“I went over and beat him up. I hit him so hard and so many times his eye popped out.”
The president of the Golden Hawks tried to calm things down, but Campbell said he wouldn’t accept any excuse for kicking him out of the party. It was too massive a breach of etiquette to be smoothed over with a few “I’m sorrys.” Golden Hawks didn’t have the right to tell Satan’s Choice what to do, even in the Golden Hawks’ clubhouse.
“That should never have happened,” Campbell said.
“What do you want?” the president asked.
“I want all of their colours.”
Taking someone’s colours is the ultimate humiliation in the outlaw biker world, equivalent to excommunication or shunning in religious orders, or dishonourable discharge from the military. The Golden Hawks’ president wasn’t willing to let this happen; there must be some compromise solution. Campbell replied that there was an alternative, but it would be even more severe.
He shut down the once proud Golden Hawks altogether.
Two years later, in October 1978, there were rumblings that the Golden Hawks were making a serious effort to take flight again. They were supported by the Outlaws in their efforts to re-establish a chapter around the small town of Port Hope, about half an hour east of Oshawa. One of their new members was 23-year-old Bill (Heavy) Matiyek, who had the habit of carrying a sawed-off double-barrelled shotgun up his sleeve or tucked inside a cowboy boot. Even without the firepower, Matiyek was imposing enough, standing over six feet tall and weighing in the neighbourhood of three hundred pounds. Perhaps he was hopped up on bennies one evening that autumn when he opened fire on Campbell’s friend Smutley. He proved to be less of a marksman than a physical presence, and Smutley was able to duck behind a car door and save himself.
On the evening of October 18, 1978, Campbell was watching the Maple Leafs hockey game at the Satan’s Choice Toronto clubhouse when a telephone call came through telling of trouble in the bar of the Queen’s Hotel on Port Hope’s main street. The Queen’s was billed back in 1918 as “without a rival between Toronto and Belleville,” but like the Genosha in Oshawa, the Queen’s glory days seemed a million boozy Saturdays in the rear-view mirror by October 1978. At this point, the seedy three-storey dive was best known in Campbell’s world as an Outlaws hangout.
Inside the Queen’s that night, Matiyek was stoned on bennies, more than a little drunk, and had a .32 pistol tucked inside his coat. Perhaps emboldened by the pills and the beer and the gun, he was openly contemplating putting a hole in someone from the Satan’s Choice.
Campbell and his clubmates rushed out the door of the Toronto clubhouse when they got the call about what was happening at the Queen’s. “Back then, people moved when there was trouble.” They stopped en route at a house near Port Hope. “Somebody else had a gun with them and was told to give it to me because it was a revolver and they were trying to figure it out. Somebody said, ‘Give it to him, just in case.’ We were told the Outlaws were in the bar and we went from there to the bar.”
Campbell was a natural to carry the revolver, since he was considered calm enough not to panic and tough enough to kill if necessary. Semi-automatics eject cartridges, leaving evidence for police, so the revolver seemed the right gun to carry into the Queen’s that night.
In the L-shaped, dingy bar were Sonny Bronson and Fred Jones, both former Satan’s Choice clubmates who had patched over to the Outlaws. What happened next would become part of biker folklore. “It was actually pretty simple,” Campbell says. “They like to make it complicated. People have embellished it a lot. We went to the bar. I sat with one other person. We ordered a drink.… Mike Everett, he said, ‘Bill’s sitting with a gun pointed at Rick and Gary.’ … I got up right away and went to the table and I said, ‘How are you doing, Bill?’
“As soon as I said, ‘How are you doing?’ he went for it.…
“I totally wish he hadn’t gone for it. I’ve had to live with it. It hasn’t been easy. But he went for it and I happened to be faster.… It happened so fast that I just reacted. When you see somebody going for a gun and you’ve got one, with the upbringing I’ve had, you’ll be fast. I’m glad I had the gun.… I never questioned my decision. Not once. Not for a second.
“You’re kind of helpless to change anything, but I just wish it hadn’t happened. Just a waste of life.”
Bill Matiyek’s life ended at 10:55 p.m.
How it ended would be discussed for decades.
Campbell took the long way out of the Queen’s, not noticing a side door near Matiyek’s body. On his way towards the front door, Campbell saw his former Choice brothers Jones and Bronson. They had ridden with Campbell, partied with him and broken bread with him. Now they were on the other side of an unbridgeable divide, and Campbell couldn’t help but think they were dupes and traitors. He had already fired three shots and there were three bullets left in his revolver. The thought flashed through his mind that maybe they would have to be shot as well, but Campbell kept his gun down and walked through the front door onto Walton Street, the same way he had entered. “What had just happened was totally self-defence. Shooting them would have been different. People who do that kind of thing are stone cold. They weren’t a threat to me.
“I just walked past them on the way out.”
Campbell drove back to Oshawa, dumping the pistol on the way, and spent the rest of the evening at the Cadillac Hotel. The next day, he was back at his day job as an ironworker on the Air Canada hangar at the Toronto airport.
He says it never entered his mind to flee the area. At the very worst, it would be a second-degree-murder beef, since it wasn’t premeditated. “I would never run on anything that I’ve been wanted for or anything that I’ve done.”
It took police a while to catch up to Campbell, and when they did, it was for an unrelated charge. He was dispatched to Toronto’s Don Jail in 1979 for three months for an assault he described as “beating the snot out of a bar owner for pulling a gun.” Larry Vallentyne also took part in the tenderizing. Since Campbell is left-handed and Vallentyne punches best with his right, they stood side by side, with Campbell on the left, and whaled away on the man. “We were still beating the guy when the cops got there. Every time he started sliding down the walls, we pulled him back up and hit him some more.”
That meant Campbell was in jail for the Christmases of 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1979. He had stopped celebrating Christmas after he burned down his old house and lost contact with his only child. “After her mother and I split up, because of Janice I never celebrated Christmas all of the time I was with Charmaine. I didn’t get sad, but I was happy to be by myself.”
At night in Toronto’s Don Jail, after the lights were turned out, he noticed a mouse sneak up to the bars of his cell, looking for crumbs. Campbell began gathering scraps for his visitor from the evening “jug up,” slang for the prisoners’ evening snack. He left crumbs by the bars and watched as the mouse—which he called Mouse—scurried close to eat them. He next placed the scraps inside his cell. Mouse ventured inside to eat them too. In time, he placed them inside his shoes, and watched as Mouse ran up to eat them. Campbell had to lie perfectly still so that he didn’t scare Mouse away. To keep from spooking his new friend, the drug debt collector for Canada’s toughest biker gang had to stay quiet as a mouse himself.
He was assigned to work as a garbage collector at the Don, under not-so-tight supervision. This allowed him to leave the secured jailhouse, a rare privilege. Other prisoners told him of a plan in which their friends would leave a pouch of Daily Mail tobacco filled with marijuana along his route outside on the jail grounds. He would pass through security heading out of the jail with a pouch of Daily Mail tobacco in his shirt pocket. When the guard wasn’t looking, he was to pick up the pouch that was waiting for him, with marijuana hidden under the tobacco. He would put that pouch in his pocket and throw out the pouch containing only tobacco, so that he could bring the weed in for his fellow inmates.
The plan worked like a charm,
and soon prison staff could detect the burnt-popcorn smell of marijuana wafting from the cells, and see that several of the prisoners now seemed to be floating on a druggy cloud. The only prisoner who was leaving the building was Campbell, and so he was pegged as the likely culprit, even though the guards hadn’t figured out how the weed was being smuggled inside.
“You’re not working anymore,” a guard told him. Campbell was being moved.
“Okay, where are you taking me?”
Campbell was led to a range of eighteen cells. He did a double take when he saw male prisoners with nail polish, some of whom were doing other inmates’ hair. Standing outside Campbell’s cell was what appeared to be the lone non-transvestite on the range.
“How are you?” the man asked.
“Not too bad.”
The man could see that Campbell was taken aback by the sight of the other male prisoners flamboyantly decked out as women.
“I don’t mind the odd blow job,” the man said.
Campbell stormed up to a guard. “Why are they putting me here? Why did they put me on this range?”
“There’s no other room.”
The guard seemed nonchalant until Campbell turned suddenly and walked away, saying, “Watch this. If you don’t move me, I’m going to punch every one of them out.”
“Campbell, come back here.”
He was transferred back off the range before he ever set foot in his new cell.
CHAPTER 11
Busted
What breaks a chain, Rick, is a weak link. Don’t be a weak link.
LORNE CAMPBELL
Baraang!
Baraang!
Campbell was on the second floor of the Toronto clubhouse on the evening of Wednesday, December 8, 1978, when he heard something crashing repeatedly against the front door. Outside was a police officer with a sledgehammer, slamming it hard into the steel-reinforced door and then struggling to regain control as the hammer rebounded sharply each time. There was no doorbell and he didn’t feel inclined to knock.
Baraang!
Baraang!
“It’s steel,” Gary (Nutty) Comeau shouted out the window. “Come to the back door.”
The cop either didn’t hear or chose to ignore him, and kept bouncing the hammer off the door. Behind him were some seventy officers, in riot gear and looking ready to go to war.
“We’ll open the door,” Campbell shouted.
Before he could get there, a police truck with a mounted boom on the back reversed hard into the door, punching out a panel. “Then somebody opened the door and they all came in.” Fortunately for the bikers, none of them was standing behind the door when the boom hit it. “It would have knocked somebody’s head right off their shoulders.”
Comeau, Jeff (Boom Boom) McLeod and Larry (Beaver) Hurren were among those led out in handcuffs. An hour west in Kitchener, David (Tee Hee) Hoffman of the Choice chapter in Waterloo Region was arrested at his home. All four arrests went off without incident, and police told reporters they put on the show of force because they expected to be met by some fifty Choice inside. It struck Campbell as odd that four members of the club were charged but he remained free. “I wouldn’t say I was shocked, because not so many things shock me, but I was surprised. I had expected to be arrested.”
The investigation into the death of Bill (Heavy) Matiyek had started badly and gone downhill from there. Police generally craft a case with a combination of forensic and eyewitness evidence. In the case of the Queen’s Hotel killing, forensic evidence was sadly lacking. Beer glasses weren’t fingerprinted, which would have shown that Campbell was in the lounge. Immediately after the December police raid, Nutty Comeau’s black leather jacket disappeared after it was taken by police from his mother’s home as evidence. Testing on the leather jacket would have shown that Comeau had been shot in the arm that night with a bullet that had passed through Matiyek.
Eyewitness evidence in the case was no better than the forensics. Perhaps it was fear or booze or the biker code against testifying against others. Or maybe it was that the shooting happened so suddenly, with the three bullets fired within seconds of each other in a corner of the room while many of the bar’s patrons were distracted or drunk. Or maybe plenty of people were lying.
Whatever the case, about all the police knew beyond a reasonable doubt was that there were a lot of Satan’s Choice members in the Queen’s when Matiyek was shot and that they all hightailed it immediately after he slumped over dead.
At age twenty-six, Comeau was already an eight-year member of the Choice. In the early 1970s he’d been convicted for indecent assault, but as he explained it, he didn’t touch a girl who was having sex with a group of bikers, he just didn’t stop them. The Crown said the bikers could all plead guilty to indecent assault or all be tried for rape. Pleading guilty seemed like the prudent thing to do, but it meant he was still classed as a sex offender. Comeau wasn’t someone Campbell hung around with a lot. He was loud and could joke about others, but was thin-skinned about taking a ribbing himself. That said, he was still a brother, and for Campbell nothing trumped brotherhood.
Fellow arrestee Jeff (Boom Boom) McLeod was a quick-witted 24-year-old Toronto Star delivery driver who tipped the scales somewhere around 315 pounds, give or take a couple of hamburgers. He and Comeau were men of big appetites, and the two pals could put down ten burgers each in a feeding. Boom Boom wouldn’t back down from food fights in restaurants or real brawls in bars, but he was far more intelligent than his looks suggested.
At twenty-seven, Larry (Beaver) Hurren was three years younger than Campbell, who had sponsored Hurren into the club. They got to know each other when he lived in Campbell’s home with Elinor, her father and Janice for a time while attending high school. He had been the best friend of Campbell’s former brother-in-law and supported himself by working alternately as cab driver and factory worker. He was also the veteran of one amateur boxing fight. He might have won that bout at the Oshawa United Auto Workers hall if he hadn’t been docked a point because his corner man, Campbell, shouted instructions too loudly and too often about how he should handle his more experienced opponent.
Not long after the raid on the clubhouse, police made another sweep of arrests, picking up four more Choice members. They included Rick Sauvé, who in the Crown’s eyes was another of the ringleaders in the Matiyek killing. Those who knew Sauvé considered him an unlikely candidate for the role of underworld killer. Just twenty-five, he was a Port Hope boy who quit school in grade nine to take a local factory job, where he rose in the union until he was elected local president. He was married with a four-year-old daughter and coached minor hockey. He was also distantly related to Matiyek: his brother’s wife and Matiyek’s brother’s wife were sisters.
Sauvé was a genuine motorcycle enthusiast, as opposed to a criminal with a motorcycle, and this passion led him to join the Peterborough chapter of Satan’s Choice. Sauvé had been a member for only a couple of months when Bill Matiyek was shot to death, and the night he spent in jail after the clubhouse raid was the first time he had ever been in custody. While he was nothing close to a hardened jailbird, Sauvé was a solid member in Campbell’s books. Years later, Sauvé would remember Campbell telling him: “What breaks a chain, Rick, is a weak link. Don’t be a weak link.”
The most noteworthy thing about co-accused Merv (Indian) Blaker of the Peterborough chapter was his quiet and respectful demeanour. Campbell wasn’t sure if that was his natural way or an Ojibwa trait or a bit of both. Blaker’s family moved to Port Hope from the Curve Lake reserve when he was young. At thirty-three, Blaker was the oldest of the accused and was considered a hard worker at an outboard marine outlet in Peterborough. He had been a Choice member since 1967, and was acknowledged by his fellow bikers as a top-level rider. At times, he truly seemed at one with his motorcycle, commanding it to do high-speed controlled wheelies, veering to the left and right, or to inch forward at what seemed like an impossibly slow speed. His skills reminded other
experienced riders of the possibilities of true bike riding, and conjured up images of a Native warrior from an earlier age, doing tricks on a war pony.
Indian’s biking was about function, not form. There was a competition in the Choice for the “Rat Bike” owner: who had the skuzziest motorcycle. It was an oddly respected award, because it was meant to be presented to a true biker, one who rode hard and kept his bike on the road and didn’t care in the slightest about it looking pretty. Indian always seemed to win the Rat Bike award. Indian was slightly built and not considered a threatening man. Campbell still smiles at the memory of Bill (Mr. Bill) Lavoie trying to teach Indian how to use a handgun. That lesson ended suddenly when Mr. Bill accidentally shot himself in the finger.
Since Indian grew up close to the Queen’s, it is hard to imagine he would have taken part in such a brazen crime in such a public place, where he would almost certainly be recognized.
Thirty-one-year-old Tee Hee Hoffman got his nickname for his distinctive high-pitched laugh. That laugh didn’t seem in keeping with his stature as a champion super heavyweight powerlifter, but it was just as much a part of the man as his mammoth size. A bookkeeper at B.F. Goodrich in Kitchener, Tee Hee was known for his good nature, not for violence. His arrest was particularly baffling, since Tee Hee wasn’t even in the bar—or Port Hope—that night.
Like Hoffman, Peterborough welder Gordon (Dog Map) Van Haarlem was facing charges despite a strong alibi: he was sharing drinks in the Grand Hotel in Peterborough with off-duty jail guards at the time when witnesses put him in the Port Hope bar. He would have been hard to miss, since he showed up at the Grand wearing his club colours. Van Haarlem had been nicknamed “Dog Face” by Comeau, a comment on how the Peterborough bikers weren’t a particularly handsome bunch. Dog Face was actually on the good-looking side, however, and in time his nickname morphed into Dog Map, for the winding routes he sometimes took getting places.
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