Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  Pigpen became quick with his fists, and refined his fighting style by boxing as an amateur at the Peterborough Boxing Club and East City Bowl Boxing Club. He grew to be solidly built, carrying about 245 pounds on a six-foot frame. His most memorable organized fights were settled far from referees, including one that spilled onto a major Toronto street against George Clark of the Vagabonds. The punches and bloodshed weren’t necessarily started in anger but they weren’t meaningless either, and spectators could sense they were witnessing something truly epic. “They blocked off Avenue Road—the cops—for an hour,” Pigpen said. “They didn’t want to stop it. They had bets on it. I wore him down.” Neither man was knocked out, but Clark later said he had never been hit so hard in his life.

  A six-foot-seven Vagabond named Igor provided Berry with a much easier test than Clark. “I knocked him out,” Pigpen recalled. There was also a dust-up with the formidable Howard (Baldy) Chard, “King of the Bouncers,” a five-foot-eight, barrel-chested 280 pounds. Chard fought with professional cool, as befitted someone who collected debts for the likes of mob boss John (Pops) Papalia of Hamilton. “He never lost a street fight, a fight in reform school, in reformatory or in the pen,” Paul Rimstead of the Toronto Sun wrote of Chard (though he wasn’t counting a less-successful tussle in which Chard was pitted against seven men).

  Pigpen’s self-defence tactics went far beyond weathering and throwing punches. Bikers liked to reminisce about a time when Pigpen was arrested with a pack of outlaw bikers. One by one, the bikers were led outside by police, who put a hurt on them to teach them a lesson. “He shit his underwear and covered his face in shit,” former Choice member Cecil Kirby recalled. “It worked. Better than getting a phone book against your head.” Police wouldn’t touch Pigpen in that condition.

  “There are guys who would start fights and then they’d say, ‘Come and help me.’ I can’t stand people like that. Be a stand-up guy,” Kirby said, with Pigpen in mind. “He was a stand-up guy. That’s what I liked about him.”

  The Markham police raid made the front page of the Toronto Daily Star. “If they don’t get a fair shake in court, we’ll tear that place apart and then come into Toronto,” a biker vowed to the newspaper’s Eddy Roworth. The bikers were indignant at having to spend a night in the Don Jail, as well as at their mangled bikes. None of their rides was in worse shape than the Wild Thing, whose three-foot-long front forks had been ruined by the tires of a police cruiser. “Just horseshit,” Guindon later said. “It was worth good money. It was a show bike.”

  “We’ll get even,” a biker said at the time. “When the guys that own these machines get out, you’re going to see a lot of cops with scars. We know who they are. We’ve got names and addresses.” Someone called Scarborough police to say, “Let the guys out or we’ll blow up that hellhole.”

  Some of the bikers sounded surprised and even a little offended that police had crashed their party. They had already retreated from the city after police had made them feel unwelcome. “We got out of the plazas because of them,” one told the newspaper. “Now they follow us out here. We don’t want trouble. We moved out here so we could have our blowouts without bothering anyone. And we’re going to blow, man, no matter what. Maybe they’d like it if we went back to the plazas.”

  From a police van outside the courthouse, Guindon called out to reporters that police had deliberately ruined their bikes. “The bikes were right underneath a light,” Guindon shouted. “The police car ran right over them on purpose. Thirty guys lost their jobs over this. They wouldn’t let us make phone calls.” Another biker who had attended the party with his wife shouted about not being allowed to phone their babysitter.

  “Hey, Bernie,” one biker piped in. “Tell them how they made us take a shower.”

  “Yeah, that’s police brutality,” Guindon said, warming up to the press attention. “We’re only supposed to do that once a year.”

  Markham deputy police chief Robert Hood said some bikes were damaged but much of it was “the doing of the motorcycle gang members themselves.” Hood added that he couldn’t understand the accusation that his men ruined the farmhouse, since it was “a pigsty to begin with.”

  In the end, Guindon and the other bikers got off with a series of one-hundred-dollar fines. They didn’t have to follow through on their threat to ride three hundred bikes into the heart of Toronto on a rampage, which was just as well since they didn’t have anything close to that number of roadworthy bikes to rampage with. That weekend, Guindon said goodbye to the Wild Thing. He swapped its mangled remains for a 1947 Knucklehead. Guindon could measure phases of his life by the bikes he had ridden. After the Matchless G80, he had owned a Triumph Bonneville, then a Norton 750 twin and then a series of Harleys, the official ride of true outlaw bikers. He had ridden them all hard, sometimes with painful consequences. The worst mishaps were when he scraped off skin during a slide. “Road rashes, they’re the worst,” he said. “I’d rather have a broken leg than a road rash.”

  Guindon lost some heavy-duty support in December 1967, when his right-hand man, Big Jack Olliffe, was packed off to prison. The charges came from a beating that Big Jack and a biker named “Tank” had laid upon a junior member from Kitchener named Arnold Bilitz at a party the previous year. Bilitz had come on to another guy’s old lady. A member named Terry Siblock had thrown in a kick for good measure.

  They’d meant the beating to be a harsh lesson, but Bilitz died and Big Jack and Tank ended up with prison time. Siblock was allowed to walk free as he had only struck one blow, which wasn’t likely the fatal one.

  Wondering at Siblock’s freedom, Big Jack couldn’t resist calling him a stool pigeon, even though Siblock was a solid member and no police informant. For a biker like Siblock, whose dad was an ex-con and had raised his son to hate stool pigeons, Big Jack’s insult was the type that festers, threatening to one day explode.

  CHAPTER 9

  Yorkville

  If anyone gave one of my dealers a hard time, I was swift to use my type of justice on them.

  Satan’s Choice member FRANK (HIPPY) HOBSON on life in Yorkville

  The Satan’s Choice had seventy or so members in Toronto by early 1968, which put them on a par locally with the Wild Ones, well ahead of the Para-Dice Riders, which had thirty members, and far ahead of the once mighty Black Diamond Riders, which had dwindled to fifteen mainly older bikers. The Vagabonds remained the city’s dominant club, with a hundred members, many of whom could be found hanging around in Yorkville.

  In the late 1960s, Yorkville was close to bursting on weekends with middle-class kids wearing granny glasses, love beads, paisley shirts, sandals and bell bottoms. Many were “commuter hippies”—in from the suburbs to buy marijuana and LSD and feel groovy until classes or work started up again on Monday.

  At The Purple Onion coffee house, they listened to Buffy Sainte-Marie, who wrote “Universal Soldier” in the basement there. At The Mynah Bird there were go-go dancers in a glass booth, a pet bird that once appeared on The Johnny Carson Show, X-rated film screenings, and Neil Young and Rick James playing in the house band. For a limited time, a cook did his basting and frying wearing nothing but a chef’s hat. At the Riverboat, hippies fawned over Young, Joni Mitchell, Gordon Lightfoot, the Staple Singers and Phil Ochs. Sometimes Bob Dylan, Jack Nicholson and Eric Clapton were in the audience.

  For the most part, the bikers and hippies happily co-existed, since the hippies wanted to buy drugs and the bikers wanted to sell them, as well as have sex with hippie girls. For Guindon, trips to Yorkville were a bit like visits to the zoo. It was interesting but not threatening, and he didn’t feel the urge to partake in any poetry readings or play the bongo drums. “I wore my big boots, my leathers, my patch. They did their thing and we did our thing.”

  Flying the Satan’s Choice flag regulary in Yorkville was a biker fittingly nicknamed “Hippy,” who was originally from Kingston, Ontario, and whose real name was Frank Hobson. Later in life, he wrote down his t
houghts on the road that led him to the Choice and Yorkville. Like many bikers, his childhood included a violent father: “My father was an alcoholic who was not afraid to slap me around. I remember some of those beatings when I was very young. Some of those were for very minor things and some were for things I had never done.”

  Hippy’s father had a warm side too, and he sometimes took his son fishing. He was an army veteran and, like many a biker father, wanted his boy to grow up tough:

  One day when I was about nine years old, a classmate was bullying me outside of our home. I was scared and did not want to fight back. My father saw what was going on and shouted out from the window, “You either fight him or I will tan your ass.” I punched the kid in the face and he started crying and ran home. From that time, I never backed down from a fight. That was both a blessing and a curse.

  Like Guindon, Hippy found himself protecting his mother from his father at home:

  My father’s abusive behaviour toward my mother and I came to an end when I was around seventeen years old. He would often come home drunk and push my mother around. On one occasion, I went into the kitchen and grabbed a pair of scissors and stood up to him. He cursed at me, saying, “I’ll kick your face in with my boots!” He had big, double-soled army boots and I was not looking forward to having them in my face. I was lucky; he backed down and went upstairs to sleep. From that day, my father left my mother alone. We never talked about it.

  Hippy often wondered about the roots of his father’s rage, and one day he felt he found the answer. “My grandfather was gassed in World War I and he was never the same when he returned home.” The pain kept getting worse, and when Hippy’s father was five years old, he watched his father cut his throat on the kitchen floor. “My father never told me about his father committing suicide and I never brought it up.”

  Hippy travelled to Windsor in 1968 in the hopes of landing a production line job at Chrysler. He succeeded and bought a customized BSA. It wasn’t a Harley but it was the next best thing: chopped, awash in chrome and painted candy apple red and tangerine orange with “Hippy” written on the gas tank. “I did this so that it would be easier for me to pick up girls. The hippie girls back then were totally freaked out with bikers.”

  He became a striker for the Choice in Windsor, who had patched over from a local club called the Heathens in 1967. Its two dozen members were a tightly knit group. Strikers were gofers for full members, on call twenty-four hours a day to do menial jobs like scrub the clubhouse and fetch cigarettes and hamburgers. “Striking was likely the most difficult thing I have gone through. The problem with striking is that it demoralizes you. It breaks you down. There is really no ‘you’ anymore. It was like the basic training I took in the air force but worse.”

  The Windsor Satan’s Choice was very close to the Outlaws in Detroit, which allowed the Detroit Outlaws free rein to treat Choice strikers any way they wanted. Once, Hippy was in Jackson Park in downtown Windsor with his girlfriend when he was spotted by a Detroit Outlaw. “He told me to get on his bike and said he was following a Queensman. The Queensmen in Windsor were rivals of the Choice in Windsor. He turned around and handed me a gun, telling me to shoot the Queensman when we caught up to him. It was my lucky day because we never did catch up to him.”

  Three of the Detroit Outlaws—Yankee Tom, Scotty and Walter—actually lived on the Canadian side of the Detroit River in 1968, and often hung out in the Choice clubhouse. That led to Hippy planning a visit across the river with some Outlaws, including the Detroit president, who went by the unlikely name of “Harmony.” But he received a word of caution before setting out. Hippy had long hair and constantly wore black bell-bottomed pants. “I remember my brothers telling me not to go to Detroit with the name ‘Hippy’ and dressed in those bell bottoms. I went anyway.”

  During that first trip to meet Detroit Outlaws, Hippy spoke with a Florida Outlaw nicknamed “Crazy,” who was said by the press to have crucified his old lady. Crazy told Hippy that the whole crucifixion thing was a hoax and that the story of her being nailed to an orange tree had been staged for shock value. Exactly how a crucifixion could be faked was not explained. But Crazy proved to be as crazy as the trip would get, and despite his apparel Hippy’s trip to Detroit was a success. “We really hit it off with those guys, and before leaving, they offered me a full patch.”

  Hippy decided to stay on with the Satan’s Choice, eventually quitting his job at Chrysler and moving into an old billiards hall that had been converted into a clubhouse in Windsor’s Westminster district. His bed was a mattress atop one of the clubhouse’s many pool tables.

  He was now a full-time drug dealer, driving to Detroit to buy kilos of marijuana and thousands of hits of LSD for sale in Yorkville. Sometimes Hippy brought the drugs into Toronto himself. Other times, he had them flown in from Detroit. “If it was weed, I would clean it up and bag it. I would distribute it to my people on the street, who were all hippies. I gave them a good commission for selling my stuff and I protected them. I would go around the next day and collect my money and give them more product. They were happy and so was I.”

  Hippy had a girlfriend who used to turn tricks for him in Detroit. Tired of that scene, he took her to Toronto to try their luck, where she caught the eye of a Black Diamond Rider. He offered Hippy a bike and some cash for her. The bike was flush with chrome and metal flake, radiating drug dealer success. Hippy jumped at the offer. “I left Toronto with an amazing custom-built Panhead, five hundred cash and no girlfriend. Best deal I ever made.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Darwinism

  You’ve got to be on top to survive.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  The Choice weren’t yet dominant, but they knew what it took to survive, a skill sometimes exercised in small cruelties. Motorcycle clubs kept testing each other in a two-wheeled version of Darwinism in which the weakest clubs became extinct. At a Thanksgiving weekend hill climb attended by six thousand people in the village of Heidelberg, nine miles west of Kitchener, four Toronto Choice members used a jackknife to trim off the patch of a member of the London Road Runners Motorcycle Club. The Road Runners soon lost respect and were no more. One less rival who couldn’t stand up or get in their way.

  Sometimes Guindon’s club was tested by its rivals too, like when someone in May 1968 torched the rundown Scarborough barn on Finch Avenue East that the Choice had most recently adopted as a clubhouse. There was also what police called a “no-holds-barred rumble” between more than two dozen men from the Satan’s Choice, Chainsmen, Henchmen and Fourth Reich in a downtown Kitchener garage.

  As the Choice ascended the biker food chain, a potential rival in the Cross Breeds of Niagara Falls posed unique challenges. The Cross Breeds looked like a throwback to the early biker club days, wearing black and white shirts rather than leather jackets or vests. More importantly, their clubhouse was an easy stone’s throw from the Niagara Falls police station, making it virtually impossible to attack them and not be seen by police.

  Perhaps most significantly, some members of the Cross Breeds felt they had the local mob on their side. While the club had only one chapter with no more than fifteen members, they appeared to be well connected with the local underworld. Some members stood guard in the parking lot outside the high-stakes gambling game of Louis Iannuzzelli, whose family owned a hotel and the House of Frankenstein on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls’ touristy downtown. Iannuzzelli also had mob money on the street as a loan shark.

  The Cross Breeds didn’t want to expand or be absorbed into a larger club like the Satan’s Choice, Outlaws or Red Devils. “They didn’t want to cross over to anything,” said Mark DeMarco, a long-time Niagara Falls resident who did custom painting on club members’ bikes as well as stock cars. “They figured Niagara Falls, the border town, they were in with the Italians. They didn’t want anybody to interfere with their Italian association.”

  That made the Satan’s Choice attack on the Cross Breeds on Sunday, June 1, 1968, all the
more audacious and satisfying for Guindon and his club. They trashed bikes and beat Breeds members, then jumped on their own bikes and raced away. “They never thought we’d be there,” Guindon said. The Cross Breeds’ black and white club shirts soon went the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. “I think we told them to either take [the club shirts] off or else,” Guindon said.

  Guindon didn’t quote Charles Darwin exactly, but he alluded to his theory of evolution when explaining the necessity of such violence, even if it looked wild from the outside. “You’ve got to be on top to survive.”

  In Toronto, high-spirited Choice members managed to rile up both the Vagabonds and the Black Diamond Riders, and they expected their Choice brothers from other chapters to rally behind them. That was a problem. The Vagabonds had plenty of friends in the Choice outside Toronto, and a solid reputation in the biker world. Choice in Oshawa, Kingston, Ottawa, Kitchener and Brampton scoffed at the idea of a war with the Vagabonds. Meanwhile, the Choice from Hamilton, Montreal and Brantford were spoiling to jump into the tensions, just for the sake of a good fight, while St. Catharines, Niagara Falls, Peterborough and Richmond Hill didn’t know what to do. Guindon enjoyed a rumble as much as anyone, but he had no beef with the Vagabonds and realized that an escalation of hostilities with them could irreparably split his own club.