Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  One of Guindon’s closest buddies was John Mazzotti, president of the Windsor-based Lobos, who served time with him in Collins Bay and Millhaven. “He was just a solid guy that watched your back if you watched his. A good biker.” With friends like Mazzotti, Guindon would sometimes say they “had to hang T,” prison talk for “stay cool and keep things together.”

  Guindon also knew the mob guys, from a distance. “I never paid attention to them. Most of them seemed to think their shit didn’t smell. They didn’t want to hang with you. Joe Dinardo (a boxer) used to be with those guys all of the time. He was always with the Mafia guys.” During Guindon’s first prison stint, mob guys were openly hostile toward bikers, but that had relaxed somewhat. Both groups had come to understand the other group had power and could be useful. “They had a lot of long arms, so to speak. They used to pay a lot of people to do their dirty work.”

  Danger behind bars often came at unexpected times from unexpected people. “There are a lot of crazy fuckers in there. They get paid by somebody else that don’t like you. I had the problem once. I remember giving him a shot or two,” said Guindon. The attackers were often addicts, paid in drugs, or men of little status in the hierarchy of inmates. “They send the idiots, the ones already doing life. They’ve got nobody visiting them, no family. They’re just left in there. They’re just vegetables.”

  About two and a half years into Guindon’s sentence, his lawyer was able to reduce his sentence from seventeen to twelve years. It was now possible to think ahead to the day when he would be set free, and he pushed to upgrade his employment potential. He wanted to take a course to learn upholstery, and when he couldn’t get in, he went on a hunger strike. That lasted a couple of weeks, but the smell of food was starting to get to him. Then he retched and coughed up a tapeworm, which mystified and disgusted him. “I was so fucked up. How do you get a tapeworm? It don’t make sense to me. You wonder, What the fuck’s happening?”

  Despite the toll prison was taking on his health, it was bringing his leadership instincts to the fore. He was made an honorary member of the Allied Indian and Métis Society and was voted head of the prisoners’ committee. There, he became friendly with prisoner and author Roger Caron, who served with him on the inmate committee. Caron was a fellow bootlegger’s son whose father also beat him in his youth. By the time Caron published his Governor General’s Literary Award–winning prison memoir, Go-Boy!, in 1978, he had spent twenty-three of his thirty-nine years behind bars. Guindon liked Caron but they didn’t hang out together, Caron “being a straight john—somebody not into the motorcycle world.”

  Though he was separated from his Harley, Guindon never turned his back on the fact that he was a biker. He felt that bikers were discriminated against when it came to getting passes to leave the prison, and he raised his concern during a visit from Solicitor General Robert Kaplan. “I told him right straight out in front of the warden that if the discrimination didn’t stop, we would start tearing the walls apart.”

  Not long after that, Guindon and fellow inmates literally did tear the walls apart. During a riot, they broke up bed frames and used the metal to carve holes between cells. There were eighteen cells on a range, and they busted a passageway between all of them. When order was restored, authorities installed quarter-inch steel between the cells to prevent it from happening again. Exactly what triggered the riot wasn’t clear, but a precise reason wasn’t needed. “It was just about stupidity. We didn’t want to smash up, but you’ve got to follow the leader sometimes.”

  The riot landed Guindon in the box, a windowless cage in the middle of the yard, with a tin for a toilet and no light. It didn’t take long in there before he lost track of day and night. The closest thing to a human interaction he experienced was someone slipping a bologna sandwich through the door. “It’s not a happy place to be. All you do is think about what you’re going to do. What you’ve been through. Are you going to behave? You just sit in the dark. It’s just a hole. You’re just in a square box. You wouldn’t know what fucking time of day it was. You roasted. You had no clothes. You just had your shorts on.”

  On happier days, when he was back in his usual cell, Guindon resumed work on his crafts, making tap, tap, tap sounds on metal or leather late into the night. Sometimes, the persistent noise and his flashlight annoyed other prisoners and they asked him to stop. He did. Other times, when no one seemed to mind, he kept on tapping.

  In May 1979, he was transferred to nearby Joyceville. There, he tried to teach others how to do leatherwork. One of his students was his cousin Maurice (Bullfrog) Guindon from Hull, who was serving time for theft. Guindon had become a sort of craft master, having won seven national awards for his leatherwork. Bullfrog was a rank beginner, who hadn’t been the same since he caught a bullet in the head in a Quebec pool hall. He was further hampered by losing half the fingers on one hand to gangrene. While he remained a nice guy, Bullfrog was clearly not master craftsman material. “He was fucking useless, him and Tom the Wop,” Guindon recalled. “He was in the Vagabonds. I’d just lose it on them. They drove me fucking nuts. I had a year in with them. It felt like five years.”

  While Bullfrog was a bust at leatherwork, he did have a black belt in karate and understood exercise. He helped Guindon with his physical training, using a broom handle to smack him in the stomach as he continued to obsess about making his abs preternaturally strong.

  Some of Guindon’s energy went into making leather key fobs with “Free Bernie Guindon” on them for his brother, Jack, to sell. There was also something special for his daughter Debbie Donovan on her eleventh birthday: a matching purse and wallet set with a little tiger and “Debbie” on the strap. A string of roses adorned the wallet. He sent the gift to her grandmother’s house in Oshawa. When Debbie opened the wallet, she found fifty dollars inside with a note explaining it was bad luck to give one that was empty. “Back in those days, my mom was a bootlegger,” Debbie recalled, “and money was tight.” At one point, Debbie’s mother had two booze cans running, one on Elena Street in Oshawa, just a few minutes’ walk from where Guindon’s father had sold illegal liquor. Like Guindon, with whom she frequently corresponded, she didn’t drink.

  Debbie spent the money her father sent on new clothes. They had always been close, though at her age, she’d never visited him in custody and he never spoke about prison life in his letters to her. Instead, he told his daughter that he missed her and asked how she was doing. He never apologized. Without deliberate irony, he advised her to stay in school and behave. He signed his letters with “SWAKAH” for “sealed with a kiss and hug.”

  Debbie tucked the purse and wallet set away in a safe spot. “It’s gorgeous but I never used it. I still have it. It was more sentimental.”

  —

  In late 1979, Guindon was transferred again, this time to Collins Bay, an aging medium-security correctional facility in Kingston. It was unusual for a prisoner’s security to be upgraded to Collins Bay from lower-security Joyceville as his sentence progressed, leading Guindon to suspect he was the target of a prison snitch. “Maybe they figured out I was selling drugs.”

  Prisoners had a choice of drugs while inside: hashish, cocaine, methamphetamines or angel dust. Marijuana was generally too bulky to smuggle in. “I used to have a guard bring in some of my stuff,” Guindon said. “I’d have somebody pay the guard on the street.” Sometimes, the payment was made with cheap companionship. “The guys would get them a broad,” Guindon said. “She’d get him the dope and get lucky with him.”

  In addition to leatherwork, Guindon learned a new craft to help mellow out his remaining time inside. He called his serendipitous new creation “Frog Logs,” cigarette papers drenched in hashish and marijuana oil. “It was an accident,” Guindon explained. He was rolling hash papers to sell to prisoners when he caught wind that a guard was coming by. He quickly hid about a hundred papers, but when he retrieved them, they were hopelessly stuck together. “I had a hundred or so papers and I had to d
o something.” He squeezed them together into a giant joint and then sliced it into one-eighth-inch segments, like coins. Extra potent and easy to hide, they proved to be a hit with customers.

  A guard once told Guindon that he wanted everyone to quit smoking up. That was akin to telling senior management at Harley-Davidson to stop making touring bikes and focus on mopeds.

  “Would you rather see everyone on Valium?” Guindon asked.

  “Forget I ever asked,” the guard replied.

  Though Guindon’s reduced living conditions weren’t enough to push him to prison moonshine, he did indulge in hash oil. Even a devoted teetotaller needed some help, once in a while, settling his nerves. “Smoking relaxed me. You’re doing big fucking time. You go, ‘Holy fuck, am I ever going to get out of this?’ You’ve got a lot of maniacs in there who don’t like club bikers. It didn’t take much to walk by and stick a knife in you.” Guindon also dropped acid, a drug he only used in prison. “I only did it in jail. I never did it on the street. I used to go on my own vacation, so to speak. Go on a holiday. Take a trip. I probably did more drugs in two months in the joint than I ever did on the street.”

  Sports provided another outlet. He played defence on an inmate hockey team. “I was fairly good,” he said. “In defence, you’re in more fights than playing forward. You’re hitting the guys more. I wasn’t a fast skater.” He was also a catcher on a baseball team. A high point in his prison athletics career was when he managed to score a home run on a bunt, through a combination of hustle, poor fielding and a thunderous collision with the opposing catcher.

  Despite the drugs, sports, politics and crafting, Guindon was still best known behind bars as a boxer, and a dangerous one at that. “He had that killer instinct,” Hamilton street gang member George McIntyre said. “He had power, he had speed, and blood did not dissuade him at all. You had to kill him to beat him. There was no quit in him.” McIntyre remembered Guindon particularly shining on Friday nights, when inmates would play floor hockey. “Anytime you played floor hockey, somebody was getting knocked out. On Friday night, somebody got knocked out, and the person usually knocking them out was Bernie. In an environment like that, Bernie was king. Nobody could touch him.”

  —

  Back in Oshawa, Guindon’s eldest child, Teresa, got her driver’s licence when she turned sixteen. She also became the proud owner of a yellow 1969 Mustang.

  She drove it to a friend’s apartment, which was in a house that had been split into several units. Outside, a smiling stranger who looked to be in his early thirties approached her, saying he knew her father from prison and that he had a box of letters and cards from him that she might like to see. Her father was somewhat of a mystery to her, since she’d been raised in her maternal grandparents’ home. “My mother wouldn’t tell me a lot about my dad. I’m sixteen. I’m all excited. I’m finally going to find all about my dad.”

  Minutes after entering his apartment, she realized she was the victim of a horrible deception. “None of this was true. There were no cards and letters.” The stranger surprised and overwhelmed her as soon as they were alone. “I put up a good fight but I lost it.” He severely injured her wrist in the struggle, but other damage was far worse. “I was a good girl. I wanted to save my virginity for my husband. He stole stuff from me that I couldn’t get back.” Another man entered the apartment, and Teresa felt he was about to rape her too, but she managed to run away.

  She could feel something changing inside her. It wasn’t pleasant, but it did feel necessary. “After that rape, I was tough,” Teresa said. “I wasn’t a bully, but I didn’t put up with crap. After you’ve had bad things done, you become hard. You shut your heart down. I didn’t give a crap about anybody…I didn’t tell my mom for the longest time. I didn’t tell anybody.”

  She only told her mother after she heard a rumour that the man who raped her had venereal disease. Her mother took her to a gynecologist, where she learned she did not have the infection. The experience was humiliating, nonetheless.

  Word of the attack filtered back to Guindon, who called her from prison.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “Don’t,” she replied. “I don’t want that man’s blood on my hands. Don’t do anything. Don’t touch him.”

  Guindon had faced down some tough men for the honour of his club. He’d have done the same for his daughter in a heartbeat, so it wasn’t easy to hear Teresa call him off. But he wouldn’t want people making decisions about his life for him.

  “I will respect your wishes.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Quiet Expansion

  He was a stand-up kid at seventeen.

  BERNIE GUINDON on Oshawa Satan’s Choice member Lorne Campbell

  The first time Cecil Kirby saw Wolodumyr Walter (Nurget) Stadnick of Hamilton was in the summer of 1977 at Wasaga Beach. Stadnick had just graduated from a local teen motorcycle club called the Cossacks to the Wild Ones, who were making a name for themselves at the time with their mob ties. They had helped Mafia families undertake a flurry of bombings of bakeries and other small businesses, which earned Hamilton the nickname “Bomb City.”

  Kirby thought Stadnick was trying too hard to look like a badass biker. “I didn’t like him,” Kirby said. “I thought he was sort of a poser.” It wasn’t until later that Kirby realized his initial impression was wrong. Stadnick was the real deal, from head to toe.

  Somewhere along the line, Stadnick picked up the nickname “Nurget.” Usually, there’s no mystery to biker nicknames. It’s easy to imagine what inspired the likes of Pigpen, Tiny, Crash, Slash, Boxer and Skid Mark. But no one beyond Stadnick himself had a clue what “Nurget” meant, and he refused to tell. What is known is that Stadnick is the five-foot-four son of a tree cutter who worked for the City of Hamilton. Born on August 3, 1952, he had two older brothers, but neither was a hardcore biker. By the time he crossed paths with Cecil Kirby, Stadnick had settled into a solid home on East Hamilton Mountain, not far from where he grew up. He kept rock star hours, seldom rising before noon. He worked out regularly and was fit if not physically imposing. He abstained altogether from smoking and narcotics, and drank only in moderation. His icy stare rarely devolved into anger, and never into the psychotic flashes displayed by some outlaw bikers. Even to an enemy, Stadnick seldom raised his voice or even said anything memorable. Years later, a police officer was asked how Stadnick could function in Quebec when he didn’t really speak French. The officer replied that Stadnick didn’t speak much English either.

  Stadnick preferred to listen and watch rather than talk over others. He was able to draw advice from a wide range of people, from drug dealers to professionals, without appearing threatened. He was clearly a man much bigger than the sum of his parts. As Guindon weathered his second prison stretch, Stadnick quietly set off a chain of events that would one day make the Choice leader’s world nearly unrecognizable.

  —

  On the night of October 18, 1978, Bill Matiyek of the tiny Golden Hawks biker club was shot dead in a bar in Port Hope, east of Oshawa. Authorities called it a cold-blooded execution, but Satan’s Choice members called it self-defence and a defining moment for their club, especially its Oshawa and Kitchener chapters. Lorne Campbell of the Satan’s Choice said he shot Matiyek that day to protect his biker brothers, that Matiyek was about to open fire, and Campbell and others left the bar alive only because he was faster on the trigger.

  After a sloppy police investigation and trial based on questionable testimony, a half-dozen bikers went to prison for the killing, but not Campbell, despite his confession. Guindon had known Campbell since he was a seventeen-year-old and was impressed but not surprised that Campbell stepped up and said he pulled the trigger. “He was a stand-up kid at seventeen…That took a lot of balls. That’s why Oshawa had such a good name.”

  One of the men convicted for the Matiyek killing was David (Tee Hee) Hoffman of the Kitchener Choice. He served a couple years for the shooting before police
wiretaps surfaced that revealed he was far from Port Hope the day Matiyek was shot. Even though Hoffman was serving time for a crime he didn’t commit, he didn’t say a word against Campbell or anyone else.

  Guindon was impressed by everything he heard about Hoffman, whom he considered quiet, extremely strong, popular and well mannered. Hoffman didn’t use his status in a biker club to bully anyone either—something that was big in Guindon’s books. “He was a helluva guy. Never bothered nobody. I don’t think he used his patch.” It was also a point of pride for Guindon that no one ratted on any other club member, and that Hoffman stayed quiet, even when he was wrongfully sent to prison. “How many guys would do that? I was very proud of them.” They reminded Guindon of why he became a biker in the first place.

  —

  The year 1979 was shaping up to be a particularly tense one. On Saturday, June 23, 1979, police in Hamilton swooped in on the Outlaws, Wild Ones and Red Devils, seizing LSD, marijuana, speed, shotguns and rifles. Meanwhile, the Outlaws and Hells Angels continued to jockey for power in Canada. Staff Superintendent Bruno Dorigo, head of the OPP’s criminal intelligence branch, didn’t see peace on the horizon. “Our sources and undercover agents tell us these two clubs are battling for supremacy in the province,” Dorigo told the press. “There have been several killings in Quebec [from biker rivalry] and now it’s spilling into Ontario.”

  Tensions played out on both sides of the international border, as guns were sent north and drugs went south. Perhaps that explained why at least one hitman entered a small house on Allen Road South in Charlotte, North Carolina, sometime between two and five in the morning on July 4, 1979. The shotgun-wielding intruder managed to kill a guard who had been posted outside on a chair, and then made it inside to where three men and a woman connected to the local Outlaws were resting.