“What are you doing?”
“Well, I’ve got girls working for me.”
Although she generally found her father charming, Teresa wasn’t impressed with this particular boast. “He was laughing and thought it was funny.”
One day around this time, Suzanne Blais’s mother called her daughter to tell her that Bernie was going to be boxing at the Sheridan Mall in Mississauga. “I had moved into a new home in Erin Mills, and had two kids, but dropped everything and went out with my mom to see the fight,” Suzanne recalled. “Bernie won and I was so proud. This was the first time I’d seen him since 1960.”
Later that year, he fought on a card at the Burnhamthorpe Community Centre that included Nicky Furlano of the Cabbagetown Boxing Club in Toronto against Thomas Hearns of the Kronk boxing club in Detroit. Hearns would later become a world champion, but he left town that day a loser. Guindon was impressed by Furlano’s potential and personality. “I used to give him a lot of pointers. He wasn’t a smart aleck.”
Guindon was paired against Wilson Bell of Detroit. They stayed close for all three rounds, but Bell won the decision with a series of left hooks. That said, Choice members appreciated the fury of Guindon’s punching and cheered loudly. Among them was Ken Goobie, playing the role of his manager.
Jack Guindon still flirted with boxing but never displayed the primal rage or natural gifts that made his brother such a force in the ring. Jack had a boxing match of his own planned for the UAW union hall in Oshawa. While he didn’t pretend to be a great fighter, Jack was good enough to have a solid shot at winning the regional Golden Gloves. He was looking forward to a little hometown glory. But Jack’s opponent didn’t show up, and a replacement was needed fast. Bernie was in the crowd and was hauled in as a last-minute opponent for the five-round main event. It was Jack’s chance to finally beat his younger brother, since Bernie hadn’t been training for it, while Jack had been working out hard.
Lorne Campbell considered both of the Guindon brothers friends, but that day he was in Jack’s corner, taping his hands. He heard Jack warn Bernie that he meant business. He would be coming after him when the bell sounded. “I’m not going to fool around, Bernie,” Jack said.
Despite the warning, Bernie started off like a joker. “He just dropped his hands and let Jack hit him,” Campbell recalled. Then Bernie settled down to business, torquing a left hook that began at the soles of his feet and exploded somewhere deep in Jack’s midsection. “You could hear the wind go right out of Jack,” Campbell said. “Everybody heard it. He broke three ribs. Man, it was a beautiful punch.”
Years later, Jack remembered that left hook just as vividly. “It just lifted me off of my feet and down I went on my back. I was in pain. Guess what? I was off work the next day. Sore. I could hardly walk. Everything seized up on me.”
Guindon offered no apologies. Boxers are supposed to punch hard, and he felt he honoured the sport when he competed seriously. “He folded over like an accordion,” Guindon said, adding, “He beat me up when I was a real young kid.”
Guindon was a far gentler man when he thought of his young daughter Debbie Donovan, who was born in 1969. Guindon loved her company and shielded her from the club during their times together. “He never brought me around any of them,” she recalled. “Any time I saw him was family time. He always picked me up on the bike. He would take me to the CN Tower, to breakfast.”
Guindon would appear and then disappear from her life, and she never really understood what was going on when he was out of sight. “He was in and out of jail so much. I didn’t really know where he was. I know he loved his mother. He was just a normal guy to me. Never drank. I’ve never seen him smoke. Never heard him swear. He was always soft-spoken.”
Even during the occasional bike rides, he didn’t present himself as a dangerous boxer or biker. “I never saw any bad side of him. I’d see him…He was always happy. I never seen him angry, yell. Nothing.”
Years later, she would realize that her father was protecting her, in his own way. He was her dad, and dads are supposed to protect their little girls, even if Dad runs an outlaw biker gang.
CHAPTER 24
Strange Clubmate
You could feel he was just a little strange.
CECIL KIRBY on Satan’s Choice member Gerald Michael Vaughan
For all of the Satan’s Choice members’ motorcycle thefts, break-and-enters, prostitution rings, drug and gambling rip-offs and production of “Canadian Blue” methamphetamines for export to U.S.-based Outlaws, several members weren’t criminals at all. They held down regular jobs as labourers, electricians, plumbers and truck drivers. One member was a stock market executive. Members weren’t required to commit crimes, and criminals in the club weren’t obligated to share their scores with fellow members. Everyone, however, had to know how to keep his mouth shut.
Among the more active criminals in the Satan’s Choice during the mid-1970s was Gerald Michael Vaughan of the Richmond Hill chapter. He was an odd candidate to join a biker club, since he didn’t really like being around people much and he didn’t even look like a biker, with his short hair and tattoo-less physique. What Vaughan did like was to steal cars, guns and pretty much anything else that wasn’t nailed down and could fetch a price.
Membership in the Choice gave Vaughan a ready pool of potential partners in crime. Armand Sanguigni was a frequent one, joining Vaughan for break-and-enters, clothing store robberies and jewellery store smash-and-grabs.
Kirby was another, and estimated he took part in more than a hundred break-and-enters, as well as auto insurance frauds. Vaughan particularly liked to steal 1962 Pontiacs, with their easy-to-change serial number tags. When the opportunity presented itself, he also got into weapons trafficking. He and Kirby once broke into the home of a Mississauga gun collector and made off with about a dozen pistols, including a .450 Webley, World War II Luger, .38 Special and 9mm Czech Star that Kirby kept for himself. Guns sold for about two hundred dollars each and were a profitable sideline for Kirby. “I used to buy a lot of guns off people who did break-and-enters. I didn’t have to go out. They were coming to me with them.”
Kirby helped Vaughan break into safes, at all manner of stores and offices. During one heist at a Food City grocery store, they had to improvise when the safe proved too hard to crack. “You can’t open a steel cast safe, too hard,” Kirby said. Instead, they’d tip them over and peel off their backs with firefighter axes.
Vaughan and Kirby went together on a drive-by shooting of the Black Diamond Riders’ clubhouse on Steeles Avenue in Toronto one night, but that was more fun than business. They fired some lead into the clubhouse wall, just to piss off Johnny Sombrero. “I thought, I don’t like this guy,” Kirby said. “He’s got a really bad mouth…I put about twelve shots into the house. I was aiming high…I just wanted to throw a scare into them.”
While they were together, Kirby got an odd vibe from Vaughan, although it was nothing he could really put a finger on. “You could feel he was just a little strange,” Kirby said. “He seemed to be a bit of a loner. He’d walk around talking to himself.”
Once, as Vaughan was muttering unintelligibly in the Richmond Hill clubhouse, Kirby asked him what was wrong.
“He said, ‘I’m just having a bad day.’ ”
Vaughan didn’t talk about his personal issues during his time as a club member, between 1972 and 1974. He had a few. Born on December 11, 1950, he was the youngest of thirteen children in a family in which he was emotionally starved for positive attention or guidance. After his mother died of cancer when he was eight, he spent time in foster care before he was returned to his alcoholic father. His father tried to support his kids by driving a truck, then died of cirrhosis of the liver when Vaughan was fifteen.
Vaughan quit school at age sixteen, midway through Grade 9. He worked as a labourer and spent three months in the army, followed by a lot of time spent doing very little. He was unemployed when he joined the Satan’s Choice at age tw
enty-one. He liked motorcycles and smoking and selling pot, and he’d piled up convictions for theft, assault causing bodily harm and break-and-enter, but nothing in his past suggested that he was particularly dangerous.
Still, Kirby got a hinky feeling about Vaughan, in part because Vaughan also hung around with a club member nicknamed “Duke,” and Kirby had no doubts about Duke. “He’s a rape hound.”
There was money to be made working with Duke. He was about five-foot-four and wiry, and he was an exceptional climber who often broke into houses and robbed them while residents were sleeping. “He was a second-storey man,” Kirby said. “He’d climb up balconies and apartments…I know that Michael Vaughan was hanging around with him…They went out and did some B and Es together.”
Duke seemed to have frightening ideas about women. “He was always following women around Weston and Lawrence,” Kirby said. “You couldn’t trust him around women alone. I never wanted to leave him alone with any girlfriend I had.” One shouldn’t presume that all—or even most—bikers have a penchant for sexual assault. Though Sanguigni often partnered with Vaughan in criminal activities, Kirby said that Vaughan wouldn’t have raped anyone in the mob killer’s company. Even the hitman drew the line somewhere. “Armand Sanguigni was not the type of person to be raping women,” Kirby said.
There was one club party where Kirby was certain that Duke took a woman into a bedroom and raped her. “He just walked out of the bedroom and shut the door…I was ready to fucking kill him for that. Another member intervened and said, ‘We’ll kick the shit out of him later.’ ”
The activities of Kirby, Vaughan, Duke and many others in the club were unknown to president Guindon. Choice membership changed often and many members were spread out, making it next to impossible to keep tabs on everyone. “We had all kinds in the club,” Guindon said. “You never went to the club meetings because they’re private, and if you did, it was after all of the business was closed. It was just, ‘Hi, how are you, go fuck yourself.’ ”
Members with complaints against another member were required to make them at the chapter level first. The next level was the officers—the presidents, vice-presidents and secretaries—who met once a month. It was much more complicated than in the early days, when Guindon could turf a member on the spot. He didn’t even know who they all were. “In those days, you were lucky to see the guys two times a year,” Guindon said. “Maybe three times…Them days, you didn’t get to meet a lot of the guys. If you’re on a club run, everybody kind of kept to themselves, to their own chapters.”
Despite the sometimes reserved welcome he received at his own club’s gatherings, Guindon took pride in seeing clubhouse walls covered in patches torn from the backs of other clubs, including big ones like the Para-Dice Riders, Red Devils and Vagabonds. These displays made it clear to visitors that trying to set up shop in a Satan’s Choice neighbourhood was a bad idea.
There was one patch Guindon hadn’t seen on any Choice clubhouse wall, but he’d like to. The Hells Angels were rumoured to be preparing to use an underworld rounder—a sort of free agent in criminal circles—to help them establish their first chapters in Canada. When he heard the talk, Guindon threatened he would personally rip off the patch of Hells Angels’ leader Ralph (Sonny) Barger if he ever showed his face in Toronto.
—
War was always brewing in Quebec, and the province sucked up much of Guindon’s time and energy. Whenever police busted a meth lab, it created an opening for rival labs and renewed fighting for turf. There were twenty-three biker-related killings in 1974 and 1975 as bodies appeared in trailer parks, cafés, brasseries, rural fields, cottages, country roads and the St. Lawrence River. Most of the victims were bikers, but there was also a woman who knew too much and an innocent bystander. If the Popeyes had had their way, the number would have been twenty-four, with Guindon himself being one of the casualties.
Guindon was hardly surprised to hear that his club’s Quebec rivals had a murder contract on his life. An Ontario biker cop told Guindon when and where the Popeyes were meeting. “He didn’t give a shit,” Guindon said of the cop. Guindon arrived at the meeting unannounced, wearing his Choice colours, and interrupted to say, “Let’s talk.”
The Popeyes didn’t offer him a chair or a drink, but they didn’t shoot him either. Around this time, a Popeye was found hanging by a rope in his home. Perhaps it was suicide or perhaps it was murder craftily packaged. Whatever the case, a ceasefire followed.
The Devil’s Disciples had been rare and valued allies for Guindon in Montreal. But in 1975, they were finally bled dry. After fifteen members were killed in their war with the Dubois family over speed, the club disbanded. That left Guindon’s Quebec chapter isolated and vulnerable.
—
In the mid-1970s, a massive biker wiped out his Harley during a local run with members of the Queensmen, a Windsor-area club close to the Satan’s Choice. The rider wasn’t badly hurt, and the incident wouldn’t have been noteworthy if some of his possessions hadn’t spilled across the roadway. The other bikers thought they saw police identification lying on the pavement.
The Queensman’s sergeant-at-arms and another member went to check out the biker’s apartment. There, they found police files on bikers and realized the guy was a cop. He was given a severe beating and lost several of his teeth to the toe of a Queensman’s boot. That was the end of the undercover career of Terry Hall of the OPP. He had been trying to get his patch with the Queensmen, which would have given him the credibility to work his way into Guindon’s larger, more powerful Satan’s Choice.
“He was pretty smart,” Guindon said of Hall, who would become all outlaw bikers’ nemesis in Ontario. “I’m positive there was other [undercover] guys in all the clubs.” Guindon also believed that the police had developed a fairly strong network of stool pigeons, insiders who were willing to trade information for favours. There were too many times when police knew precisely where bikers would be going on runs, even though members themselves only learned what their destination was at the last minute. “They definitely had our phones bugged,” Guindon said.
The Choice now had enemies on the streets and in their clubhouses, wearing their patches. Even a calm man could be forgiven if he acted a little paranoid.
CHAPTER 25
Mountie Radar
We didn’t normally work the bikers. We happened to do this because we wanted to get out of the office.
Retired organized crime cop MARK MURPHY
In January 1975 two Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers in Toronto went out for a cup of coffee. Mark Murphy and his partner Don (Pots) Pospeich of the national Criminal Intelligence Service needed a break from the internecine bickering that often contaminates police departments, just as it does biker clubhouses. The two Mounties were anxious for a big project to get them out of the office for a while. Maybe something involving drugs would do the trick. An investigation into cocaine trafficking in Toronto could turn up big results if they started pulling on strands.
Mother McEwen was caught up in some intense office politics of his own. McEwen had invited some Chicago Outlaws up to Oshawa to meet with Guindon and others in the Choice. McEwen wanted to forge a more formal alliance between the two clubs. Not long after that, as a sign they were making progress, they made up a mini-patch for both clubs to wear: a piston overlapped with a devil’s trident, under “1%” and the word “brotherhood.”
The alliance wasn’t just about the warm and fuzzy possibility of calling more hairy men “bro.” It served a couple of practical purposes. The first was to block the Hells Angels from establishing chapters in Canada. The second was business. Tighter ties between the Choice and the Outlaws opened a ready southern market for Canadian-made speed.
It was around this time that McEwen introduced Guindon to Allan George Templain, who he said was from the Choice’s Kitchener chapter. Templain appeared to have money and also boasted a black belt in karate. He lived in a custom-built, waterfron
t home in Guindon’s old hometown of Sault Ste. Marie and flew a private aircraft with pontoons, so he could land it on water or land.
During his frequent runs over Lake Superior in the months that followed, Guindon stopped by a few times to see Templain at home. Something about those visits left Guindon with an uneasy feeling. “I said to myself, ‘Stay the fuck away from him.’ Every time I went to Thunder Bay, I’d stop there for something to do. I’d kick my ass. On the surface, he was a good guy.”
Sometimes Templain and Guindon sparred, matching karate against boxing, although it never ended well for Templain. “He never liked it when I jabbed at him,” Guindon said. “When I hit him, he stopped.”
Templain also owned a secluded hunting lodge. Located on an island in the middle of Oba Lake, one hundred miles north of Wawa, it was surrounded by rugged bushland as far as the eye could see. Close to the lodge, hidden in the woods, was a lab he used to make phencyclidine, known on the street as PCP, angel dust, peace pills and hog. The animal tranquilizer and hallucinogen was originally developed as an anaesthetic but was withdrawn for human use because it caused convulsions.
Getting involved in the drug trade was an abrupt change of course for Guindon, who had beaten up club members for using drugs less than a decade before. But the times had changed, and he could use the money.
Bikers like Guindon, McEwen and Templain weren’t yet on Murphy and Pospeich’s radar. Their mandate within the RCMP was to fight organized crime, and they didn’t consider the likes of Satan’s Choice to be real organized crime. Bikers were rough and dangerous, but police still equated organized crime with the Mafia. If the bikers were involved in narcotics trafficking, two officers reasoned, that was an issue for the drug enforcement units.
One day, Murphy and Pospeich sat down with Sergeant Lou Nave of the RCMP drug section. Nave had a lead about someone on Danforth Avenue in Toronto’s Greek neighbourhood who was suspected of delivering a weekly shipment of speed to Oshawa. He knew little about the suspect except that he drove an old white Chrysler.
Hard Road Page 14