Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  Woody, the most senior Thunder Bay member and an experienced hunter, who considered Pigpen practically a member of his family, was there, and so was John Raleigh, who had transferred from Southern Ontario, or “down east,” to the small but proud chapter in Thunder Bay. “He was an all right guy,” Guindon said. “I don’t know why the hell he was up there. If it was something to do with a court case or just getting out of shit.”

  “One night, relaxing after the day’s hunting, Pigpen burst into the shack and rushed out again after grabbing Woody’s .308, a high-powered rifle,” Erslavas said. “A moment later, we heard the loud discharge of the gun right outside the shack. We rushed out to see a large owl sitting in the snow, looking at us. He had only one wing because Howard [Pigpen] had blown the other one off. We were all pissed.”

  “What the fuck—why’d you do that?” a usually calm and collected Woody yelled at him.

  “He wouldn’t stop staring at me,” Pigpen replied, looking both sorrowful and crazed.

  “You don’t shoot a fucking owl,” Woody said, stressing each word.

  The bikers quickly agreed that the owl should be put out of its misery. To do anything else would be simply cruel. Pigpen chambered a round, since no one else wanted the job. There was another rifle blast but…

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Erslavas said. “The owl was still there, looking, and now he had no wings because Howard had shot the other one off! We looked at the owl aghast. Woody took the rifle and finished the job quickly.”

  Woody turned to Pigpen and asked, “Why didn’t you finish him?”

  “I couldn’t look at him ’cause he was staring at me, so I closed my eyes when I pulled the trigger,” Pigpen replied sheepishly.

  “You couldn’t help but laugh, but I can still see that owl’s big eyes,” Erslavas said. “Thankfully, we didn’t see any moose or deer, but we did bag a couple of partridges, which we brought home and cooked at the clubhouse after soaking them in a brine overnight.” As the crew sat around, savouring the last bites of an excellent meal, Pigpen made an announcement. He had pissed in the brine. True to form, Mike began to gag.

  “Pigpen was happy. His face was beaming. You couldn’t help but like the guy, but you had to be wary.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Riot

  If I can get into a good brawl, I’m happy.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  Guindon was on parole in April 1971 when things exploded inside Kingston Penitentiary. Prisoners gawked from the upper tiers as inmates dragged pedophiles and men who had done violence to children into the central dome and tied them to chairs.

  “The fun is about to begin!” someone shouted.

  “You’ve got a real nice nose there, but it’s kind of twisted, so I think I’ll reset it for you,” a prisoner announced to one of the bound men.

  He smashed the prisoner’s face with an iron bar.

  “Kill the child molesters!” prisoners screamed down from high above.

  And so it went during four days of madness, as six guards were held hostage and two inmates were executed. Blaring rock music could do only so much to muffle the screams of the tortured child molesters. One of the doomed men was repeatedly burned with a lit cigarette before he was finally put out of his misery. Prisoners particularly hated the sex criminals because they couldn’t protect their own wives and children from men like this while inside, so they took out their worst fears on the predators available to them. “Guys have got a wife at home, a mother, daughter, sisters,” Paul Gravelle said.

  The damage to the prison from the rioting was hard to fathom. “They bent the cell door right back, with their hands,” said Gravelle. “It was something else. Incredible.”

  Among the prisoners charged with murder following the riot was twenty-three-year-old Brian Leslie Beaucage of London, Ontario, who eventually pleaded guilty to assault. Beaucage was a veteran of the prison system despite his young age and carried the emotional scars of sexual abuse from older inmates when he was a teenager. When he finally got out, he became a member of the Satan’s Choice.

  Guindon wasn’t surprised when he heard of the murderous anger and sustained violence of the riot. “Nobody listens to you when you’re a prisoner. Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”

  Now that he was on the outside, Guindon decided to make up for lost time by rededicating himself to boxing. The clock was ticking if he wanted to make it as a big-time fighter. He was so close, but it would take a big push to get over the hump. It was tough to find fighters his size who could challenge him, so he sparred with light-heavyweights and heavyweights.

  His hard work paid off. Between January and November 1971, Guindon won the Ontario Golden Gloves, Eastern Canadian Golden Gloves and Canadian Golden Gloves tournaments, and he was chosen to be part of the Canadian team in the Pan Am Games in Cali, Colombia. He was selected as a light-middleweight in the 156.5-pound weight class, even though he was naturally one weight division lighter than the welterweight class. Guindon was convinced he was put in the ring with the larger fighters because a key boxing official didn’t want him to advance. “He didn’t like me because I was a biker. He didn’t like all that.”

  The tight security during the Colombia games jolted Guindon. “I’ve never seen so many guns. They even shot people down there while we were there. You’d say, ‘Holy fuck, what kind of a country is this?’ It’s crazy down there.”

  Guindon brightened when a Cali cop let him try out his Harley in the downtown. Most of the time, coaches escorted them everywhere, but he did manage to slip away and spy on the Cuban team as they trained. He was impressed at the lengths they went to work their core areas, which meant plenty of sit-ups. He decided he would incorporate more of that into his own training. When the Cubans noticed him, “They told me to leave. ‘Get out! Go!’ I knew they were going to get pissed off. I was sort of hiding.”

  International amateur boxing is meant for technicians, not brawlers, which played away from Guindon’s natural strengths. “That boxing is on points. How many times you hit a person, how you keep your hands, your balance. They watch that. How you move in. How you accept a punch. Sometimes it’s a bitch. I like fighting. I like the toe-to-toe. If I can get into a good brawl, I’m happy.”

  The Games were a limited success. Guindon had always found southpaws tricky, and he drew Mexican left-hander Emetorio Villanueva in the semi-finals. He lost by a technical knockout and left the Games with a bronze medal. For this, he got his smiling image wearing a white shirt and string tie published in The Daily Times-Journal in Thunder Bay.

  He kept up the hard training and was made captain of a Canadian boxing team that toured Europe, fighting five matches over twenty-one days in Stockholm, Helsinki and The Hague. Guindon won three of five fights against Olympic-level fighters, including Swedish light-middleweight champion Christer Ottosson.

  It felt special to wear a maple leaf on his chest, even though he had recently served hard time in Her Majesty’s prisons. “It gives you a better feeling. It also shows that you’ve done something that’s beneficial to you that you can always remember that at least you were on the team.”

  Along the way, he made a couple of connections with people overseas who were interested in setting up their own Choice chapters. It was exciting to think of expanding across the ocean but also daunting. “It’s time-consuming. Nobody was paying me any fucking money. At the time, it was kinda hard, keeping it together.”

  The highlight of his first year back on the streets came when he was selected as Thunder Bay’s Athlete of the Week and given a key to the city. Among those honouring him at a dinner was his old friend George Chuvalo, who famously was never knocked off his feet in bouts with top heavyweights like Floyd Patterson, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. Chuvalo said he was happy to attend and honour Guindon. “It was richly deserved, so it was easy to do,” Chuvalo said.

  “Everybody in town was there,” Verg Erslavas said. That included Guindon’s father
, who was now off the bottle, bespectacled and looking smaller and frailer than when he had ruled the Simcoe Street South household by fear. “They went up on the stage together,” Erslavas recalled. “Bernie introduced him. It was a great night all around.”

  But things got a little tense later in the evening, when Chuvalo asked Guindon when he was going to stop hanging around with the biker crowd, and Guindon replied that being a biker was better than being a punching bag for the whole world. At that point, they both jumped to their feet. Fortunately, others intervened and the celebration continued.

  The magic of 1971 lasted until December, when Guindon was finally busted for breaching his parole by associating with bikers. It had been no secret that he was back with his old friends; the only question was why authorities waited so long. His fresh arrest meant spending Christmas 1971 behind bars in Thunder Bay. “Every Christmas was rough inside. Everybody sending you cards. You sat there and you looked at your Christmas cards and you think it would be nice to be out with your family and friends. You didn’t do much in there.”

  Guindon’s father dropped by the jail for a visit, but he didn’t bring much warmth or good cheer and it felt a bit late for a stern fatherly lecture. “What are you going to do?” Guindon later said. “He can get mad at you but he can’t do anything.”

  His father was a calmer man now. “He had seen the light, I guess.” Lucienne Guindon’s changed demeanour didn’t do much to impress his oldest son, though, because he couldn’t recall his father ever showing remorse. “I can’t remember my old man saying he was sorry for kicking the shit out of me.”

  Guindon would have appreciated an apology, but he didn’t kick his old man out of his life, either. Whether he suspected it at the time, he’d be grateful one day for that kind of unspoken forgiveness and the second chances it allows a father who wasn’t often there.

  CHAPTER 19

  Olympic Contender

  I have five bouts lined up. But when you’re in maximum security, it’s tough getting away.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  Guindon was a favourite to qualify for Canada’s boxing team at the 1972 Summer Olympics, right up until he heard the jail doors close behind him for violating his parole. As the Canadian team prepped to compete in Munich, Germany, Guindon settled into Stony Mountain Institution in Manitoba, a forbidding fortress on a slight hill on the plains. The prison didn’t appear to have changed for the better since it housed Big Bear and other prisoners from the North-West Rebellion back in the 1880s. “You look outside and it’s just fields. When guys got out of there [escaped], and they did, they’d always get them in a couple of days. They didn’t know where to go.”

  Guindon tried to keep himself busy and not get sucked down into the historically proportioned morass of negativity permeating the building’s stone walls. He felt awkward but appreciated the effort his mother made in venturing west on the train to visit him. “She came a long way. She didn’t speak English. She couldn’t read. That was hard. That was very hard for her to manage.” Guindon got a day pass, borrowed a buddy’s motorcycle and took his mother out for a spin that she would fondly remember for years. The ride was fun but there wasn’t too much they could say. “What are you going to say to your mother when you’re in jail, doing time? She’s trying to get you to go the straight and narrow because you’re a dirty biker.”

  Guindon did have a sharp message for his mother’s boyfriend, who came along for the trip. He told him to treat his mother right, or “I’ll come back and put you in a hole.”

  Back behind bars, Guindon seethed with aggression and the urge to work out, but there were no sparring partners of his own size and ability. There was also precious little in the way of equipment. For hand wraps, a prisoner stole bandages for him from the medical area. He also sometimes trained in leather work gloves. Guindon befriended a massive Native inmate who he knew as “Big Indian.” His enormous new friend shadow-boxed with him and sacrificed his own body so that Guindon could get a proper workout. “Nice guy. He was an old pro. He used to let me use his body as a heavy bag. I would love to say thank you.” Guindon never did learn why his new friend was in prison.

  The spartan training paid off. Guindon won the Manitoba light-middleweight title on a pass and was eventually allowed night passes to train at a real gym, with real sparring partners. When his request for a transfer back to Ontario was granted, he was housed in the maximum-security prison Millhaven Institution (“The Haven”) in Bath, Ontario, near Kingston. Millhaven had been built to replace the aging Kingston Penitentiary and had opened early because of the Kingston riot.

  One of the workers preparing Millhaven was Frank Hobson. His employers didn’t know that he had ridden with the Choice back in the 1960s and had sold drugs and pimped out his girlfriend in Yorkville under the name “Hippy.” His biker days were behind him when he was hired to lay sod on the Millhaven grounds. He hatched the idea to plant a loaded Beretta 9 mm pistol somewhere inside the facility to help out bikers like Guindon and John Dunbar of the Lobos Motorcycle Club of Windsor. Perhaps the gun could be hidden under the sod of the new courtyard. “There was a park bench there, and I seriously considered wrapping a gun up and burying it there by the bench!” Hobson later said.

  Or perhaps the best hiding spot would be somewhere in the prison’s massive new heating system. It was a walk-in unit, big enough for Hobson to wander about in it, looking for a good spot to stash the Beretta. “I searched for a good place to put the gun I had brought in with me in my lunch box. Nobody was there! No guards! Nothing.” He discovered a spot in the duct work that looked perfect, but he hesitated. “I had second thoughts. I thought about my wife and three children and the harm that could come to them. I put it back in my lunch box and…took it home.” Hobson never told Guindon about his plan to stash a gun in the prison.

  Guindon was housed on the fourth floor, which put him in danger of a thirty-foot drop over the railings if he angered the wrong inmate. He kept his eyes open around the “muscle guys,” prisoners who would do the dirty work of other inmates for a fee. “I don’t like muscle guys. Everybody’s having a hard enough time doing their time.” The muscle guys just amped up the tension, which was already considerable. Ten days could feel as bad as ten years if a prisoner wasn’t mentally ready. There were so many nasty places for an inmate’s mind to go if he let it. “Is somebody fucking my wife? Is somebody stealing this off me? Your mind is rotating, just rotating. Every person’s time is different. They’re all the same and all different.”

  Guindon quickly befriended Lauchlan (Lockey) MacDonald of the 13th Tribe Motorcycle Club in Nova Scotia. MacDonald and three others from the club were convicted of statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old in a highly publicized trial. Guindon didn’t believe the news reports. “He was an okay guy. Didn’t bother nobody. Just that he was in on that charge—sexual charge—and so was I. He was kind of quiet. Minded his own business. He could look after himself if he had to. He was nervous inside. That’s why they shipped him out west, because he would have gotten killed out east.”

  MacDonald was stabbed inside Millhaven by a muscle guy he didn’t know. He managed to drag his attacker into his cell, where he forced the assailant to admit that some mobsters from Hamilton had put him up to it.

  Guindon stormed up to the Hamiltonians in the common room.

  “Last time I seen you, Guindon, you was in PC in Kingston,” one of them said.

  That was exactly the wrong thing to say. Guindon had never agreed to protective custody, with the snitches and child molesters.

  What happened next was the stuff of prison legend, and bikers talked about it with a touch of awe and gratitude decades later. It started with a crisp left hook to the jaw of the smart-mouthed mobster. Then the mobster’s buddy stopped another punch and shared space on the floor. “He knocked two of them out,” Satan’s Choice member Lorne Campbell said. “Said, ‘Anybody else got a problem with me and Lockey?’ ”

  It was relatively easy work fo
r Guindon to starch a non-boxer with a shot or two, and he certainly had enough practice doing it behind bars. “A lot of times, I didn’t hit them in the chin. I hit them in the stomach first. Slow them down. Depends on my mood.” In the case of the mobsters, it was their attitude that brought them in contact with Guindon’s knuckles. “I remember they were just rapping away. I hooked a guy. I gave him a hooking and straightened ’em out. Usually, I gave a guy a left hook. Then if he mouths off, I gave him a right hand.”

  Guindon said the shots were meant as a clear message about MacDonald and himself. “Leave the guy alone. We don’t bug you. Leave him alone.”

  Campbell went to prison himself a decade later for an assortment of assault and drug charges and said he and other bikers continued to benefit from Guindon’s tough line. “That was what paved the way for every other biker who went to the pen after that,” Campbell said. “I was glad I went in after Bernie.”

  Ottawa-area bouncer and armed robber Richard Mallory first met Guindon while crossing the Millhaven exercise yard and instantly knew this wasn’t someone to be trifled with. “If you were smart, you didn’t say anything about him,” Mallory said. He had done time in Kingston in the late 1960s, when inmates still weren’t allowed to talk to each other. He appreciated the reforms that followed the riot, like increased exercise and socializing time, but he was also cautious. When strangers tried to strike up a conversation, Mallory refused with a standard response: “Do I know you? No? Then go away.”

  Mallory described Guindon as a “little guy, pretty friendly. He wasn’t ignorant.” But Guindon hung around with bikers and Mallory spent his time with weightlifters, and the two groups generally kept a respectful distance. “You hung around with your own,” Mallory said. “You don’t get friendly with people you don’t know right away. You don’t know who’s who.”