Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  Some of Harley’s fights were over money. Others were over curiosity about who was the better fighter or because of an inflammatory comment. Sometimes it seemed as though guards enjoyed the fights as much as the inmates. “I’ve had a lot of them [guards] watch. A lot of them walk away.”

  As Harley’s prison fight record improved, he decided to celebrate it with tattoos. Prison tattoos are etched onto an inmate’s skin by using the “e” string of a guitar as a needle and the motor from a radio or an old Walkman cassette player. Getting a tattoo is a time-consuming affair, sometimes softened with prison moonshine. One of Harley’s new tattoos read, “Before I PC I’ll die in the yard.” It took eighteen hours for Harley to have “GLADIATOR” etched across his shoulders. It was a reference to Millhaven as “gladiator school.” His next tattoo was “2005–2009” and his fight record of 41-0. The thick needle left a ridge of scar tissue, an unspoken challenge to other prisoners. “It didn’t make life easy for me,” he said.

  Harley was in the weightlifting pit at Millhaven in 2010 when a heavily built Hispanic man walked up to him.

  “Hi. I’ve heard about you,” the man said, his face betraying no sign of whether this was a friendly approach. “My name is Ray.”

  “Ray Fernandez?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve heard about you,” Harley replied.

  Fernandez was the right-hand man in the Toronto area for Montreal Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto.

  Harley and Fernandez were soon getting along well, and Harley also became friends with Fernandez’s associate Daniel Ranieri. “He was my workout partner, him and Danny. We walked a lot of miles around the yard. He was a gentleman. He didn’t carry himself like a gangster.”

  Harley and Fernandez talked of plans for business once they were free again. Harley had every confidence they would become reality. “Ray’s not a storyteller. If he says he’s going to do something, he does it.”

  Harley also met up with Gregory Woolley from Montreal. The Haitian-born gangster ran Montreal street gangs and also had tight ties to the Hells Angels and Vito Rizzuto. “He was always smiling,” Harley said. “He was always laughing. He was the best chess player I’ve ever played.” When Harley wasn’t working on vehicles destined for the army, physical training and school work, he was facing Woolley across a chessboard. Over a four-year stretch, Harley estimated that he and Woolley played 2,500 games. Harley also estimated that he won one of them. “We’d play all day, every day, for four years,” he said.

  As Harley sat in prison, he thought about how many people blamed his father for the time Harley was doing. He took this as an insult to his father and himself. His father wasn’t a puppet master. Harley wasn’t a puppet. “I chose my own path of life, one I never witnessed from under my father’s thumb,” Harley said.

  Guindon couldn’t tell his son what to do as a kid, and he couldn’t tell him much of anything now. Harley was incensed that he couldn’t have visits from his father because of an order barring him from connecting with criminal associates. Harley grieved this, and eventually he was granted a ten-minute phone call every second week with his dad. It wasn’t much time, but enough for Harley to realize that despite his father’s age, Bernie Guindon hadn’t much changed.

  CHAPTER 45

  Remarriage

  I don’t know what the fuck she sees in me. She knew I was a fucking whore.

  BERNIE GUINDON on his upcoming marriage

  Guindon moved more slowly and deliberately now than in his prime boxing years, but as he slipped into old age, he still wasn’t soft and cuddly. Rick Gibson recalled being at a motorcycle show when his father was somehow irritated by another man whose name was also Bernie. Gibson didn’t see the incident, but he caught up with his father in time to see the result.

  Someone called out, “Bernie just knocked out Bernie.”

  Gibson didn’t have to be told which Bernie he would find still conscious.

  “I’m the Bernie,” Guindon announced.

  “Fuck, that guy raised his cane at me,” recalled Guindon, “so I gave it to him.”

  Stories like this didn’t surprise Harley. He had seen and heard much to make him marvel that his father was still alive. “I could understand why rival clubs disliked him,” Harley said. “He walked right up to two dozen members and told them what he thought, which wasn’t good. I witnessed him losing his lid at a Toronto bike show, calling on one percenters [outlaw bikers] while foaming at the lips, solo. These guys were in their twenties to forties while he was pushing sixty all alone. This happened because a man looked at him and smirked. When it came to him being disrespected, he would swing first, ask questions later.

  “A larger, in-shape guy not listening to my dad’s direction to leave, unaware of who he was, turned to him and said, ‘What are you going to do about it, Grandpa?’

  “Not a second thought, and whammy!” Harley said. “There’s a helmet in the mouth and you’re missing eight teeth. The man just never cared. He’s going to die the same way he was born, an alpha male.”

  Guindon was nothing if not a survivor. After his Orono home burned down, he stayed with friends and family for two years before he once again found some stability. He and Suzanne Blais married on September 11, 2009, at a resort motel in scenic Kawartha Lakes, north of Toronto. It was her third wedding and either his third or his fourth, depending on whether you counted the annulled prison one.

  Harley had been released from prison but remained under strict parole conditions. His request to attend their wedding was denied by his case management team, who reasoned that going would bring him in contact with criminals.

  Suzanne was as giddy as a blushing schoolgirl as the wedding approached. Guindon was in good humour himself, though no one would mistake him for Keats or Byron when speaking of the ways of the heart. “I don’t know what the fuck she sees in me. She knew I was a fucking whore. I’d fuck anything that walked the streets. The more the merrier. You only live once.”

  Their nuptials were celebrated with 529 fellow bikers and other friends, and at least twenty-nine uninvited guests. Police surveillance officers carried binoculars, cameras and notebooks around the property, and it seemed a biker couldn’t piss in the bushes without tripping over an officer spying on the event. Other officers stood on ladders for a more panoramic view, calling out licence plate numbers of guests for another officer to write down. Annoyed, Suzanne approached some and sarcastically thanked them for making them all feel safe.

  During the ceremony, Guindon, wearing a black shirt and white tie with a black leather vest, rode his FLHT Harley Decker through a gauntlet of bikes onto a white stage. Suzanne, dressed head to toe in white, appeared riding side-saddle on a Harley Road King tricycle.

  The bride and groom each held live white doves as the assembled guests and police surveillance officers heard that doves mate for life. The bride and groom released the doves, then set free another ten for good measure.

  At the end of the ceremony, the newlyweds climbed onto Suzanne’s Road King to ride off, with fellow bikers revving their engines and beeping their horns in a salute. Then everyone dined on burgers, corn on the cob, beans and pickled eggs long into the night.

  Married life would require some adjustments for Guindon. Suzanne had a cabinet full of Paul Anka CDs and memorabilia. “I hear it every fucking day,” he grumbled. Still, even a daily earful of Canada’s beloved crooner beat sleeping on someone’s couch. “If it wasn’t for her,” said Guindon, “I’d be hitchhiking.”

  CHAPTER 46

  Gladiators

  I’ll never forget him getting stabbed in the top of the forehead and this guy struggling for a legitimate three seconds, trying to pull the blade out of his head, while I’m being sprayed in this guy’s blood.

  HARLEY GUINDON describes a prison attack

  Harley missed his father and Suzanne’s wedding. A parole condition banned him from associating with criminals, but he couldn’t avoid those connections for long. He was arrested agai
n in February 2011. That meant a trip to the Kingston Penitentiary Transition Department, a holding-processing area that’s a particularly unpleasant place to do time. “You have no idea what crimes the other inmates were there on or revoked for, and it is entirely integrated.” In the holding area, an inmate like Harley, destined for the general prison population, is kept with those bound for protective custody. Harley felt like he was constantly being goaded. Fortunately, he didn’t have to share a cell. “Believe me, coming from the Millhaven max, the only institution not integrated, it’s impossible to turn an eye when in knowledge of a diddler or baby killer. I always had an issue putting on my blinders.”

  Already emotional because he felt police had framed him on the charges that had brought him to Kingston, Harley deeply resented the separation from his family. Aggravating him further, his new surroundings were spartan at best. “The windows were smashed out due to previous riots, leaving the extra blanket to do no justice during the winter months. I remember my toes frozen together and seeing my breath each time I exhaled, sleeping with a toque on my head and my hands in my armpits.”

  Next came three months in J-Unit, which Harley would later call “extremely character building.” J-Unit remained home for the bad apples of the penal system, who had stacks of institutional misconduct charges against them. Like his father before him, Harley rioted there. “We burned the range down.” He and other inmates were hosed down three times in a week with OC spray, an intensified form of pepper spray. They were sprayed so often that the prisoners seemed to become immune to it, like cockroaches who aren’t slowed down by weak pesticide. As the noise from live gunshots carried on during the riots, Harley slept on the webbing of a goalie net.

  The day the riots and the OC spraying ended, Harley and his bridge partner Michael Swift were walking back to their range when “he was rudely approached by a guard with an ego problem,” Harley said. The guard announced he was taking Swift to segregation for arguing, and Swift responded with a one-punch knockout. “The guard literally lay unconscious, stiff as a board, snoring on my foot,” Harley recalled. Then they were overcome by a cloud of “enough OC spray to drop an elephant.”

  Violence among inmates was frequent and bloody and lasted long after the riots ended. “There were too many stabbings to count or be able to remain solid if I spoke about the details,” Harley said. “It was rare to see a fist fight, and even when those are in action, nine times out of ten there’s a shank on someone’s hip.” Prisoners couldn’t expect anything resembling a fair fight. “A pack of wolves will tear the meat off your bones with sharpened steel—like teeth biting through an apple,” Harley said.

  Harley was able to talk about two stabbings that took place during his time in J-Unit without violating the inmate code of silence, because they were swiftly dealt with by prison authorities. In one case, Harley was talking on the phone under a guard tower when he saw a cluster of inmates throwing on their institutional green jackets, even though they were indoors. Something bad was about to go down and it would be hard to identify who had done what because the green jackets made them all look the same. “Sure enough, they start running towards me, and for a second, I ask myself, What the fuck is this? and then it happens: eight to ten bandana rabbits stabbing this one guy from a rival crew that just landed in the jail the day before, literally two feet beside me.” He called them “bandana rabbits” because of the odd, animal-like way they hopped about, although there was nothing funny about their actions. “I’ll never forget him getting stabbed in the top of the forehead and this guy struggling for a legitimate three seconds, trying to pull the blade out of his head, while I’m being sprayed in this guy’s blood.”

  A few weeks later came another night Harley would never forget. He’d gotten to know an inmate from Toronto called Little John. “He had been on my range for a couple weeks and we’d shared some good conversation,” Harley said. “I thought he was a good, solid guy.” Harley and Little John had each formed a negative opinion of an inmate who they thought acted like a tyrant. “Little John and I had something in common as we attempted to fight the same man that populations feared.”

  A rumour began circulating about Little John. Prisoners were saying he was staying out of the yard because he was dodging a beef with another inmate. Left unanswered, talk like that could get an inmate killed. Making matters worse, the man Little John was rumoured to be avoiding belonged to a group Harley called “one of the fiercest groups of men in the Canadian federal system.”

  There was still a prison code—although it wasn’t as strong as it had been in Guindon’s day behind bars—that a prisoner had to be considered solid to be respected. “The solidest place that carries a code is J-Unit,” Harley said. Prisoners there constantly evaluated who was solid and who wasn’t. “People get killed for making a mistake like talking to a guard.” It was time for Little John to prove himself.

  Harley told him about the rumour. “I said, ‘People are saying that you’re hiding out on our range, and we can’t be having that. If you have a problem, it’s either you face it or you have to leave.’ ”

  Little John answered back sternly, “I’m not hiding from no man. I’ll be in the yard tonight.”

  He was true to his word. That night, on March 20, 2011, 230-pound Little John stood off by himself against the gymnasium wall, one foot up on a cinder block. A beefy black man who looked a bit like UFC fighter Kimbo Slice, Little John didn’t seem like he should be afraid of anything, but Harley knew that waiting like this was nerve-racking for him. Though Harley was supposed to stay out of it, he was anxious too. “I sat down with three people to play bridge with my back to the wall,” said Harley.

  A group of inmates flooded into the gym. They had their green jackets on. An unusual silence fell over the men inside. Out of the corner of his eye, Harley noticed Jordan Trudeau, a twenty-nine-year-old aboriginal inmate from Manitoulin Island, Ontario, separate himself from the pack. Trudeau was serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. He made a quick approach toward Harley’s table.

  “He began driving his jail shiv four to five times into the side of my bridge opponent’s neck. I knew what he had just done was the biggest mistake he ever made.” The target of Trudeau’s assault was a lifer who had just been returned to Millhaven and happened to look a lot like Little John. “The worst case of mistaken identity I have ever seen,” said Harley. Trudeau had accepted the job of killing Little John, not knowing his victim, only what he looked like.

  “The card room went wild, yelling at Jordan,” Harley recalled. “The people in the room began to congregate, pacing towards Jordan as he walked backwards, palms out in protest.” He still didn’t understand his error. At least a dozen men stepped in to defend the bleeding inmate, who’d been quietly dealing cards to Harley only a moment before.

  The miscue gave Little John time to make a decision. He landed a right hand squarely onto Trudeau’s chin, knocking him cold. The pack of men in green pulled back.

  “The man has to go,” one of them said about Little John, and the mob concurred. To let him live because of a case of mistaken identity would be an embarrassment.

  Twenty-one-year-old David Bagshaw was beginning a life term for first-degree murder for a particularly cowardly offence that disgusted many of his fellow inmates: he had stabbed fourteen-year-old Stefanie Rengel of Toronto, then left her to die in a snowbank on New Year’s Day 2008. Taking up where Trudeau had left off was Bagshaw’s chance to earn some much-needed prison stripes. “Bagshaw truly was trying to stay out of trouble, but sometimes when it’s you or him, animal instinct takes over and you eat or be eaten,” Harley said. “The parole board would say he had a choice, but they weren’t there.”

  Bagshaw sprinted in Little John’s direction “knife out, cornering him…behind the heavy bag and swung with purpose, landing every blow,” Harley recalled. The shank sank deep into the target’s leg and midsection. “You could see Little John was refusing to go out faintheartedly.”
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  Sensing wounded prey, the pack surged forward, but Little John kept fighting. With a flurry of punches, he broke away from the group, and then abandoned any thought of his immediate safety and waded back in, “throwing and punching until he was pushed to the ground and dug out by multiple weapons.”

  A guard fired down from the tower, hitting Bagshaw in the leg. “He hopped in my direction to avoid any more wounds, and to me, it appeared that the bullet went in and out, and I told him he needed to get medical attention,” Harley said. Bagshaw hopped out of the yard through an open door to the weight pit, and through that space to another door, opened by staff. “Once he skipped through that door, I never saw his face again.”

  The gunfire had backed the mob off Little John. One of them noticed Trudeau stirring. He awoke from his stupor, an eighteen-inch puddle of blood around his mouth. He struggled to his feet and a friend counselled him to “just finish what you were doing and everything will be all right.”

  Trudeau advanced on Little John, shiv in his hand. Little John clutched a side wound, leaning against the same wall where he was first attacked. The pool of blood around his feet was visible from across the room. “Little John couldn’t believe his eyes,” Harley recalled. “How could this not be over? What did I do so wrong to deserve this? I could only imagine how he felt.”

  Fear and adrenalin were keeping Little John on his feet. He sluggishly eluded thrusts of Trudeau’s shiv as the guard fired down again. Trudeau paid no mind to the warning shots. If he didn’t scar his target and fulfill his duty to his peers, his life wouldn’t be worth much anyway. Harley recalled: “Then there was a shot that echoed and sounded like two. Little John went back to the wall while Jordan folded like a chair.”

  Though Harley was friendly with Little John, he believed the rules of the range had to be respected, and so he didn’t take sides. He and another inmate ran to the fallen Trudeau. Someone grabbed the shank from his hand and tossed it away. “The guards shot tear gas at us like we were trying to hurt Jordan,” said Harley, so they tied T-shirts over their mouths and carried Trudeau’s slackened body through the same route Bagshaw had just taken to get to the hospital. “As we got him to the back door, a number of guards answered with assault rifles aimed at our chests, screaming to ‘Get away from the door!’…They looked at us like we were next.”