Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  Guindon was in charge of running the prison’s sports shack, where equipment was stored. That made him visible to guys like Mallory. Like Guindon, Mallory was using his time behind bars to build himself up physically. “You’ve got nothing else to do in there,” he said. “You’ve got proper nutrition, proper rest. I did it [weights] seven days a week.”

  He thrived physically while inside Millhaven, which had impressive new fitness facilities. He went into prison with a solid three-hundred-pound bench press but soon wanted better. “I seen a guy doing four hundred. I said, ‘I want to beat that.’ ” Within a few years, he was able to push up a staggering 550 pounds. “I had a whole bunch of guys around me, cheering me on,” he recalled of the day of his big lift. “The guys were all cheering me on. A lot of them were doing life. They had never seen that.”

  Mallory got up to twelve reps with a four-hundred-pound bench press. He could also dead-lift a thousand pounds, which is about the weight of a thoroughbred horse. Like Guindon, he was obsessed with planning his workouts. “You only had a couple hours in the yard. Two hours, seven days a week…Snow on the ground, I’d go out. Seven days a week. Parkas, mitts, I’d go out.”

  Guindon was allowed passes to compete in boxing and was a Canadian amateur champion again in 1972, but he wasn’t surprised when the Canadian Olympic Association didn’t send him to the Summer Olympic Games in Munich. He knew the association was against him representing the country, even when he’d been a free man. So at a time when he could have been heading overseas to fight in the Olympics, he was once almost killed during a high-spirited wrestling match on the second tier, when he nearly took a deadly tumble through the railing. “You do stupid things in stupid times.”

  The prison was now pushing more structured combative pursuits. A recreation officer occasionally brought in a former pro boxer to train with Guindon. He was also allowed out to Toronto to fight Bob Proulx, the former Canadian junior welterweight champion. Guindon had to drop ten pounds in two days to qualify. He lost the weight and took the decision against Proulx.

  There were also matches in Kitchener, Guelph and Windsor. It didn’t have the cachet of an international boxing tour or the Olympics, but it still felt good to rack up a win against an American Golden Gloves champion. Competition brought perks that went beyond the thrill of victory. Before starting the drive back from a bout in Windsor, Guindon persuaded his guards to stop over at the local Satan’s Choice clubhouse. The guards were thanked with a party featuring plenty of booze and female companionship. Guindon passed on the liquor but indulged with the women. “We were there for three hours, then another clubhouse for another hour. We got lucky down there in Windsor.” The guards were too hungover and exhausted to drive, so Guindon took the wheel himself and drove them all back to prison.

  During a bout at the Cabbagetown Boxing Club in Toronto, Guindon caught the eye of Toronto Daily Star reporter Arlie Keller. “All I can do up there is hit the heavy bag, do lots of leg exercises, work with the weights and do exercises to strengthen my stomach,” he told Keller. “There are no ropes which I can use to skip or mirrors to look into to check my style. Nothing resembling a weapon is allowed.”

  “I have five bouts lined up,” Guindon continued. “But when you’re in maximum security, it’s tough getting away.” He told the reporter that he refused to step away from his biker friends, even though he knew that would irritate the parole board. “I’ve been a biker since I was fifteen,” he said. “They are the only friends I have. I’m not going to give them up.”

  It was while he was in Millhaven that he got a phone call from his brother, Jack, telling him that their father had died of lung cancer. The news didn’t come as a shock and Guindon processed it coolly. “I knew he wasn’t well. You gotta accept the fact that it’s over.”

  There was a small ceremony in Thunder Bay, and then Guindon was allowed to ride with his father’s body on the train to attend the funeral in Buckingham, Quebec. There weren’t many people at either ceremony and there didn’t seem to be much to say. Guindon’s mother didn’t show up at all. Few tears were shed and that seemed okay. His father hadn’t been big on tears anyway, although Guindon could recall his father crying at the funerals of his own parents in the same town. Once the funeral was over, Guindon got on a plane and returned to his cell.

  For all of its dangers, prison could be deadly boring. Many prisoners tried to find a hobby. “You’re in a cell that’s twelve by eight; you can’t do much in there. You’ve got to think, What am I going to do to keep myself busy? Make myself some money?” Guindon said.

  His mother and brother sent him some cash to buy a stash of supplies such as all-purpose cement, a cutting block and assorted dyes. He also stocked up on stamping tools, leather lace, screwdrivers, magic markers, hole punches, edge cutters, a utility knife, rawhide mallets, a book on Indian lore, and patterns for moccasins, purses and wallets. He used these to make clutch purses, wallets and a tan holster, for which he had no gun. He poured his energy into his projects, creating a petit point picture of a fist on a motorcycle throttle, in which the knuckles were a skull, snake, witch and devil. That project took three and a half months, with him sometimes working six hours a day. He made an estimated 88,000 stitches with single strands of thread to complete the image. “Many a time I had to cut the thread,” he said. He also made a plaque with the Serenity Prayer adopted by Alcoholics Anonymous, a group he joined in prison to strengthen his resolve against drinking. The plaque read, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

  He specialized in leather and copper. He created a series of decorative wallets and plaques of boxers, birds and sad clowns, which had the face of his mother’s boyfriend. His mother liked the clowns, and she hung one on her wall.

  Guindon hadn’t done any artwork before he went to prison, and neither of his parents was particularly artistic. So he was surprised at how the work consumed him, how much pride he felt in his creations, and how closely he guarded his freedom to continue making them. As a serious hobbyist, he was allowed to use glue that was coveted by addicts, and X-Acto knives, which were valued by almost everyone. Guindon guarded his glue and his knives, not wanting to lose his crafting privileges. “That’s what gets you in shit. Guys sell their glue to glue sniffers. I would never loan my knives to anybody. My razors. I had little X-Acto knives. They can do a lot of damage.”

  He made a leather picture of a cougar in a tree for Suzanne Blais. She was still married, but her feelings for him hadn’t died. When she received his gift, she cried.

  CHAPTER 20

  Expansion Troubles

  He [mobster Frank Cotroni] should have gone into the club [where the bikers hung out], clients or no clients, lined everybody against the wall and rat-a-tat-tat.

  Montreal Mafia boss PAOLO VIOLI

  The young man’s body washed ashore at Curtis Point on Rice Lake, about eighteen miles south of Pigpen Berry’s hometown, Peterborough, in the spring of 1973. He was wearing jeans and a denim jacket. In his left ear was a gold earring, and his mouth and hands were bound.

  Forensic testing determined he had drowned. A Toronto Transit Commission subway transfer on his body indicated he had been in Toronto on March 9. Further testing revealed that the body was that of twenty-one-year-old William Lee Graham of Oakview Beach near Collingwood, several hours north of Toronto. During his final days alive, Graham had been a minor witness in a drug trial against the Satan’s Choice.

  What happened between the time of Graham’s testimony and the discovery of his body in the water was later described by Cecil Kirby. After his court appearance, Graham had been spotted by bikers at a custom motorcycle shop in Toronto’s west end and was taken to a Choice clubhouse at Woodbine Avenue and Highway 7, where he was beaten and bound. Among those who dumped his still breathing body into the lake was Armand (In the Trunk) Sanguigni. “I was told of it later by Armand himself,” Kirby said
.

  If the weights had been properly applied to the body, he would never have surfaced.

  On May 27, 1973, two badly decomposed bodies were found by a farmer in a ditch between two isolated fields about twenty-five miles east of Windsor. Dental records revealed that one of the bodies was eighteen-year-old Cathryn Hulko, wife of William (Wild Bill) Hulko, the president of the local Satan’s Choice chapter. The other body was that of her fifteen-year-old friend Lynn Campeau. They had each been shot in the head at least four times.

  The teenagers had vanished on January 31, 1972, the night Wild Bill and seven others with the Windsor Choice chapter were charged with the murder of twenty-three-year-old Leonard Craig, a fellow member of the local Choice. Craig was severely beaten inside the Windsor clubhouse during a party. He staggered outside, collapsed, then died in hospital.

  Hulko was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the Craig killing. Kirby said it was rumoured that Hulko’s wife and Campeau had co-operated with police to put him behind bars. As in the death of Graham, no charges were ever laid for their murders, which served as reminders that it was dangerous to stand up to the Choice in court.

  The Satan’s Choice was reaching out and trying to expand, even as Guindon was bunkered away in prison with his workouts and crafts. They had some success in Winnipeg, where the Spartans club decided to patchover to the Choice. Then came word that someone had torn the Choice patch off the back of one of the new members. This was taken as an attack on the honour of each and every member and it merited a group response. Fifteen Ontario members drove up to Winnipeg with their trunks full of guns. Pigpen was among them. Once there, they learned that they had been duped. The member had simply handed in his patch to a rival Los Bravo. “That guy got a helluva beating,” Kirby said.

  Things only got worse: the remaining members of the new Winnipeg Choice chapter decided they wanted to become Spartans again. Behind bars, there wasn’t much Guindon could do but wonder about the often low quality of leadership in the club. “That’s the way it goes. You wonder who’s leading the pack. The club’s only as good as its officers.”

  The expansion effort was also crumbling on the West Coast. Some of the Vancouver members were becoming an embarrassment with their out-of-control drug use. Ken Goobie, John Harvey and a member called “Rabbit” headed west with the hopes of cleaning up the chapter and establishing a viable drug pipeline. If that meant shutting down the existing Vancouver Satan’s Choice chapter, then so be it.

  Goobie was a different sort of biker. He was tall, lanky, and tough as beef jerky. He had boxed as an amateur and once fought bare-knuckles with former pro heavyweight boxer Joe (Ironman) Dinardo. That tussle ended in a draw. Certainly, that was impressive, but what set Goobie apart was his appearance, especially his fondness for business apparel. Goobie was the only club member known to wear his grinning devil patch on a three-piece suit.

  The club’s western front collapsed, as Goobie and his crew didn’t have enough backing to take on existing clubs like the Satan’s Slaves. That was the end of the coast-to-coast dream, at least for the time being. Hearing the news from behind bars, Guindon was disappointed but not heartbroken. “They’ve got so many clubs out there.” It would have been too expensive for Vancouver members to make it over the Rocky Mountains for national meetings anyway. Keeping an eye on them would have been tough, and unsupervised chapters increased the chance of police infiltration. “The communication is too hard,” Guindon added. “If we can’t get everybody working together, you’re never going to make it.”

  Toronto remained solid for the Choice. Despite his dust-up with Goobie, Dinardo was a friend and business partner with some of the members there. Dinardo offered them a sort of one-stop shopping. His criminal record included robbery, arson, theft, passing forged documents and counterfeit money, and weapons and parole violations. He provided Sanguigni and Kirby with targets for lucrative jobs. “Joe had all kinds of connections with people,” Kirby said. “Break-and-enters. Armed robberies.” While he was good with his fists, he always seemed to carry a gun. That came in handy when someone pulled a knife on him at Wasaga Beach. One wave of the handgun and the man ran away while Dinardo strolled along. “Joe just walked down the beach, buried the gun in the sand and kept on walking,” Kirby said.

  Toronto-area police could be forgiven in the early 1970s if they pined for the heyday of Johnny Sombrero and his street rumbles. Over the past decade, bikers had moved from being a rowdy nuisance to something much more menacing.

  In 1970, the Ontario Police Commission started an intelligence unit that focused on bikers. In mid-June 1973, the Ministry of the Solicitor General of Ontario reported that motorcycle gangs were pushing to entrench themselves as the main suppliers of illegal narcotics in Ontario, with the primary street drug at the time being amphetamines, or speed. Police estimated at the time that there were six hundred outlaw bikers in Ontario, including two hundred members of the Satan’s Choice. The Vagabonds and Para-Dice Riders remained important forces. Police didn’t count the Black Diamond Riders among the six hundred because they were not believed to be in the drug trade.

  Sombrero still lumbered about but he had become a quaint relic of another era, and the Battle of Pebblestone seemed like a Sunday school sack race compared to what Pigpen, Sanguigni and Kirby were doing. “So I broke a couple of arms and split some guy’s skull from here to there,” Sombrero told the Globe and Mail, running a finger down his head. As Sombrero held forth with the reporter, Black Diamond Riders splashed about in a pool at their clubhouse like kids on summer break.

  Sombrero held on to delusions of grandeur and sipped champagne from his own personal silver goblet, which was refilled by members. “I’m a Liberal-monarchist. I feel like shooting some of those people the way they talk against the Queen.”

  He explained how one of his many brawls was handled by the courts, when he said he reached for a fence rail to dispense with a group he called “seven of the bastards.”

  “Judge was a great old guy. Said, ‘Whatever happened to the old rules of one against one?’ He convicted me of assault, but sentenced me to one day in jail and then told me to serve it in his chambers. Let me go about an hour later.”

  Sombrero was married now, with three children, but he still called his clubmates “my boys.” He revelled in being a father figure of sorts. “I don’t know what my boys do at home or someplace. You know, grass and stuff. Who knows? But nobody in this club’s gonna get into the real drug thing.”

  “Look, this is going to sound corny, but I’m a nationalist, see,” he told the Globe and Mail. “I believe in a strong Canada. You gonna have a strong country, you gotta have strong young men. And any guy gets on dope won’t make it.”

  He spoke of his weariness of paying fines and court costs, like the time he was docked money for knocking someone’s eye out of its socket. “When I go with one or two of my boys, to visit any other club, I let ’em know I’m coming. They clean the place out, tell their guys, ‘Johnny Sombrero’s coming,’ and they get rid of any of that kind of stuff they have. They know me.” He was proud that he hadn’t changed with the times and that his members had a certain uniformity as well as club uniform shirts. Some bikers spoke of rugged individualism, but not Sombrero. “One guy leaves, another just exactly like him comes in.”

  While Sombrero didn’t venture far from his Toronto home, in 1973, the Satan’s Choice was pushing into Crescent Street in Montreal’s downtown, home to a lively collection of bars and restaurants close to McGill University and the Sainte-Catherine Street tourist drag. Also trying to gain the upper hand on the Crescent Street drug trade was the Popeyes Motorcycle Club.

  The police responded with a special squad of a dozen or so members to keep an eye on them. Leaders of the local Mafia favoured a more direct approach. After hearing that three members of the Cotroni crime family were killed by bikers in September 1973, Mafiosi Paolo Violi called for blood, according to a police bug planted at the ice cre
am shop on Jean-Talon East that doubled as his headquarters: “He [Frank Cotroni] should have gone into the club [where the bikers hung out], clients or no clients, lined everybody against the wall and rat-a-tat-tat.”

  It was around this time that a former Maritimer entered Guindon’s world as quietly as a thief in the night. Garnet Douglas (Mother) McEwen was the hippie-ish proprietor of a head shop in St. Catharines, Ontario, having worked his way up from selling pencils on street corners. Mother hobbled about with the aid of an artificial leg after a nasty motorcycle accident. He sometimes altered tattoos, but he was not a tattoo artist by any stretch. Lorne Campbell of the Choice covered his arms with tattoos and felt the worst of the bunch were the ones inked by Mother. “He was just a fat, stinky guy,” Campbell said. “That’s all he was. He was just a dirty guy who looked like a 1950s biker. He was filthy.” No doubt Mother was not amused when Campbell quipped that he didn’t have a leg to stand on. Campbell threatened to tear off Mother’s wooden leg so that he could beat him with it.

  Niagara region motorcycle painter Mark DeMarco didn’t like McEwen either, and he also didn’t trust him. Mother borrowed DeMarco’s dark blue Cadillac DeVille when he was getting married, saying it would be a great car for the occasion. In return, he loaned DeMarco his custom Harley. DeMarco found it odd that the pearl-white Super Glide had “SCMC” (Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club) on the sissy bar. Only club members could have club gear or markings like that. McEwen was late returning the Cadillac, and DeMarco was troubled by what he discovered when he finally got it back: three hidden recording devices. Two were on the inside and another was on the outside mirror, to catch conversations on the street. “That was my first giveaway that he was a rat,” DeMarco said.

  By 1974, McEwen was frequently associating with members of the Outlaws on the American side of the border, around Niagara Falls. McEwen, Kirby and a Kitchener member named Drago flew to Florida to visit with the Outlaws for two weeks. That trip was the start of a chain of events that would dramatically remake Guindon’s world, with no shortage of blood spilled in the process.