The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  The Reids would have their day in court: Constable McClellan was charged with assault. On the day of the hearing to set a trial date, Al Robson stood outside the courtroom waiting for his partner when the doors opened. “Ted came out, and then Chuck Reid with his kid after him,” Robson says. “Before he left, Chuck pointed at Ted and said, ‘You better watch your back!’” With plenty of witnesses on hand, Chuck Reid was subsequently charged with uttering threats. Eventually, the judge and prosecutor arranged for a settlement: both the assault charge against McClellan and the charge against Chuck Reid were dismissed.

  The street fight between police and the gang remains one of the more public examples of the nature of the relationship between the two groups that summer. Members of the Clark Park gang were now staging incidents to draw police into direct confrontation, and some gang members spoke of getting into fights with police as an evening’s entertainment. (Efforts to reach Terry Reid through other old associates of the Clark Park gang for comment were not fruitful.)

  For the most part, however, it was a peaceful summer in the city. Besides the Rolling Stones riot, Vancouver had avoided a major public clash like the Gastown riot or the Sea Festival incidents. But there was still noticeable tension, an as yet unlit powder-keg of distrust between young people and the police. In a Vancouver Sun article, reporter Keith Taylor canvassed 500 Vancouver youths and found that young people in Vancouver believed the treatment that citizens could expect at the hands of police depended on how old they were and how they were dressed. “Don’t let the uneasy truce fool you,” wrote Taylor. “Unless the two sides can get together to try to understand each other, to become more aware of each other’s thinking, the peace will never last—and the violence with all its attendant ugliness will flare up again in our city.”54

  Taylor, of course, was unaware that a secret war between the H-Squad and the Clark Park gang was already being waged. While the Sidney Street fight was mentioned in the newspapers, other incidents remained classified. One weekend that summer, during an evening sweep of East Vancouver, police arrested nine Clark Parkers, who were brought to the Main Street police lockup. Among those arrested were Mouse Williamson, Rod Schnob, Dwayne Nelson, and Larry Booth.

  “When we were at the booking desk, one of the guards in the jail started to rough up Rod,” Williamson recounts. “Rod pushed back and yelled, ‘You guys are all gutless pricks. You’d never go one on one!’ The guard who was dealing with him barked, ‘Yeah, I would!’ and some of the other guards at the desk said they would too. Rod and this cop just start to fight right there. Another cop went to jump on Rod, and Larry Booth jumped in to hold that cop back. While those two started to square off, another cop tried to jump on Larry, and Dwayne Nelson jumped on him. The rest of us tried to pin the other cops back, yelling, ‘You said a fair fight, one on one!’”

  There, in the middle of the police booking room, an impromptu bare-knuckle fight broke out. The Clark Parkers egged on their comrades while police cheered their fellow officers as the lockup roared with obscenities and desks were noisily pushed out of the way. According to Williamson, Schnob began to get the better of the guard he was fighting, and all the men voluntarily broke it up. The gang insisted they’d won the match as they were hustled to their cells.

  Booking Desk at 312 Main Street Police Station, c. 1970s.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, P00156

  Did police have a different judgement of the fight’s outcome, and can they even verify that it took place? The incident was never leaked to media at the time, and if there are any police still living who recall the incident, none are talking. That no police officer simply pulled out his firearm to stop the fight is difficult to believe, but Williamson insists that the story is not a fabrication. If police had come to despise the Clark Parkers just as much as the Clark Parkers hated them, perhaps they shared an appetite for brawls. “Everything happened so fast,” says Williamson. “I doubt that anything like it ever happened again … The cops just don’t play that way. If they did have security cameras in the jail, I bet they erased the tapes pretty quick, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they all got together afterward and said, ‘Don’t mention this to anyone.’”

  With the Clark Parkers in their cells and the lockup cleaned up after the melee, Williamson recalls what happened next. “After the fight, when things had calmed down, they pulled Rod [Schnob] aside and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you come work with us? We could use a guy with good hands like you. You should join the force,’ but Rod told them to fuck off.” Would Schnob have made a decent policeman? We’ll never know. In 1984, he was arrested and convicted as a hitman in a sensational contract killing of a drug dealer in the small town of Duncan, BC. The hit went awry; the drug dealer’s wife was murdered instead. Schnob received a minimum twenty-five-year life sentence.

  49 Christy McCormick, “Clark Park Harassment: Peaceful Rally Raps Police Action,” Vancouver Sun, July 17, 1972, 10.

  50 McCormick, 10.

  51 Ibid.

  52 CBC Television News, Untitled film strip, dated July 27, 1972 (Vancouver, BC: CBC Vancouver Archives).

  53 “Policemen Injured by Street Rowdies,” The Province, September 18, 1972, 23.

  54 Alan Daniels, “Young People Complain: The Police Discriminate Against Us,” Vancouver Sun, October 5, 1972, 6.

  NINE: STREET FIGHTIN’ MAN

  Throughout the fall of 1972, in the wake of the Sidney Street fight, rumours swirled that the Clark Park gang still planned to lure a uniformed patrol officer to a staged incident, perhaps even in the park itself, and attack him. But it’s difficult to know, some forty-five years later, if the rumour had any substance. Former gang member Bradley Bennett has doubts. “We had no organization. If something did happen, it was completely by chance and spur of the moment. It was, ‘Let’s get stoned and drunk and go somewhere,’ and then all of a sudden all fucking hell would break loose,” he says. The disorganization of the gang made it difficult for police to predict where they would next show up to cause a problem. Individual Clark Parkers had their own agendas; each was considered by police to be as much of a problem as the next.

  Mac Ryan recalls learning that another Clark Parker, Danny Teece, had been stopped by the squad that summer. “They … accused him of being one of the fire bombers at the Stones concert, took out these knives, and slashed up a brand-new vest he was wearing.” Ryan says the police threatened Teece the next time they saw him, saying they would cut up more than his vest. As a teen, Teece had fallen in with Paul Melo and another gang member, Robert “Bum” Wadsworth; in 1969, they were arrested for three B and Es and for the theft of a car. Teece’s divorced parents then decided that he would be better off away from Clark Park and sent him to attend school in Maple Ridge, outside the city, where his grandmother lived. But Teece didn’t like it there and moved back into town. He quit school in the spring of 1972, worked a few legitimate jobs here and there, spent weeks away from home, and ran around town with Clark Park friends. “Danny Teece was my good little buddy,” says Wayne Angelucci. “We used to hang around all the time. He was younger than us, and we got into all kinds of crazy trouble—but he was a good kid. Everybody liked Danny, and he was easy to get along with.”

  If the H-Squad’s surveillance and other activities were beginning to cause stress within the gang, it was difficult to determine. They were already leading complicated lives that, even without extra pressure, could at any moment lead to random violence. Even having a Clark Parker as a neighbour could invite trouble. Mac Ryan lived in an apartment with a friend from Clark Park for a while, and while Ryan hadn’t been a keen student, he was an avid reader—he even subscribed to a daily newspaper. After staying up late one night drinking with friends, he woke up in the morning a little worse for wear and went to pick up the newspaper that was usually right outside his apartment door—but this time, it wasn’t there.

  Mac Ryan, 1970s.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Danny Williamson

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sp; “There were these college guys who lived in the apartment across the hall, and I got it in my head that they must have taken my newspaper,” he says. Ryan pounded on their door. When one of them opened it, he barged in and demanded the return of the stolen newspaper. The two students, along with two visiting friends, told him that they didn’t have it. Ryan accused them of lying, of taking him for a fool, and summoned his roommate. The two men punched up the college students in their own living room and stormed back across the hall, still angered that the neighbours would so blatantly steal the paper.

  “I realized when I woke up the next day that it had actually been a holiday and there wasn’t a newspaper delivery that day,” he says. “I went over to apologize, but they’d packed up and moved out. Scared, I guess. I felt pretty bad about that one.”

  If Gerry Gavin was worried about the H-Squad, it didn’t show, though Gavin was unpredictable. “If you were Gerry’s friend, you were fine. But Gerry had a dark side to him, and he could turn on people,” says Bradley Bennett. Bennett recalls one night when a group of Clark Parkers were at a party at Gary Blackburn’s house. Mac Ryan’s mother showed up with a new boyfriend and his younger brother, who was closer in age to the gang. “They dumped him off at the party while they went out. He didn’t know anybody, and he didn’t fit in at all. He was trying, but most guys just ignored him. Gerry Gavin instantly hated him, and so he beat him up really bad. Gerry even went to grab a claw hammer to beat him with, but we pulled him off.”

  Bradley Bennett and Mouse Williamson. c. 1970s.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Bradley Bennett

  When Mac’s mother and her boyfriend returned, they found the younger brother passed out in the living room with two swollen eyes and a cut lip; his face was covered in bruises. The boyfriend demanded to know what had happened to him, but party-goers sheepishly said that they had no idea. “He was a big guy, and he could have individually beaten all of us up, one at a time, I’m sure,” Bennett says. “He grabbed somebody and was going to hit him if he didn’t say who had beaten up his brother. Then Gerry piped up: ‘Hey, I’m the one who beat him up—and I’m going to beat you.’” The men charged at each other, but others stepped in to break up the fight, kicking the older brother out of the party. He left, taking his unconscious sibling with him out to the car, and drove off. “Mac’s mother stayed behind with us and drank. She said to us, ‘He was a nice guy who treated me well—why do you do that to all my boyfriends?’” Bennett says. “It hadn’t been the first time.”

  Bradley Bennett and Mouse Williamson were out with a number of others from the gang one afternoon in Grandview Park when police spotted and detained them. “They used to make you take your jacket off, and they’d write down what tattoos you had. This was long before cell phone cameras, of course, and I guess they were too cheap to get a Polaroid, but they kept these little cards on everybody and asked us our names as they went through it,” says Bennett. “They hassled us for about ten or fifteen minutes and finally let us go. Somebody said, ‘Hey, Mouse, let’s get the fuck out of here,’ and as soon as the cops heard that, they grabbed him again. The beat cops only knew him as Danny and didn’t realize he was ‘Mouse.’ They’d been looking for a ‘Mouse’ for years, but never knew his real name. Hell, I never knew his real name either! I’d only ever known him as ‘Mouse,’ but the cops knew him only from his ID.”

  Mouse Williamson got his Clark Park tattoo in the early 1970s.

  PHOTO: Erik Iversen, 2016

  At the end of August, Williamson finally went to court for the charge of assaulting an officer at the Rolling Stones riot the year before. He was found guilty, although he said that he was unaware his victim was a police officer. If Williamson already had reasons to be angry about the conviction, it got worse when his sentencing hearing was held. Ken Doern (Bell) testified that he’d seen Williamson with a gun at his house. The judge believed Doern’s testimony, and Williamson was given a two-year sentence in Oakalla prison. Williamson was furious—as far as he was concerned, Doern had lied. “I saw him years later and asked him why he had lied. He sheepishly said he couldn’t remember or would have to check his notes. But it was all bullshit. I bet he was padding all his undercover reports this way to make it look like he was getting all this good information.”

  In a strange way, Williamson’s sentence came as welcome relief. “Between the Fraser Street party and my court case, I’d been out of jail for twenty-eight days, and I was never so happy to go back in. Every time I was out on the street, the [H-Squad] cops would stop me, insult me, slap me around. I couldn’t go anywhere.”

  Clark Parkers were being taken off the street. Williamson was now in jail, Mark Owens was doing a year for armed robbery, and Bradley Bennett was also in prison again, this time on a conviction for assaulting a police officer. Those on the outside were getting older or just busier, and began to drift away from the park scene. There were only so many houses in the East End they could break into. Eventually, some considered more legitimate forms of work. “By 1972, I started to work on the tugboats with my father. I was attracted to the idea of working on the water,” says Rick Stuart. “I’d be gone for weeks at a time. It was nice to not be so broke. I’d come back and see everybody [in the gang] and end up getting into a little trouble, but I’d quickly be back out on the boats again.”

  Another Clark Parker who had begun to move on was Wayne Angelucci. “I didn’t hang around the park as much when I got older,” he says. “I thought it was a waste of time. The only time I stayed out of trouble was when I’d be in jail—three months here, three months there. Mac and I were both in, doing time together. But I wanted to have money. There used to be logging companies that had labour offices on Hastings Street, so I went down to Pigeon Park, got a haircut, and went to one office. The guy said, ‘There’s a plane leaving for the logging camp in Tahsis in two hours. I can put you on that.’ So I went to work up at the logging camps, and that got me out of the park for a month or so at a time. They phoned my father and let him know where I was, and asked if it was okay with him, because I was so young, but I’d quit school and wasn’t doing anything else. So I’d work, then come back to town and see everybody and spend all my money, and then go back up [north] and do it again.” Although some Clark Parkers were now off the streets or at least spent less time there, the H-Squad continued to go after the remaining gang members in the East End.

  Police cars in the neighbourhood were continually made to feel unwelcome. “They were breaking a lot of windows in the backs of patrol cars,” remembers Constable Paul Stanton, especially if they were unattended at various trouble spots throughout East Van. The gang continued to invite conflict with the police that summer, sometimes for seemingly harmless things—at least in comparison to other crimes they’d been involved in—but police took them just as seriously.

  “Somebody stole a policeman’s hat out of the back of a patrol car. The cops went nuts over that; it was a big insult to them,” says Gary Blackburn. “When I heard about it, I felt bad about that one, because the particular cop was a really nice guy. He’d come by the park and tell us, ‘Get the fuck out of here because there are people coming up to get you guys.’ He treated us decently. I mean, if we’d done something wrong or got busted for something fair and square, no problem, he’d arrest you for it, but he treated us fairly. I guess he’d taken his hat off and thrown it in the back of the car, so it got stolen. That hat got passed around the entire East End. People took pictures of them wearing it on their heads at parties, and it was a couple of years before it was found again.” But more significant burglaries took place as well, and that summer the gang’s criminal activities did not slow down.

  The railyards were always a favourite target for robberies. The long boxcars were difficult to guard at night and made for easy scores. “A few of the guys broke into a boxcar. It was full of Winchester rifles. There was no ammunition with them, but the police went nuts, thinking that we were now all armed with guns,” says Gary Blackb
urn. He believes now that most of the guns were later recovered when they were found scattered and discarded.

  The railyard thefts would not always yield such a bounty. On another occasion, the gang broke into a boxcar hoping there would be television sets or some other high-value items inside, but it was full of boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. “The next day, one of the newspapers, covering our great train robbery, ran a headline: ‘Hoodlums Munch on Cap’n Crunch,’” Williamson recalls with a laugh.

  Most of the gang’s burglaries were more profitable, usually yielding cash or items of value that could easily be sold or stored in neighbourhood garages. Police rarely caught the thieves in the act. But one night, Mac Ryan and other gang members stole some lawnmowers and gardening equipment. With the gear loaded onto the back of a flatbed owned by one of the gang, they made a clean getaway. But as they drove back into the East End with the haul, they were pulled over by a passing police car. “It was late at night, and the cop asked us what we were doing with all the stuff,” Ryan says. “We told him it was equipment for a landscaping job we had the next day, and we were just going to drop the gear off at job site to get a head start. He looked at it, and then he looked at us. He knew us from Clark Park. He said, ‘I know who all of you are, and if I read a report tomorrow that somebody woke up and found their lawnmowers stolen, I’m coming around to pick every one of you up and arrest you.’” They protested, with Ryan even telling the police that he was offended that such assumptions would be made. They assured the officer that the gear was all equipment for the next day’s work, so the police let them go on their way. Knowing they’d already been caught, however, they had to drive all the gear back and reluctantly—and quietly—return it.

  The H-Squad was not without its own unexpectedly humorous incidents. Squad member Jim Maitland recalls that one night he, Joe Cliffe, and John Flaten were doing a surveillance of the park to see if any gang members had shown up. Needing to make a personal call at a pay phone, Flaten stepped away and walked down Commercial Drive after agreeing to meet up with the other officers later in a different corner of the park. Cliffe sat in one car, while Maitland drove to 16th and Commercial to wait. Just then, they heard some noises and suspected that something was up.