In all, Parente spent about 30 months behind bars, had turned over hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own and his friends’ money and had his life held hostage for 42 long months. Always jovial, he had taken to calling himself and Ferreira “the last men standing” and — in protest of his treatment by the legal system — refused to shave for the last six months of the trial. By the time he was freed, his beard flowed long, white — almost Santa Claus-like — down his chest. “I was prepared to sit in there forever if I had to,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned, we fought this to the bitter end; I was prepared to go on as long as I had to to prove otherwise.”
He was free and he was, he said, proven right. He had managed to get off when so many other prominent bikers — Stadnick, Boucher, the Cazzettas, the Vachons and countless others — had gone down.
But unlike Stadnick and Boucher, he didn’t have a club to go back to when he was finally free. When the entire organization was arrested in 2002, he told them to stay firm, to stick together and that they would all get out of it as a unit. Other than Ferreira, a small-timer, none of them did. In fact, more than a dozen of them pleaded guilty to being members of a criminal organization, a move that endangered the very existence of the club. Particularly galling to Parente, members of law enforcement have told me, was the betrayal of the man they identified as his No. 2, Woodstock Chapter president Kevin Legere. He pleaded guilty in February 2005.
And, when Parente needed cash for bail, none of his so-called brothers came to his aid. “The club has never donated a nickel,” he said. “So that’s how much of a criminal organization this club in Canada is.” He had to sell virtually everything that he owned that hadn’t already been confiscated by police. When last I heard from him, he was still trying to get thousands of dollars’ worth of property back from the government. They claim that it’s theirs because he was a member of a criminal organization, even though he personally beat that charge. But they maintain that because others in the same organization pleaded guilty, his stuff is now theirs.
So he publicly quit the Outlaws. He gave a three-hour interview to reporter Peter Edwards explaining why. “I’m disgusted with everybody,” Parente told him. “I wash my hands of them all.” He later explained that by “everybody,” he meant the legal system, law enforcement and his former fellow Outlaws.
He made it clear that he was shocked and still bitterly disappointed by the fact that the other Outlaws did not support his defense, which, he maintained, would have helped them all. “They were out partying and didn’t donate a dime to help out,” he said. “I [didn’t] get a nickel of support from anybody to fight something that implicates everybody.”
He acknowledged that some of the Canadian Outlaws were criminals, but that since they acted individually within the organization, it didn’t make the Outlaws a criminal organization. “If someone was dealing coke, he wouldn’t tell me about it, it wasn’t my business,” he told me at one of our meetings. Then he gave me an example of how the Outlaws worked. “One time a guy comes up to me and tells me he is selling a trailer full of chickens — didn’t tell me where or how he got it, and I didn’t ask. All I said to him was, ‘What the hell am I going to do with a trailer full of chickens?’”
Had the Outlaws gone ahead with it, Parente’s plan may well have worked. In fact, Hells Angels had used that very defense against similar anti-racketeering laws in the United States and won.
But it didn’t happen, and Parente summed up his opinion of the Outlaws in his typical wry style: “With brothers like that, who needs enemies?”
Soon thereafter, Parente — through his friend Luther — approached me about writing his life story.
Many people have said that the charges being withdrawn against Parente were a huge victory for the bikers in Ontario. Isnor disagrees. “My job was not to put Mario Parente behind bars,” he told me. “It was to put the Outlaws out of business in Ontario.”
And he certainly did manage that.
Chapter 12
Trouble on the Horizon
With all the Outlaws behind bars, it looked like Hells Angels controlled organized crime in all of Canada. After all, the Walter Stadnick-led expansion had established chapters from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island to Halifax, more than 3,500 miles away. And he and his gang had finally invaded Ontario where the last holdouts had held sway. His patch-over of hundreds of bikers on December 29, 2000 was just the beginning. With all of the Outlaws behind bars because of Project Retire and the Mafia in complete disarray, Hells Angels were virtually unopposed in Ontario, unless of course you include law enforcement.
But there were some remaining pockets of resistance: the holdouts, rejects and odds and ends Hells Angels couldn’t account for. Most of them, after Project Retire, were located in the Southwestern part of Ontario.
One very important one was in Windsor. Just a mile south of Detroit, Windsor is almost as tied to the auto industry as the Motor City. These days, of course, that’s bad news, but in the 1960s and 1970s, it meant jobs for everyone. It attracted all kinds of people, including a Calabrian family called the Muscederes.
Every day, on their way to and from elementary school, Giovanni Muscedere and his little brother Joe were bullied. Their family had recently emigrated from Italy to Windsor and the boys still didn’t speak English all that well. Some of the area’s other boys thought the Muscederes’ attempts at communicating in their new language was comical, so they teased them. After a while, the teasing became verbal abuse, and that evolved into physical assaults.
After being beaten up a couple of times, Giovanni Muscedere vowed to his little brother that he would never lose a fight again, no matter how big or how many his enemies were. He learned to box, he worked out. He grew big, strong and fearless. He stopped calling himself Giovanni, and switched to John. John Muscedere turned the tables on his bullies and then became something of a bully himself.
Years later, Muscedere lived in Chatham — about an hour’s drive east on the 401 from Windsor, halfway to London — and had a steady job as a forklift operator at the Rockwell International (later renamed ArvinMeritor) brake plant in Tilbury, about halfway between Chatham and London. He was a jolly guy who made friends easily and liked to party. He also taught kids how to box, earning him the nickname “Boxer” among his friends.
Giovanni Muscedere
He was also a biker. Muscedere originally ran with a low-level gang called the Annihilators. Based in a lonely little shack in a hamlet called Electric about 20 minutes northwest of Chatham and not far from Sarnia, the Annihilators were big-time partiers and small-time crooks. Muscedere himself had gotten into some trouble with break-and-enter charges and the odd assault.
But his rap sheet paled in comparison to his old friend and Annihilators president — Wayne “Weiner” Kellestine. Although he was first arrested many years earlier, Kellestine began to enter law enforcement’s collective consciousness in a serious way in 1982. At the trial of another man, a witness testified that it was common knowledge that Kellestine had murdered a man named John DeFilippo and wounded his father-in-law Vito Fortunato in a Woodbridge home invasion back in 1978. Police investigated, but couldn’t muster enough evidence to bring charges against Kellestine.
A couple of years later, Kellestine was charged with assault after he punched a bouncer who was trying to eject one of his friends from a London bar. He paid a $700 fine. Months later, police found $325,000 worth of cocaine and LSD and a semiautomatic handgun on Kellestine’s farm in Iona Station, a village not far from London. But again, they couldn’t build enough of a case to lay any serious charges.
Kellestine kept out of serious trouble until December 1991. On a cold morning, a black SUV screeched to a halt in front of the emergency admitting entrance to the Elgin General Hospital in St. Thomas. A rear door opened and a body wrapped in a blanket was thrown out of the vehicle. EMTs rushed the man inside and hours of surgery saved his life as surgeons took four bullets out of his gut.
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p; Wayne “Weiner” Kellestine
The man was 34-year-old Thomas Harmsworth. He was a full-patch Outlaw who came from Iona Station, the same 300-resident hamlet just west of St. Thomas that had produced one of the 20th century’s greatest minds — economist John Kenneth Galbraith — and, more dubiously, Wayne Kellestine.
Once he was conscious, police questioned Harmsworth. But he refused to speak. If he knew who shot him, he wasn’t saying. The cops proceeded to investigate without his cooperation, but quickly abandoned the case in January 1992.
The official reason was a lack of evidence — which was completely plausible since Harmsworth wouldn’t talk — but others in the area had a very different opinion. A couple of sources I spoke with said that the cops knew Kellestine was behind the shooting, but they made a sweetheart deal with him.
Just two days before they officially dropped the Harmsworth case, police announced they had found the body of David McNeil in a shallow makeshift grave on a lonely country road just outside another nearby village named Dutton. His corpse had three holes in the back of its skull, the result of three .38-caliber bullets fired at extremely short range.
McNeil had been wanted for the September 19, 1991 murder of an Ingersoll police officer named Scott Rossiter. While nobody has come out — even off the record — to tell me that Kellestine killed McNeil, the consensus among the cognoscenti in Southwestern Ontario is that Kellestine at least knew of McNeil’s death and led the cops to his body in exchange for a quick end to the Harmsworth investigation.
Two months after the McNeil incident, local police forces and the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) mounted Project Bandito (this was long before the Texas-based Bandidos had any presence in the country, so the name is just a coincidence), in which more than 100 officers raided the clubhouses of the Outlaws and Annihilators, along with the residences of many of their members, prospects and associates.
Kellestine was caught red-handed. When police broke into his house, he was passed out on his living room couch, surrounded by drugs, cash and weapons. And there was an unregistered, semiautomatic handgun within his arm’s reach.
Faced with mountains of evidence — including videotape of him selling cocaine, ecstasy and a handgun to an undercover cop — Kellestine pleaded guilty. He was given six years.
It is a custom in the Canadian correctional system to release prisoners after two-thirds of their sentence unless there are some extenuating circumstances. The parole board twice denied Kellestine’s bids to leave prison before his six years were up, citing his continued association with “known and active criminals” and for failing mandatory drug tests while in custody.
Things shifted in the Ontario outlaw biker environment while Kellestine was in prison. Changes in Toronto reverberated through the rest of the province, and the southwestern corner was no different.
After the Loners won the great Toronto biker war of 1995 against the Diablos, they split into two distinct pieces. One was absorbed by the Hells Angels-aligned Para-Dice Riders, while the other stayed nominally independent.
Kellestine — eager to be on the side against Hells Angels but reluctant to align directly with the Outlaws — accepted the Loners’ offer of a patch-over. The Annihilators ceased to exist. Although police and the media generally refer to this new chapter as the St. Thomas or London Loners — perhaps because most of the members lived in or around the city — they always identified themselves as being the Chatham Chapter. Soon thereafter, the Loners established another, smaller chapter based in Amherstburg — a small town just south of Windsor.
Things got complicated after that. The London Outlaws fought a small and largely indecisive war with Coates’ Hells Angels. Two Hells Angels operatives had tried and failed to assassinate Kellestine, probably in an effort to bring them into the war as well.
The Rock Machine — supported by the Texas-based Bandidos — set up three chapters in Canada. Then on December 29, 1999, Stadnick pulled off his massive Ontario patch-over, in which all kinds of bikers — the Para-Dice Riders, the Vagabonds, Satan’s Choice, Iron Hawgs and others, even a few Outlaws — became Hells Angels. Many observers in the media and law enforcement were aghast. “They were truly scraping the bottom of the barrel,” one cop I know told me. “They were trading patch-for-patch the legendary Hells Angels patch for some of the lowest of the low.”
But still, the remaining Loners who had not joined the Para-Dice Riders were among the few gangs in Ontario not offered Hells Angels patches. The Woodbridge Loners continued to survive as a nominally independent but, in practice, pro-Hells Angels club. The next time they made news was in January 2001, when the club attempted to keep its mascot — an 800-pound, neutered, declawed lion named Woody — on a farm north of the city in the face of widespread protests.
The Chatham Loners, however, were another story. Because of Kellestine, Hells Angels wanted no part of them. Instead, they, along with the Rock Machine chapters in Toronto and Kingston, became a prospective Bandidos chapter.
Like many motorcycle clubs, Bandidos were formed by a man who admired Hells Angels, but couldn’t join them. Bandidos formed in 1966 in the Southeastern Texas town of San Leon when a longshoreman and former U.S. Marine named Donald Eugene Chambers met a fellow dockworker who had been with Hells Angels in upstate New York. Despite the number of ports there and the proximity to Mexico, there was virtually no Hells Angels’ or Outlaws’ presence on the Gulf Shore of Texas.
The gang took off very quickly. Bandidos took over the region, and expanded rapidly, attracting Vietnam veterans the same way Hells Angels and the Outlaws had veterans of World War II and the Korean War a generation or two earlier. It has frequently been reported in the media that Chambers, a Vietnam combat veteran, took the name and look from the Frito Bandito, a cartoon mascot the Frito-Lay company used to sell its corn chips, but that logo actually debuted in 1968, well after the club’s formation.
By the time Stadnick conquered Ontario, Bandidos had eclipsed the Outlaws as the second most powerful biker gang in the world, behind only Hells Angels themselves. They had a few advantages. While Hells Angels have a strict whites-only rule (the Outlaws’ views on this vary from chapter to chapter and country to country, but they are still overwhelmingly white), Bandidos readily welcomed some non-whites, and are very heavily Hispanic or even predominantly Muslim in some areas. And while Hells Angels do have many foreign chapters, Bandidos have been far more aggressive when it comes to recruiting overseas.
And it was actually from Sweden that the first Bandidos’ presence came to Canada. In the late 1990s, when the Rock Machine was losing what had become a very one-sided war against the Hells Angels in Quebec, a high-ranking member of the Rock Machine named Fred Faucher asked the Swedish Bandidos for help.
He was impressed by what the Scandinavian Bandidos had accomplished in what the media called “The Great Nordic Biker War.” In a battle waged from 1994 to 1997, Bandidos (along with a few Outlaws and smaller clubs) managed to fight Hells Angels and their allies to a stalemate. Although there were far fewer casualties — 12 deaths (including one innocent civilian) and 96 wounded — than in the Quebec Rock Machine-Hells Angels war, the conflict in Scandinavia made more headlines worldwide. That was probably because the war crossed international borders — Sweden, Denmark and even Finland were involved — and because the bikers (many of whom had ties with their countries’ militaries and/or white supremacist groups) used machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades to settle their differences. It got so bad, in fact, that the Danish government actually passed a law forbidding biker gangs from buying or renting property as clubhouses. The law was later overturned as unconstitutional, but it lasted long enough to make a big difference. The Bandidos and Hells Angels even signed a truce in Denmark, live on national television.
The European Bandidos — especially in France, a place where Bandidos are quite strong — welcomed the Quebeckers with open arms. But things were different with their bosses down in Texas who had the final say
on everything. At first the Texans weren’t crazy about the idea of the Rock Machine. They knew little about Quebec, the war with the Hells Angels or the gang itself. But when some arrests and casualties led to Faucher becoming acting president of the Rock Machine by default, he invited Bandidos from around the world to a huge party in Quebec City, and things quickly changed. The Rock Machine may have ceased to exist, but it wasn’t because of the Hells Angels. Instead of surrendering, Faucher and his men wanted to get stronger.
It happened, appropriately enough, in Woodbridge, a town best known for its Mafia connections. In recent years, it had been home to at least three separate incarnations of the Loners, the Diablos, Satan’s Choice, the Para-Dice Riders, the Rock Machine, Hells Angels and, now, Bandidos. The Rock Machine negotiated with Bandidos, and the patch-over was official.
And on Saturday, January 6, 2001, a banquet hall in Kingston was the site of a huge party. At it, what remained of the Rock Machine in Ontario and Quebec patched over to Bandidos as a prospective chapter. While it was the Scandinavian Bandidos who sponsored the Canadians and were considered responsible for them, the Americans were ultimately in charge.
Soon the Canadian Bandidos went looking for other gangs to recruit. A group of American Bandidos — led by Oklahoman Edward Winterhalder, who had been assigned the task of patching over the Rock Machine and getting them up to speed in Bandidos’ rules and philosophy — visited the Woodbridge Loners in February. Although he was very impressed by Pietro Barilla, their leader, Winterhalder didn’t have much hope of patching them over. The Loners they met indicated they didn’t hate Hells Angels — usually a prerequisite for Bandidos membership — and had, in fact, just kicked out a promising and prominent member for being “too anti-Hells Angels.”
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 18