Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  After fourteen months in ultra-maximum-security Millhaven, Campbell was bumped down to Gladiator School, and just two weeks after his arrival he was elected inmate representation for 3 Block. That’s quite impressive for a newcomer. More impressive yet was his 88 percent approval rating from voters, most of whom Campbell hadn’t met yet. It didn’t hurt his campaign that Larry Vallentyne and two bikers known as Mule and Flex went cell to cell, saying words to the effect, “You’re voting for Lorne, aren’t you?”

  Serving on inmate committees had become a tradition of sorts for bikers at Collins Bay. Bernie Guindon was a previous head of the inmate committee, enjoying the wide range of information the position offered about goings-on throughout the prison. For Campbell, it meant that at ten every Thursday morning he would sit down with prison officials, including warden Ken Payne, and prisoner representatives from each cellblock. It was a chance for both sides to air complaints. Sometimes the hostilities were between inmates, with staff relegated to the role of interested bystanders or referees.

  One particularly contentious topic involved conjugal and family visits, during which prisoners could spend time with loved ones in a nicely equipped trailer, with a living room and a little yard for a barbecue. Prisoners who weren’t expecting visits would often apply for them anyway, and then deal their credits for visits to other prisoners for the going price of ten rolling papers smeared with hash oil. It appeared everyone was happy with the arrangement, since prisoners with families got more visits while prisoners without families got the hash oil papers, and prisoners including Campbell and Larry Vallentyne made some spending money selling them. Guards who imported the hash oil also benefited from the trailer trade business, rounding out the circle of satisfaction.

  So it seemed to be a perfectly symbiotic relationship, until an inmate representative known as O.J. spoke out loudly against it at one meeting. O.J.’s moral objection was hard to define, but he felt it strongly enough to risk the wrath of the pro-trade inmates and staff. Up to this point, Campbell had had plenty of respect for O.J., who was an outspoken advocate for black prisoners’ rights. Until O.J. fought the good fight, black inmates had been unofficially barred from working in the Collins Bay kitchen, since it was understood that the white inmates would go on strike if blacks ever dared to handle their food. Kitchen work was a good clean job and the extra food it provided for workers was a perk. There was a sign outside the kitchen that was originally meant to refer to the cooks’ uniforms, and which had read, “Whites only are to be worn.” The sign had been altered to read, “Whites only.” Through nerve and negotiation, O.J. managed to change all that, and got black inmates into the kitchen. “The guy’s a drug addict on the street, but nobody else would fight for that. O.J. was the biggest fighter of blacks’ rights in Ontario prisons back then, in my eyes. I respected him for it.”

  That morning at the meeting, however, Campbell’s respect for O.J. was quickly forgotten when he spoke out against the conjugal visit trade. “It was cold,” Campbell recalls. “The atmosphere was heavy. I’m looking right at O.J. You could cut the tension in the air with a knife at that point.” In prison, that wasn’t entirely a metaphor.

  “Anybody that would begrudge another inmate extra visits with his family is less than a man in my eyes,” Campbell said to O.J.

  “Warden Payne and the head of security looked at each other and the warden ended the meeting.” It could have got far uglier, but in the end O.J.’s attempts to stir things up over the visits went nowhere. “Everything stayed the same. His comment didn’t ruin anything.”

  At another inmates’ committee meeting, the warden noted a deadly cyanide threat inside the prison. Danny Spielchek, a First Nations hockey player who was captain of Campbell’s Millhaven hockey team, had just died after overdosing on poison. It had been murder, not suicide. The warden told the committee that Spielchek’s coffee had been spiked with cyanide, and that the threat wasn’t over. More cyanide was believed to be in the hands of at least one unidentified prisoner.

  “Just so you know, we believe it might have been brought over here recently by an inmate,” the warden said. “A pinhead of cyanide. We can’t help you. So watch what you’re drinking. Be careful who you accept a cup of coffee from.”

  Prisoner Tommy (Retard) Horner wasn’t a smart man, but he did know who had the cyanide. Retard had briefly been with the Choice, until Campbell kicked him out for being too much of an idiot. “He had the audacity to tell me, when we were in Millhaven, that he wanted to come back to the club. I reminded him who kicked him out. Duh.” Making things worse, Retard had developed a serious Valium addiction since his ouster from the Choice. He had gulped down fistfuls of the drug at one point, rather than have them confiscated by guards. The results were repulsive. “He’s shitting them out and eating them again because he’s a Valium freak.”

  One day when Campbell was walking in the yard with an inmate named Phil, he heard a voice bellowing from the prisoners’ sick bay.

  “Lorne!”

  Campbell looked around and couldn’t see anyone.

  “Lorne!”

  “Keep walking,” Phil said.

  Campbell kept walking.

  “Lorne! You know that fucking guard we’re getting the Valiums from? He’s putting it on us!”

  “Keep walking,” Phil said.

  “Lorne! You know that cocksucker guard? He put it on us!”

  The shouting was a reminder of how Retard got his nickname and why Campbell was right to boot him from the Choice in the first place.

  After Spielchek’s murder, Retard told the prisoners with the cyanide that he would hide it in his cell since no one suspected him. The poison was eventually discovered by guards and Retard was put in the hole until he fessed up about who had given it to him. “Eventually he put it on the other guys. He ratted on them.”

  Ratting on fellow inmates is a crime far worse than Valium addiction or idiocy. It’s the worst possible breach of prison’s unwritten rules, and it didn’t matter if the cyanide had been used to kill a popular fellow inmate. Campbell lost sight of Retard after that, but it was clear he would now be forever shunned or worse by other inmates. “A rat is a rat is a rat.”

  Campbell’s old friend Larry Vallentyne had been sent directly to Collins Bay upon conviction. By the time Campbell arrived, Vallentyne had already found himself a cherished spot as head of the inmates’ grievance committee. But anyone who showed up expecting a warm shoulder to cry upon was in for a rude awakening. Prisoners who complained that they needed extra bed sheets or delivered up other snivelling grievances that bored Vallentyne were sent packing with words like, “Get the fuck out of here, you fucker!” One of Vallentyne’s pearls of advice when approached by morose inmates who wanted to whine about their confinement was, “If you want to be a cowboy, you’ve got to learn to ride the range.” He meant “prison range,” of course. The message was simple: “You got caught, so shut up and serve your time.”

  Campbell asked Vallentyne for some advice when he was going to be sent for a few days to the medical unit inside the nearby Kingston Penitentiary to get his hemorrhoids treated. Kingston Penitentiary was the permanent home of the lowest of the low of prison society, the protective custody prisoners such as child molesters and convicted police officers. Some of them worked in the kitchen, and Campbell shuddered to think of such people handling his food. He wanted to get back to Collins Bay as quickly as possible.

  “Larry said, ‘When the food’s delivered, fire it back at them.’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll do that.’ … There’s stool pigeons, child molesters. You don’t take the chance to eat the food they’re handling. I was on heavy medication. I thought the bed was going to rise up like a Frankenstein movie. It was like a dungeon.”

  Vallentyne’s strategy might have worked, but Campbell was too high on medication to put it into practice. When a nurse arrived to talk about a meal, Campbell warned her, “If you give me that food, I’ll fire it right back at you.” The nurse just wa
lked away. Campbell didn’t get a meal or the chance to throw food, and wasn’t transferred back to Collins Bay until the next day, which was when he was due back anyway.

  While Vallentyne offered tips on food tossing, Rick Sauvé was definitely the man to consult about food eating. From the time of his transfer, Campbell was determined to focus on his mental and physical health. He had read some disturbing things that made him question the healthiness of his diet. “When I got to Collins Bay, I didn’t want to eat any red meat or dairy products. I just wanted fresh vegetables and fruit. The only way you can change your diet is religion or health, and there was nothing wrong with me.”

  Sauvé impressed Campbell as extremely healthy, considering the circumstances. You might expect someone serving life with no chance of parole for twenty-five years for a murder he didn’t commit to be a bitter man. Sauvé instead seemed to have risen above anger and self-pity to some higher plain of existence. Further, Campbell was struck by how Sauvé held no grudge against him, even though Campbell did the killing for which Sauvé had been imprisoned. Sauvé didn’t seem to allow bitterness to pollute his soul. He also didn’t want much in the way of material possessions. His cell was stripped down, with no television, radio, books or exercise equipment—nothing that was considered a prison luxury. He didn’t even sleep on a bed, preferring to roll out his mattress on the hard floor at night and then roll it back up again in the morning. Sauvé practised Buddhism and transcendental meditation, and studied for his BA in psychology through correspondence, paying for the courses with money he earned behind bars. When that was done, he completed a masters in criminology, again paying for it with his prison earnings. He had broken up with his first wife, not out of anger but so that she could get on with her life.

  Campbell wasn’t the only one impressed with Sauvé. A guard once told Campbell: “Sauvé’s a guy that can do time in a box.”

  Campbell didn’t feel any special urge to join Sauvé in transcendental meditation, but he was impressed by Sauvé’s steady supply of fresh fruits and vegetables.

  “How do you have that diet?” Campbell asked.

  “I get this because I’m a Buddhist now.”

  Campbell and Sauvé wrote to Toronto Buddhist temples until they found one whose leaders agreed to take Campbell on as a long-distance member of their congregation. Then Campbell and Sauvé started to talk about traditional Buddhist feasts they could order from behind bars.

  “Rick told me once a year Zen Buddhists are allowed Himalayan yak. So I said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ We were gonna, then we thought, ‘No, we’ve fucked them enough.’ ”

  Sauvé didn’t just have what appeared to be the key to inner peace; he also had access to a secret stash of moonshine. The guards had the key to the enclosed plumbing unit, but Sauvé was able to open its panel with a piece of sheet metal, like a safecracker. The hooch was tucked away in the pipes, and odds were if you weren’t looking you wouldn’t find it. That was a particularly good spot, because it minimized the chances of guards smelling the foul concoction or seeing the fruit flies that tend to hover over jailhouse shine.

  His occasional forays into moonshine aside, Sauvé was serious about yoga and meditation, and once said he was able to transport himself to another state of being. Campbell laughed that any journey Sauvé took was because of prison moonshine, not spiritual awareness. “He said, ‘I can do transcendental mediation. I was outside my cell.’ I said, ‘No you didn’t. I saw you puking on the floor.’ ”

  With Sauvé’s help, Campbell took up a self-help regimen that placed heavy emphasis on relaxation, with yoga and deep breathing exercises. There was also reading, including the self-help bestseller by Thomas A. Harris, I’m OK—You’re OK.

  Someone who definitely wasn’t okay in anyone’s books was Pigpen, the biker from Peterborough who had hid out for a time in the United States with the Outlaws under the alias “Garbage.” Eventually, he was returned to serve out a sentence for violence in a Canadian cell. Pigpen carried about 245 pounds on his six-foot frame, and while his wasn’t pretty, Muscle Beach muscle, he still possessed crazy, ill-defined “bug strength,” hard to measure or oppose.

  One day, Campbell was lying in his cell relaxing when he sensed someone close by. He looked up and there was Pigpen, blocking his doorway, his arms tightly crossed, staring at him.

  “Scared you,” Pigpen said.

  Campbell denied he had been frightened, but the big crazy man with the tightly crossed arms could see that Campbell was rattled and seemed particularly pleased with himself.

  Another time, Pigpen announced to Campbell that he had just seen the moon in the afternoon. “That’s the first time that has ever happened,” declared Pigpen.

  “Howard, I’ve seen that dozens of times,” Campbell replied.

  Pigpen fumed at anyone daring to question his credentials in astronomy. “That’s the first fucking time that’s ever happened!”

  Campbell didn’t have a retort, and there was no point in getting Pigpen’s dander up. Pigpen was unsettling enough when he was relaxed.

  “You know what that means?” Pigpen continued.

  Campbell had no quick reply. Pigpen leaned close to him, so close Campbell could feel the warmth of his breath. Campbell still said nothing. Then Pigpen leaned closer still.

  “You know,” Pigpen declared.

  With that, he snapped his head back, gave Campbell a knowing look, turned quickly on his heels and walked out of the cell with a triumphant strut.

  One day, Campbell and inmate Mike (Mule) Poisson had a disagreement about exactly what was going on between Pigpen’s ears. Mule asserted that Pigpen was just playing crazy, albeit very well. Campbell argued that Pigpen was truly out of his mind.

  “It’s a big put-on,” Mule said.

  “What do you mean?” Campbell asked.

  “He’s not really insane.”

  “Yes he is.”

  At this point, Pigpen appeared and walked up to them.

  “We were just talking about you,” Campbell offered. “I say you’re truly insane. Mike here is saying you’re just putting it on.”

  “He just looked at us, turned around and walked out,” recalls Campbell.

  “That answers your question for you, Mike,” he said.

  One day, Campbell and another inmate were talking about Pigpen when a guard overheard them. “You have no idea how nuts he is,” the guard said.

  One of the prisoners Pigpen associated with was an Outlaw named Andy. Campbell advised Pigpen that it didn’t look right for a member of the Choice to be talking with an Outlaw, even if Andy was a good-enough guy and married to one of Bernie Guindon’s cousins. Campbell had already told Andy, “When you go by me, don’t look at me.” It wasn’t personal; it was just the way things were. Members of the Choice weren’t to mingle with the Outlaws in Ontario, just as members of the Hatfield and McCoy clans didn’t share jugs of moonshine in Tug Fork, West Virginia. “He freaked out and then went out to Andy’s cell,” Campbell says. “Andy’s sitting there doing his leather hobby craft. He punched the fuck out of Andy. He [Andy] had no idea why.”

  “I wasn’t telling you to do that to Andy,” Campbell told Pigpen.

  “I believe he’s insane,” Campbell says. “He’d be a bad enemy.”

  Pigpen had his own notions about hygiene and personal health. He stayed away from showers, preferring to sponge-bathe his bulk in the privacy of his own cell. That way, other prisoners couldn’t sneak up behind him and attack. Pigpen’s strategy was tested after he ran afoul of Collins Bay’s Caribbean population.

  There were about fifteen Caribbean inmates in Collins Bay who were poorly educated and highly superstitious. For reasons known only to himself, Pigpen delighted in enthusiastically barging into their cells, spouting Bible passages. Whatever one might say about Pigpen, he did appear to know his Scripture. When he was done his oration, as a final crescendo, Pigpen would take his “whammy dust,” made from crushed-up mirrors, and throw it into the air li
ke a magician casting a spell.

  “Serious? Who knows if he’s serious?”

  One day, after his Scripture rant and whammy-dust toss, one of the Caribbean prisoners was convinced that Pigpen had cast a curse upon him. He snuck up on Pigpen when Pigpen was having a sponge bath in his cell and shanked him. The shank didn’t have the desired effect, and now Pigpen was even more dangerous, charging his attacker like a stuck wild boar.

  Campbell caught sight of Pigpen hotly pursuing his would-be killer, with no clothes on and a shank in his hand. “What the fuck’s he doing now?”

  Guards let the black inmate run into a cell for safety, then moved him down into the hole and protective custody.

  For all his unsettling and repugnant qualities, Pigpen was a biker brother, and so the hostilities with the Caribbean inmates became Campbell’s concern as well. At this time, Campbell had a job on the range changing light bulbs. A perk of the job was that it meant he could wear a belt with a row of screwdrivers on it. In the absence of guns in holsters, screwdrivers on a tool belt were the next best thing.

  Campbell’s job allowed him to approach the Caribbean prisoner hiding out in the hole.

  “Howard has no hard feelings,” Campbell said.

  Campbell’s hands were on his tool belt, close to the screwdrivers, like a cowboy ready to draw a gun.

  “Do you have a problem?” Campbell asked.

  There was no reply. The prisoner still balked at coming out.

  The next day in the yard, Campbell and Larry Vallentyne were just wearing T-shirts and shorts as the weather was too hot for anything heavier. Campbell noticed the curious clothing of more than a dozen Caribbean inmates in an area called Mosquito Alley, where there were a couple of benches. They wore winter coats and heavy boots, as if they were about to head out in a blizzard. They also had newspapers on their laps. “They’re all carrying shanks,” Campbell concluded as he and Vallentyne walked over to the Caribbeans’ benches.