Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  Still, there were offers for Guindon to turn pro, but he worried that it could be used against him in court after one of his many street brawls. He suspected that a simple assault could become assault with a weapon if an ambitious Crown attorney argued that the fists of a professional fighter should be considered weapons. He also didn’t trust the boxing business in general. There were fixed fights, managers who didn’t care about their athletes, and not much money for most fighters. “There are a lot of crooks who are managers. Fucking crooks take all of your money.”

  “He could have done well as a pro,” Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo said. “He was ready to turn pro. He could take a punch. He could deliver a punch. You weren’t going to go in there quickly and knock him out, that’s for sure. He knew what he had to do to be a good fighter. He had the stuff.”

  Henry said there was always a special buzz whenever Guindon appeared on a fight card. “Everyone would go just to see him because he was in Satan’s Choice.”

  “He was intimidating,” Henry recalled. “Stick his chin out. Go, ‘Come on, hit me again.’ One of those types of people. A lot of them were afraid of him…He was just a tough fighter. A good boxer but mostly looked to fight. Looked to get in and slug it out.”

  Coming from Belfast, Henry didn’t know a thing about the Satan’s Choice, beyond the club’s obviously tough reputation and cryptic things Guindon would tell him. “People would say, ‘You’re friends with Bernie?’ I’d say, ‘All I see about Bernie is good stuff. I’ve never seen him do any bad.’

  “All I ever knew about Bernie was that he was such a nice person. A gentleman…We were very close friends. We got along very well. He never spoke about it.”

  Henry was impressed that Guindon helped out other boxers with money when he could. He also sometimes covered for them, taking the blame for things he didn’t actually do. “He’d take the rap for a lot of things that he wasn’t the instigator of,” Henry said. “He was loyal to a fault. He just feels that’s the way the leader should be.”

  On June 3, 1968, Guindon was doing well enough in the ring to be one of the local sports celebrities honoured at the Oshawa Sports Celebrity Dinner at the Oshawa Civic Auditorium, despite his growing notoriety as an outlaw biker. Guests of honour that night included Montreal Canadiens’ captain Jean Béliveau, former world boxing champion Rocky Marciano and Oshawa mayor Ernie Marks. Guindon was suitably impressed by Marciano but didn’t approach him. “He was busy. I just don’t like bugging guys. You see the man. You know who he is. You respect him for what he has done. What else can you do? He wasn’t going to be able to help you.”

  Sometimes Guindon wondered if Sister Dirty Gertie at Holy Cross Catholic Elementary knew who he had become. He certainly hoped she did. He still considered her a bully. “She lived long enough to know who the hell I was. I was so fucking happy when she died.”

  Guindon still made training trips to Buffalo. Monsignor Kelliher didn’t talk much about Bernie’s biker club with the ungodly name. “I’d go and see him on a one-on-one basis. Me being a Satan’s Choice, he knew that. I just said it was a motorcycle club.”

  Once when Guindon was fighting in Buffalo, a vocal contingent of Satan’s Choice members showed up, and one filled in as his corner man. Guindon was handily winning the three-round bout when the clubmate in his corner ran out of water just after round two. He grabbed another member’s Coke, drained it and then dropped the ice cubes into Guindon’s trunks, just in time for the third round to begin. Guindon managed to hang on to win the fight, although he was shivering visibly.

  No one questioned his durability in the ring. He possessed the rare ability to stay on his feet even when temporarily detached from his senses. “The only time I ever got knocked out was at the beginning of the third round of one fight,” Guindon said. “I don’t remember anything else. My corner man was cutting off my hand bandages at the end of the fight. I said, ‘Grant, who won the fight?’ He goes, ‘You did.’ I said, ‘I don’t remember anything after the third round.’ He said, ‘Oh, you fought better in the last few rounds.’ ”

  CHAPTER 14

  Eye on Montreal

  He’d be in the far corner. Staying away from everybody. Make sure his back was to the wall.

  BERNIE GUINDON on Montreal hitman Yves (Apache) Trudeau

  Guindon wasn’t much concerned about his club’s local rivals as the 1970s approached. His focus was on Montreal. The Satan’s Choice had more than outgrown its Toronto peers, it had grown into the second-largest outlaw biker club in the world—behind only the Hells Angels. Now Guindon wanted to expand coast to coast. To do so, he needed to build on his toehold in Montreal, which at that time was Canada’s largest city.

  Rod MacLeod’s Montreal chapter was tough but threadbare. They didn’t have the money for a clubhouse and often hung out at Joe’s Snack Bar in the Saint-Henri district. They met every Tuesday night, paying weekly membership dues of two bucks. The dues buttressed an emergency fund, from which members could borrow for repairs to their bikes or for bail.

  When in Montreal, Guindon stayed with MacLeod and noted that he didn’t live lavishly by any stretch, but that he also didn’t seem to need work. “He had a bunch of guys working for him. He had something going. I don’t remember him having a job.” It was all quite modest stuff, especially since MacLeod’s bunch was playing in a very rough league.

  Montreal’s geography ordained it would be a hot spot for Canadian organized crime. The long St. Lawrence River shoreline and access to the Atlantic Ocean made it a natural for drug smuggling. It was also less than four hundred miles by highway to New York City, the continent’s richest drug market. The violence in Montreal intensified as drug use inside and outside the city’s many clubs increased.

  MacLeod gave Guindon a guided tour of various rival clubhouses in Montreal. Guindon still wasn’t comfortable with guns, which made him stand out in Montreal’s underworld like a vegetarian at a pig roast, even within his own club. “There were a few guys in the Montreal chapter you had to be careful with. They were notorious. You knew they would shoot you.” The more Guindon saw of Montreal, the more he realized how competitive its streets were. “They did a lot of killing there in Montreal. Montreal is a rough, tough town.”

  He found one slender, smallish Montreal biker particularly chilling. Even his fellow members in the Popeyes were creeped out by Yves (Apache) Trudeau’s habit of just staring into space as they partied. Perhaps he had horrific things on his mind, or maybe his head was as empty as his stare—or his soul. Nicknamed “The Mad Bomber” and “The Mad Bumper,” Trudeau once worked for Canadian Industries Limited, which manufactured dynamite and detonator caps. That early training proved useful in his current job: making people disappear.

  When Guindon met him, Trudeau was on his way to becoming one of the most prolific killers in Canadian history, responsible for an estimated forty-three murders. “He’d be in the far corner. Staying away from everybody. Make sure his back was to the wall. He only paid attention to his own close friends. He tried to stay away from everybody.” Trudeau’s Popeyes were a particularly dangerous club, despite their cartoonish name. “When they had wars, they really had wars,” Guindon said. “No hesitation to bring out the shotguns and the machine guns.”

  Among the frequent visitors to the Choice’s Montreal chapter was Pigpen Berry, who was affectionately known in some rough Montreal circles as “Piggy.” Pigpen also did enforcement work for the West End Gang, or Irish mob. This involved spending time in Pointe-Saint-Charles, a community along the St. Lawrence River southwest of the downtown, built by a broad range of European immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century, when it became one of Canada’s first industrial slums.

  The Pointe had been home to an early incarnation of the West End Gang since the early 1900s. By the 1960s, they worked mostly in truck hijackings, home invasions, kidnapping, protection rackets, drug trafficking, extortion and armed robbery. They moved heavily into hashish and cocaine im
portation in the 1970s, developing links to the Mafia, Hells Angels and Colombian cartels.

  “I had the Irish mafia behind me,” Pigpen recalled.

  The Irish mob wanted Pigpen to help in their war against the Dubois, a clan of nine brothers with interests in prostitution, loan sharking, extortion and dealing cocaine and a host of other narcotics. That said, members of the Irish mob weren’t always amused by Pigpen’s eccentric nature: “On one hand, they wanted to kill me. On the other, they wanted to keep me on,” Pigpen later said. Some of Pigpen’s Quebec time was spent in the Bordeaux jail, where he was sent to the hole and taunted: “Hey English, when you come out in the yard, we’ll fuck you in the ass.”

  By this time, Pigpen had befriended Armand (In the Trunk) Sanguigni of the Toronto Choice chapter. Sanguigni was a smallish man with the empty eyes of a heroin user and a reputation as someone who handled murder contracts for the Montreal mob. “He was a good guy,” Pigpen later said of Sanguigni. “I got along with him good…I don’t agree with the homicide part.”

  Guindon also found Sanguigni to be okay, although he added that he didn’t know him or his side business well. Even if he had, the club didn’t have rules against killing for money or to eliminate witnesses. “I didn’t have much to do with those guys,” Guindon said. “I was from Oshawa. They were trying to make a living as well.”

  It was hard to stay on the sidelines in Montreal, and Guindon’s Choice was drawn into the Devil’s Disciples’ conflict with the Dubois. Pigpen was particularly in demand, and Cecil Kirby, the former biker and mob enforcer, explained why: “If there was trouble somewhere, they’d send Howard Berry out to take care of it. He was the Choice hitman and everybody knew it.” Pigpen said that wasn’t exactly correct; he shot people but never killed anyone.

  Kirby said he was in Montreal when Pigpen opened fire on the Popeyes’ clubhouse with a sawed-off .303 with a ten-round clip. “It was like a cannon going off,” Kirby said.

  Closer to home, the Satan’s Choice clashed with the Chosen Few, Saddletramps, Chairmen, Fourth Reich, Devil’s Law, Coffin Wheelers, Plague, Wild Breed, Los Santos, Outlawed Morticians and, most notably, the Henchmen Motorcycle Clubs. The Henchmen even outnumbered the Choice in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, but the Choice had more members throughout the province. Any rival could pose a threat, but none of the smaller clubs could take Guindon’s down.

  The violence was escalating, though, and it took very little to incite it. On one occasion, a Choice member attended a party with the Cross Breeds in Niagara Falls. He and a member of the Para-Dice Riders were thrown out for bad behaviour. They returned with a bomb and blew up part of the house. That understandably angered everyone still inside, including members of the Wild Ones and Vagabonds. A wave of violent retribution hit the Choice, which hit back even harder, blowing up other clubhouses. A Wild One was shot in front of his house in Hamilton. Shooting and bombing continued, but somehow no one was killed. Even the tiny Fourth Reich and Chainmen joined in against the Choice.

  But for all this heat in Ontario, nowhere was hotter than Montreal. The city’s underworld was expanding as demand for drugs increased. The bigger business got, the closer the turf was to exploding. “You used to see Montreal guys disappear just like that,” Guindon said. “You wonder, ‘When is my trip up?’ ”

  Ultimately, it wasn’t another motorcycle club that struck the hardest blow against Guindon and his Satan’s Choice.

  CHAPTER 15

  Skin Beef

  I knew that a skin beef made a guy undesirable in the general population.

  BERNIE GUINDON talks of prison

  Guindon, not to be slowed down by the fact that he was a young father with three daughters from two marriages, hooked up routinely with random women. He wasn’t sure why some of the women were attracted to him, and he didn’t waste much time trying to figure it out. Certainly, many of them seemed drawn to anyone wearing a biker patch, and it didn’t hurt that Guindon ran the club. “Maybe they like the wild side. He’s not straight up and down like her father was. Who knows?” Certainly, Guindon didn’t have any illusions that he was a great lover, but he was happy to oblige them. “They called me needle dick, the big flea fucker. Hung like a stud field mouse.”

  Guindon was at the Choice’s Ottawa clubhouse in October 1968 when he met a fifteen-year-old girl who was hanging around with members. That day, she went to the house of a man who hung around the Choice. At one point Guindon joined them. There was group sex and then things got particularly ugly when the man’s wife showed up unexpectedly and phoned the police. “The concocted story was that they saved her from being raped and beaten at the Satan’s Choice clubhouse,” Guindon said. Using the call and accusation of rape against a minor as a reason, police raided the Ottawa clubhouse.

  Transcripts of the case don’t exist and accounts are widely divergent. There was violence as well as group sex, although Guindon was not himself accused of hitting anyone.

  As the indecent assault trial began, the girl described being confined for three days and forced to have sex with five men. Guindon’s mother wanted to attend the trial but he didn’t want her to see her boy in court facing such sordid charges. He assured her he wasn’t guilty, but he also knew that that didn’t really matter. “You know you’re getting fucked, no matter how you look at it…You look at the jury. You can’t blame them for judging you the way they judge you. I had a good idea we were going to get it.”

  In May 1969, the bottom fell out of Guindon’s world. He was twenty-five and in his athletic prime when he was sentenced to five years in prison—what criminals call a “solid nickel.” Four other club members were also sent to prison, while a woman who associated with the club was sentenced to two years in reformatory for assault after she admitted she kicked the girl with steel-tipped cowboy boots. Their one small relief came when the judge denied a Crown submission that Guindon’s punishment should also include lashing.

  Criminals locked up for “skin beefs” are considered the dregs of prison society and fair game for anyone with a shank, a nasty attitude and an urge to make a name for himself. In the Ottawa jail, Guindon got into a fight with a prisoner whom he considered mouthy, and cut him with his fists for eleven stitches. But he knew far worse lay ahead when he got to Kingston Penitentiary, the place his father had once told him he was going to end up.

  The Choice at that point had chapters in Hamilton, Oshawa, Guelph, St. Catharines, Preston, Peterborough, Ottawa, Kingston, Windsor, Montreal and Vancouver and about three hundred members. All of that muscle on the streets would do Guindon no good as he headed alone behind the infamous prison’s thick limestone walls.

  “When they closed those gates, it was just boom,” Guindon recalled. “Big steel gates closing. You just have shivers going down your spine. You sure knew you’re in jail when those fucking gates closed.” Long-time inmate Paul Gravelle has been locked inside plenty of prisons and jails and said there was an especially harsh feeling when he heard himself locked inside Kingston. “It was like going into a dungeon,” Gravelle said. “It was something else. You knew your place.”

  New prisoners at the Kingston Penitentiary were marched through a shower, like a car wash for humans. Staff then covered the newcomers with a disinfectant powder and hosed them down again.

  Guindon arrived at Kingston at a time when conversations among inmates were forbidden. So were radios and televisions in their cells. Guindon found the penitentiary oddly silent. “We weren’t supposed to talk to anybody,” he said. “We used to send messages to the guys who were doing the cleaning.” Prisoners would whisper messages to the cleaners to pass on to other prisoners, also in whispers. There was great power in controlling the flow of information in the prison ranges. “I used to try to get out on the cleaning job quite a bit,” Guindon said.

  None of the other Satan’s Choice members who were convicted with Guindon went to Kingston. Their club president was isolated and vulnerable. “It’s scary…A lot of them don’t like bike
rs. You have problems, you don’t know who the hell is going to back you up.”

  One of the first prisoners Guindon befriended cautioned him that he should tell fellow prisoners he was locked up for armed robbery rather than indecent assault. Armed robbery is a socially acceptable, suitably tough crime among inmates. Guindon argued that he was in custody on a bogus beef and he shouldn’t have to hide anything or lie. The prisoner was just trying to be helpful and told him that there were a lot of prisoners who would rather “off a skinner” than have to look at him every day.

  “You just give them the number of my house [prison cell], okay?” Guindon answered back.

  He had the chilling feeling that he was being set up for attack, but he refused to go into the special protective unit. That area was known as the “skinner range,” and Guindon would rather risk death on the main range than set foot there. That would look like an admission of guilt. “I knew that a skin beef made a guy undesirable in the general population.”

  There was no mercy in the pen for undesirables. “When I got in there, they gave me the room of the guy who got thrown off the tier. And that was the third floor at Kingston. He was right beside me when he got thrown off.” Guindon kept his mouth shut about seeing the forced three-storey death dive and moved into the victim’s six-by-ten-foot cell. “I was minding my own business. You don’t ask questions. You save a lot of goddamn problems.”

  The railing outside his cell was a constant reminder of how quickly his life could end. Guindon later saw an inmate hanging on to that railing for dear life to prevent a fatal plunge onto the concrete below. “I was in the cell. I couldn’t get out of the cell.” It was after lockdown and Guindon could only watch as guards pulled the inmate to safety.