Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Tulip had considerable difficulty making his way out the door, since Campbell had pounded on his feet with the hammer after he’d finished with his hands. Tulip also had cigarette burns, cuts on his knees, loose teeth and welts on his chest. He still hadn’t confessed.

  Everett rode up on his Harley as Campbell led Tulip out. He jumped in and stopped the execution, saying there had been enough violence that night. Campbell acceded to him, but didn’t apologize for the bloodletting or bone-breaking. “If you’re playing the game or if you’re trying to harm me or mine, suffer the consequences. He could have killed one of my friends, including my best friend.”

  Some members still dared to suggest that perhaps Tulip was innocent, since he hadn’t confessed in order to stop the beating. Campbell argued back that Tulip didn’t admit to setting the fire because he knew it would surely seal his death.

  “I never seen him after that.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Short Honeymoon

  Charmaine and I were married on Valentine’s Day, and within three months I was in Millhaven Penitentiary.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  When they were married on Valentine’s Day in 1983, Campbell wore a grey Edwardian tuxedo and Charmaine a white and pink suit. If she wanted Campbell dressed that day in something more formal than Choice colours, that was a small concession he was happy to make. There was no doubt that Charmaine was a quality person; she had planned to stay by him even if he was hit with big prison time after coming forward about the Port Hope killing. They had been together eight years and had experienced plenty of highs and lows already, more than enough to assess each other’s characters. Among their guests that day were his old friend Smutley and Smutley’s new friend Dave. Like many bikers, Dave liked weightlifting. Unlike many of them, Dave had a ring through his nose that he wore every day, not just when his friends were getting married.

  About three months after the wedding, Smutley disappeared from circulation for several weeks. It’s not unusual for bikers to go away for a while, especially for out-of-town work on construction jobs. It is unusual that they just vanish, without saying a word. When Smutley finally resurfaced, Campbell saw him at a booze can and he was accompanied by two heavy-set men Campbell had never seen before.

  He asked Smutley where he had been and Smutley’s story reeked of a lie. In Campbell’s world, you simply don’t lie to a brother. “I just laid him out right on the floor,” Campbell recalls.

  Campbell glared at Smutley’s new friends. “You want a part of this?”

  They didn’t, and stayed out of reach.

  There were troubles at the time about an assault beef faced by Peter Rabbit and several members of the Para-Dice Riders. The Choice and PDR were getting along well, and both clubs were uneasy about a drug dealer named Billy who was apparently helping the Crown build its case against them. Not surprisingly, Billy was keeping a particularly low profile.

  Campbell wasn’t really hunting for him one night when he and Dave dropped in late on a woman named Muggins, who used to go out with Billy. Muggins seemed unusually jumpy as soon as they came in the door.

  “What’s wrong, Muggins?”

  “Billy’s here,” she whispered.

  “Where is he?”

  “Behind the door to the stairs.”

  Campbell walked over to the door and swung it open.

  “Hi, Billy. Come here.”

  Dave sat in the middle of the kitchen floor as Campbell started beating on Billy. This was something he could easily handle by himself. “He [Billy] was just shaking,” Campbell says. “There was blood all over the walls.”

  Campbell asked Dave to go over to a booze can run by Muggins’s sister to fetch some beer. “We’re going to be here a while. Leave me alone with this guy.”

  After Dave returned, Campbell decided to bring the beating to an end. It was time for something decisive.

  “You’re coming with me, Billy. Get in the car.”

  Campbell was taking Billy into the country north of Oshawa. “He was history.” As they pulled out of the driveway, Dave was at the steering wheel and Campbell sat in the front passenger seat, with Billy squished between them.

  “Look behind you, Lorne,” Dave said before they could get out of the driveway. Campbell recalls, “There was red. Like a dozen cruisers.”

  A cop leaned into the car with a shotgun. He was shaking. “Get out of the car!”

  “Tell that guy to relax,” Campbell told another cop. “I’ve been through this before, he hasn’t.”

  As Campbell was led away in cuffs, he looked at Dave and saw that he wasn’t under arrest. In that instant, Campbell realized that Dave, Smutley’s friend with the ring through his nose, was an undercover cop.

  Events of the past few months fell into harsh focus for Campbell. Smutley had turned on him to shake off new drug charges. One of Smutley’s family members was also getting heat for gun-running. That explained Smutley’s introduction of Dave to Campbell. He found himself angry at Smutley, not Dave, who had always seemed like a good guy. “Smutley, he’s a piece of shit in my eyes. He was my friend.” Dave was a different matter. Campbell had no qualms about lynching a biker for not fetching him a drink, but his code of honour didn’t allow for any ill feelings against a cop who did his job so well. If you have to be arrested, it’s best to be arrested by a smart and cool-headed cop, and Dave was certainly that. “Dave always wanted to be a cop. He can look at himself still in the mirror.”

  There were fifteen charges filed against Campbell from four different cities. They included possession of an explosive with intent to endanger life, after Dave had found boxes of dynamite while helping Campbell move. The dynamite was to be used to blow up the car and house of a Kitchener man, police said, although Campbell maintained he had no clue about the identity of the target. There were also three charges of forcible confinement and one of trafficking cocaine, for selling Dave an ounce of cocaine worth $3,200 on January 27, 1983. Campbell acknowledges that he was guilty of every one of them.

  In the basement of the Whitby courthouse, a detective named Tolly Wozniak approached Campbell on his way to court.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute, Lorne?”

  Campbell was handcuffed and police blocked the entrance and exit.

  “Are you ready for this, Lorne?” Wozniak continued. “You’ve got another charge.”

  “Yeah. What?”

  “Attempted murder.”

  Campbell’s eyes went to a water fountain behind the detective. “Holy smokes, Tolly. You really know how to make a guy’s mouth go dry.” Campbell collected his thoughts. “With who?”

  “Does Pat Roberts ring a bell?”

  It didn’t initially. Then he remembered that Pat Roberts was the real name of Tulip, the biker with the flower painted on his Harley whom he had beaten and almost executed after the fire at the Choice clubhouse. “I had beaten up so many guys I didn’t have a clue.”

  Once all the charges were packaged together, Campbell was facing the threat of at least fifteen years in custody. “Get it down to one digit,” Campbell instructed his lawyer, Bruce Affleck.

  After meeting with the Crown, Affleck came back to tell Campbell he could cut a deal that would mean five and a half years’ prison for himself and five years for Larry Vallentyne. The judge was a military veteran and seemed sympathetic to arguments about the harsh things that are sometimes done in the name of brotherhood. It was almost too good to be true.

  The most important thing about the deal Affleck had brokered was that Campbell wouldn’t be charged with anything else arising from Dave’s undercover operation. That was a relief, since the charge that Campbell was really worried about stemmed from his attempt to buy five hundred machine guns for Joe Napolitano. Campbell was the middleman in a deal that called for muscle, and what he had to gain was money. “A hundred or two hundred thousand I would have made.” That meeting, in the basement of an Oshawa home, had almost gone awfully wrong, when one of the sellers, clea
rly drunk, objected to Campbell’s presence, pointing a gun at his head and asking Napolitano, “What the fuck’s he doing with you?” The man eventually lowered the gun, but the deal hadn’t yet been completed at the time of Campbell’s arrest.

  Still, Campbell couldn’t shake the fear that the machine-gun rap might mean some kind of treason conviction, which would carry a life term. It was easy to see why acquiring that many machine guns could be spun into an attempt to attack the state itself, although Campbell says that was never his intention.

  There was a catch to the plea bargain offer that Affleck delivered: the judge was leaving soon, and if Campbell and Vallentyne wanted the deal, they both had to agree within a day.

  “No fucking way,” Vallentyne said.

  “The deal isn’t good after tomorrow,” Campbell said.

  “No fucking way.”

  When Vallentyne got like this, there wasn’t much to do except sweat. Arguing would only make him dig in his heels. Finally, at the last moment, the penny dropped and Vallentyne agreed.

  There was another snag when they appeared in court. The Crown attorney stood well under five feet. Vallentyne giggled at the sight of his courtroom booster seat. Campbell wondered if this Crown harboured an unhealthy dose of pent-up hostility towards big, bad bikers. But Vallentyne wasn’t theorizing about Napoleon complexes. He just couldn’t stop giggling.

  “Don’t laugh at him,” Campbell whispered in the prisoners’ dock. “Don’t laugh at him.” Campbell felt himself ready to start laughing too. “Larry. Stop it. I will burst out laughing and I will do fifteen years.”

  They managed to control themselves and the deal was cut, Campbell pleading guilty to wounding, selling dynamite, tampering with witnesses, assault causing bodily harm and trafficking cocaine. Toronto chapter vice-president Mike Everett, the one who stopped Campbell from killing Tulip, got two years for cocaine trafficking. This struck Campbell as odd and a bit unfair, since things would have gone far worse if Everett hadn’t been present. “That’s the irony. Mike talked me out of it and Mike ended up getting time.”

  Not surprisingly, Everett once again wasn’t happy with Campbell. This was obviously far worse than yolk in his hair. A couple of years before, Everett had told him: “There’s only one reason why you’re in the club right now.”

  “Yeah, and don’t you ever fucking forget it,” Campbell replied. There would be hell to pay if anyone tried to pull his patch, but the “one reason” went much deeper than just his friendship with Guindon. There were no limits to how far Campbell would go to defend those close to him. “Maybe I’m willing to do more for me and mine.”

  Despite Campbell’s relief at the reduced sentence, Charmaine fumed at the betrayal by Smutley and Dave. They had attended her wedding. She had cooked for them. They were supposed to be friends. She was still livid when she bumped into Dave almost a decade later at a friend’s place, when he was back in uniform.

  “You were in my house,” Charmaine raged. “You came to our wedding.”

  Dave was with a young partner then, a big, strong-looking cop who didn’t say a word.

  “You stayed at our house,” Charmaine continued. “You were at our house.”

  Dave seemed to respect Charmaine’s anger, and Campbell appreciated that. “He just stood there. He said, ‘Yes, I know, Charmaine.’ He was polite. He let her vent.”

  A surprise visitor showed up at the Whitby jail one afternoon, as Campbell waited for the aftermath of Dave’s undercover operation to work its way through the courts. Campbell had faced down drug dealers and gunmen and an assortment of bone-breakers while developing a reputation for toughness in an unforgiving environment. However, no one he had met up to that time made him sweat more than the sixteen-year-old girl who appeared unannounced at the jail that day. He hadn’t seen his daughter, Janice, for seven years and here she was, right out of the blue, looking nervous on the other side of a Plexiglas wall. “It was really scary. I hadn’t seen her since I burned the house down. She just showed up with friends.… You don’t know what to say. I was actually sitting there sweating. I wasn’t confident in myself about that. I didn’t know how to act as a father.”

  Janice had put considerable thought into what to wear to jail that day. Years later, she can’t remember the exact outfit, but she does remember the impression she was trying to create. She also remembers feeling afraid, since she knew she wouldn’t likely see her father again for a long time. “I would have dressed like a lady. My mom always said you have respect for a lady.”

  Campbell didn’t want her visiting him in a federal penitentiary, where he was sure to be headed next. “I didn’t want my daughter seeing me in there. Letters and cards were enough. We were separated by Plexiglas. It was unnerving for both of us.”

  The guards gave them a couple of hours when they could have limited the visit to twenty minutes. It was a kind gesture, although it probably didn’t hurt that Campbell had a reputation with staff for freaking out. He felt grateful that Janice still loved him, and he was also grateful that she had turned out to be the kind of young lady who makes a father proud. “I just thanked God that she loves her dad still, although I haven’t been around a lot in her life.” They didn’t talk about how he’d set the fire to the family home, but he knew this must be on her mind. “I know she remembered. ‘Why would my dad do that?’ I never explained it.… Not that I understood either.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Big House Crew

  Guys that don’t have anybody are preyed upon a lot.

  LORNE CAMPBELL on prison life

  It’s not unusual for prisoners to shake or even break down and blubber like babies by the time they’re fingerprinted at Millhaven super-maximum-security penitentiary. By this time, a prisoner has likely ridden for hours on a bus, with his hands cuffed together and his legs shackled to the floor. He has already passed along treeless lawns, through two nine-metre chain-link fences, each topped and linked in razor and barbed wire, and a metre-high “warning fence” that marks the outer limit of how far prisoners can walk from the exercise yard before deadly force can be used to stop them. He has also passed under guard towers, and if he looked up, he may have seen guards staring down at him, gripping machine guns.

  Once he has been escorted into the mesh-lined holding cell where he’s fingerprinted, the prisoner has become an unwilling member of a community comprising 525 of Canada’s meanest, most dysfunctional men. Odds are, even if he was once the toughest kid in the class, he’s not even close to the most feared convict on his new range. Millhaven, also known as “Thrill Haven,” was Canada’s highest-security prison, and a third of the inmates were serving life terms when Campbell arrived.

  Some locals and inmates believed it was built on a Native burial ground, making it forever cursed. The prison itself certainly had a nasty birth. It opened prematurely in 1971 to accommodate prisoners from nearby Kingston Penitentiary, which required an extensive cleanup after a bloody four-day riot that year.

  When he was there in 1972, Bernie Guindon saw a prisoner lead another inmate across the weight room, stop, and pull out a hidden shank (an improvised knife). It was so smooth and seemingly effortless that it looked somehow choreographed, and it took just seconds for the shank to be thrust into the inmate’s chest a dozen times. “I went, ‘Wow, quick.’ It’s just like watching television.” Guindon saw another inmate get shanked in the exercise yard after demanding pharmaceuticals from fellow prisoners. That attacker also led his prey to a spot where he had hidden a shank.

  “Are you going to help?” an inmate asked.

  “No, he can die,” Guindon replied. “He was stealing pills.”

  Like all new arrivals, Campbell first went to the assessment centre in E-Unit. He was slated for psychological and IQ testing and an audience with Dr. George Ducolon Scott. A jaunty, charismatic, terrier-like little man, Scott had the all-knowing air of someone who had borne witness at least once to almost every form of human depravity. He once told the Ottawa C
itizen that he was fascinated as a boy growing up in Kingston by what he imagined lay inside the stone walls of the Kingston Prison for Women, which loomed within eyeshot of his childhood home. Somehow, the sight of the prison stirred “a deeper part of my soul,” and tantalized him with a sense of mystery—“like running into the sun; you can’t quite see what’s there.”

  The doctor was in his early seventies when Campbell walked into his office, and by that time Scott had peered inside the minds of tens of thousands of prisoners. He hadn’t just asked them questions from across a desk, either. He had overseen LSD experimentation on prisoners funded by the Canadian Department of National Defence, as well as testing on the effects of shock therapy, sensory deprivation and pain tolerance. When the press caught wind of this in the 1990s, he dismissed suggestions that such experimentation reduced patients to the status of mere guinea pigs. “It’s a lot of bullshit,” Scott told the Ottawa Citizen. “It was good research back then. It was good research with good motivation, with good supervision, and the government supplied the bucks for the whole thing.” Pressed another time by the newspaper, he was even more to the point: “I am happy with myself. I don’t give a shit.”

  Unfortunately for the doctor, some people in power did give a shit. A dozen years after he met Campbell, Scott was stripped of his licence to practise medicine for testing of a profoundly lurid sort: using Sodium Pentothal and electroshock to drop female patients into an almost comatose state. Then he would implant sexual suggestions and revive them with Ritalin.

  But when Campbell met Scott that day in his office, the doctor still displayed the easy confidence of a man who enjoyed a secure, fascinating job for life, since there was little chance of prisons shutting down due to an outbreak of lawfulness. Every day, he could take a close-up view of varying degrees of deviance, and then stroll out again to have a quiet supper with his family in the comfort of his century-old hobby farm. “He took things in stride, like he was a movie star,” Campbell says.