Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Newstead certainly wouldn’t have looked threatening as she told 58-year-old Phyllis Kehoe: “There’s an accident a bit down the road. There’s a policeman been shot.”

  Phyllis Kehoe later recalled that she felt she wasn’t dressed properly when she answered the door. Her mood shifted from hospitable and concerned to terrified when she saw the shotgun. She fled to their bedroom. Shotgun pellets ripped through the bedroom door, wounding her and knocking her 63-year-old husband, Robert, to the floor.

  Dollan and Newstead tied Phyllis and Robert Kehoe together. When they saw that the couple’s grandchildren—a thirteen-year-old boy and fourteen-year-old girl—were also in the home, they bound them together with their grandparents. Then they cut the phone cable and escaped in the Kehoes’ truck.

  The grandson freed himself and ran more than a mile to their closest neighbours. It was around this time that Dollan and Newstead were pulled over at a nearby OPP roadblock and arrested. By that time, Robert Kehoe was dead.

  Newspapers quickly dubbed Newstead and Dollan “Canada’s Bonnie and Clyde.” They dug up information on them, which was far more sad than glamorous. Dollan had lived in fifty-two foster homes in Alberta before his tenth birthday, and had been diagnosed as suffering from a personality disorder with antisocial, depressive and schizoid features.

  Eight years after their trial, Newstead was back in the news. This time it was for something positive: she received a degree in religion from Queen’s University while an inmate at Kingston’s Prison for Women, serving a second-degree-murder term for her role in killing Robert Kehoe. That made her the first woman in Canada and the first inmate in an Ontario prison to earn an entire degree behind bars. Her area of study was Buddhism, which encourages followers to lead moral lives and to be aware of their thoughts and actions.

  In the biker world, club members are expected to ask permission to date other members’ former girlfriends. That’s what Campbell did before he began his relationship with a black-haired seventeen-year-old named Charmaine. Charmaine’s family had moved to Oshawa from the Maritimes, and she was pretty and fun and hard-working and didn’t seem to have an enemy in the world. Charmaine had dropped out of school, but always managed to find a job.

  “I met Charmaine in 1975. She had gone out with [club member] Larry Hurren and I asked him if I could have her number. I saw that she was fun to be around. After we had gone out a few times, I told her she was a breath of fresh air compared to the girls I had been with up until then.”

  Campbell recalls with pride an evening with Charmaine and a friend and his date. The other woman clearly looked down her nose at Campbell and Charmaine. The conversation was already more than a little strained when the topic shifted to fantasies.

  “What’s yours, Lorne?” the prissy woman asked.

  “My fantasy is to be in a room with thirty or forty naked beautiful women,” he replied. “I don’t want to be fucking them. I want to be rolling over them. I just want someone to take pictures of me so no one can say I’m a liar.” Campbell betrayed no trace of a smile as he pretended to confide his deep yearning. It took the prissy woman some effort to regain her composure, and then she asked Charmaine, “What’s your fantasy?”

  “I just want to be one of those women,” she deadpanned.

  The prissy woman had no clue how to react.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Biker with the Dragon Tattoo

  I’m his sister and you slit his throat.

  A WOMAN upon meeting Lorne Campbell in an Oshawa bar

  In the late 1970s, Campbell was running Top Choice Tattoos on downtown Bond Street in Oshawa with his friend Joe Napolitano. Joe and his brother John moved in mob circles, and Campbell was amused by a story about Toronto area Mafiosi once kidnapping Joe over a debt John owed to them, in the $30,000 to $40,000 range. The mobsters figured that John would pay his debt for the return of Joe.

  “You guys know him,” Joe told his captors. “You know what he’s like.”

  The mobsters did indeed know what John was like—and they freed Joe.

  It was hard to be mad at John for any length of time. He had a certain charm and flare, and after his brother’s release he used a large portion of the booty to buy drinks for the men he was cheating. “He would take them to the bar and it was their money.”

  One of the employees at Top Choice Tattoos was Poncho, a skilled, if light-fingered, skin ink artist. Poncho went on the run after stealing money from the shop. One day, while Campbell was getting a dragon tattooed on his back, he heard a commotion at the front door. The noise kept getting closer to the chair where he sat. Then Poncho appeared, with a biker tight on either side of him. “I said, ‘How the fuck did you get him?’ They didn’t say anything. They just went downstairs.”

  Campbell followed them down to help discipline Poncho. There, he saw his old friend Larry Vallentyne. “I went to punch him [Poncho] in the head and Larry kicked me in the hand. It wasn’t meant for me—it was meant to hit the guy’s head.”

  The fumbling continued. His co-workers leaned down to cut off one of Poncho’s fingers, missed, and amputated a pair instead. No one but Poncho felt the worse for it. Campbell returned upstairs, nursing his sore hand, to finish getting his dragon tattoo.

  Not surprisingly, the ten-fingered tattoo artist who’d been working on Campbell was too shaken to resume work immediately. “The guy who was tattooing me was nervous. I had to tell him to settle down.”

  One evening in the winter of 1976, at the Vagabond Motorcycle Club’s clubhouse on Kintyre Avenue in Toronto’s Riverdale neighbourhood, the music was so loud that Campbell was having trouble carrying on a conversation. He was trying to talk with a Vagabond nicknamed Beach because he looked as if he had just strutted off Muscle Beach. Beach didn’t just look tough; he was a former mercenary soldier and had a well-deserved reputation to match his appearance.

  Beach looked concerned about something that evening, but Campbell couldn’t make out what he was saying.

  “I can’t hear you, Beach,” he said, and they both walked outside.

  As soon as they got outside, Beach caught him solidly with a punch to his face. “He’s a powerful guy. It didn’t hurt, but I went on my back and slid about ten feet. It was the-punch-that-didn’t-hurt, but it sent me flying.”

  Campbell ran back at Beach, but Vagabond president Bambi jumped into the middle. “Bambi, he was a tough guy despite his name. I don’t know how he got the name.”

  Bambi told Campbell, “He’ll get a beating from us for doing that.”

  “Okay,” Campbell replied.

  In fact, it wasn’t even close to okay for Campbell. He drove to Oshawa, picked up a pistol and returned to the party. “I’m not showing it, but they all know I have a gun.”

  Beach had already left the party, and things simmered until a run to Sault Ste. Marie the next year. Beach was there and immediately apologized, not out of fear but because he realized his punch to Campbell’s head had been out of line. Campbell later learned that Beach was angry because he had heard that a member of the Choice who was in the United States, partying with some Outlaws, had called the Vagabonds “a bunch of faggots.” When Beach corked Campbell, he thought that all of the Choice were saying that about all of the Vagabonds. Clearly, things were about to pop unless something was done fast.

  At another party around this time, a man named Tom became enraged. The cause of his anger was the apparent theft of his girlfriend’s purse or coat. Venting his anger, Tom said that the thief would suffer dearly if he ever caught him. In front of several people in Campbell’s circle, Tom announced: “I don’t even care if it’s Lorne Campbell. I’ll shoot him and cut his old lady’s tits off.” Tom felt bold enough to say this because Campbell wasn’t at the party. Even so, it was a breathtakingly stupid thing to do. When word got back to Campbell, he had no doubts about his required course of action. “I went where he lived.”

  Tom wasn’t there, so Campbell spent the night in the man’s bed, awaiting
his arrival. When Tom still hadn’t appeared the next morning, Campbell joined up with his friend Smutley. There was a .45 pistol in a bag in their glove compartment when a Durham Region cop pulled them over. The cop recognized them both. He had no clue that what he said over the next five minutes or so would determine whether Tom lived or died.

  “Hi, Lorne.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “You’re on parole?” the cop said to Smutley.

  It was a hot afternoon, but Campbell didn’t sweat at all. He felt certain they were going to be arrested, so why get stressed out about it?

  Smutley confirmed that he was on parole.

  “What are you on parole for?”

  “Armed robbery.”

  With that, the conversation ended. To Campbell’s amazement, the cop let them drive on, and the hunt resumed in earnest. “I was hunting him every day.”

  The pursuit of Tom consumed Campbell’s life. He went to parties he figured Tom might attend. He went to bars that Tom frequented. In the end, Campbell couldn’t stand the prospect of hearing Tom’s friends say one more time that they didn’t have a clue where he was. “I started hitting people. Finally someone told me.”

  Tom was reportedly in the Cadillac, the same Oshawa hotel where Campbell worked as a bouncer. It was too good to be true. Once again, the hunters and the hunted had returned to the same watering hole.

  Before Campbell could get to him, Larry Vallentyne stepped in. He told Campbell that Tom had recently dropped Campbell’s name, as if they were good friends, and then talked about someone Campbell wanted beaten up. Vallentyne, thinking he was doing a favour for his friend Campbell, went to the home of the stranger Tom had mentioned and brained him with a large glass coke bottle.

  “Larry, you just got suckered in, buddy,” Campbell said.

  Now they both had a serious grievance against Tom, who didn’t have a clue how much worse his fortunes had become. They approached him together, and before Campbell could do anything, Vallentyne smashed a glass across the front of Tom’s neck.

  “Phone the fucking ambulance,” Campbell ordered a bouncer. None of the patrons seemed to notice the man bleeding all over the bar. “After it was over, we just sat down and drank another beer.” Tom survived, although Campbell heard later that it was only because the ambulance arrived on the scene so quickly and the attendant was exceptionally skilled.

  A couple of weeks later, a woman Campbell had never seen before appeared alone at the Cadillac. She had the type of good looks that Campbell would have remembered. Not long after she walked in, she was smiling at him.

  “You Lorne Campbell?” she asked.

  A few minutes after that, they were dancing together close.

  Somehow, as their bodies pressed together on the dance floor, the conversation shifted to the man whose throat had been sliced open at the Cadillac.

  “You know Tom?” Campbell asked.

  “Yeah, I’m his sister and you slit his throat.”

  “I didn’t slit his throat. I just held him.”

  Campbell then told her his side of the story, about how Tom had said things that simply couldn’t go unpunished. The woman might be good-looking, but Campbell was too angry now to mince words. “Your brother is a conniving piece of shit,” he said, and added, “I found out he was using my name.”

  The woman was a good listener. Later in the evening she admitted that she had brought a knife to the Cadillac, hoping to catch Campbell off guard so she could stick him with it. “That’s the only night I ever seen her. I spent the night with her.”

  As for Tom, Campbell later heard that he died of a drug overdose.

  Hamilton Choice member James (Wench) Kellet was a particularly loud partier. Part of the reason was his enthusiasm for drugs. Another factor was his out-there personality, which didn’t bother Campbell. “I just thought it was funny.”

  Things got funnier in 1976, when Wench decided he should run for mayor of Hamilton, under the slogan “Choice in the Right Direction.” Wench knew he had no chance of actually wearing the mayor’s chain of office, but he sounded positively civic minded as he explained that getting involved in politics was better than just sitting around complaining. Not surprisingly, Wench proposed to curb police powers if he ever made it onto the police commission. “They have too much power and they’re always bothering people,” he told a Hamilton Spectator reporter.

  All joking aside, Wench saw himself as an inspirational figure for the little guy. “I hope somebody will see that I’m a nobody running for mayor and I hope that moves somebody with something on the ball to run in the next election.” Wench truly felt his city needed someone like him in the corridors of power. “Hamilton is in the dark ages with stuffed shirts at City Hall and some are just out of touch.”

  No one was shocked when Wench finished last at the polls, although some observers were impressed that he managed to get 1,000 of the 100,000 votes cast. A year later, Wench was back in the news. This time, nobody in the Choice was laughing. There had been a disturbance at Wench’s apartment building, most likely a drug binge that got out of hand. When police arrived, shotgun fire from inside the apartment trapped them in a cruiser. Members of the Hamilton Choice offered to mediate, but police turned them away. The four-hour standoff ended with more gunfire. Wench was shot dead by the police.

  CHAPTER 9

  Family Breakup

  Knives, guns or fisticuffs. Keep in mind that I am good at all of them.

  LORNE CAMPBELL challenging a biker to a fight

  Campbell hated few things more than conniving. He liked to handle problems face to face, man to man. Conniving was especially rank to Campbell when it involved an attack on his extended family, the Satan’s Choice, and there was plenty of that going on when the American-based Outlaws sought to woo away Choice members. The Outlaws were the oldest of the big outlaw motorcycle clubs. The group had been founded in 1935 in the Chicago suburb of McCook, Illinois, in Matilda’s Bar on old Route 66. They were the second-largest outlaw biker club in the world, behind only the Hells Angels, with a particularly strong siren call for Canadian bikers living near the American border in Windsor, across from Detroit, and along the Niagara Peninsula.

  The conniving really got going after May 1976, when Bernie Guindon was sent back to prison. This time, the Frog was sentenced in a Sault Ste. Marie court to seventeen years for conspiring to traffic what police said was between $33 million and $60 million in PCP, or horse tranquilizers. The conviction also deep-sixed Guindon’s hopes of qualifying as a member of Canada’s boxing team at the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

  There wasn’t any evidence directly connecting Guindon to the stash of drugs, but police put together a damning case nonetheless. Police had a letter he had written to clubmates while awaiting trial. It read: “What’s really going to sink me is the undercover man from Buffalo, Kenneth Peterson, a special U.S. agent, if he shows up. If he sings the way I think he might, I’ll be going away for at least a dozen. If you hear of anyone who might be of some help, let me know. I just found out his name, that’s why the delay.”

  It was hard not to see the letter as an invitation—or even a plea—for others to rub out the prosecution’s star witness. No one acted on it, but in the end the letter was enough to send Guindon away. “The only evidence they had on me was that letter,” Guindon says, as if amazed at how a few sentences can alter the course of a life. Two others involved in actually trafficking the drugs got relatively light ten-year sentences.

  Guindon suspected he was sold out by a man who had been introduced to him by Garnet (Mother) McEwan, a St. Catharines member of the Satan’s Choice. Guindon won’t say much about McEwan, as outlaw bikers are loath to criticize each other publicly. The Frog limits his comments to a terse six words: “Mother was a big fat sonofabitch.” It stung Guindon that McEwan assumed his presidency of the Choice just as Guindon was heading off to Millhaven super-maximum-security penitentiary. Worse yet were his suspicions that McEwan was conniving to
sell out his club to the American-based Outlaws.

  The tensions within the club regarding the Outlaws were just simmering in 1976 when Campbell drove to a biker funeral in Montreal with Moose, a friend from the Para-Dice Riders. Campbell was bellied up to the bar in the Montreal Choice clubhouse when he heard a commotion in another room, where he knew Moose sat playing poker. Someone had stabbed Moose a half-dozen times in the forehead with a buck knife. The wounds weren’t life-threatening, but it certainly didn’t make Campbell or Moose feel welcome.

  “What the fuck did he do?” Campbell asked someone in the room.

  “He spilled a bottle.”

  Lorne made sure Moose was taken to hospital, then returned to the party, where things only got worse. Clearly, Satan’s Choice members who were leaning towards joining the Outlaws were trying to stir up something with club loyalists and their friends. “They wanted trouble,” Campbell says. “They wanted something to happen.”

  A Windsor Choice member said, not so far from Campbell: “You can say things in front of some of your brothers, but other brothers”—he gestured towards Campbell—“you can’t.”

  Later that weekend, a Windsor Choice member named Dave Séguin seemed particularly bent on insulting Guindon’s old Oshawa chapter. Oshawa was the birthplace of the Choice, and there was no chance that members there would be giving up on their club. It was to the turncoats’ advantage to belittle them.

  “If I broke down on the 401, I wouldn’t phone anyone from Oshawa,” Séguin said. “That’s how much I hate Oshawa.”

  It was impossible for Campbell to remain silent after hearing that.

  “You know what, Dave, you don’t even know me,” Campbell said.

  Then Campbell introduced himself with five knuckles to Séguin’s head, which dropped him onto the floor. A group of Windsor Choice supporters rushed in and began pounding on Campbell. “I’ve got six guys behind me, boot-fucking me, and I’m pounding on Dave. He’s yelling, ‘Let me go, let me go.’ I said, ‘Not till I’m finished with you, Dave. This ain’t hurting me.’ ”