Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  To gain an in with the gang, I decided to use the concert-promoter background I had established in Ottawa-Hull a couple of years earlier. It worked like a charm. I’d perused the PDR’s website to get a feel for my new target and noted that they were suing police for illegal harassment on their way to and from club events. The case had been going on for a while, with the PDR usually losing and always appealing when they did. To pay their legal bills, the gang was soliciting for donations. All bikers know that their mystique can charm the stupid and that sometimes the stupid have money to throw away. But the gang didn’t really need the cash; rather, they needed a way to legitimize some of the cash they already had. With police specialized in tracking and identifying proceeds of crime keeping a vigilant eye on them, the PDR regarded donations as a perfect vehicle to launder illegal money.

  So I opened an email account with a Boston Internet service—in order to minimize the possibility of my messages being traced—and sent the following to the PDR website:

  I’m with “National Concerts” (Action West Talent Group). I have read with great interest about your ongoing fight for your rights. As you say, the cost of getting justice is very high ($300,000 by your own estimates). We are prepared to assist you throughout the summer to achieve that goal, along with maximum exposure of your cause. I will be in Toronto next week and would like the opportunity to discuss our ideas with you. If you can email me a name and number to contact I’ll give you a call as soon as I’m in town.

  Within twenty-four hours I had received a terse reply: “Call Mark” along with a Toronto phone number.

  My contact turned out to be Mark Staples, a patched member of the PDR who the police told me was both plugged into the music scene and a martial arts enthusiast—he even had his own club. He could be the PDR’s Gunk, I surmised initially, the guy who uses his key to the club to open all its doors for me. There was a crucial difference, however, one that almost brought the operation to a premature end: Staples was extremely street-smart and suspicious, and immediately very wary of me.

  Our first meeting was at a restaurant called Taro on Queen Street West, the bohemian part of Toronto. Staples came in covered in plaster dust; he’d been doing renovations on his dojo across the street. I came straight to the point: I was a Canadian promoter relocating to the Toronto area from the States and looking to get established.

  “You have a cause and I want to do a show,” I said. “I’ll tell you right up front, I don’t give a shit about this ‘right to ride’ stuff. I don’t ride, but I will do a great show and we’ll all make money.”

  “Money’s good,” he said.

  “My goal is to have a few small shows over the summer and go for a big one in September,” I continued.

  The meeting went well. He told me about other promoters who tended to look unkindly upon upstarts—just before squashing them. We talked martial arts and he even invited me to teach a class in his studio. We blue-skied all the business we might do together and made plans to meet again soon.

  But I left there a bit nervous. We had too much in common and he was clearly too smart. That made the likelihood of his figuring me out just too high. Especially since I never really planned to put on a show; I just wanted to talk about it for a while before segueing into criminal activity.

  Over the next few weeks I saw Staples every couple of days, usually dropping by his club and just hanging around. I knew I was going too often, but he was pretty much all I had. In retrospect, I was probably generating activity for the file, as much to show I wasn’t slacking off as anything. I tried to avoid concert talk and asked too many questions. For instance, if he told me he was going to the States for a few days, I’d ask where or whether it was business or pleasure. That probably sharpened his natural suspicion.

  He’d dropped the names of a couple of his PDR brothers who might be interested in coming in on my concert plans, including one, Paul “Sunny” Braybrook, who ran an annual bike show in the Toronto area: custom bike contests, live music, wet T-shirt contests, the works. I’d spoken with Sunny, but hardly in circumstances that would allow me to broach illegal activities—he was doing a short stretch in Mimico Correctional Center on a coke charge. As for giving me the phone numbers or an intro to any other members, Staples was clearly in no rush.

  One afternoon in late June, I had a meeting set up with Staples at his studio. When I showed up at the appointed hour, however, an underling told me he wasn’t there. I left, got back in the Intrepid the police had provided me with and used my cellphone to call my handler, Detective Constable George Cousens, who was in position and probably had a visual on me at that very moment.

  George told me where to meet. But, being directionally dysfunctional, I soon got confused, pulled over and got out of the car. Before too long, George and his partner, who were following me at a distance, joined me. After being shown which way to go on a map, I got back into my Intrepid and we duly met at the safe location, which that day was the public parking lot in High Park. No big deal, I thought.

  Two days later, however, after I’d taught a class at his studio, Staples came up to me and got straight to the point.

  “Who were those guys you were talking to Tuesday?” he demanded.

  “Where?” I asked, genuinely confused.

  “Down on King. You had pulled over on the side of the road and were talking to two guys in a beige car. They looked like cops. Standing there stoic like cops. One had brown hair and mustache.”

  It all became clear in an instant: Staples had set me up. Called me to a meeting, had his grunt tell me he wasn’t there and then followed me when I left. Well, time to get my back up, I decided. After all, as I knew from past experience, the best defense is a good offense.

  “What are you saying here?” I asked, staring hard at him.

  “I’m saying that I don’t really know you and then I see you talking to those guys, it gets me thinking.”

  “Are you saying I’m a cop?”

  Staples backed off a bit, but not much. “I’m not accusing you of anything, but something was going down.”

  “Maybe I had a deal going down? Anyway, who I was talking to is really none of your business.”

  “It’s my business if you’re coming in and out of here.”

  “Rest assured they’re not cops,” I said. “In fact, they’re about as opposite of that as you can get.”

  “Either scenario is not good for me,” Staples said. “If it’s cops, I don’t want you around, and if it’s the other, then I don’t need the heat. There is some of my brothers that I’ve asked not to come here ’cause of the things they’re involved in. I was planning to introduce you to my other brother who wants to get into shows, but now I have to be careful—I don’t want to be doing the wrong thing. I’m going to have to check you out a lot more now.”

  “You should have done that from jump, man. I’m easy to check up on. And look, if you feel uncomfortable, I can get in my car, forget this place exists and just be out of your life. Just say the word, right now, and I’m gone. How’s that?”

  That backed him off some more. “No, that’s not it. I just don’t want any heat on this place. If you’re doing stuff, that’s your business. But keep it away from here.”

  I’d dodged that bullet—but just barely. And it didn’t bode well. Staples would be watching me extra-closely now and, as he’d said, wouldn’t be introducing me to any other PDR.

  After that incident, I saw a lot less of Staples. I would have cut him off completely, but it would have looked too suspicious. Instead, I focused my attention on Braybrook and, since contact with him was limited, his wife, Alana. I’d met her a couple of times prior to meeting Sunny in jail and it had been immediately apparent she had seen better days. She was in her mid-forties with dyed black hair and had that hard look of someone who’s been struggling for way too long and doing too much coke to cope with it all. With Sunny in jail, she was left way out of her depth trying to get the bike show together. To boot, she w
as obviously broke, or as good as. That was clear not just from the chaotic state of her home, her wreck of a car, her swarming brood of kids and their clothes, but from the almost endearingly small-time maneuvers she used to get me to foot some of her bills.

  On my way to talk to her about Sunny one day at her house in Barrie, fifty miles north of the city, I phoned to say I’d be there in an hour.

  “Well, if you’re going to be here that soon, can you pick up something for me on the way?” she asked. Sure, I said, and she proceeded to give me a long grocery list. Needless to say, she neglected to reimburse me.

  Another time, her son wanted a dollar to buy something from the corner store.

  “Do you have change for a five?” she asked me. I did and gave her a handful of dollar coins. She gave one to her son, put the remaining four in her pocket and left it at that.

  It was one of Alana’s less modest requests that finally got me an in with an influential (and not very cautious) member of the gang. By then I’d visited Sunny a couple of times in jail and become pretty tight with him—as much by convincing him we’d once run into each other during one of his many stretches in prison as by the fact that I wanted to do business with him. He also appreciated that I was helping out Alana and their kids, or at least that I had no problem with her hitting me up for cash on occasion.

  One day Alana phoned me in a state from a clothes store at Danforth and Victoria Park in Toronto’s east end. “I owe someone fifteen hundred bucks and only have thirteen hundred. Can you please, please help me out?” she begged.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I answered. “Phone me back in half an hour or so.”

  I immediately called George, my handler, and asked his opinion on bailing out Alana. I gave him all the details I had—that Alana was at a place called the Jeans Store with a woman called Brenda—and he said he’d have to consult his own bosses. But he wasn’t optimistic. “She’s just trying to rip us off. Take you for as much as she can.”

  “Of course she is,” I said. “But it might just pay off.”

  He said he doubted it and promised to call me back in the next few minutes, after going upstairs.

  As soon as I hung up, the phone rang. I expected it to be Alana again. It wasn’t. It was Sunny from jail.

  “Listen, you help my old lady out now and I’ll make it up to you as soon as I’m out,” he said. Hearing a biker ass-licking rather than ass-kicking was novel, and further convinced me that bailing out Alana was a smart move. Still, I didn’t commit myself.

  “I’ll go over there and check it out,” I said. “Do what I can.”

  After getting off the line with Sunny, I phoned George back. He made it sound as if the issue was already resolved—that I wasn’t going to give Alana the two hundred dollars. I told him about Sunny’s call. “That’s what bad guys do—they help out the families of their friends who are in prison,” I said. “This could score us some serious points. It’s not easy for him to ask me, you know. And it’s only two hundred fucking dollars.”

  “It’s not a question of two hundred dollars,” George said. “It’s a question of him leeching on you. You give it to him now, he’ll keep coming.”

  “Well, I don’t really care. He comes to me again, I’ll just say no. So today, I’m going to go and give her the money—even if it comes out of my own pocket.”

  George, who would turn out to be the best handler I ever had, was smart enough to recognize that I wasn’t going to be swayed, and he relented. He didn’t promise to reimburse me, but he and the team would cover me when I went to meet Alana.

  “Just to give you a heads-up,” he added, “Brenda is a friend of Brett Toms and he’s a real target of ours.”

  If I’d heard his name earlier in the investigation, I’d forgotten it. But Toms, it seems, was a high-ranking member of the PDR. He was sergeant-at-arms and considered by the police to be one of the smarter and more dangerous members. One member of the police team had been trying to nail Toms for more than a decade, to no avail. If a measly two hundred bucks could perhaps buy me an audience with him, it was all the more worth it, I thought.

  I took all the cash I had available—about two thousand dollars—made a roll so I’d look like a crook of substance, and headed over to the Jeans Store. There, I peeled off the two hundred and put it on the counter in front of Alana. She pushed it over to Brenda, who folded and pocketed it. Alana was groveling in her thankfulness and promised to pay me back.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll deal with Sunny for it.”

  I had no doubt that I was paying off a drug bill for Alana; she had cokehead written all over her, and the $1,500 she’d owed suggested she’d bought an ounce. She soon left the store and I hung out for a while, chatting with Brenda. Brenda was a whole lot smarter than Alana—she ran the Jeans Store and clearly had a mind for business—but she wasn’t nearly as smart as she thought she was. Brenda was so intent on making money, and therefore so focused on how she might make money off of me, that she was oblivious to any danger I might have represented. I told her about my concert plans—which she had already heard about from Alana—while admiring the clothes she was selling. All of the clothing, it turned out, had come from stolen shipments.

  “You should meet my friend Brett,” she said as I was finally preparing to leave.

  “I’d like to very much,” I replied.

  “Well, come on by tomorrow and we’ll grab a beer next door.”

  Brett didn’t show the next day, but we met soon enough at a steakhouse in Scarborough. He was a tallish, heavyset man of about forty with what people call hockey hair: business on top, party at the back. To draw more attention to it, the business part was bleached blond. He opened up immediately, telling me he owned through a proxy the shop Brenda sold the hot clothes from and that he worked for the city driving a snowplow in winter and other vehicles the rest of the year. At our first meeting I ordered from Brett a bunch of T-shirts with SECURITY written on them in big letters. He had a contact from the Last Chance motorcycle gang who had a silkscreening shop, and I told him I needed the shirts for the concert I was putting on.

  Later I got the green light to buy $10,000 worth of stolen clothes from him on the pretext that I wanted to open my own clothes store in Niagara Falls, Ontario, as a front business. By then I’d hinted to both Sunny and Brett that one of my criminal activities was smuggling, so Niagara Falls, right on the U.S.–Canada border, was a logical place for me to set up.

  However, once I told Brett that I was in for $10,000 in clothes, the OPP brass informed me that I only had $5,000 to spend. I revised the order, saying I didn’t want to tie up too much cash in something that wouldn’t bring much, if any, profit. Brett wasn’t thrilled, but he was cool with it. Then, when I was meeting George minutes before I was to connect with Brett at his house to inspect the clothes, he told me they only had $500 for me. I lost it.

  “You’re fucking me up totally,” I said, adding a few more choice words for the police bureaucrats and bean counters. This was our first buy of any kind in the case and for a while I thought it would be the last. I was convinced that that would be it for my relationship with Brett—anyone who does business with bikers and doesn’t make good on his word can expect to be cut off, perhaps even cut up. And after the close call with Staples, I figured we might as well fold up the investigation then and there.

  “Just work your magic,” George said, as if nothing was the matter. With no real options, all I could do was cool down and continue over to Brett’s place.

  In their basement I started picking through the clothes thoroughly. I’d looked them over briefly before, but this time I played the discriminating customer and after a while started shaking my head. Inside, however, I was smiling: the clothes were obviously second-rate and that might save the day.

  “I have to be honest with you, man,” I finally said. “This is not the type of clothes I want to have in the store. I was hoping for something more in boutique style. This i
s too Kmart.”

  Luckily for me, Brett knew I was right and showed a reasonable side. “Ah, well. I’ll line up better stuff for you.”

  “I feel bad, so I’ll tell you what,” I went on, trying to make it easier for both of us. “I can use a few sweaters, so I’ll give you five bills for these.”

  I grabbed a handful of clothes, he took the five hundred dollars, and everybody left happy.

  A couple of weeks later, Brett accompanied me down to Niagara Falls to introduce me to another PDR member who lived down there. I had mistakenly thought that the orbit of the gang didn’t extend so far from Toronto, and had chosen the Falls as the location for my store expecting that the distance would spare me a certain scrutiny. But as soon as I’d mentioned setting up there, Brett had said I’d have to meet “Hollywood”—Jason Bedborough—who was the PDR delegate in the diverse and active criminal community in Niagara Falls. So much for my staying under the radar.

  By then I was fairly tight with Brett and Sunny, as well as Psycho Dave, a tattoo artist, his business partner Dirtbag and a couple of other members. I was gathering relatively good intelligence on the gang’s relationship with les Hells and other criminal groups, but hadn’t got anywhere in our secondary goal: making drug buys. The PDR were well aware that the cops were on their case. The Quebec biker war had opened the taps across the country for the funding of police operations targeting bikers, and the PDR knew it. They also knew that police expected Ontario—in particular Toronto—to be the next battleground, and so were watching bikers there very closely.