Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

Sometimes, Campbell’s party was joined by Dwayne, a Mohawk who would carry on an entire conversation using only different inflections and combinations of “huh.” Dwayne seemed to assume he could behave with total impunity, and from what Campbell saw, he was correct, as he was generally surrounded by four or five other Mohawk men who gave the impression they would proudly die for him. On occasion, Dwayne placed a big bowl of cocaine on the table, in plain view of other diners, and snorted a long line, as if this were a normal part of anyone’s breakfast.

  Like the operators of many a thriving business, the smugglers threw a company Christmas party, with a live band and presents and prizes under a tree. First prize at the “Smugglers’ Ball” was a four-by-four truck, while the runner-up received a high-speed cigarette boat.

  That night at the banquet, a blond woman came on to another woman at Campbell’s table. When a love connection wasn’t made with her, the blonde made a pass at Campbell, who also rejected her. It’s not pleasant when your partner publicly tries to stray from you. It adds insult to injury when your partner attempts to stray—with both genders—and is rejected by both right in front of you while your peers watch in amusement. So it wasn’t surprising that the husband of the blond woman didn’t react well when Campbell told her to cut it out. “They were swingers,” Campbell says.

  No sooner had Campbell brushed her off than the husband sucker-punched him in the nose. Campbell responded with a stiff left, then threw him down the stairs. There, the husband found himself questioned by Stan from the Oshawa Choice, who was working security for the soiree.

  “What happened to you?” Stan asked.

  “I got into a fight with Lorne.”

  Out of loyalty to his friend, Stan caught him hard in the head with a karate-style roundhouse kick. They were on slushy ground and both fell over, which embarrassed Stan.

  The brawling aside, it was an enjoyable evening, even though Campbell didn’t win the truck or the speedboat and someone stole envelopes of cash from a hotel room that were intended as gifts for attendees. “That was a good party.”

  If Campbell had known the identities of some of his partners in the smuggling enterprise, the level of organization wouldn’t have been so surprising. Working alongside the bikers, Mafiosi, Native gangsters and Asian gang members were top-level executives of the tobacco industry. In an effort to exploit the high taxes on cigarettes, tobacco executives were selling large caches of contraband smokes to smugglers through middlemen. This allowed the businesspeople to work both the legitimate and the illegal ends of the multi-billion-dollar tobacco market. In December 1998, executives in the Northern Brands International unit of the RJR Nabisco Holdings Corporation pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Binghamton, New York, to criminal charges stemming from a scheme to smuggle cigarettes into Canada through the Akwesasne Reserve and avoid both Canadian and American taxes.

  Sometimes Campbell rode shotgun on loads bound for Chinese- and Vietnamese-born criminals in upscale Toronto neighbourhoods. He arrived at dawn, and the people receiving the loads were precise about the time; showing up a little early or a little late wasn’t permitted, and often Campbell had to cool his heals at a nearby McDonald’s restaurant while waiting for his time. Then the truck would be backed into a laneway. Some of those lanes were so narrow he had to retract the truck’s mirrors so it would fit. Someone dropped a tarp in front and in back of the truck and Campbell remained inside in the dark as it was unloaded. No words were exchanged with whoever was picking up the cigarettes, and within fifteen minutes—not much longer than it takes to drive through a car wash—he was back on the road.

  Campbell also acted as a bodyguard when money was exchanged, making sure there were no rip-offs when cash was laid out on the table. For two weeks in October 1993, he was paid to stay in the west end of Toronto, watching television in a Holiday Inn bar near Highway 401 as the Blue Jays tried for their second straight World Series title. Campbell wasn’t a big baseball fan, but he still got caught up in the excitement when Joe Carter homered for his series-winning run.

  A few problems cropped up when some junior members of Campbell’s side routinely came up a couple of hundred dollars short. A former Vietnamese soldier who was receiving the money suggested Campbell help one of the offending men improve his counting. “You take one of them. You take him and snip his finger off,” he said, sounding as if he were giving tips on how to prune a rose bush. He wanted the offender to confess that he had been skimming money. “If he don’t talk, you snip off his other finger,” the former soldier continued. If there was still no confession, he advised, “You snip off his wrist.”

  This was too much even for Campbell. He knew they shouldn’t steal, but he had got to know them on ironworking jobs and didn’t think they were bad guys.

  “Slow down,” he said. “They don’t need that.”

  It was clear the former soldier was speaking from personal experience. “He’s serious,” Campbell says. “He ain’t trying to scare me. This guy’s done it. He wants me to do it. He was not excited. He was saying, ‘This is how you do it.’ ”

  Throughout the summer, the atmosphere in Akwesasne smuggling circles took on an increasingly Wild West flavour. Once, on-reserve gangsters who were standing just a few feet from Campbell opened fire with machine guns at an army helicopter overhead. The pilot clearly didn’t see or hear what was happening, as he hovered dangerously nearby. Campbell exploded at the gunmen.

  “If you shoot this down, they will bomb us,” he warned.

  Some of the Natives got too familiar for his liking and started calling him Harley Man. Campbell had never been big on nicknames and wasn’t starting now, especially with people from outside the club. “I said the next time you call me Harley Man, I’ll stab you in the throat.”

  Just the sight of a Mountie sitting in his cruiser was enough to enrage Dwayne one day. “Cookie, go down there and beat him up,” he ordered a Blackfoot from out west.

  Cookie seemed eager to begin his assignment, but Dwayne called him back for a few minutes. “Hey, wear your war paint,” Dwayne ordered.

  “It wasn’t a joke,” Campbell recalls. “Cookie goes down with his war paint, drug him out of the car and beat him, and nothing was done about it.”

  One afternoon in the summer of 1993, Campbell was on the reserve with two of his Native contacts as they talked about selling guns to a couple of white strangers. Campbell had a bad feeling about the strangers, and sent one of the Choice members to follow them. He reported back that they had driven to a fast food restaurant, where several police cars soon appeared.

  There had been increased heat from the police after someone threatened the life of Cornwall’s mayor—twice—and opened fire with an automatic rifle on a city building. Tensions were stoked by the shooting of a Québécois smuggler in the stomach for refusing to hire Natives to work with him. “I was on parole and my instincts told me it was time to move on. They hated to see me go, but understood and are still friends. I just wish I could have been there a year earlier.”

  The money was great, but Campbell didn’t second-guess his decision to leave. He didn’t fancy any more prison time and he had already made enough to buy a new Harley and a nice headstone for Charmaine’s grave. He hired a stoneworker to chisel into the granite the image of an owl gracefully landing “Charmaine collected owls, stuffed owls. Always. I just started getting her owls. She’d buy them everywhere she went.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Mostly Happy Trails

  Larry, you just about shot my dick off.

  LORNE CAMPBELL on things almost going horribly wrong at a party

  The May Two-Four long weekend is always a big one for Canadian bikers, as they’re expected to have their motorcycles up and running by then. It marks the official start of riding season, just as Sarasota Springs mark the full stride of race season for horse-happy bluebloods in the American South.

  “Do you want to go to a party with me?” Campbell asked Charmaine’s friend Evelyn in
1993, before the May 24 weekend.

  Evelyn balked.

  “Come on. Come on. You’re going.”

  Evelyn was a petite, pretty blonde with a natural smile who grew up on a farm near the Georgian Bay community of Midland. She ran track and played basketball at school and taught gymnastics at the YWCA. Perhaps her best sport was barrel racing in rodeos, a difficult test of horsemanship in which a rider directs her mount around a cloverleaf pattern of plastic or metal barrels in the fastest possible time. Evelyn was a strong rider. She could ride horses on the farm with no saddle or bridle. Campbell was particularly impressed by how she could get a horse to rear up on command, like a movie cowgirl, and expresses his admiration in a way befitting his past: “She does wheelies with the horses.”

  When she was fifteen, a photographer at the local paper took a shine to her and made her “Girl of the Week.” She wasn’t an eager subject. In the photo, her expression is somewhere between annoyed and threatened, and it appears she’s almost being stalked as she wraps herself in a denim jacket and turns away from the prying lens.

  As an adult, Evelyn was a volunteer for Child Find of Canada and Meals on Wheels and worked as a shift manager at Mitsubishi Electronics in Midland. She was also a sucker for any kind of stray or mistreated animal, and was rejected as a Humane Society volunteer when she voiced her strong opposition to euthanizing animals, saying she would take strays home with her instead. Campbell took to calling her Evie May—a nickname Vallentyne’s wife, Brenda, had already coined for her—after Elly May Clampett, the animal-loving beauty on the Beverly Hillbillies sitcom.

  Eventually, Evelyn stopped balking at Campbell’s invitation to attend the May 24 party. “I wanted him. I was just reeling him in. I had him all the time. I just made him work for it.”

  Campbell packed his guitar and collected Evelyn. They stopped for a beer at one of his old haunts, the biker-friendly Atherley Arms hotel outside Orillia. The Arms could have been renamed the Armpit, as it reeked of stale cigarettes and ten-cent draft from generations past. There was a stage for strippers, who also provided private lap and couch dances for a fee. Campbell and Evelyn headed far back from the stage area—or “Perverts’ Row”—to enjoy their beer.

  A stripper’s head snapped up when they sat down. She stopped mid-dance to wave at Campbell. Then, when her set was over, she pulled on a see-through housecoat and joined them, her back to Evelyn. Soon, their visitor went back onstage and resumed her show. “Oh, I know her from years ago,” Campbell told Evelyn.

  If not for her friendship with Charmaine, Evelyn would likely never have been drawn into Campbell’s circle. It didn’t take her long to learn that dating a biker wasn’t like going out with a stamp collector or curler or anyone with a more regular passion. Campbell was old school and wore his club colours whenever he rode his Harley. In the winter of 1994, he was with Evelyn, wearing his Satan’s Choice vest at the Highwayman Hotel in Orillia, when three men clearly felt the need to provoke him rather than just enjoy the hockey game on television. They kept bumping into Evelyn and her chair, as if begging for a response. “I just had enough of that,” Campbell recalls. “Said, ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ … Where there’s a lot of people, I always picked out the biggest guy. That’s my technique.”

  Campbell didn’t wait for an answer. “I knocked him off his chair. There’s blood all over the place. He’s crying.”

  Campbell looked down at the man blubbering on the floor. “Look at you, you baby.” Then Campbell turned to the other two men and said, “Do you really want a part of this?”

  They didn’t. Not long after that, the police arrived. The waitress stuck up for Campbell, while the bloodied man continued to cry. The police left without pressing charges, and the three men bought Campbell and Evelyn drinks.

  On another excursion, they rode northwest to Thunder Bay, where they stopped for an oil change and a visit to the Choice clubhouse. It should have taken just half a day. They found the clubhouse empty, and when they tried to leave, the door wouldn’t open. Campbell yanked it hard and it still didn’t move. They were locked inside and he realized they would need a key to get out.

  Evelyn contemplated jumping off the balcony, but it was a major fall even for a former gymnast. Had she survived that, she’d still need to scale a steel wall surrounding the premises. They were marooned for a day and a half with nothing to eat but a few chips and other munchies, until Campbell saw a man on the street and yelled at him to go to one of the members’ houses and send someone back.

  Larry Vallentyne had left the Choice in good standing in 1987 and remained a particularly good friend of the club. But a bullet fired in jest by a friend is just as dangerous as one from an enemy. So Campbell wasn’t too happy when Vallentyne brought a loaded .38 revolver and a .22 semi-automatic pistol to a party at his house in 1994.

  Evelyn was sitting on Campbell’s knee and Vallentyne was seated at the other side of the table. “All of a sudden it went off. Right through the chair.”

  Campbell couldn’t help but worry that the shooting wasn’t over. “It was a semi-automatic. The next shot is ready to go.”

  “Larry, do you realize what you did? You just about shot my dick off, Larry.”

  Vallentyne had the .22 in his hand and the .38 tucked in his belt.

  “Give me the gun, Larry.”

  Vallentyne wasn’t quick to respond, most likely because he wasn’t even close to sober.

  Campbell pressed his point. “Larry, you almost shot my dick off. I don’t want you to do that again, bro.”

  To a sober man, that would have sounded more than reasonable, but Vallentyne was nowhere near reasonable at the time. He paused for a few seconds, although it felt much longer to Campbell.

  “Yeah, okay,” he said finally.

  Another time, Campbell and Evelyn were at the home of Vallentyne and his wife, Brenda, along with Choice member Doug Hoyle and a striker. The striker remained outside with the wives on the deck as Campbell, Vallentyne and Hoyle went into the garage to talk. There, they sat around a small round table.

  “Put the pistols down,” Campbell ordered.

  They were all good friends, but it was generally better to discuss things without loaded guns, especially when there was booze around.

  Three guns were placed on the table.

  Campbell emptied them all into the baseboard of the garage, firing almost two dozen shots. “Now we’re even. We can sit here and talk.”

  The striker had no way of knowing what was going on inside the garage. It was also forbidden for a striker to question the actions of senior members. He could only imagine what Campbell was doing to his old friend as he heard the bursts of gunfire. “He was just white,” Evelyn recalls. “It was over for twenty minutes and he still hadn’t got his colour back. He looked like he wanted to run.”

  Evelyn tried to lighten things up by noting that she had just bought new tires for her Firebird. “All I could say was, ‘He better not put a hole in those tires or he’s paying for them.’ ”

  The striker didn’t laugh.

  Despite the happiness of his new relationship, Campbell couldn’t stop thinking about Comeau and Sauvé, still serving their life terms. Sauvé was now spending some of his time visiting schools, warning students to stay clear of a life of crime. He paid the $300-a-course tuition for psychology and criminology classes with the $5.10 a day he was paid for working in the store at Frontenac minimum-security institution in Kingston. He also sold wooden figures he carved in prison. Earning his tuition was tough, and so were the lockdowns that followed stabbings or other disturbances when he was trying to study.

  By February 1994, there were signs that people on the outside were listening to Comeau and Sauvé. They had been in prison almost fifteen years, and now had the support of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, whose director was Rubin (Hurricane) Carter, a top contender for the world middleweight boxing crown who served nineteen years in prison in the United St
ates for a triple murder he did not commit.

  Campbell attended an AIDWYC conference in Toronto where Comeau’s and Sauvé’s stories were told to assembled lawyers and activists. That night, Campbell shared drinks in his room with Subway Elvis (a.k.a. Michael McTaggart), an Elvis impersonator who had once been a fixture of sorts at the Yonge and Bloor subway stop in Toronto. Subway Elvis was wrongly convicted and jailed for twenty months for armed robbery, and his life had spiralled downwards into substance abuse, not unlike his idol. That night, Subway Elvis helped Campbell drain the hotel mini-bar.

  There was room for hope in March 1994, when Comeau was granted a judicial review aimed at winning an early parole hearing. The review heard from a psychologist who called him a “very, very low risk to society.” The next month, Comeau’s parole eligibility was cut from twenty-five to seventeen years. He had already served fifteen years and four months, which made him eligible for full parole in less than two years. He was also able to apply immediately for unescorted day passes from Warkworth Institution, east of Peterborough.

  Good news arrived for Sauvé as well, in May 1994. A jury ruled that he was eligible for an immediate parole hearing, after hearing that he had been a model inmate. He was the first prisoner at Collins Bay to be awarded a degree from Queen’s University, earning his BA in psychology in 1987. He was working on a master’s degree in criminology at the time of the jury’s ruling.

  One way of following the relationships between bikers is by their tattoos. Another is by murder plots. In 1995, Campbell and Evelyn rode with Brian Beaucage’s widow, Valerie, and Valerie’s common-law husband, Ollie Nelson. Ollie was the brother of Skinny Nelson, the man who shot Wayne Kelly between the eyes. Wayne Kelly was the biker who had tried to enlist Campbell to murder Beaucage while in prison. Now, Campbell and Evelyn were on good terms with Valerie, even though Campbell had briefly plotted to murder her late spouse. Aside from his short-lived bid to murder the man, Campbell had considered Beaucage a valued friend.