Sometimes there’s just something about a prisoner that creeps others out. It’s hard to define why they give off this vibe, but the creepiness is palpable. Any association with someone like that can be dangerous. Nutty Comeau couldn’t abide the sight of a glue sniffer who sat down next to Campbell at an inmates baseball game. Prisoners could easily get glue to sniff from woodwork or leather craft hobby work, and when they did, they became a menace, or at best annoying. “Lorne, don’t be fucking talking to that guy,” Nutty cautioned.
At first, Campbell had no problems chatting with the man. Then Campbell saw what Nutty meant, when the man began babbling in verbal circles one day, making no sense to anyone but himself. That’s when Campbell decided that Nutty, for all his own issues, was right: “The guy’s nuts. A glue sniffer. Anybody that’s on downers, glue sniffers, too fucked up when they do something, we’d stay away from in jail. He was too screwed up to hang around with. If you’re sniffing glue, it’s gluing your brain cells or something.”
Keeping the company of glue sniffers was hardly on the same level as being friendly with a diddler, but Campbell quickly learned that seemingly little things in Millhaven could bring major and irreversible penalties. Bad personal hygiene was often enough for an attack. So was a sloppy cell. Potentially capital crimes behind bars also included stiffing someone on a gambling debt, failing to deliver drugs as promised, and theft. For the weaker inmates, it could be dangerous to snub sexual advances. And sometimes prisoners saw their time behind bars as an opportunity to avenge grudges from the outside.
Campbell was repeatedly reminded that it was often best just to keep his thoughts to himself. Prison drag queens weren’t preyed upon or goaded, as they fashioned halter tops from boxer shorts and makeup from ash and food colouring. There was just nothing to gain in hassling them and provoking confrontations. One drag queen who was given a particularly wide berth by the other inmates was a solidly built, six-foot-five former army sergeant. Underneath the makeup and woman’s clothing, he still had a soldier’s strength and skills. He also had a chilling reputation, having landed in prison for stabbing his mother to death. Her crime was to call him a faggot.
Charmaine dropped by for visits religiously, reminding Campbell of the life that awaited him once his time was served. “She visited every week, rain or shine,” Campbell says. “Bad weather or good, she was there.”
Campbell had been running his stripper agency with Joe Napolitano when he was sent to prison, and Charmaine continued working as a dancer. Campbell was alarmed one day to hear that she was working at a bar in Windsor run by the Outlaws. It was easy to imagine them doing something terrible to her, just to punish him. “I said, ‘Just go to the owner and get your pay. Don’t work there. I just don’t like the idea of some fucking wacko finding out you’re my wife and doing harm on you.’ I worried. Worried.”
CHAPTER 16
Fighting Bitterness
I just wanted to come out and put a bullet between the eyes of some people.
LORNE CAMPBELL in Millhaven Penitentiary
It was behind the walls of Millhaven that Campbell experienced runner’s high for the first time, during a ten-mile jog. He belonged to the inmates’ Olympic Jogging Club, which awarded round patches to runners who put in a hundred miles. Campbell earned his 100-mile award—just like he had earned his biker patches—and went on to earn patches for putting in 200 and 300 miles on the track. That afternoon in 1983 when he managed ten miles, Campbell rode a wave of endorphins into the auditorium, where “Bad to the Bone” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers was blasting through the speakers. It was a straight-ahead, unapologetic joyful sound, and Campbell bathed in feelings of calm and achievement that lifted him temporarily above his surroundings. Boom Boom McLeod took up running as well, dropping from 320 pounds down to 190. “I can’t get rid of my child-bearing hips,” he joked.
A wall of the common area in Millhaven’s M2 range was painted like a biker saloon. It was the sort of place that encouraged conversation, and Campbell was in a chatty mood there when he asked inmate Steven Haudenschild about the progress of some artwork he’d been promised. Campbell already had a silhouette of Doc Holliday and the Earp brothers that Haudenschild had painted. He liked looking at images of the Wild West’s gun-fighting legends, and Haudenschild was currently painting a canvas for him of a biker riding into the wind, wearing no helmet, like a modern-day cowboy.
“Have you got that painting?” Campbell asked.
“I fucking told you, Lorne, I’d do that.”
His mood was more than a little testy, so Campbell didn’t push things.
When Haudenschild finally delivered the artwork, Campbell saw it bore the inscription “to the SC brother of the wind” and was signed “Steve Road Rash,” slang for the burns a biker gets when he wipes out on gravel. There were also the letters “GRMC” in the corner. He knew Haudenschild was an outlaw biker from the west, and he also knew the Grim Reapers were a big deal out in Haudenschild’s home province of Alberta.
“Are you a Grim Reaper?” Campbell asked.
It seemed an innocent-enough question, but Haudenschild looked like his mother had just been spat upon. “He lost it on me. He was really insulted.”
“Sorry,” was the best Campbell could say at the time. He didn’t realize that Haudenschild was a Ghost Rider, a lesser-known western club that also used the initials GRMC. He also had no idea that the Ghost Riders hated the Grim Reapers as much as Campbell despised the Outlaws.
Later, Campbell would piece together part of Haudenschild’s story. Like Campbell, he went to extremes in defence of his notion of brotherhood. Haudenschild landed in prison after confessing to murdering three Americans and dumping their bodies into a Lethbridge rendering plant, where the carcasses of dead animals are broken down into products such as lard. Haudenschild told police he killed them over an unpaid debt. In his version of events, he had lent the three Americans fifteen thousand dollars to come to Canada “because the heat was on them” and he later murdered them because they didn’t repay him. That was all a lie.
Haudenschild’s secret was that he wasn’t a multiple murderer at all. He had falsely confessed to killing American Ghost Riders Kenneth Martin Solomon and Jeffrey Heath as well as Heath’s wife, Kathy, as an act of good citizenship, as he saw things. In fact, they weren’t dead, and his lie to police gave them a chance to start their lives anew in Canada, with blank slates and new identities, while shaking off a slew of American charges. The scheme was ruined when the Americans were discovered alive and well in Alberta a month after his bogus confession.
That didn’t mean Haudenschild wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. He was in prison for a verified murder, and had shown no agitation in court when he was called to account for the killing of Charles Drager, a former Lethbridge Ghost Rider president. He never told the court what Drager had done to anger him so profoundly that he killed him and dumped his remains into the rendering plant. Haudenschild simply said he felt “no regret or remorse for these acts—the only thing I regret is the adverse publicity this has brought on the Ghost Riders.”
For the most part, long-standing biker club divisions didn’t matter in a super-maximum-security penitentiary such as Millhaven. “That’s all forgotten in there,” Campbell says of club lines. The generally accepted view was that all bikers must look strong and united for their mutual benefit and security, because most often it was a small core of bikers against the rest of the inmates. Guindon, Dunbar and Logan had set the tone that way. Because of them, it was a received truth that you shouldn’t fuck with an outlaw biker behind bars. “They paved the way for the rest of us. They wouldn’t back down. There were anti-bikers there. They’ll stab you in an instant, just because they don’t like bikers. Maybe something had happened to them on the street.”
That said, membership in a biker club wasn’t a passport to easy living. “Just being in a club, that don’t do anything. There’s a beef, you’ve got to handle it. Some people that th
ink that just because you’re in a club, that’ll handle it—it’s the opposite. You earn it. It doesn’t matter who you are. You must earn respect.”
The idea that club tensions should be put on hold inside Millhaven didn’t extend to everyone, as far as Campbell was concerned. Campbell heard that Dave Séguin, the Outlaw he’d once pummelled in the Montreal Choice clubhouse, was being hunted by police for slaughtering three men and wounding three more at the Chosen Few clubhouse on September 17, 1983, in the small community of Emeryville, east of Windsor. According to police, Séguin entered the clubhouse carrying a nine-millimetre semi-automatic handgun and emptied its bullets into the victims. Then he pulled out a knife and repeatedly stabbed them. One of those murder victims was Chosen Few club president Edward (Snake) Morris.
It only seemed a matter of time before Séguin and other Outlaws were arrested for the Emeryville slaughter and delivered to Millhaven. Campbell was primed to jump Séguin at the first opportunity, or any other Outlaw who got there before him. “The first Outlaw that comes in that strip, I’m waiting for him,” Campbell announced.
Jeff McLeod urged him to hold back so that there wouldn’t be retaliation by the Outlaws or their friends against Rick Sauvé and Gary Comeau. They were serving life terms, meaning they would be vulnerable for a long, long time. “You’ve got to think of Rick and Gary,” McLeod told Campbell. “They’re doing ‘the book’: life-twenty-five,” meaning a life prison term with no possibility of parole for twenty-five years.
“I am thinking of them,” Campbell replied. The idea was to send a loud message to the Outlaws to back off. “I figured I’d teach them a lesson right off the bat,” Campbell says.
The debate turned out to be academic. In July 1985, Séguin was shot dead by police in Steger, Illinois, outside Chicago, the Outlaws’ hometown. At the time, Séguin was on Canada’s most-wanted list, living in Illinois under the bogus name George J. Johnson. Police surrounded his house after a neighbour said he had been abducted and bound by Séguin and then released ten hours later. The dead man’s fingerprints were taken in the Cook County morgue, where they matched up with those of the fugitive Séguin. When police searched his home, they found nine-millimetre pistols like the one used in the Chosen Few massacre, as well as marijuana, cocaine, a machine gun, three other handguns, exploding ammunition, gunpowder, and a book on how to make bombs.
There were a few good memories from Millhaven for Campbell, such as the pleasant buzz he felt at Christmastime from some moonshine that had been stashed somewhere in the ceiling above the showers. There were numerous forms of prison moonshine, all vile and all effective. Prisoners gathered potato peelings, fruit peelings, prunes, peaches, vegetable scraps, sugar, yeast, cherries, ketchup, orange juice and even Cheerios to produce potent “shine” that was concocted in elaborate stills or simple garbage bags. The final brew could be ready in twenty-four hours, or it might take several days to produce a mix so potent it could burn.
Moonshine was highly valued in prison, and it was common for inmates to pay twenty or thirty cartons of cigarettes for two jars of 95-proof shine. It took skill, plenty of copper tubing and stealth to make a batch, and an inch of it in a jar could give even a veteran drinker a considerable buzz. “You can’t sit and drink that stuff all night.”
The shine Campbell consumed that Christmas was made by a prisoner in the cell next to Campbell’s from hundreds of packets of ketchup, among other things. It wasn’t smooth crossing the throat, but that Christmas it hit the spot nonetheless. To further enhance the festive mood, Campbell stole the crepe paper folding bell that was about the only decoration in the unit and hung it in his cell, where he was already displaying some one hundred cards from friends and family. The glow of his moonshine coursed through him as he called out, “How’s life?” to the lifers walking past and wondered how much crazier his own life could get. “I was happy to be in my cell. I said to myself, ‘I can’t believe I’m happy to be here.’ ”
Most of the time in Millhaven, mob people didn’t mingle with the other inmates. “The mob guys had young guys around them who were loyal to them. They stayed pretty much to themselves.” Despite the general separation between groups, Campbell found himself on pleasant terms with Cosimo Elia Commisso from north of Toronto, who was in prison for an assortment of organized crime charges, including three for conspiracy to commit murder. Commisso could be gregarious and friendly, and Campbell became a personal trainer of sorts for him, introducing him to jogging and helping him shed roughly a hundred pounds.
A sore point with the mobsters was that Cecil Kirby, a former Satan’s Choice member from Richmond Hill, had worked as a police agent to put Commisso and his brothers Rocco Remo and Michele behind bars. Kirby had been hired on to do dirty jobs for the mob, then turned police agent and disappeared into a witness protection programme. Campbell hadn’t known Kirby well and didn’t particularly like the little he saw of him. After his police agent work became known, Kirby was so reviled within the Choice that Larry Vallentyne ordered a rock musician whose stage name was Kirby Luke to go by a different name when he was around them.
One day in Millhaven, Campbell and the mobsters watched a television programme on Kirby, and Campbell felt Commisso’s younger brother, Rocco Remo, glaring lasers at him.
“I said, ‘Don’t be fucking staring at me,’ ” Campbell recalls. “ ‘Don’t tell me you guys don’t have problems with your members too.’ ”
Campbell felt it was the mobsters’ fault if they placed too much trust in Kirby, whom he considered more hype than anything else. “Why would you trust a guy who wasn’t true-tested? Kirby wasn’t a hit man. He was just a guy who went around scaring people, knocking their mailboxes over.”
Also sharing space with Campbell was Antonio (Tony) Musitano of Hamilton, who was serving a life sentence in connection with a series of bakery bombings which, in the late 1970s, had earned Hamilton the nickname “Bomb City.” One afternoon during visiting hours, Charmaine arrived to see Campbell at the same time as Musitano was joined by his older brother Domenic, another mobster. Tony Musitano struck Campbell as a charming man, and he gave Charmaine a jovial hello before hunkering down to talk business with his brother.
Years later, Campbell read that the Musitanos’ table at Millhaven was electronically bugged. The taped discussions from that day in the visitors’ area suggest that Campbell’s prison acquaintance Billy Rankin was about to begin enforcement work for their crime family. Rankin wasn’t a biker, but rather a mob rounder, given to hanging around underworld characters. Campbell knew him as a serious guy inside prison, whose face was invariably knotted in a tight expression, as if he were permanently sucking on a lemon.
On Saturdays, the bikers would sit in the back row of the auditorium as movies were shown. “We always sat at the back. If somebody’s going to be shanked, that’s a good place to do it because it’s dark. We’d be right against the wall, us bikers.” Rankin would sit in the row in front of them, and Campbell would call him Bacon Hips because he pumped his legs and butt up doing heavy squats. “We’d say, ‘Can’t see, Bacon Hips. You’re blocking the view.’ He’d get pissed. There were no smiles.”
Rankin was released from prison on December 7, 1983. It wasn’t a shock to see that he quickly took up with Hamilton mobsters. It was surprising that Rankin abused drugs and bragged to strippers about his new job, which caused him to fall from grace with the mob. It was always a crapshoot to predict how an inmate would act once he was freed. “There are guys you see on the street who seem solid. When they get in the pen, they’re fucking cowards. Tough guys on the street and then they just wimp out inside. That’s when you see their true colours. There are guys who are comfortable and solid in the pen and outside they’re totally different. They just short-circuit when they get out on the street. Drugs will do that to people. They turn into something they’re not. Anybody’s capable of anything, I think.”
Campbell had things of his own to worry about. He and everyone else on
his range were sent into solitary confinement for four and a half months. There had been a murder on the range and no one co-operated with investigators. For Campbell and the others, that meant time alone in a 1.83-by-3-metre cell, with only ten minutes a day to shower. He didn’t have a television, but he did have a radio with five channels and reading privileges. There wasn’t much to do besides ponder his situation and worry about the hurt he was causing others, especially his family. It was a scary trip, going inside his head to confront his bitterness, but it was worth the journey. “You get self-pity for a while.”
He thought back to his time with the Durham psychologist who had helped him with relaxation therapy, and he concluded it was time to stop blaming others, even if he hadn’t been dealt a great hand in life. Campbell started to appreciate that it takes more courage to love than to hate. “You get better. I got thinking about that saying, ‘It’s not the rest of the world, it’s me.’ I thought about that. I had been bitter. I just wanted to come out and put a bullet between the eyes of some people. I fought it, the bitterness.”
CHAPTER 17
Disneyland
The only way to change your diet in prison was through health reasons or religion. I didn’t have any health problems, so I became a Buddhist.
LORNE CAMPBELL
If you drive by Collins Bay medium-security prison on Bath Road in Kingston and don’t look too carefully, its bright red turreted roof makes it look like some enchanted castle from Disneyland. If you slow down and take another second or two, you’ll also see the lookout towers and barbed wire and realize this elegant limestone structure wasn’t built for fun. Those who see its hard, cold walls from the inside on a daily basis call it Gladiator School.
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