Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  CHAPTER 40

  Biggest Party Ever

  I don’t think I’m a fucking idiot. I’ve done some things in my life. I’ve had a big club myself.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  Police surveillance officers shivered outside the Hells Angels clubhouse in Sorel, Quebec, on the night of Friday, December 29, 2000. Inside, Guindon and three hundred or so others attended what many thought was the biggest party in Canadian outlaw biker history. Despite the magnitude of the event, just outside Montreal, Guindon wasn’t particularly excited to be there on that bitterly cold night.

  They were gathered on hallowed ground, as far as outlaw bikers went. The Sorel clubhouse was home to the first Canadian Hells Angels charter. It was here that the Hells Angels took root in Canada on December 5, 1977. Now, almost a quarter-century later, the Angels’ winged death head flag flew over the clubhouse’s roof as the club swallowed up members of well-established Ontario clubs like the Lobos, Last Chance, Para-Dice Riders and Satan’s Choice. The Vagabonds in Toronto and the Hamilton-based Red Devils remained intact; they were considered friendly enough to the Angels not to be a threat and were not vital to the mass expansion.

  The Ontario bikers inside the Sorel clubhouse were allowed to join the Hells Angels without having to go through any initiation process. For many of them, getting an Angels winged death head patch was a dream come true. Guindon’s feelings were more complicated. Diehard Satan’s Choice members had bitterly resisted the American-based Outlaws, and now they were joining another international club. Guindon was going in as president of the new Hells Angels Oshawa charter. Nationalistic feelings ran particularly strong in the Oshawa chapter of the Choice, and they had been the last to concede to the Angels. Guindon had been pulled out of retirement for the patchover, likely averting a war between the Angels and diehards in his old club.

  The mass patchover to the Angels bolstered their Canadian position against the Outlaws, but it was more immediately a response to sudden moves made in Quebec by the Rock Machine, a rival club that had already folded into the larger, U.S.-based Bandidos Motorcycle Club. Just four weeks before the Sorel patchover, the Bandidos had shocked the biker world by expanding en masse into Ontario, giving forty-five members of the Ontario Rock Machine probationary Bandidos status at a ceremony in a banquet hall in Vaughan, north of Toronto.

  The Angels’ response in Sorel gave the club instant charters on both coasts and throughout much of the country in between, the Prairies excepted. There were three new Hells Angels charters in Toronto, and one each in Woodbridge, Kitchener, Sudbury, Oshawa, Thunder Bay, Windsor, Lanark County, Keswick and Simcoe County, as well as a probationary charter in the Niagara region. With one bold move the Hells Angels could boast 110 members in the Greater Toronto Area alone, the highest concentration in the world. Canada was now home to some 550 Hells Angels, which accounted for about a fifth of the membership of the world’s largest outlaw motorcycle club. Angels’ founder Sonny Barger liked to say that the sun never set on his Hells Angels, and now Guindon’s old empire helped him solidify his boast.

  If Guindon was going to wear the patch, he decided he’d live it as well. In 2003, he made a pilgrimage, riding down to Arizona to meet Barger for his sixty-fifth birthday on October 13. Barger ran the Cave Creek charter of the Angels and lived on a small ranch near Phoenix. It was familiar territory for him, not that far from where he’d served four years of federal prison time for conspiring to blow up the Outlaws’ clubhouse in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1980s.

  The year 2003 hadn’t been a good one for Barger. That was the year he learned that his third wife had been a paid police informant. Also that year, someone put an up-close bullet between the eyes of Dan (Hoover) Seybert, president of Barger’s Cave Creek chapter.

  Not surprisingly, Guindon rode his Harley into a high-security environment in Cave Creek. Barger seemed uncomfortable, and not just because he spoke through a stent in his throat after a bout with cancer. His attitude, as Guindon summed it up, was one of “Yeah, okay, you’re here. I have to put up with you.” Guindon was particularly sensitive to the perceived snub: “I don’t think I’m a fucking idiot. I’ve done some things in my life. I’ve had a big club myself.”

  Barger once had a bodyguard who drilled horns into his head to give himself an extra-intimidating appearance. That guard wasn’t on duty when Guindon arrived, and he wasn’t happy with the replacement.

  “I wasn’t impressed with his bodyguard or whatever they call him. Had this attitude. The guy had a fuck-you attitude. Things he’d say, like a rude remark all the time. I came all the way from Canada. I didn’t stay long.” With the Arizona desert beckoning, Guindon did what he always did when he didn’t want to sit still. “I went riding…Got better out on the bike.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Regrouping

  I don’t recall how we got to the topic, but he [Guindon] said if he ever heard I was doing pills or opiates that he would literally kill me.

  HARLEY GUINDON

  Harley left home at fifteen, first moving in with his older sister Shanan and niece Rori. “When I was leaving, my father said, ‘You’ll be back,’ ” Harley recalled. “That statement gave me the courage and strength to overcome every obstacle by myself to prove him wrong.” They still loved each other, but Guindon’s house was far too small for two alpha males.

  Living with his sister also proved to be a challenge, though Harley loved her too. His next move changed his life forever. “After leaving my sister’s on good terms, I moved right into the worst part of Oshawa, the real south end. There were times I drank hot water in the winter to stay warm and had migraines from not eating for days at a time. Then I started selling dope and stealing cars and got myself into some trouble.”

  Like his father, Harley was charismatic and he didn’t do things by half measures: “We probably stole about three hundred cars. We’d go joyriding.” Once, when they were playing bumper cars with two stolen vehicles, Harley hit the brakes and was rammed from behind, flipping his ride into a ditch by a farmer’s field. “We gathered our thoughts and went back and stole another one.”

  Dodge Neons were particularly easy pickings in the early 2000s, as were Oldsmobiles. All it took was a screwdriver, some nerve and a few seconds to get one rolling down the road. “We even took them from the police pound one day. They were easy. They were there.” Once, Harley was riding in a stolen minivan on John Street in Oshawa, close to his grandmother’s old folks’ home. Music blared and the youths felt happy and at peace with the world, until a stranger’s hand reached inside the vehicle at a red light and yanked out the keys. Then a voice shouted, “Call the cops!” The hand and voice belonged to the minivan’s rightful owner, who was shocked to see his vehicle cruise past him with the radio cranked up. A slow-footed member of Harley’s group did some detention centre time for the crime, but Harley and the others managed to bolt from the scene.

  Harley was now living on Wentworth Street, about a half-mile from the Simcoe Street South residence where his grandfather had once sold bootleg booze out of the family home. On Harley’s sixteenth birthday, Guindon took him shopping to buy him new running shoes and jeans. “I was a happy camper,” Harley later said. His father changed the mood. “I don’t recall how we got to the topic, but he said if he ever heard I was doing pills or opiates that he would literally kill me.” Harley had only ever smoked a bit of pot and the like, so his father took him by surprise. “I took the threat seriously because he said it with such conviction I forgot everything else we spoke about.”

  As Harley watched friends he’d once respected succumb to Oxy-Contin addictions, sometimes fatally, he became grateful for his father’s pre-emptive warning. “He was always adamant on carrying myself as a leader, and there was no room to dishonour our family name by shaming him with addiction. I truthfully believe that is what kept my head clean from the narcotics all these years.” To this day, Harley rarely smokes even marijuana. He is reluctant to be caught with “a stupef
ied appearance and unable to share mindful conversation.”

  Harley picked up a couple of assault charges, which put him into the Brookside Youth Centre in nearby Cobourg. There he received a visit from Rick Gibson, who had relocated to nearby Lindsay from Winnipeg.

  “This wasn’t the way I wanted to meet you,” Gibson told Harley.

  They both welcomed the idea of finally having a brother. At one point, they tried to tally up the number of Guindon siblings they had, but were unable to reach a more exact number than somewhere between eleven and sixteen.

  Once released, Harley decided to get his life back on track and moved in with his sister Michelle and brother-in-law Tony. “The deal was to stay out of trouble and go to school. Their daughter Danielle lived there, so I had to be on my best behaviour.” He lasted a year.

  Harley gravitated to a street crew that took a page from the script of the 1991 action thriller New Jack City, which featured Mario Van Peebles, Wesley Snipes, Ice-T and Chris Rock. In the movie, a gang converts an apartment complex into a crack house. Like the movie characters, Harley and his friends learned how to protect their turf in a rough business. “You have a group of white guys selling a black drug, crack cocaine, in a black area,” Harley said.

  His friends included Kyle James Odette, who did prison time for pistol-whipping a former friend over a $1,500 drug debt, then forcing him to strip in a field near Belleville, where he froze to death. Another was Christopher Dwyer, who would later do time for murder. That was par for the course, as seven of the ten members in Harley’s group ended up serving adult time for killing someone.

  Harley’s new circle of friends fell into a routine of going back and forth between the streets and custody. It was part of the natural ebb and flow of their lives, with games being one of the few constants in both places. Once, Harley was at a party playing bridge when news came that a body had been found and that one of them was about to be charged with the killing. The soon-to-be-arrested friend just joked, “Here’s my gun. Pack my pen bag”—a bag of items inmates are allowed to bring into custody, like a small television, stereo and clothing. With the bag packed, the game resumed.

  Harley was with his father when he got the news by phone that his friend Brandon Saville had been murdered on Saturday, June 2, 2005, on a footpath by the Erie Street bridge in Oshawa. Harley turned to his father and said he needed a gun to protect himself. “He flat out told me no,” Harley recalled. Guindon was always there with advice or support for his son, but when it came to helping him with anything illegal, he drew the line. “I was understanding but disgruntled because the streets were a wild place at the time and I wanted to protect myself.”

  Around this time, there was a weekend house party where, in Harley’s words, “Some idiot hit a girl after already being belligerent with a friend of mine.” Harley one-punched the idiot unconscious, hurting his hand in the process. While the idiot lay in a snowbank, Harley went inside to tend to his injury. “I could literally have slid a quarter into my hand wound.”

  Soon, police were everywhere. Harley called his father and told him what had happened. Guindon wasn’t impressed with the 2 a.m. phone call but did suggest “pouring liquor on my hand and getting the fuck home before I land myself back in chains.”

  “That was the first and last time I ever called that man intoxicated,” Harley said.

  When the calls became more serious, Guindon never failed to answer. “He would visit me wherever I was incarcerated, which I knew was hard for him to do considering I was the only child he raised due to his prime-life prison stretch. Although he wasn’t impressed with my lifestyle choices or his name getting dragged into the media for being the son of a Hells Angel, he remained by my side the whole way through.”

  When Harley was eighteen, he was charged with assault with a firearm. He faced a possible ten-year sentence. His father, knowing all too well what would be in his son’s future if he lost his case, attended all his court dates, worried.

  “I remember our smiles remaining on our faces for several straight hours after being acquitted. We went out for fish and chips, and he was even bragging about the acquittal to the waitress while I was wearing prison clothes, all embarrassed.”

  Even when police didn’t become involved, Guindon seemed to always know what Harley was up to. “The man finds out everything,” Harley later said. “Everyone knows him or claims to know him. I’d get in a fight and he would call me up and ask about it.”

  Harley had left home several years before, but he thought of his father often and with a particular strain of pride. “I didn’t realize my father’s street status until my early adulthood. I never ran around threatening people with him. Anyone that knows me knows it to be fact. I never had to because I was always the toughest on the block, still am. I learned to handle my own conflict using him as a template of right and wrong. Standing up for the weak. Never backing down. Remaining forthright no matter the consequences. These are a few of the characteristics instilled to my very core, principles that have heightened my sense of self-worth to the point no one can tell me shit.”

  His friend Saville’s murder brought about a five-month undercover investigation by Durham police called Project Burn, which wound through Bowmanville, Oshawa and Whitby, then outward into Lindsay, Peterborough and Toronto. It dealt with a street gang police called the Baby Blue Chippin’ Crew or Crippin’ Crew. Police accused them of picking fights with uniformed police officers and attacking innocent victims.

  The street gang changed its name to the Cash Money Brothers, but its business remained the same: dealing crack cocaine. Project Burn ended with almost five dozen suspects charged with offences that included extortion, drug possession and aggravated assault. Harley was just twenty and he was once again looking at the very real possibility of serious prison time. To focus himself, he thought of his dad. “I would take perspective by putting myself in his shoes and think, What would his standpoint be with this behaviour? Would he become irate? Would he be proud? Would he give me a whupping? Am I honouring him? Dishonouring him?”

  —

  Guindon had split from Harley’s stepmother around the time that Harley moved out, although they both still spoke well about each other. Guindon moved out to the town of Orono, about a forty-five-minute drive east of Toronto, to live with a girlfriend who was around his age, which was a switch for Guindon. The new girlfriend was suspicious of Suzanne Blais and wouldn’t let her call or visit. She was also a drinker and a gambler, and she constantly proposed marriage.

  Guindon was a survivor of three failed marriages (if you count the prison annulment) and countless dalliances. He had more kids than he could count. He wasn’t in the mood for more drama, especially a union with a gambling drinker who didn’t like his friends calling or dropping by. But he also couldn’t leave. Guindon was focused on someone coming back into his life: his estranged daughter, Sarah Hodgins.

  Six years after he’d stopped speaking to her, Sarah made the effort to re-establish ties with her father. “I called him and told him I’d like to come for a visit.” She couldn’t understand how she could lose contact with her father for so long just because she had gone out with a black boy for a couple months. She wasn’t aware that her father had let the first black bikers into the outlaw biker world in Canada. She didn’t know that he had stuck up for Spider Jones when racist bikers were trying to goad him into trouble, not that her father’s past seemed to have any bearing on his present state of mind. But she did know that it was wrong to break ties with your own flesh and blood over something so minor. “It hurt that he would just lose contact with me over a guy,” Sarah said. “Why would he stop talking to me over a small thing? It just seemed so petty and insignificant to me. I had never known anyone who was racist at that time in my life.”

  Years later, Guindon said he couldn’t remember the cause for the lengthy split with Sarah, but he allowed that it would have upset him if his daughter had a black boyfriend. “I wouldn’t have liked that.�
� He had befriended and defended black bikers and boxers in his past, but drew a line here, admitting to a qualified racism. “It’s totally different being in the family and the club. The club, I can get away from. You can’t get away from them if they’re family.”

  Her dad acted as if nothing had gone awry, and he quickly invited her down for a visit in Orono. Sarah found her father’s new partner unsettling, with her less-than-subtle wig and false teeth and overall tough attitude. The woman only spent an hour or so with them before heading off somewhere else, alone.

  Sarah and her dad never mentioned the split, as much as it still gnawed at her. What he did talk about was troubling as well. He mentioned smacking a woman upside the head and putting some woman in her place, reminding her just how rough a man he was. “I’m extremely against it. It kind of made me lose a bit of respect for him.”

  It wasn’t the homey reunion Sarah had hoped for, but at least they were talking again. “It was Thanksgiving,” she added.

  Even when distant from her father, Sarah had remained close to Harley, and she found herself constantly worrying about her half-brother’s future as he became an adult. “I always tell him to smarten the fuck up,” she said, ever mindful of her father’s long stints behind bars. “He doesn’t listen to me.”

  —

  Suzanne Blais’s husband Grant died of a respiratory illness in January 2006. When Guindon dropped by to help her clean up her place, he found Grant’s diary. In it, he read that Grant had never really loved Suzanne. He’d married her only for her refurbished 1928 Model A automobile and trailer. “I felt how many mistakes can I make?” Blais said. “In my life, that was the worst mistake.”

  Blais swore that it was only then that her relationship with Guindon had turned physical. “I didn’t have sex with him until I was a widow,” she said.