Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  When Suzanne’s mother was unable to land a job at GM, she took a job steaming sweaters in Toronto. Suzanne decided to drop out of school to help pay the bills. In May 1959, she called Guindon and asked if he would drive them to Toronto so they could look for an apartment. “He helped us out with no hesitation, more than once,” Suzanne said. “By this time, Bernie and I had become quite close, and I wanted to stay in Oshawa.”

  The teenagers planned to meet one evening in Toronto and go for dinner, but Bernie didn’t show up. Suzanne got tired of waiting and went on to the restaurant herself. He didn’t appear there either and she ate alone.

  Bernie wrote her a letter, dated January 24, 1960, explaining that one of the MG’s headlights had gone out and he had needed to get back to Oshawa before dark. He suggested that Suzanne take a bus out to Oshawa so they could get together, and that he could drop by her home in Toronto with his good friend Vince Barrese.

  Dear Nicky how are you coming along. I received your letter while I was watching TV…So I decided to write my first letter to a girl. Vince and I went to see if you were home and your Mother told us to go to the Pacific. We went there and you were not there so we went back to your apt. and your mother wasn’t there so we decided that we would take off home. It was getting dark out so we wanted to make it home fast. I’ll try to get up there as soon as possible maybe within two-weeks or less…I hope you will give me something when I go up there. If you would like…come to Oshawa…I wouldn’t mind at all. I would be very pleased. I hope you’ll write me back as soon as possible and tell me if she wants Vince to come and if you made up your mind to come to Oshawa. I hope youl’ forgive my writing. I know it’s sloppy but I can’t help it

  Boyfriend

  Bernie

  XXXXXXXXXXX I am waiting for some soon.

  Money was tight and Suzanne couldn’t afford the trip to Oshawa. By the next time she saw Guindon, both of their lives had changed in large ways.

  CHAPTER 3

  Branching Out

  Some guys fight to win and other guys just fight.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  Guindon trained under Grant O’Reilly at the Oshawa Boys Club, where boxers were expected to mind their manners. Cursing was forbidden. Guindon liked how O’Reilly could fight far above his weight division. O’Reilly boxed between 118 and 124 pounds while Guindon was between 132 and 135 pounds, but O’Reilly made up for the size deficit with a jab that he snapped at a speed unavailable to the bigger fighters. “Size doesn’t mean shit,” Guindon said. “I’ve seen big guys who are like mama’s boys and little wee guys who’ve been picked on their whole life fight like a rattlesnake. Some guys fight to win and other guys just fight.”

  Plenty of fighters obsess about their hand speed, and Guindon did too, but he wanted something more. He studied other fighters’ footwork, balance, punching power and reaction patterns. “There’s quite a few different aspects to boxing. It’s not just going in and clubbing each other.” He paid particular attention to his footwork because he realized that the lower body is where real punching power begins. In order to improve his balance and lay a foundation for his punching, he practised dribbling a basketball. Years later, former world-ranked heavyweight George Chuvalo said he was impressed with how Guindon channelled maximum power into his punches. “You hit harder when you twist your rear end,” Chuvalo said. “You maximize your leverage.”

  Guindon developed as an amateur fighter, displaying a pronounced comfort level in the ring and a natural ability to take a punch. Violence felt like his natural element.

  After the downtown Oshawa club folded, Bernie took to the road to find training and competition. In the Buffalo area, he connected with Monsignor Franklin M. Kelliher, a priest who had a strong amateur career and a past double life. In addition to wearing the robes of the clergy on Sunday, Father Kelliher had donned a pro wrestler’s tights and mask on weekdays, rassling as the Red Devil and the original Masked Marvel. In 1932, someone tore off his mask and exposed his true identity, which to that point had been a secret to almost everyone but God. The local bishop wasn’t crazy about having a priest who doubled as the Red Devil, and he body-slammed Kelliher’s ring career.

  From that point on, the fighting Father concentrated on developing young boxers. A man of few words, he impressed Guindon with his down-to-earth, no BS attitude. “He wouldn’t swear and he wouldn’t want you to either. He was a terrific guy. He was a more serious type of guy.”

  At six foot four and in the neighbourhood of 300 pounds, Kelliher was a physically imposing guy. He spoke in a soft voice and expected fighters to shut up and pay attention. “Boy, those kids did what they were told when Father K told them,” Canadian fighter Walter Henry said. “We knew to keep our mouths shut when Monsignor Kelliher was around.”

  Back at home, Guindon found that trouble was coming now from an unexpected source: would-be altar boy Jack, who had left school at age fifteen with a Grade 6 education. Although Jack liked to needle Bernie, he felt a certain pride that his younger brother was the youngest member of the Golden Hawks. Jack thought about joining, to add some glamour to his life, but deep-sixed that notion after a brush with the law when he was seventeen.

  As Jack tells the story, he was more of a curious passenger than a criminal the day he became a car thief. He and an Oshawa friend named Herman lifted a car from the lot of a dealership on Bond Street with a set of keys Herman managed to steal from the office. Herman wanted to visit some relatives north of Toronto, near Barrie. “We went back that evening and away we went,” Jack said. “It was a fine car. He was the driver.”

  Oshawa police caught them on the return trip. For the theft, Jack was chained and sent by bus to the Ontario Reformatory in Guelph for three months. He was assigned to a dormitory for twenty youths, where he slept on a bed with no mattress, just a blanket on top and another blanket under him.

  Some of his new companions immediately met to test him. “These guys told me, ‘Jack, we want you to punch this guy out.’ I went over and punched this guy. Then he grabbed me, had me down on the bed. Somebody was keeping six—watching for the guard.”

  For that, Jack spent some time in segregation. After that, he settled down and earned a job in the reformatory slaughter house. “It was good,” Jack recalled. “I didn’t mind it at all. The time went by fast.”

  He got in a few fights and also boxed one bout in the reformatory, against the father of a stripper Bernie had dated. “I won. Got a chocolate bar for it.”

  Once released, Jack felt he had spent enough time in a cage. Wearing a Golden Hawks’ patch would only make him an obvious target for police. “After that, I said to myself, ‘Never again do I want to go back.’ I didn’t want to join the clubs. I didn’t want to go to jail.”

  Bernie knew that jail was a real possibility in his own future, if he stayed in biker clubs, but he charged ahead anyway.

  CHAPTER 4

  Supreme

  Commander

  I knocked out two of them. I started with the sergeant-at-arms and knocked him out, and then Johnny Sombrero chased me down the field with a log.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  Canada’s best-known biker in the early 1960s was a square-shaped man from Toronto named Harry Barnes, who demanded that people call him “Johnny Sombrero,” “Chief,” “Boss,” “Supreme Commander” or, if they were in his inner circle, “Sombrero.” He’d grown up in the Junction area of west Toronto. He recalled his childhood as “violent, very violent,” even in preschool. “I nailed my first customer when I was four years old,” Sombrero said. “I was in kindergarten, making a little castle with my blocks. He kept pushing them over. They were little maple blocks with ABCs on them. I picked one up and conked the kid over the head with it.”

  In the Barnes household, Harry’s mother was the one to be feared. She was a member of the Italian Commisso clan. Many of their relatives were active in organized crime. Harry’s father, an Englishman from the North Country, was more restrained. He was s
ocially isolated after marrying into his wife’s tightly knit family. She lived to be a hundred while his father didn’t make it to retirement age before falling dead from asthma over his morning newspaper.

  When Harry’s kindergarten teacher called, his mother immediately took charge, lecturing the teacher on the proper way to handle her boy: “You can’t touch his toys when he’s playing with something. You leave him alone.” Then she dealt with Harry. “My mother was very violent,” Sombrero recalled. “She used to beat the shit out of me. She told me every day of my life she was going to kill me…She hit me with her hand and hurt her hand. Kicked me and hurt her foot. Then she went for the rolling pin.”

  Years later, a judge asked Sombrero, “Do you fear any man?”

  “I fear no man and only one woman,” he replied.

  Sombrero was just entering puberty when the soldiers returned from World War II. The thought of men bonding over violence appealed to him. Highways were becoming a big thing and he wanted to be a part of that action too. He and a group of his teen buddies joined a bike club called the Humber Valley Riders, despite a serious age gap between Sombrero’s friends and the club’s leaders. “We were fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. They were forty-four, forty-five.”

  All of the Riders wore matching silk shirts while on public runs. In the right light, they looked a bit like cowboys riding together in the Rose Parade. In the wrong light, they looked like they got lost on their way to a square dance.

  When the club set up a branch called the women’s auxiliary to allow the wives of its middle-aged members to meet, Sombrero couldn’t stomach it any longer. He led a splinter group of a dozen or so teens into a new club he called the Black Diamond Riders. Sombrero also took to calling himself the “Supreme Commander,” a reference to Dwight D. Eisenhower and his role as supreme commander of Allied forces at the end of World War II. As it was in the military, Sombrero had no desire to make his club democratic. “I don’t care what you say,” he told members. “It’s done my way or it’s not done.”

  Powerfully built, Sombrero stood around five foot ten and carried 245 pounds on a barrel-shaped frame (“I’ve got muscles bulging out of me everywhere”). He rode a Harley chopper with squared-off, galvanized sheet metal mufflers that obviously didn’t come from a dealership.

  When he wasn’t riding his chopper, Sombrero cruised behind the wheel of a Cadillac. Sometimes he could be found living in a hotel, like a celebrity on tour. He brawled like a petulant star, too. He fought hard and dirty and often, but he prided himself on fighting only other bikers.

  Some fights were so ferocious that Queen Street in Toronto had to be blocked off to accommodate the young thugs. When police intervened, Sombrero and his gang jumped on their bikes and barrelled away. Outrunning cops was exhilarating but no great challenge. The Toronto area was home to thirteen separate police forces who generally didn’t cross into each other’s jurisdictions. “The police forces couldn’t follow us. They had no power in those days…We used to outrun them.”

  In 1956, Sombrero took notice when a new club called the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club appeared on Niagara Street in downtown Toronto. “The first time I invaded their clubhouse, I had to. They were invading our property.” That’s when the “beer bounties” began. Sombrero gave a case of brew to any member who could strip a Satan’s Choice member of his club crest, the “colours” on the back of his vest. “The guys used to go hunt them down like animals.”

  In time, Sombrero forced the Satan’s Choice off the road. Then Sombrero reconsidered and let them return, reasoning that they would distract the police and make life easier. “If the cops bother them, they are not bothering us.”

  Sombrero often travelled with a goon or two by his side. They sometimes carried violin and guitar cases, although these hadn’t been recruited from any music conservatory. The cases, he said, held Thompson submachine guns from his private collection, since he was a licensed gunsmith with a legal stash of military firearms. As if the goons and violin cases weren’t unsettling enough, Sombrero adopted an unlikely club mascot: a fluffy white bunny rabbit. The club’s five-acre property at Steeles Avenue and Dufferin Street in north Toronto was complete with a swimming pool and groundhog burial site. “We had five acres of land. We had rabbits, foxes, pheasants by the dozens, groundhogs.”

  When Sombrero first met Guindon, he was freshly inducted into the Golden Hawks. Sombrero announced to the teenager that he expected to be called “Supreme Commander.” Sombrero later admitted that this was a tad provocative. “The word ‘supreme’ is a little heavy,” he allowed.

  Guindon declined and told Sombrero to get fucked instead. Not surprisingly, things between them went immediately downhill.

  Guindon had an uneasy feeling when Sombrero and his “BDR” arrived in force at a field day in 1961. Beside the Pebblestone Golf Course, in what is now the village of Courtice, east of Oshawa, the Golden Hawks had turned a barn into their clubhouse and invited a number of other clubs to the field day. Among them were the Para-Dice Riders from Toronto, the Canadian Lancers from Scarborough, the Vagabonds from Toronto, and local car clubs like the Spacemen and Nomads.

  Sombrero recalled his club winning a lot of motorcycle skills events and expected to be rewarded accordingly. Then they realized what kind of prizes were up for grabs. “They didn’t have a trophy for us. They wanted to give us a can of Castrol 50.” The master of ceremonies wasn’t helping. “Son of a bitch swung a chord at me with a microphone on it.”

  Guindon was already nursing two black eyes and a broken nose from a beating he took the previous week in Grand Bend when he tried to punch his way through three guys. As the Black Diamond Riders got angrier, Guindon pulled on his helmet, anticipating the worst. Then he warned the president of the Oshawa chapter of the Golden Hawks that things were going to get nasty. “Bill wouldn’t listen to me,” Guindon recalled. “He said they wouldn’t do that in a field day.” Guindon was astonished at the senior biker’s naïveté. “They were out in the bush cutting trees and branches and whatever they could use to beat us with!”

  Once they had gathered sufficient lumber, Sombrero’s men attacked. “I knocked out two of them,” Guindon said. “I started with the sergeant-at-arms and knocked him out, and then Johnny Sombrero chased me down the field with a log. I wasn’t going to stand around waiting until he hit me. I ran.”

  Armed as they were with branches and tree trunks, the Black Diamond Riders were in the minority that day, while the Golden Hawks had plenty of Oshawa auto workers on their side. “There was about sixteen of us there plus a few Vagabonds, who were always on our side,” Sombrero recalled. “We were fighting half of GM.”

  Sombrero remembered the enemy coming in waves. “They were up on a hill. They kept sending down fifteen at a time to fight us. We were polishing them all off.” Then skinny, teenaged Guindon reappeared, carrying a massive pile of lumber he had torn off the barn. “This kid came up on me with half a barn,” Sombrero said. The planks teetered and then fell onto the Black Diamond Riders. “He almost suffocated us all,” Sombrero said. “He turned around and he ran like a deer…I thought, That’s good. I don’t have to kill that little kid.”

  The melee became known in biker circles as the “Battle of Pebblestone.” One of the Hawks suffered a broken arm while another was treated in hospital for a blow-induced blood clot on his brain. Sombrero followed up the beating by bashing the Golden Hawks’ bikes and burning down the barn. They were all lucky no one was killed.

  The victory made Sombrero even more arrogant and harder for his rivals to take. In 1962, he led the Black Diamond Riders down the western end of Toronto’s brand new Gardiner Expressway in formation, two abreast, heading the wrong way, which seemed wholly appropriate. The Gardiner hadn’t opened yet, so there was no traffic to spoil the rough pageantry.

  In the aftermath of the Battle of Pebblestone, the Golden Hawks, Canadian Lancers, Nomads and Para-Dice Riders struck an alliance. They grandly called it the Amalgamated Ri
ders Association, and under the terms of their mutual defence pact, all of the clubs kept their old colours and structure but now also wore two-inch round patches over their hearts with the letters “AR.”

  Then Sombrero made what appeared to be a friendly overture to the local club with the coolest name, the Satan’s Choice, whose members included characters like Black Peter and Spaceman. They were all invited by the Riders to a party in their honour. Instead of offering cake and beer, however, the Riders pulled out guns and stripped them of their patches. It was the second time Sombrero forced the Satan’s Choice off the road in just a few years. “We took all their crests and told them they couldn’t exist any longer,” Sombrero said. “I wiped them out twice, the Choice.”

  When the other clubs heard the news, they hung back and cringed, thankful they weren’t the ones suffering the humiliation. A surge of disgust cut through Guindon. He was eighteen and impatient for action. When none came, he quit the Golden Hawks and began calling them the “Chicken Hawks.” He washed his hands of the whole scene, moving to Quebec for a short time, where he competed in motorcycle ice racing and stunt riding.

  Quebec was fun but Guindon couldn’t ignore a sense of responsibility toward his mother, who still couldn’t read or write in English. Oshawa was inevitable. When he returned, he took up with an attractive, religious teenager named Veronica, who lived in an area of the city where Guindon used to deliver newspapers. In short order, he got her pregnant. In November 1961, true to the practice of the time, he married her and then continued to have sex with any woman who would accommodate him. Their daughter was named Teresa.