When Foote stalked drug dealers, he’d find those in the low end of the drug trade often flashing their wealth and bragging about their business. They were as sloppy as Foote was relentless. “In the drug world, people talk.” Campbell heard that Foote had once gone to a residence in Toronto to rip off some drug dealers only to find that half a dozen police officers had arrived just before him. He caught the cops by surprise, handcuffing them together at gunpoint. He then proceeded to rip off the drug traffickers as planned, and left with the loot as well as the cops’ guns.
Not long after that, he placed a call to the officers’ detachment. “I’m John Foote and you’re looking for me,” he announced. “I’ve got six handguns of your police. You’re looking for them.”
The stunned officer on the phone professed ignorance.
“Okay, then I’m keeping them,” Foote said.
He was never charged for ripping off the dealers of their money or relieving the police of their guns. Shortly afterwards, however, he was pulled over by police and beaten. “When they were beating him, he was laughing. He was a pretty neat guy.”
Foote was five years older than Campbell and treated him as an understudy of sorts. Campbell quickly came to regard him as a solid friend, whose loyalty was beyond question. Like Foote, Campbell didn’t feel bad about putting fear into people when collecting drug debts. “I collected money for people. I just look at it like they were playing the game. They’re not innocent people. They were aware of the consequences. I was totally without remorse. They chose to be in this world.”
Foote sometimes spoke to Campbell about fear, and how it was their worst enemy. He wasn’t talking about their own fear; he was talking about the fear that often consumed their targets when they showed up to collect money. Such fear could drive men to do dangerous things. That connected with another key lesson from Foote: if things went sour, there was no point in beating someone up just a little bit. “ ‘If I give a guy a shot, he may come back with a gun. If I beat him senseless and break a couple bones, he ain’t coming back. It’s just human nature.’ ”
When attempting to collect drug money, Foote and Campbell often had to determine if they were dealing with someone who was just acting crazy or someone who was truly nuts. “I always thought, if someone’s going to be crazy, I’m going to be crazier. That’s not the same as insane. I treat them differently. If they’re crazy, I’m two times as crazy. I hurt them so that they’ll never come back to me. I’ve always got along with crazy people. But insane people, you handle them altogether differently. You have to do one thing or the other: kill them or walk away from them. I’m nervous about insane people.”
Foote and Campbell both felt at home with violence. Breaking the fingers of someone who was tardy in his debt repayment wasn’t a problem, nor was more serious violence. “My heart’s never pumped any faster when I fought or was involved in gunplay. But I have fear for people around me. I worry about the people who are close to me being hurt—my loved ones and my friends.” They also both felt a certain professional pride in their chosen trade as drug debt collectors. “They already had been threatened by the time I got to them. I would hurt people and they always paid. I would hurt them first. It was people who were always making excuses, running away. I used to say, ‘There ain’t nobody I can’t find.’ When people used to try to intimidate me, I’d say, ‘That’s my game.’ ” To find missing debtors, Campbell would go to bars and houses where he expected to find friends of his prey. “I’d beat up their friends. They’re drug dealers. Drug addicts. After a while I’d just walk in and they’d tell me right away.”
Campbell and Foote also both accepted that spending time in jail went along with their line of work. Time with Foote in the Whitby jail on an assault beef was a fresh experience for Campbell, although he was already accustomed to jail. It was as though they were the ones with the power, even though they were on the wrong side of the bars. That came across once when a guard tried to bully Foote, blaming him for the loss of a pillow.
“What do you think I did?” Foote asked. “Shoved it up my ass?”
The guard declined to speculate or give Foote another pillow. Other prisoners, including Campbell, managed to secure one for Foote anyway. They also got a light bulb. They crushed half of it down to a powder and poured it into a pot of tea the guard routinely drank from. “He drank it and didn’t come to work for two weeks. When he came back, he wouldn’t say fuck all. He just stared at us. We smiled at him.”
Campbell was driving on November 4, 1976, to the Kitchener Choice clubhouse on Weber Street, where he had been partying regularly. The news came on his car radio that his friend John Foote had been shot to death at 4:40 that morning in the Markham Road clubhouse apartment. It was as though Campbell was shot too. “I was supposed to be with him that night. I heard it on the radio: ‘John Foote was just shot and killed.’ My head hit the steering wheel and I turned around and went right back to Toronto. I really believe that if I had been there, it wouldn’t have happened. It was just a fear thing. Fear can be your worst enemy. If someone’s scared of you in that world, you could be shot because of their fear.”
There were three bullets in Foote’s body and Campbell had no doubts about who put them there. Foote had argued earlier that night with a 23-year-old clubmate named John Harvey, a surgeon’s son. Harvey had the unsettling habit of scaring people with his pistol in the evening and forgetting all about it by morning, by which time the Valium he often took had worn off. In one incident, he levelled his pistol, which had a notorious hair trigger, at member Jeff (Boom Boom) McLeod’s head for what felt like an eternity before he was finally convinced to put it back in his shoulder holster. “All he had to do was twitch and Jeff would have had half his head blown off. It was scary. Was he joking? Who knows?”
On the final evening of Foote’s life, things escalated to the point that he whacked Harvey with a pool cue. Harvey left the clubhouse and Campbell was certain he’d returned with his pistol. Ironically, there was a good chance that it was Foote himself who had modified the handgun to make it even more sensitive.
It was just like Foote’s warning: it was the fear of other people you had to worry about. “Who else would have gotten close enough to Footie? Who would he open the door for?”
Campbell was out on probation for the arson of his home at the time of Foote’s funeral. His probation officer chewed him out for attending the service, which meant he’d violated the conditions that stated he couldn’t associate with clubmates.
“It was my best friend and I went to his funeral,” Campbell told him. “Go fuck yourself.”
“You don’t care about anything, do you?” the officer asked.
“No,” Campbell replied.
Oddly, Harvey didn’t appear to realize what he had done. A heavy Valium user, he seemed oblivious to the fact that he’d fired the fatal shots, even though he was eventually convicted of manslaughter. The funeral was a blur and Campbell didn’t say much to anyone. He just kept his eyes on Harvey. “I watched him all through the funeral. I was a pallbearer and I was so upset I couldn’t grab onto the casket.”
Foote’s death made Campbell think a lot, but he didn’t consider leaving the club. Instead, he sewed a patch on his vest over his heart that read, “In Memory of John Foote.” Campbell now understood why Foote tried to teach him about preparedness. “From his death, I really learned that saying: ‘Fear is your worst enemy.’ In anyone else’s lifestyle it wouldn’t make any sense. But it did make sense in mine. It was a guy who feared him who shot Foote. In other words: be prepared.”
In the end, Harvey was killed by a drug overdose, dead from his own demons.
The passing of John Foote meant Campbell was now collecting drug debts alone. Campbell was just as serious as his mentor. “If I died at that point: don’t feel bad for me, because I was playing the game.” Naturally, he took it seriously when the club’s president, Peter (Rabbit) Pillman, told him in the mid-seventies that he had been ripped
off by a young biker named Shaun Robinson. Campbell stuffed a sawed-off shotgun into Robinson’s mouth, making it clear he expected the money to be paid promptly. The gun was rammed in so hard Robinson’s cheeks popped out like a chipmunk’s.
The next day, Robinson rode up to Campbell’s place to renew the discussion. Robinson clearly looked whipped, but he felt compelled to talk nonetheless. Campbell had the sawed-off shotgun to guarantee himself the last word in the conversation.
“What do you want?” Campbell asked.
“I came up here to tell you that you were wrong yesterday.” Robinson protested that he had paid the money to a third party, who was supposed to deliver it to Peter Rabbit.
“Who was it?” Campbell demanded.
“I can’t tell you, but you’ll find out,” Robinson replied.
Campbell was impressed that Robinson had the balls to approach him. He was further impressed that Robinson refused to rat anyone out when he removed the shotgun from his mouth. That was a solid, if dangerous, thing to do. “It took balls. I was nobody to be fucked with.”
Campbell asked around and determined that Robinson was telling the truth. Robinson had paid Peter Rabbit’s money to a third party, who took off to Florida with it, making Robinson look like the crook. When the third party returned to Durham Region, minus the money but sporting a suntan, Campbell hauled him into the Cadillac Hotel by the CPR tracks, just north of Highway 401 on Simcoe Street South. When it was built in the early 1950s, it was considered the place to be by movers and shakers, but by Campbell’s time it was known by a new generation of patrons as a bucket of blood. Campbell worked there as a bouncer, and the Cadillac doubled as an office of sorts for him. “I beat him so badly I put him in the hospital.”
Two weeks after the beating, Campbell heard that the man had committed suicide. “I didn’t have any bad feeling over it. I didn’t feel any remorse. Good for him. He killed himself. He was a cheat. A scam artist. Always dressed in a suit. Just a guy out for himself.”
As for Robinson, Campbell grew to consider him a valued friend. “He was one of my favourite guys in the club. He’s true blue. He’s been time tested.”
As he rose up through the ranks of the Satan’s Choice, Campbell harboured a particular fantasy. He dreamed of the day he would meet up again with the supervisor from the training school in Cobourg, the one with the rings, who used to beat him. When that day came, Campbell was twenty-eight years old, weighed a solid 185 pounds on a compact five-foot-ten frame, and had earned a fearsome reputation for his ability to settle scores and collect debts with baseballs bats, pistols and the hard, precise punches he had learned at the hands of his father.
Campbell was leaving the British Hotel in Cobourg around last call with fellow Satan’s Choice member Brian (Babs) Babcock, and didn’t recognize the supervisor at first. The British was the type of place that gave rundown dumps a bad reputation, and Campbell was a weekend regular, best known for pounding out its patrons. He beat up so many of them that Bill (Mr. Bill) Lavoie asked him to ease up a little. “Then quit sending stupid people to my table,” Campbell replied.
That night, the former training school supervisor looked like a shrivelled old man, even though he must only have been in his late thirties. He and a buddy were obviously drunk, and it was clear from his puffy grey face and bloated body that getting pissed drunk was part of his daily routine. His eyes were glassy, he had just wet his pants, and he leaned on his friend to keep from falling over.
“You know who that is walking in front of us?” Babcock asked.
“Who?”
“That’s Montgomery from the training school.”
Babcock had known Montgomery from around town and recognized the face. As Campbell watched the man stagger across the hotel parking lot, he remembered the feel of the drunk’s ring-covered fingers on his face.
Montgomery didn’t recognize Campbell. He was having a hard enough time just making it across the parking lot.
“It was a pathetic sight,” Campbell says. “He was a drunk and he died of cirrhosis of the liver shortly afterwards. If he was in better shape, I would have beaten him up right there. But I just smiled at him.”
CHAPTER 6
Turf
In my heart, I knew I was dying.
LORNE CAMPBELL after he is shot
Campbell added a tattoo to his left forearm with the letters FTW, which could alternately be translated as “Fuck the World,” “Fight the World” and “Fight to Win.” All interpretations were correct in Campbell’s world. The biker violence of the sixties and seventies was almost always about turf rather than profits, and largely reflexive, reactive, ultra-harsh and utterly pointless to anyone but another biker.
One day, Campbell heard that the Choice had been permanently cut off from being served at the Plaza Hotel tavern. It was the nicer of two drinking holes in Cobourg, the other being the British, and Campbell wasn’t about to have the club’s drinking options limited. He also wasn’t keen on being told where he was and was not welcome.
He turned to a biker called Fat Frog (not to be confused with Bernie Guindon, the Number One Frog, or Guindon’s cousin from Quebec, the Bull Frog). “Go over to the Plaza and open the door,” Campbell said.
Fat Frog did as he was asked, and Campbell rode through the door on his growling 1948 panhead chopper. He weaved around the tables before gliding to a halt in front of the bar.
“Give me a rye,” Campbell ordered.
The bartender gave him a rye.
“Are we cut off here?”
“No.”
“I know you cut our guys off. Are we cut off now?”
“No.”
Campbell downed his rye.
The other Plaza patrons kept chugging their draft, as if this were somehow normal. “Who knows if they were afraid?”
“Fattie, open the door again,” Campbell said.
Fat Frog opened the door again as Campbell revved up his chopper.
“See you later,” Campbell called, and cruised out of the Plaza into the pouring rain in a scene worthy of Lee Marvin himself.
Much of the biker fighting wasn’t of the one-on-one, fair contest variety. When Campbell was faced with a threatening group, he reasoned that it generally made sense for him to attack the biggest enemy first. A quick, brutal knockout tended to calm down smaller would-be tough guys. That was the guiding principle late one night on Thickson Road, on the Oshawa–Whitby town line, when Campbell and another Choice member overheard what they took to be disparaging comments about them from inside a car while stopped at a gas station. Campbell and his friend were wearing their club colours, so group honour was at stake and playing deaf wasn’t an option.
“What’d you say?” Campbell shouted. “Get the fuck out of the car!”
There were six men in the car and they all got out. They clearly weren’t intimidated by the two bikers.
Campbell pasted one of the bigger men with a boot to the groin that would have done a Canadian Football League kicker proud. The pointed toe of his cowboy boot focused the kick and made it all the more nauseating at the receiving end. The man appeared out on his feet when the cops arrived and ordered Campbell and his buddy to get lost.
Campbell met the recipient of his right foot a couple of months later at a party. It was far more pleasant than their first encounter, until the man proffered a baffling comment.
“If it had been just me, I’d have punched you out.”
“Bill, don’t say anything more,” Campbell said.
“If it had been just me, I’d have punched you out.”
It was a decidedly odd comment and Campbell wasn’t about to waste time and brainpower deciphering it. Instead, he replied with a left hook that sent Bill down hard, between the fridge and the counter. On the counter sat a huge man, who packed considerable muscle and girth onto what Campbell guessed was about a six-foot-four frame. This Goliath couldn’t help but gawk at the violence a few feet away.
“You got a problem w
ith this?” Campbell shouted.
The Goliath didn’t reply fast enough, and Campbell let loose his best shot. The big man wasn’t able to block it and Campbell’s knuckles collided squarely with his head. But he didn’t go down. He didn’t even appear to flinch. “He grabbed me and like a rag doll he threw me down,” Campbell says.
Then he cocked a mammoth fist directly over Campbell’s head. There was just enough time for Campbell to think of the damage that fist would cause to his cranium, like a sledgehammer on a coconut. Once the Goliath was sure he had made his point, he calmly lowered his fist and returned to the party. Throughout the altercation, the big man had looked bewildered, not angry. “You talk about grateful,” Campbell says.
Big violence frequently bubbled up from little things in the outlaw biker world. Infringements on their turf, and real and perceived slights against the honour or security of them and their clubmates, often served as detonators. Bikers sometimes didn’t have much beyond their Harleys and an exaggerated sense of honour, so they guarded those things with their lives. That’s the way it was when Campbell heard that Jimmy Brockman, a former Golden Hawk who was no longer in a club, had threatened a Choice member named Pete. Campbell couldn’t just leave that threat against a clubmate hanging in the air. He needed to take Brockman aside and tell him that such talk simply wasn’t acceptable.
Campbell had just downed a mouthful of beer at the Royal Hotel in Whitby when Jimmy Brockman walked by. A comic named Kangaroo was due to perform that night and Campbell had been looking forward to the start of his show. Now he’d have to miss at least some of the comedy.
“Jimmy, I want to talk to you outside.”
Brockman stepped outside, where Campbell asked: “Just what were you doing at Pete’s?”
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