Before long, the bikers refortified the building, installing a tall privacy fence with barbed wire, video surveillance equipment and concrete barriers in front of the wall that faces the street. Although the club featured some tough guys, they didn’t impress a city that had seen Red Devils, Cossacks, Wild Ones, Outlaws and Satan’s Choice, not to mention what was arguably Canada’s biggest mafia concentration, the Barton-Sherman Gang, and plenty of skinhead, Asian and Jamaican gangs. “They weren’t seen as a big deal,” said Sergeant Steve Pacey, another Hamilton biker cop. “It wasn’t like the Hells Angels. When Stadnick would walk into a bar in his colors, even as small as he was, he commanded a great deal of respect. The Foundation didn’t have any of that; they were a joke.”
They did have one moment in the sun, though. When heavy metal superstar Ozzy Osbourne played Hamilton’s Copps Coliseum in 2002, The Foundation were invited as guests of the band and, after a rumor that a number of Outlaws would attend, they arrived in full colors. There weren’t any incidents at the show, but their presence caused the city to consider banning gang colors at local events. “Yeah, who’s gonna tell a biker to take his jacket off?” said one Copps ticket taker. According to police, some members of Ozzy’s entourage went back to Lottridge Street for a party, but the man himself declined.
On March 9, 2005, less than six months after Stadnick and Stockford were convicted and sentenced, the Hells Angels moved into Hamilton. With a massive party that brought dozens of bikers to the Lottridge St. clubhouse, The Foundation finally got something that would give them respect on Hamilton’s mean streets—Hells Angels colors. According to Pacey, it was the 16th chapter in Ontario. Naturally, the locals went crazy. Police chief Brian Mullan said that he was “extremely concerned . . . We’ll do our utmost to ensure citizens of the city don’t see more crime or violence.” Newly elected Hamilton mayor Larry Di Ianni seemed caught unawares by the turn of events. “This is not the kind of club we want to see set up in our city,” he said. “It took me by surprise. There has been motorcycle-gang activity in all the communities around here. I heard that consistently from the police. But to see an actual establishment of a clubhouse in our inner city is not an encouraging sign.” SQ biker expert Guy Ouellette piped up that Stadnick would be delighted. I don’t believe him.
I’m in the passenger seat of Harris’s giant white police Suburban. I’m surrounded by computers, lights and shotguns. It’s hot and the windows are open. Every time we stop, people talk to us. Harris leaves every person he talks to laughing. He’s telling me stories about Stadnick, Stockford, Alvin Patterson and Mario Parente and a hundred other bikers. He laughs a lot. He swings the big truck around and checks in on a convenience store robbery. I grew up in Hamilton. We pass the hospital I was born in, my high school, a dozen friends’ houses. We talk about crime, bikers, the mafia, cops, politicians, football. I tell Harris that I played football in high school. “I know,” he says. That disturbs me a little. He tells me a story about a cop he convinced to move from Toronto to Hamilton. About how the next time he saw him, he asked him how it was going. “Well,” the cop told him. “I’ve pulled my gun more times in six months in Hamilton than I did in ten years in Toronto.” We drive up Lottridge Street to the Hells Angels’ headquarters so I can take some pictures. Harris gets out of the truck and laughs.
“Who’s in there?” I ask. “Would they know you?”
“Yeah, some of the older guys would,” he replies. “They’re mostly from the West Toronto chapter, guys who lived in Hamilton but didn’t have a chapter until now—bunch of muscle-heads, you won’t find a Walter Stadnick in there now.” But they don’t need another Stadnick. His work is done.
And he’d done it exceedingly well. Since his widespread recruitment drives saw unprecedented success, there really aren’t any other bikers left in Canada to compete with the Hells Angels. “There are maybe a dozen or so Outlaws left in Ontario,” said Harris. “But they’re old and they all have so many court-ordered restrictions against them they’re pretty well harmless—some of them can’t even ride their bikes.”
And it’s not like the mafia is in any position to stand in their way. In most Canadian cities where any form of traditional mafia even exists, they work in close partnership with the bikers. And what’s left of the mafia is fading. Big-time assassinations and arrests—like Johnny Papalia and the Musitanos in Hamilton—have robbed it not just of numbers, but of leadership. “The mafia guys, their kids don’t want to get in the family business,” said Harris. “Oh, they’ll take the money from their parents and use it to buy a big house and set up a legitimate business, but they don’t want to get their hands dirty.”
Of course, there are other gangs, mostly ethnic, but they are far too disorganized and isolated to mount much of an opposition to the Hells Angels—at least for now. Most police I’ve spoken to agree that ethnically based gangs will eventually overtake the bikers—as the Mexican cartels have with the methamphetamine trade throughout much of the U.S.—that day still appears to be far off.
In many places, particularly in Scandinavia and the southwestern U.S., the Hells Angels’ primary foes have been the world’s second-largest biker gang, the Bandidos. Formed in the late 1960s by Houston biker Donald Eugene Chambers, they didn’t acquire much of an identity until they adopted the Frito Bandito—a cartoon Mexican bandit armed with bad attitude used by the Frito-Lay Corporation to sell corn chips—as their logo. Chambers had been amused by his antics on a TV commercial and drew an even more ridiculous version of the Bandito and gave them to his gang as patches. As absurd as it sounds, it worked. By 1972, they were considered players in the Texas drug market and, by the 1990s, the Bandidos were the Hells Angels’ biggest rivals in the southwest. In places like Denmark, the Bandidos have held the Hells Angels at bay or even pulled ahead of them. But in Canada, where Stadnick had put together a Hells Angels juggernaut from coast to coast, the Bandidos have had a difficult time becoming established.
Just before the end of the Quebec Biker War, the Rock Machine’s Fred Faucher attempted to forge an alliance between his club and the Bandidos, but the war was already lost. There was very little the Bandidos could do but watch from the sidelines as the best of the Rock Machine—guys like Paul “Sasquatch” Porter—were absorbed by the Hells Angels. Of course there were a few holdouts—or, as many have told me, rejects—who didn’t become Hells Angels. The Rock Machine officially ceased to exist in the summer of 2000 when those leftovers patched over to the Bandidos.
The Canadian Bandidos didn’t have enough members in any particular area, so its single chapter was loose-knit and its meetings occurred in various places around Ontario despite being officially known as the Toronto chapter. They also established a prospective chapter in Winnipeg made up of disgruntled and disenfranchised former members of Los Brovos, the Spartans and the Redliners.
Not surprisingly, they didn’t accomplish a whole hell of a lot. They failed to make a dent in the drug trade and only made headlines on the morning of April 8, 2006 when six full-patch members and two associates were found murdered in a farmer’s field in the rural hamlet of Shedden in southwestern Ontario.
When the photos of the dead bikers, some falling out of their own cars, were splashed on the fronts of newspapers and flashed on TV screens nationwide, many in the media breathlessly predicted another biker war. Even the normally cautious Globe & Mail ran a story headlined “Massacre points to Toronto biker war.”
But there was no war. The Hells Angels didn’t kill George Jesso, George Kiriakis, Luis Manny Raposo, Francesco Salerajno, John Muscedere, Paul Sinopoli, Jamie Flanz and Michael Trotta. Instead, it appears to have been Wayne “Wiener” Kellestine, himself a Bandido.
Kellestine was always considered a pretty weird dude, even by Canadian biker standards. “I witnessed him shoot his girlfriend in the back with an air pistol just for a joke,” said Michael Simmons, an undercover RCMP agent who followed Kellestine before he became a Bandido. “He pointed a .45 caliber
at my big toe and asked me if he could blow it off when I was trying to buy some cocaine off him.” According to many reports, Kellestine was often stoned, armed and angry. He was well known in the area for making a fool of himself with gleeful abandon as evidenced in his one-man protest against the London Gay Pride Day parade when he waved a Confederate war flag and chanted increasingly nonsensical slogans.
Kellestine originally ran with a gang called the St. Thomas Loners (not to be confused with the Toronto gangs of the same name) and then the Annihilators, and was a magnet for negative attention. He has a rap sheet dating back to the 1960s, with plenty of convictions for assault, robbery, drug trafficking and possession of illegal weapons. He developed a reputation not just as a criminal, but as someone who was easily caught and would never stop breaking the law. Every time he was eligible for parole or early release, cops would show up to lobby against his freedom.
And it wasn’t just police who kept their eyes on him. In October 1999, Kellestine—then boss of the St. Thomas Loners—was headed to a wedding when he stopped his pickup at the only stoplight in Iona Station. He didn’t pay much attention when a Ford Bronco pulled up beside him until he saw the gun. In flash of smoke and broken glass, both SUVs raced off in opposite directions as their occupants made frantic cellphone calls.
David “Dirty” McLeish and Phil “Philbilly” Gastonguay were a couple of nobodies who wanted to become Hells Angels. At a time when it was well known that Stadnick was looking for courageous young men especially in places like southwestern Ontario, the pair were hoping to make a name for themselves by offing one of the few established bikers in the area.
It might have worked if their aim was true. But Kellestine was unharmed. When force failed, the Hells Angels used persuasion. Soon after the assassination attempt, two of Kellestine’s Loners—Jimmy and Johnny Coates, a pair of gigantic farm boys with immense strength and a fondness for publicity—defected not just to the Hells Angels, but to the Sherbrooke chapter. It was an interesting choice not only because neither brother spoke any French and that the clubhouse was almost 600 miles from their homes, but because no chapter held Stadnick in higher regard.
Before long, the Hells Angels started taking an interest in the London area’s drug trade, strip joints, rub’n’tug parlors and other quick-money operations. “One guy had his ankle and wrist busted,” a London cop said of an area businessman who rebuffed the Hells Angels advances. “He ran a tattoo parlor and they wanted to take it over. So they broke the hand he does his work with.”
Pissed off, Kellestine tried to join the Outlaws, but they were in such disarray that he was strung along between them and the Rock Machine and he eventually found himself a Bandido. Although he was the senior biker in the area, the club’s bosses in Texas had enough intel on him to make someone else, Toronto-based John Muscedere, president.
In the five years that followed, not much happened. And in the high-buck world of biker gangs, that means failure. The Canadian Bandidos didn’t make a blip on the radar until most of them were found dead in Shedden.
Two days later, the OPP—not a group prone to making rash decisions—arrested Kellestine and four of his friends. Although the murder charges were later dropped against two of them, three more men in Winnipeg were arrested two months later on charges of conspiracy related to the incident. All of them are Bandidos or associates, and one--Michael Sandham--was not just the president of the Winnipeg prospective chapter but also a former police officer.
When the dusted settled, two theories emerged. The OPP maintained that the massacre was simply an “internal cleansing.” The Bandidos brass were so fed up with the poor performance of the Canadian branch office that they engaged in a little tough-love management shuffle. It’s hardly unprecedented in the biker world, as evidenced by the Lennoxville Massacre almost 20 years earlier. The OPP maintains that the important guys in Texas ordered Kellestine to get rid of the deadweight and he complied.
Not everyone agrees. It’s well known that the OPP where tailing members of the Bandidos in Durham County east of Toronto as part of an operation to arrest methamphetamine dealers. But when things started to get strange, the investigation moved towards London. Some sources insist that Kellestine and his associates, high on meth, took it upon themselves to get rid of their “brothers” in an effort to remake the Canadian Bandidos with themselves in charge.
Whether the orders came from Texas or Kellestine’s own troubled psyche, most people on both sides of law enforcement agree on what happened. They say that Kellestine and his operatives invited the doomed bikers to a party at his farmhouse in tiny Iona Station. The victims were all given different times to arrive so that no more than two would show up at the same time. After Kellestine met them at the door, the victims were overpowered and then shot. A cursory clean-up was then done and the process was repeated for the next pair of guests.
After the bodies were found, many in the media guessed that the Hells Angels ordered the hit as a message to the Bandidos to stay out of Ontario. That speculation was fueled by the fact that the bodies were left out in the open, close to a major highway and just a 15-minute drive from Kellestine’s house. But there’s no real evidence to support that theory. The conspicuous disposal of the bodies appears to be a result of Kellestine’s poor organization skills, not a message from a rival gang.
While the Hells Angels almost certainly didn’t have anything to do with the massacre, it must have delighted them. Although the Canadian Bandidos had not emerged as a viable rival to the Hells Angels, their existence was annoying—they weren’t just a rival gang operating in their territory, but they were what remained of the much-despised Rock Machine—and portentous—the Bandidos had successfully fought off the Hells Angels in other parts of the world and allowing them to establish in Canada was clearly dangerous. But that threat evaporated with the Shedden Massacre. The extinction of the fledgling Bandidos chapter left the Hells Angels as the only biker gang with any power in Canada.
I have spoken with plenty of bikers in Quebec, Western Canada and the United States, but in Ontario, they mostly won’t talk. So I recruited an old friend from high school named Brian, specifically because he used to sell drugs and claims to know some bikers. We meet in a seedy Hamilton bar. There are four of them. Long hair, jeans, leather jackets. No colors. Plenty of tattoos, but nothing that identifies them as Hells Angels, prospects or even hangarounds. I pay for the jugs of beer.
We talk. As always, they start in with the bullshit about how biker gangs—they call them “clubs”—do plenty of good in the community (like toy drives and other charitable events) and that the mainstream media never report it. The fact is that they do report it, or at least they used to. Bikers do, in fact, participate in many charitable functions, especially around Christmas, and I have no doubt that many needy people genuinely benefit from their generosity. But the newspaper editors I know are reluctant to cover such events for fear of being labeled gullible pawns in what would appear to be an obvious, if not ham-handed, PR ploy.
Then, as I have heard many times before, the bikers rattle off a list of cops who have been accused or convicted of crimes, as though the news of a half-dozen crooked cops should make me consider hiring the Hells Angels to protect me from the OPP. Then they talk, as bikers always do, about the anti-gangster legislation—what they call the “guilt by association” law. Here, I admit, they have a point. But then I bring up the Hells Angels’ paradox. There is nothing more valuable, more necessary to the Hells Angels than their image as outlaws, yet they cry foul whenever anyone accuses them of breaking the law. I couldn’t prove it in a court of law, but the table agrees that a very big part of being a Hells Angel is not just having a disregard for the law, but a desire to break the law. They consider it wrong to label the Hells Angels a criminal organization, but they also acknowledge that it is one. They continue to drink the beer I pay for but tell me nothing that I haven’t heard a million times before from cops and street-level dealers.
When I asked Harris and Pacey where I’d meet some real local Hells Angels, they listed pretty much the same bars. One strikes Brian’s fancy and we drive four blocks north. It’s hard not to recognize the neighborhood. The jail is across the street, Hamilton General is in sight, and the Hells Angels clubhouse is just a few blocks to the east. When I pull open the purple metal doors of Hamilton Strip, Brian jokes, “In nice cities, they call it a ‘gentlemen’s club’ or ‘adult entertainment, ’ but here in Hamilton, it’s just ‘the Strip.’ ”
The first thing I see is a red-and-white sign that says the wearing of gang colors is prohibited. Beside the sign is a gaudy red-and-white Molsons ad declaring, “I am Canadian.” Once past the second set of doors, it is another world. Although it is a bright, sunny Saturday afternoon, at first glance it appears pitch black in there. There are hundreds of tiny multicolored bulbs, but they do little to illuminate what’s going on. My eyes never really adjust. Brian, excited, gets us seats near the stage. The first thing I notice is the L-shaped bar with much of the area out of sight of the stage. More goes on here than just stripping, it would appear. On the stage, which still has the name “Hanrahan’s” inlaid in it, although the bar hasn’t been called that for years, is a black dancer who is pushing the line between voluptuous and fat. She’s working hard to acknowledge, while at the same time avoid, a patron, also black, who is very drunk and determined to get to know her better. Behind her is a small motorcycle—what they call a pocket bike—styled to look like a Harley and painted red and white. The pixel board above her advertises “The Edge 102.1.” Three snickering guys who look like they just walked off a golf course sit down in front of us and obscure our view of the stage.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 58