Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Back when he was a striker for the Peterborough chapter, Pigpen had seemed relatively normal. He was a good-looking, well-groomed, tattoo-less man with a solid education and an obviously high IQ. Somehow, the rush of being an outlaw biker surrounded by other rebels was too much for him. “Within six weeks, he was a nutcase.… It never impressed me, people like that.… They called it ‘pulling class.’ It was freaking the public out. Now, clubs own their clubhouses and they are always tidy. They’re cleaner than most houses. Back then, the clubhouses were always rented. The guys would get scabies in them.

  “He’d flip out at meetings. They’d [Peterborough members] jump him. Knock him out cold. He’d either wake up and sit down or they’d have to do it again.” Pigpen’s craziness was directed towards himself as well as others. He pulled out his teeth with pliers lest dentists insert listening devices into his mouth. In one of his increasingly rare moments of relative normalcy, Pigpen appealed to a jailhouse doctor.

  “You have to help me,” Pigpen confided. “I’m starting to eat my own shit.”

  Campbell heard from Pigpen that the plea for psychiatric aid didn’t go well: “The doctor just ended the interview. He said, ‘I’m not ready for you yet.’ ”

  Once, while awaiting a court appearance in a holding cell, Pigpen decided that he just wanted to be left alone. Normally, guards would force reluctant prisoners to go to court, but Pigpen had a plan. He stripped off his clothing and smeared his body with feces, from head to toe. Not surprisingly, the ploy worked, and guards kept him at a distance and out of the courtroom.

  “When he told me about that, he was proud,” Campbell recalls. “He said, ‘Who won?’ ”

  “You did, Howard,” Campbell replied, not wanting to excite Pigpen further.

  Greatness of any sort seldom goes unchallenged. At one get-together, Windsor Satan’s Choice members rolled out their own Pigpen, billed as “the Classman from Windsor,” whom they considered the most disgusting person on wheels. “He had eaten a mouse. Howard [Pigpen] would not be outdone. He said to the guys, ‘Go out and find a mouse.’ ”

  The bikers managed to catch a live fieldmouse, which the Classman grabbed. “He bites the head right off the mouse. The mouse was squirming. He put the body on the table. He’s not spitting out the head. Howard won’t be outdone. They both kept breaking it apart, taking the intestines, eating them like it was caviar [or] sirloin steak. I went outside, thinking I was solid. I couldn’t get out fast enough, just turning to the left and letting her go.”

  Sometime in the early 1970s, Pigpen fled to the Carolinas, staying ahead of Canadian charges. While there, he joined up with the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, changing his biker name from Pigpen to the alias “Garbage.” The Outlaws and the Satan’s Choice were on friendly terms and had a brotherhood pact, which made it fairly easy to make the switch from club to club. “Whatever happened to him?” Campbell said when asked. “He’s running a restaurant with his lovely wife.” Campbell chortled at the absurdity of the notion.

  It was common for bikers to ride into a town in a pack and leave shortly afterwards with an eager police escort. “They just wanted to get you out of their jurisdiction,” Willerton says. “They didn’t want to touch us with a ten-foot pole.”

  Not all the police were so accommodating. There was an Oshawa officer named Forchette whom Guindon insisted on calling For-Shit. It didn’t help that Forchette was an aspiring boxer and that Guindon had seriously tuned him up in the ring. They fought on the lawn outside Guindon’s home one day and Guindon paid for the tussle by spending the next few months in jail. When he returned to General Motors, Guindon was told he was out of a job unless he mended his ways. “If I would quit riding my bike to work, then they would give me my job,” Guindon recalls. He told them to stick it and climbed back on his motorcycle. With that, his five-year career as an autoworker was over in 1968. Years later, Guindon said he could understand why they wanted him out of the plant. “I wore my colours to work and I started a lot of other guys wearing colours to work.”

  At the age of eighteen, Campbell found work on a tobacco farm northeast of Oshawa. The job occasionally involved riding a horse, something he hadn’t tried since he was five years old. Now, on the cusp of adulthood, he was told to ride a Morgan draft horse. “The horse wouldn’t obey me, so we headed back to the barn, where I fell off.” He fell in slow motion, as if in a cartoon. He quit the job that day and thereafter confined his riding to motorcycles. “My dreams of being a cowboy were over.”

  Next, Campbell drove trucks for Canada Dry, Pepsi and North American Steel, and worked on the loading dock for the steel company. When he wanted a break, he deliberately sliced his hand, took four or five stitches, and enjoyed a week of recuperation.

  “I want some time off, but I want more,” said a co-worker Campbell didn’t particularly like. “Can you help?”

  “I can. How much time you want off?”

  “Six months or so.”

  Campbell prepared to swing a sheet of 18-gauge steel across the man’s arm. It would be more than enough to leave a bloody stump and take him off the job forever. At the last second, the man saw the steel about to cut into him and yanked his arm away. “He had no idea what my mind was about,” Campbell says.

  The Satan’s Choice lost their leader in 1968, when Guindon and five other bikers were convicted of raping a fifteen-year-old girl in an Ottawa home. He was twenty-four at the time. There were so many sexual assaults committed by outlaw bikers back then that the Hells Angels felt the need to draft a rule specifically forbidding rape. There were also plenty of orgies, when willing women and girls serviced whole groups of club members.

  As Guindon tells the story, the charge that sent him to prison was for an encounter of the second variety. His relatively light five-year sentence suggests the court believed at least some of his account. “She was at the clubhouse. She was a groupie. Everything’s okay. Everybody had fun, but we all left and left a couple guys who were hangarounds. These guys had taken this girl to one of the guy’s houses and the guy’s wife was gone and she came home and caught the guys doing whatever they were doing. That girl told the wife that she got raped.”

  It didn’t help his case that she showed up for court in little-girl pigtails, Guindon says. Guindon found himself in Kingston Penitentiary, where one of the few other outlaw bikers was Lockey MacDonald. He was a member of the 13th Tribe Motorcycle Club from Halifax, convicted of a similar charge. As they were both in prison on “skin beefs”—sex-related crimes—they were fair game for other convicts to attack under the unwritten but undeniable code of conduct that governs prison life. “They would sic the older winos on them,” Guindon says. “Say, ‘Here’s a knife. Use it or else.’ ”

  One day, MacDonald staggered into his cell with a knife wound. He dragged with him the old convict who had stuck him. Guindon said it wasn’t hard to get the old-timer to talk, and he told them: “I stabbed him and so-and-so told me I had to.”

  The prisoners behind the stabbing were two Italian criminals from Hamilton. Guindon didn’t know whether or not they were mob, and that didn’t particularly matter. “I went in the common room and punched them out. I hit them with a nice left hook.” One of the punches was particularly crisp. “I put his nose on the other side of his face.”

  Guindon says it made sense to carry out a very public pre-emptive strike on the Hamiltonians: “I was on a skin beef. [I said,] ‘Why don’t you all come after me?’ Nobody bothered me.” Things got decidedly better after that, Guindon says. “They didn’t bother me. I don’t hold grudges. The only time I hold grudges is when somebody comes back for a second one.”

  When Guindon confronted the Hamiltonians, he showed that outlaw bikers weren’t to be fucked with either behind bars or on the streets, Campbell says. That made things safer not just for Guindon and Lockey but also for generations of club members who would do hard time in the future. “That particular incident paved the way for other bikers.”

  Guin
don trained hard in boxing while behind bars and managed to qualify for the 1971 Pan American Games in Cali, Colombia. He won a bronze medal at 157 pounds, despite fighting one weight division above his usual. When he was freed on parole in January 1972, he moved several hours northwest to Thunder Bay, and it wasn’t long before he was on bad terms with local police. He told them, “If you keep harassing me, I’ll start a chapter here.” The war of words continued and Guindon made good on his threat. But establishing a Thunder Bay chapter of the Choice made it easy for his parole to be yanked for criminal associations, and he found himself back in prison by November 1972. He was now known inside the club as “Number One Frog” or simply “Frog,” from the French Connection book and movie.

  This time, Guindon ended up in Stony Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba, a nineteenth-century stone-and-brick dungeon on a tiny hill outside Winnipeg. “The day I got there, a guy from Ontario got killed.” Guindon kept training, despite not having real boxing facilities. For a punching bag, he had an obliging First Nations behemoth who let Guindon whale away on his midsection. To toughen his own core area, Guindon did a series of ab exercises he’d picked up while watching the Cubans train at the Pan Am Games.

  During the time Guindon was away in prison, Campbell quit the club. There had been an ugly brawl between two Choice members over a woman, and the intensity of the anger was too much for Campbell. Somewhere, the promise of brotherhood seemed lost. “I didn’t want to belong to a bunch of guys who are fighting like that.”

  Campbell had his grade twelve and completed a drafting course at Oshawa’s Durham College in 1972. Then he started a two-year mechanical technician course, but never completed it. Despite quitting the club, he never stopped hanging around with his friends from the Choice. He also didn’t stop riding bikes. In 1973 he bought a 1969 BSA Thunderbolt motorcycle for eight hundred dollars. The next year he bought his first Harley-Davidson for nine hundred: a 1948 panhead chopper like the Captain America cycle Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider. It was a rigid, heavyweight ride with no shocks or swing arm, which left its rider feeling every bump on the road. It also screamed badass from blocks away.

  The use of drugs was up in the early 1970s, but it didn’t seem that anyone in their circle was making money selling them. Sellers would become users, and people using drugs just got stoned and violent a lot.

  The times were changing. As Willerton entered his twenties, he found that membership in the club was taking money out of his pocket and focus away from his plans to someday become wealthy. His father made auto glass for the GM plant and Willerton wanted something far better than the merciless boredom of life on an assembly line. When he had signed on with GM after dropping out of high school, he told his friends he might stay two years before setting out for something better. When he reached his mid-twenties, though, he was still on the assembly line, and restless. “You can’t leave GM. That money for no education. The habit becomes a ditch, and the ditch becomes a grave. We had that saying in GM.”

  Willerton bought himself a three-piece suit and a Cadillac and set out part-time to try to sell soap franchises in Montreal, hanging on to his GM job as insurance until his outside ventures took off. He decided it was time to stop wearing the Choice patch on his back and focus on making real money in the mainstream world. “I figured to get rich I had to get out of the club and get a suit. I wanted to get rich and I knew I had to be playing the game and leave the club.”

  And it wasn’t just Willerton who was changing. There were also seismic shifts under way in the outlaw biker world, and Willerton wasn’t comfortable with what he was seeing. When he had joined the Phantom Riders as a teenager, he had convinced himself that the biker world offered a balance to his life as an assembly-line drone. In its best light, it represented an oasis of honesty in a hypocritical world and a chance for juvenile fun and near rock-star glamour. That life officially ended for Willerton one day when he was expected to fly down to Montreal and pick up a gun to help settle an inter-club beef. To that point, the Choice had largely been about mindless hijinks and punch-ups and splashers, but now the club was heading in a more dangerous direction, from which there was no turning back. “The guns were starting to come out. That was the turning point for me.”

  Campbell’s life was moving on an opposite track, as he answered what felt like an irresistible pull to re-enter the ranks of the club. Not long after he rejoined, Campbell was appointed sergeant-at-arms of the Choice’s Oshawa chapter, and his new official duties included punching out guys who got out of hand at parties and enforcing club discipline in general. He had no doubts he could handle the job. “I know when a guy is out of hand and needs a shot in the head.” Unlike many of the outlaw bikers, he didn’t take on a nickname to go with his club persona. “I was known as ‘the Hick from Oshawa.’ They never called me that to my face. I was from a small town. Never did drugs. I was thought of as a hick. Then I started fighting and people saw how loyal I was.”

  It was around this time that Campbell happened to bump into a girl he had known in elementary school, who had somehow seemed even poorer than Campbell. She always wore ratty clothing and was the constant butt of jokes, ostracized to the point that other kids refused even to touch her while square dancing during physical education classes. Since those awkward, unhappy days, she had blossomed nicely, finding a loving husband and building a good life with him. That day when they met by chance, she approached Campbell and made a point of saying some kind words to him. “She just remembered that I was nice to her back at school. It was a nice feeling. It was nice, very nice, for her to say that.”

  The iconic gangster movie The Godfather came out in 1972, ushering in a public fascination with organized crime. There was a fair amount of crime in Campbell’s biker family, but still not much organization. At Choice meetings, talk was about club runs, not drug deals, he says. Any cop trying to predict the club’s movements by using organizational charts and economic analysis would have had just as much luck relying on a dart-throwing monkey. “They’d call it organized crime. We’d say, ‘Fuck, if they only knew.’ ” Steve Earle, the American roots musician who spent many of his formative years in Texas biker circles, later wondered about the effect Marlon Brando’s performance as Mafia boss Don Corleone in The Godfather had on biker culture in general and Hells Angels leader Ralph (Sonny) Barger in particular. “He saw Marlon Brando in The Wild One and he wanted to be scooter trash. He saw the same actor in The Godfather and decided he wanted to be a gangster.”

  Something about the Satan’s Choice still appealed to Campbell’s romantic nature, but the reality of the club often disappointed him. To an outsider, it may seem odd to call someone romantic when he talks wistfully of the days he punched out bikers on a regular basis and rode in a snarly pack that scared the bejesus out of civilians. It’s tougher yet when those days also included bumping shoulders with the likes of Pigpen from Peterborough. But romance isn’t an exclusive thing, limited only to well-behaved lovers of Keats and baby’s-breath bouquets.

  At this point in his life, Campbell wasn’t looking for employment in the underworld; he already had steady work. He sought something more precious and elusive. He wanted a family, he wanted fun, and he wanted to be a part of something big that mattered. “When I was a kid and we would make a wish when we broke a turkey wishbone, I’ve always wished for happiness. I never wished for money.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Anger Mismanagement

  I bit a chunk out of his arm.

  LORNE CAMPBELL talking about competition during biker field day

  Campbell’s daughter Janice was eight when he split with Elinor in 1974 at age twenty-six. That made Janice the same age that Campbell had been when his parents broke up. For most of his time with Elinor he had been out of the club, but he never really left the lifestyle. By the time the relationship ended, Campbell was back wearing a grinning devil patch on his back and living at the Choice clubhouse on the sixth concession north of Oshawa, a modest Ontario-styl
e cottage with tarpaper siding on a semi-rural acreage. Since the days in the basement of Guindon’s home, the clubhouse had shifted from a cleaned-up barn in tiny Nestleton to a downtown Oshawa house and then to a century property outside Port Perry near Lake Scugog. The closest neighbour on the sixth concession was the landlord: former pro wrestler Bill Stack, a Maple Leaf Wrestling regular best known for unmasking the Red Demon.

  One evening, Campbell called Elinor and there was no answer. He drove to see her with no particular purpose in mind; he just felt a need to be there. Elinor and Janice still weren’t home when he arrived. He ordered a pizza and ate it alone. The next thing he knew, he was walking through the empty house they had once shared, cigarette lighter in hand, setting the curtains ablaze. It was as if he were watching another person. He crossed the street to his sister’s house, where he sat in the kitchen by the front window as his former family home went up in flames. “I watched the TV explode, go right through the front window and land on the lawn,” Campbell says. “I got a kick from it.”

  Squad cars fanned out over the city in pursuit of the arsonist as Campbell watched firefighters quell the blaze. Eventually, he crossed the street and walked up to the cop. “I just said, ‘How are you doing? I’m Lorne.” ’

  When the cop realized whom he was talking to, he tried to draw his gun, but he was too nervous to get it out of the holster, fumbling with it like Don Knotts’s Barney Fife character on the old Andy Griffith Show. Then he tried to call in other police officers, but they were too busy hunting down Campbell to listen. Campbell stood by quietly with the nervous cop until he and his fellow officers sorted things out. “Finally he screamed, ‘He’s here! He’s here!’ He was scared shitless.”