Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (69 page)

Like most places in Canada, the United States and Western Europe in the '60s and '70s, Alberta suffered through a period where disaffected young men jumped on motorcycles, wore leather jackets and went wild in the name of freedom. And like those other places, they saw the biggest and strongest groups of bikers swallow up or get rid of the smaller and weaker ones. At one point in the '70s, police say there were 35 distinct outlaw motorcycle gangs in the province. A half-dozen years later, there were four. The smallest of them, the Ghost Riders of Lethbridge, had survived mainly because of a strong working relationship with other Ghost Riders on the West Coast. But when Yves “Le Boss” Buteau extended prospective Hells Angels membership to the Satan's Angels in British Columbia, he did so under the condition that they get rid of all their competition in the area. In July 1978, the B.C. chapter of the Ghost Riders and Satan's Angels faced off and the Ghost Riders were routed. Without their Pacific Coast allies, the Lethbridge chapter knew they were an endangered species. When representatives of the Grim Reapers, Alberta's biggest gang, showed up at their clubhouse with guns in November 1980, the Ghost Riders didn't fight. They just gave up their patches and retired.

The Hells Angels interfered in the Alberta gang wars again in 1980 when the Satan's Angels formed an alliance with the smallest surviving club, the Rebels. With the threat of the Satan's Angels (and, by extension, the Hells Angels) looming, the Grim Reapers called off plans to exterminate the Rebels and trained their sights on Calgary's King's Crew instead. In the spring and summer of 1983, Alberta endured a small-scale biker war. It started when the Grim Reapers showed up at the King's Crew clubhouse with guns and demanded the colors of everyone inside. Their burned, still-recognizable remains were sent to a Calgary paper to add public humiliation to the private one already suffered. The King's Crew vowed revenge and bombed an Edmonton Harley dealership which was associated with the Grim Reapers, but caused little damage. The Grim Reapers launched a crushing attack of bombings, shootings and abductions that caused the King's Crew to stop hostilities and go underground before Labor Day.

As tensions simmered between the Grim Reapers and the Rebels, the B.C. Hells Angels stepped in. They suggested that the Grim Reapers, based in Edmonton, and the Rebels, based in Calgary, divide the province. The Grim Reapers would take the north and the Rebels the south. Of course, the Hells Angels would supply drugs to both gangs. When a few members of the King's Crew regrouped and the Grim Reapers were poised to crush them again, the B.C. Hells Angels stepped in and guaranteed their survival. Before long, all three Alberta gangs were begging to become Hells Angels. Despite their involvement with all the gangs in Alberta, the B.C. Hells Angels—some say on orders from Stadnick—refused to grant any of them prospective membership.

When Stadnick himself started coming west, at first partying with all three clubs in Winnipeg, he started feeling the Alberta gangs out for their strength, their reach in their respective drug markets, and the quality of their leadership. In the summer of 1996, he decided that the Grim Reapers (who had since opened a chapter in Calgary, violating their agreement with the Rebels) were the best gang in Alberta, and he offered them prospective membership. But there was a catch. Traditionally, members of prospect clubs wear half patches, but Stadnick convinced the Grim Reapers to wear their old colors while prospecting. The concept wasn't entirely unprecedented. The Aliens of New York City retained their patch while prospecting because they weren't sure they even wanted to be Hells Angels, and they were powerful enough to force the Hells Angels to bend the rules for them.

The Grim Reapers were no Aliens, but that's how Stadnick sold it to them—keep your own colors while prospecting—as though the Grim Reapers were trying the Hells Angels' colors out. But if the Grim Reapers were trying to play it cool, they failed. Not only did their 1996 Christmas card identify them as Hells Angels prospects, but so did the answering machine in their clubhouse. But it flew beneath the radar of local police and media. Although the frequent presence of luminaries such as Stadnick and de facto B.C. chief Rick Ciarniello, raised red flags, it raised the wrong ones. When a hundred rooms were reserved in a Red Deer hotel for a fictitious motorcycle racing company, reporters began frantically writing about how the Hells Angels were going to move a chapter to Alberta (like the Demon Keepers) or start a new one (like the Redliners), but they were caught off guard by what actually happened.

The people of Alberta, many of whom were there because they were fed up with the regulation and bureaucracy of the rest of Canada, welcomed the Hells Angels with open arms. Not only did published polls indicate that the overwhelming majority of Albertans believed the Hells Angels had a right to exist, they came out in droves to meet them. So did the police. At provincial boundary crossings, police set up roadblocks. They stopped everyone who looked like an outlaw biker and forced them to produce their license, registration and insurance papers. Familiar with the way police do things, the Hells Angels were ready and made it through without any major incidents. What they weren't ready for was what waited for them on the other side: cheers and applause.

Curious Albertans took pictures of the Hells Angels, often posing with their families and children, and asked them to sign autographs. Not since the days when the California hippies fatuously referred to them as “the people's police,” had the Hells Angels been so warmly embraced. When the party finally ended on July 23, the Grim Reapers' two chapters became the Hells Angels Edmonton and Calgary, the Rebels were granted prospect status in Red Deer and the King's Crew had their continued existence ensured as a puppet club for all of them.

The Albertans proved their worth almost immediately. A week after the party, longtime Grim Reaper and new Hells Angel Terry Malec applied for a Firearms Acquisition Certificate and was turned down. Since he already had two FACs for guns he'd used for years while hunting, he was surprised. When he found out why he'd been turned down, he was angry. Despite the fact that Malec had no criminal record, RCMP officer Joe Coulombe refused to approve his application because he was a Hells Angel. Predictably, both sides assembled their lawyers and had it out in court. The RCMP brought in a biker expert from Montreal who spoke of the horrors the war had brought to Quebec, but it was in vain. Judge Jeanne Burch ruled that Malec had the same right to a gun as any other Canadian without a record, no matter what jacket he wore. It was a huge judgment. The Alberta courts said, as the bikers had always maintained, that being a member of the Hells Angels does not make you a criminal.

But Stadnick didn't coast. Ever PR-savvy, he managed to make the most out of a horrifying turn of events in Winnipeg. In September, a pair of full-patch Spartans and two friends were arrested after they lured a teen-age girl into their clubhouse and violently raped her. It was a crime eerily similar to one that sent Spartans' chief Darwin Sylvester and a friend to prison on 1979, a crime many Winnipeggers remembered. Although Stadnick had already distanced himself from the Spartans and Redliners, he made sure everybody important knew that it was Los Brovos who were the Hells Angels' favorites in the area. He knew that if he could ensure that Los Brovos had a distinct identity in the public perception, they would look like “good” bikers in simple juxtaposition to the Spartans.

His plan came to fruition on October 18, when hundreds of Hells Angels and associates flooded into the city, ostensibly to celebrate Los Brovos' 30th anniversary. Large crowds turned out, although they weren't as blindly enthusiastic as the ones in Alberta a few months before. There were few skeptics, however, when the bikers arrived at Los Brovos' east end clubhouse. Elmwood is the poorest section of Winnipeg and is home to many recent immigrants and First Nations families who had little reason to fear the bikers. When Los Brovos threw a massive street party, neighbors came out in droves. When reporters and photographers arrived, one smart biker got an idea. He got a visiting Joker to stand beside a hot dog cart and buy some neighborhood kids hot dogs, then instructed a cameraman from the
Winnipeg Free Press
to take a picture. It was pure theatrics, and it worked. The staged photo ran the next day with a caption that called it an example of “biker kindness.”

But it wasn't just a social call. By the time the visitors left, Winnipeg had a prospective Hells Angels chapter. Later, chapter president Ernie Dew told reporters that, for him, the deciding factor was that Stadnick had already patched over the Grim Reapers, Los Brovos' old allies in the fight to keep the Hells Angels out of the prairies. Before he left, Stadnick sent over some of his toughest Quebec bikers to tell the Redliners they were disbanded. Not only had they not done enough to become Hells Angels, they weren't even fit to be a puppet club. Now that their purpose for existing was moot, they were in the way—except for one man. Bernie Dubois, the only Redliner who had proven himself a consistent money-maker for the club, was invited to join his old enemies in Los Brovos.

Stadnick gained more for the club and for himself than just new chapters. While the Hells Angels he'd left in Quebec had turned the corner in their war with the Rock Machine Alliance and moved onto bigger things, it had been costly and ugly. The media and public perceived Boucher as the architect of all the violence and had thoroughly demonized him. When he wasn't holed up in his Rue Bennett bunker listening to talk-radio callers demand his head, he was wearing body armor and surrounded by a brigade of bodyguards as police and would-be assassins stalked his every move. Stadnick, on the other hand, moved stealthily and comfortably throughout the country as the chapters in British Columbia dominated the drug and sex trades there with near-immunity to prosecution and the prairie bikers he'd personally brought into the fold rode through the streets to public acclaim and applause. Under what one source (a Rockers associate from Montreal) claimed was Stadnick's urging, even Carroll had emerged from his drunken haze and restaked the Hells Angels' claim to Halifax and the East Coast. Stadnick's philosophy had played out almost precisely as planned. While ordering their underlings to do the dirty work, the Nomads had proven almost impervious to prosecution (the only exception, Vallée, was arrested for crimes committed before he was a Nomad), the Rock Machine were on the run and the Hells Angels had spread their influence throughout the country.

But it was also apparent that his quest was far from complete. Ontario still remained tantalizingly out of his grasp. Although he had managed to sneak his men into the Para-Dice Riders, they were still a minority voice—and hardly one known for its intelligence or stability—in the province's third-biggest club. He was a hunted man in his own hometown and, although he had managed to get a trickle of drugs into the area, his partners in Satan's Choice were making the real money. Still, it wasn't in Stadnick's nature to give up. He had a plan for Ontario, just as he had had for the rest of the country. There was just one annoying problem to deal with first. Steinert and Magnussen had to be stopped.

His hand was shaking when he put down the phone. Although they had known each other for a while and had been married for a month, Scott Steinert's wife had never seen him scared before. He'd just gotten off the phone with his right-hand man, Donald Magnussen. She knew better than to ask what was wrong.

Although he enjoyed a rich sex life both on and off camera and owned five different escort agencies, Steinert had remained at least nominally with Louise, his girlfriend since high school. That changed in 1996, when he visited a restaurateur he had business dealings with, saw the man's daughter and immediately fell in love. Before long, he dumped Louise, moved Magnussen out of the mansion and into one of the three houses he'd had built on the grounds, and married the girl.

Many people who knew Steinert thought the marriage was an attempt to stave off immigration officials who were inching ever closer to his deportation as his appeals ran out. When his legal avenues dried up, Steinert approached some contacts in the nearby Kahnawake Mohawk territory about getting them to draw up some papers that stated he was a full-status member of the Mohawk Nation. First Nations status would allow him to live in Canada or the United States free of government interference. That plan fell through on September 23, 1997, when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) raided Kahnawake. Although the primary reason for the assault was to stem the flow of illegal weapons coming through the Mohawk territory, the widespread arrests effectively ended Steinert's attempt to claim First Nations status. Other sources claim the marriage was real and that Steinert was truly in love. “He even gave up the porno,” pointed out one Death Riders associate.

And, on November 4, 1997, his wife saw the big man cry. The same thing happened at the little house outside where Magnussen hung up the phone, hugged his girlfriend and wept before saying good-bye. Earlier in the day, Steinert had received an important message that said he and Magnussen were to report to an urgent meeting with the Nomads that night. When he called Magnussen and they discussed it, they both realized it wouldn't be a party in their honor.

The consensus among forensic investigators is that the more grisly the mode of killing, the more hate the murderer has for the victim. If that's true, somebody really hated Steinert and Magnussen. It has never been positively determined who killed them, if they made it to the Nomads meeting or even if the meeting took place. What is clear is that on November 4, 1997, Steinert and Magnussen were beaten to death with hammers. Their horribly battered bodies were then wrapped in plastic, taken almost 200 miles downriver and dumped in the St. Lawrence at the historic village of Beauport.