Stadnick’s involvement in what the media labeled “The Quebec Biker War” was oblique. At least as far as law enforcement ever found out. It was Boucher’s thing — one of his many violent things.
Stadnick had more important things to do. He wanted to make all of Canada, especially Ontario, Hells Angels territory. And he wanted to get rich. Back in his hometown, things took a turn for the strange. With Parente in prison, the Outlaws looked very vulnerable. To take advantage of this, Satan’s Choice set up a chapter on St. Matthew’s Avenue in North Hamilton, less than a mile away from the Outlaws’ Birch Avenue clubhouse.
It didn’t last. On August 25, 1985, the bullet-riddled body of Brent Roddick was discovered in front of his house on East 25th Street up on the Mountain. He was the fourth dead biker to surface in Hamilton that month, joining chapter-mate Allan Kinloch, Outlaw James Lewis and Red Devil Michael Carey. Another Red Devil, Dave Pichet, was also shot, but his assailant underestimated the firepower needed to bring the giant biker down. “He was hit several times,” said John Harris. “But since it was just a .22, it didn’t do much damage.”
The three gangs in Hamilton — not to mention the omnipresent influence of Hells Angels and the danger posed by the Mafia — found themselves in a standoff. Satan’s Choice blinked first. The day after Roddick was murdered, Satan’s Choice abandoned their clubhouse in Hamilton and, tail between their legs, got out of town. The surviving members went to the Kitchener Chapter.
Chapter 7
The Choice-Angels Alliance
Historically, here are three proven ways for an outlaw motorcycle gang to become established in a new region. They can start from scratch, recruiting members from the general population. They can import members from already-established clubs to start a groundswell in the region to be annexed. Or they can woo existing clubs in the region, getting them to switch allegiance from their own club to the new one.
In Ontario, Hells Angels tried all three, with varying degrees of success. Careful to avoid a war like the one in Quebec, Stadnick and Hells Angels first infiltrated Ontario stealthily and in a small but effective way.
If you look at a map of Ontario, you’ll see that it falls into two basic parts. Southern Ontario — defined by Lakes Erie, Ontario and Huron — and Northern Ontario, which begins at Georgian Bay and stretches all the way up to frigid Hudson Bay. And the two pieces could hardly be more different.
Southern Ontario was settled by European immigrants early. Its rich farmland, long growing seasons, water accessibility and proximity to the United States drew migrants in droves. As manufacturing replaced farming as the primary commercial action in the area, the population boomed.
Northern Ontario never took off that way. Virtually uniform in its environment of exposed rock covered in sparse forest interspersed with hundreds of thousands of lakes and rivers, you can’t really grow any crops there and it’s even difficult to raise livestock. The settlers who came were originally after fur, and then logging as the paper industry took off. Mining was also an important employer, and after World War II increased the value of minerals like uranium, cadmium and tungsten, there was a minor influx of migrants, mainly from Quebec. French is still widely spoken up there, and a quick search of any Northern Ontario phonebook will reveal most communities as having a majority of French last names.
But those industries don’t support many people. While Northern Ontario is about eight times the size of Southern Ontario, it has about one-twentieth the number of people. And if you take away its three biggest cities — Sudbury (about 150,000 inhabitants), Thunder Bay (150,000) and Sault Ste. Marie (75,000) — there’s about one square mile for every human up there.
With such a small population, cultural events were few and far between at the time. Even TV was intermittent in many communities back then. But Hells Angels had two guaranteed boredom stoppers — drugs and strippers.
The province of Quebec has been a net exporter of strippers for a very long time. Most of them go to Toronto or the cities of Western Canada, but some also go to the U.S. and resorts in places like Mexico and the Dominican Republic.
And, from talent agencies owned by Hells Angels like Scott Steinert of Montreal and Donald “Pup” Stockford of Hamilton, strippers were showing up in Northern Ontario bars. They worked surprisingly cheap because they were being subsidized by the organization. Their job — besides dancing and anything else they could negotiate — was to get to know who ran things in the towns and relay that information back to Montreal. They found out who the tough guys were, who wanted drugs and who could sell them. Hells Angels would then send a representative down to check the guy or guys out. If he met their standards, Hells Angels would start supplying him with drugs. In a very brief period of time, towns that had never seen the like before were full of Hells Angels-supplied strippers, escorts and drugs.
It was a smart plan. And probably the only one that would have worked up there. Some years earlier, Kitchener Satan’s Choice full-patch John “Turkey” LeBlanc had also wanted to stake a claim in Northern Ontario. He went back to his hometown — a hard-drinking mining town in the middle of Northern Ontario named Timmins — and tried to form a Satan’s Choice chapter there. It didn’t work. It wasn’t because the community didn’t want bikers in their midst; it was because the local drug dealers didn’t want to work for someone else. They literally chased him out of town. So Hells Angels learned from his mistake and allowed the guys in Timmins and all the other Northern Ontario towns to think they were in charge. All they supplied were the drugs and the girls at irresistible prices.
One of those northerners was a tall and muscular ne’er-do-well from Thunder Bay named Donald “Bam Bam” Magnussen. Nothing more than a local tough guy at first, he became the leading supplier of cocaine in Thunder Bay and its environs after meeting Stadnick. Impressed by his size and aggressiveness, Stadnick started bringing Magnussen with him on his recruiting trips all over the country. For some time, the two were rarely seen apart.
Although there were no chapters up there (the Outlaws had a chapter in Sault Ste. Marie and Satan’s Choice had established themselves in faraway Thunder Bay) and, for a long time, no full-patch members either, Hells Angels quickly rose to dominate organized crime in Northern Ontario. Of course, being at the top of the organized crime heap in Northern Ontario is a little bit like having the best snowplow business in Texas — there’s not a lot of money in it. But it did bring in some income for the club, gave it some connections in Ontario and allowed a predominantly safe and Hells Angels-friendly route with a series of pit stops on the way from Montreal to Winnipeg and points west.
While that was happening, Stadnick also decided to import his own gang to Ontario. And he was going for the big prize — Toronto. It might have worked, but he picked the wrong man to be in charge. David “Wolf ” Carroll — former president of the Halifax Chapter and a close friend of Stadnick’s — introduced him to a young man named Dany “Danny Boy” Kane.
Immediately, Stadnick liked the young man. He was a nice-looking boy with short hair and glasses, but also strong and muscular. He could have passed for just about any occupation. He was friendly, outgoing and chatty. And he came from a trusted source.
He had been with a respected South Shore club called the Condors, and had the backing of their old boss Pat Lambert, a man Stadnick knew well and trusted. A few months earlier, Stadnick had allowed a bigger Hells Angels-affiliated gang on the South Shore, the Evil Ones, to absorb the Condors. Both Lambert and Kane were offered positions in the club — Lambert as full-patch, Kane as prospect — but both declined. Lambert continued to work with the Sorel Chapter as an independent contractor, supplying girls for export and serving as a drug retailer at his bar.
Kane, though, had bigger ambitions and started hanging around with the Sorel Chapter, getting to know Carroll in particular.
From a biker perspective, Carroll’s résumé was great. He’d proven himself as a fighter and tough guy, he’d planted bombs and
set fires, he’d sold both drugs and handguns and had done time for his organization without complaining or talking to the cops. For Hells Angels, that made him a model employee, one to be groomed for bigger and better things.
But there were a few things about Kane that Stadnick would not have approved of, had he known about them. Kane was flagrantly bisexual, he had some pretty strange tastes, he was paranoid and he had no natural leadership ability.
The plan itself was mostly sound. Stadnick’s franchising style of business has often been compared to that of McDonald’s, but in this situation, it seemed more like Wal-Mart. He wanted to start a coke-dealing organization that would offer the same product at lower prices than the competition. And then, when they had a decent-sized customer base and had — if all went well — put a few competitors out of business, they could bring prices up to Montreal levels and turn a huge profit into an enormous one. When the new gang grew in size and stature, it could expand, branch off and even perhaps eventually become the Hells Angels Toronto Chapter. And, although it was not expressly in their mandate, anything they could do to intimidate the Outlaws or any other Ontario competitors would be seen as an extra benefit.
But there were problems from the start. Qualified personnel were hard to find. Hells Angels had very few English-speaking options. Stadnick had done some great work in the three Prairie provinces to form working relationships and even patch over full chapters, but the members there were obviously not ready to represent his interests in Ontario. The three B.C. chapters — closer to the Montreal-based leadership than it had been before, mostly thanks to Stadnick — were simply not interested. They were busy with their own operation and were still coasting on keeping Halifax alive. And the Halifax Chapter was still suffering its own chronic manpower shortages, made far worse after their personable leader Carroll left the east coast for Montreal.
So Stadnick staffed this new gang — which Kane named the Demon Keepers as a tribute to his own initials — with Quebeckers, few of whom spoke anything better than rudimentary English. It may seem foolhardy in retrospect, but Stadnick himself, his right-hand man Stockford and their friend Carroll had all succeeded in Quebec with even less ability to communicate in French. Besides, Kane was a francophone (with passable English skills), so it would be his problem to figure out.
The Demon Keepers existed for a little more than two months. After riding out of Sorel on January 29, 1994 with a big launch party, they established their headquarters in a luxury apartment near Toronto’s Yonge and Eglinton shopping district. That was the cops’ first clue that they were not dealing with a wily group of veterans. The newcomers did their best to hang around bars, looking for people to sell drugs to. But their poor English, clumsy approach and unsophisticated behavior yielded not a single sale. Kane’s choice of bars didn’t help either. Instead of strip joints or working men’s taverns, he took them to discos and nightclubs — even faux dives instead of actual dives.
The OPP and Toronto cops knew how to deal with these guys. Stopping them every chance they could, the cops would frequently take out warrants for their arrest and offer to release them on the condition they leave Ontario for good. Over a very short period, that system eliminated more than half of the Demon Keepers’ membership.
And the police also managed to turn one. He didn’t have a lot of information, but he knew something big was going to go down with Kane on April Fool’s Day. He told them that Kane and his friends would be meeting more Demon Keepers in the parking lot of a Wendy’s fast-food restaurant in Belleville, Ontario, just off the 401. They were to look for a yellow Mustang.
Apparently, there was a drug dealer and on-again-off-again manager of a Belleville strip joint called the Go-Go Club named Greg Walsh who owed a friend of the Hells Angels a lot of money. At the time, it was widely believed that the Outlaws were encouraging drug dealers and others in Ontario to renege on payments to Hells Angels and their associates. They offered to protect these people, and offered them drugs at a lower price. It’s not known if Walsh contacted the Outlaws or not, but there weren’t any with him at the Go-Go that day.
The SQ followed Kane as he picked up some friends in Montreal, and then handed them off to the OPP once they crossed the border. The car — an incredibly nondescript 1992 Chevy Corsica — turned off the 401 at the Front Street exit in Belleville. The Go-Go is located at 320 North Front Street (although the most commonly used entrance is off to the side on Tracy Street), just two blocks south of the 401.
The Corsica turned into the parking lot of the Wendy’s at 350 North Front Street, less than 200 yards away from the entrance of the Go-Go. The police were already there, watching the yellow Mustang. When the Chevy pulled up beside it, the police pounced.
There was nothing of incriminating value inside the Mustang, and its passengers were released. But in the Chevy, the cops found a veritable treasure trove of evidence: three Demon Keepers’ jackets, two handguns (including a stolen.357 Magnum), gloves with lead stitched into the fingers and an ounce of hash. That wasn’t enough hash to make a lot of money selling, so it was forgiven. The real haul was the guns.
Since the other guys in the car — Kane’s No. 2 Denis Cournoyer and a talented Montreal meth cook named Michael Scheffer — had basically clean records, the lawyer they met with convinced Kane that it would be best for everyone if he took the blame for everything. The prosecutor couldn’t prove any plot against Walsh’s life, so the charges were simply possession of the weapons. Cournoyer walked, Scheffer got two months and Kane — who had previously been imprisoned in Quebec for torturing and nearly killing a young man who had stolen some handguns from him — got four months.
Upon hearing this, Stadnick was eager to cut his losses with the Demon Keepers and disbanded them immediately. He then sent a message to Kane telling him there were no hard feelings.
But, as he later told police, Kane — a sensitive and preternaturally suspicious man — came to believe in prison that Stadnick had intentionally set him up to fail: that, for some reason, he wanted to get rid of him. Some commentators in the media have since agreed with that idea. But it’s absurd. Stadnick wanted nothing more than to move the Hells Angels into Ontario and the utter failure of the Demon Keepers set that plan back considerably. And the proud Stadnick was personally humiliated by the ineffectiveness of his pet project, a fact that allowed his rival Steinert to mock him and openly talk about forming his own gang in Ontario. In fact, it was at about this point that Magnussen stopped acting as Stadnick’s bodyguard and lackey, instead following tall, handsome Steinert around.
But it didn’t matter. Kane, who had been so loyal to Hells Angels for years and through much suffering and little reward, changed his mind. He turned. Kane became not only an informant, but a very rich one as the RCMP paid him dearly for his information.
When he was released from prison, he went to go see Stadnick right away. While it’s pretty standard practice in biker clubs to see your boss after getting out of prison, I’ve since been told Kane was also looking for some usable material from the normally immune-from-prosecution Stadnick to give to his new bosses in the RCMP.
He didn’t get any. Stadnick was polite, but curt with him; shooing him back to his old sponsor Carroll at every occasion. That convinced Kane that he was right about Stadnick setting him up to fail. But it was later determined that Stadnick was busy putting together his master plan. In fact, in an effort to accomplish it, Stadnick had even given up his title as national president, after eight long and productive years, to giant, short-tempered Robert “Ti-Maigre” Richard, who had been Sorel’s much-feared sergeant-at-arms.
Made up of Stadnick’s trusted friends and the Hells Angels’ best drug-sellers, the Nomads were a new kind of chapter. Welcome at any Hells Angels clubhouse, the Nomads were a sort of super-chapter, a “dream team” whose primary task was the equitable and profitable sale of drugs across the country. The long-range goal — and this perfectly dovetailed with Stadnick’s coast-to-coast recruitment
drive — was to have a virtual monopoly on all drug sales in the entire country. La Belle Province was becoming just too small a market, and the Hells Angels were fighting a bloody war with the Rock Machine and their allies for control of it.
An added benefit of Nomads membership was that it allowed another layer of protection against prosecution. A Nomad never touched any drugs. He told a Hells Angel to tell a prospect to tell a hangaround to tell an associate to do the actual drug dealing. If any active party was caught, he could only turn in the guy above him. And, as the chain of responsibility got higher, the likelihood of anyone turning informant — at least, according to the plan — was decreased. It’s unlikely any street-level dealers even knew who was actually pulling the strings on, or getting the big profits from, their very risky occupations.
It was the antithesis of the traditional motorcycle club model in which individual members were allowed to engage in illegal activities, but the club itself — and, importantly, its management — was not involved and had the ability to deny any knowledge of any illegal activity. That was the key difference between Stadnick’s Hells Angels and Parente’s Outlaws. Stadnick was involved up to the hilt, but insulated himself from prosecution with layers and layers of lackeys. Parente, on the other hand, could deny any knowledge of any illegal activity undertaken by a fellow member, and certainly would never admit to being involved with anything any other Outlaw did to break the law.
At various times, the Nomads consisted of Stadnick, his right-hand man Donald “Pup” Stockford, former Halifax boss Carroll, Montreal kingpin Maurice “Mom” Boucher, former Trois-Rivieres Chapter president Richard “Rick” Vallée, former SS member Normand “Biff ” Hamel, Louis “Me-Lou” Roy, Salvatore Brunetti, René “Balloune” Charlebois, André Chouinard, Denis “Pas Fiable” Houle, Gilles “Trooper” Mathieu, Michel Rose, Richard “Bert” Mayrand, Normand Robitaille, Luc Bordeleau and Pierre Laurin along with prospects Bruno Lefebvre, Guillaume Serra, Paul “Smurf” Brisebois and Jean-Richard “Race” Larivière.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 11