Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle
Biker, Outlaw Biker and Dead Biker
Jerry Langton
CONTENTS
Biker
Outlaw Biker
Dead Biker
About the Author
About the Publisher
Biker
Inside the Notorious World of an Outlaw Motorcycle Gang
Jerry Langton
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Copyright
Dedication
To my own little gang: Tonia, Damian, and Hewitt
Acknowledgments
Biker isn’t a typical novel. While it is a work of fiction, I didn’t make very much of it up. There’s very little in Biker that didn’t actually happen at one time or another.
Much of it comes from the research I did for my first book, Fallen Angel. While collecting the material necessary for that book, I had some great stories that just didn’t fit because they didn’t fit with the primary theme of Walter Stadnick’s rise to power, couldn’t be substantiated in time, or put me at risk of libel.
And since Fallen Angel was published, I have met dozens of other people—including bikers, their friends, their girlfriends, cops, lawyers, and others—who have told me more and more about their world. So Biker is as much a collaborative effort as any non-fiction book I could write. And I’d like to thank all of my collaborators here.
My thanks has to start with John Wiley & Sons’ Robert Harris, who believed in this crazy hybrid idea right from the start and is ultimately responsible for its existence. And, of course, the great Don Loney, the only editor any author would ever want, deserves just as much thanks. The rest of the team at Wiley—from Robin Dutta-Roy and Erika Zupko, who will make you want to buy the book, to Adrian So for his awesome cover and Tegan Wallace for her great interior design, to Lindsay Humphreys for her production prowess—were outstanding as always. Thanks also go to my agent B.G. Dilworth. I must also mention Leta Potter here.
And I am grateful to the people who talked with me. Most of them would prefer not to be mentioned by name, but there’s no way I can leave out the incredibly informative Sergeant John Harris of Hamilton Police Services.
And I have to thank my wife and children, whose patience and creativity made writing Biker not only possible but enjoyable.
Chapter 1
Even though his girlfriend was gyrating on stage completely nude, Steve Schultz wasn’t paying any attention. The former Miss Nude Springfield—who went by the name of Lexus onstage and Connie Horvath away from it—was doing her best to be seductive, but Steve was busy with something he considered far more pressing. He was in the middle of a meeting with his two most trusted confidantes—Warren “Lizard” Lessard and Daniel “Bamm Bamm” Johansson—and one of his most promising young newcomers, Ned Aiken.
The subject was a phone card scam. Steve had fake long-distance phone cards printed in Thailand and he marketed them through convenience stores in Toronto, across the border. The immigrants who bought them were desperate for a bargain, and too scared of the authorities to raise a fuss when they discovered that Steve’s cards didn’t actually connect to anything.
Unlike Steve, the rest of the patrons of Foxes Gentlemen’s Club (known throughout town as “the Strip”) were eating up Connie’s act. Connie was exactly what they had come for. She was tall and blonde. But under the harsh light at Foxes, her natural blonde hair darkened and appeared light brown, so she dyed it nearly white. Away from the stage, it looked harsh and unnatural, but that’s not where she made her money. She was painfully thin. You could easily count her ribs from behind. The view from the front was a different story. A former boyfriend, intent on advancing her career, had sprung for radical breast augmentation surgery. Distinct lines ran down from her sternum and they ended a few inches below her ribcage. The implants in no way resembled actual breasts—and the crowd adored them.
Calling the collected patrons at Foxes a crowd might be too ambitious. There was seventy-one-year-old Hank, who sat silently in the back of the bar, three shy Chinese teenagers who popped up the collars of their golf shirts and sipped long-necked Buds, and Buddy, a morbidly obese kid with a learning disability who cleaned the place and worked the dishwasher in exchange for not having to pay a cover charge or order drinks.
Steve didn’t own Foxes. The actual owner was a wealthy man named Myron Fishman whose luck was in decline. Myron had made his considerable fortune manufacturing cardboard boxes. He had retired to Florida not long after Steve made his first appearance at Foxes in the company of Lessard and Johansson, who were decked out in full Death Dealer colours—complete with club patches that featured a skull in a top hat with four aces and a joker tucked into the brim. Now Steve had the run of the place.
A full-patch member of America’s largest bike gang, the Sons of Satan, Schultz had been hand picked by the gang’s national president, Ivan Mehelnechuk, to bring the ragtag assembly of Springfield’s bikers under the Sons’ control. The larger goal was to wrest the city’s drug and prostitution rackets out of the hands of their biggest rival, the Lawbreakers, who had adopted the Satan’s Own, a proudly independent local club, as their Springfield chapter.
Many of the disenfranchised and disillusioned local bikers approached the Death Dealers when word spread that they were now headed by a bona fide Son of Satan. Steve had earned his nickname “Hollywood.” He was handsome, he was larger than life, and he never, ever stopped talking about himself. Steve wasn’t from Springfield and he never let the other guys forget it. He had moved there when he was fifteen, then left to enjoy a successful career with the Sons of Satan in Mehelnechuk’s power base of Martinsville. While Martinsville was a fairly large city by Midwestern standards, it was hardly cosmopolitan. Steve’s brash worldiness stood out.
Steve was actually from Bay Ridge, a quiet, residential neighborhood full of tree-lined streets in the south side of Brooklyn. It has more in common with the New Jersey suburbs than the mean streets people associate with Brooklyn, but that didn’t matter to the guys in Springfield. In their minds, Steve was a New Yorker with all the rights and privileges that held. And he knew how to play it up. He’d go from spouting a ridiculous parody of Brooklynese (“dese,” “dose,” and “dem”) to speaking in overly complicated English—sometimes in the same sentence—whenever he thought it would give him a psychological advantage.
He hadn’t wanted to go back to Springfield. He considered it being sent to the minors—going to the boondocks to babysit a bunch of idiot yokels. But Mehelnechuk painted an entirely different picture of the Springfield assignment. Steve wouldn’t be a babysitter, the boss assured him; he would be a general, heroically carrying the Sons of Satan banner into a war he was sure to win. Ivan also, subtly, indicated that once the city was secured, it would be his to plunder. Schultz readily accepted and, in a short time, he had achieved impressive results.
By the night on which he spoke with Lessard, Johansson and young Ned Aiken, Steve had turned the Death Dealers into the Sons “puppet” club and made them a force to be reckoned with in Springfield.
; As they discussed the nuts and bolts of the phone-card scam, Connie’s show was coming to a close. “Let’s have a big hand for Lexus. Lexus, everyone,” the DJ intoned as Connie crawled around the stage on all fours picking up the crumpled bills that had been thrown at her. There were a few minutes of awkward silence as the DJ waited until she was finished before starting his spiel to introduce the next dancer.
There was a smattering of applause. Most of it came from two guys who stumbled in halfway through Connie’s act, when she was already nude. Jason Sugarman and Tyler Heath barely knew each other. They were junior employees at a local television station who had stumbled into Foxes toward the end of six-hour binge following a work function earlier that day.
Tyler, who was drunker, got right into it. Connie, or “Lexus” as he knew her, was exactly what he imagined “his type” to be and he fell for her act. Once he had gathered enough nerve, he abandoned Jason and took a seat up close to the stage. He lured Connie over to his area with five and ten dollar bills and very nearly touched her a few times. When she left the stage, he applauded loudly and even hooted a few times before returning to his seat beside Jason, whose anxiety was obvious.
The DJ threw on a song with heavy synthesized bass. As it got louder and louder, he growled into the microphone: “Gentlemen . . . please put your hands together for Destiny . . . Destiny joining us for her first time at Foxes, gentlemen, it’s Dessssssssssssstiny.”
Lessard nudged Ned, and said, “You may want to watch this.” And pointed at the stage.
Destiny was none other than Ned’s girlfriend Kelli. She was dressed in what appeared to be a hard plastic corset and matching miniskirt, and was prancing nervously around the stage. She studiously avoided eye contact with any of the men. Ned was shocked to see her there, but did his best not to let the other bikers notice.
The crowd gave her the benefit of the doubt through the first song, but began to get restless during the second. Tyler voiced their disappointment with her unwillingness to take her clothes off. “Take it off, you fuckin’ bitch!” he shouted. “I didn’t come here to see your fuckin’ face!”
Jason tried to get him to simmer down but that actually egged him on more. “Look you fuckin’ skank, I paid my fuckin’ money and I came here to see some skin, not some dancing,” Tyler shouted as he imitated Kelli’s tentative steps. “Do your fuckin’ job!”
Kelli, who was extremely nervous to start with, lost it. She retreated to the back of the stage and started crying.
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” said Tyler with an exaggerated flourish of frustration. “Do I have to come up there and show you what you have to do? Do I?” With that, he put his right foot up on stage and prepared to climb on.
That was enough for Ned. He bolted for the stage. Lessard started to go after the kid, but Steve grabbed him.
Ned was no bigger than Tyler, but a lot stronger. He seized him by the shirt with his left hand and threw him back into his chair. He didn’t say anything. Ned turned to look at Kelli, but she looked away. While he had his back turned, Tyler lunged at him, hitting him in the hip with his shoulders. Ned bounced off the stage as Tyler slipped and landed in a heap. Enraged, Tyler got back up and let out something of a roar as he lunged back at Ned. Instinctively, Ned grabbed a beer bottle by the neck and slammed it into the back of Tyler’s head as hard as he could. Tyler went down hard and didn’t get back up again.
Everyone was silent. The DJ cut the music. Kelli ran off the stage. Two dancers came out of the change room to see what was going on, then turned around and went back. The Chinese guys with the turned up collars ran out of the building and down the street. Grizzled old Hank remained seated at his place in back and pretended to have suddenly acquired an interest in Major League Baseball as it played on the bar monitor. Buddy looked at his feet and waited for it all to be over.
Jason was in shock. He couldn’t talk, couldn’t move. Ned sprang past him to see what condition Tyler was in. He’d landed face-first on the lip of the stage, chipping both of his front incisors, then had fallen on his right side on the tiled floor. A pool of thick, dark blood was slowly widening around the back of his head. Ned put his hand under Tyler’s head to take a look at his face. He was surprised at how light it felt, how little resistance his neck gave to his lifting and turning of Tyler’s head. The skin on Tyler’s face was a pale color Ned had never seen before, almost blue. His eyes were rolled up into his head so that only the white showed. Ned instinctively knew that if Tyler wasn’t already dead, he would be soon and that nothing could stop it from happening.
Without thinking, he turned at looked at Jason. When their eyes met, Jason snapped out of his trance.
“You killed him!” he shouted. “You fucking killed my friend! Call an ambulance! Somebody call the police!”
Annoyed, Steve excused himself from what remained of his meeting and walked over to the scene. Johansson followed him. Steve then put his arm around Jason, turned him away from Ned and Tyler, and said: “Don’t worry, son, your friend is going to be fine; why don’t you come with my associate here and we’ll take care of your friend.” Steve then turned to Johansson and said, “You make sure our friend here has everything he needs, I’ll initiate CPR and call the police and ambulance.”
Johansson put his arm around Jason and led him to a door behind the bar that had an “employees only” sign taped to it. Confused and frightened, Jason neither struggled nor agreed; he simply complied.
Once Jason was out of the room, Steve stepped over to where Ned was still holding Tyler. “It’s a shame when these drunks fall over and hurt themselves—but accidents do happen,” he announced, loud enough for everyone to hear. Buddy laughed nervously. “Alright, let’s clean him up; until we’re done here, everybody gets a free trip to the VIP room and two . . . no, three free drinks.”
As the patrons and dancers filed out of the room, Lessard went to guard the bar’s front door and Steve dialed his cell phone. Ned couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying, but he could tell that he was ordering someone to come to the bar immediately. He understood from his tone that Steve was more exasperated than worried.
When Steve finally hung up and came over to Ned, he just glared at him.
“I’m sorry, man . . . ” Ned began.
Steve wouldn’t let him finish. “I’ll say you’re sorry,” he scolded. “You are indeed a very, very sorry sight.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Not only do you kill a guy in my bar, making a huge fucking mess, but you did it in front of witnesses,” he continued. “And do you know what the worst part of it is? You did it over a fucking woman. What an asshole. You should know by now no woman is ever worth putting yourself in danger for.”
“I—I think he’s still breathing; maybe we should call an ambulance.”
Steve sucked air between his clenched teeth. “Uh—that ’s not going to happen,” Steve shook his head. “He’s dead, or just about—he’s way too far gone. Even if by some medical miracle they kept his heart and lungs going, he’d be a fucking vegetable—and nobody should have to live like that.”
“So what do we do?”
“Well,” Steve paused. “I guess it’s up to you to put him out of his misery.”
“Kill him? I can’t do that. I’ve never . . . ”
“Sure you have—you’ve actually already killed this guy,” Steve told him. “All you’re doing now is making it easier for everyone, including him.”
“How do I do it?”
“Do I have to do everything around here?” Steve asked, as though Ned were a petulant child who refused to clean his room. “I would suggest you do it quickly and quietly—look, he’s not moving, never will again—just put a damp cloth over his mouth and nose to cut off his breathing.”
Ned walked over to the bar and grabbed the bar rag. He went back to Tyler and held the white cloth—already stained red from the blood on Ned’s hands—to the young man’s nose and mouth.
Just as Ned began to apply pressure, h
e heard a loud bang. Startled, Ned dropped the rag and fell backwards into a table, knocking it, and three chairs, over.
Steve started laughing. The noise had come from some of his men—Dario Gagliano, Dave Peters, and “Little” John Rautins—coming into the bar to help. Gagliano had a habit of making big entrances, and he kicked the bar’s outside door open. He figured that the situation inside the bar would be tense and thought it would be funny to scare the shit out of whoever was in there.
Lessard positioned himself by the door. Gagliano immediately recognized what was going on. Although many in the Death Dealers considered him a total asshole, he had a knack for acting without fear or remorse in tough situations. He was a bold and decisive man, and that’s why Steve depended on him for jobs like this. “Looks like we had a little accident,” he said, laughing at his own half-joke.
“Don’t step in,” Steve said. “He’s got to take care of this himself.”
Ned, surrounded by the other men, knew he had to go through with what he started. He picked up the bar rag and held it over Tyler’s nose and mouth. He pressed silently for about two minutes. Tyler convulsed once.
“Dude,” Peters said quietly, “I think he’s done.”
Everybody but Ned laughed.
“Okay, now for the hard part,” Steve said, once they all quieted. He instructed Peters and Rautins to clean up the place. They both knew the drill and started unpacking the mops and sponges from a nearby closet, complaining all the while.
Ned sat in a chair. He just wanted to sit and collect his thoughts. Steve wouldn’t allow it. “Get up, lover boy,” he ordered. “You made this mess, you have to take care of it—pick him up and follow me.” Without looking back, Steve went back to the employee washroom.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle Page 1