Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Hey!!!

  Scare ya? Well here it is “prison justice day” again. No food for the day. Actually I don’t mind it. As it is I haven’t eaten after supper since last Sunday and I think I’ve lost weight. And I do my abs everyday too.

  The new glasses finally came which is a big relief. Tell me that wasn’t like pulling hen’s teeth. [happy face]

  John just came back from his visit and told me he just found out they finally offered him a deal. Twelve years for conspiracy to commit trafficking, and leave the criminal org. up to the judge. Outrageous but that’s just my opinion.

  And that’s about it for now. If I tell you everything that’s going on there wouldn’t be anything to put in the next card. [happy face]

  I Love You

  Lorne XOXO

  Evelyn kept writing, sending cards and articles and puzzles and health recipes, with news of their dogs and anything else she thought he might want to hear. His Christmas cards in 2009 included one from his ten-year-old granddaughter, Chaedra: “Grandpa—you mean so much.… I love you Grampa. I miss you soooo much and I wish I could see you at Christmas Love Chaedra.” Then she drew three hearts and concluded: “oxxxxxooooxxxxo”

  On an earthier note, another card read: “Your Luxembourg Brothers wish Merry Xmas and a fucking new year.”

  His Christmas reading also included an article sent to him by Evelyn, written by Sandro Contenta for the December 20 Toronto Star. In it, an academic likened shepherds at the time of Christ’s birth to outlaw bikers in the twenty-first century. The comparison was that both the shepherds and the outlaw bikers had outsider roles, at the low end of the social ladder.

  Contenta’s article included this:

  “It’s perhaps an exaggeration to say, ‘When you hear shepherds, think biker gang,’ but they were really on the margins of society,” says Rev. Andrea Budgey, the Humphreys Chaplain at Trinity College, who, as it happens, grew up on a Nova Scotia sheep farm.

  Shepherds were poorly paid, transient and armed to protect their flocks—characteristics that made them widely suspect and feared.…

  We even have documents from the Roman period where a prefect would say, “If you catch shepherds, flog them on the suspicion that they’re bandits.” You don’t necessarily have to have evidence that they are—the very fact that they’re shepherds tells you that if they’re not criminals they’re thinking of being one.

  The year 2010 began with heightened fitness goals. This should be the year Campbell finally went to trial, and he planned to show up in shape when he was judged by a jury of twelve strangers. His journal for January 1 stated: “160 decline pushups-Abs.” The next day, it was: “Chin-ups, 6 sets of 5, Squats (240) 300 incline pushups, Abs.” He also did incline and decline push-ups using the bars of the cell as leg and arm supports. The man who had been extreme in anger and extreme in drugs was now extreme in his pursuit of health and fitness. The former cocaine enthusiast now perused Muscle and Men’s Health magazines, putting plenty of thought into various recipes for soy milk.

  In federal penitentiaries, prisoners had jump ropes, but not in jail. Campbell would pay a couple of chocolate bars for other prisoners to make ropes for him, stripping sheets and braiding. Then Campbell dipped them in water, so they had just the right weight. It was steady work for the rope makers, as they were constantly confiscated. “I had guys that would do that. Just gave them a couple chocolate bars.”

  By January 16, Campbell was up to 300 push-ups, while his January 30 entry recorded: “Pull-ups 6 sets of 5, Abs 400 incline push-ups.” Evelyn helped out, sending him information on the nutritional value of oats and rolled-oat recipes.

  His daughter, Janice, wrote on March 10 to say that his granddaughter Chaedra had won a speech competition. London, England, Hells Angels sent him a card marking March 22, 2010, as Angel Day: “Thinking of you on this 22nd day of march 81st day of 2010.” Cards of support kept coming in from places he had never visited and bikers he had never met, including charters in Bohemia and Luxembourg and a support charter in Bretagne (the Dreadfuls MC).

  There was also news about bikers who had once worn Hells Angels patches and who were now publicly distancing themselves from the club. Terry Pink, the biker Phil Boudreault had almost starched in the Sudbury clubhouse, was among that group. He had been president of the Simcoe County charter, and was pinched through his deals with Steven (Hannibal) Gault.

  It disgusted Campbell to learn how Pink had cried in court in February 2009, as he pined to be kept at home with his wife and two young kids. Pink had been convicted of selling 8,340 ecstasy tablets to Gault on four occasions, but vigorously denied committing the crimes. Campbell fumed that his crying threatened to make them all look weak and degrade the Angels brand. “You’re a big shot, eh? You’re making money. Two-inch chains around your fucking neck. Diamonds and gold and a big fancy bike. See how much you stand up when you get arrested and you’re in one of these shitholes. See how much you complain. I didn’t complain—only to my wife. I hate a coward. I can’t stand a coward. Nothing wrong with fear. You don’t have fear you’re insane, but there’s still no excuse for a coward.”

  There was also a generational disconnect between Pink and bikers like Campbell. Pink frosted his hair, installed a Louis Vuitton seat on his Harley, and shipped his bike long distances. Harleys in the 2000s were light years more comfortable than the spine-shaking, oil-dripping choppers of the 1960s and 1970s. Bikers like Merv (Indian) Blaker had built their rides up from rejected clunkers into something special. You wouldn’t have caught Blaker on a Louis Vuitton seat. And you also would never have caught him shipping his bike for long runs. That was another Pink crime against the natural order of the biker universe, in Campbell’s eyes. “Anybody that ships their bike, unless they have to be back real fast, I can’t have a conversation with.”

  Campbell may have used Spray ’N Wash a couple of times a year to keep his Angels colours legible; otherwise, they’d go black from the road mud spraying up on them. But somewhere between the high-fashion seat and frosted hair and bike shipping and crying in public, men like Pink stopped being real bikers. “He’s just a poser. The only time you’d see him on his bike is when he’s on a run.”

  Campbell also felt severely let down by what he heard of the emotional courtroom performance of Kenneth (Wags) Wagner, another of Gault’s targets. In October 2008, federal prosecutors announced that Wagner was the first Canadian criminal to have been found guilty under the “boss law,” which involves directing others to commit crimes for the benefit of a criminal organization. Wagner, a first-time offender and father of two, had been a founder of the Hells Angels’ Niagara charter in 2001. He pleaded guilty to trafficking four kilograms of cocaine, selling a gun to another Hells Angel and possessing $150,675 in criminal proceeds. Court heard that confidential police documents were found when police raided the Hells Angels’ Niagara clubhouse and the homes of Wagner and Ward.

  Campbell couldn’t stand the image of club members like Wagner looking weak before the courts. “He’s just a piece of shit. He was crying on the stand. It goes back to the saying, ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ ” In Campbell’s books, Ward was cut from totally different cloth. “He stayed solid. He got an extra nine years after three in the bucket, but he still stayed solid.”

  Andre Watteel, president of the Angels’ Kitchener charter, carried himself like a real biker, in Campbell’s eyes. He too had been nailed by an informer in his midst whom he’d once trusted. But Watteel wasn’t crying or buckling or squealing as he awaited his sentence for selling cocaine. Watteel wrote Campbell on June 6, 2010, from the Barton Street East jail in Hamilton:

  We were immediately told there was a paid police agent + his name. It was not kept a secret. Buddy Frank was a friend of mine for 15 to 20 years. It makes me sick to think that a person I partied + drank with for that many years + trusted would work with the police against me. I guess some people have no trouble selling their friendship, that dollar
is their only friend.

  At the pretrial, the Crown offered to let Watteel off on fifty-six other charges if he pleaded guilty to criminal organization. “The answer was no,” he wrote.

  In his letter to Campbell, Watteel sounded hurt as he continued:

  I never involved anybody else in anything I did. In the bodypacks I found some things that were said to the agent by myself that proved the rest of my friends were not involved in any way + I read in one of his conversations towards the end of the project to another person that Andre is independent + not working with any of his friends.…

  Then, like a true friend, he dropped the subject and asked about Campbell’s family. “How is your wife doing? She is a nice person. I know how hard it is on her + Winner’s wife also.”

  Former Manitoba Hells Angels president Dale (Deli) Donovan wrote Campbell from Stony Mountain Penitentiary, outside Winnipeg, where he was serving an 8½-year sentence for an assortment of offences, including cocaine and marijuana trafficking. Donovan had sent Campbell pictures and designs to use in his former tattoo business, which was a big deal in the skin-inking world. With him was fellow Angel Jeff Peck, whom Campbell had known from Peck’s days back in the Los Bravos. Police had managed to pay a career criminal to infiltrate their charter. If Donovan was flustered, he didn’t show it as he wrote: “Me and Jeff are making good use of our free gym memberships here too.… I lost my gut and even put on some size.”

  Behind bars, the lines between paranoia and healthy realism all but evaporated. One day, he heard that a prisoner’s wife had been caught trying to smuggle six .38 bullets inside. What the inmate planned to do with a gun was anyone’s guess. “I don’t know if he was going to smuggle the gun in after, a bit at a time,” Campbell jokes. A guard asked Campbell if he had a gun and Campbell laughed at the suggestion.

  On August 5, 2010, someone slipped a note under Campbell’s cell door that read, “everything that you do in here is being recorded and you’re being watched.” The note wasn’t signed. Meanwhile, gangstas remained protective of Campbell. If they didn’t trust an inmate who was about to be transferred into his cell, they would warn the prisoner that they didn’t want him there. They didn’t have to say it as a threat; it was obvious what the words meant. That summer, the gangstas were leery about an older prisoner also named Campbell, who had only been in the jail a couple of days.

  “We seen him talking to people,” a gangbanger said. “We think he’s a cop here for you.”

  “They told the guards to get him the fuck off the range,” Campbell recalls. “They did so. They’re not stupid.”

  Evelyn kept driving down to Toronto for visits. Things warmed up with the Metro East staff after they noticed her weeding a flower garden outside the jail while waiting to be let inside.

  CHAPTER 33

  Legal Showdown

  He felt like picking on an old guy. I hit him six or seven times.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  Campbell’s trial was set to begin on Monday, September 13, 2010, at the Toronto Courthouse on University Avenue, a stately limestone building just down the road from the former mental asylum grounds where the provincial legislature now sits. Shortly before the first day of court, Campbell received a card from Rev. Douglas Tebbutt, a heavy-set, leathered man who had been officiating at biker funerals since the 1960s: “There is a strong team on the internet standing in strength for you.” Some of the bikers who had once found freedom and brotherhood on the open roads now sought them online.

  Campbell marked the opening day of the trial with an entry in his journal. At the top of each page was a religious inscription. On that day: “For the LORD is good, his mercy is everlasting; and his truth endureth to all generations”—Psalms 100:5. Campbell’s handwritten entry for that day dealt with something far less than absolute, godly truth. In pencil, it read: “START OF TRIAL.” By that were three stars. It continued: “5.55 breakfast. Chest & back pain!!!”

  Campbell had elected trial by jury. Almost three years in jail with no bail, nor even time to attend his mother’s funeral, had convinced him that trial by judge alone would be suicide. Campbell’s trial was being conducted at the same time as the cases against John (Winner) Neal, the sixty-year-old president of the Downtown Toronto Hells Angels; vice-presidents Larry Pooler, sixty, and Douglas Myles, fifty-four; and member Mehrdad (Mark, Juicy) Bahman, forty-nine. Two currents ran through each of their cases. The first one was relatively commonplace and grubby, and involved the efforts by Shakey Dave Atwell to draw as many of his clubmates as possible into low-level drug and weapons deals. Campbell fell into the net when he agreed to take a thousand dollars for setting Atwell up with Shaun Robinson.

  The second current was far more serious. It involved allegations of criminal conspiracy and committing crimes for the benefit of a criminal organization. At its core were Juicy Bahman and his dealings with Vincenzo (Jimmy) Sansalone of the Haney, B.C., charter of the Hells Angels and Omid (Mo) Bayani of the United Nations, a new and particularly violent group of west coast criminals.

  The United Nations was a gang that existed to commit crimes, with none of the bikers’ allusions to brotherhood. Originally called the Global United Nations Syndicate (GUNS), their name referenced their multi-ethnic nature, as the gang had Indo-Canadian, white, Iranian and Asian members. Much of their money came from flying tons of high-grade British Columbian cannabis by private planes and helicopters into the United States, where they swapped it for cocaine to sell at home. This business meant run-ins with B.C. H3ells Angels as they carved out their market.

  Bayani had middling power in his group, which boasted about seventy-five members in the Lower Mainland area of B.C. The commonly accepted story behind Bayani is that when he was just five years old, his father was murdered in Iran and the word “Bahai” was written on his lifeless chest by Iranian fundamentalists bent on stamping out the Baha’i faith. Bayani’s family fled to Turkey, and when he was sixteen he arrived in Red Deer, Alberta, with his mother and sisters. He found work at a fast-food restaurant and was still in his teens when he drew a four-year term in a medium-security prison for a crime spree. Wearing a balaclava, he’d robbed workers at five convenience stores for cash and cigarettes at knifepoint.

  If Bayani was bad on the streets, he was even worse behind bars. He ran up twenty-one more charges as a prisoner, including one for beating an inmate’s face with a club that had the words “goof beater” carved into it. He was bumped up from a medium- to a maximum-security prison, where his behaviour only got worse, as he constantly tried to goad guards into fights.

  On July 20, 1997, the federal immigration minister signed a deportation application to send him back to Iran, declaring him “a danger to the public of Canada.” His lawyer fought back with an application to stay in Canada on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. As the lawyers wrangled, Bayani floated away on bail and began doing business with fellow Iranian immigrant Juicy Bahman when Bahman was just a Hells Angels prospect.

  Bayani had fronted Bahman six hundred litres of the date-rape drug GHB, worth eighty thousand dollars, with an agreement to pay him back with the profits from sales. When police caught wind of the deal, they lifted the drug from the Toronto garage where it had been stored and staged things to look as if there had been a break-in.

  What happened next was predictably tense. The United Nations threatened to murder Bahman if he didn’t pay back the eighty thousand dollars he owed them. Bahman didn’t have the money to do so without sales proceeds from the drugs, which had been taken by the police. The B.C. Hells Angels needed some sort of truce to get the United Nations off their backs, since Bahman’s dealing threatened their credibility. Furthermore, there was a principle at stake for the bikers. Hells Angels have a “no rips”—or no drug rip-off—rule, and Bahman’s predicament reflected badly on all of them.

  Despite the mess, Bahman had gone on to get his full patch, and the club in B.C. and Ontario inherited his troubles. Toronto president John (Winner) Neal felt t
he need to mediate, even though no one in the Toronto charter had been part of the GHB deal apart from Bahman. “Nobody knew about this but Juicy,” Campbell explains. “It was no club conspiracy to deal GHB. They don’t even know what it was.”

  There were times during the preliminary, held by Justice Gail Dobney, when the Angels might have been forgiven if they had reconsidered their effort to save Juicy’s skin. “He was farting from the prisoners’ box during the preliminary. He thinks it’s funny. I said, ‘That’s the judge that’s judging you, you stupid fuck. That’s the judge that’s judging me too. We’re facing years. I’m getting double digits if we’re convicted, you stupid fuck.’ It was funny when he called her Judge Dodge Omni, but the loud farting had to stop. She seemed to be reading papers, but she had to hear it. I spoke to him. He stopped doing it.”

  Even with Juicy’s new-found efforts to control his flatulence in the prisoners’ box, he remained a boor at heart. “You can’t imagine the pig that the guy is.” He revelled in displaying the tattoo of JUICY that ran across his ample belly. “He was fond of showing people that.” Juicy didn’t say how he got the nickname, and there was a good chance not many people would have wanted to know. Perhaps the worst part of sharing close quarters with Juicy was when he ate, and his big round face moved like oatmeal coming to a boil, with every muscle actively involved in the chewing, smacking, sucking and swallowing of whatever was on his plate. It was even worse than eating with Pigpen back in the old Satan’s Choice days. “He [Pigpen] eats normally. He was brought up as a gentleman. It was the acts that he did that got him his name.”

  During the court case, Campbell finally learned why he had been “mud-tested” in Haney, B.C., at the Angels’ clubhouse. It was because Juicy, who was then just a prospect, had used the Angels’ name to get into the GHB deal with Bayani and the United Nations, only to screw it up and bring heat back on the club. “That’s why I got mud-tested. That’s why they said, ‘We don’t like guys coming out here from Ontario and acting like they’ve been Hells Angels for fifteen years.’ I had no idea until the court case. I just knew I was mud-tested.”