Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  The two couples rode up to a bar near Sault Ste. Marie and ordered a round of drinks. Three Outlaws were there, including Randy Robitaille, who was also connected to the group through a murder plot. Robitaille had been charged with trying to shoot Beaucage outside a strip club in London.

  “They were obviously packing,” Campbell says. An Outlaw behind Campbell had his leg on a stool and kept pulling back his long coat so that they could clearly see the pistol stuffed into his waistband. Ollie and Valerie quickly recognized the Outlaws, and Ollie followed Campbell into a washroom.

  “We’ve got to leave,” Ollie said.

  “I ain’t leaving,” Campbell replied. “I just ordered a tray of beer.”

  Leaving in a hurry would have been humiliating and a profound show of weakness, and any display of weakness is a dangerous thing in the biker world. Aside from that, an early exit really would be a waste of good beer.

  The Outlaw behind Campbell kept patting his pistol, an annoying habit in any situation.

  “Sit down at the fucking table. Don’t stand behind me like that.”

  The Outlaw sat down.

  When the tray of beer was emptied, Campbell and his group got up and left. Valerie was riding her own Harley Low Rider with “In memory of Bo” painted on the gas tank, while Evelyn rode on the back of Campbell’s Harley.

  The Outlaws had got into a pickup truck, and on a remote stretch of road it pulled ahead of Campbell’s party. There were no street lights, and everything around them was darkness, except for their headlights, the truck’s tail lights in the distance ahead, and the stars and moon above. If anything happened out here, the only witnesses would be owls and chipmunks. Just ahead of the bikes, gunfire flashed from the back of the pickup.

  “Did you see that?” Ollie yelled.

  “Yeah, I see them.”

  Some of Campbell’s party had to pee because of the beer.

  “What do we do if they come shooting?” Ollie asked.

  “Run,” Evelyn offered.

  “See those trees?” Campbell said. “That’s where I’m going.”

  Evelyn recalls: “All I could think of was, ‘If he’s hit, I’ll drag him off the road. Which side should I drag him to?’ ”

  Campbell pretended to talk on a cellphone, hoping this would signal that reinforcements were on the way and push the Outlaws to back off. Hopefully, the men in the truck wouldn’t realize there was no cellphone reception in the area. That done, there didn’t seem to be a better option than to ride ahead into the darkness. Says Evelyn: “You couldn’t just stop because then you’re a sitting duck. But you don’t know if they’re waiting down the road.”

  Campbell’s party stopped at a motel in the remote town of Wawa, where Campbell slept well while Ollie spent the night at the window.

  “They aren’t going to attack us in a public place,” Campbell said.

  “I didn’t know if they were shooting to kill us. They didn’t know if we were carrying weapons. I was known to carry a weapon at the time.” That day, however, he was carrying just a knife. Every biker has heard the saying that you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight, even if it was Campbell’s military replica model with “One shot, one kill” engraved on its seven-inch blade.

  In 1995, the Outlaws weren’t the only concern. That summer was one of serious tensions between the Satan’s Choice and the Loners, who had a club north of Toronto that included several former members of the Choice. Frank (Cisco) Lenti, a long-time biker and tow truck operator, was at the core of the tensions. Lenti had left the Loners for Italy in the wake of bitter club infighting. It was also a good time to leave because of a police probe of the underworld after former Satan’s Choice member Cecil Kirby decided to turn police agent.

  Upon his return to Canada, Lenti formed a group called the Diabolos, who were quickly absorbed into the Choice. This infuriated the Loners, and the summer of 1995 saw a half-dozen bombings directed at biker businesses—including a bar, a shop specializing in motorcycle repairs and a tattoo parlour—and a rocket launcher attack on the Toronto Choice’s Kintyre Avenue clubhouse. Three Loners were shot but not seriously injured in Woodbridge, and the home of a Choice member in Kitchener was hit with two Molotov cocktails.

  Then, around ten in the morning on August 25, Lenti put his key in the ignition of his midnight blue Ford Explorer, parked in the laneway of his red brick house. He lived just across the street from a Montessori elementary school and just a hundred metres down Kipling Avenue from the Loners’ clubhouse. The noise of the explosion that followed startled people for blocks. Lenti survived the attack, but just barely, as parts of his back, legs and buttocks were gone forever. Some cops started calling him a half-assed biker, but never to his face.

  Campbell and Evelyn were entertaining a visitor from the Loners and his wife in their home when they received a phone call informing him that the Choice was now at war with the Loners. Campbell turned to his guest and announced, “Sorry, Rob, but you’ve got to go.” Evelyn gave the Loner’s wife a sweater, as it was a cold day, and they left with a smile, not bitterness. “I was laughing. I said, ‘Fuck, sorry, I can’t have you here.’ ”

  Campbell had discussed a “no-war zone” north of Highway 7 in York Region with local Loners, to keep the violence from getting too personal or close to home. He also instructed Evelyn to take a flashlight and check under her car from now on before starting it up. “I was always security-wise about Ev. At that time, any enemy that showed up unannounced at my home would have died where they stood.” Knowing Campbell’s frame of mind, Evelyn was jolted when a half-dozen Keswick Loners rode up to their home. She didn’t know he had reached a deal to patch them over to the Satan’s Choice.

  The initial phase of the patch-over took place in his garage. “They all came there with Loners patches that night and we made them Satan’s Choice.” Then Campbell turned to their chapter president and said, “You’re not president anymore. I am.” He remembers, “There was the party in my garage and it moved over to the clubhouse in Keswick. It continued on for many months, with booze in our stomachs and telltale white powder on our noses.”

  There were disputes with other clubs at the time, but nothing that involved bullets, bombs or rocket launchers. Campbell spotted riders wearing a patch for something called the Eagle Riders MC, and also Straights Inc-1995 M.C., Lakeshore Area, Clean & Sober. The patch for the latter was done in turquoise and baby blue, with a graphic of playing cards, and looked like something for a seniors’ Wednesday night bowling league, not an outlaw bike club. He stopped them and confiscated their offending patches. It wasn’t like the 1960s, when a sound beating often accompanied a patch-pulling. Now it was a polite, if terse, transaction, as if the soft-core bikers should have known better and Campbell was a bylaw officer merely doing his job. “They’d say nothing.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Milestones

  There were two guys snorting cocaine right beside a [police] cruiser. It was unmarked.

  LORNE CAMPBELL describing his wedding reception

  Bernie (The Frog) Guindon retired from the Choice in 1996 at age fifty-four. He exited in good standing, ushered out by a growling quarter-mile run of chrome and leather that snaked north from Oshawa into the quaint lakeside town of Port Perry for a two-day camp-out and field day. It was a no-bottles-or-pets event, with French toast, Polish hot dogs, hamburgers, chili and beef on kaiser buns for sale, and donations accepted for a local food bank. Campbell was riding alongside Guindon at the head of the pack, and at one point he turned to him and said, “Check it out, Frog. Stand up on your bike and look around.”

  “What? What?” the Frog said.

  “Check it out.”

  Guindon had always been the one to tell Campbell to look in his mirrors when he was riding so that he could fully enjoy the scenery. “He got me doing that once for a sunset. ‘Look in your mirror to see how beautiful it is.’ ” This time it was Campbell’s chance to return the favour, as he asked Guindon to look out over
the club he had revived back in the 1960s. “It was nice, happy. Everybody had to stop. He could just check them all out. Soak it in.”

  The next summer, it was Campbell’s turn to retire in good standing from the Satan’s Choice, after nine straight years as Oshawa chapter president. There was no dramatic or even specific reason for his departure. It was just his acknowledgement that something had faded away. He realized he wasn’t putting in 100 percent anymore, and in his world you had to be 100 percent 1 percent. As someone who left in good standing, he was still allowed to attend parties, but he and Guindon weren’t obligated to attend meetings and events. Since each of them left in good standing and had a quarter-century with the club, they were also permitted to keep their club colours; they just weren’t permitted to wear them anymore.

  To mark Campbell’s retirement, there was a party planned called A Run of Memories. All of the outlaw clubs in Ontario—except, of course, the Outlaws—attended. To get there, Campbell led a procession of club members and friends on his brand new 1997 Harley Classic. They first rode up Simcoe Street through Oshawa, a massive re-enactment of the Simcoe Street parades by the Phantom Riders that had so impressed him as a child. Then they wound through Durham Region and west to their eventual destination of Brown Hill in East Gwillimbury, north of Toronto. The pack grew as they rode along, pulling in current and former members of the Vagabonds, Para-Dice Riders, Red Devils, Last Chance and other clubs, as well as friends and supporters. Some 150 Harley riders finally arrived at the field day site, under the eyes of officers circling in an OPP helicopter.

  Mae Boardman, a local fortune teller who read tea leaves and tarot cards, was duly impressed. She had a special connection to the event, as her son Tim had been a Choice member known as “Grizzly,” and was buried with his Harley after he was killed in a car accident in 1979.

  “Isn’t that nice, Lorne?” Mae said. “They even gave you a helicopter escort.”

  “I didn’t have the heart to tell her it wasn’t a nice escort.”

  ———

  Campbell’s fiftieth birthday on September 2, 1998, was another chance to get together with members, past members and friends. There were country and rock bands present, and speakers were set up around his and Evelyn’s property in Port Bolster. Campbell himself got onstage to sing something—probably “House of the Rising Sun” again. “There were more people on our property than lived in Port Bolster,” Evelyn recalls. “It went all night and the next day.”

  There was one unpleasant incident when a guest flashed a handgun and Campbell was too into party mode to sort things out himself. “I said, ‘You guys go and look after that, please.’ So Larry Vallentyne went out and knocked him out. There might have been other guns there, but I would have known about them. As long as I know about it, it’s okay.”

  Among those attending was Bill (Scotty) Dunn from the Para-Dice Riders. Scotty used to joke to Campbell that he was going to take him to Scotland someday so he could show him pubs with “No Campbells Allowed” signs over their front doors. Dunn belonged to the MacDonald clan, and some of the MacDonalds apparently still hadn’t got past an ugly incident in 1692 called the Massacre of Glencoe. That’s when seventy-eight unarmed MacDonalds were slaughtered by soldiers led by Captain Robert Campbell of Glenlyon. What made it worse was the abuse of hospitality involved in the preamble to the slaughter. The victims were wined and dined for a week until their guard was suitably lowered. It didn’t lessen the hatred felt by Clan MacDonald that only seven actual Campbells (none of whom were named Lorne) were involved in the bloodbath.

  When Dunn made these offers, Campbell would reply, “Sure as hell, after a few drinks you would be saying, ‘Lorne, tell them your last name.’ ”

  It was a joke between them that seemed to improve with age, like good Scotch whisky. And so it was with a great deal of pain that Campbell heard that Scotty had crashed his bike and suffered severe brain damage in an accident near Sudbury, riding home from Campbell’s birthday party. His girlfriend was badly injured as well.

  Scotty was strapped to a hospital bed in Sudbury when Campbell arrived to see him.

  “I want a drink,” Scotty said.

  “I can’t give you a drink,” Campbell replied.

  “Untie my hands.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Untie my hands.”

  “Scotty, I’m sorry, I can’t.”

  Scotty noticed a door in the corner of his room. His tone was now conspiratorial, like that of a gangster in an old movie. “Lorne, where does that door go to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Check it out for me.”

  Campbell checked it out. “It’s a set of stairs.”

  “We’re out of here tonight.”

  “Okay, Scotty.”

  Campbell left his friend in the care of the hospital. He was eventually untied and allowed to leave the bed, but Scotty was never the same.

  Psssh.

  Psssh.

  Campbell was intrigued by the soft hissing sound at a party at “Hells Half Acre,” the waterfront property at Caesarea, west of Toronto, in 1999. “I’m looking at a half-dozen Hells Angels. They’ve all got balloons. I’m thinking they’re going to hang them up. Decorating. Half an hour later they’ve still got them. Nurget [senior Hells Angel Walter Stadnick] comes over and says, ‘It’s nitrous oxide.’ ”

  Nitrous oxide isn’t to be confused with helium, which can make an imbiber sound like Donald Duck. Nitrous oxide’s also known as “laughing gas” or “sweet air,” and it’s used in surgery and dentistry, as well as for boosting the power of rockets and engines. It wasn’t a new or novel way of getting high, having been a mainstay of naughty British upper-class parties in the late eighteenth century. The bikers liked it because it gave them a powerful buzz that only lasted a couple of minutes. “That was the first time I tried it, and I didn’t get anything out of it. Didn’t do it right, I guess. I’ve never heard of it except at parties. All you hear is pssh pssh. A lot of guys don’t like to drink and drive. Half an hour later you can drive.”

  Campbell and Evelyn decided to make it official and get married on May 27, 2000. There wasn’t anything sentimental about the date, just that it was after the May Two-Four weekend, when every club in the province had a run. At first they planned a small, relatively quiet affair, but somewhere along the way it took on a life of its own. “Every time Lorne came back from a party, there was another chapter invited,” Evelyn recalls.

  They chose to have the wedding in Baysville, in Muskoka cottage country north of Toronto, where they could find cottages for some two hundred guests. There was a minor hiccup when they realized that the banquet hall they had rented was in the same building as the local Ontario Provincial Police detachment, but there wasn’t much choice in the area, and OPP surveillance was a given anyway. At least this way they would save the taxpayers gas money. In the end, the police weren’t a problem. “They were good. There were two guys snorting cocaine right beside a cruiser. It was unmarked.”

  There were tuxes and club colours, and Campbell sang “Today I Started Loving You Again” by country stars Merle Haggard and Bonnie Owens. Among the invited guests were plenty of Satan’s Choice and Vagabonds, but no Hells Angels, since the Satan’s Choice had a non-association rule regarding them at the time, stemming from a drug debt dispute in Thunder Bay. To celebrate Campbell’s nuptials, his old Oshawa clubmate Stan rode north from Durham Region with his gift flung over his Harley, wrapped in a blanket.

  “Guess what this is?” asked Stan.

  Stan was the same member who had unsuccessfully tried to hide an M1 assault rifle in a tree behind the Oshawa clubhouse and who worked with Campbell in security at Akwesasne.

  “It’s a fucking rifle,” Campbell replied.

  “How the fuck did you know?” asked Stan, genuinely surprised that another of his firearms had been detected.

  There was a minor glitch when Evelyn tossed her garter into the crowd as part of a good-luck ritu
al. The garter had bullets tucked into it and the biker who caught it was on parole stipulations, banning him from possession of weapons or ammunition. Fortunately, police surveying the event let it pass.

  In September 2000, Gary (Nutty) Comeau finally walked free of prison after twenty-one years inside. Comeau was forty-eight years old and the last of the Port Hope Eight to be released, as Rick Sauvé had been granted his parole the previous year. They had both maintained their innocence from the time they were led into prison until the day they walked out; but, in true one-percenter fashion, neither pointed a finger at Campbell or anyone else, even if he’d been publicly pointing one at himself.

  By this time, their former co-accused Armand (In the Trunk) Sanguigni had been dead for close to two decades. Sanguigni was found in October 1984 in his semi-detached home in a working-class neighbourhood of west Toronto, alongside his common-law wife, Katalin Dobrovolszky. A hypodermic needle lay nearby. “It could be murder-suicide, a double suicide, a drug overdose—we don’t know at this point,” a police spokesperson said. No one was ever charged with the deaths and bikers assumed it was a misadventure with heroin, the drug Sanguigni was so confident he could control.

  Another of the Port Hope co-accused, Campbell’s long-time friend Larry (Beaver) Hurren, died in a motorcycle accident in 1996. He was riding towards a dead end, which left him a choice of going either left or right. He often travelled on that road, but for some reason Beaver shot straight ahead, dying when his bike crashed into a tree. On the gas tank of Beaver’s crashed Harley were the words “Justice in Ontario,” the title of the Steve Earle song about the Matiyek trial and the nineteenth-century massacre of the Donnelly family.

  In the fall of 2000, Campbell got a phone call from Mark Stephenson, the millwright who had succeeded him as president of the Oshawa Satan’s Choice chapter. Stephenson gave Campbell the news that the Hells Angels had offered his chapter full membership in their club. It was part of a mass patch-over that would absorb the Choice into the Angels, if the Choice agreed. Stephenson wasn’t sure how Campbell would take this. It was a chance to be part of something global, since the Angels had more than 3,600 members on five continents. It also meant the end of the road for the once fiercely proud, all-Canadian Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club.