Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  “Who’s in charge here?” Campbell asked.

  No one answered.

  “Is this Stab-a-Biker Day?” Campbell continued. “So come to my cell—3A-10—and stab me.”

  By now, Campbell and Vallentyne were backed by Flex, Nutty Comeau, Rick Sauvé, Jeff McLeod and Paul Rogers, a karate black belt who joined the Choice in 1984, just before he was sentenced for armed robbery. They carried baseball bats from the recreation shack. The guards just stepped back and let events unfold. “They knew what was happening, but they didn’t do anything. It was quite obvious. It was the day after Pigpen got stabbed.”

  None of the newspaper-toting men in winter wear appeared eager to take up the invitation. One of them denied that the prisoner who’d shanked Pigpen during his sponge bath was part of their group.

  “Lorne, that guy’s not with us.”

  Campbell wasn’t satisfied. He let the others know that they had better keep that prisoner away from the bikers. The Caribbean inmates would still be responsible for his conduct. “Four months from now or six months from now, he’s going to be with you.”

  The Caribbean prisoners stayed silent. Their eyes said that they didn’t want things to go further. A baseball bat can do a lot of damage quickly, and the Choice controlled the recreation area, including the rack of baseball bats. “It just ended right there.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Shaping Up

  A lot of people are in there [prison] for a reason.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  Even in prisons, staff had to have some level of trust in the inmates. Prisoners were allowed to cut each other’s hair with scissors and shave each other with old-fashioned straight razors, while prisoners who did leather craft were given sharp knives and glue that could get them high. Most of the time, prisoners lived up to the trust, but not always.

  Campbell once saw an inmate with a nasty gash that ran across his throat from ear to ear. Campbell inquired of a friend how that had happened. He was told that the man with the gash had been sitting in a barber’s chair, enjoying a soothing shave and chatting about a fellow inmate. The mellow man in the chair had said something to the effect of: “That guy’s a stool pigeon.” The last words he heard, before he was rushed to the infirmary across the hall, came from the barber behind him.

  “That’s my partner,” the barber said, putting the blade in motion.

  Much of Campbell’s time in Collins Bay was spent in the weight room, where one of the stronger men was Jamie Scott Munro. He gave Campbell one of his first haircuts in Collins Bay. “He said, ‘How do you want your hair done, Lorne?’ I said, ‘Make me look as much like Charles Bronson as you can. There are many big muscular guys in here.’ It was jailhouse humour. From then on, Jamie cut my hair all the time I was in Collins Bay.”

  Munro’s pleasant demeanour was at odds with his horrific backstory. He was just twenty-two in 1981 when he was sentenced to life in prison without eligibility for parole for twelve years. The judge who put him away, Mr. Justice Frank Callaghan, called Munro’s crime “one of the most callous killings of a police officer this municipality has seen for many years.” Munro and his older brother Craig were convicted of the murder of Toronto police constable Michael Sweet during a botched robbery at George’s Bourbon Street tavern on Queen Street West on March 14, 1980. It was a breathtakingly stupid, cold crime. Jamie and Craig were robbing the tavern. They were trying to raise a thousand dollars to pay a fine against Craig for possession of a dangerous weapon. Sweet was thirty years old and the father of three daughters when he was patrolling in Toronto’s downtown that night. Just after two in the morning, a restaurant employee flagged down Sweet and his partner, telling them there was an armed robbery under way and there had been hostages taken.

  Sweet and his partner tried to sneak into the restaurant through the basement, but they were detected. Sweet was shot in the chest while his partner was able to escape and alert reinforcements. Sweet’s injuries were serious, but there was still time to save him when the Emergency Task Force arrived quickly on the scene, led by Sergeant Edward (Eddie) Adamson. His paramilitary officers were ready to rush into the restaurant, but they were ordered to stand down as negotiations began. For the next ninety minutes, Adamson and his fellow officers heard Sweet plead to be set free so that his three little girls wouldn’t grow up without a father. Eventually, as negotiations dragged on, Sweet’s voice went quiet.

  Eddie Adamson was the second casualty of that evening, but the bullet that killed him wouldn’t be fired for another quarter century. Adamson couldn’t stop thinking about Sweet and the Munro brothers and the sound of Sweet’s voice as he died that morning. He couldn’t outrun his sense of guilt for not risking his career and rushing into the restaurant sooner, despite the order to stand down from his senior officer. On October 5, 2005, eleven years after his retirement, Eddie Adamson gathered up some notebooks and press clippings about Sweet. He also took his handgun with him to a motel room in Simcoe County, where he ended his life.

  Campbell didn’t know any of this when Munro was cutting his hair that day in Collins Bay. He also didn’t know that, on the day he was sentenced for killing Sweet, Jamie Munro softly told the court: “When people used to ask me, ‘How do you feel about this incident?’ I used to lower my eyes and drop my head in shame, because I felt there were no words that could express how very sorry I felt for the officer and his family, and mine.… I wish there was some way I could undo this whole thing, but unfortunately I can’t.”

  Had he tried to explain, Munro might have mentioned his upbringing, and how eight of the Munro children had criminal records, as did their father. But Munro didn’t talk about the murder while behind bars. He was considered a pleasant guy in the weight room and a friendly barber, who kept his thoughts to himself. “He was a good guy. I liked him. He worked out a lot.”

  Campbell was reunited in Collins Bay with his old mentor Bernie Guindon. Guindon hadn’t mellowed much while serving his drug conviction. Between his boxing and his brawling, his nose had been broken eighteen times, to the point that it was difficult to breathe. He hoped that would be corrected through an operation that left his beak taped up and filled with gauze. He was in this painful state of recovery one day when a tall girl in her early teens came walking by as part of a group of Special Olympians who were at an event hosted by the inmate committee. It was considered a personal growth thing, with prisoners helping coordinate their events and awarding them medals.

  The girl apparently had Tourette’s syndrome, and made sudden jerky movements with her arms. When she was close to Guindon, one of her arms flew out wildly and smashed him directly on the nose. That gave the Frog his nineteenth broken nose.

  “You do that again and I’ll kill you,” hissed Guindon, his eyes watering from the blow.

  The Special Olympian marched away. “She knew what she was doing,” Guindon recalls, without a trace of a smile.

  One of the senior guards at Collins Bay had once been a striker for the Satan’s Choice. He seemed to have a soft spot for the club, even if he was no longer part of it. Certainly, no guards under him objected, or even seemed to notice, when Guindon hosted a party of some eighteen inmates in his cell. Long gone were the days when Guindon threatened to take a baseball bat to anyone in his fold who dabbled with drugs. Now, Guindon was the master of “Frog Logs,” his extra-strong hash oil cigarettes. His special recipe called for twenty-nine rolling papers, each saturated with oil that was heated up in a “hot plate” made of burning toilet paper stuffed around the rim of his metal toilet. They were powerful and they were consistent, just like a good biker in Guindon’s road days. “One Frog Log will last you thirty-five minutes,” Guindon boasts.

  The guards knew about the Frog Logs, but didn’t seem to care. They were far more concerned about prisoners cooking eggs in their cells than puffing mega-joints. Eggs in the prisoners’ possession must have been stolen from the cafeteria. Cannabis, meanwhile, only made prisoners passive and less prone to violenc
e. It was different for pills and moonshine, as they tended to make prisoners aggressive. “Valiums and booze are no-nos,” says Guindon.

  It was inside Collins Bay that Campbell smoked his first and only joint behind bars. It happened while listening to the music of blues man Stevie Ray Vaughan. Campbell played some guitar himself and that only helped him appreciate Vaughan’s mastery of the instrument. He was so overwhelmed that he threw his earphones across the room, for a reason he still cannot explain. “I was so high. I thought he was playing three guitars at once.”

  When Campbell arrived in Collins Bay, some guards there still chuckled about a story from Guindon’s boxing days back in the 1970s, when two guards from the prison took him to Windsor for a bout. After Guindon won his fight, they all retired to a party at the Choice clubhouse. “I wanted to get a broad down there,” Guindon recalls. “I said to them, ‘I’ll get you one too.’ ” The guards thought this was a fine idea. “We partied at the clubhouse on a pass,” Guindon says. When it was done, the guards were so partied out and exhausted that it was Guindon who drove them all back to Kingston.

  Guindon took it upon himself to train Campbell. He told Campbell that hard abs were the key to protecting his kidneys from body blows. To toughen his core, Guindon coached Campbell to do plenty of hard calisthenics, including the tough core work the Cubans had so impressed him with back at the 1971 Pan Am Games. Then there was twenty minutes of skipping and a 6½-mile run. Guindon sometimes tried to spice things up during workouts. Once, he kicked Campbell hard when he was doing push-ups, just because he felt the urge. “Everybody backed away. They thought it was a fight. I couldn’t stop laughing.” Another time, Guindon smacked Campbell across the stomach with a board while he was doing leg raises. “I had him in the best shape of his life,” Guindon says.

  Campbell paid the experience forward, pushing a fellow Collins Bay resident, career thug and former pro boxer Joe Dinardo (a.k.a. Gabor Magaostovics and Joe Simon), to get back in shape. Dinardo was in his early forties and had packed on about twenty pounds since the 1960s, when he boxed under the nickname “Ironman” and enjoyed moderate success as a heavyweight out of Toronto’s Lansdowne Athletic Club. He was described in the press during his ring days as “211 pounds, 6-foot-4 inches, wedge-shaped from shoulders to waist.” His trainer, Vince Bagnato, was quoted as saying, “We’re teaching him to keep his hands in his pockets when he doesn’t have them in someone’s kisser.”

  Dinardo was in prison this time for the robbery of a jewellery store in Toronto’s swanky Yorkville neighbourhood, but his criminal record also included stretches for arson, forgery, assault, theft and weapons offences. His body bore the scars of an arson gone wrong, when he had to drive himself to hospital for treatment of burns. In the murder trial of Peter Demeter, a Mississauga millionaire developer, Dinardo told the court that in July 1973, Demeter’s wife, Christina, a former model, offered him ten thousand dollars to kill her husband. A week after she allegedly made the offer, she was found in the garage of their home, bludgeoned to death with a crowbar.

  It was part of prison lore how, back in the 1970s, Dinardo and Ken Goobie of the Choice had a bare-knuckle brawl worthy of John L. Sullivan. Perhaps they were angry at each other, or perhaps they were just curious to know who was the better fighter, or perhaps it was a little of both. Whatever the case, it was a great fight. “The older white guys are probably still talking about it. The black guys didn’t care. They fought to a draw. The guards just let them go. Apparently it was something. No rounds, no rules, no timekeeper, no winner. But I did hear it lasted half an hour or so. The thing that stands out in everybody’s mind is that they fought to a draw. I believe they were friends after that.”

  Campbell got Dinardo running, along with bikers Paul Rogers and Tom Raimier. “I got him out there. [I told him,] ‘You’re out of shape.’ The guys who run in jail run every day. It’s an everyday thing.”

  Campbell pushed himself into shape to run a twenty-kilometre race on the track, and Larry Vallentyne was a trainer of sorts. Vallentyne had the duty of handing him water when necessary. Most of the time, Vallentyne lay on his back, swigging moonshine, enjoying the spectacle as Campbell pounded around the track. “At the halfway point, he goes, ‘Well, you’re downhill now.’ I felt like kicking him in the head.” Instead, Campbell shot his friend a dirty look. “He didn’t catch the stare.” Campbell finished the race in third.

  There was also a chance to work off some aggression playing floor hockey. Fewer inmates at Collins Bay were killers than at Millhaven, so players could fight without worrying so much that it would necessarily lead to murder. “In floor hockey, that’s where you’d see the fights, really nice fights. Just fights all over the place. Kicking each other in the head. The guards just let it go. I didn’t play, but I was a good spectator. In the pen, guys take it very seriously.” After one hard-fought 1-0 victory over 1 Block, Larry Vallentyne of 3 Block seized banners that read “1 block’s #1” and set them ablaze. The guards let this go too.

  There were two gyms on the same floor at Collins Bay. Campbell was skipping in one of them one afternoon when three inmates walked in. Campbell didn’t pay them much attention as he was focusing on his workout regimen, which at that time consisted of the military 5BX Plan plus running and skipping. The three men were clearly serious, but Campbell wasn’t about to be intimidated. He was doing his workout and just wanted to be left alone.

  He started skipping towards a barbell bar that might make a handy club if things got ugly.

  Larry Vallentyne came in another entrance, away from the three men and close to Campbell. “Lorne, you’ve got to leave,” he said. “Lorne, you’ve got to leave,” Vallentyne repeated.

  Campbell kept skipping closer to the barbell.

  “Lorne, there’s a dead guy in the next room,” Vallentyne said.

  Suddenly it made sense, and Campbell almost ran back to his cell. The three strangers didn’t want to do anything to him. They had just beaten someone to death with dumbbells in the adjoining gym and now they wanted a quiet place to talk.

  Not long after that, the prison detective squad came by Campbell’s cell to ask if he knew anything about the killing.

  “Well, I know somebody was killed.”

  “Were you here when it happened?”

  “I was in the other gym.”

  “Do you know anything about this?”

  “Well, I know he was only nineteen and never should have been sent here in the first place.”

  Campbell later heard that the kid was killed because he told someone in a county jail to go fuck himself. That inmate made up a story about the kid and told it to other inmates. Thinking they were carrying out prison justice, the three men beat the kid to death. Campbell wasn’t about to rat out the killers, but he couldn’t help but feel bad for the kid who’d died.

  Campbell was an organizer for the prison powerlifting competition. It was a serious event and spotters signed up in advance to help out, moving the barbells as needed and, if necessary, lifting them off the lifters.

  There was one extremely powerful inmate who hadn’t signed up as a competitor or as a spotter. He was in and out of shock therapy, and a hard man to understand or predict.

  “I want to be a spotter,” he told Campbell on the day of the event.

  “We’ve already got our spotters.”

  “I want to be a spotter.”

  Campbell knew he had to be careful with his tone and words, but he wasn’t about to be bullied either.

  “Listen, if you had talked to us even as late as yesterday, you could be a spotter. But we’ve already got our spotters now.”

  “I don’t care. I want to be a spotter.”

  There was no point extending the argument, and Campbell started to walk away. A couple of steps down the hall, he reminded himself that the matter hadn’t really been settled. There are some wrongly accused people in prison, but there are plenty of others who truly must be separated from society. This man was clear
ly one of the latter. “A lot of people are in there for a reason,” Campbell says.

  Campbell wheeled around and glared at him, eye to eye.

  “Don’t even think about it. I will slit your throat.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Freedom

  You’re suspected for twelve homicides.

  CORRECTIONAL OFFICER to Lorne Campbell

  Campbell had a parole hearing scheduled for June 1985, but his classification officer told him not to get his hopes up. “I don’t think you’re getting it,” he said. “I didn’t recommend you. There are reasons why. Your record, and you’re suspected for the homicides.”

  Campbell was shocked, and pressed to find out what he meant by “the homicides.” He learned that his police file stated he was a suspect in twelve unsolved murders. “It wasn’t fair. I was a violent guy, but I didn’t commit twelve killings.”

  Years later, he would try to get his prison files through the Freedom of Information Act, only to be told that too much time had passed and they were unavailable. He was able to get a parole officer to give him a glimpse of his security record, but it showed no names of men he’d supposedly killed besides Matiyek. “It had no names on there. I was looking for them. It was upsetting when I read that. I said, ‘I don’t deserve that.’ ”

  There was a certain whiff of irony here that Campbell didn’t find amusing. Try as he might, he couldn’t get sent to prison for shooting Matiyek to death. Now that he was inside prison anyway, it looked as if he couldn’t get out because of other killings for which he had never even been charged and which he swore he hadn’t committed.

  At his parole hearing, Campbell was asked to talk about the night he took a hammer to Tulip at the Satan’s Choice clubhouse on Kintyre Avenue. He wasn’t about to fake contrition for what he thought was a righteous beating and what would have been a righteous execution, in his opinion. “I said I have lots of remorse in me but I can’t have remorse for somebody burning the clubhouse down.”