Although the Latin American immigrant population of Canada is still relatively small, the country — especially British Columbia — has caught the attention of the Mexican cartels. The primary draw has been BC Bud, a particularly powerful strain of marijuana grown in the province. Through the use of such specialized farming technology as aeroponics and halogen daylight simulators, farmers in B.C. have been able to produce unprecedentedly huge crops of marijuana with a much higher THC content than ever seen before.
While it sells for a small premium on the domestic market, it sells for a much higher amount across the border and is even reported to be traded on a one-for-one basis for cocaine in Miami. Because of this, authorities have intercepted BC Bud traveling into the U.S. not just in the traditional ways, but in school kids’ knapsacks, hot-air balloons, ocean-going kayaks and even purpose-built tunnels constructed under the border. That kind of profit margin has led to many different gangs attempting to get a piece of the pie (which authorities estimated to be worth $6.3 billion in 2008), and the Mexican cartels have moved in with force.
Not only has the volume and potency of BC Bud led to decreased sales of Mexican- and U.S.-grown marijuana, but the cartels have also found that it is actually much easier to move product over the Canadian-U.S. border than it is over the heavily defended U.S.-Mexican border.
So far, Hells Angels have managed to keep a lid on B.C. They have done so largely by staying off the front lines and dealing with smaller (often racially mixed) gangs like the United Nations and the Red Scorpions. But they are in a precarious position. In fact, it’s a scenario not unlike the one that occurred in Montreal in the 1990s that gave birth to the Rock Machine because it pits an insular gang that makes rules against street-level dealers and smaller gangs who have their own ideas about how best to profit from the distribution of drugs.
Back then, a few dealers who did not want to deal with Hells Angels and their rules teamed with bar owners and disgruntled bikers like the Cazzetta brothers and Paul Porter and the Mafia to form an alliance that eventually fought a long and bloody war with Hells Angels for the streets of Montreal. The Mafia was Hells Angels’ primary supplier, but they did not want to have one single avenue of sale; instead they played the Rock Machine against Hells Angels. By having them both sell drugs in direct competition with one another, it increased the Mafia’s volume and selling price.
Currently in B.C., one can see the Mexican cartels eclipsing Hells Angels as the primary distributors and exporters of BC Bud and they are reported to be currently seeking other gangs to deal with. Complicating matters is the fact that until recently, Hells Angels practically had a monopoly on cocaine sales in B.C. But the Mexicans have more, better and cheaper cocaine. In fact, they have found it easier to barter cocaine for BC Bud instead of importing the large quantities of cash that would be necessary for such huge transactions. The effect has been to bring down the overall price of cocaine, putting a significant bump in Hells Angels’ bottom line. And the bartering has brought cocaine — and its inherent problems — to parts of B.C. that had never seen that kind of thing before.
While the Mexican cartels already deal with a number of ethnic gangs in major Canadian centers, if they want to expand in Canada, it would make sense to employ outlaw biker gangs. While it is, of course, true that previous attempts by the Outlaws and Bandidos to establish themselves north of the border met with eventual failure, that doesn’t mean they won’t try again.
Keep in mind that Hells Angels were repeatedly rebuffed when they first tried to come to Canada, and, even under the masterful hand of Walter Stadnick, it took many years and some significant failures and some outside help before they could take Ontario.
For now, Hells Angels are pretty much it for bikers in Canada. But another group will almost certainly rise to challenge them. Maybe the Outlaws or Bandidos will take another shot. More likely, a gang who hasn’t already been burned in this country will set up shop.
Until recently, my money would have been on the Mongols, but they have hit a massive roadblock. On October 21, 2008, 38 members were arrested after ATF agents infiltrated a chapter and became full-patch members. Two days later, U.S. District Court Judge Florence-Marie Cooper granted an injunction that prohibited club members, their family members and associates from wearing, licensing, selling or distributing the Mongols’ logo. The reason she gave was that, according to police testimony, the Mongols had used the logo and names as an identity and as a form of intimidation to help them, among other things, commit crimes. Despite an outcry from the club and free-speech advocates, the injunction held for a year.
While the Mongols have slowly started to wear their patches around the U.S. and started to sell support wear again, their long-planned expansion east of the Mississippi and into Canada appears to have been indefinitely shelved. Still, the guestbook on the Mongols Canada website is peppered with posts from people claiming to be Canadian Mongols, including one who goes by “Irish” (there was a Bandido prospect by the same name) and another named “Red Power.” Before the injunction, media reports as recent as 2007 claimed that the Mongols were setting up a loosely organized puppet gang in Winnipeg made up of former Bandidos associates — many of Aboriginal descent — called Red Power.
There are, of course, always the Outlaws. As the years have gone by, more and more of the original Outlaws have gotten out of prison and more and more of the court-ordered restrictions on the free ones expire. They have regrouped to some extent in Ottawa and Niagara (under the auspices of Mario Parente’s old friend Richard “Dooker” Williams), but still appear too small to make a dent in the Hells Angels hegemony in the province. Some knowledgeable sources I’ve spoken with have speculated that Parente could rejoin his old mates and rally them back into a viable force. They point out that, back in 1988, he told a judge he had quit the Outlaws and had put them entirely out of his life. While it’s true that he did do that, it appeared from speaking to him that this time he really meant it when he said he was through with the Outlaws. It was no ploy to get his stuff back from the government; he really was disgusted with the way the Outlaws behaved during his trial.
And in April 2008, another familiar name popped up in Ontario — the Rock Machine. According to media reports, the Rock Machine had re-formed in Winnipeg (there had been a few newspaper ads there that announced it was going to happen) and Edmonton, and that their recruiters had come to Toronto to drum up support.
The recruiter, who refused to be named, said that the Rock Machine had a small probationary chapter in Toronto and another one in Kingston that already had 12 members. The one in Toronto was called Rock Machine Ontario West and the one in Kingston was Ontario East. The recruiter admitted that some of the new Rock Machine had been associated in the past with Bandidos (by then a dirty word in Ontario because of the publicity of the Shedden Massacre), but that most of them were younger and had come from a small Woodbridge-based gang called The Crew or had never been in a motorcycle club before.
One of the more well-known members of the Rock Machine Winnipeg Chapter was a man named Ron Burling. He looked pretty much how you’d expect a biker to look these days. He had a shaved head and a bushy goatee. He was a physically huge man, one of those body-builder types who had grown so muscled that his arms were no longer able to touch his sides. And, except for his face, it looked like every square inch of him was covered in tattoos, even the top of his head. His Facebook profile (49 friends) listed him as a “member of the rock machine nomads,” and he named his employer as “Edmonton Maximum Security Penitentiary General Population.”
Ron Burling
He wasn’t kidding. Burling was in prison (in part) for his contributions to a February 8, 2005 kidnapping and assault in Toronto. Burling (a full-patch in Sandham’s prospective Bandidos chapter at the time) and Adam Curwin, Billy Joe Ducharme, Daniel Pereira and Jason Michel (all members of a local puppet gang called La Familia) forced a car driven by Adam Amundsen off the road and into a snowbank. Then they ap
proached the car and smashed in its windows. As the 20-year-old Amundsen and his girlfriend attempted to escape, the bikers grabbed the pair and forced them into what some newspapers called a nearby apartment building and others called a crack house. They were held in separate rooms.
Amundsen, the court was told, was a street-level dealer for Bandidos and was also way behind in his drug debts. To encourage him to pay the $6,000 he owed, the bikers beat him with fists and wooden baseball bats for several hours, sliced off a tattoo on his left hand and broke the index finger of his right hand with a sledgehammer before cutting its tip off.
On the same day, a woman claimed to have been robbed of drugs and money by two armed men she identified as Burling and Pereira, but they were acquitted of that crime.
Although Amundsen endured the beatings in broad daylight and for a very long time, he claimed he could not identify his attackers. His testimony rarely ranged from anything other than “I don’t know” or “I don’t remember.” Burling kept grinning at his responses, until his lawyer told him to stop.
Instead, Michel (who took no active part in the torture), spoke on his behalf. “He looked like a beach ball. He was all puffed up,” Michel testified. “His finger was smashed; it was flat.”
The bikers’ defense attorney, Ian Garber, asked the jury to disregard the testimony from Michel and the robbed woman as he was an admitted drug dealer and had already made a plea deal that saw the Crown drop kidnapping charges against him in exchange for his testimony and she was an admitted crack addict. “If the Crown had a choice, they wouldn’t be asking you to take [the two witnesses’] word for anything,” he said “On cross-examination [Michel] admitted there is no reason for [the jury] to believe anything he told you. Mr. Michel would promise anyone anything he had to get out of the mess he was in.”
But the jury did believe Michel and all four accused bikers were found guilty of kidnapping, aggravated assault and extortion. Burling was given an eight-year sentence, while Curwin, Ducharme and Pereira were given six each. A woman who lured Amundsen to the address and had some degree of knowledge of the plan, was given four years.
Burling appealed his sentence, believing it too harsh because he was already serving nine years for another crime, but lost. On hearing the verdict at his failed appeal, Burling stood up in court and started screaming. He began by telling the judge that “the Bandidos aren’t fuckin’ going anywhere! God forgives, the Bandidos doesn’t!” Then he turned to the Crown attorneys, calling them “fucking clowns” and vowing “to see [them] in 10 years.” As soon as the tirade began, he was rushed by court officers who started to drag him out of the room. As Burling attempted to overturn (or perhaps lift) a bench, the officers brought him to the ground. Moments later, Burling began clutching his chest and bellowing: “My heart! My heart!” He was removed from court on a stretcher, but never lost consciousness and asked his defense attorney for his sunglasses on the way out.
But the Rock Machine recruiter, a former Bandido himself, wanted to distance his new gang from the Rock Machine’s first incarnation. “Obviously, we’re keeping out of crime. We’re going back to old-style biking and brotherhood of the ’50s and ’60s,” he said. “We want to go back to the older ways, the way it was in the early ’50s — when it was just a bunch of drunken toughs.” He further denied that the new Rock Machine would be involved in crime, at least anything serious. “We’re not going to throw a guy out for a bar brawl,” he said. “But anything that we consider an assault on society will be immediate expulsion.”
When asked about guys like Burling — who was still serving 17 years for a laundry list of violent crimes — being in the club, the recruiter demurred. “We believe everybody deserves a second chance,” he said. “We won’t throw our members out who are in jail. We don’t abandon our brothers that are in jail.”
He completely ignored the fact that this new version of the Rock Machine was actually formed when Burling was in prison for his crimes. In fact, they were not standing by him when he was put into prison, but actively recruited him while he was behind bars.
There’s no irony here; or if there is, it’s old and tired. Every outlaw motorcycle gang says the same thing about not being interested in crime. All they want to do, they say, is ride and drink and party and engage in “brotherhood.” And, of course, a remarkable number of them are eventually arrested for crimes — often in conspiracy with their “brothers” — or killed.
But what is interesting is that the new club has chosen to call itself the Rock Machine, a name completely at odds with their self-stated philosophy of avoiding organized and violent crime. Those paying attention will remember that the Rock Machine was formed by a group of disgruntled drug dealers who recruited dozens of toughs and a few legitimate bikers — notably the old SS minus Maurice “Mom” Boucher. It existed for years before it even started calling itself a motorcycle club, let alone actually becoming a semblance of one. And even if the Rock Machine was ever a motorcycle club (and that is stretching the definition), it certainly wasn’t an old-school ’50s and ’60s gang. In fact, no prominent gang was on the farther end of the spectrum. The Rock Machine were justifiably known not for riding and partying, but for trafficking drugs, shooting opposing dealers and setting bombs in public places.
But these guys aren’t the Rock Machine. In fact, they have little to do with them. If you want a good idea of who these guys really are, take a look at their website. Then click on the link marked RIP. It’s commonplace for outlaw biker gang websites to have a page dedicated to the memory of deceased members (although they normally call it GBNF, gone but not forgotten). For the Rock Machine, you’d expect to see the names of notable dead Rock Machine members like Johnny and Tony Plescio or Richard “Bam Bam” Legace. But instead this is what you’d see at the time of this writing: Shedden 8 (? - April 8, 2006)
Our fallen brothers will never be forgotten. Your memory will
always live on with us.
George (Pony) Jessome, 52
George (Crash) Kriarakis, 28
Luis Manny (Chopper) Raposo, 41
Frank (Bam Bam) Salerno, 43
Michael (Little Mikey) Trotta, 31
Paul (Big Paul) Sinopoli, 30
Jamie (Goldberg) Flanz, 37
John (Boxer) Muscedere, 48
Clearly, these guys are the same guys that used to be the Canadian Bandidos. But they couldn’t call themselves Bandidos because the club’s international leadership in Texas wouldn’t allow that crew ever to use their name again. Bandidos may eventually want to take another shot at Canada, but not with the same guys they worked with last time.
So when the old Canadian Bandidos got together to re-form, the guys needed to either come up with an original name or take an established one that wasn’t being used. Of the established gang names no longer in use, the obvious choices were limited to Satan’s Choice and the Rock Machine. Since Satan’s Choice worked for Hells Angels for years before being absorbed by them, and the Rock Machine fought a bloody war against Hells Angels and almost toppled them from the top spot, the decision must have been easy. Since their raison d’être is to be in opposition to Hells Angels, what better name than the gang that killed more of them than any other?
While the reappearance of the Rock Machine name may instill fear in some, most law enforcement I spoke with aren’t that impressed. One cop I know summed up his opinion of the new Rock Machine by telling me: “Internet bikers? LOL.”
So that’s how it stood in 2010 when it came to bikers in Canada who weren’t Hells Angels, their allies or their servants. The Outlaws existed, but were few in number and many are still limited by court-ordered restrictions. The men they had were mostly old, and they had a hard time recruiting new members as they were seen by many in their environment as the guys who always finish second. That, however, could change with the emergence of a charismatic leader. There appeared to be a few people identifying themselves as the Mongols in Canada, but they had no official presence, cer
tainly no charter or clubhouse. And, because of judgements in the U.S., they were unlikely to change that status in the foreseeable future. Bandidos had officially ceased to exist in Canada, but what remained of their former membership had regrouped and renamed themselves the Rock Machine. They may not sound like much, but they actually had better numbers and better organization than what Hells Angels faced in Quebec until the Rock Machine began to coalesce in the 1990s.
Chapter 15
“I did not have anything to do with the murder ...”
Bang! The sound knocked Robert Parrish out of a deep sleep. “I thought my truck had blown up,” he said, not explaining why. So he gathered himself up, and went out the front door of his one-story Hamilton Mountain bungalow to investigate. It was December 15, 2009 — a cold morning, but warmer than you’d expect considering the date — so he had to bundle up a little.
Once outside, the first thing — and only thing — he saw was about two dozen heavily armed and heavily armored cops. Some were from Hamilton — many of the locals still call them “regionals,” a vestige of when they were called the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police Force — and some were from the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
Maybe it’s a Hamilton thing, but Parrish instinctively surrendered. “I put my hands up, and they said, ‘Please, go back inside your home,’ ” he said. “So I did.” Before he left, one of the officers (a regional) told him not to worry, that they were only serving a warrant. Nothing terrible had happened there that night.
Parrish knew who they were after. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that his next-door neighbor, John Cane — the man who resided at 174 Duncairn Crescent, a pleasant home with a yard that backed onto Gourley Park — was a member of Hells Angels. He lived up in this nice, quiet neighborhood, but drove down the 300-foot hill Hamiltonians call “the Mountain” every day to the city’s rough-and-tumble north end, where his very successful store, Darkside Tattoos, was located.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 24