Hard Road

by Peter Edwards

  When the Choice was forced to fold, Spaceman started a club called the Nomads in Highland Creek.

  In the 1950s, the Black Diamond Riders hung out at a Queen Street restaurant. The BDR had a clubhouse on Steeles Avenue near Bathurst Street in northwest Toronto.

  The Para-Dice Riders appeared around 1961, wearing a crest with a pair of dice. It was black and white and looked a lot like the BDR crest, which angered the BDR.

  Another club of the late-1950s was called the Beanery Gang.

  Lots of information about the Montreal chapter of the Satan’s Choice can be found in Bill Trent’s article “Riding Against the Square World,” in Weekend Magazine, No. 38, 1967, with photos by Ronald Labelle.

  Information about the Satan’s Choice while Guindon was in prison the first time was provided by the Toronto Daily Star, Canadian Magazine, Paul King’s “Chicklet Gets By with the Help of His Friends—Satan’s Choice,” (January 2, 1971.)

  The rude ending to the first Satan’s Choice convention is described in Eddy Roworth’s “85 policemen break up ‘convention,’ nab 64 motorcyclists in farmhouse,” Toronto Daily Star, September 25, 1967: 1.

  CHAPTER 7: National President

  Guindon guesses that it was his attitude that caused him to be locked up a couple of hours down the road in Guelph rather than close to home. He said he was told to expect a rough time, but it wasn’t so bad. “Everybody said they would attack me down there. I had a couple of fights in there. I held my own.”

  Guindon was fired from General Motors in 1966 after refusing to stop riding his motorcycle to work. It didn’t help that he wore his club colours on the assembly line.

  Guindon said that biker club election campaigns generally lasted about a week and weren’t a particularly big deal. There were secret ballots.

  Carmen Neal once ran against Guindon for president. When he lost, he wasn’t particularly upset, Guindon said. “I tried to run it as straight as I could,” Guindon said. “Everybody has an opinion. If they think he’s better, let him run it.”

  The leaping left hook was a punch to be used sparingly, especially against an experienced fighter like Gray. “You’ve got to be careful that the guy don’t hit you with a right when you’re leaping,” Guindon said. “It’s not one that I could use three or four times. The only time you’d use it is if you know the other guy…You’ve got to be careful of the right hand. If you’re dropping your left hook, your hand goes down so you’re leaving your head open to a right hand.”

  CHAPTER 8: Pigpen

  I had a series of interviews with Howard (Pigpen) Berry and Cecil Kirby. They were conducted separately and not in the same area.

  Baldy Chard is remembered in Paul Rimstead’s “Tough Guy with a Heart of Gold,” Toronto Sun, April 17, 1983, Jim Kernaghan’s “Parker’s Death Recalls Another Era,” London Free Press, June 27, 2006, and Nicki Cruickshank’s “ ‘Barrie Bomber’ James Parker Moved to City in 1930s,” Barrie Examiner, September 28, 2012.

  Chard lost thirteen fights as a pro heavyweight, although he did once level the third-ranked heavyweight in the world. There was also a fight against James J. Parker, who had a title bout against Archie Moore. That fight between Chard and Parker was the stuff of underworld legend, when the two men went bare knuckles in a closed-off ring in west-end Toronto, until Chard won in forty-eight minutes. That brawl was almost stopped when a friend of Moore’s pulled a gun, only to be overpowered by the ringside mob and hustled out the back door.

  Nazi Martin Weiche is described in Jennifer O’Brien’s “Infamous Ontario Neo-Nazi Dies,” The London Free Press, September 6, 2011, and also in Jane Sims’s “The Last Stand of an Old Nazi,” The London Free Press, January 11, 2014.

  Cecil Kirby is described in “How Does a Hitman Say He’s Sorry?” by Cal Millar and Peter Edwards, Toronto Star, September 22, 1991, D1. He is also co-author of Mafia Assassin: The Inside Story of a Canadian Biker, Hitman, and Police Informer with Thomas C. Renner, Methuen (Toronto, 1986).

  In the years after he was released from prison in the 1980s, Howard (Pigpen) Berry became increasingly reclusive, vanishing from the biker landscape. There were stories that he had glued a jewel to the middle of his forehead and was wandering about telling people he was from India. Other stories had him living out of a small truck, or living off the land in the woods, occasionally foraging for food like a feral cat. The least probable of the rumours came from Lorne Campbell, who jokingly suggested he had married and was quietly running a charming bed and breakfast back in his hometown of Peterborough. I met with him and he had no jewel on his forehead. Out of respect, I won’t say where we met, except that he was not running a bed and breakfast, charming or otherwise.

  CHAPTER 9: Yorkville

  The comment about Harley-Davidson having a trademark growling sound is from “Harley-Davidson Declares Victory in the Court of Public Opinion—Drops Federal Trademark Application,” Business Wire, June 20, 2000.

  Frank (Hippy) Hobson (he spelled his nickname with a y and not ie) and I corresponded on and off for several months. He graciously allowed me to quote from his unpublished writings on his life. He had gotten into the Satan’s Choice through friends in the Kingston chapter, including Charles (Chuck) Grey and Wally High. One night in the summer of 1968, they went to a field meet, where there were also members from the Para-Dice Riders and Vagabonds, as well as Rod MacLeod from Montreal. This is how Hippy described it:

  There were two Ontario Police Officers sitting in one car watching everything we did. It was a hot day and I recall one of the Choice going over to the car and offering the officers a cold coke. About ½ hour later I remember seeing those police with their sirens roaring and doing donuts. Apparently there was a hit of acid in each coke. We were hysterical watching them carry on.

  It was particularly steaming weather, underscored by the hit song on the radio by the Doors, “Light My Fire.” He said that the song, with its line, “Gonna set the night on fire,” was playing in his ears as he watched from across the river the city of Detroit go up in flames during race riots. He wrote:

  I had a front seat row view of Detroit from a park bench in Windsor. The Detroit River separates Windsor and Detroit it is not that wide. It was nighttime and you could hear gun shots echo through the smoke from the fires. Both the bridge and the tunnel to Detroit were closed to the public. Tanks were clanking up Woodward Avenue as the National Guard had been called to help crack down on the rioting.

  CHAPTER 10: Darwinism

  In February 1968, Satan’s Choice biker Michael George Nichols, twenty-one, of Toronto was convicted of common assault for using a jackknife to cut off the shoulder crest of a jacket worn by a member of the London Road Runners Motorcycle Club at a Thanksgiving weekend biker hill climb attended by six thousand people at the village of Heidelberg, ten miles west of Kitchener. Three other Choice members held the Road Runner relatively still as the crest was cut off.

  I interviewed Mark DeMarco on July 5, 2015.

  The Cross Breeds survived in Niagara Falls until the mid-1970s.

  The family of Louis Iannuzzelli owned the House of Frankenstein wax museum on Clifton Hill in Niagara Falls. Iannuzzelli had ties to the California mobster Dominic Longo, who had been close to Hamilton mobster John (Pops) Papalia’s father. He infuriated Papalia by putting money out on the streets to loan. Papalia didn’t do anything about it while Longo was alive, but when he died in the fall of 1985, his protection evaporated. Iannuzzelli disappeared. There was a widespread belief that he was killed by Carmen Barillaro and an associate and that his remains were deposited in the foundation of a building in Welland. Barillaro was murdered in July 1997.

  The Vagabonds and Black Diamond Riders were both long-established motorcycle clubs, although neither was an outlaw club in the strictest sense of the term. Members of these clubs did not wear the diamond-shaped patch with “1%” on it over their hearts, in the fashion of true one percenter clubs. (That “1%” stood for the 1 percent of bikers that the Amer
ican Motorcycle Association would not admit.) The Vagabonds did something unique instead: they wore a patch with “100%” for 100 percent biker.

  The convention weekend also included a “memorial service” for Guindon’s long-time associate Carmen Neal, who was killed in an industrial accident at age twenty-six in western Canada the previous summer.

  CHAPTER 11: Shock Value

  Again, I benefited from interviews with Howard (Pigpen) Berry.

  CHAPTER 12: Big Apple

  I benefited from interviews with Frank (Hippy) Hobson and portions of an unpublished manuscript he provided to me.

  There were happy times in the Guindon household when his father and mother danced. Guindon liked doing waltzes and imitating Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis.

  CHAPTER 13: Ring Wars

  Walter Henry was kind enough to give me an interview.

  The Hells Angels had a head start on the Satan’s Choice, starting in San Bernardino, California, on March 17, 1948, and moving to San Francisco in 1954 and Oakland in 1957.

  CHAPTER 14: Eye on Montreal

  The Satan’s Choice had a clubhouse in the 400 block of King Street East in Kitchener, while the Henchmen gathered inside a clubhouse on Highland Road in Kitchener.

  The Dubois brothers rose up in the hardscrabble Saint-Henri district amidst rail yards and factories. They later bitterly recalled how they had been mocked by other children because they wore second-hand clothing and sometimes had to skip meals or eat molasses sandwiches. By the time they reached adulthood, the sons of Napoleon (Paulo) Dubois were feared by the Cotroni mob family and biker gangs alike.

  The Devil’s Disciples controlled the emerging crystal meth business around Saint-Louis Square in Montreal. What had once been magnificent Victorian manors had been converted into boarding houses as it became a hippie haven in the 1960s, with students, flower children and the trendy offering a potential customer base for the growing drug trade.

  Allegiances constantly shifted in Montreal. In time, the Montreal chapter of the Choice lined up with the Devil’s Disciples against the Popeyes. The Popeyes sold drugs, stole cars and broke into houses on a regular basis and used knives, guns and fists to get their way. But that didn’t make them unusual. What made the Popeyes really stand out was their ability to use explosives against their enemies, who now included Guindon.

  CHAPTER 15: Skin Beef

  Armed robber Richard Mallory was a massively powerful 275-pound man who sometimes collected drug debts in the Ottawa area. He recalled how powerless he felt when he heard the Kingston Penitentiary gates slam shut behind him in 1968. “I was scared. That was my first prison bit. You hear the big gates close behind you. When the first gate closes, you hear the bang! I said, ‘What did I get myself into?’ ”

  Mallory quickly learned why gangsters in old movies often talk funny, as if their lips are stapled shut. That was because conversations were often forbidden in the old prisons like Kingston Penitentiary. “You couldn’t even talk,” Mallory said. “You had to talk out of the side of your mouth.”

  There actually was an official club position for someone who hung around a club but wasn’t a full member. The position was called “hang-around” and is a common one for outlaw motorcycle clubs.

  Another rule for prisoners is not to check yourself into segregation to dodge a beef or a debt to someone. Don’t ask to be transferred, saying you are in danger, when you really want to move because you owe money. And don’t peek into a cell when you’re walking down a corridor. Prisoners don’t like to be snooped on, like they’re nothing more than animals in a cage.

  Toronto Star writer Paul Hunter wrote an e-book for the newspaper called Life after Life, which tells of prison justice and the unsettling use of wheelbarrows.

  Paul Gravelle gave me an interview for this chapter, as did Paul Henry.

  Born on March 15, 1947, in North Bay, Gravelle was the eldest of twelve siblings, half boys and half girls. “I had to set the example,” he said.

  Gravelle had been a jailhouse and prison inmate for some time. At sixteen, he was arrested for car theft, break-and-enters, joyriding and weapons possession. “I was amassing a collection of guns,” Gravelle said. “When they caught me, I had about thirty or forty guns in the crawl space of my house.

  “I used to carry one all of the time—a .357 Magnum. When I was sixteen.”

  Gravelle’s views about how he actually enjoys crime seem to fit into the thesis of Nicole E. Ruedy, Celia Moore, Francesca Gino and Maurice E. Schweitzer’s “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 105, No. 4 (2013): 531–48.

  There are family connections between the Gravelle family and the Guindons in the Buckingham, Quebec, area, as one of Guindon’s uncles married a Gravelle.

  CHAPTER 16: Proud Riders

  Paul King wrote the article “Chicklet Gets By with the Help of His Friends—Satan’s Choice” for the January 2, 1971, issue of The Canadian Magazine, while Marci McDonald covered the filming for the Saturday, October 3, 1970, Toronto Daily Star.

  CHAPTER 17: Thunder Bay I

  Verg Erslavas was extremely helpful here. He even went to the great trouble of writing out his memories as well as speaking about them on the phone.

  There had been a club called the Road Agents in Thunder Bay before Guindon showed up. The Road Agents were based in Minnesota and weren’t a one percenter club. They also had a chapter in Duluth. They left Thunder Bay about a year before Guindon’s arrival.

  Erslavas hadn’t been a Road Agent.

  CHAPTER 18: Riot

  A commission of inquiry was set up in an attempt to make sense of the madness. Even before it concluded its hearings, Solicitor-General Jean-Pierre Goyer announced on July 20, 1971, that reforms for prisoners’ living conditions were underway. Now, reforms included the new right for prisoners to elect committees and take part in work programs. Convicts would be given work clothing with their numbers on the inside and not the outside. Inmate committees would have a voice on treatment, training, recreation and community service projects. These reforms would apply to all thirty-two federal prisons, and not just the Kingston Penitentiary.

  CHAPTER 19: Olympic Contender

  Frank (Hippy) Hobson and John Dunbar lived in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Windsor and worked together at Chrysler.

  Richard Mallory was in Millhaven in 1973 for the armed robbery of a Dominion store in Ottawa. “It was a folly of errors. We held up the place. We didn’t get no money…They caught me under a porch somewhere. They said I never seen a big guy clear a fence like that.”

  Mallory knew future biker Brian Leslie Beaucage of London, Ontario, well and considered him a good lifter.

  George Bradley was transferred in June 1972 to the maximum-security mental hospital in Penetanguishene for a psychiatric assessment. On June 28, 1972, a man who said he was Bradley’s brother paid him a visit. They held a gun on an attendant and fled. Police suspected a third man acted as driver and lookout.

  Banks and trust companies in the Toronto area were placed on special alert for the next few months, until Bradley was re-arrested at gunpoint in Toronto.

  Richard Mallory was convicted in 2000 of being one of four men involved in the 1990 shotgun slayings of twenty-four-year-old Michel Giroux of Ottawa and his pregnant, common-law wife, Manon Bourdeau, twenty-seven. Mallory was arrested in 1990 and held in an Ottawa jail for almost ten years before the conviction. The case became known as the “Cumberland murders.”

  Mallory won a new trial on appeal after the original trial judge was criticized for not properly cautioning the jury about “disreputable witnesses” and certain “hearsay evidence.” Mallory and his co-accused argued the Crown and police knew they were relying on “false evidence” from key witnesses, including a drug dealer, who received more than $400,000 from the Crown. That witness demanded more money if there was a new trial.

  Charges were stayed in 2007 instead of ha
ving a new trial. The trial had cost more than $30 million and was called in the press the longest and most expensive trial in Ottawa history.

  CHAPTER 20: Expansion Troubles

  Joe Dinardo’s real name was Gabor Magasztovics and his parents had brought him to Canada when he was twelve, in the aftermath of the 1957 Hungarian Revolution. His troubles with the law in his new country began almost immediately. Dinardo made national headlines in 1974 when he was a central character in the murder trial of millionaire Mississauga developer Peter Demeter, who was charged with hiring someone to beat his wife, Christine, to death in the garage of their home. Dinardo testified that he declined when Christine Demeter offered him ten thousand dollars to break her husband’s legs and arms a week before her murder. Demeter was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill his wife, but the identity of that killer for hire was never determined.

  I interviewed Cecil Kirby several times for this book in the spring and summer of 2015.

  By 1974, the border chapters of the Satan’s Choice associating with the Outlaws included Windsor and St. Catharines.

  Kirby told of a trip in the winter of 1975, when about twenty Satan’s Choice members were guests of the Detroit Outlaws on a bus travelling from Dayton to Georgia, with plenty of Coors, dope and women.

  In 1976, there was a formalization of the association between the Outlaws and Satan’s Choice with the creation of a patch showing a Choice pitchfork and an Outlaws piston.

  According to the online obituary of Garnet Douglas McEwen, he was born on September 25, 1945, in Campbellton, New Brunswick, and died in hospital on Friday, January 27, 2012, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

  CHAPTER 21: Thunder Bay II

  The late Daniel R. Wolf, who rode as an outlaw biker as part of his research, explained the difference between extreme recklessness and suicide on pages 216 to 217 of The Rebels: A Brotherhood of Outlaw Bikers, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, 1991). Raleigh’s death wasn’t suicide, although it was obviously behaviour that tempted death. Bikers hate the very mention of suicide and tend to shun the funerals of its victims. While Raleigh’s death definitely was reckless, bikers often celebrate recklessness.