Stadnick’s first act as president was an astute one. He took Boucher aside and let him know that he would be the top Hells Angel in Quebec and that Stadnick would concentrate primarily on recruiting clubs in English-speaking Canada and other strategic goals. It made perfect sense: besides the obvious language problem, Stadnick realized he didn’t have a very firm grip on the cultural differences between Quebec and the rest of Canada. And he liked what he saw in Boucher, who could be charming and likeable when he wanted to be and had kept his promise to stay off drugs. He was a natural leader, and he also appeared to be a loyal friend who understood that Stadnick possessed organizational skills and a strategic intellect he would never have.
Reinforced with a strong new leadership team, the Hells Angels again went on the offensive. A Quebec City club, the Vikings, had been prospecting for the Hells Angels and many members had become skeptical about the organization after Langlois fled. They didn’t know Stadnick well and were dismayed that a runty Anglophone was now in charge of the mighty Hells Angels. On May 28, 1988, the Sorel chapter rode down the river and partied with the Vikings. Stadnick negotiated the deal, while Boucher translated and made friends. It was so successful, they patched over the Vikings—who became the Hells Angels’ Quebec City Chapter—that night. Little more than a year later, October 17, 1989, the SQ executed a search warrant on their clubhouse with a backhoe. After knocking down two outside walls and a ceiling but finding nothing incriminating, the police shrugged their shoulders and left. The Quebec City chapter called Sorel for help. Stadnick told them to sue the police and gave them the names of some lawyers. They won their case and the SQ was forced to pay for the clubhouse repairs.
When Stadnick returned to Hamilton, he was a different man. Or at least, he looked like one. “I first realized he’d been elected president when he showed up with the company car,” said Harris. Instead of his familiar Pontiac Bonneville, Stadnick was driving a brand-new black Jaguar with Quebec plates. And his wardrobe changed too. Always a flamboyant dresser, Stadnick pushed the limits after he became president. “He wore his colors more and more and decorated them with patches and red leather fringes,” said Steve Pacey, a Hamilton cop who took over the biker beat in 1999 and had known Stadnick since high school. “He was very ceremonial, like a king; but sometimes he reminded me of Michael Jackson.”
He may not have impressed the cops, but Stadnick was beginning to increase his influence in his hometown. On August 23, 1988, he was arrested at the home of Douglas Freeborn, a former president of the Hamilton Satan’s Choice chapter who had decided to quit when the Outlaws took over. Just over 11 ounces of hash was found in the couch they were sitting on, and both men were charged with possession with intent to distribute. What happened next surprised everyone, particularly Harris. For reasons that have never been made entirely clear, Freeborn claimed that all the hash was his; Stadnick was free to walk.
The case made Stadnick famous in his hometown. The Hamilton Spectator, a daily newspaper as old as the city itself, acted as though it was the first time they had heard his name. On September 15, 1989, it ran an article claiming that Stadnick was in Hamilton recruiting potential members in an effort to establish a chapter there. “He is a bona fide Hells Angels member, and he does have permission from the national president to start a chapter here,” the article quoted Bob Slack, head of the Hamilton-Wentworth Regional Police vice and drug departments, as saying. Obviously, he didn’t know that Stadnick was national president at the time.
Other police disagreed. “Clearly he wanted to move the Hells Angels into Ontario, but he wouldn’t establish a chapter in Hamilton,” said Harris. “He didn’t want that kind of attention in his backyard.” Although Harris was right, it didn’t matter. The idea had been planted, and Stadnick was better known and more feared than any other biker in Hamilton.
Emboldened, Stadnick and the Montreal Hells Angels began to exert themselves again. Days after setting fire to the old Laval clubhouse, the Sorel chapter showed up at a party held by the Vagabonds, a non-aligned club in Toronto. “When the Hells Angels show up in Toronto, they are always welcome now,” said a Sorel prospect who attended the Vagabonds party. They were greeted with hospitality, but when discussions turned to patching over, the Vagabonds were noncommittal. Stadnick did manage to hammer out a working relationship with Vagabonds president Donald “Snorkel” Melanson, in which members of the Toronto gang could buy drugs from the Hells Angels individually and sell them locally, but there would be no official contact between the two clubs.
While Stadnick was preaching the Hells Angels gospel across the country, Boucher was consolidating the club’s power at home in Quebec. He fired his first salvo on September 15, 1989, when the Hells Angels rode into Danville, located in the Eastern Townships between Sherbrooke and Asbestos, and fire-bombed the Outlaws’ heavily fortified clubhouse. The next day, Darquis Leblanc, president of the Outlaws’ Danville chapter, showed up on the steps of the Sorel clubhouse and asked to defect. Boucher accepted his offer, but told him that he could never be a Hells Angel, a prospect or even a hangaround. Instead, he would serve the club as an associate, doing the dirty work Hells Angels found beneath them. Leblanc quickly agreed.
To press the point that Quebec was their turf, large groups of Hells Angels and their puppet clubs started showing up in Outlaw towns and in Outlaws bars in full colors. Now it was the Outlaws who were beginning to worry about wearing their colors in public.
The Hells Angels punctuated their statements on September 15, 1990. Montreal Outlaws president Claude Meunier took his Harley to a repair shop in the Côte-Saint-Paul section of the city. As he was parking his bike out front, he looked over his left shoulder to see a car creeping slowly along the curb. When he turned back around, a man in the back seat of the car opened fire. Meunier died slumped over his handlebars, with four bullets in his chest and another in his neck.
Meunier’s funeral drew hundreds of Outlaws from Canada and the United States, and one surprise guest. Leblanc, who had befriended Meunier before they were Outlaws, appeared to show his respect. Despite the presence of dozens of uniformed and plain-clothes cops, the enraged Outlaws who recognized him started insulting him, spitting on him and pushing him around. Leblanc fled and a number of Outlaws took off after him. Once they were satisfied he was gone, they gave up the chase. But a group of police kept following him and saw him desperately pull on the door of a parked white van, only to be refused entry and start running again. When the police searched the van, they found two Evil Ones and a Hells Angels associate inside with a .30-caliber machine gun and two .44 Magnum handguns.
Three weeks later, Tony Mentore, Meunier’s old friend, was waiting for his brother outside their dad’s store in Joliette. A young man with a map approached him, apparently looking for directions. Mentore rolled down his window; the stranger pulled a handgun from under his map and shot him three times in the head.
The murders and the increased presence of the Hells Angels and Evil Ones on their turf had a devastating effect on the Montreal Outlaws. By December 1989, deaths, defections and hasty retirements had rendered the once-powerful gang impotent. They had been had reduced to just ten members who rarely wore their colors. Their new president, Johnny “Sonny” Lacombe became a virtual recluse, leaving his Chateauguay home only when necessary and always with at least two armed bodyguards.
With the Outlaws eliminated as a viable threat in Montreal, Leblanc had outlived his usefulness. On the snowy night of February 21, 1991, he and his brother-in-law, Yvan Martel, were found shot dead less than 100 feet from the Sorel headquarters. Their cars were parked in the clubhouse parking lot. When the police questioned the Hells Angels, they all denied they had ever met Leblanc or Martel.
One immediate reward of the war with the Outlaws was the addition of another Quebec chapter. One of the oldest clubs in the province, the Missiles, had a checkered history but were well-known as expert drug traffickers. First based in Jonquière, they moved to Chicoutimi a
nd later Trois-Rivières after repeated arrests made their members well known to local police forces. Finally, settled in a fairly large city where they could blend into the crowd, the Missiles were so successful that they were courted by both the Hells Angels and Outlaws for years. After the Stadnick-led Hells Angels forced the Outlaws underground, it was no contest. On June 14, 1991, the Missiles patched over and became the Hells Angels Trois-Rivières Chapter.
After a string of small successes, Stadnick’s Hells Angels endured their first crisis on May 16, 1992. A random search of a prisoner’s cell in Archambault Prison in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines just north of Montreal revealed a sobering surprise. Inside his refrigerator was a list of the names, home addresses and Social Insurance Numbers of more than 260 prison guards from across Quebec. Chillingly, more than 60 of the names were underlined or marked with asterisks. Although the inmate had proven ties to the Sorel chapter, he refused to talk and nothing stuck to the Hells Angels.
Since no Hells Angels of any significance were hurt or arrested during the war with the Outlaws, Stadnick was well insulated from police. They often saw him back in Hamilton, escorting his now elderly parents to church, but he was also spotted in Winnipeg with increasing frequency.
By 1990, cops and informants were constantly exchanging information on the movements and activities of bikers like Stadnick. “As soon as a biker crossed into Ontario from Quebec, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) would tail them, often in unmarked cars,” said Frankel. “And the police from the individual forces would watch them whenever they were in a city.” Although that kind of cooperation proved vital in countless investigations, it also compromised sensitive information on at least one occasion. Kevin Roy Hawkins was a respected cop who took over the Kitchener-Waterloo biker beat in 1987. Things started going downhill when he met Cherie Graham, a stripper who worked at the Breslau Hotel just east of downtown Kitchener, and fell in love. Within weeks, he left his wife and moved in with Graham. Their relationship wasn’t always loving; Graham complained to other police officers that Hawkins could get physically abusive when he drank too much. More important, however, was his relationship with her talent agent. Claude Morin was not just in the business of handling strippers: he was also president of the Kitchener Satan’s Choice chapter. Between alimony and his new girlfriend, Hawkins ran into severe financial trouble. Graham told him that Morin could help him out. The men met and Morin paid him $5,000 for some information. If it proved accurate and useful, Morin promised to pay him $10,000 more. The next time they met, Hawkins told Morin about a drug bust that was going to go down in Hamilton that week. From the information supplied, Morin deduced who Hawkins’ informant was and had him killed. “At first we thought it was a drug deal gone bad,” said Harris. “But when Hawkins went down and we found out what happened, we were all more careful about what we said.”
Chapter 6
While Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia and the East Coast of Canada were either under control or being fought over by the Hells Angels, the parts in between were largely no-man’s-land. Right in the middle of the country was Winnipeg, an urban area at least as big as Quebec City or Hamilton, where all the highways, railroads and airlines stopped to serve the prairies. Naturally, it was a huge market for drugs, strippers and prostitutes and even boasted, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the biggest gang population in all of Canada. But there was one big difference: in Winnipeg the overwhelming majority of those “gangsters” were teenagers—many still in high school—not the hardened criminals who made up organizations like Satan’s Choice and the West End Gang.
The city did boast two large biker gangs with roots going back to the 1960s—Los Brovos and the Spartans—but they had always been more interested in riding and drinking than getting involved in organized crime. The two gangs united under the name Los Brovos in the early 1980s, but a number of disgruntled bikers left to form a new gang, the Silent Riders. Under the leadership of hardcore tough guy Darwin Sylvester, the Silent Riders were more ambitious than Los Brovos. They had made repeated advances to the Hells Angels, including riding out to British Columbia to meet with the chapters there, but when Sylvester went to prison on drugs and weapons charges in 1984, their ambition ended. Unhappy with the upstart gang and sensing its weakness, Los Brovos decided it was time to retire the leaderless Silent Riders. The resulting war was distinctly one-sided. Without Sylvester, the Silent Riders were quickly routed and forced to burn their colors.
When he was released from prison in 1990, Sylvester was too late to save the Silent Riders, but he did recruit some of the survivors and enough disgruntled Los Brovos to form a new club, big and tough enough to resist a forceable takeover. He called his new gang the Spartans, returning Winnipeg to the status quo—two biker gangs who lived in basic tolerance of each other because a full-scale war would be too costly. That situation could hardly be more perfect for the Hells Angels. Winnipeg had a large, decentralized drug trade and enough biker manpower and competent leadership to dominate it. “Winnipeg is the chokepoint for the drug trade in Canada,” said Rick Lobban, the city’s biker cop in the early 1990s. “We knew the Hells Angels were going to come; it was just a matter of time.”
It didn’t take long for Stadnick to become a regular visitor to Winnipeg. He started spending a great deal of time in the city, generally with members of Los Brovos. Police said Stadnick found them more efficiently run than Sylvester’s thuggish Spartans. As he had in Toronto, Stadnick liked to wear either his colors or audaciously expensive outfits and was always surrounded by a phalanx of bodyguards. One of them, a drug dealer originally from Thunder Bay, Ontario, named Donald “Bam Bam” Magnussen, almost never left his side. They made an odd pair and drew many stares. Stadnick, a neatly attired man of limited stature, looked even shorter and more garish next to Magnussen, a huge man who preferred to wear old T-shirts and battered jeans, no matter what the weather.
Although the members of Los Brovos and the Spartans were proud of their independence, they were impressed by Stadnick’s ability to buy booze, drugs and other entertainments. And the power and fame of the Hells Angels preceded him. “This was the club,” Ernie Dew, president of Los Brovos, said of the Hells Angels. “You’ve gone from the farm team to the major leagues.”
Despite his power in the underworld, things weren’t always easy for Stadnick. Lobban had followed him to the airport on the morning of June 16, 1992, and tipped off the security officers. As Stadnick traveled through the metal detectors, one of the officers asked him to step aside and gave him a little extra frisk. Inside his belt, the authorities found just over $81,000 in cash, and Stadnick was arrested on the spot for possession of the proceeds of crime. Within hours he was out on bail and on the next plane back to Toronto, since the next flight to Hamilton was almost a week away. Stadnick preferred to use Hamilton’s John C. Munro Airport, because, Harris asserted, it had no on-site police detachment.
In August, the next time Stadnick was back in Winnipeg, he was entertaining a few Los Brovos, Spartans and local call girls in a downtown rock ’n’ roll bar called the Rolling Stone Cabaret. The drinks and conversation were flowing and everyone was having a good time, when a pair of unwelcome guests dropped in. Two off-duty Winnipeg cops, already drunk, sauntered into the bar and took a table near Stadnick’s. As soon as they sat down, they started in on the assault. Making fun of Stadnick’s height, clothes and scars and questioning his relationship with the ever-present Magnussen, the cops probably intended to raise doubt about the Hells Angels, but only managed to make themselves and their employers look bad. When they finally became frustrated at the lack of reaction they were getting, the two cops stumbled out of the bar, still flinging insults and accusations. Outside the bar, the cops got a bit bolder. No longer content with calling the bikers names, they started pushing them around and slapping them. There was no reaction until one of the cops mounted a Los Brovos’ Harley. In an instant he and the other officer were leapt upon by the bikers and beat
en badly. Both officers wound up in local emergency rooms, treated for a variety of injuries. Stadnick, Magnussen and another biker were arrested.
Police nationwide rejoiced as they finally had the elusive Walter Stadnick. Not only had he been arrested for assault—and on a police officer yet—but it had happened when he was out on bail. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Harris. “It was like Walter, who was so careful here at home and in Montreal, went crazy out west.”
But their celebration was short-lived. On October 4, 1993, Stadnick came to trial for the airport arrest. His lawyer argued for a stay on the grounds that the Winnipeg Sun had run an article about Stadnick’s career with the Hells Angels, which he maintained would jeopardize his client’s chances of getting a fair trial. He also questioned the accuracy of the article, and he argued to get the reporter to reveal her sources. Before the trial, the woman who wrote the story, Melanie Verhaeghe, noticed she was being followed by a large man with long blond hair in a Jeep (he was later identified as Magnussen), and she told Stadnick’s lawyer, Sheldon Pinx. She expected him to be surprised and helpful, but actually found him quite threatening. He pointed out that he had a thick file on her and had had her followed by a private investigator who had shot some pretty interesting videotape of her daily life. The judge didn’t agree that the article would make a difference and the trial went on as planned. Despite hours of testimony, the prosecution could prove nothing. Although there are laws against earning money selling drugs, there is no law against having $81,000 in cash, and, since it could not be linked to any criminal act, Stadnick was free to go.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 39