Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  The Bloc Québécois was not amused by the invitation to the Angels to participate in the Jubilee’s celebration of alternative culture. The separatist political party had unsuccessfully tabled a motion in the House of Commons asking the Queen to rescind Snob’s invitation. For his part, Snob told the press he was honoured and surprised by the invitation, although he shunned a suggestion that he wear a golden helmet or any kind of uniform other than his leather Angels jacket. “I will ride with pride,” said Snob.

  Campbell and Evelyn particularly enjoyed hearing of rocker Ozzy Osbourne’s role in keeping Snob in the parade. When he heard of the movement to boot Snob and some other Angels out of the celebrations, Osbourne reportedly threatened to pull out himself. “I thought it was pretty cool for Ozzy Osbourne to do that. It was the right thing to do.”

  In defence of Snob’s invitation, a Palace representative told the press that he was a successful businessman, not a criminal, noting that he ran a Harley-Davidson shop in west London called Snob’s Ultimate Customs. The club had been in England almost a decade longer than in Canada, and it had enjoyed a far gentler ride. There were almost twice as many Hells Angels in Canada as in England, with 450 in the former colony and 250 in England. The English bikers were generally much better behaved, with nothing to compare to the carnage of Quebec’s biker war, in which some 170 lives were lost.

  English Angels like to note that they were originally invited into the country by no less a personage than George Harrison, “the quiet Beatle.” Harrison met some Angels while in California in October and November 1968. A month later, Harrison circulated a memo to Apple Music staff, noting that a dozen or so of the California bikers might soon be dropping into their offices at 3 Savile Row. “Hell’s Angels will be in London within the next week, on the way to straighten out Czechoslovakia,” he wrote on December 4, 1968, an ambitious reference to undoing the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia earlier that year. “There will be twelve in number complete with black leather jackets and motor cycles. They will undoubtedly arrive at Apple and I have heard they may try to make full use of Apple’s facilities. They may look as though they are going to do you in but are very straight and do good things, so don’t fear them or up-tight them. Try to assist them without neglecting your Apple business and without letting them take control of Savile Row.”

  The Angels did arrive at Savile Row, although there’s no record of the outcome of their plans to “straighten out Czechoslovakia” or even take control of Savile Row. They did tighten up the club’s brand in the U.K., however. There were a number of bogus Hells Angels in England at the time, wearing knock-off Angels patches as nothing more than a fashion statement. The bona fide Angels scoped out the situation and two British bikers were sent to San Francisco to prospect with a real Angels charter. On July 30, 1969, they were back in England as charters were granted for South London and East London—the first true Hells Angels charters in Europe. Not long after that, the only people wearing Angels patches in London were true Hells Angels.

  Canadians seemed to be corrupting influences on the Angels of the Mother Country. In 1985, Quebec Hells Angel Robert (Snake) Tremblay was found hiding out in a flat in Bermondsey, a neighbourhood of London, fleeing murder charges in the slaughter that year which sent five members of the club’s Laval charter to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River in weighted-down sleeping bags. At the time of his arrest, British Angels had provided him with a place to stay and a false passport and had plans to smuggle him to France.

  In February 1995, Quebec Hells Angels Pierre Rodrigue and David Rouleau were arrested at a London Hilton hotel while planning to smuggle more than five hundred kilograms of cocaine into England in a scheme that involved Angels pulling together their own fleet of trawlers. A search of their hotel suite netted police contact lists for all of the Angels’ twelve British charters.

  While the level of criminality of the British Angels was nowhere near that of their Canadian counterparts, it was on the rise. This included a propensity for violence. In January 1998, thirty Angels confronted members of the rival Outcasts in south London with baseball bats, knives, metal bars and a hatchet. Two Outcasts lay dead by the end of the evening, after violence that one witness called “ritualistic.”

  Despite the occasional spasms of violence, the public face of the Hells Angels in England was more quirky than threatening. For many of their early years, the club’s spokesperson was Dr. Ian (Maz) Harris, a Ph.D. in sociology from Warwick University. Dr. Maz certainly looked the role of an outlaw biker, with shoulder-length hair, tattoos, a small beard and wraparound sunglasses. His curriculum vitae as a biker was impossible to challenge. Born in 1949 in Bexleyheath, Kent, Dr. Maz dropped out of school at age fifteen. Not long after that, he founded the London biker club the Anarchists, and then gained membership in the Angels.

  Dr. Maz was killed on May 31, 2000, when test-driving an extremely high-powered Buell motorcycle, a subsidiary of Harley-Davidson specializing in racing bikes. As there was only seating for three hundred in the picturesque Church of St. Paulinus in Crayford, Kent, his funeral service was piped outside to mourners. It included a playing of the Doors’ “Riders of the Storm” and Richard Burton’s reading of Dylan Thomas’s play Under Milk Wood, which includes the lines, “We are not wholly bad or good/Who live our lives under Milk Wood.”

  CHAPTER 27

  Unwanted Attention

  I wanted it to be the way I pictured it in my mind. It never is.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  Membership in the world’s largest outlaw motorcycle club attracts plenty of attention, much of it unwanted. Campbell was on the porch of his home in rural Baysville, near Orillia, about a year after the mass patch-over to the Hells Angels. He was chilling out and cleaning his 30-30 hunting rifle when his phone rang.

  “Who are you?” the caller asked.

  “I’m Lorne Campbell.”

  “I’ve got a deal for you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The caller explained that he wanted to get into the illegal drug dealing business. He sounded as if he was in his early twenties and his tone suggested he was plenty eager, if not wise in the ways of the world.

  “I don’t do things like that,” Campbell said.

  The caller babbled on a little longer until the conversation became too annoying for Campbell to continue. He still didn’t even know who was on the other end of the line. It sounded like an idiot or a set-up, and neither was welcome.

  “Where are you?” Campbell asked. “Get over here.”

  Not long after that, a stranger rolled up to Campbell’s home. Campbell levelled his 30-30 at him.

  “Get out of the fucking car.”

  The man got out of his car.

  “Who gave you my fucking name? I’ll shoot you. I will shoot you.”

  The stranger yammered something about a woman he knew who had heard that Campbell was in the Hells Angels. Then he said again that he wanted to get into drug dealing, as if he was at a trade show, inquiring about opening a pita or doughnut franchise.

  Campbell demanded to know how the man knew where to find him.

  “I googled you.”

  “Googled me?”

  “I googled you.”

  The man bragged that he could find anybody’s address on the Internet.

  “You’re kidding,” Campbell said, then kicked him off his property at gunpoint.

  As the Angels expanded, Campbell was getting a reputation for shutting down charters. He ousted most of the Simcoe County charter when he got the feeling that members were hiding behind their patches rather than making the club stronger. He didn’t like how several Simcoe County members weren’t attending club functions and weren’t even riding their bikes. A breaking point came when he was at the bar at a Simcoe club function and a member’s wife turned with a smile to her husband and said, “Tell them what happened the other day.”

  The Simcoe County Angel started laughing, telling how he was getti
ng beaten up in a fight. “He had me down, kicking the shit out of me. All I did was show him my patch and he stopped.”

  Campbell was blown away by how wrong this was. It was pretty much the opposite of the way things should be, and the man and his wife didn’t have a clue. They should be ashamed and yet they were proud, in a profoundly stupid way. They somehow thought it was funny, when the joke was on them. How could they expect anyone to respect the club if they hid behind the patch like this? “I was embarrassed. That’s what was protecting him—the Hells Angels patch. [He felt that] it’s the club that makes the man. It should be the man that makes the patch.”

  In a sense, Campbell’s philosophy is the outlaw biker version of John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, in which he said: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Unfortunately, in Campbell’s view, the Angels lowered the brand after the mass patch-over of 2000, in the same way that fake Angels patches had flooded England and degraded the brand back in the late 1960s. “They feel: ‘Now I’ve got power and backing, so I can do anything.’ But Hells Angels are smarter than that. Most Hells Angels worldwide are comfortable in their own skin.”

  The man, and presumably also his wife, wasn’t smiling when his charter was shut down and he could no longer take refuge behind a Hells Angels patch.

  Campbell was in Amsterdam in 2005, preparing to travel on to Barcelona and Benidorm on the Spanish Riviera for a World Run. He was at the Amsterdam airport with a Dutch member named Harry when Harry got a telephone call.

  “Fuck, the Amsterdam clubhouse just burned down,” Harry said.

  Campbell felt his stomach drop. “What! It couldn’t have,” Campbell replied, thinking, “I was just there last night. It was intact.”

  Campbell’s mind flashed back to how he had been smoking at the clubhouse bar. Could he have accidentally caused the fire with a cigarette ash or butt? “It was all wood.”

  “I think I just burned it down,” Campbell announced.

  He didn’t consider hiding his suspicion that he was to blame. “It turned out I was wrong. It was a wiring problem. We found out that in a day or two. I’ve never ever lied to a brother. Never have, never would.”

  The Benidorm get-together was in an ancient castle, close to cabins owned by Spanish Hells Angels. Each morning, artists would go onto the beach and build elaborate sand castles, often with religious themes. It was in Spain that Campbell met Hells Angels from the San Bernardino—or “Berdoo”—charter, east of Los Angeles. San Bernardino is home to two American exports that have become fixtures around the globe: the world’s first McDonald’s restaurant and the Hells Angels’ “Mother” or original charter, formed back in 1948. Campbell told a half-dozen Berdoo members a joke that, when he had shared it with Andre Watteel of the Ontario Hells Angels, had almost made Watteel physically sick. It went something like this: “So I’m screwing my buddy up the ass and he’s giving my dick a tug. And then he turns around and kisses me on the lips, the faggot.”

  The Berdoo Angels proved to have stronger stomachs than Watteel. “One of them fell off his stool, he was laughing so hard.”

  It was on the Spanish Riviera that Campbell learned his cousin Shawn Campbell had recently got his Angels patch back home at the waterfront property known as Hells Half Acre. Campbell couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been told in advance so that he could attend. Not long afterwards, he knocked on the door of the Spanish motel room where Shawn was staying.

  When the door swung open, Campbell punched Shawn quick and hard. “I fucking gave him one right on the side of the head. He fell.”

  When Shawn got back on his feet, Campbell said, “Congratulations,” and the cousins laughed and shook hands as if the non-invitation and the hard left had never happened. “He’s a fighter. He’s been there before.”

  Arriving in Spain with Campbell was an Oshawa prospect known as Sims. If Sims looked nervous surrounded by 1,500 Hells Angels from around the globe at the World Run in Spain, it was totally understandable. Sims was black, while the Hells Angels were close to all-white, like many posh golf and country clubs. California Hells Angels had already told Canadians, in effect, “Send him here and we’ll kill him.”

  The Downtown Toronto charter had an Asian member, who worked on their computers and always seemed to be taking courses. There were a few other members at the World Run who looked black but whose clubs maintained they were really Hispanic or some other non-black colouring that was okay with the Angels.

  The English were also pushing to get a black man accepted as a full member of the club. “The guys in England must have loved the guy. We loved Simsy. We fought for it. But it’s just a passionate subject. It gets Hells Angels yelling at other Hells Angels at important meetings.” The old guard, including Barger, simply wouldn’t hear of admitting black members, saying the topic was closed and they didn’t want to hear it reopened. When they returned to Canada, Sims was told he would have to leave. “Everyone that met him thought the world of him. He’s a great guy.”

  Not too far from the Toronto Angels’ downtown clubhouse on Eastern Avenue in Riverdale was a ragtag group of Bandidos, who gathered occasionally in the basement of a Greek restaurant. The Bandidos Motorcycle Club had absorbed the Rock Machine of Quebec into their ranks, also inheriting their drug turf war with the Hells Angels in downtown Montreal. In the Texas Gulf, where they began, the Bandidos were a serious club, and several of their members had high-paying, demanding jobs in the oil industry. Their new counterparts in Toronto, however, were a pale, sad imitation.

  The newly formed Toronto Bandidos defiantly called themselves the No Surrender Crew, borrowing the name from a faction of the Irish Republican Army. Their leader was John (Boxer) Muscedere, a small-town factory worker on disability leave who had been an outlaw biker for less than a decade. He inherited the presidency from Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine when Kellestine was briefly sent to prison on an assortment of drug charges. Now, Boxer was scrambling to hold together a club of misfits who could never hope for Angels membership.

  It was a struggle for Boxer to get Canadian members of his motorcycle club to actually ride motorcycles. This mystified Campbell. “Motorcycles are the key. The ‘MC’ stands for something.” Campbell was impressed by the loyalty Boxer displayed towards his clubmates, although it was clearly misplaced, especially with Kellestine. There were plenty of stories about Kellestine, few of them flattering. He had been punched out by a lesbian at a sleazy London, Ontario, bar, crashed a gay pride parade with a collection of fellow white supremacists, and threatened to shoot a disc jockey at a party for playing non-white dance music. He was considered too unstable to reason with or threaten. “A guy like him, you have to kill.”

  The Bandidos were just an obnoxious presence in Riverdale, mouthing off and acting tough with friends of the Angels. They were annoying enough that the downtown Angels called a meeting with the Bandidos to rein them in. It was held in the basement of the Bandidos’ usual Greek restaurant, and Campbell and other Angels were decidedly unimpressed. Campbell didn’t pack a gun as they just didn’t seem worth the effort. “They looked like drug addicts. I thought, ‘Why are we having this meeting? They’re not bikers.’ ” The Ontario Hells Angels couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if the Americans at the top level of the Bandidos could see them. “I used to tell people they won’t last very long because they’re drug addicts. I told the guys they’ll implode.”

  The Canadian Bandidos became more than a mild irritant when they cozied up to the Outlaws. The two clubs tried a show of force at the London, Ontario, motorcycle show at the Western Fair, organized by Larry Pooler, vice-president of the Downtown Toronto charter of the Hells Angels. Ian Watson of the Angels was in a booth when the Bandidos showed up and started taking photos.

  “Hey, fuckhead. Take a picture of this,” Campbell said.

  The Bandido smiled.

  “Take a picture of me.”

  The Bandido stopped smiling.
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  “You’re a fucking coward,” Campbell continued.

  The cops were there now, but Campbell didn’t stop trying to goad them into violence.

  “Hey, Musclehead. You want a problem with me? I’m the real deal.”

  The Bandido just seemed to want out of the building now.

  “Don’t worry about getting thrown in jail,” Campbell heckled, “because I’ll make sure we get bunked together.”

  A police officer was genuinely nervous now. “There’s families here. There’s children here. I’m asking you to stop.”

  “Okay, but they started it.”

  There’s a motorcycle tradition in Port Dover, a fishing town on the shore of Lake Erie a couple of hours’ drive southwest of Toronto. Every Friday the thirteenth, from spring to fall, outlaw bikers—and far more bikers of the non-outlaw persuasion—congregate here in a middle-aged sea of black leather and chrome. The Ontario Bandidos showed up, wearing their Fat Mexican crests and trying to affect swaggers. The very sight of them was too much for a Quebec Hells Angel, who approached them. “The Quebec guy just leaned over and said something. They were gone within minutes.”

  Hells Angels were the initial suspects when the bodies of Muscedere and seven other Bandido members and supporters were found in April 2006 in vehicles abandoned by a farmer’s field, about a ten-minute drive from Kellestine’s farm. They had all been shot, and the initial suspicion was that it must be the result of a battle over drug turf. A Hells Angels spokesperson ridiculed the suggestion, implying that the Bandidos had no turf worth taking.