Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  For his part, Campbell was determined to stay as positive as possible as he settled into another prison term, even though he maintained he hadn’t been part of Close-Up’s drug conspiracy. He told himself, “I guess I’ll make up for the stuff I didn’t get caught for.”

  It was in the Millhaven assessment area that Campbell heard startling news regarding his old friend and would-be murder target Brian (Bo) Beaucage. It had always seemed as if Beaucage was on borrowed time. Beaucage had a long-standing problem with heroin, and he had accumulated a dangerous list of enemies. Campbell personally knew of plans for a hit against Beaucage, since he had been approached to carry it out. “Wayne Kelly told me that he wanted Brian Beaucage killed. He wanted me to do it. I liked Beaucage. I went and told him. I didn’t like Wayne Kelly. Wayne Kelly was a very smart guy. He read a lot of books on brainwashing, things like that. In the end, he turned out to be someone not to be trusted. He was a manipulator.”

  Beaucage wasn’t one to leave a grudge—let alone a murder contract against him—unattended. However, before he could do anything about Kelly, his own fate was determined by someone he considered a friend. Frank Passarelli of the Loners Motorcyle Club killed him in a rooming house on Lansdowne Avenue in west end Toronto after a night of drugs and pornography and an argument over a woman. Brian Beaucage, perhaps the most feared of the Dirty Dozen of the Kingston prison riots, died because he had a woman in his room and asked Passarelli to leave. “No one is going to ask me to leave for some girl,” Passarelli allegedly said, according to the prosecutor who got him convicted of second-degree murder for bludgeoning Beaucage to death.

  By the time police found Beaucage’s body on March 4, 1991, his remains had been chewed over by Bouvier dogs owned by another tenant in the rooming house. Beaucage had made it to age forty-three. Seventeen of those years were spent behind bars. Aside from the damage done by the dogs, his head was almost totally severed from his body, an event that became known in the biker world as “Fifty Whacks with an Axe.” After all the hard situations he had survived, he had been killed over a few words, just as Campbell had almost killed him over words a half-dozen years earlier.

  As Campbell lay on his cell bunk and heard of the murder on television, he felt a wave of disgust towards Beaucage’s killer. “He must have been asleep,” Campbell says. “He had to give it to him in his sleep. Brian wasn’t no slouch.… My thoughts, when I first heard that, was to think, ‘What a coward. He couldn’t do it when he wasn’t sleeping.’ ”

  Campbell was still housed in the Millhaven assessment area when Close-Up rushed into his cell.

  “Guess who got killed?” Close-Up was obviously in a good mood.

  “Who?”

  “Wayne Kelly.”

  Campbell recalls, “It didn’t excite me, but he [Close-Up] was excited. He [Kelly] was known as NG. No Good. Not to be trusted.”

  Kelly, who had floated the contract to have Beaucage killed, was shot to death in a Richmond Hill basement by David (Skinny) Nelson. As Campbell heard the story, Kelly had been using heroin when Nelson walked in on him. It’s never safe to walk in on a drug user who has been awake for a couple of days, especially when he has a loaded gun. Skinny Nelson hadn’t been considered a violent guy, which led Campbell to conclude that Kelly must have fired first. “I was kind of surprised that that happened. He nailed him right in the head with the first shot. That’s what I heard.”

  Nelson was charged with first-degree murder after he sought help at Richmond Hill’s York Central Hospital for gunshot wounds to his stomach. Murder’s always at least a little unsettling, even in Campbell’s world, but it was never totally shocking when serious drug users met unnatural ends. So it also wasn’t surprising when Skinny Nelson died of a drug overdose not so long after that in Collins Bay. “This was a heavy crew.”

  Campbell’s conditions improved markedly when he was transferred from the Millhaven assessment centre to the low-security Bath detention camp. It would take only a few minutes to walk from Millhaven to Bath—if you could somehow make it past the armed guards and the double gates and the razor-wired fences—but the two institutions are in fact worlds apart. Millhaven is designed to hide you away and severely restrict your every movement, while Bath is preparation for life on the outside. Bath is ringed by a fence and barbed wire, but inside that fence men live in trailers or houses and often barbecue their own meals.

  An official Campbell knew at the Millhaven assessment centre made sure that prisoners he liked—or who would pay him two thousand dollars—were sent to Bath and not to a heavy institution such as Collins Bay. The official was a fat, often drunk man who liked to belly-fight bikers and steal chocolate bars from their cells. His wife was dying of cancer and he was clearly becoming unhinged by stress and loss. Once, a prisoner tied a string to a Mars chocolate bar and placed it in the hallway. When the portly guard bent over to pick it up, the prisoner yanked on the string. It took several more tries before the official caught on that the prisoner was fishing for him.

  “Fuck you,” he finally snorted before waddling off.

  Other times, the fat official announced that he was taking prisoners off to a work detail. Then it was down to the kitchen, where they would dine on pilfered steak. The official was eventually fired for corruption.

  Not long after arriving back in custody, Campbell got Class of 91 tattooed onto his chest, using the high E-string of a guitar and the small motor of a transistor radio. He was given a job as clerk, ordering clothing and supplies for a couple of hours a day. A prison official noted in his file that he “works well in a difficult area and has learned the job quickly with little supervision.” Much of the rest of his time was spent working out. As prison stays went, it was relatively comfortable. One counsellor wrote in his file: “Lorne appears to have a positive attitude and is a very pleasant individual.” In one psychological test, Campbell was asked if he thought of himself as a worthless person. “Not at all,” he replied. He gave the same answer when asked if he felt that life wasn’t worth living. Asked if thoughts of suicide kept coming into his mind, Campbell replied: “Definitely not.”

  He was classed as a multiple recidivist with a maladaptive lifestyle, but staff also concluded that Campbell wasn’t out of control and lacking impulse control. To the contrary, he appeared very much in command of himself, however wild his actions might appear to an outsider. In the world of freelance debt collection, beating someone with a hammer was a logical method of enforcing verbal contracts. “Violence was planned and designed for effect rather than impulsive + uncontrolled,” his file states.

  There was also a certain order to his personal interactions, staff concluded. He told a psychologist that he deeply loved his wife, Charmaine, whom he had been with for seventeen years. That said, he also didn’t feel any guilt over a string of one-night stands during his married life. This was simply part of the biker lifestyle, as he told things, and he gave no hint of ever wanting to leave that lifestyle or the Satan’s Choice. His case management officer wrote: “Still member of Satan’s Choice. Very ‘solid’ with his club.”

  For Charmaine, this was the second time she’d had to deal with her husband doing federal prison time. Since quitting school as a young teen, she had always managed to support herself, working in an office and at the Mitsubishi plant in Midland that made colour television tubes, and then dancing in strip clubs across the province. Through it all, even while dancing, she remained a loyal and loving wife. “She was always there for me. She visited without fail. She was doing everything for me.”

  Campbell was proud of how Charmaine always managed to hold things together, even though life had never been easy. Oshawa in the 1960s and 1970s had a reputation as a city with lots of good unionized jobs, and perhaps that’s why her parents moved the family there from Nova Scotia. Her parents split after the move, and Charmaine learned early on to stay positive in difficult times. “She never had an enemy in the world. Everybody loved her.”

  Among her friends
was a former co-worker at Mitsubishi named Evelyn Hughes. Charmaine and Evelyn had met in 1986, when they were both taking a weekend course at Georgian College in Barrie to obtain their motorcycle licences. Evelyn was impressed with Charmaine’s no-crap attitude towards an instructor who didn’t seem to think women should ride motorcycles, and who went out of his way to make the course difficult for Charmaine and Evelyn in particular. In the end, they both got their licences. “We were the only two girls that passed,” Evelyn says. “There were five or six of us.” Soon they were enjoying regular potato pancake breakfasts together as friends.

  Evelyn hit the roads on a maroon 750 Suzuki while Charmaine rode a black one. Getting a Harley to fit a smallish woman simply wasn’t in the cards, but the Suzuki frame was a manageable size for Evelyn. “I could reach the ground on it,” Evelyn recalls. “We could leave the guys in the dust, and we often did.”

  Evelyn was a comfort to Charmaine when Charmaine went into hospital for a hysterectomy. It was during this operation that doctors discovered Charmaine had advanced cancer. She was transferred to hospital in Kingston, where medical treatment was better. Evelyn and another friend, Jacquie Ross, had stayed with her for the last seven weeks, providing whatever comfort they could, but it was clear their friend’s health wouldn’t be getting better. Campbell was allowed out on day passes to visit her and given permission to sleep in a cot by her hospital bed in the cancer ward. The cancer had hit Charmaine’s lymph nodes, so they all knew the end wasn’t far away. Without a morphine derivative, the final months would have been unbearable for her. “It hurt her even to blink,” Campbell says. She would alternate between seeming to be worlds away and being totally focused and in the moment. “She’d be not there, then she’d be sharp as a pin.”

  On April 14, 1993, ten months after Campbell got the news that Charmaine had cancer, she died in his arms at home. “She was coherent right to the day she died. She had cancer everywhere but her brain. She was a beautiful woman. Beautiful personality.” Jacquie had stayed with her for the last seven weeks, and she and Evelyn lovingly bathed her, washed her hair and did her makeup before anyone from the funeral home arrived.

  Among those who sent their condolences was Dave, the undercover cop who had attended their wedding, eaten at their table and weathered Charmaine’s verbal blast after she learned he was really a cop working against her husband. “He wanted to come to her funeral. His captain told him he couldn’t.”

  Campbell was on parole at the time of her death. He moved in with his friend Larry Vallentyne so that he wouldn’t be alone. “I don’t think I was right for a long time. I was devastated, just devastated.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Smugglers’ Alley

  We were making money hand over fist.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  It didn’t take long after Campbell’s release from prison in March 1993 for a friend to call with an employment offer. It wasn’t parole-board approved. Campbell was asked to provide security for smugglers moving cigarettes from the United States to Canada via the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation/Akwesasne Reserve that spanned upstate New York and eastern Ontario on the St. Lawrence River. He would be working for two white guys from the Cornwall area with ties to Mohawk smugglers, and organized criminals of various ethnic groups in Ontario and Quebec. About a dozen such groups operated in the area, and smugglers needed protection from their underworld rivals. Campbell picked three helpers from the Oshawa Satan’s Choice and started accepting jobs that paid him as much as $3,000 or $4,000 a day. In what seemed like no time, Campbell was so flush with money that he gave a hundred dollars to a panhandler in Cornwall while leaving a Mexican restaurant. “He was just elated. I thought about it later. I thought, I probably killed the bugger. If he goes around anybody out there with a hundred-dollar bill, they’d kill him.”

  His parole officer sensed something was afoot. “What have you been up to?” he asked during one meeting.

  “Not too much. Sitting in the backyard.”

  “How many trucks do you have?” the parole officer asked.

  “I’ve just got a car.”

  “That’s not what I hear.”

  “What do you hear?”

  “You haven’t got a few trucks?”

  “No. Why?”

  The parole officer didn’t answer.

  “Why would you say that?”

  The parole officer didn’t say why he would say that.

  It was early morning work, as Campbell stood guard while smugglers picked up cases of cigarettes on the American side of the St. Lawrence River. One pickup spot was a warehouse with visible stacks of bills, which he estimates ran well into the millions of dollars. Campbell often sat waiting in a boat laden with eighty cases of cigarettes, holding a massive firearm. He kept his eye on hijackers who prowled the shore in speedboats, ready to pounce and steal Campbell’s cargo. “They’d see you with a machine gun and just go, ‘Fuck that.’

  “There’s nothing like going down the river at eighty miles an hour on a flat-bottom boat with a bunch of cigarettes. You have a machine gun on your lap and you don’t trust the guy with you and he doesn’t trust you.”

  It was about a forty-minute trip on the St. Lawrence River, and Campbell only had to make one trip a night. Each boat held about eighty cases, each of which contained fifty cartons of cigarettes. Once on the Canadian side of the river, Campbell and his cronies moved the cigarettes to safe houses, where they could be stored temporarily. “They had houses all along the river. They were paying people just to use their houses.”

  Cigarettes bound for Quebec were then loaded onto bogus Purolator vans, ambulances or even a limousine, complete with a driver in a suit and black cap. Earlier smugglers had used transport trucks, but police caught on to them, forcing them into more discreet vehicles. Smaller trucks were often bought at a gas station/car lot north of Toronto, whose owners had invariably purchased them at auctions. They were fitted with special switches to allow all their lights to be shut off instantly, making them hard to see when parked at night. The vehicles were further modified with ultra-hard suspensions so they would ride high off the road even when carrying heavy loads. “The cops see a low truck, they pull it over,” Campbell says.

  Ontario was safer ground for the smugglers than Quebec. Getting caught only meant losing the load for a first offence, losing the vehicle for a second, and the possibility of imprisonment for a third. Since the trucks were registered under a multitude of names, the odds of anyone being nabbed for multiple offences were minimal. The smugglers didn’t bother to disguise the vans heading to Toronto; it wasn’t worth the bother.

  The smugglers’ level of planning impressed Campbell. Guards were stationed on highway overpasses to watch for police both on the roads and in the air. Night-vision goggles allowed them to see high in the sky, to detect police surveillance aircraft that couldn’t be heard or seen from the road. They also had jumbo-sized cellphones that looked like something out of the North African conflict in World War II. “It was so fucking organized I couldn’t believe it.”

  Smugglers had to budget for boats, trucks, safe house storage, security and drivers. That said, the profits were staggering. The wholesale value of each boatload was about $56,000, depending on the brand of cigarettes, while the retail value for consumers was roughly $320,000.

  There were money-counting machines that could quickly detect counterfeit bills. The few times bogus bills were found, the culprits acted mortified and quickly offered proper currency—as well as a generous tip—to mollify Campbell’s business partners. Cash was stuffed into duffle bags, to the tune of $500,000 a bag, and it was the job of Campbell and his crew to protect and move that money. “Every day, there was at least a half-million dollars we’d take over to the island to pay for the cigarettes.”

  His crew included Musclehead and Stan from the Oshawa Choice. They each received a thousand dollars a week as base pay, plus extras for running errands, delivering money or doing extra security work. On Stan’s
first day on the job, his task was to bring $500,000 in a duffle bag to the water’s edge, where he was to give it to a man who would come by in a boat.

  “His name’s going to be Bob,” Stan was told.

  A man came by in a boat and stopped in front of Stan.

  “Are you Bob?” Stan asked.

  “No, I’m Jack. Bob’s sick today.”

  Stan was armed with a .38 revolver, which was nothing to snicker at, but Jack was packing a machine gun, which could have cut Stan in half. “He [Stan] didn’t want to be on the boat with him.” As is often the case, the man with the bigger gun and the most bullets won out, and so Stan stepped into the boat with the $500,000 and headed out to the middle of the waters with Jack. The middle of the St. Lawrence isn’t a comforting place to be in the middle of the night when you’re carrying $500,000 in cash and sitting across from a stranger with a loaded machine gun. Stan stared at Jack and his gun. Jack stared back at Stan and his .38. The only sound was the whir of the motor. As Campbell tells it, “There was only smugglers and lakers [commercial vessels] on the water at night. They were just looking at each other.”

  To Stan’s great relief, Jack turned out to be telling the truth. Stan’s first job didn’t end with him shot and dumped overboard. Later that day, Stan told Campbell, “Lorne, if it was anybody else but you, I’d have been gone.”

  Mornings often meant breakfast in the dining room of a Cornwall hotel, where they could expect to see RCMP officers eating a few tables over, close to members of the military. As a professional courtesy, smugglers and police generally left each other alone while getting ready for their workdays, except to perhaps say hi.