Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  On July 22, a couple of Diablos were sitting in a car trying to decide what to do that night. They eventually went to a hospital emergency room. Five bullets crashed through the car’s back window, and both men were hit once. Although neither man was seriously hurt, war was undeniably declared. In a less-than-courageous response, the Diablos convinced a pair of underage girls to pour gasoline all over the cars at a used-car lot owned by a Loners associate. They chickened out before either could light a match and were arrested about a block away.

  At that point, local police stepped in. They held a meeting with some representatives of both the Diablos and the Loners and warned them against using minors and bombs to solve their differences. The cops pointed to what was happening in Montreal as an example of how a biker war could get out of hand. “In retrospect, it was a bad idea,” said Tony, pointing out that neither the Diablos nor the Loners struck him as exceedingly intelligent. “It’s almost like we gave them the idea.”

  Appalled at how low the Diablos would stoop, the Loners brought the war downtown. On the night of August 1, Toronto suffered its first biker bombing when an explosive device took off the front door of the Satan’s Choice headquarters, not far from the Don Jail in the rapidly gentrifying industrial part of old Toronto. The bomb was big enough to shatter windows on houses and cars around the block, but did little to damage the heavily fortified building. None of the five bikers inside were hurt, but they were angry. Less than four hours later, somebody threw a firebomb through the front window of Pluto’s Place, a tattoo parlor in the same neighborhood that was frequented by Loners. A little more than 24 hours later, three Molotov cocktails crashed through the windows of Bazooka Joe’s, a bar north of the city frequented by members of Satan’s Choice. As was the case at the beginning of the war in Montreal, the bombing took place in the middle of the night and the bar was empty at the time. The next explosion happened at a machine shop owned by a Diablos associate just after sunrise.

  Desperate not to turn into another Montreal, Toronto city council set up a committee to find a way to get the clubs into legal trouble. They pored over thousands of documents until they found out that recent renovations—bomb- and bullet-proofing—done to the Satan’s Choice Kintyre Avenue clubhouse violated an earlier agreement and reverted the building’s zoning to residential. When the city informed the bikers they’d have to give up their building, they responded by moving in a club member, making the clubhouse an official residence.

  The police actually made the next move in the war. On August 15, two cops saw Loners president Pietro Barilla’s white Lincoln Town Car in a Harvey’s parking lot. As two of his associates brought back the burgers and fries, the cops stopped them. A quick search of the car found a pair of .380 caliber handguns under the front seats. The following day a bomb planted in the alley behind a Loners clubhouse in Markham, north of the city, blew off a portion of the building’s back wall.

  Just as the assassination of Émond in Montreal gave police fears of massive reprisals from the Hells Angels, the cops in Ontario saw the Loners make a move they felt would require a crushing response by Satan’s Choice. In broad daylight, a car drove past the house of Andre Wateel, president of the Satan’s Choice Kitchener chapter, and threw a firebomb through the front bay window. The drapes immediately ignited and, if not for the quick reaction of the fire department, the house would have burned down. Wateel wasn’t home at the time, but a woman and child were upstairs. They escaped unhurt. Not only had the Loners taken the war outside of Toronto, they picked the wrong guy. A close friend of both Guindon and Stadnick, Wateel was seen within the club as a rising star and by police as a rare biker with both leadership skills and the will to fight when he had to. Hoping to put at least some fear into the bikers before they struck back, a group of high-profile Ontario police officers asked federal justice minister Allan Rock for stronger anti-gang laws. He refused.

  The final blow of the war was struck the following day. At 10 a.m., Frank Lenti was halfway into his Ford Explorer when a Loner across the street detonated a bomb. The Diablos president lost his right leg. When police searched his house, they found an unlicensed handgun and a Mac-10 submachine gun. “I know he was officially aligned with Satan’s Choice, but it seemed like both sides were relieved he was out of the picture,” said Tony. “With Lenti gone, they all stopped fighting.” Without their president, the Diablos quickly folded. Without an enemy in North Toronto, the Loners decided to make peace with Satan’s Choice. After feeling out the situation with some go-betweens, the Loners went to a Satan’s Choice party and forged an informal alliance, hinting that they might even be willing to take the Diablos’ place as a North Toronto chapter.

  Lacking any intelligence on the peace treaty, Toronto city council was still panicking. With news of Desrosier’s death still fresh, they were desperate to stave off a full-scale war. Desperate enough that frustrated Toronto mayor Barbara Hall decided to deal with the bikers. On September 20, she called the Satan’s Choice lawyer and told him the city was willing to buy their clubhouse. The next day he called back and said his client, former chapter president and owner of the house, Larry McIlroy, was willing to sell for $350,000. Although the building had been recently appraised at $190,000, Hall agreed and told them to draw up the papers. When the media, who had been largely supportive of Hall up until then, heard, they reacted in a huge way. The item became front-page news and Hall was saddled with the nickname “Biker Barb.” Despite a large public outcry—one that did not include the clubhouse’s neighbors—city council pushed through the plan. After many concessions were made, all on the city’s side, the plan finally came to a humiliating end on October 20, when the club refused to include a clause that would prevent them from acquiring a new clubhouse in the same area. In a futile attempt to mitigate the disaster, city council hired a lawyer to help a neighborhood association search for more zoning violations.

  A week later, the police mounted a massive raid on the Loners’ Woodbridge clubhouse. Although they found three restricted weapons—a submachine gun, an assault rife and a spray can of mace—they failed to close it down and made no significant arrests. Far more effective was the owner of a farm in Milton, which the Loners were planning to use to serve the Hamilton area. When he read in The Hamilton Spectator about the Loners’ war with Satan’s Choice, he threw them out and suffered no repercussions.

  While bikers and their supporters were laughing at the authorities in Toronto, the war-weary people of Montreal finally saw faint glimmers of hope. Carcajou paid almost instant dividends when Mom Boucher made a surprising slip on September 25. An old friend, low-level cocaine trafficker Steven Bertrand, called him looking for advice. A few days earlier, Bertrand had seen a man flirt with his girlfriend and attacked him. The two men were rolling around on the bar floor when the interloper’s friends pulled Bertrand off and showed him their handguns. Bertrand and his girlfriend had slunk out of the club threatening revenge. Eavesdropping police heard Boucher laugh as he counseled Bertrand. On tape, he told Bertrand to collect a few friends, grab some baseball bats, go back to the bar and get his manhood back. Counseling violence is a major violation for someone on probation, and the police issued a warrant for Boucher’s arrest. When he found out, Boucher fled. Carcajou officers anticipated this and got warrants to search clubhouses. On October 23, 1995, the cops raided the headquarters of three puppet clubs. Realizing he wasn’t going to avoid the police forever and that the more they searched the more chance there was that he would get into much bigger trouble, Boucher surrendered the next day.

  The public, many of whom considered Boucher responsible for the war, celebrated. Although he had been convicted 14 times in Quebec courts—including once for sexual assault with a weapon—and he was on probation for two different crimes at the time, Boucher was freed on bail. His lawyer, Léo-Réne Maranda, told the press, “it’s not against the law to be a Hells Angel.” The judge may have disagreed. Among the many conditions of Boucher’s bail was a strictur
e against communicating with any other members of the club.

  After that small success, Carcajou declared all-out war. In a raid on the Rockers’ Lachine clubhouse, the squad came up with automatic weapons, shotguns, detonators and drugs. Six bikers were arrested. A few days later, an Evil Ones associate named Patrick Dupuis was arrested with four sticks of dynamite in the trunk of his Ford Tempo. With information gleaned during the search for Boucher, Carcajou officers conducted a raid of eight buildings, including the houses of six Hells Angels associates. The October 26 assault led to the arrest of two Death Riders and 13 others, the confiscation of illegal weapons ranging from an assault rifle to a hand grenade and enough marijuana and cocaine to bring distribution charges. Then Carcajou officers proved they weren’t playing favorites when, on November 9, they raided 25 locations associated with the Rock Machine and made 22 arrests on weapons and drug offenses. Three weeks later, a raid on the Jokers’ clubhouse yielded the usual weapons and drugs, but also something more grisly. In September, three Rock Machine associates had attempted to blow up the Jokers’ headquarters when their home-made bomb exploded as they were planting it. In a macabre twist, the Jokers were found to have been collecting souvenirs. When the police found dozens of pieces of human remains in jars of preservative and in food storage bags in the clubhouse freezer, they identified many of them by their still-legible tattoos.

  Despite the arrests, there was no decline in biker-related violence. Bombings were still commonplace. The house of the warden of Sorel prison was set on fire again, and Rock Machine snipers had taken pot shots at some Hells Angels as they walked around the exercise yard of Leclerc Prison in Laval. It seemed like the bikers were running out of ideas when Bob Chopper was bombed again. Marcel Blondeau, a mild-mannered father of two who lived next door to the biker hangout, couldn’t take it anymore. He’d tried to sell his house, but nobody in the Montreal area would consider it at any price. Finally, he begged Longueuil mayor, Claude Gladu, to do something. At the same time Barbara Hall was trying to pay the Hells Angels to leave Toronto, Gladu convinced the city of Longueuil to rent the Blondeaus a house on the other side of town until they could sell theirs. Both acts showed that the authorities understood the biker problem, but also underlined the fact that neither could do anything about it.

  Tired of dragging Serge Quesnel out to biker trials only to have his testimony discredited every time, the police were desperate for another, more impressive witness. They found him—a man so bad the other bikers called him “Satan”—in a cell awaiting trial for drug offenses stemming from the October 26 raid. In exchange for dropped charges, Martin “Satan” Lacroix agreed to testify against his boss. Michael “L’Animal” Lajoie-Smith was a big strong man with a hair-trigger temper. After the members of Sorel eliminated the Laval chapter, they set up a puppet club, the Death Riders, to operate their business in the city just north of Montreal. They sent full-patch member Lajoie-Smith to oversee the gang and make sure they did as they were told and that they commanded respect in the area. When he got there, he showed up at La Marsolaise bar, where the owner had refused to pay protection. Lajoie-Smith didn’t negotiate; he simply picked a bar patron at random and beat the hell out of him. He was very thorough. The victim, 32-year-old Alain Cadieux, hasn’t left his wheelchair or institutional care since.

  Two months later, Lajoie-Smith gave Lacroix $400 to deliver a bomb to Le Gascon, a strip club popular with Alliance members in nearby Berthiersville. It didn’t explode, but it and the Cadieux beating were enough to put Lajoie-Smith away for a long time, and Lacroix told the police everything he knew. The officers of Carcajou had learned from the Sûreté du Québec’s mistakes with Quesnel. They didn’t give Lacroix any cash and, although they put him in protective custody, kept him in prison. When police told Lajoie-Smith about the charges, he was already in jail on unrelated weapons charges. He didn’t show much emotion, but asked that he not be sent to Bordeaux prison, which was now Rock Machine territory.

  Overwhelmed by the amount of evidence against him, Lajoie-Smith later pleaded guilty to the Cadieux beating. Using the proceeds-of-crime law, Carcajou seized his residence, Cadillac and two Harleys. A week before the government was to auction off his 13-room house, it mysteriously caught fire and burned to the ground. With Lajoie-Smith out of commission, the Hells Angels sent the still-ambitious Steinert north to act as the Death Riders’ godfather.

  While Carcajou was seeing some success putting Hells Angels and members of the Alliance behind bars, three men had managed to remain remarkably unscathed. Perhaps not coincidentally, they also happened to be the three highest-ranking Anglophone Hells Angels in Quebec, all of them Nomads. Stadnick, who had never been convicted, and Stockford, who had never even been arrested, approached their old friend Carroll to help them with their ultimate goal: Ontario. On February 20, 1996, Stockford met Carroll at a chalet in the Laurentian ski resort town of St-Sauveur. Despite the hospitable surroundings, it was primarily a business meeting. Under what Kane told police was Stadnick’s direction, Stockford purchased a large quantity of drugs from Carroll and arranged for them to be shipped back to Montreal. From there a courier took 4 kilos of hash to a contact at Toronto’s Union Station and then rented a car for the big deal.

  A little more than halfway down the Queen Elizabeth Way from Toronto to Hamilton, the courier turned off onto Bronte Road and stopped at a Tim Horton’s. Once inside the familiar brown-on-brown doughnut shop, he met a contact: Stockford’s cousin. The two men then walked out to the parking lot and, in the rental car, they exchanged a bag full of cash for a bag containing a kilogram of cocaine and 1,000 hits of ecstasy destined for the Hamilton market. According to what Kane told the RCMP, it was the first of many such shipments to the area. Although the Hells Angels had no official presence in Ontario, they didn’t have any problem selling drugs there.

  Just a few miles away, a fledgling biker gang got a big break and helped contribute to the anti-Hells Angels forces in Ontario. When Johnny Sombrero took over the presidency of the Black Diamond Riders, a small but well-established Toronto gang, he threw out all the members with criminal records. He just wasn’t interested in going to prison when one of his men slipped up. There was no argument. None of the exiled members would challenge Sombrero, an all-time tough guy, and they left without incident. Instead, six of them formed a new club in Milton, the hometown of two of them. They gave it a rather defeatist name: The Lost Souls.

  Just north of Burlington, Milton had been a sleepy farm town until people started moving out of Hamilton in droves. As the standard of life rapidly declined in the city, those who could afford it moved to suburbs like Milton, Waterdown and Ancaster. With their rapidly swelling populations of displaced urbanites, the towns surrounding Hamilton became very profitable markets for drugs like cocaine and ecstasy. On April 13, 1996, Satan’s Choice, clearly not as choosy as Sombrero and the Black Diamond Riders, approached the Lost Souls with an offer. If they would sell Satan’s Choice drugs in the area and kick 10 percent of proceeds back to the nearby Kitchener chapter, they would become a prospective chapter.

  The imbalance didn’t last long. On May 4, all 20 members of the Loners showed up at the headquarters of the Para-Dice Riders, Toronto’s biggest independent club. Despite having flirted with Satan’s Choice after the Diablos went down, the Loners showed up with an offer: they wanted to be a Para-Dice Riders chapter. The Loners offered the bigger club a presence in North Toronto and access to some of the Italian mafia’s biggest names. The reason they wanted to join, they said, was that Satan’s Choice, particularly president Andre Wateel, were out for their heads, but would never touch them if they were Para-Dice Riders. The response was immediate and positive. First came the beer and then came the patches. Not expecting visitors, the Para-Dice Riders didn’t have enough patches to go around, but promised they’d have some more made. What the gracious hosts didn’t know, and wouldn’t find out until it was too late, was that it wasn’t fear of Wateel that sent the Loners dow
ntown. Instead, Stadnick had convinced them to infiltrate the Para-Dice Riders by dangling a Hells Angels prospective membership in the event they managed to take over.

  Despite years of peaceful coexistence, there was very little affection between the Para-Dice Riders and Satan’s Choice. The two big clubs, which had aligned mostly to present a united front to the Hells Angels, had grown suspicious of each other once large-scale patch-overs had begun. And when they met at a Victoria Day protest over police roadside stops, insults and threats started flying. Ironically, the presence of many uniformed and mounted Toronto police officers prevented any actual violence. Although no shots were fired and no punches were thrown, a different kind of war had begun in Ontario: a cold war in which the Para-Dice Riders and Satan’s Choice scrambled for new members and new chapters in an effort to retain their chunk of the Ontario pie.

  Farther down the road in Hamilton, Ion William Croitoru had no idea of what was going on, but soon became a major player. A hardcore Hamilton boy who carried 285 solid pounds on his 6-foot frame, Croitoru was famous in some quarters, but it hadn’t made him particularly wealthy. When the World Wrestling Foundation hit its peak in the late 1980s, they needed guys for their stars to beat up on, and Croitoru fit the description. He was big, funny looking and ethnic (Romanian, but he generally ended up playing, in the long tradition of wrestling villains, a Turk). Even better, he had the ability to act like a fool in front of millions of people. While the likes of Hulk Hogan were throwing him around, Croitoru—who wrestled under the name Johnny K-9—enthralled audiences with his silent-picture actor-style theatrics.