Zager owned Hardcore Tattoos & Piercing (with locations in London and the nearby resort town of Port Stanley) and, allegedly, a number of rub ’n’ tug parlors in the London area. A low-level form of prostitution that begins with a massage, rub ’n’ tug parlors are targeted at truck drivers and office workers, both of which London has in abundance.
It was those successful businesses, sources say, that caught the eyes of the Hells Angels. Zager quickly became a member. And he was a very visible one, wearing his colors every chance he got, even at events where he knew Outlaws and/or Bandidos would be present.
Although he was a valuable member, Zager’s absence didn’t do much to hurt Hells Angels in Ontario. They were solidly at the top of the food chain. The Mafia was all but extinct, most of the other biker gangs had been absorbed or sidelined. The Rock Machine-turned-Bandidos were few in number and not very well organized. If there was any organization that could prevent the Hells Angels hegemony, it had been the Outlaws. And now, thanks to Project Retire, they were all gone.
“Once we had it all wrapped up, a bunch of us were sitting around and the subject came up that without the Bandidos and the Outlaws, there wasn’t much to keep the Hells Angels from taking over,” a cop who was involved told me. “Everybody just kind of said ‘yeah.’ ”
Chapter 11
Victory for Mario “The Wop” Parente
Elizabeth Maguire was in a familiar place, but in an unfamiliar position. The well-known and highly successful Crown attorney was in a building she felt comfortable in — the London courthouse — but she didn’t look comfortable at all. She looked shaken and about to cry. She was being questioned about potential wrongdoing, or at least incompetence, in one of the most important biker trials in Canadian history.
It had started almost seven years earlier, in 2002 when Project Retire arrested all of the Outlaws in Ontario. Most of them made deals right away and were back on the streets, but with so many court-appointed restrictions that they could not operate as a viable organization. But 10 of them, including national president Mario “The Wop” Parente, remained on trial.
At a preliminary inquiry, Justice John Getliffe saw Maguire in a courthouse hallway and asked her to speak with him in his chambers. Once inside, the pair had a conversation that led Maguire to believe that Getliffe had already made up his mind to convict the Outlaws. A few days later, they had another private conversation that Maguire later said further convinced her that Getliffe meant to convict the Outlaws as a criminal organization.
Assuming she already had the case in the bag, Maguire decided against calling in a number of witnesses who had a great deal of evidence against the individuals and the organization. Her logic at the time was that exposing some of these witnesses to cross-examination, especially from Parente’s legendarily sharp defense attorney Jack Pinkofsky, could lead to a mistrial or jeopardize Getliffe’s ability to give the ruling she was sure they both wanted.
So it came as a tremendous shock when, on June 30, 2004, Getliffe discharged all criminal organization charges against the bikers. In his summation, he mentioned that what convinced him to drop the charge was the fact that Maguire failed to call enough witnesses.
Enraged, Maguire took the rare and fairly drastic step of preferring an indictment. In effect, she went over Getliffe’s head to ask the Attorney General to reinstate the charges. A four-person panel (including Deputy Attorney General Murray Segal) considered the case and the evidence already presented. Citing the importance of the case and its likelihood to set an important precedent, they ruled that Getliffe was wrong. The charges were relayed upon the accused.
Years later, Parente told me that he was frequently offered deals under which all other charges would be dropped if he agreed to plead guilty to being a member of a criminal organization. He always refused. That didn’t surprise anyone who knew Parente. He was true to his club and its members and made it known that he believed they should sink or swim together. His pride would not have let him be known in history as the man who sold out the Outlaws for a few dropped charges.
It was clearly important to prosecutors all over the country to get someone to admit they were members of a criminal organization. That fixation started during the Hells Angels-Rock Machine war in Quebec. Under a great deal of public pressure, the federal government passed Bill C-95 in 1997. It read, in part, “every one who ... participates in or substantially contributes to the activities of a criminal organization knowing that any or all of the members of the organization engage in or have, within the preceding five years, engaged in the commission of a series of indictable offences ... of which the maximum punishment is imprisonment for five years or more ... is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 14 years.” So if the Crown could prove that, for example, Hells Angels are a criminal organization, then simply being a member of the club could make someone liable to 14 years behind bars. It would, essentially, outlaw the club.
But it hadn’t really seen any real success. The Crown failed to win a single C-95 conviction in the Hells Angels’ megatrials primarily because the individual bikers maintained that they were doing business independent of one another, despite the proven existence of the Nomads and their drug distribution organization, which they called The Table.
The next time it was invoked was against the Rock Machine’s Peter Paradis, but he turned informant and the charge was dropped. It finally won convictions in 2001 when Philippe Côté, Mario Filion, Eric LeClerc and Simon Lambert were found guilty of operating a drug ring for the Rock Machine. But, by that time, the Rock Machine had ceased to exist, having been patched over by Bandidos.
It finally made some headway in September 2004, when two Hells Angels were found guilty of extorting a huge sum of money from a cocaine-addicted black-market satellite TV equipment dealer in Barrie. Steven “Tiger” Lindsay and Raymond Bonner showed up at the man’s house in full colors and demanded $75,000. He refused and called police as soon as they left. They convinced the man to meet with them again in a nearby restaurant. He wore a wire.
According to court records: Lindsay wore boots with the words ‘Hells Angels North Toronto’ and the death head logo, a belt bearing the words ‘Hells Angels’ embroidered on it and a death head on its buckle, a T-shirt bearing the death head logo and the words ‘Hells Angels Singen [a chapter in Germany],’ and a necklace with a pendant of the Hells Angels death head logo and Bonner wore a jacket bearing the Hells Angels death head logo and the words ‘Hells Angels East End’ and a black T-shirt bearing two death heads and the words ‘Hells Angels First Anniversary.’”
The police recorded Lindsay warning the victim that he would send people to his house, and that the money belonged to him and “five other guys that are fucking the same kind of motherfucker as I am.”
Judge Michelle Fuerst found them not just guilty of extortion, but also of being members of a criminal organization. “Both Mr. Lindsay and Mr. Bonner went to [the victim’s] house wearing jackets bearing the primary symbols of the HAMC [Hells Angels Motorcycle Club], the name ‘Hells Angels’ and the death head logo,” she said in her ruling. “In so doing, they presented themselves not as individuals, but as members of a group with a reputation for violence and intimidation. They deliberately invoked their membership in the HAMC with the intent to inspire fear in their victim. They committed extortion with the intent to do so in association with a criminal organization, the HAMC to which they belonged.”
But since Lindsay and Bonner both immediately appealed the ruling — and their appeal wouldn’t be heard until 2009 — C-95 was still without precedent.
And Maguire — who had missed a similar opportunity at the 2001 extortion trial of Douglas Johnstone, Tom Walkinshaw and Jimmy Coates — wanted to be the first to bring down an entire biker gang. But while Maguire would get another chance to convince a judge that the Outlaws were indeed a criminal organization, her explanation of why she lost the preliminary inquiry, why she hadn’t ca
lled on her legion of witnesses revealed something worth investigating. And in June 2005, Pinkofsky filed an abuse of process motion against her.
As a result, Maguire’s boss — Senior Assistant Crown Attorney John Hanbidge — ordered her to explain exactly why she behaved the way she did in the preliminary inquiry. Her reaction was immediate and revealing. “Are you nuts?” she shouted. “You’re giving my head to Jack on a platter!” It would come back to embarrass her.
At the abuse of power hearing, Justice Lynda Templeton ruled that it didn’t matter what Getliffe said to her or whether he had gone back on a deal or not. Clearly she didn’t like how he behaved. “For a presiding judge in an ongoing preliminary inquiry to have unnecessarily called the Crown into chambers, and to have proceeded to discuss the case to any extent at all in the absence of opposing counsel was, in my view, entirely inappropriate,” she told Maguire. But Pinkofsky hadn’t filed against Getliffe, he had filed against Maguire, and so it was incumbent upon her to answer any and all questions about backroom dealings and subsequent cover-ups. And Templeton made sure that Maguire knew that any sort of meeting she had with a judge at which the defense was not present and not even informed of later was not the kind of action that could be tolerated from a Crown attorney. “It is incomprehensible to me that ... Ms. Maguire did not disclose this meeting to defense counsel,” she said. “Her obligation to do so was unequivocal; her failure to do so was a breach of duty.” And when she heard what Maguire had said to Hanbidge when he asked her to come clean, Templeton said she was shocked that Maguire cared more about “her own status, sense of professionalism and protection from scrutiny” than she was about justice for the accused. She further went on to say that her behavior “sullied” the reputation of the entire Ontario legal system.
Maguire was dumped from the case. Parente, who considered her beneath contempt, was delighted. He still has outstanding suits against her that he can’t talk about because they are still active. In her place, the Attorney General’s office named Alex Smith — a capable and respected prosecutor but one who was taking over a very flawed and now heavily scrutinized case — to lead the Crown’s argument.
Even outside the case things were not going well for the few remaining Outlaws in Ontario. The Black Pistons puppet gang had been reduced to 15 members in two chapters (Simcoe County and London) when their most senior member was arrested on November 10, 2006. Greg Brown — who lived in Ottawa and belonged to the Simcoe County Chapter three hours’ drive away — was charged with eight offenses, including possession of a loaded firearm, possession of a weapon obtained by crime and unauthorized possession of a restricted firearm.
On the night of April 15, 2007, Marcus Cornelisse — who had done his time for the Egerton Avenue shoot-out after plea bargaining down to one count of aggravated assault and one of illegal firearms possession — was working at the Solid Gold, a London strip joint not affiliated with similar bars in Sudbury and Burlington that shared the same name. Shortly after 1 p.m., a pair of cops approached Cornelisse and started asking him a few questions. The big biker punched one of the cops in the face. Before they could act, he punched the other cop in the face, knocking him down. He took a moment to kick the prone officer in the head and back and then fled out the front door. The cops gave chase. One caught up to Cornelisse and grabbed him, but the Outlaw punched him again and broke free. He suddenly turned around and ran back into the Solid Gold. The cops followed him in, but lost him in the dark, cluttered bar and he slipped out a hidden exit. He was arrested the next day and, in yet another plea agreement, was sentenced to a year in prison. He was released after seven months.
Cornelisse was hardly the only Outlaw arrested in Project Retire to be back on the streets. Although 56 men were arrested on September 25, 2002, by the autumn of 2008 only three men remained accused. The trial had crawled through the courts as the Crown and the accused were continually wheeling and dealing with charges and potential punishments. It was also slowed down considerably by the Maguire incident. All of the others had made deals, and 16 of them — much to Parente’s chagrin — admitted they were members of a criminal organization.
On October 18, 2008, the number of accused fell to two. William Mellow — a full-patch member of the London Chapter and a former national secretary-treasurer of the club — had been arrested in Project Retire and charged with a number of offenses. Police had searched his farm just outside Bolton and found a loaded 10-mm handgun and 50 rounds of ammunition in a bedroom. Handguns of that caliber are rare and extremely powerful. Also in his bedroom, the police uncovered some hash oil, steroids and a syringe. In his garage, they discovered an unloaded 12-gauge shotgun wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. The shotgun’s barrel had been sawed off. And in his Cadillac, they found $11,065 in cash.
After more than six years of severe bail restrictions, Mellow was ready to deal. He had his load of charges reduced to one simple count of possession of a handgun without a license. He was sentenced to a year’s probation.
While that punishment seems remarkably lenient in light of what the cops had against Mellow, it also came down with a court order that he may not be in possession of a firearm or be in association or communication with any members of the Outlaws, Hells Angels, Bandidos or Black Pistons. Any violation would earn him a long prison stay.
And it was typical of the deals the other Outlaws arrested in Project Retire had made. In exchange for very light sentences, the guilty were subject to court orders prohiting them from keeping company with each other or any other bikers. Clearly, it was far more important to the Attorney General’s office to break up the Outlaws as an organization than it was to put individual members out of commission. Take Cornelisse for example. He shot another biker in the abdomen with what appeared to be intent to kill and beat up two cops before escaping — and he spent just a few months behind bars and was forbidden to be a biker anymore.
Two Outlaws held out. One, to nobody’s surprise, was Parente, and the other was also from Hamilton. His name was Luis Ferreira. A much younger man (33 to Parente’s 60), nobody I spoke with considered Ferreira to be a big-time biker. “He was a local bad guy, a buddy of Parente’s,” recalled Hamilton biker cop Sergeant John Harris, who knew them both well. “He became an Outlaw, but was never a major guy. Nobody ever really knew what he did to deserve membership, but he was always a loyal guy.”
The primary evidence against Parente came from a Sault Ste. Marie Outlaw who had turned informant. Parente told me that he did not know the man very well, that the man in question was made a member when Parente was in prison, so he had no opportunity to check him out, so he had little to do with him on purpose. But OPP investigator Len Isnor told me that the pair were in frequent contact and that he’d seen “at least three [cocaine] buys” occur between the two.
And on March 12, 2009 — just a few days less than six and a half years after the arrests — it was his turn to talk. But to everyone’s surprise, he wasn’t in court that morning. Instead, Alex Smith, the Crown prosecutor told the Justice Lynda Templeton that he was withdrawing all charges due to a lack of evidence. The informant, he said, had changed his mind; without him, the Crown had “no reasonable prospect of conviction.”
Thinking quickly, Jack Pinkofsky, Parente’s lawyer, asked Templeton to make it part of the public record that the informant declined to testify of his own free will, not because of any threat from Parente, Ferreira or anyone else. Templeton asked Smith if he had any objection to that. He said he didn’t. Parente and Ferreira were free to go. Pinkofsky later said he had “a hunch” the trial would end that way.
I asked Parente why he thought the informant declined to testify. He told me that it was because the informant didn’t actually have anything on him, he just wanted to get paid. When I asked Isnor the same question, he answered with a different opinion. “After six and a half years, he was tired, not as sure he could provide accurate evidence,” he said. “I’ve got to hand it to Pinkofsky for dragging the trial o
n that long.”
“Sometimes true justice takes that kind of course,” Pinkofsky said. “Sometimes it takes a long time for justice to be done.”
After he left the courtroom a free man, Parente stopped to talk with reporters. “I’m just glad everything is over after all this time,” he said. “It’s been a long, long road; and I never had any doubts that the matters were going to turn out the way they did.”
It had indeed been a long, long road for him. Arrested in 2002, he was held in jail until Justice Getliffe dropped the criminal organization charges against all the accused. He was then released on $250,000 bail. Then when Maguire won her preferred indictment, he was thrown back in jail. When that was overturned and she was dismissed from the case, Parente was offered bail once again, only this time for $400,000. He was forced to find work immediately, had a strict sundown curfew and was required to check in with London police — even though he lived and worked on the other side of Hamilton, at least three hours’ drive away — three times a week.
And it wasn’t just him. Parente’s girlfriend, Nadia Kosta, and a common friend, Silvana DiMartino, lost their security clearance at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport where they both worked as passenger-information representatives. Without it, they were as good as fired. The reason, their superiors gave, was that they had put up surety for Parente. Kosta was shocked. She had put up surety for Parente once before in 1996, and had acquired her security clearance in 2001. Kosta was adamant in the media that she had made no secret about her relationship with Parente, and she felt that changing the rules on her now was petty and unnecessarily punitive.
An inquiry noted that Kosta had been in court with Parente and had been rude and combative with court officers. They also claimed DiMartino and her boyfriend were both good friends of Parente’s and knew about his criminal record. They even brought up the fact that a deck of playing cards with a “Support Your Local Outlaws” logo on them was found in DiMartino’s purse. Kosta said they were hers. The women later regained their right to work at the airport, but had been suspended without pay and were dragged through hours of inquiries and other proceedings.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 17