Campbell told the cop that he hadn’t originally set out to burn the house down and had only planned to get a pizza. The fumbling cop regained his nerves by that point. “He said it must have been a bad pizza.”
Campbell could be glib about many things in his life, but he would profoundly regret his conduct during much of his time with Elinor. “I wasn’t cruel to my daughter, but I was abusive to her mom. I was too nuts, too radical. She was just a beautiful mother and everything. I was too wild to settle down. I was abusive to her mentally and physically. It’s not an excuse, but it’s a learned behaviour from seeing how my dad treated my mother.”
Long before he set the family home on fire, Campbell knew he had a serious problem. He wasn’t worried about his habit of punching out other outlaw bikers; they all deserved it, in his opinion. What scared him was the thought of repeating the angry pattern of domestic abuse in his childhood home. From the age of eighteen, Campbell had sought out psychiatric and psychological counselling on his own, something he would continue for decades. “I’ve seen at one time every single psychiatrist in Durham Region.”
One psychiatrist nervously blinked and twitched as he sat at his desk and read Campbell’s growing history of assaults. After what seemed like several minutes of watching him read and twitch, Campbell said, “I’m outta here,” and got up and left.
Another psychiatrist diagnosed him as having “phobic anxiety.” Somehow, Campbell’s violence was linked to his need to be protective and his deep anger was often misdirected against those he loved. He presented Campbell with what Campbell called his “crazy papers,” which spelled out this diagnosis. Campbell was told to present them to police officers or others, should the need arise.
The psychiatric analysis may have provided fascinating reading, but it didn’t really help Campbell cope with the violence. The first counsellor who really clicked with him said he wasn’t going to waste time trying to catalogue the many possible causes of Campbell’s deep anxiety. His specialty was relaxation therapy, which was considered cutting edge at the time. This approach appealed to Campbell because it sought definite results, not just interesting explanations and excuses. Campbell paraphrased the psychiatrist as saying: “It could be hundreds or thousands of reasons. Who gives a shit? Let’s learn how to deal with it.”
He found ways of getting Campbell to unwind, such as listening to a tape of running water. “He gave me the key. Try to find out what your body’s feeling. Learn how to deal with it. I said, ‘It’s not the rest of the world, it’s me.’ ” It was a breakthrough, although not a total solution. Campbell only went to one more session and then felt he could start applying the doctor’s teachings on his own. “I was still violent after that, but more controlled. It took time. He gave me the key. I took about a year to learn how to relax with people.”
Campbell made a conscious and determined effort to face down his boyhood fears on his own, just as he had been taught by his father to confront problems head-on. He suffered a phobia of heights, which he tackled by finding jobs as an ironworker, repairing smokestacks. He addressed his deathly fear of spiders by purchasing a Mexican redleg tarantula as large as his hand, and holding it each day. He had Mother McEwan of the Choice tattoo a tarantula onto his right calf along with 1% in 1974. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing.” The same year, he had Elinor’s name covered with an eagle tattoo and inked a Choice devil’s head onto his left shoulder, with space to record each year he was in the club. “I thought I’d be in for the rest of my life, for eternity.”
The pet tarantula died when he went to Thunder Bay for a couple of weeks and forgot to leave it water. He would never learn to love spiders, or even be comfortable with them, but by that time he at least had his arachnophobia in a tight mental box. He bought replacements for the dead spider, lest his fear well up again.
Campbell remained fiercely competitive, always feeling the need to prove himself. This was never more obvious than during Satan’s Choice field days near Kitchener, when members of different clubs came together to party and show off their bike-riding skills. Field day events included one in which bikers competed to see who could push a beer keg farthest with a motorcycle. There was also a hot-dog race, in which a woman riding on the back of a bike has to reach up and bite off a wiener dangling from a scaffold. The wiener was made more slippery with mustard. Another event was called Pick Up Sticks, and it involved a biker cruising slowly in a circle with a passenger on the back, riding sidesaddle. The passenger would scramble from the motorcycle to retrieve sticks thrown into the centre of the circle and then jump back on the Harley. Whoever rode off with the most sticks won. It sounds simple, even gentle, like a Sunday school Easter egg hunt, but it was little more than a human cockfight. Campbell won the event against two dozen other bikers by wearing spurs and kicking often and hard, like a rooster engaged in bloody combat.
If Campbell couldn’t win field day games himself, he helped fellow Choice members defeat bikers from other clubs. In 1975, the Choice celebrated their tenth anniversary with a field day just north of Oshawa, by the clubhouse. Campbell lined up for a drag race between Guindon, fresh from prison, and Bobbo Gray of the Para-Dice Riders. Campbell was riding his 1948 panhead while Guindon was also atop a Harley-Davidson, a brand of motorcycle he loved so much that he named his own son Harley Davidson Guindon. Guindon was an excellent rider, but Gray’s knobby-tired, self-built racer, Brain Damage, made him the prohibitive pre-race favourite. Campbell deliberately crashed his bike into Brain Damage, taking Gray out and ensuring Guindon’s victory.
There was also the turkey race, which involved fighting to see who could pull off the biggest chunk of a freshly beheaded turkey and run to a finish line. “This sounds simple, but it takes hours to rip apart a turkey.” It had evolved from the chicken race, a much-maligned contest in which live chickens were sacrificed. In the old chicken races, the competition began when a biker lowered his arm and contestants raced after the live birds. After a huge furor from the media and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, races now began the instant an axe swung down, beheading the turkey.
Bikers were almost sacrificed as well. In one turkey race, Campbell pressed down on the neck of a member of the Detroit Outlaws as they fought for the same poultry chunk. Eventually, teenaged Joe Ertel of the Satan’s Choice pried Campbell off the motionless Outlaw and threw him backwards. The Outlaw was an odd shade of blue-grey and Ertel shouted, “Look, he’s dead! The guy’s blue! His tongue’s out!” The Outlaw was loaded onto a St. John’s ambulance that had been hired for the event and was eventually revived through an emergency tracheotomy.
The near killing of the Outlaw didn’t quell Campbell’s competitive juices at the field days. “I knocked out four teeth from a particularly tough club member. If you’re a biker, lose some teeth—you look too good.” Years later, when he was forty-four, Campbell competed in a field day against a boxer who was almost half his age. “I bit a chunk out of his arm. I thought, ‘This 25-year-old, he’s not going to win. I’ve been fighting all my life.’ He had no hard feelings. He lived to fight again.”
The only race that couldn’t be mastered by trickery or extreme violence was the slow race, in which bikers deliberately rode their motorcycles as slowly as possible. “I never won the slow race. My mind would never slow down enough.”
They camped out in tents for the anniversary field day, and one morning Campbell had a rude awakening. Bill (Mr. Bill) Lavoie, Jungle and others had tied a rope to his legs while he was sleeping and fastened it to Mr. Bill’s Harley. Campbell’s wake-up call that morning was the unfamiliar sensation of bouncing across a field. “I was being pulled at thirty miles an hour over grass. It was in retaliation because I was bugging people for days. I couldn’t sit up. They stopped before the gravel road. I thought, I’ll fucking shoot him if they drag me on the road.”
As the new version of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club wheeled into its second decade, it developed a certain amount of struc
ture, almost despite itself. Members drafted a national constitution, which filled just one page. It had nine rules, mostly about crests, tattoos and bikes:
1. Every member must have a bike over 650 c.c. in running condition (no Jap scrap etc.).
2. Any club wishing to strike for S.C.M.C. must hand in one set of colours for each recognized chapter, and wear sponsoring chapters’ side flashers. Striking clubs must strike for a minimum of three officer’s meetings and pay $100.00 to their sponsoring chapter. Individuals wishing to strike must strike for a minimum of six weeks.
3. There must be a 75% vote for rules to be passed or changed at an officer’s meeting. New rules must be proposed then taken back to individual chapters for members votes, then returned to an officers meeting. Any chapter not represented will lose its vote.
4. If a chapter misses two consecutive officers meetings or three in a year, its vote is automatically called. Excuses will be considered and left to the president’s discretion as [to] whether it shall remain a chapter.
5. All new presidents must have twelve or more months in the club (excluding ex-members). All other officers positions are left up to chapter discretion.
6. Any Satan’s Choice chapter folding must appear at an officers meeting, with a complete explanation, colours, all club property, and bills paid.
7. Any members leaving the club must have tattoos dated or disfigured.
8. After five years a member of S.C.M.C. in good standing may become an honorary member with the approval of his chapter and then the approval of the officers at an officers meeting (75%). [Honorary members couldn’t vote but could attend club parties and other events.]
9. Any member found to be using a needle for the purpose of shooting anything will be automatically expelled from the club.
Life at the farmhouse on the sixth concession was bucolic, in a bikerish way. Campbell had a new girlfriend who was a frequent visitor and nature lover, after a fashion. “We used to screw under the willow tree.”
At one club meeting, Oshawa chapter president Peter (Rabbit) Pillman was visibly upset as he spoke of a complaint from their landlord, Bill Stack. Pillman got his nickname more for his enthusiastic appreciation of women than for any resemblance to the Beatrix Potter character.
“Somebody’s fornicating on the front lawn and Bill don’t want that,” Peter Rabbit announced.
“You know, Peter doesn’t know what ‘fornicating’ means,” a member piped up. “It’s too big a word. Peter, do you know what ‘fornicating’ means?”
Peter Rabbit didn’t miss a beat. “No I don’t, but I want it stopped.”
Apparently, Campbell and his girlfriend had been ratted out by members of a family who boarded their horses in a nearby stable and who went for weekend rides together.
Campbell saved Peter Rabbit from further aggravation by speaking up.
“Peter, it’s me,” Campbell said. “ ‘Fornicating’ is fucking, and I’ll stop.”
CHAPTER 5
Friend for Life
They’re not innocent people. They were aware of the consequences.
I was totally without remorse. They chose to be in this world.
LORNE CAMPBELL on collecting drug debts
At club parties, Campbell and Guindon always seemed to be the first to get up and grab partners and dance. That’s how it was at a party held by Doug (Chicklet) MacDonald, president of the Toronto chapter. Campbell soon found himself guiding Kay Foote around the floor. It was a slow dance, but nothing grinding or disrespectful. Kay was the old lady of someone in the club, not some anonymous splasher, and Campbell treated her accordingly.
When the tune was over, club striker John Foote walked over and punched his wife Kay in the face, ignoring Campbell altogether. Campbell was shocked and primed to defend her when MacDonald stepped in and pulled him back.
“Lorne, this is normal for them,” Chicklet MacDonald said.
Kay wasn’t screaming or crying and didn’t seem particularly upset. It was almost as if she expected to be hit. Campbell looked towards Foote and saw no anger in his face. When Foote turned to Campbell, his tone was matter-of-fact. “He said, ‘No hard feelings. That’s just the way we are.’ ”
Campbell later concluded that Foote must be a sadist and his wife a masochist. It was a match made nowhere close to heaven, but they both seemed fine with it.
The incident didn’t even appear to be that big a deal for Foote, who clearly had other things on his mind that evening. He had already heard of Campbell’s ability with his fists, and he said: “Lorne, with my strength and your fighting ability, we can make a lot of money.”
He was referring to the profits to be made in the ever-expanding trade of underworld debt collection. The commission was 50 percent of any unpaid debt they managed to recover. Not long after that, Foote gave Campbell visual proof of what he meant. “Within two or three weeks, he brought down forty thousand dollars to the Oshawa clubhouse.”
Foote wasn’t just good at collecting money owed by street drug dealers to their suppliers; he was also heavily into drug rip-offs, which were planned robberies of drug dealers. On the upside, these were crimes for which the victims could be counted on not to call the police. On the downside, they were also crimes in which the targets were hard-core criminals who could be expected to fight back.
Foote lived in an apartment at 399 Markham Road in Scarborough, on the eleventh floor of a high-rise, just down the hall from the temporary clubhouse of the Choice’s Toronto chapter. The old Toronto clubhouse had burned down and these were the club’s temporary digs. Foote’s apartment wasn’t in his name, but it was clearly his place and he had customized it in the same way bikers personalize their Harleys. The front door of Foote’s apartment was heavily reinforced and backed with sliding steel bars on a hinge. The walls of the front hallway were painted black so that anyone peering in the peephole could see nothing. Razor wire ringed the balcony, in case anyone felt like climbing up or dropping down from a higher apartment. The Choice clubhouse down the hallway was easy pickings by comparison, with just a regular lock and nothing protecting the balcony.
One of Foote’s two bedrooms was set up as a motorcycle chop shop, for dismantling the motorcycles that he stole. He limited his thefts to Harleys, as if they were the only bikes worth stealing. He would get them up to his apartment through the main elevator and then wheel them into his place, as if this was part of a normal workday.
Campbell wasn’t a motorcycle thief himself, except when he thought a bike needed liberating from a particularly bad owner. Once, a biker couldn’t control his chopper and asked Campbell to ride it back to Toronto for him from northern Ontario. Campbell obliged—but then kept on riding once he reached the big city. He also would accept Harleys to settle debts, but in his books that didn’t count as theft either. “I’ve never stolen one. Never would. I’ve done a lot of things. It might not make sense, but I wouldn’t steal one.”
For tax purposes, Foote ran a business that involved painting murals on the walls of muffler shops, but by the time Campbell met him he had settled into the role of full-time gangster. Foote was the undisputed master of the don’t-fuck-with-me expression, squinting hard and talking out of the corner of his mouth like a character from a James Cagney movie. He’d pinch the front of his mouth tightly shut and squeeze out words from the sides so that no one could read his lips. Sometimes the tough effect was heightened by the presence of a cigarette stuck in his mouth. Maybe this was a trick he’d learned while serving time in Texas and Michigan prisons after he’d got in a shootout with police. Or maybe he picked it up from the movies. Or perhaps that was just the way he always talked. Whatever the case, no one knew and no one was asking.
There were plenty of things you didn’t ask John Foote. You certainly didn’t push him about the rumour, never proven in court, that he shot a prowler dead and drove around for a time with the corpse in the trunk of his car, looking for an appropriate final resting place. It was better just to leave that s
tory alone, since it certainly wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility and there was always room in his trunk for another body. “He was a very tough, serious individual. Feared by many.”
Foote didn’t take up a lot of space, but he radiated power, as if he was a much bigger man jammed into a five-foot-nine frame. He set weightlifting records in U.S. prison and could do repetitions on the bench press at 350 pounds. Strength is impressive, but it is often explosiveness that separates the good from the great in physical pursuits. Despite club rules against needle use, Foote liked to inject liquid speed into his veins for an added boost.
Foote also had ingenuity. On the job, he packed a sawed-off 16-gauge shotgun that fit neatly into a quick-draw holster he designed himself. He also built guns, including palm-sized, double-barrelled shotgun pistols that sprayed out wide so they could disable but not kill several people at a time. Some of his personal arsenal was hidden inside walls of his apartment, stored away for whenever he might need them.
While working, Foote eschewed the flashy, attention-grabbing jewellery of many in his milieu, preferring a businesslike appearance in a suit and trench coat. Sometimes, when he was trying to keep a particularly low profile, he would dye his hair and comb it differently. “He was indefatigable.”
No matter how he looked, Foote displayed a sphinx-like countenance, betraying little emotion. As Campbell got to know him, he could detect a slight shift in his new friend’s appearance when he was on the verge of violence. “If Foote smiled at you, be scared.”
Others in the club certainly learned to take him seriously even before he got full member status. Full members sometimes kidded probationary members that they were going to strip them of their patches and demote them back to civilian status. Established members made the mistake of trying that joke with Foote before he got his full membership patch. “John had four or five members against the wall with a handgun pointed at them.… When the vice-president came down, he said, ‘Tell these guys they ain’t taking my striker patch.’ ” They didn’t.
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