That’s pretty well what Satan’s Choice was like in the early years. They liked to ride, they liked to fight and they liked to party. They did stupid things. When they fought other gangs, it was with baseball bats and brass knuckles; sure people got hurt, but they didn’t die.
They were what bikers always claim to be — a bunch of guys out to have fun, and if they hurt a few people (or animals) or made a mess, that was just too bad. “They were rough guys, for sure,” said a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer who had many run-ins with the Choice over the years. “But they weren’t gangsters; we’d pick them up for little things — simple assault, vandalism, trespassing, public drunkenness, that sort of thing.”
But Sergeant John Harris of the Hamilton police, who investigated bikers for much of their rise to prominence, disagreed. “Guindon had a right-hand man named Arnold Kelly, who was never a member, never wanted to be,” he told me. “He made his money in construction and owned a resort north of Orillia.” Kelly was not physically imposing. “Believe it or not, he was actually smaller than Stadnick,” he said, laughing about his old adversary Walter Stadnick, the biker chieftain who was no fewer than 15 inches shorter than him. “But he arranged everything — drug deals, beatings, shootings — he was probably more dangerous than Guindon himself.”
And Satan’s Choice, especially Guindon, found themselves drawn to Toronto. Particularly the city’s Yorkville district. Back then, it was the polar opposite of the chichi wine bar and gourmet chocolate shop strip it is now. At the time, it was notorious as a hippie ghetto and open-air drug market.
Originally, the bikers were attracted by the freer lifestyle and the girls, but they came to realize that they could make huge profits selling drugs to the itinerant youth culture. They probably didn’t realize it, but they made the same discoveries and decisions in Yorkville that the American Hells Angels had in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Drawn to the hippies for esoteric reasons, they evolved into a drug-dealing organization simply because the opportunity was just too good to pass up.
Maybe it was Guindon, maybe it was the lifestyle, the Globe article or maybe just the cool name, but Satan’s Choice really took off. By 1970, Satan’s Choice had 13 chapters, all of them in Ontario except for one in the then-mostly anglophone west end of Montreal.
But with expansion came tension, especially from the Toronto Chapter. By 1970, they were getting bigheaded. Making huge amounts of cash on drug sales and regularly getting away with gang rapes — they called them “splashes” — convinced them they were above any law, including their own club’s. They thought they should be running the town, the whole show.
The problem was that two other big-time biker gangs were already established in Hogtown and, although they were prepared to share the city with Satan’s Choice, they weren’t quite ready to hand it over. When the Toronto Chapter of Satan’s Choice began to overstep its boundaries, the Vagabonds and Black Diamond Riders began to rattle their swords. History had proven that neither crew would back down from a fight. An all-out war seemed imminent.
That pissed off the rest of Satan’s Choice. “The Toronto Chapter did most of the shit disturbing. Now they start a small war with two of the heaviest clubs going and they’re asking us to come in and bail them out,” said the road captain of the Brampton Chapter of Satan’s Choice at the time, a man who would only consent to be known by the name “Gypsy.” “This caused a lot of friction between the other chapters.”
That friction wasn’t only because the Toronto Chapter came begging for help, but because most of the guys in the other chapters had as much respect for their would-be enemies as they did for their “brothers” in Toronto. “The Vags were a solid club,” continued Gypsy. “I knew Edjo, their president; and the BDRs had been around forever.”
The potential for war in Toronto divided the club. “The Oshawa, Kingston, Ottawa and Kitchener Chapters and us [Brampton] wanted nothing to do with Toronto’s mess,” Gypsy said. “Montreal, Hamilton and Brantford were all for it — the other guys [chapters in Richmond Hill, Niagara Falls, St. Catharines and Peterborough] didn’t know whether they were coming or going.”
Guindon stepped in. It’s rare for a national president of any biker gang to intervene and interfere with the goings-on of one chapter, but this was important. Not only was the Toronto Chapter biting off way more than it could chew, it was making decisions that threatened to tear Satan’s Choice apart. The undisputed boss called a meeting of all the officers of all the chapters.
“It was a fucking heavy meeting.” Gypsy said years later. “Some of the officers were called cowards, others were called fight-crazy idiots.” It devolved into a shouting match. Hamilton and Montreal were screaming “Kill! Kill! Kill!” and the other chapters were preaching common sense. Guindon, seconds from losing control of the proceedings, issued an ultimatum. If they decided to go ahead with the war, they would lose him as president. That quieted things down.
Ottawa and Brampton came up with an idea. Why not just dump the Toronto Chapter? Guindon wasn’t that stupid. Besides, he really liked Toronto; he enjoyed partying with the hipsters in Yorkville, which was officially Vagabond territory, but where he and his friends could act with impunity. And he knew that even a one-third share of Ontario’s biggest drug market was better than none. He suggested another idea. Instead of fighting the Vags and the BDRs, the collected chapters of Satan’s Choice would descend upon Toronto. They would remove the “fight-crazy bastards” who were causing all the problems, and make good with their would-be enemies.
On the same night the foot soldiers of the Choice went to Toronto to get rid of the troublemaking members there, Gypsy took Edjo out for dinner and drinks. Peace was established in Toronto. And a precedent was set in Ontario.
Under Guindon’s now-totalitarian leadership — he gave himself the title “Supreme Commander” to go along with National President — Satan’s Choice flourished. They were so powerful that, in 1973, Hells Angels (at the time the only motorcycle gang in the world bigger than Satan’s Choice) sent an emissary from California to discuss a merger (what the bikers call a “patch-over”) or at least a working agreement between the two clubs. A few of the top members of Satan’s Choice — though, notably, not Guindon — met the Hells Angel at the Toronto airport and sent him home. He never even left the terminal. Clearly, Satan’s Choice felt they didn’t need Hells Angels.
Guindon, as fiercely xenophobic as the Californians who started Hells Angels twenty-some years earlier, had no intention of working with what he considered a “foreign” club. He worked very hard to ensure that Satan’s Choice remained “proudly Canadian” — never mind that the bikes their club was centered upon all came from Milwaukee, and their look, language, mannerisms and organization were stolen directly from San Bernardino.
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 do
zen 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 20th 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 celebrit
ies. 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.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 4