The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  “Gerry was always like that. If he got whacked by a cop, he wouldn’t take their shit. He’d try to punch cops in the head, piss on them, anything,” Angelucci says. “One time, we were in the city jail and this cop saw him pass and said, ‘Is that Gerry Gavin? Hold onto him.’ He brought in eight other cops who stood in a gauntlet and made Gerry run through it as they punched and hit him. The whole time, Gerry was talking back, saying, ‘I’ll see you in the morning at breakfast!’ When they took him away, I overheard police laughing about it, saying, ‘Man, that kid can take a punch.’

  “Eventually police figured out not to hold him anymore because he always flipped out in jail so much. They’d beat him up and afterward he’d yell at them from the cell, ‘I didn’t come in bleeding like this—what are they gonna say about that?’ After a few hours, maybe after he passed out, they’d just kick him out of jail, rather than have to deal with any more paperwork on him.”

  In the booking photo, Constable Stan Joplin looks on as plainclothes police officer Mike Barnard holds Gavin’s arm behind him. Gavin is noticeably bleeding from the mouth and is either laughing or snarling at the cameraman. Next to him, Esko Kajander holds Gavin’s wrist and hair back and is unexpectedly smiling at Gavin. “I’m laughing at Gerry in the photo because he was trying to be macho, saying this ridiculous stuff, and because his hair was over his eyes, I’m holding his hair back so the camera can see his face,” recalls Kajander, who had arrested Gavin on previous occasions. “He was always one of the main characters in the gang, and everybody knew him.”

  Constable Jim Parker (far left), stands with Rob Thacker, constable Gary Campbell (middle) and constable Esko Kajander (far right).

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, N00582K

  The H-Squad’s John Flaten stands with a visibly nervous young offender.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, P02010

  There were others at the Fraser Street party that night who managed to escape arrest, including Gary Blackburn and Mac Ryan. “It was crazy, but we managed to get out of there. Heck, I think we even just made it to another party that night! There were a lot of nights that went that way,” Ryan says.

  The neighbourhood disturbance was given brief mention in the local newspapers. Approximately nineteen people had been arrested; bail was set at $250 for the men and $100 for the women. All were forced to sign statements swearing that they would be off the streets after nine o’clock at night. “The guys from The Grape got some money together and bailed the Clark Parkers out,” recalls Bradley Bennett. The Youngbloods were apparently still trying to get the Clark Park gang to join the revolution. Angelucci and Gavin were held over the weekend until Monday; Williamson, although accused of creating a disturbance, a minor charge, was sent to Oakalla prison, as the Fraser Street incident was considered an infraction of his bail conditions.

  Police attention was highly focused on the gang now. After the concert riots, with the “goon squad” on his tail and multiple arrests that summer, Mouse Williamson increasingly felt the pinch. Warnings had been issued from on high. Williamson’s uncle, who occasionally lunched with a high-ranking police superintendent who cannot be named here, said that when the subject of the gang had come up, the officer apparently said, “Tell your fucking nephew and his friends that if they don’t knock off that shit they’ve been doing, we’re going to fucking kill them.”

  Commercial Drive has long had a spirit of activism and been the scene of countless political demonstrations in Vancouver. Recently, the Drive has seen May Day protests against capitalism and gentrification and demonstrations over natural gas pipeline expansion, and in the early 1950s, more than 1,000 people crammed into the Grandview Theatre to protest what residents considered the deterioration of the district. While there were neighbourhood residents who had applauded the increased police presence near Clark Park that summer, many other residents bitterly organized against it.

  Constable Esko Kajander holds back Gerry Gavin for an arrest processing photo; Gavin smiles for the camera. Also pictured are Constable Stan Joplin (left) and Constable Mike Barnard (right).

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, N00582L

  On Saturday, July 15, 1972, an anti-police demonstration, billed as the Clark Park Freedom Rally, was held. Featuring angry speeches from East End neighbourhood residents and legal rights counsellors on hand to provide advice, the event had been advertised for two weeks in The Grape, and handbills and flyers for the event had covered notice boards and lampposts all over the area. An estimated 350 people, mostly youths, descended on the park that sunny afternoon to take in what organizers tried to frame as a block party, a festival-like gathering. At first glance, it hardly seemed to have the bitter rancour of an anti-establishment anti-police protest. Along with the free hot dogs and lemonade, live music was performed by local acts Crackers (billed as “a Clark Park area band”), the Lions Gate Jazz Band, and Sleepy John. The Clark Park baseball diamond finally got some legitimate use beyond acting as a battlefield for rumbles. One of the rally’s events was an exhibition game put on by the Kosmic League, an infamous amateur baseball team made up of artists, poets, and journalists, including local artist Gary Lee-Nova and future Canadian poet-laureate George Bowering. (Despite Bowering’s keen memory, he does not recall any details of this particular game.)

  The rally also attracted the attention of local media, with the Sun, Province, and Georgia Straight all on hand to report on the event. Their focus was not on music or baseball, but on the speeches protesting against police harassment, some given by parents of Clark Park gang members who felt their children had been subjects of police brutality. While it was believed at the time to be okay for parents to hit their own children, they were not going to allow the police to do so.

  Clark Park Freedom Rally poster, July 1972.

  SOURCE: Courtesy of the author

  Chuck Reid addresses those gathered at the Clark Park Freedom Rally in July 1972.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Sun

  The most vocal of the speakers was Chuck Reid, a muscular forty-three-year-old electrician and father of three teenage children. Reid told the crowd: “I used to be scared about sending my kids out [on the street] because of rapists. Now I can’t send them out without being scared of the police.” He went on to say that his sons had been subject to hectoring and abusive language by police, who refused to identify themselves when requested. Reid did not openly admit to being anti-police; he insisted that he was “an establishment type” who had joined the protest because of his sons’ experiences. He asked that anyone who had witnessed anything or wanted to file a complaint let him know about it as he had begun to keep records of the incidents, and gave out his home address near Trout Lake, just minutes away from Clark Park.49

  Organizers listed a number of recorded police offences that had occurred in recent weeks, many of which appeared to originate with the H-Squad. Specific dates when area youths were stopped for questioning immediately outside their homes or searched on the sidewalk were enumerated. On the back of the rally’s flyer, organizers had written a half-true description of the Fraser Street incident, which stated that several dozen police had “broke up an up-til-then peaceful party,” and failed to mention the original noise complaint or the bottles thrown at police.

  Many in attendance were present just to take in the music and atmosphere and had not shown up with a political agenda. And despite the impassioned speeches, the event was, by all accounts, a very pleasant afternoon. Even when two police cars cruised by the park, at one point stopping to observe before they drove on, there was no incident. Although the Clark Park Freedom Rally had been open invitation, the H-Squad refrained from attending. “We figured some of our faces were already getting a little bit known around there,” Stanton says.

  Mac Ryan and Gary Blackburn, who attended the rally, recall seeing members of the Youngbloods there, as well as a group calling themselves the Volunteers who handed out a thirty-page handbook decorated with the black flag of anarchy, which ex
plained the legal rights of Canadian citizens when dealing with the police. “[There] were these radical shitheads there who told us, ‘You have rights. You don’t have to tell police anything,’” recalls Blackburn. When he next encountered the H-Squad, he “yelled at them, saying, ‘I’ve got rights, and you can’t do this to me!’ One of the squad just pulled me up to his face and said, ‘You’ve got no fucking rights at all!’ and threw me on the ground.”

  Not all present were in agreement with the organizers, including a Mr and Mrs Carlo Rigoni, a couple who lived across the street from the park. Speaking to a Sun reporter, Mrs Rigoni said she felt police were not being tough enough. “I’m afraid to use that park. I’m frightened that I’ll get beaten or killed if I go there.”50 Despite Mrs Rigoni and a few others’ voices of dissent, most in attendance—in particular those who were political activists—believed that the police were doing more harm than good, going after innocent adolescents.

  At the rally, a petition was produced and circulated among the crowd for signatures, stating: “Specifically, we oppose the high level of unwarranted police intimidation and harassment, unnecessary police brutality and use of excessive force and the illegal use of off-duty and plainclothes police officers as vigilantes against young people in the Clark Park area of the city.”51 The rally raised questions not only about the police and what was happening in the East End, but about the gang itself. In a segment on the CBC television news, reporter Bill Dobson noted the concerns of rally organizers about “continued public attention focused on rowdyism and petty crime near Vancouver’s neighbourhood parks.” Dobson interviewed Mark Edelstein, an outreach worker with an East End youth centre called The Stay Project:” What about this discussion of gang problems at parks, and hassling by police?” he asked.

  “There have been enough children coming here, enough words from parents, and what’s in the newspapers to make us believe that there’s certainly something happening around Clark Park,” Edelstein said.

  “Is it a gang problem, do you think?” Dobson asked.

  “I think the gang is a myth.”

  “What about the police hassling?”

  “That’s not a myth. That’s really happening. But from what we’ve heard its not the entire Vancouver police force hassling people in the area, but individual members of the force.”52

  The opinions of those who were on the Clark Park scene then haven’t changed much. “They figured they were curing the problem—they just made it worse,” says Rick Stuart. “What [the H-Squad] did was [bring] out a big hatred of cops in everybody in the neighbourhood, and that feeling stuck with people over the years. It did with me. They’re the biggest fucking gang I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Looking back, Gary Blackburn concurs. “They were supposed to intimidate—and they did to a point. They didn’t stop anything from happening, but they probably made people start to watch their backs.” And it made some want to fight back.

  Just about everyone of a certain vintage who worked in the Vancouver Police Department has an Al Robson story or a favourite colourful anecdote of working with him. “I once went to answer a dispatch call at the Wings Hotel on Dunlevy off Gore Street,” recalls Constable Chris Graham, who joined the department in the mid-1980s. “[I] was [on] a call [about] a man with a gun in the hotel, but not much was known beside that. I was on my own but was the only one nearby, so I radioed in that I’d take the call.” Graham was a little nervous—he’d been in uniform for just a few months—when suddenly he overheard the voice of Robson, then a sergeant in another district, replying to the dispatcher, ‘Tell that kid to wait there for me.’” Graham arrived at the hotel, and Robson screeched up in his patrol car a minute later. Stepping out of the car, he motioned to Graham and said, “All right, come with me.” The two constables entered the hotel.

  The Wings Hotel, 1979.

  PHOTO: City of Vancouver Archives, CVA 780-323

  “We find out the guy had been shooting a gun off and yelling in his room,” Graham says. “So Robson just pounds up the stairs down the hallway to his room, kicks open the door, grabs the gun out of the guy’s hands, slaps him in the head, and tells him off. It turned out that the gun was a starter pistol and not really dangerous, but he couldn’t have known that when he went in. I was stunned! When it was all over and we were leaving the hotel I asked him, ‘How the hell’d you know it wasn’t a real gun?’ and Robson just grumbled and said everyone in the building were ‘real assholes,’ and that was it. But Robson did stuff like that every day. The younger guys completely idolized him.”

  Recalling the Wings Hotel incident in 2016, Al Robson says, “Well, I was at the end of my shift, and I didn’t want to have to call in a barricade, close the street, bring in a negotiator, and have to write up all that paperwork. I just wanted to go for a drink after work.”

  With a brusque and happily unapologetic, politically incorrect sense of humour, Robson is the kind of headstrong, tough, no-bullshit policeman that today’s generation of police academies can no longer produce. (Perhaps they never did.) Officers like Robson didn’t have much sympathy for purse-snatching culprits who complained that their handcuffs were too tight after they’d just pushed an eighty-year-old woman to the ground. Surrounded by layers of official bureaucratic policy, sensitivity training, and passersby ready to pull out a camera phone to record an officer’s every move, a man like Robson would find today’s world of policing a difficult place in which to work. Yet he was ideal for his generation.

  Born in Saskatchewan and raised in East Vancouver, Robson was the son of a policeman. He joined the VPD in 1971. His home neighbourhood would also become his first patrol. “Clark Park was my area—I was in car 311,” he says. Clark Park was a known trouble-spot when he began as a police officer. “There were a bunch of houses along 14th at Commercial. The whole street was nothing but assholes.”

  Robson still recalls some of the neighbourhood problems that the Clark Park gang caused. “They were into a lot of burglaries, vandalism, mischief, and bullying. In those days, there wasn’t much else to do,” he says half-jokingly. “At one time, around 18th and Commercial, the city had run a gas line and dug a trench in the street, four-and-a-half feet wide and two feet deep. They put up a sawhorse with flashing hazard signs, but these little bastards had taken them away, and a couple of people had driven into the ditch at night. One lady drove through the unmarked road, buried her face right through the windshield of her Toyota, and got hurt pretty bad. I got interviewed by the city in the investigation and insurance claim by the woman. Nobody was ever caught for it, but we all knew it was them.”

  On September 16, 1972, Robson and Constable Ted (Ed) McClellan had just sat down on a break and ordered dinner at the White Spot restaurant at Gladstone Street and Kingsway when their police radio squawked a disturbance call: “Two men fighting on Sidney Street,” just a few blocks away. Robson and McClellan jumped into their patrol car and drove to the location where they spotted a couple of young men fighting on the road as they pulled up. “When I opened the door, they both suddenly ran up and bashed the door on my leg. When I got the door open, four more jumped over a fence and came after us. That’s when we knew it was a set-up.”

  In the summer of 1972, police and the Clark Park gang went to war.

  SOURCE: The Province.

  As another two men also jumped out, Robson recalls that McClellan was hit hard in the head and went down. “I was pretty big in those days, and I grabbed three of them and hit them all hard, handcuffing one of them and hanging him over the branch of a tree.” Robson then yelled for backup over the radio, and several of the men ran off. “It took a long time for backup to get there—they weren’t near.”

  The incident was reported in The Province, which called it “a street battle with an east end gang” and noted that it “ended with three arrests.” McClellan had suffered a hairline skull fracture and spent the night in hospital. While a number of the young men in the fight escaped, The Province reported tha
t “Randolph George Johnston, eighteen, Terry Reid, seventeen, and a sixteen-year-old juvenile” were arrested. Johnston faced a charge of possession of a dangerous weapon, “a length of dog chain with a lead weight tied to one end.” The article also noted: “Police say they believe the eight youths involved in the street fight were members of what is known as the Clark Park Gang.”53

  That Clark Park gang members were armed with weapons was not a new development. Weapons had always been seen at rumbles, and rumours had it that the gang had hidden caches in Clark Park itself. Constable Paul Stanton notes, “We never found any weapons in the park, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had some in there.” Most Clark Parkers claim that while some individuals might have stashed items in the park, this was just another one of the dark rumours that followed the gang.

  The newspaper article didn’t tell the complete story, however. Johnston’s dog chain, hidden in his boot, was found only after he’d been arrested and used it in another fight in the holding cell that evening. Robson, recalling the fight in 2016, remembers, “I’d hit Johnston pretty hard after Ted [McClellan] got hit. Ted was knocked out so hard, he was muttering for his wife and thought he was at a bowling tournament in Las Vegas … I had hit Terry Reid hard enough that he was still on the ground when Ted managed to get up, and he kicked Reid. Just then, Chuck Reid showed up. It turned out Terry was his kid—and they both wanted to press charges for assault.” Although Terry Reid and others had initiated the assault, Reid’s father stood by his son.