Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  When the chapter president arrived later that morning, he found no signs of struggle on the lifeless body of the guard. He had clearly been caught by surprise. There were also no signs of resistance on the other four bodies inside the clubhouse, where they lay face down. They had been shot several times, and one of the men had also been tortured. The massacre was never solved.

  Guindon read the news reports and wondered. He’d fought many a David and Goliath–type battle, but this time he was stuck in prison and his club was finding itself caught between a pair of giants. Two hundred members was still a serious club, but nothing compared to the forces now bearing down on the territory of the Satan’s Choice.

  A new visitor was shining some light on Guindon’s time at Collins Bay: his daughter Shanan Dionne, who was born in January 1975 to a girlfriend named Wendy. Jack would drive the child down to Kingston so she could connect with her father.

  In retrospect, Shanan resented being watched over by a guard, but she was impressed at how respectful the other inmates were toward her father. She had particularly fond memories of a huge Native inmate named Tom, who gave her a handmade suede vest. Tom clearly respected her father, as did the other inmates in the visiting room. As her dad walked over to see her, they would stop him to ask, “Hey Bernie, is that your daughter?”

  “He’s a showstopper when he comes into the room,” said Shanan.

  She didn’t like being told their visiting time was up. But when she got back in the car for the drive home, she couldn’t help but feel like a member of a very special family. What she couldn’t have known was that everything that made her father seem like royalty was crashing down around him, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  CHAPTER 30

  Reunited

  I had the feeling that the only one who cared at all was Bernie Guindon.

  Long-time Bernie Guindon friend SUZANNE BLAIS

  Guindon had a realistic shot at parole in the mid-1980s, so he busied himself with learning new skills so that he would be able to make a decent living. He already knew how to be a cook, and now he set his mind to learning how to be a barber and an upholsterer. He also set his mind on an old fascination: Suzanne Blais. He even remembered a tiny bit of French.

  Hi Sweets!

  Just received your letter & as always it’s really nice hearing from you. Thanks for the news clippings.

  Started back hitting the bag this week & doing more exercises & feeling much better. A good way to relieve head pressure.

  Been doing a lot of cell time of late & have been watching & listening to the ball games. Hope the Phillies win the Play-offs. They do deserve to win the way they’re playing.

  Yes I do think I’ve got you figured out pretty close & reading between your lines does help. Look if you are so worried why don’t you write under your maiden name & give me another address at least you’d be able to get it all off your chest as you’ve been holding it in much too long. Am I right Sweets? Still awaiting answers to several of my letters I’ve written to top officials regarding my case. Mind you I have caused several waves which is the main thing. With luck I should be hearing some good news by the end of the mth of early Nov.

  Well Sweets till next time do take real good care of yourself & best wishes. Goodnight, god bless, sweet dreams, many pleasant fantasies of me as I’ve of you & fond memories.

  Love & Respect Always

  Bernie No #1 Frog SWAELKAHF OOO

  XXXXXXOOOOO

  Would you please get me Spectator clippings from Sept. 23/80 about Bikers. Thanks.

  Ton amie pour toujour Suzanne

  Bernie No #1 Frog

  SWAELKAHF

  XO & much more.

  Determined to get out as soon as parole was available, Guindon made a bold decision and quit the Satan’s Choice. The apparently life-altering decision didn’t alter as much as he meant it to appear. Asking for early release while an active member of an outlaw motorcycle club would have been futile. “It wasn’t really a quit,” he later said. “I had a leave of absence so to speak until I had my act together.” Even though it was just a sabbatical of sorts, even the guise of leaving the Choice bothered him.

  He wrote Suzanne in another undated letter:

  Thanks for the call much appreciated. I feel real bad that you no longer write. I’ve quit the club & finding it hard to adjust but I’ll do it. Hope all is going well with your family. Got the Caron story. Again thanks.

  Love in friendship forever

  Bernie No #1 Frog

  SWAELKAHF

  XO

  He was elated when she wrote him back in a card with a Christmas scene, a horse hitched to a sled and hauling a Christmas tree. The picture looked like something out of rural Quebec.

  Just received your beautiful card & the lovely poems & can’t thank you enough. You are one of my oldest & truest friends & I hope someday of getting together for long talks. Did I miss sending you a birthday card & if so I apologize & I’ll now wish you a belated birthday wish. Sure would be nice if you could visit or if I could phone you at nights as I’ve access to a phone from 5:30 till 11 PM & on holiday wk ends 8 AM – 11 PM. See if you can give me a ph. # as I’d like to talk with you in privacy…

  Love, friendship & respect always

  Bernie No #1 Frog

  SWAELKAHF

  XXXXOOOO

  His mood picked up as she wrote back yet again.

  Hi Beautiful so how is mon sheri? Sure hope this letter does find yourself, family & friends all in the very best of health & in fine spirits. Thanks for the last card & etc. much appreciated. Sorry for cutting you off short the last time we were on the phone. Believe me I love to hear your voice & it just hurts me deep down that I cannot touch you or see your beauty. Theres so damn much to say & I just keep finding my mind going black. The poem in the last card was just beautiful & I can’t get over how so few words can mean so much. I’m just waiting anxiously for the 22nd so I can find out in which direction I can move in concerning my life. Well this one will tell all that for sure. As for me I’m still active in fact I even took a few more items on, like as if I didn’t have enough on my mind. I only get into the Barber Shop once a day for one hr & then its Committee work. I’m (we) are finally making progress & we are getting a lot of backing which is something new in here. Hope all is going as well as can be expected at your end. Always remember that your always thought of & our memories will last a lifetime. So until next time do take real good care of yourself. Give my love & best wishes to your mom for me.

  Love & Respect always

  One who Cares

  Bernie No #1 Frog

  SWAELKAHF OO

  XXXXXOOOO

  Guindon was guarded in what he wrote, especially after authorities had intercepted his letters from jail after his PCP bust. That intercepted message, with its mention of how his life would be easier if someone did something about a DEA agent, had most likely added a few years onto his prison term. “You had to be careful what you said in letters,” he said. “They were listening to all of your conversations.”

  Suzanne’s mother died of a heart attack on May 7, 1981, while visiting a Toronto weight-loss clinic. She was just fifty-six. When Suzanne went to her mother’s home to clear out her mailbox, she found a card for her mother’s birthday, which was May 18. It was from Guindon. “At that time, I had the feeling that the only one who cared at all was Bernie Guindon,” Suzanne said.

  —

  Cecil Kirby was also feeling alone, though for very different reasons. He had become convinced that his former bosses in the Commisso crime family were planning to murder him.

  By this time, Kirby had done some truly horrible things, including providing the gun used to kill Constable Michael Sweet at the Bourbon Street tavern on Queen Street West in Toronto on March 14, 1980. He had also planted a bomb at the Wah Kew Chop Suey House on Elizabeth Street in downtown Toronto, which killed cook Chong Yim Quan and injured three others in May 1977.

  There w
ere still some jobs Kirby refused, like carrying out a murder contract on mobster Paul Volpe. Compassion had nothing to do with it. Kirby worried that this job in particular would endanger his own life. Volpe’s death would create a lot of heat in the underworld, and killing a hitman is cheaper than paying him to keep his mouth shut.

  As Kirby’s employers dragged their feet on paying him for past work, he grew convinced that he was next on their hit list and felt his range of options narrow. In the biker world, there’s no greater crime than being a rat, but staying alive is a good thing too, so Kirby called the police for help. Soon, he was wearing a hidden recording device while working as a police agent. By the end of 1981, evidence obtained by Kirby had put the brothers Rocco Remo, Cosimo Elia and Michele Commisso behind bars.

  Kirby also helped police jail more than a dozen others, including Charles (The Bike) Yanover, who was convicted of trying to overthrow the government of Dominica. Yanover was also pinched for bombing Harold Arviv’s Toronto disco for insurance money, a crime that Kirby said he almost committed himself. He said that he asked for a high price for the job, and Arviv hired Yanover to bomb the disco instead. “I guess he did it cheaper,” Kirby said.

  He wasn’t a member of the Satan’s Choice any longer when he worked for the Commissos or the cops. He was also surgical about the evidence he shared with police, telling them plenty about the mob and nothing that put any bikers behind bars. He even warned former Toronto Choice member Frank (Cisco) Lenti that he should get out of town for a while, before all his information led to arrests. Soon, police heard of four separate contracts of $100,000 for Kirby’s death and then another one for $250,000. The rumoured numbers may have been inflated, but the desire for his death was real.

  From his vantage point in prison, Guindon had mixed feelings about Kirby. He had no sympathy for a rat, but he felt that the mobsters had brought grief upon themselves by not honouring their debts to him. “I never thought he would do that. For what he did for that family, they should have paid him instead of trying to kill him. He stood up to them.”

  Kirby also played a role in Ken Goobie of the Choice going to prison, but not by ratting him out. Back during his break-and-enter days, Kirby floated the idea that they would be less conspicuous in residential areas if they dressed up as postmen. “I said, ‘Nobody pays attention to a mailman when you’re breaking into a house,’ ” Kirby recalled. Goobie acted on the idea in Kirby’s absence and was caught, earning himself two years inside Collins Bay Institution.

  As Kirby faded into life in witness protection, Lorne Campbell and Guindon were reunited in 1984 in Collins Bay, after Campbell was convicted of violent gang-related crimes. Campbell quickly became the workout partner that Guindon had always wanted.

  He didn’t question Guindon’s training techniques, not even when Guindon would whomp him in the stomach with a board while he did sit-ups.

  The Choice reunion continued when Pigpen Berry was shipped north from a North Carolina lock-up. He had been convicted in the United States of a series of crimes, including trying to steal a tank from a military base. Exactly why the Outlaws felt the need for a tank was never explained. Already a skilled cook and musician, Pigpen proved to be an accomplished artist. Among his miniature prison creations was a stagecoach and horses, and a ship, all painstakingly carved out of wood.

  The calm and focus of working on a hobby was a balm against the barrage of insanity behind bars. Recently, a kitchen helper at Collins Bay had repeatedly stabbed and almost beheaded an unsatisfied diner who had become rude when denied a second portion. (To prevent similar outbursts in the future, the service area was almost entirely closed off from inmates, so that food was pushed out through a narrow slot.)

  Prisoners often used each other for crude amusement. One evening, after lockdown, a prisoner began screaming and making smashing noises, calling on fellow inmates on his range to riot. Campbell later noted that nothing was broken in the prisoner’s own cell. He had only been making loud noises with a cup, pretending he was wrecking his cell. His goal had been to incite others to riot for his own entertainment. “Nobody fell for it,” Campbell said. “He was removed from the range.”

  In the yard, talk occasionally turned to fantasies of escape. Two inmates tried to recruit Guindon to go over the wall with them. Perhaps they thought that Guindon’s Choice buddies on the outside would help them hide out. Guindon bluntly declined. “I told them to go fuck yourself. I’m already doing enough time. Get caught and I have to do twice as much. I’m having a hard enough time doing what I’m doing.”

  Guindon didn’t hear the shotgun blast that stopped the pair of would-be fugitives before they could clear the wall. He imagined they would have had a tough time crawling across the barbed wire at the top, even if the guards in the towers somehow didn’t notice them. The two men recovered from their wounds behind bars. “I think they watched too many movies,” Guindon said.

  —

  Now eighteen years old, Guindon’s daughter Teresa was sitting at a common-room table with her father, his girlfriend Wendy Dionne and her uncle Jack. As they were chatting, a husky inmate came by their table.

  “This is Pigpen,” Guindon said.

  “That’s your name?” Teresa asked him.

  “That’s what they call me because I’m a fucking pig,” Pigpen explained.

  Her father laughed and kept on laughing after Pigpen made some sexually suggestive comments to her. She felt ridiculed and exploded, punching her father square in the nose. It was a hard, focused blow, worthy of a Guindon. He bled heavily on the table before being led back to his cell.

  Not all of the women in Guindon’s life were fed up with him. Though he continued his correspondence with Suzanne Blais, he was introduced to a woman by another female friend. In a short period of time, she and Guindon became a couple of sorts. Soon, she gave birth to yet another Guindon daughter.

  CHAPTER 31

  Reconnecting

  I don’t think any of us girls had a cakewalk of a life.

  Bernie Guindon’s daughter SHANAN

  For a long time, Guindon hadn’t expected to hear anything positive at parole board hearings, but he could at least hope for a few laughs. Once, he attended one with a tape deck and played a few bars of Johnny Paycheck’s country hit “Take This Job and Shove It” before he was dismissed and ordered back to his cell. Even if he had gotten paroled that day, he figured he wouldn’t have lasted long on the streets. With his reputation, he would’ve been scooped up by police for associating with criminals. “What’s the sense of getting out if they’re only going to get me for association or thinking of association?”

  In time, he became more optimistic and his behaviour followed suit. In the fall of 1984, Guindon was granted parole. On November 19, his forty-second birthday, Suzanne Blais picked him up from a halfway house in Toronto’s Parkdale district. She was sitting in a limo with a bottle of champagne and a green-iced birthday cake shaped like a frog. Guindon wasn’t a drinker and he wasn’t supposed to consume alcohol on parole anyways, but at least he could enjoy the cake.

  Suzanne was still married, but that didn’t bother her as she took him to a Burton Cummings concert at the Imperial Room in the Royal York hotel, a venue so ritzy that Bob Dylan was once refused entry because he wasn’t wearing a tie. Guindon marvelled at the sight of the CN Tower a couple blocks away on Front Street. The world’s tallest free-standing structure stood for eight years before Guindon saw it. “It was brand new. It was to me.”

  Guindon felt as warmly toward Blais as when they had shared their first dinner together almost thirty years earlier, but wondered how long she’d feel the same. “We had a great time, and he was really surprised,” Blais remembered. “I felt it was the least I could do for all of the encouragement and support he had given me all those early years.”

  Much had changed in the decade Guindon had spent locked up. The old, seedy Yonge Street strip had been flushed away in the aftermath of the August 1977 sex murder of
twelve-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques. His body was found on the roof of Charlie’s Angels body-rub parlour at 245 Yonge Street, across from the current Eaton Centre and a stone’s throw from the old Venus Spa, where Guindon used to work.

  Upon their former leader’s release from prison, club members supplied Guindon with a Harley, and he used it to reconnect with his daughters. He hadn’t been around to protect them, and now there was plenty of damage he wanted to repair. Estimates varied of just how many children he had fathered. Guesses began at eleven, and at least two of them were in the care of Children’s Aid. “I think that it bothered him that a lot of his kids were in a lot of horrible life-changing situations that he couldn’t take care of,” his daughter Shanan said. She was just ten when he was freed, but most of Guindon’s kids had grown up before he had gotten out of jail. “I don’t think any of us girls had a cakewalk of a life.”

  Guindon climbed on the bike and took some long rides down some hard roads, seeking out his daughters and trying to find a place for himself in their lives. There were no sons, as far as he knew. “He basically had to go around the country, one by one, and collect them,” Shanan said. “I remember going into a strip club with my dad to check on one of my sisters.”

  It wasn’t easy growing up in Oshawa as Bernie Guindon’s daughter. “I thought if I acted really tough, he would accept me,” Teresa said. “It brings you in circles you don’t want to be in…A lot of kids get in trouble because it’s attention. It’s not good attention but it’s attention.” She felt she was doomed to be rejected by her father because she was a girl. “My dad didn’t want a daughter. He wanted a son.”