Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  Even Sunny Braybrook, who was about as low on the PDR totem pole as you could get (a fact suggested by his club nickname, Zero), and certainly no great confidant of Staples, had heard the story of me talking to the cops the summer before.

  “Of course, I don’t believe a fucking word of it,” he said one day when we were in a cafeteria at the Canadian National Exhibition fairgrounds in Toronto. “All the same, I don’t want to do any more deals with you. Just to be on the safe side.”

  I wasn’t doing any deals with Sunny anyway in those days, but had kept seeing him on occasion. I could always count on him to run off at the mouth if he knew anything worth talking about. First Brett and now Sunny—my credibility with the PDR was definitely at an all-time low.

  “Well, go fuck yourself then,” I said to Sunny, and got up and left. I wasn’t in the mood to be told by a guy called Zero that I was above suspicion in one breath but then questionable in the next.

  All that being said, the real catalyst for the bust wasn’t a deliberate, rational analysis of the state of the investigation and a cost-benefit evaluation of continuing it or not. Instead, it was a showdown between me and a staff sergeant in the OPP, Steve Rooke, a man I knew as Mouse even if he was George’s boss’s boss.

  The PDR owned a nice piece of property near the town of Caesarea on Lake Scugog, barely an hour northeast of Toronto, on which they would hold a big weekend party every August. It was a mandatory run for all the members of the PDR and also drew a good crowd from other gangs, including all the Last Chance, a few Vagabonds and Loners, and, of most interest to us, a good sample of Quebec Hells Angels, including Walter Stadnick, who was in charge of the Angels’ expansion into Ontario and elsewhere in Canada.

  The year before, in the summer of 1998, I had been invited to attend by Staples and Psycho Dave. Even so, I’d had to go through three lines of biker security just to get in. It might have been worth it had there been some payoff, but there wasn’t. All I really did was spend an afternoon sitting around being ignored. It was like going to a picnic for a company I didn’t work for.

  In the summer of 1999, I wasn’t invited. Whatever the reason for not being on the guest list—my relocation to Niagara Falls, my dicey relations with various members of the club, simple oversight—I was perfectly happy being snubbed. I’d been getting signals from various members in the days previous that I was on the outs, not least an instruction from Sunny not to talk to any other club members except in his presence.

  Mouse, however, was intent that I go to the Caesarea party, as much, I think, to show his own bosses that we were still in tight with the PDR as for any intelligence purposes. After I’d told George I wasn’t going to the gathering that year, Mouse appeared at one of our regular meetings at the Keele Street HoJo.

  “What’s this about you not wanting to go to Caesarea?” he asked me straight out.

  “Well, first of all I wasn’t invited, and second of all I don’t think it’s secure,” I told him.

  “You went last year and there were no problems. I’m sure if you just show up, they’ll let you in. Or call up one of the guys and get yourself invited.”

  I didn’t much like the direction this was going but still tried to be reasonable. “There aren’t very many left who are talking to me right now. Anyway, we’ve moved on since then—getting into the Falls and so forth. It’s a step backward, I think. Circumstances just aren’t the same.”

  Mouse didn’t like that at all. I suppose he felt that I was trying to tell him what direction the investigation should be going, so he decided to get alpha male on me.

  “Well, make the circumstances the same,” he ordered. “I want you there, so you’re going.”

  “No, I’m not,” I insisted, getting alpha right back at him. “I don’t think it’s safe, so I’m not going.”

  That brought out the trained interrogator in him. There was the textbook transition pause—no less than ten seconds, no more than fifteen. Then the sigh. Then the calm voice and the false paternalism.

  “Listen, I’ll tell you what. If it’s a security concern, there’s nothing to worry about. The guys will be out there covering you. It’ll be safe.”

  “It’s not safe,” I said, seeing right through his technique. “There are three checkpoints and they’re setting off fireworks in there all the time. How you going to tell a gunshot from all those? How you even going to get the boys in there in a hurry? I tell you, I’m not going.”

  That set him off again—he wasn’t backing down. “Sounds to me like you’re just scared to go,” he sneered.

  “Yeah, I am—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” I shouted.

  “You either go or I pull this investigation.”

  “Then pull it.”

  “Okay, then, that’s it,” he said, and left.

  And that was it. Two days later we were all summoned to a meeting to plan the takedown. Lining up all the affidavits and warrants would take time, as would mobilizing the tactical squads, so brass chose September 9 for the bust. Ten a.m., to be precise.

  In the meantime I didn’t have a great deal to do, other than putting in orders to buy as much product as possible that day—after all, it would all be free. I sent out some feelers, sounding out various bad guys on buying drugs, guns, even grenades. Then I went home to visit the family in New Brunswick for a week or so while the OPP got ready.

  Back in Niagara Falls in the last week of August and first week of September, things didn’t fall into place as we’d hoped. It might have been expected, I suppose—all of a sudden we were asking that everyone be ready to deal at a precise time on a precise date. The deals for the guns and grenades fell apart in the days before the takedown. We had taken too long. Someone got to the Uzi and other handguns ahead of us; the grenades never seemed to materialize.

  But we did have two firm orders for five kilos of coke from two different sources. Neither source, however, understood our timetable or felt particularly obliged to play by it. So to get them onside we decided to flash some cash, showing them each the $225,000 we had for the purchase (we’d also agreed to pay top dollar, $45,000 per kilo).

  That seemed to do the trick. Then, on September 7 or 8, a classic police blunder screwed up one of the deals. The Niagara Regional Police were doing backup for the operation but were still using open radio channels—frequencies that could be picked up on a simple scanner. One of their jobs was to follow Freddie, our source for one of the buys. The problem was that he didn’t yet have the drugs—and his own source had a scanner. The source heard the chatter from the police tail on Freddie as Freddie approached the bar where the drugs were stored, and greeted him at the door saying the deal was off.

  The other deal vaporized because of the OPP brass’s, or perhaps just Mouse’s, fixation on everyone—everyone—kicking in the doors at precisely 10:00 a.m. on September 9. That was also the time Barney and I had arranged to buy five kilos from Moby and an associate of his. We were to do the deal at Joe Toth’s place on Taylor Street, and we arrived there around quarter to ten. We’d already phoned to say we were on the way, had the money and that everything was cool. Joe relayed the message to Moby and he got his people and the drugs moving. But not fast enough. Joe had encouraged us to come inside, but Barney and I told him we wanted to wait in my car in the driveway. As the seconds and minutes ticked down, there was no sign of Moby et al., although they were probably only a few streets away.

  We were under strict orders to get out of there at 10:00 a.m. sharp—even if we were in the middle of doing the deal. So when the clock struck (we’d gone so far as to synchronize watches earlier), we started the car and pulled out.

  “Where you going?” shouted Toth, sticking his head out the screen door. “They’re on their way!”

  “Just going to Tim Hortons,” I said from my red Sebring convertible. “We’ll be back.”

  Of course, I was really just giving up my parking space to the tac squad. Moby arrived in the midst of it all and was arrested
on the spot. His associate, however, had the drugs and got away.

  So, because of police obsession with punctuality (something I usually share) and a radio scanner, we didn’t get the ten kilos of free coke and a few bad guys we might otherwise have busted slipped away. Still, the investigation landed more than a dozen PDR and other mobsters in prison.

  The court proceedings that resulted from the PDR investigation dragged on for twice as long as the operation itself—thirty-two months. The reason was simple: all the accused pleaded not guilty, at least to begin with. For me it meant regular trips to Toronto, where I was greeted at the airport by a tactical team, hustled off to a secure hotel room and kept there until it was time to testify. Then I was bundled into one of three black SUVs with tinted windows and driven to court, sometimes in Toronto, sometimes in Welland, a small town nearer to Niagara Falls. I’d be on the stand for a day or two, maybe even a week, and then I’d be sped back to the airport again, having seen nothing much beyond the inside of the hotel room, the SUV and the courthouse. It wasn’t much fun, but there was a definite financial upside: I received $4,400 per month for as long as the cases dragged on, plus any expenses incurred on those days when I was actually in court (which maybe totaled a month to six weeks).

  There was also a certain satisfaction in seeing all the bad guys sent off to prison, even if the stretches most pulled weren’t very long. Hollywood was one of three or four who changed their plea to guilty after being shown all the evidence against them in the preliminary hearings. He got eighteen months or so for selling me cocaine. Not long after he was released, he headed out west to try his luck as a B.C. biker. He didn’t find much: someone put two bullets in his head, killing him.

  Sunny also ended up pleading guilty, getting a short sentence and having things end badly. While he was in jail, his son was killed in a traffic accident. A year to the day afterward, Sunny, by then released, was riding his Harley near Alliston, Ontario, when a pickup truck ran a stop sign and hit him broadside. That was it for him.

  Death also got in the way of Freddie Campisano, who might have expected the stiffest sentence for his role in selling me the explosives. I testified against him and he was found guilty, but, with money to spare, he’d managed to get out on bail while awaiting sentencing. During that time, he got sick—with what I’m not sure—and underwent surgery. Within days of his release from hospital, however, he was finding convalescence a bore, so he went downtown and started partying with some friends. A bit too heavily, it seems. After a lot of booze and coke, he collapsed from a heart attack. This time he left the hospital via the morgue.

  Joe Toth was the one bad guy from the operation whom I felt kind of sorry about putting away. He was a very pleasant and friendly fellow, but he just couldn’t not be a crook. Not violent, not nasty—just a guy who wanted to make it in his ill-chosen field. He got provincial time, so not more than a couple of years.

  Brett Toms got the longest sentence—three years—but beat it on appeal. The judge, it was decided, had erred in his instruction to the jury. By the time the appeal court ruling came in, Brett’s time was as good as served, so the prosecution didn’t challenge it. The net difference was that he didn’t have the conviction in his record and was allowed to own a gun again.

  When, in December 2000, the inevitable occurred and the PDR patched over to the Hells Angels—along with the Satan’s Choice, the Last Chance, the Annihilators, some Loners and a couple of Outlaws, somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred Ontario bikers in total—Brett was among them. He remains a member in good standing.

  Mark Staples and Psycho Dave, neither of whom were charged as a result of the investigation I took part in, also became full-patch Hells Angels when the PDR finally succumbed to the bigger club’s wooing.

  In that respect, if part of my assignment was to prevent the Hells from moving into Ontario, I suppose our investigation was a spectacular failure. But I never heard it described that way. By 1998 everyone already considered the Hells’ conquest of Ontario a foregone conclusion; the police just wanted intelligence on how it was proceeding and whether it was likely to be bloody. I was really just supposed to be a bystander, reporting back on the Hells Angels action, and of course the PDR reaction.

  The next job would be very different. It involved going into the belly of the beast.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Dago Hells Angels and the Russians

  ______

  Back in New Brunswick after the PDR case, I went into what I called ’borg mode—doing very little but sitting on the couch waiting to be activated again. The family was doing well. My son was sailing through high school; my elder daughter had moved east from Vancouver and enrolled in the University of New Brunswick; the baby wasn’t such a baby anymore. Natalie had access to her older kids and was running a little hobby business, fixing up and reupholstering old furniture.

  Everything was cool, but still, none of it really interested me. I was completely back in the game. Not in the same way I’d been with the Bandidos—I’d simply rediscovered my taste for the thrill, the excitement and the adventure of the work. The white-hat aspect of the job played a role in my reborn enthusiasm—being on the side of the good guys makes sleeping easy—but it shouldn’t be exaggerated. The work was noble, sure, but it was also fun.

  I remained in close contact with the boys from Ontario, but the province, especially the Toronto and Niagara regions, would be a no-go zone for me for a long while. Instead, I was waiting for the call from my rabbi, J.P. Lévesque. I knew he wouldn’t call with just any old gig; he’d say no to jobs he thought weren’t right without even running them by me. So I wasn’t necessarily holding my breath.

  He finally called in late January 2000. J.P. had met a DEA analyst by the name of Bob McGuigan and the two had become friends. At some point, McGuigan told J.P. about a French Canadian whom the DEA suspected of running cocaine from Colombia up the Pacific coast of Mexico in his yacht. The guy and his family lived on his boat and harbored just south of San Diego in a Mexican enclave for rich Americans. There, the DEA figured, he unloaded the drugs, which were then smuggled across the border by—or at least for—the San Diego Hells Angels.

  The French Canadian had proven very slippery; his boat had been searched on several occasions and nothing found. Still, the DEA was convinced he was moving major volume. To begin with, they knew he had close ties with the bikers through a member, Brandon Kent. In turn, Kent was known to be well connected to Quebec’s Hells. Not too long before, he’d been in a house in Montreal when the police raided the property and found a large quantity of coke. (Kent wasn’t charged, just told to go home.) Kent was also the only international Angel known to sport a side patch that said Quebec, which suggested he was some sort of honorary member.

  So there was an intriguing association that led to a great deal of speculation by police. One popular theory: Kent moved the coke north to Quebec and exchanged it for Canadian pot, the quality and exports of which were exploding in the 1990s. This, of course, was all conjecture or intel from less than perfect sources. McGuigan and the DEA were eager to nail something down.

  “I’ve got the perfect agent for you if you want someone to get inside and help you build a case against this guy,” J.P. said to McGuigan, obviously thinking that my speaking French would be a big asset. The idea appealed to McGuigan, and by early 2000 he had approval from the DEA bigwigs. That’s when I got the call from J.P.

  I phoned McGuigan and we spoke at length a few times. As I look back on it now, his plan seems clumsy. He wanted to set me up in my own yacht in a neighboring slot at the marina, have me establish a rapport with the guy—“You’re from Quebec too!? C’est incroyable!”—and take it from there. But at the time it sounded fine. I’d been idle for four months, winters are long in New Brunswick, and this was a yacht and sunny southern California beckoning. I was down there by the end of February.

  The operation never got off the ground. The French Canadian and his family disappeared th
e day before my arrival; they and the boat were suddenly nowhere to be found. Needless to say, it struck me as odd not only that he would vanish just when the investigation was about to begin but also that no one could figure out where he’d gone. That was the first of many times over the next couple of years that the Angels seemed to have extraordinary luck—or advance information. I was also surprised by the DEA’s lack of surprise at this turn of events. Nobody appeared to think it remarkable, McGuigan included. So much for my yacht. I expected to be back in Saint John for the next snowstorm.

  Then Bob McGuigan suggested I attend a barbecue the next evening hosted by the Hells Angels at the main location of San Diego Harley-Davidson, on Kearny Mesa Road. Anyone could attend—it was one of those public relations stunts that Hells Angels chapters undertook occasionally to show neighbors that they were nice, misunderstood guys. McGuigan thought it was worth a shot going there and trying to find out where the French-Canadian guy went. He figured if I connected with Brandon Kent, I could say, “Hey, I’m down here from Quebec to meet up with my buddy, but now he’s gone. You know where he went by any chance?”

  I never got the opportunity. It was southern California, but still the cops hadn’t bothered to provide me with a car, so I was left taxiing it. And either the taxi driver or I had the address screwed up. I eventually got out of the cab in an industrial area thinking that the shop was nearby and tried to find it on foot. Maybe it was nearby—again, my sense of direction is about as reliable as a compass in an iron mine—but I certainly didn’t find it. Pissed off, I just said “Fuck it” and took another taxi back to my motel in San Diego’s old-town area.