Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  We had not had much time together because you are so far away. Please don’t think that you are forgotten. Nothing could be further from the truth. We think of you all the time & wonder how you are too. Hopefully we can have you come visit & you will get a chance to see Grandma Lucy while you are near. Your Uncle Jack had two heart attacks last year but he has quit smoking & is doing much better now.

  Please don’t forget to send a letter & a picture if you have one. I love you very much & miss you always. Be good for your mom, do as she says, she knows what is best for you. Good behaviour at school is very important to you so that you will learn skills that will help you later in life.

  We will look forward to hearing from you soon. Until then, we will miss you. Please do take care of yourself & do your best at home & school.

  Say hi to your mom and Michelle.

  Love Always & Forever

  Dad & [name omitted] XOXO

  Harley xo

  Harley’s stepmom encouraged more visits, and sometimes Sarah stayed for over a week. The Guindons tried to make their home as peaceful and welcoming as they could. Once, when Sarah’s mom was en route to pick her up, Harley’s stepmom noticed a hooker standing on “her corner.” “I had to go out and walk the hooker up the street to get her away from my driveway before her mom showed up,” she said. “Since then, I’ve acquired a high-pressure hose. You should see those gals run when I pull it out.”

  —

  Guindon remained under constant police surveillance. A paid police agent with a lengthy record that included fraud and theft convictions approached Guindon at the bar of the Dynasty strip club in Oshawa and asked to speak with another biker. The agent later testified: “He [Guindon] asked, ‘Why?’ and rubbed his finger against the side of his nose. I said, ‘Yeah, could you help us out?’ ” The agent also testified that another patron later came to his table to discuss a drug deal, and the evening concluded with the purchase of a quarter ounce of cocaine for four hundred dollars in a pizzeria parking lot.

  Guindon was charged in April 1992 after a ten-month investigation by Durham Regional Police and the OPP called Project Overhaul. The police agent said under cross-examination by defence lawyer Howard Goldkind that he never dealt directly with Guindon over drugs. The police agent also dismissed Guindon as someone who might have mattered in the area at one time but now was just an “old has-been trying to make ends meet.” The trial ended in July 1994 with Guindon being found not guilty of trafficking drugs. But the investigation was a reminder that he was still squarely on the police radar.

  A month after the trial ended, Guindon and Harley’s stepmother climbed onto his Harley. He’d heard that an old Choice member named Greg Bradley was dying of cancer in Moncton, New Brunswick. Bradley’s pain was so intense and unrelenting that he slept with a gun by his bed in case he couldn’t handle it any longer. Guindon often needed long rides on his motorcycle to sort out his life. Sometimes the rides were to get away from things, but this time he was going to confront the problem head on: he was driving to Moncton so that he could give his old friend one last ride on a Harley. The fact that Guindon was short on money didn’t stop him.

  One night during the ride to New Brunswick, a Mountie stopped by their motel room and asked him for an autograph, which threw him for a loop. The long ride gave Guindon a chance to reflect on friendship, loss, the absurdity of life and how some things just feel good. It was also a chance to get away from some of the phantoms that seemed to be constantly following him. Harley’s stepmother described Guindon on that ride as “Quiet, quiet. We did a lot of miles. When things bothered him, he got on the bike and went for a ride.”

  Sometimes, to get away, Guindon climbed on his Harley and went to visit his daughters in places like Winnipeg and Northern Ontario. Other times, he rode south for adventure. During extended hauls, he and Harley’s stepmother brought a saddlebag each for clothes and a “beer box” for maps, her purse and various emergency items and tools. For longer trips, they also carried a suitcase on top of the beer box. Halfway down the road, they’d mail their dirty laundry home to lighten the load and make room for souvenirs. “We never passed anyone on the side of the road broken down without offering help,” Harley’s stepmother said. “He was a very good man in many ways. Others might argue, but I know different.”

  When Guindon rode south, he taped a map over the Satan’s Choice sticker on his gas tank to cut suspicion at the American border. During one trip to the United States with Harley’s stepmother, they stopped at a ceremony where a priest was blessing motorcycles. The priest became animated when he saw the grinning devil of the Satan’s Choice crest on Guindon’s gas tank. The man of God couldn’t shake the holy water fast enough onto the grinning devil’s face. “He stood there just whipping it,” she said. “He emptied it out on the patch.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Unwelcome Guests

  Bring your dancing shoes.

  AN INVITATION to a Hells Angels party

  Walter Stadnick rode out of Quebec in June 1993 at the head of a pack of some hundred Hells Angels and supporters. They descended on Wasaga Beach in a not-so-subtle announcement that they planned to move into Guindon’s home province. Ontario was simply too big and rich to ignore.

  In early 1995, Quebec Hells Angels met in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, with Ontario bikers from the Vagabonds, Loners, Satan’s Choice and Hamilton Red Devils. The long-anticipated battle between the Outlaws and the Hells Angels for the Ontario drug market was on. The smaller clubs would have to pick sides if they wanted to stay alive.

  Guindon was invited to a Hells Angels get-together in May 1996 in Halifax. Ostensibly, the Angels were celebrating their twelfth anniversary in the Maritime city. However, Guindon thought it sounded ominous when he was told to “bring your dancing shoes,” and stayed home.

  David Boyko of the Los Bravos club in Winnipeg decided to attend. Like Guindon, Boyko was fiercely independent and wanted to keep his club’s Canadian identity. He maintained close ties to other Canadian independent clubs like the Calgary-based Grim Reapers and Rebels, the Apollos of Saskatchewan and Guindon’s Satan’s Choice.

  Things seemed friendly enough when Boyko left his Halifax hotel with Donny Magnussen of the Hells Angels. There had been bad blood between Boyko and Magnussen in the past over a drug deal, but Boyko didn’t seem nervous. He was a six-foot-two, 240-pound enthusiastic fighter. Before leaving, he told his wife he would be out for a little while.

  Boyko never did come back. His body was discovered in a wooded area beside a Dartmouth industrial park. He had been shot behind the ear, execution-style. If Magnussen was the killer, he kept his secret to the end. Magnussen’s bound, plastic-wrapped body was discovered in the St. Lawrence Seaway, amidst talk that he was eliminated by the Angels to signal to the Los Bravos that they didn’t support the Boyko hit.

  Guindon didn’t regret turning down the invitation to Halifax. In fact, he’d had just about enough of life as a target. He retired from the Satan’s Choice as an active member later in 1996. He was fifty-three years old and had been a member of outlaw bike clubs for more than two-thirds of his life, if you count his prison time.

  He left in good standing, meaning he could still attend Satan’s Choice social functions, although he couldn’t go to meetings or vote. It also meant he could enjoy a party inside a Satan’s Choice clubhouse without constantly having to monitor security cameras and make sure no one got out of line.

  His retirement was marked with a long bike ride and farewell party, from June 28 to 30, 1996, at a twenty-acre farm outside Port Perry. At the end of the ride, Lorne Campbell got him to stop and look at the procession behind them. There were Harleys as far as the eye could see, as well as ten-year-old Harley play-fighting in the mud with the son of another biker.

  In the crowd was Suzanne Blais, who was accompanied by her new husband, Grant. They pulled up in a 1928 Ford Model A, then promptly got stuck in the mud. Guindon was her white knight of sorts that after
noon. “He pulled us out with a tractor that he just happened to be driving at the time,” Suzanne recalled. “His sense of timing is perfect.”

  In his retirement speech, Guindon announced that he was “stepping up to share more time” with his son, Harley.

  It turned out to be a good time to leave. The OPP ran Project Dismantle from 1996 to 1998 in an effort to target every member, associate, wife and girlfriend connected to the Satan’s Choice. Some 250,000 phone conversations were intercepted, 197 people were hit with 1,363 charges, and $3 million in drugs, property and cash were seized. The club’s fortified Hamilton clubhouse was also seized, marking the first time police confiscated a gang’s headquarters in Canada. The Toronto clubhouse was then taken under a bylaw crackdown. As a result of the sustained police pressure, membership dropped from 135 in 1995 to just over 70 in September 1998.

  At the same time, the Choice fell into a bloody rivalry with the Loners over drug manufacturing and distribution in Ontario. Most of the Loners were breakaway members from the old Choice, including Frank Lenti, who was almost killed in a car bomb explosion in the driveway of his home, across the street from a Montessori school.

  It was during this turmoil that the Choice took new member Steven (Hannibal) Gault into its Oshawa chapter. Club rules stated that an existing member had to know a prospective member for at least five years before sponsoring him into the club. Gault’s sponsor, Bill (Mr. Bill) Lavoie of Peterborough, hadn’t known Gault for five months. Soon, there were rumours that Gault paid Lavoie twelve thousand dollars for the favour. There was something about Gault that didn’t sit right with Guindon. “He had a cocky attitude,” Guindon said. “That’s what I got from him. I always had a gut feeling about him. The questions he’d be asking me. You always had to be careful how you answered him.”

  Because Mr. Bill hadn’t done his screening job, club members weren’t aware of Gault’s backstory. He had been part of a group called the Travellers, which targeted seniors living on farms in Eastern Ontario for renovation scams. One elderly farmer was bilked for $260,000 for renovation work that was never done. Gault’s personality got even worse after he started wearing a Choice patch. “After he got his full patch, he thought he was king of the world,” his former wife said.

  The Choice had done a fairly good job of keeping informants out, but Mother McEwen’s betrayal still struck a raw nerve with older members. Guindon wondered about Gault, and he wondered, too, if Mr. Bill was selling information about club members to police. “He hadn’t worked but he always had money,” Guindon said. “I always wondered where he got the money.”

  —

  In 1998, police approached Cecil Kirby to ask if he was game for another undercover job. This time, their target was Gerald Michael Vaughan, the former Richmond Hill Choice member whom Kirby had done break-and-enters with back in the early 1980s.

  Vaughan was no longer a Satan’s Choice, and he had never been a high-profile member. Guindon and many former club members didn’t even recall him wearing a patch when he was with the club between 1972 and 1974. After quietly quitting the Choice, Vaughan tried for a time to upgrade himself professionally. He studied heavy equipment operating, studied for his Grade 10 equivalency and then was certified as a gas fitter. He also bought a car licensed to operate as an airport limousine at the Toronto International Airport.

  Then, over a five-week period in the spring of 1979, something inside Vaughan snapped. Using a knife and a gun, he attacked women on Toronto streets, in parking garages, in a car, in an elevator and in their beds. He didn’t know any of his victims, who ranged in age from fifteen to twenty-eight, but he somehow still felt they had brought the attacks on themselves. He later called them “loose women” and declared that his attacks “help them straighten out their own lives and thereby society in general.” He opined that “society was in a pretty bad state” and that the attacks were part of “a mission to purify the world.”

  On May 21, 1980, Vaughan was found not guilty by reason of insanity on four counts of rape, four counts each of attempted rape and choking, five counts of break-and-enter with intent and one count of assault causing bodily harm. He was sent for an indefinite term to the Oak Ridge maximum-security mental health facility in Penetanguishene, Ontario. Vaughan was a sick, unapologetic man, and it was only natural to wonder what else he might have done.

  Inside Oak Ridge, Vaughan refused to take part in treatment programs. Cold, controlling, distrusting, narcissistic, paranoid and psychopathic, Vaughan had the officers truly scared about what he might do should he be allowed to walk free in 1998. They suspected he was a serial killer but needed more evidence. Their idea was to send Kirby into the mental health facility to hook up with him and get him to open up about his other suspected crimes.

  “Could you approach him?” an officer asked.

  Kirby said he was considering taking on the job, but then the offer just went away. He was left to wonder if the woman-hating serial killer who once wore a Choice patch had been released into the unsuspecting public.

  —

  It was around this time that Frank (Hippy) Hobson hit rock bottom. The former Windsor Choice member’s wife left him in Calgary for another man, taking their three children with her. He was selling dope one night when police caught up with him and two friends. “The police pulled their guns and my two buddies froze,” Hippy recalled. “I got out and ran.” The officers threatened to shoot but Hippy ran on. By the time they caught up with him, he had shed his .9mm Beretta and stash of marijuana. Fortunately for him, the police didn’t check out his apartment, where they would have found a dozen sticks of dynamite and blasting caps.

  His life started to rebound, finally, when he was allowed to work for the John Howard Society, which helps prisoners integrate with society. He was granted permission to take a job as a cook at a gold mine in Lupin, in the Northwest Territories, about twelve miles from the Arctic Circle. A librarian there showed him a self-help book called Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz, which had been drawn upon by elite athletes and personal development coaches like Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins. At that point, despite all of his crime, Hippy had only spent about five days in jail. He now decided to clean up his act, had his record expunged and went off to university.

  Within a few years, he found work as a parole officer, which eventually gave him access to highly confidential biker intelligence reports on his old Satan’s Choice clubmates, as well as members of the Para-Dice Riders and Vagabonds. He estimated he reviewed some one thousand files at the police station on Toronto’s Cherry Street. “Those albums had all kinds of pictures of bikers. I was amazed at how many I knew,” Hippy recalled. He was now in a nice position to do his former clubmates and rivals huge favours, or harm, while drawing a government salary.

  Unfortunately for his old club, Hobson had truly changed. “I never said anything to anyone and just put the albums back.”

  —

  Rick Gibson of Winnipeg had heard throughout his childhood that his father was none other than Bernie Guindon. The thought that he was the son of the Satan’s Choice founder appealed strongly to him. Gibson had always felt an attraction toward motorcycles, as if the yearning to be on two wheels was in his blood.

  When he was ten years old, Gibson inserted table legs into the forks of his bicycle so that it would look like a chopper. He and some like-minded friends called themselves the Hells Choice.

  In 1998, Gibson heard that Guindon was in Winnipeg. He made a point of dropping by to finally meet him.

  “When I walked in, he was drinking a tea,” Gibson recalled. He introduced himself.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Guindon replied.

  Gibson told him that he thought he was his son.

  “Who’s your mother?” Guindon asked.

  Gibson told him.

  Then he asked when Gibson was born.

  Gibson replied that he was born in 1965.

  “Yeah,” Guindon said. “That sounds right.”

  —r />
  When Sarah Hodgins was fourteen, Guindon broke off communication with her. There had been no argument and there was no explanation at all. Up to that point, Sarah had never even seen him angry. He just went quiet. “He didn’t say anything,” Sarah later said. “He wouldn’t talk to me.”

  The problem, she heard, was that he had found out she was dating a young man from the Caribbean. “He had heard from my sister that I was dating a black guy, period. That’s all. He knew nothing about any of it. Just that he was black.”

  They only dated for a month or two, and later, she even forgot his name. What she did remember was that it caused a split between her and her father. A couple of years later, when Sarah was about sixteen, Harley was upset that their dad still wasn’t talking to her. Harley called her and left a message for her to call back. When she returned the call, she got Guindon instead. He said, “What are you doing calling here?”

  “That’s the only time I’ve heard him raise his voice to me,” Sarah said. For reasons that perplexed her, Guindon, a rare biker president who had let black men join his motorcycle club in the brazenly racist seventies and defended his black boxing friend on the streets of Toronto, had frozen her out for the most insignificant of relationships, just because her boyfriend had been the wrong colour.

  In 1999, Guindon was getting some work done on a car at a garage when harsh words were exchanged with the mechanic. The next day when Guindon returned, he was clubbed twice in the back of the head.

  There was no thought of calling the police. “No, Bernie would never go to the cops,” Campbell said. “Not Bernie.”

  He was left with a feeling of lingering dullness in his head, which would never entirely go away. There was no retaliation. Guindon might have been playing by rules only he understood, but there was no denying he was living life as a civilian now, outside of the pack.