Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  The Outlaws were extremely territorial. Florida had become a cash cow and a rough playground for them since their South Florida chapter was founded in 1967. The state offered all-year bike riding, as well as proximity to South American drug routes and several military bases, which were prime spots for recruiting members. The Hells Angels held a firm grip on the West Coast and the Bandidos controlled Texas, but Florida belonged to the Outlaws.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the Outlaws and Hells Angels would butt up against each other in Florida. When an Outlaw raped the wife of a Hells Angel in 1969, it set off a chain of attacks and counterattacks that echoed for years. The woman’s husband and other Hells Angels beat the rapist to death. In retaliation, three visiting Massachusetts Hells Angels were kidnapped in April 1974 and shot execution-style with shotguns. Their bodies were tied to cinder blocks and dumped off a cliff into a quarry in southwest Broward County. Violence bred more violence with no end in sight.

  Upon their arrival in Florida, McEwen and Drago were grilled by airport security officers, but Kirby, a gym rat who was more clean-cut-looking, passed through unhassled.

  Many of the Outlaws Kirby encountered in Fort Lauderdale were ex-servicemen, numb from the carnage of Vietnam, and their headquarters was a bungalow with gun ports instead of windows. “Their clubhouse was like a fortress,” he said. “They put a chill in my spine.”

  McEwen had made several trips south already, and he owned a couple of body-rub parlours in the area. During the visit, one of them caught fire and a woman inside died. Kirby wondered if she had been murdered. McEwen’s grief over her death seemed real to his clubmate.

  Wherever McEwen went in the years to come, whoever’s lives he touched, pain would follow, for them and the biker with the bugs in his car. But few would feel it as keenly as Guindon.

  CHAPTER 21

  Thunder Bay II

  That time he ate the bird! He vomited that thing. You could hear the feathers cracking, the bones. Him chewing it down. The guts were on his chin, his chest, and then he barfed.

  BERNIE GUINDON on Pigpen Berry

  In the summer of 1974, Guindon walked free from prison for the second time. He was sent on his way with a train ticket to Thunder Bay in his pocket. “That was about the only fucking place I’d call home.”

  Shortly afterwards, the good citizens and police of Thunder Bay braced themselves as 150 beer-swilling members of the Satan’s Choice and their bike-loving buddies prepared to descend on their community. Guindon had served his entire sentence and he was free without conditions. He could socialize with whoever he wished.

  The bikers planned to gather on a property that was owned by a prominent lawyer on Spruce River Road for what was improbably billed a “convention.” Thoughts of two-wheeled terror brought a collective shiver to the land of the Sleeping Giant. Since poop-eating Pigpen was among the arriving delegates, concerns of an impending assault on the senses were justified. For Guindon, it was a chance to jump back into his old world with both boots.

  At the top of the bikers’ agenda that weekend was a memorial service at St. Andrew’s Cemetery for John Raleigh. The club’s vice-president had been killed in August 1972. It was a particularly poignant day for Verg Erslavas. “I first met John when we were riding back home from a field day,” Erslavas said. “It was fall and we were on the Lake Superior stretch. The weather was brutal with freezing rain and wind blowing off the lake. Of course, we had no rain gear. No one wore it in those days. We met John and Jungle, a couple of Toronto guys coming up to Thunder Bay for a visit. They took a turn on the bikes, as we were cold and wet, and we jumped in the car to warm up. After becoming acquainted for a while, we became inseparable.”

  In 1972, Raleigh had been atop Toronto president Larry McIlroy’s Harley on the last ride of his life. Raleigh took a curve at too high a speed, hit a bump and was thrown from the bike. “It hit me hard,” Erslavas said. “I really loved the guy. We gave him a great send-off and a headstone inscribed with ‘Satan’s Choice M.C.’ To this day, whenever I’m in T. Bay, I place a red rose on his grave and shed a tear or two.” Erslavas even named his son John after his late clubmate.

  To bolster the forces of decency in Thunder Bay that August, police chief Onni Harty cancelled all leave for Thunder Bay police officers and brought in twenty-five reinforcements from the South Porcupine detachment of the OPP. Even the four-dog unit of the local OPP, which was in town for training, was put on call for active duty.

  Branch 5 of the Royal Canadian Legion indefinitely postponed its annual men’s picnic, which had originally been planned for the same Sunday as the “convention,” at the adjacent picnic site, no less. Some three hundred dollars in meat was put into deep freeze as the former servicemen braced for the worst that Guindon’s hordes could offer. Restaurants and even a gas station announced their precautionary closures.

  The abundance of caution made many locals only more curious. People ventured out to watch the procession of Harleys growl down Hodder Avenue to the cemetery.

  “When we had that run, it was like the Choice’s big parade,” Erslavas said. “People were lined up three deep on the bike route…We were kinda proud of it…A lot of the girls wanted to meet the guys…Thunder Bay had some pretty friendly girls.”

  After that, there was an explosion of…nothing. No chickens were beheaded, no businesses were trashed and no police were attacked. Pigpen stayed amongst his fellow bikers and, in the end, it was the motorcyclists and not the locals who suffered his antics most. “That time he ate the bird!” Guindon later said. “He vomited that thing. You could hear the feathers cracking, the bones. Him chewing it down. The guts were on his chin, his chest, and then he barfed.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Pigpen Goes South

  They capture them up. The girls. They send them to Saudi Arabia and are slaves for the rest of their lives.

  PIGPEN BERRY on Florida Outlaws

  Pigpen’s digestive system had barely settled from its encounter with the bird feathers in Thunder Bay when he hightailed it south to Florida, his new home. Pigpen was an unlikely snowbird, migrating south before he could be arrested on pending charges for attempted murder and wounding.

  The Outlaws had agreed to hide Pigpen as part of a new fugitive exchange program between the two clubs. His legal name was changed to “Peter Ray Johnson” and his street name was changed to “Garbage.” “They said I was supposed to get ID and be looked after,” Pigpen recalled.

  In Florida, Pigpen soon witnessed things so disgusting that even he wouldn’t do them. One was kidnapping young girls for sale in the overseas sex trade. “They capture them up,” he said. “The girls. They send them to Saudi Arabia and are slaves for the rest of their lives. Kids are captured up. I said, ‘I don’t want to get into that.’ ”

  Outlaws who met inside the fortified walls of the Hollywood, Florida, clubhouse also made money from body rubs, topless dancers, hookers and drugs. Problem workers were sometimes beaten and murdered. Hardcore bikers from Canada were not strangers to lethal violence, but the intensity of Southern business left Pigpen numb and suspicious. “Down there, they played the game for keeps,” Pigpen said.

  It wasn’t just a sense of brotherhood that inspired the Outlaws to welcome Pigpen into their ranks. In 1974, tensions between the Outlaws and Hells Angels in the United States escalated into open street warfare. As the Hells Angels tried to push into Florida, Outlaws began wearing patches that read “ADIOS” for “Angels Die in Outlaw States.”

  It was common for Pigpen to ride around with a machine gun across the front of his Harley, a .44 strapped to his chest, and two more pistols behind his back. That was just prudent in Pigpen’s new world. “Down there, everybody’s got guns,” he said.

  When Pigpen’s Canadian friends Larry Hurren and Sweet Kid came down for a visit, they were struck by how bikers there seemed to all ride in packs, and how, when a strange car went by, bikers naturally reached for a firearm.

  During one ride
through Hollywood, a van pulled alongside Pigpen and its doors swung open. As the guns came out, Pigpen recognized a biker named Swampy and some of his associates. Pigpen took two bullets in his chest, near his heart, but managed to return fire.

  As the war escalated, Pigpen found himself making more rides into North Carolina, home of the Fort Bragg army base, Pope air force base and Camp Lejeune marine base. Pigpen noted that seven members of the Lexington, North Carolina, chapter of the Outlaws were members of the elite Special Forces unit, known as the Green Berets. Their skills included guerilla warfare, a useful background given the Southern biker climate.

  While hiding out, Pigpen supported himself by stealing cars and yachts on their trailers. Other Outlaws were heavily into running prostitution rings and selling cocaine, designer drugs, marijuana and methamphetamines. For many of the bikers, selling drugs was vastly preferable to running women. It wasn’t so much an ethical issue as a practical one. Drugs paid more, took up less space and they didn’t talk back or squeal to authorities. They also didn’t need to eat. As slovenly as Pigpen’s new companions were, they did have a crude business sense. “They’re well organized,” he said. “They made money big-time.”

  Guindon, curious, decided to visit the Florida Outlaws around this time. “I just wanted to see what the other side looked like. And it didn’t impress me. They think their shit doesn’t smell.” He considered many of the Florida Outlaws to be anti-Canadian and spoiling for some kind of a fight, just for the sake of fighting. “You had to be careful,” he said.

  He made a point of not losing himself to the partying. “I don’t party in a sense. I don’t drink. I definitely wouldn’t do drugs down there. You don’t know what kind of shit you’d get. They might give you the wrong fucking dosage. Better to be careful than sorry later. If you can keep your faculties, you’re okay.”

  Despite his aspirations to expand Satan’s Choice, maybe even into the United States, the gun culture there gave him pause. He also wondered about police informants within the American biker ranks. He thought it would be hard to pick them out, since so many American bikers were ex-servicemen and acted like yes-sir, no-sir cops or soldiers to begin with. “Most guys are military. You don’t know where they’re coming from.”

  During his visit to Florida, Guindon met up with Big Jim Nolan, a talkative, charming and cold-blooded Outlaws leader. Big Jim was a pretty good guitar player and had been his school’s valedictorian. More importantly, he said that he would rather be an Outlaw in prison than just some jerk on the streets. That statement pretty much captured his life view.

  Guindon respected the power of Outlaws like Nolan, but he didn’t want his Canadian club to fall under their thumb. He and his members had built a viable, powerful all-Canadian club, and they weren’t about to be swallowed up in some gigantic American enterprise. Guindon was willing, however, to lend limited support to the Outlaws’ fight with the Hells Angels and the Warlocks, a southern U.S. club founded by ex–U.S. Navy servicemen, whose mottos include, “Our business is none of your fucking business.”

  The Outlaws were curious about what was going on up in Canada, in the land of Pigpen. During one Florida meeting, a member remarked, “They have niggers in the club up there.” Big Jim smacked him in the head, but it wasn’t to promote civil rights or political correctness. He was simply placating the Canadians and keeping business options open.

  Stairway Harry Henderson, an Outlaws president from Dayton, Ohio, had already tried to pull the Satan’s Choice en masse over to his club. Henderson offered to let the Satan’s Choice into the Outlaws without probation in a patch-for-patch deal. While some others might consider the offer an honour, Guindon turned it down flat.

  Meanwhile, the Outlaws supplied the Choice with weapons, which were always useful considering the club’s challenging push into Quebec. For Kirby, guns were also a business opportunity. “They were all carrying guns, those guys down there,” Kirby said. “That was my business, selling guns.”

  If business kept the Outlaws friendly toward their northern peers, Pigpen’s crude antics were having the opposite effect. His moralistic stance on the sex trade didn’t help either. “They didn’t like him at all,” Guindon said. “He was getting away with it up here. Down there, I don’t think they took much to him.” It wasn’t long until a few of the Outlaws wanted to kill Pigpen. “They couldn’t stand his fucking bullshit,” Guindon said. “They thought he was totally crazy.”

  As Pigpen rankled his American hosts, the Choice reciprocated by hiding Big Jim Nolan in Ontario as he fled from American authorities, who were investigating him on firearms offences. Big Jim ended up near Kitchener, where the Choice had a strong presence. He didn’t join a local club because he didn’t want to attract police attention, and only a couple Choice members knew his new identity and whereabouts.

  Bodies kept falling in Montreal, and those American guns were proving more and more useful. One Choice member didn’t bother to check the peephole before answering a knock at his front door. He was shot dead with a .45. Another member was found hanging dead in a motel. The bloody evidence of torture made it clear his death wasn’t a suicide.

  The Popeyes and Satan’s Choice were feuding, and peace was nowhere on the horizon.

  CHAPTER 23

  Last Olympic Hope

  Everybody heard it. He broke three ribs. Man, it was a beautiful punch.

  LORNE CAMPBELL describing a Bernie Guindon punch

  Guindon hadn’t given up on boxing when he got out of prison in 1974. Thirty-two was an advanced age for an amateur athlete in a sport that rewards reflexes, but he still had a puncher’s shot at the Olympics in 1976. His strengths in the ring were power and brains and toughness, and they hadn’t gone anywhere.

  He trained now mostly with professional fighters. “I used to spar a lot with the pros, good top pros. I enjoyed that more.” He fit right in when he tested himself at the sport’s top levels. There was a loss by decision to Clyde Gray, a slick boxer with a crisp jab who would go on to become a world-ranked fighter and the British Commonwealth champion. “He gave Clyde a good fight,” Spider Jones said.

  There was also a win by decision over Gray’s brother Stu, a solid professional. “He [Guindon] fought a lot of good, good guys who were more than his weight, and he beat most of them,” Chuvalo said. “His record speaks for itself.”

  While Guindon was spending a lot of time with the pros, he still had no plans to turn pro himself, but it wasn’t for lack of confidence or opportunities. He didn’t go pro because he still feared it would have legal ramifications, giving authorities the excuse to ramp up any charges against him after a brawl. “When you’re a pro, you’re not allowed to hit anybody on the street. Your hands are weapons.”

  Outside the ring, Guindon remained a fearsome street fighter but not a particularly dirty one. He didn’t go for the stomp circles, which was when some bikers would circle, kick and stomp a fallen enemy. Once, after dropping an Ottawa-area club president, he waved off other Choice members who wanted to give him what bikers call a boot-fucking. Guindon was matter-of-fact about the encounter. He’d asserted his dominance in the club and didn’t want the dust-up to become something worse. He felt that his punches spoke loudly enough. “I said something. He said a smart remark. So I gave him a left hook, knocked him out.” The club president wound up in hospital from the one-punch fight. When he got out, he sought out Guindon but not for revenge. “He said, ‘Thanks for stopping those guys from kicking,’ ” Guindon recalled.

  He still wasn’t impressed by much of what he saw of the pro game, including how the handlers of Eddie (Hurricane) Melo of west Toronto matched him with top pros when Melo was still a teenager. Melo, who was a Canadian pro middleweight champ and an enforcer for mobster Frank Cotroni of Montreal, would likely have gone further with better management. “He was young and they just didn’t care,” Guindon said. “They threw him in with top fighters.”

  Once back in boxing circles, Guindon also renewe
d acquaintances with former pro Baldy Chard, who still supplemented his bouncer’s income by collecting debts for the mob. “He was friendly. I didn’t find him to be a belligerent person or rude. He just did his job.”

  The fights and the criminal underworld overlapped frequently, but few straddled the line between them more than Guindon. Needing work, he drifted onto Toronto’s seedy Yonge Street strip, finding employment as a doorman and manager at the Venus Spa, a second-floor walk-up with peeling paint. “At the time, my girlfriend was a stripper/dancer. That’s how I ended up in the area.” A walk down Yonge Street in the mid-1970s wasn’t too much different than a trip to the tenderloin district of Bangkok, except for the language on the sex club signs and the ethnicity of the hookers. Grainy skin flicks played at the Loews Theatre just north of Queen, where moviegoers had once watched silent pictures and vaudeville acts, and then the works of Joan Fontaine and Clark Gable. There were a hundred places like the Venus Spa around Yonge and Dundas, where for twenty or thirty bucks, a man could have a body rub with masturbation, oral sex or naked dancing. A little more cash bought full intercourse.

  Guindon’s job was to sort out customers who were mouthy or mistreating the women. It wasn’t much of a job, but there was no heavy lifting and it left him time to train. One day, his teenaged daughter Teresa noticed he was sporting an expensive-looking suit and a Rolex watch.

  “Well, you look like you’re doing well,” Teresa said.

  “Of course I am,” Guindon replied.