Even back in the 1970s and ’80s, things did not always go easily for the Outlaws in Ontario, especially in Hamilton. Roland Harper was a high-ranking member of the Red Devils who was outraged by the way the Outlaws treated a young woman he knew. He swore revenge, and decided the best way he could get back at the Outlaws was from inside. So, without telling anyone else about his plan, he quit the Red Devils and joined the Outlaws.
Because he was an experienced biker and a big, strong and bold man, he was accepted right away. And he had another strange ace up his sleeve. Because he was a diabetic, he couldn’t drink. That allowed him to stay sober while the other guys drank themselves sloppy. He earned their trust and learned their secrets.
After he became the Hamilton Chapter’s sergeant-at-arms, he called Harris and arranged a meeting at the Westcliffe Mall parking lot up on the Mountain where the Outlaws rarely ventured. He told Harris he wanted to work for him as an informant, but that he had to be paid. Harris told me he couldn’t help but laugh, then told him he didn’t have any money to give him, but he did put him in touch with an OPP officer who could authorize such a situation.
The relationship paid dividends right away. Harris and his men raided the Outlaws clubhouse after Harper told them that the bikers were running an after-hours bar there. At the time, Ontario law forbade bars from serving alcohol after 1 a.m. (last call was 12:30), so after-hours drinking clubs — or “speakeasies” as the locals called them — were not uncommon.
The raid didn’t yield any big arrests, but it did get the cops into the clubhouse. They confiscated a number of weapons, including shotguns.
And there were other problems for the Ontario Outlaws. In 1981, Buteau had made friendly overtures to three gangs in B.C. who were called the Satan’s Angels. They had developed an enviable network between themselves and their regional puppet gangs, and within a couple of years had become Hells Angels chapters, answering to American chapters in Washington State. But they had little if any communication with the other Canadian Hells Angels chapters in Quebec. To welcome them into the fold, Buteau sent a couple of veteran Montreal Hells Angels to their coming-out party in 1983.
The guys he sent were members of the notorious Montreal North Chapter in Laval. Years earlier, tension between new recruits and the old guard — the former Popeyes — caused the Montreal Hells Angels to split. The old guard stayed in Laval, while the new guys formed a new chapter in a small, industrial town about an hour downriver called Sorel. Although Sorel is geographically north of Laval, it was called Montreal South because it was on the south shore of the St. Lawrence, while Laval was called Montreal North because it was north of the island of Montreal.
Buteau’s emissaries were Michel “Jinx” Genest and Jean-Marc Nadeau. Both were very violent (Nadeau was later involved in at least four murders) and addicted to drugs. They left Montreal on July 17, 1983. They took the bus. And somewhere along the line, they picked up a 17-year-old girl.
As they passed through Ontario, they took up the back of the bus. Nobody wanted to sit near them. And when the bus arrived in Wawa, the bikers and their new friend — like everybody else — went into Mr. Muggs, the doughnut and coffee shop that served as Wawa’s bus terminal.
While they were inside, a Ford Taurus pulled up with some tough-looking characters inside. They rolled down the windows, pulled out some handguns and filled the bus full of bullets, shattering every window. Hearing the commotion, the passengers ran out of Mr. Muggs just in time to see the men pile into the car and peel out of the parking lot. Three people were mildly hurt when they were hit by shattered glass. At least two witnesses noticed the “Support Your Local Outlaws” bumper sticker on the rear bumper.
When police arrived, they found a handgun and 56 grams of PCP stuffed into an old pack of cigarettes hidden in a garbage can. The bikers were questioned, but nothing stuck to them. They were free to go back to Montreal. The OPP drove the girl back home.
Acting on the eyewitnesses’ accounts, the OPP went to the Outlaws’ clubhouse in Sault Ste. Marie and arrested Parente, who was visiting from Hamilton, a friend of his from St. Catharines named Roy Caja and a local guy named Ben Greco. When I asked him about the incident, Parente told me in no uncertain terms that he was not in the car in question when the bus was shot up. At least four sources have told me Parente was definitely in the car, but none of them was actually an eyewitness. At any rate, all three Outlaws were arrested for attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
At the preliminary hearing, the Crown prosecutor, Norman Douglas, brought up the specter of “open gang warfare” between the Outlaws and Hells Angels. Parente’s lawyer assured him the sentence would be light if he pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm for a purpose dangerous to public peace. He was released on bail. Parente took that under serious consideration.
Upon his release, Parente flew back to Hamilton. That evening, some friends suggested he go out drinking with them. Rather than potentially get into trouble, Parente turned them down and decided to go to Bannister’s, the downtown strip joint. It made sense. While other guys were paying for a night out, he could get paid to go to Bannister’s.
Mario “Mike the Wop” Parente
On that night, he wasn’t really a bouncer per se, according to Harris, but more of a greeter, like they have at Wal-Mart. Harris dropped by Bannister’s regularly. “The owners — Rinaldo Ticchiarelli and Louis Acciaroli — were big-time coke dealers. They later went to prison for it,” he said, “so I liked to keep an eye on it.” He was surprised and somewhat disappointed to see Parente there. “You’re wasting your talents in a place like this,” he told him.
Parente recalled it as a less friendly conversation. Hamilton had a bylaw that stipulated that any liquor-licensed establishment could be closed (and could potentially lose its license) if it allowed already intoxicated people inside. Parente understood that Harris and his men intended to enforce the bylaw vigorously that night, so he and his own men were very choosy about whom they let pass.
It had been an uneventful night until Brian Lewis showed up. The Lewis brothers were well known in downtown Hamilton, the three half-black, half-white (Parente used the phrase “salt-and-pepper” to describe them) brothers were day laborers and small-time criminals who had a hobby of scaring and intimidating innocent strangers. Brian, the youngest, was already wasted when he arrived at Bannister’s that night, and Parente (concerned about Harris’ warning) refused to let him in. Brian took offense and a small scuffle broke out. In seconds, Brian was turfed, and he bitterly swore revenge before retreating.
After closing, Parente didn’t go home. Instead, he went to the Birch Avenue clubhouse. He was alone. Before long, Brian’s two brothers, Jimmy and Tim, and five of their friends went looking for him. The police saw the group on a downtown street, but did not stop them.
When they arrived at the clubhouse, the gang of toughs called Parente out. He came out and they began to threaten him. Parente saw that Tim had a handgun and heard someone shout “Shoot him!” Alone and fearing for his life, as he said later, Parente brought a loaded double-barreled shotgun out with him. Harris maintained it was a shotgun he had confiscated in the speakeasy arrest, but Parente denied that.
The men were screaming at Parente, threatening him. He saw that Tim had a handgun. When he saw Tim raise the gun and point it at him, he said, Parente squeezed both triggers of the shotgun. Jimmy Lewis took the full blast of both shells in the lower back. He fell back against a parked car, exposing a big hole in his torso. He died on the street. The gang scattered. Parente fled.
Two hours later, Harris was paged at home. There had been a shooting at the Outlaws clubhouse. “That could only be one person,” Harris recalled thinking.
When he arrived on scene, the investigating officer approached him and said: “They call this guy ‘The Wop.’ Do you know him?” Harris laughed.
Harris knew Parente had probably gone to a friend’s house in St. Catharines, so he alerted the Niagara Reg
ional Police. Their biker officer, Larry Schwedic, put the house under surveillance and, when he saw Parente with another Outlaw named Darrell Sampson, he negotiated a quiet surrender. Parente rode back to Hamilton in an unmarked car and was surprised and dismayed to see that the local cops had made a huge deal of it, putting up a roadblock and escorting the car he was in all the way downtown with flashing lights.
The Crown prosecutor, Tony Skarica, argued for a five-year sentence. But the defense countered that Parente was merely acting in self-defense. Noting that Parente was “not exactly a choirboy,” Justice Thomas Callon determined that he “reacted to a serious threat of personal harm to him that included the possibility of death. Parente was sentenced to 30 months for the death of Jimmy Lewis. He was said to have breathed a sigh of relief.
Interestingly, the other Lewises also met violent ends. Tim died in a car crash. And Brian, consumed by thoughts of revenge, years later confronted Parente in a bar. Parente, seriously fearing for his life, turfed the young man again. He told me that he found out that there were two undercover cops in the bar who saw the whole thing, and that he was appalled that they didn’t intervene. But Parente didn’t kill Brian. Brian killed Brian. He got drunk at a party and held a handgun to his temple. He kept screaming “you wanna know what I’m gonna do to Mike the Wop? This is what I’m gonna do to Mike the Wop!” Then, he slipped or twitched or flinched or something and pulled the trigger. Blew his own brains out.
After the trial in Hamilton, Parente went back to Sault Ste. Marie to answer the illegal possession of a weapon charge resulting from the bus shoot-up in Wawa. He pleaded guilty and received six years. He was shocked, dumbfounded, expecting a couple of months at most. The judge explained that since he was a killer now, he had no choice but to throw the book at him.
Without Parente, the Outlaws’ fortunes in Ontario changed, particularly in the Steel City. Stadnick, who had become a full-patch member of the Hells Angels Montreal South (Sorel) Chapter, became much more open about his operations in Hamilton, often wearing his full colors. He operated out of a bar (he didn’t officially own it, but everybody knew it was his) called Rebel’s Roadhouse at the corner of Upper Ottawa and Fennell on the Mountain.
Roland Harper then told Harris about a plan the Outlaws had to assassinate Stadnick. The Hamilton Outlaws had acquired a pair of LAW (light anti-tank weapon) rocket launchers from connections in the Canadian military, and the plan was to blast Stadnick at the front door as he entered or exited the club. The other LAW was made available just in case the first malfunctioned (they are, after all, single-shot devices). Harris, acting on Harper’s tip, found the two bazookas buried in a nearby conservation area. “They didn’t have the heart to pull that kind of thing off with Parente out of the picture,” Harris said. “Maybe if he was still there, they might have gone through with it, but there was no way without him.”
When I asked Parente about the incident years later, he grinned, shrugged and told me, “I don’t know anything about any rocket launchers.”
Things were about as bad or worse for Stadnick over the same period. He and his friend (and translator) Noël “Frenchy” Mailloux came home to Hamilton from Montreal for Christmas 1982. Realizing he was far outnumbered by Outlaws — the same guys who had killed his friends and colleagues in the Wild Ones simply for meeting with Hells Angels — in his hometown, he decided to lay low. Staying mostly with family and friends, he ventured out rarely and advised Mailloux to do the same.
Instead, Mailloux and his girlfriend, stripper Connie Augustin, went on a two-month-long cocaine binge. It culminated on February 17, 1983 when he murdered Augustin’s friend, 18-year-old fellow stripper Cindy Lee Thompson, and Augustin’s son, four-year-old Stewart Hawley. He also shot Augustin several times, failing to kill her, and was finally apprehended in a nearby park babbling incoherently and still attempting to shoot the police with an empty handgun who had surrounded him.
Not only did Stadnick lose a close friend, but it set the Hells Angels campaign for Ontario back years. Outlaw motorcycle gangs rely on at least some measure of public support to survive, and need to find new members, associates and business connections from the local population. Mailloux’s actions made Hells Angels look wild and out of control. But Stadnick’s ability to keep it together and remove any incriminating evidence from Mailloux’s house impressed his brothers in Sorel.
While all of this was going on in Ontario, the war between Hells Angels and the Outlaws was still raging in Quebec, but generally at a low level. And Hells Angels were dominating, with psychopathic Montreal North (Laval) member Yves “Apache” Trudeau killing Outlaws and their associates at a sickening rate of more than one a week.
But the Outlaws managed one big blow on September 8, 1983. A small man with a rat-like face, Gino Goudreau, was eager to become an Outlaw like his older brother. He could hardly have impressed them more.
At a nice little bar and restaurant in suburban Longueuil called Le Petit Bourg, Buteau and his friend Rene Lamoureaux were entertaining a guest from Ontario. Guy “Frenchie” Gilbert was an emissary from the Kitchener Chapter of Satan’s Choice — one of the few chapters that did not patch over to the Outlaws and still held a grudge against their former brothers in Hamilton — and they were discussing an alliance between the two clubs.
As the three bikers walked outside for a smoke, Goudreau parked his bike, leaving his girlfriend still sitting on the back seat. Then he pulled a .38 from under his jacket and pulled the trigger until the magazine was empty. Buteau died immediately, Gilbert succumbed a few minutes later. Lamoureaux survived with major injuries.
To many, it looked like it would be a huge blow to Stadnick’s status. Buteau was his biggest supporter and universally respected. Without him, it looked like Stadnick (who still hadn’t mastered much French) would be sidelined or perhaps disposed of.
Because there was nobody else who approached his status, Buteau’s job was divided between two men. Rejean “Zig Zag” Lessard, who earned his nickname from his close resemblance to the guy on the Zig Zag rolling papers package, was named president of the Montreal South (Sorel) Chapter and Michel “Sky” Langlois was named the Hells Angels national president for Canada. Langlois’s duties were primarily to communicate with other chapters and to recruit bikers and gangs when possible. Lessard, on the other hand, ran the daily operations of the only genuinely important chapter in the country.
And, as luck would have it, both of them liked and appreciated Stadnick. He was, by that time, bringing significant revenue into the club, had great connections in Ontario and had also earned his “Filthy Few” patch. There are different opinions about how bikers earn that particular patch. Barger’s own autobiography claims it’s for the club’s hardest partiers. Law enforcement says it’s reserved for those who have murdered for the club. Either way, Stadnick started wearing it about the time Buteau was killed.
At the time, there was a lot of talk about the Outlaws taking Stadnick out. It made perfect sense: They would have gotten rid of the biggest hope for Hells Angels in Ontario and re-established themselves as top dogs in the province. But while he did once have to fight his way out of a Downtown kidnapping attempt, Stadnick could generally move unharmed in Hamilton. Isnor recalled wondering how unlikely it was that Stadnick could stay alive in a city teeming with people like the Outlaws, the Musitanos, the Luppinos and the Hells Angels-hating Papalias. But he later learned, he told me, that Stadnick was smart enough to either cooperate with or to avoid all of them.
But if the Outlaws had really wanted to assassinate Stadnick, they could hardly have done a better job than was accomplished by an absentminded priest on his way to see the Pope in Montreal. At the same time thousands of the faithful were streaming into Montreal to see the pontiff, the Hells Angels were riding out of town for their own event. On their way to a memorial service in the Eastern Townships town of Drummondville to observe the first anniversary of the murder of Stadnick’s mentor and friend, Buteau, the priest mis
sed a stop sign and plowed into the procession of bikers.
The biker in line in front of Stadnick — prospect Daniel Matthieu — took the bulk of the impact and was killed immediately. Stadnick crashed into the priest’s car. The forks of his bike were driven into his gas tank and the bike exploded into flames.
Stadnick was airlifted to a Montreal hospital. He was barely recognizable. He’d been burned over most of his body and had lost two and a half fingers and the tip of his nose. “He wasn’t good looking before the accident,” Harris said. “But he was downright ugly after.”
Stadnick’s common-law wife, Kathi Anderson, and his lawyer, Stephan Frankel, came to visit him. Anderson was appalled at the care he was getting from the nurses — none of whom spoke English with any degree of fluency — and negotiated with Lessard and Langlois to get him moved to Hamilton.
But there was one big problem: Hamilton was teeming with Outlaws and others who weren’t crazy about the idea of a full-patch Hells Angel in their town, and they would not mind seeing Ontario’s most prominent one erased completely. The Montreal Hells Angels had a plan; the 13th Tribe — a Halifax, Nova Scotia gang that desperately wanted to become Hells Angels — would stand guard outside his room in the hospital. While that was fine during visiting hours, there wasn’t much to keep an Outlaw from sneaking into Hamilton General and holding a pillow over Stadnick’s face until he stopped breathing.
So Anderson — out of options — called Harris. She asked him to protect her man. At first, Harris thought it was hilarious. But after some thought and consultation with his chief, Harris agreed. So when the 13th Tribe left at the end of visiting hours, the Hamilton cops took over. It was an uneasy relationship. The 13th Tribe tried to act tough, but they were not prepared for the Hamilton cops who had seen dozens of tougher gangs. And at least one Outlaws associate has assured me that at least one Hamilton cop let it be known exactly which room the helpless Stadnick was staying in.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 9