Croitoru was a local celebrity. And he was hard to miss. He was huge. Only about six-foot tall, he carried a very solid 300 pounds on his frame. He complemented his intimidating stature with wild eyes, a shaved head and a bushy, black Fu Man-chu mustache. He looked pretty much like what he was: a washed-up professional wrestler.
Years earlier, he’d been in the employ of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF). It can’t be overstated how immensely popular the WWF was at the time. Few stars had the magnitude of Hulk Hogan. He was everywhere. People in places like Hamilton wore his likeness, and even his catchphrases, on their clothing. They watched him in movies and on TV. They loved him. And he fought against Croitoru.
Johnny K-9
Croitoru was what wrestling fans call a “jobber.” That’s a guy who’s paid to show up, look tough, rile up the crowd and then get the daylights beaten out of him by the star. And Croitoru played it up. He’d show up in the ring with tight black shorts and a studded collar around his neck. He’d climb into the ring, acknowledge the boos, and do anything he could to amp them up. Then the star would come in and trounce him. His signature moves were the Stomach Claw and the Flying Headbutt and he became famous as Johnny K-9.
It was a hard way to make a living, even by Hamilton standards. But Johnny K-9 — even though it wasn’t his legal name he managed to get a bank account under it, so it has to be considered his real identity — was a major celebrity. At the time, guys like Hogan were thought of as legitimate superstars, so getting thrown out of a ring by him was enough to grant a fairly healthy dose of stardom upon a jobber. Johnny K-9 could barely walk a block in downtown Hamilton without someone offering to buy him a beer.
Professionally, things did not go well for him. After some arrests for cocaine possession and assault in 1991, he was dumped from the WWF. Over the years, he wrestled for increasingly down-market leagues, changing his identity from Middle Eastern bad guy (the Terrible Turk or Taras Bulba) to blue-collar good guy (Bruiser Bedlam). While his exposure and his paycheque dwindled, his credibility on the streets of the Hammer didn’t. He was still a star.
After a few months of semi-unemployment, K-9 was ready to make some real money. He, Noble and Rich spent a few months serving drinks at the Toronto Satan’s Choice clubhouse before they earned their patch. They bought an old convenience store at 269 Lottridge Street in the North End of Hamilton for a clubhouse. It was about six blocks away from the by-then-destroyed Outlaws clubhouse on Birch Avenue. Satan’s Choice paid $40,000 for the building. K-9 was named their president.
It wasn’t a wise choice. Isnor, the OPP biker specialist, noticed him right away. He was hard to miss. “After a while, you can tell who’s cut out for the life and who isn’t. I could tell right away he wouldn’t make it,” he told me. “Some of the guys would talk to you. If there was a guy who was really into bikes, you could talk bikes, but K-9 would talk about anything, especially himself — he was just stupid that way.”
Things were somewhat different in Sudbury. Drugs were already being poured into the city, and the local tough guys were hastily assembled into a barely cohesive group, which became the local Satan’s Choice chapter. Their president was a local thug named Michael Dubé. While he had only a few arrests to his credit, police and members of the criminal community alike considered him a dangerous man. Isnor, who said that another biker — a convicted multi-murderer — reminded him of Charles Manson because of the crazed look in his eyes, considered Dubé to be the most dangerous of all the Ontario bikers. And unlike K-9, he did not feel a need to chat with cops.
These new chapters and a close connection with Hells Angels bolstered Satan’s Choice considerably. They hadn’t come back to anywhere near where they were before Guindon went to prison, but they could make an argument that they were the second-biggest biker club in Ontario after their bitter enemies the Outlaws. They appeared to be the Hells Angels’ favorites.
But it didn’t come very easily, and it wouldn’t be a smooth road for them either. A couple of years before the Hamilton and Sudbury chapters opened, everybody in the outlaw biker world and law enforcement knew that Hells Angels in general and Stadnick in particular were looking to expand into Southern Ontario. Logic dictated that he needed an existing club in the potentially quite lucrative region — boots on the ground, as it were — to break in.
So in the summer of 1993, when Hells Angels threw a massive party in Wasaga Beach (the old Satan’s Choice resort town of preference), it was unanimously seen as an audition of sorts. They invited every single biker club in Ontario, except two that were very conspicuous by their absence: the Outlaws and Satan’s Choice.
Although Hells Angels and the Outlaws were no longer at war by then, everybody knew that it was a detente and not a real peace. Their not being invited wasn’t actually surprising, but a little disheartening for law enforcement. “We knew that if he had invited the Outlaws — especially Parente — then there would be no war in Ontario,” one cop told me. “But when they weren’t there, it kind of made us a little uneasy.”
Satan’s Choice was another matter altogether. They seemed the logical partners for Hells Angels. Even though they had been weakened by defections to the Outlaws, they had an enviable network, a strong leadership crew and a deep and abiding hate for the Outlaws. It seemed like a match made in drug-dealing heaven.
But it was not to be. At least not right away. Stadnick was not just playing hard to get. Instead, he had his eye on another gang.
In 1978, Francesco Lenti — who went by “Frank” or “Cisco” — wanted to be a Hells Angel, but they had no presence in Ontario. So, like many in Ontario at the time, he did the next best thing — he joined Satan’s Choice.
It didn’t work out. Lenti’s me-first attitude and obvious sense of entitlement rubbed the Satan’s Choice full-patches the wrong way and he never made it past prospect. Insulted and embittered, he left the gang and skulked back to Woodbridge, his hometown, and formed his own gang.
Just north and west of Toronto, Woodbridge has long been a haven for middle-class and wealthy Italians fleeing the rigors of the big city. As such, it has long had a reputation as a hotbed of Mafia activity (and there have been many arrests to back up that claim). In fact, the area’s connection with the Mafia is so tied into public consciousness that when a middle-aged Woodbridge couple that had an Italian last name were murdered on vacation in Mexico, the local papers openly speculated about their possible ties to organized crime.
Lenti called his little gang (mostly high school friends and others disenchanted with Satan’s Choice) the Loners. They met in a clubhouse he rented across the street from his own house. He even designed their rather elaborate and bizarre patch, featuring a head that is a devil on one side and a werewolf (or so it appears) on the other with blood dripping from its mouth. And the text on the patch is made up of bones.
While most other bikers and law enforcement called them the “Losers,” the Loners actually had some success. Most of it came from Lenti, who had two very successful businesses in industries bikers tend to admire — a stripper/escort talent agency and a tow truck firm.
And when Stadnick met with all those Ontario bikers at Wasaga in 1993, he spent most of his time with Lenti and the Loners. My sources say that he was not all that impressed with Lenti himself, but liked the rest of the club and considered them to be in the perfect spot at exactly the right time.
So Stadnick started shipping drugs into Toronto via the Loners. Lenti took care of the books, and when a couple of members confronted him about some discrepancies — mentioning that they knew full well he had stolen money from a previous, now-disbanded gang also called the Loners — he threw a fit and stormed away, never to return. I’ve since been told the Hells Angels were the ones who planted that doubt.
Francesco Lenti
But he did not disappear. In fact, he started up yet another club — the third he had founded and the latest of at least five he had been in — across the street from the Loners clubh
ouse in his own house. Made up of his loyalists and a few kids, they called themselves the Diablos. Since the Loners were right across the street, the frightened Diablos were forced to come to meetings through an alleyway and across Lenti’s backyard.
So desperate were the big biker gangs for every square inch of Southern Ontario — especially prime real estate like Woodbridge — the Diablos were immediately courted. A very short time after they were founded, the Diablos had a working relationship with Satan’s Choice, who were as exquisitely angry with Hells Angels for snubbing them as they were with the Outlaws for stealing their best chapters. Despite having already kicked the mercurial Lenti out of their own club years earlier and knowing he had stolen from his own club and been kicked out of yet another club he’d founded, Satan’s Choice now dangled prospective membership to his newest club, a bunch of nobodies who met in a suburban townhouse basement and were afraid to show their colors on their own street.
The Hells Angels, of course, could not tolerate that kind of insolence, and yet another small biker war was on in Ontario. It began on July 18, 1995 when a member of the Diablos threw a homemade firebomb at a tow truck owned by a Loner. The Loners retaliated by shooting two Diablos, although the injuries were minor.
Everything changed on August 1. Early in the morning, the otherwise quiet Toronto neighborhood of Riverdale shook as a huge boom shattered windows and woke everyone up. The heavily fortified front door of the Satan’s Choice clubhouse on Kintyre Avenue had been blown off. Police later determined that it had been shot with a handheld rocket launcher, much like the ones police found in a park just outside Hamilton after the Outlaws’ failed assassination plot against Stadnick.
Ever mindful of the biker wars in Montreal that had left piles of dead bodies and saw near-daily explosions, Toronto mayor Barbara Hall was determined to put a stop to it. The often-hysterical Toronto media kicked into overdrive, predicting death and destruction in the streets.
On August 16, two hours after Hall had given a speech about biker violence in the city, a similar explosion rocked Woodbridge. Someone had blown a hole in the Loners’ clubhouse wall. Everyone assumed the Diablos were responsible, but one Loner jokingly told a reporter he suspected a different culprit. “Looks like the cops have stolen our rocket launcher,” he said.
Less than a week later, Lenti opened up the driver’s side door of his white Ford Explorer. He turned the key, which ignited a bomb fastened to the bottom of the car. It didn’t kill him, but it did take a big chunk out of his upper right thigh, incapacitating him for years and giving him a pronounced limp for the rest of his life. The nature of his injuries and his reputation allowed cops and rival bikers alike to start calling him the “half-assed biker.”
With Lenti out of the way, the war was over, the Diablos were run off and an uneasy peace was made between Satan’s Choice and Hells Angels.
Years later, it came out that Nomad David “Wolf” Carroll had discussed a plan with Rocker Dany “Danny Boy” Kane that would have him and other Rockers kill a few Loners to scare both sides closer to the Hells Angels fold. The plan never materialized for two reasons: Carroll was convinced that too many people knew about the plan and was afraid that someone might rat — and he suspected Kane’s friend (and secret lover) Aimé Simard. In any event, the war ended before they could put a conclusive plan together.
But the Toronto media didn’t know that the war was over. They urged Hall to take serious action against them, to do more than just talk. Her zoning people got after Satan’s Choice for having their clubhouse in a residential area. Determining it was illegal for the building to be non-residential, they prepared a court order against the club. So the club set up a bedroom inside the building and moved a member in. Desperate, Hall offered to buy the clubhouse for almost double what it was worth. The owner, full-patch Larry McIlroy, agreed, but balked at a clause that forbade the club from re-opening in another building in the city. The local media got wind of this, started calling Hall “Biker Barb,” and she lost her re-election campaign.
Then the York Region police and OPP raided the Loners’ clubhouse. They seized a few weapons, but made not a single arrest.
Things didn’t go absolutely smoothly after the Diablos-Loners war. Stadnick was plenty pissed off at Satan’s Choice over the whole Toronto debacle and he was also owed a lot of money by the Thunder Bay Chapter. But he knew better than to keep them enemies.
He started showing up in Ontario more and more often. Despite the constant threat posed by the Outlaws, he appeared frequently at public events. OPP Sergeant Len Isnor recalled being at a motorcycle show at Toronto’s Exhibition Grounds when, suddenly, the entire crowd fell silent. He looked to the door to see Stadnick, in his flamboyant, self-designed colors, walk into the show, with a phalanx of bodyguards in tow. Immediately and without any warning, the crowd parted like the Red Sea, affording Stadnick and his men room. Stadnick walked right up to Watteel and the two, surrounded by bodyguards, talked for about 45 minutes. When Stadnick was done, the bodyguards lined up behind him and the crowd automatically separated again to let him through. “I had never seen anything like it,” said Isnor. “It was like he was a rock star or something.” Years later, at the same show, Isnor was surveying the crowd when he was approached by Parente and another Outlaw. Noting that they were the only two Outlaws in a mass of Hells Angels and Hells Angels supporters, Parente joked: “You’ll probably want to stick with us for a little while.”
For the time being, the Loners were still Stadnick’s favorites. Things were going badly for Satan’s Choice. Guindon held a huge party at his large Port Perry property. In a shocking surprise, he announced his retirement from the club. At the time, many suspected he had been tipped off about a massive raid that was coming, but I’ve since been told that he had already begun to show distinct signs of Alzheimer’s-related dementia.
That was actually good news for Stadnick and Hells Angels. Without Guindon and his dogma that the club must remain all-Canadian, the members, even the chapters of Satan’s Choice, were now free to become Hells Angels.
But there were problems just over the horizon. The joint police forces were preparing an immense raid — Operation Dismantle — aimed at arresting every member of Satan’s Choice in Ontario and depriving them of their infrastructure and income.
Because they were the newest clubs, Sudbury and Hamilton would have been the hardest to get evidence against had it not been for some bad decisions by the bikers, some good police work by the OPP and a little bit of luck.
Dubé and his guys invited K-9 and his crew — which now included Rich, Noble, Gordie Cunningham and a guy known as Lebanese Joe — up for a get-together. Once the guys from Hamilton had arrived in Sudbury, they started drinking and they all ended up at the Solid Gold, the city’s biggest strip joint.
In the spacious parking lot outside the massive, low-slung windowless blue building, the local guys took their jackets off and locked them in the trunks of their cars. K-9 asked what they were doing. One of Dubé’s men told him that the club had a strict no-colors policy so they had to take their jackets off before they could go inside. The Hamilton boys laughed derisively. One of them said: “We wear our colors wherever the fuck we want.” And the others agreed. K-9 asked rhetorically who was going to stop them.
After a round of “fuck yeahs,” the Sudbury members proudly re-donned their jackets and the whole group went into the bar. Minutes later, the police showed up in force and turfed them all from the club. Dubé swore revenge.
Not long thereafter, a bomb exploded at the Sudbury police station. Nobody was hurt, but it left a huge hole in the wall. And it spread fear throughout the community. If the police couldn’t keep themselves safe, how could they keep the public safe?
It was just about time for the Victoria Day holiday in 1997. Many Canadians refer to the three-day weekend as “May Two-Four” because it usually falls on or about May 24 and the traditional way of celebrating involves buying and consuming a 24-pack o
f one’s favorite beer. It is the traditional kickoff of summer in Canada, and it brings the first wave of tourists from Southern Ontario to the North.
Isnor was up there, but he was working. On the Friday before the big weekend, he got a call from a local drug dealer who can only be called Ed because he, too, is in the witness protection program. He was behind in his payments to the Vachon Brothers, a pair of tough guys from Sherbrooke who worked for Nomad Vallée. He promised to tell Isnor everything in exchange for his safety.
Despite the big weekend, Isnor managed to find a motel room for him in Orillia, a cute little town (and home of the OPP’s central headquarters) some four hours’ drive southeast of Sudbury.
A couple of days later, Isnor received a call at his office. It was from American Express. Their representative asked him if he was in a Peterborough restaurant. He assured them he wasn’t, that he was a six-hour drive away in Sudbury. They told him that someone was attempting to pay for a meal using his card number in Peterborough. They also asked him if he had racked up over $2,000 in charges in the last day and a half. He assured them he hadn’t, then he told them who he was and that he’d take care of it. So he called some cops he knew in Peterborough and they scooped Ed up and threw him in the “Barrie Bucket” — a notorious and since-closed maximum-security jail in Barrie, a city halfway between Orillia and Toronto.
As soon as Isnor had left Ed at the Orillia motel, the biker convinced the elderly manager that he was in something of a pickle. He told him that he had just ordered a pizza, but that his “brother” (Isnor, who looked nothing like him) had driven off with his wallet. If he could just get his Amex number from the registry, he could pay for his pizza. The manager believed him and gave him the imprint. Armed with this data, career criminal Ed went on a minor spending spree.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 13