend, Gary Noble, ride up to Toronto and visit the Satan's Choice clubhouse. The three weightlifters with shaved heads were welcomed warmly and given the opportunity to start a Satan's Choice prospective chapter in Hamilton after a short initiation in which they were obliged to act as bartenders and security guards at the Toronto clubhouse. After they had proven their worth, Noble purchased an old restaurant at 269 Lottridge Ave., just north of Barton Street, for $40,000, to serve as a clubhouse.

The Outlaws, weakened by a series of arrests as the result of an informant turned by Harris, did nothing to oppose the new chapter. And Stadnick, who'd stopped wooing Satan's Choice by that time and had switched his focus to the Para-Dice Riders, couldn't stop it either. Although Stadnick always tried to maintain a polite relationship with Outlaws boss Mario “the Wop” Parente, both of them realized they were each other's enemy and that Hamilton was, at least for the moment, Outlaws territory. Both Stadnick and Stockford were extra cautious when they were in their home town. Stockford told Kane once about hearing his doorbell ring one evening and looking out the window to see a guy on his porch with a pizza box. Since Stockford hadn't ordered any pizza, he didn't answer. Stadnick, of course, was a more valuable as well as a more visible target than Stockford, who Harris said almost never wore his colors in Ontario. The diminutive biker chief was walking down Main Street in Hamilton when a pickup truck stopped beside him. Before he could turn around to see who it was, there were a pair of large muscular arms around him. It wouldn't be easy to kidnap Walter Stadnick, though, and the intended victim managed to get out of his assailant's grasp and send him to the ground with a well-placed kick. Stadnick saw the metallic flash of a handgun as the passenger started getting out of the truck, and he started running, eventually getting to safety. He recognized both men as Outlaws.

Stadnick had other enemies as well. Steinert, who had repeatedly angered Stadnick with ambitions that often overlapped his own, started stomping on his turf. Under strict secrecy, Steinert began using Donald “Bam Bam” Magnussen, who had been Stadnick's bodyguard and good friend, to distribute cocaine in Thunder Bay, Ontario. Although there's no hard evidence that Stadnick or any of his allies knew what was going on, Steinert got into trouble at about the same time. Although he'd lived in Canada since he was eight, Steinert had never bothered to apply for Canadian citizenship. After repeated anonymous tips, the immigration department of Citizenship Canada started investigating Steinert and putting the wheels of deportation into motion.

Stadnick did receive some good news that summer. Near the end of June, the quiet town of Port Perry, Ontario, was overrun with hundreds of bikers and dozens of Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officers. The event was one of the biggest in biker history: the retirement of Bernie “the Frog” Guindon, the leading voice for Satan's Choice since becoming president in 1965. Although bikers came from all over Canada, no Hells Angels or Para-Dice Riders were invited. That fact made police speculate that tensions were heating up and that a war was imminent. Stadnick, instead, saw opportunity. He was well aware that Guindon had built and then re-built the Satan's Choice empire in Ontario. Despite numerous arrests and the loss of most of their chapters, including Hamilton, to the Outlaws while Guindon was in prison, Satan's Choice had rebounded to become the No. 2 gang in Ontario, behind only their old brothers in the Outlaws. They had, according to police, an enviable cash flow from drug sales, prostitution, strippers and other businesses and no lack of manpower ready to move product or bust heads. No doubt Stadnick was intrigued by the prospect of patching over such an established and successful network and he had tried to achieve it through negotiating with Guindon over the years. But with Guindon now out of the way, Stadnick began to make plans for an eventual takeover.

So did Ontario's police forces. With a mandate to bring down one biker gang every year until they were all gone, Guindon's retirement brought their focus to Satan's Choice (although at least one biker claimed that Guindon had been tipped off by an OPP officer that the raid was coming down and he'd be wise to leave the club immediately). On the morning of December 19, 1996, local police forces and the OPP, armed with warrants, raided every Satan's Choice clubhouse and visited the homes of every member, prospect and known associate. Before Christmas, 109 of the 125 active Satan's Choice members were under arrest. K-9, Noble, Rich and the two prospects they had gathered were all arrested in Hamilton.

What happened to them was typical of what most arrested bikers experienced. When bigger charges failed to stick due to lack of credible evidence or were plea-bargained out of significance, the Crown started nailing the bikers with proceeds of crime charges and confiscating their property. K-9, who claimed to have earned an average of $4,751 per year over the last eight years, had 48 items taken. At auction, his lot, including $7,802 in cash, two Harleys, a huge custom-built pink leather sofa and a six-foot-high laminated poster of James Dean, found a quick and anonymous taker. Like most other members of Satan's Choice, K-9 was a lot poorer for the experience, but soon back on the streets.