Nave’s lead held interesting possibilities for Murphy and Pospeich. If the man at the wheel of the old white Chrysler was indeed moving speed, then he most likely was getting his supply from a local lab. In an elevator back at their office, the two Mounties shook hands and agreed to investigate until they found that lab so that they could take out the whole organization. If they only arrested the delivery man, it would be like cutting off the head of a dandelion and then finding the pesky plants sprouting up all over your lawn the next day. They needed to bore right down to the roots and extract the entire weed.
Murphy and Pospeich cruised up and down the Danforth, looking for the Chrysler. They found a 1965 model parked in an alley behind the 2800 block of Danforth Avenue. A licence plate check showed it was owned by a man named Malcolm Raymond Bould. That name meant nothing to them. They arranged for eyeball surveillance on Bould, and also got wiretaps going. They followed him to hockey rinks and shopping centres, observing a few interactions that were clearly drug deals. At one point, the surveillance cops found themselves within a few feet of what appeared to be a drug buy. It wasn’t a problem for Pospeich, in particular, whose resemblance to Hollywood tough guy Charles Bronson made him look more authentic than most bad guys. The cops seemed to go undetected as they followed their targets around Toronto, once even holding a door for one of them. They watched Bould drop packages off beside garbage pails and telephone poles.
One day, they intercepted a call Bould made to a man named Joe Prince. Exactly what they were talking about wasn’t clear, but Prince certainly seemed important. On March 12, Prince led Murphy and Pospeich to the Cambridge Motor Hotel on Dixon Road, where they saw a man who became yet another target, James Mulryan. He wasn’t a member of the Satan’s Choice but he was connected to a few men who were. Both Mounties were surprised to suddenly see bikers entering their investigation.
With their bosses losing patience after months of surveillance and no arrests, Murphy and Pospeich tailed Mulryan to an address on Dundas Street West in Toronto. There, he met with Templain, who was accompanied by a boy who looked about ten and two other males. Mulryan drove them up Dundas Street to the Venus Spa in the downtown tenderloin district. They weren’t there long before they headed to an apartment building in the far north end of the city, at 5949 Yonge Street. Neither of the Mounties knew enough about bikers yet to know they had just seen the downtown rub-and-tug where Guindon worked and the uptown apartment building where he lived.
The next day, the officers watched Templain and a second man leave the apartment building in a silver vehicle. They felt a rush when they recognized the second man as Bernie Guindon, head of the Satan’s Choice and an international amateur boxer. As little as they knew about biker clubs, they knew Guindon to see him. Suddenly, their little probe had big game in its sites, and the OPP biker squad wanted in.
Including the provincial police force in their investigation offered an obvious political advantage for the two Mounties, whose bosses were constantly reminding them of the expense of their operation. If the OPP were involved, it would be a joint forces project and would be in less danger of being shut down due to lack of funds. The OPP volunteered as many as eight officers to help. Guindon was the trophy arrest they craved. Murphy and Pospeich said they only needed two additional officers for the time being. By now, they had wiretaps running on the phones of their key suspects, Guindon included.
Over the next several weeks, surveillance officers followed their targets to meetings in Toronto-area hotels and restaurants. In late March, Templain and the young boy appeared again in Toronto. The surveillance team enjoyed a pleasant night, tagging behind as they went to Maple Leaf Gardens and watched a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. After the game, the job became less enjoyable as they parked outside a restaurant on Yonge Street in the bitter cold, watching Templain dine inside on steak and wine.
The OPP felt it was time to arrest Mulryan, but the two Mounties still wanted to find that meth lab, as they had promised each other when the operation began.
Even while working security at a body-rub parlour to pay his bills, Guindon was pursuing his amateur boxing career with a vengeance. In April 1975, he won the all-Ontario championships at 147 pounds with a decision over Larry Llewellyn of Hamilton. He had also resumed contact with Suzanne Blais, even though they both had other partners yet again. That month, Suzanne was in hospital when she got a surprise visit from Guindon with “the largest flower arrangement I’ve ever received in my life.” Later that month, he paid her another visit at home.
On May 6, 1975, surveillance officers at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport watched discreetly as Templain disembarked Air Canada flight 429 from Montreal at 10:05 p.m. He was greeted at the airport by a man police didn’t recognize. The stranger was in his mid-twenties and wore red high-top running shoes and jeans. He was carrying a yellow plastic bag and a brown tote bag.
Police identified the man as twenty-five-year-old Chuck Jones. Officers outside took a quick look in his Dodge van and found twenty thousand dollars in the glove compartment. Surveillance officers followed the van across the north end of town to Highway 404, and north to 130 Don Park Road, an inconsequential-looking industrial mall with several small businesses, including a chemical importation enterprise. The officers felt their pulses quicken. They wondered if this was the lab.
They had barely started sipping their coffee before the two targets were back in the van, this time returning west along Highway 401 to Dixon Road. There was little traffic and the police had only three surveillance cars, making it a challenge not to be noticed. At one point, Murphy pulled directly alongside the van at a red light on Dixon Road. Templain stared down at the officers from the van’s passenger seat. Sensing he had to do something to lose his quarry’s interest, Murphy enthusiastically picked his nose and then looked disgusted as he surveyed his findings on the tip of his finger. That was enough to get Templain to look away until the light finally changed. The officers followed the van all the way to Niagara Street in St. Catharines, nearly an hour away, where Guindon joined their targets.
The next day, at three in the afternoon, surveillance latched on to Templain and Jones at a Yonge Street restaurant not far from Guindon’s apartment building. Soon, the targets collected Guindon and returned with him to the restaurant. The mood was clearly upbeat as others joined in, with plenty of laughter. The officers marvelled that they still hadn’t been spotted.
Guindon’s group now included a man with pumped-up arms who held the door as the others left the restaurant. Police didn’t recognize him, but the gym rat was Satan’s Choice member Cecil Kirby, who was working as a speed courier then. Also present were Ken Goobie, a Para-Dice Rider named John the Hat and a man named Patty LeBlanc, whose body ended up in the trunk of a car in Vancouver years later. There was also a Montreal mobster involved in the pornography business. They were moving ten to twenty-eight pounds of yellow speed a week through the restaurant.
Guindon sometimes wondered if they were being watched, but he often felt that way. “Sometimes you get the feeling that your hair stands up on the back of your neck.
“There’s something happening here. I had a funny feeling. You’re always paranoid. Because you’ve been inside so much. You always think there’s something wrong.”
In May 1975, Guindon scored a technical knockout over Terry Boyd of Montreal and won the Eastern Canadian championship. If all went well, he might soon be fighting again with a Maple Leaf on his chest. The Olympics were just a little over a year away in Montreal. Even with his advancing age, Guindon still had some grim magic in his gloves.
Surveillance continued on him and Jones. In early June 1975, the officers learned that Jimmy Mulryan had built a new house on the Lake Simcoe shore in Keswick. He was living with a schoolteacher and was excited that she was expecting their first child. And Templain, meanwhile, was observed making numerous trips to his home in Sault Ste. Marie and often left packages in a locker at the Toronto airport.
Police with binoculars scanned his Oba lodge from a nearby island on June 11, 1975 and saw Templain and another man hauling garbage cans. The officers suspected the cans were filled with drugs or chemicals for making drugs. They saw men with other containers going by boat from island to island, dropping off more containers. The officers believed they had reached ground zero. This must be the lab.
A pre-dawn raid on the lodge was set for the first weekend of August 1975. Officers checked into the Oba Lake Lodge, posing as hunters. Templain was still in his bunk when the police burst in for what would prove to be the largest drug bust in Canadian history to that date, conducted jointly by the RCMP, OPP, Metro Toronto Police and U.S. DEA. They discovered less than fifty pounds of actual PCP, but 2,300 pounds of the chemicals needed to make the drug. They estimated that if it was all put to use, it would have been worth some $91 million on the street.
Even years later, Murphy insisted that Templain, Jones and Mulryan hadn’t cut deals with investigators. And police simply hadn’t bothered to charge Bould, Prince and Mulryan. Instead, they would be left on the street as starting points for future investigations.
Since he’d come into Murphy and Pospeich’s view, the operation had focused intently on Guindon. Murphy thought he must be the mastermind, although he seemed unusually nice for a biker and was never seen packing a gun. He also didn’t seem to have much money. Still, Guindon presented police with an appealing target. He wasn’t wise to the ways of police surveillance after his prison stint, and he also didn’t seem to appreciate that he was now a major trophy for police. “The cops have always got a police informant working around him,” Kirby said. “It’s a feather in some cops’ hats if they can get a case against Bernie Guindon.”
Police arrested Guindon in Toronto on the assumption that he was using his club to set up a distribution network. Police didn’t find any guns, drugs or money. “I never got caught with any drugs whatsoever,” he reflected. “There was no photo of me being at the property when he [Templain] was making the drugs or selling the drugs,” he added. “He would sell all of the drugs and keep all the money. He didn’t pass any on to me.” When he was taken to the police station, Guindon got a chilling feeling when he saw Templain talking with police in a room. “He was there for a long fucking time.”
Guindon was in the Sault Ste. Marie jail when Kirby and Frank (Cisco) Lenti of the Choice drove up to see him in the wintertime. “We froze our fucking asses off in a Chevy van,” Kirby recalled.
Guindon felt that Kirby owed him money, which Kirby disputed. “I said, ‘When you go to jail, you lose,’ ” Kirby recalled. “He said, ‘We’ll settle it up when I get back out.’ ”
Murphy was shocked to later learn that Mulryan’s lifeless body was found hanging in the basement of his new home. Since he hadn’t been charged, the bikers figured he was an informant. “We never charged Jimmy Mulryan and that is the biggest mistake we ever made,” Murphy said. “They thought Jimmy Mulryan had been the rat in the whole thing.”
Stewing in the Sault Ste. Marie jail, Guindon had problems with Templain, but he didn’t know of anyone going after Mulryan. Thinking back, he didn’t even remember Mulryan. And the only thing he recalled about that stint in jail was its lousy cold grilled cheese sandwiches. “I couldn’t stand the fucking shit. That’s why I don’t eat it now.”
“For the record, Mulryan was not an informant,” Murphy said. Neither, he added, was Kirby.
Not yet.
CHAPTER 26
Body Seller
He sold bodies and information to the cops so he could get higher up…That’s how I got nailed.
BERNIE GUINDON on Garnet (Mother) McEwen
Guindon’s mother didn’t go to his trial and that’s what he wanted. She didn’t need to see her boy sitting in court as a prisoner or hear prosecutors say how he was part of a massive drug ring that stretched down to Florida.
Special Crown prosecutor Frank Caputo characterized the ring as “a marriage of chemical expertise and a distribution system in both Canada and the United States.”
The jury heard how U.S. Special Agent Kenneth Paterson of Buffalo infiltrated the group, and his description of how Templain brought drugs to Wisconsin several times.
Templain’s lawyer Roy Youngson said his client “was nowhere near the top of the ladder in this system,” even though the lab was on his island property and he travelled to the United States, Toronto and Montreal to distribute the drugs. “He is a self-styled big shot, a con man who has a broken-down airplane and who had the gall to tell a special U.S. narcotics agent he could deliver drugs anywhere in the world,” Youngson said. “He was not the foundation of this thing but was a man who liked money and was a hopeful participant.”
Without actually saying Guindon’s name, Youngson pointed a finger in his direction, contending it would have taken a large group with the muscle and reach of the Satan’s Choice to run the drug channel. Youngson also argued that the drugs were worth $63,000, not the mega-millions stated by police and splashed across headlines. In the end, Judge William Fitzgerald sentenced Templain to twelve years after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to traffic in narcotics.
Guindon wasn’t about to cut a deal. Like the fighter he was, he would tough it out in court and see where that left him. As he awaited trial, he didn’t help his case when authorities intercepted a letter he wrote from behind bars, suggesting that his fortunes would improve if something happened to silence an American DEA agent who was key to the case. The fact that Guindon was the leader of one of the world’s largest outlaw motorcycle gangs further tainted the court’s impression of him. Police assumed that his status was proof enough that he was setting up a drug distribution network. “Guindon was the overall coordinator of everything,” Murphy said, still convinced forty years later. “He was the overall boss of everything.”
Guindon didn’t believe the case against him was particularly strong, especially compared to the one against Templain. “I never got fuck all. That sonofabitch got everything. If he gave me anything, it wouldn’t be more than a thousand bucks,” said Guindon.
He was convinced he could also smell a sellout from Mother McEwen, somewhere in the background of the mess: “He sold bodies and information to the cops so he could get higher up…That’s how I got nailed. He introduced me to Allan Templain.” Whatever the case, Guindon bore the brunt of the operation. Ironically, the man who helped set and enforce the Choice’s policy against hard drug use took the hardest fall in a major drug bust. In May 1976, he was sentenced to seventeen years for conspiracy to traffic in phencyclidine, five years longer than Templain, the man who drew him into the scheme.
Two months after Guindon’s return to prison, Canada hosted its first-ever Summer Olympic Games. Without the drug beef, Guindon could well have starred on the Canadian boxing team. He would be into his forties or possibly even fifties by the time he got out of prison, depending on the parole board. His Olympic dream was effectively snuffed out. A tougher fight was just beginning.
In July 1976, Guindon returned to Millhaven. He didn’t even bother watching the Olympics on television. It was as if the Games were in a far-flung place, in a faraway, inaccessible world, and not just a few hours down Highway 401, in Montreal.
Inside, time seemed to have stood still since Guindon’s last mandatory visit. He was quickly reacquainted with his old cronies.
“It was like old home week,” he said. A lot of the men were lifers, and some of them didn’t really know how to survive on the streets, where they weren’t provided with wake-up calls, meals, clothing, a job and a certain level of security. “You get fed, you get clothed and you’ve got a little money for canteen. You get institutionalized and they’re bums on the street. They steal irons and toasters and televisions.” The regimented life of a penitentiary suited them. “They’ve got three meals a day. They’ve got a roof over their heads.”
Guindon didn’t want his mother to visit him in prison, just as he didn’t want
her at his trials. “What are you going to say to her? She worked all of her life hoping you wouldn’t go to jail.” He focused instead on what was essential for his survival, like quickly determining whom he could trust. He heard that one of the Millhaven guards was a striker for the Choice chapter in Kingston. That broke the rules of both the bikers and the authorities. The guard clearly wanted to talk but Guindon wondered if he was working undercover against the club. Talking with any guard was always dangerous anyway, so he steered clear of the man. “You’ve got to be careful how you’re talking to a guard. An inmate who might not like you might say, ‘Look at him. He might be squealing.’ ”
During the first year of his sentence, Guindon heard that his former sidekick Big Jack (Bear) Olliffe had been shot dead. Big Jack had been working as a bouncer at the Cadillac Hotel, the notorious bucket of blood on Simcoe Street South in Oshawa where Guindon’s father had once bounced and hung out.
On the last evening of his life, Big Jack made a fatal mistake. He tried to eject long-time Choice member Terry Siblock from the Cadillac for drunkenness. Siblock was the same man Big Jack had wrongly called a stool pigeon repeatedly over the past ten years. Such words aren’t easily forgiven or forgotten on Simcoe Street South, and Siblock decided he had been hearing the insult long enough. He left the bar to pick up a .306 rifle, returned, and silenced Big Jack’s slanderous lie forever. There were plenty of witnesses, but that just didn’t matter to Siblock. As everyone there could plainly see, he wasn’t willing to hear Big Jack badmouth him one more time. Guindon understood Siblock’s feelings, even though he liked Big Jack well enough. “I don’t know how the guy put up with it. He finally snapped. Said, ‘Enough of this shit. Enough is enough.’ ”
Hard Road Page 15