A couple of days after Ed had been dragged to Barrie, he called Isnor. The cop swore at him, told him he had a lot of nerve and was just about to hang up on him when he heard Ed say that his cellmate was bragging about blowing up the Sudbury police station. Isnor told Ed he was re-hired.
The cellmate was someone Isnor had recently put behind bars: Gordie Cunningham, a big and aggressive member of K-9’s Satan’s Choice crew in Hamilton. Raf Faiella, an undercover agent, had made a deal to buy coke from a Hamilton man, a shoe store owner named Mike Parker. The deal was supposed to go down at the Holiday Inn in Barrie, so Isnor and his team put it under heavy surveillance.
The first thing he noticed was that Parker had brought along Cunningham. “I smelled a rip,” he told me. Isnor is a veteran cop who knows the terrible things that could happen if he didn’t intervene. Faiella, his buddy, could easily be dead. “And, sure enough, it was one.” Although he would have rather arrested the men for drug trafficking, he knew it was too dangerous not to intervene on Faiella’s behalf. He arrested Cunningham and Parker on possession and threw them into the Barrie Bucket. It was just by pure chance that Cunningham and Ed shared a cell.
Before long, Cunningham made bail and Ed was released after serving a sentence made shorter by his guilty plea and his having made restitution to American Express. The pair had grown quite close in their small cell, and Cunningham had recruited Ed for the Hamilton Chapter. So when he was released, Ed went to Cunningham’s house and lived with him.
With Ed wearing a wire, the cops recorded Cunningham making three separate cocaine buys. They had enough evidence to put him away for a very long time. After they put Ed in a safe place (with no access to their credit cards), Isnor, fellow OPP officer Peter Koop and Hamilton biker cop Robert “Biker Bob” MacDonald visited Cunningham at home. Instead of arresting him for the coke buys, they gave him an opportunity to turn on his brothers. He immediately jumped at it and spilled everything he knew.
Apparently, the Hamilton Chapter came up to Sudbury to help their brothers refurbish their clubhouse. When they got bored, they went to Solid Gold. When the cops showed up and kicked them out of Solid Gold, the members of both chapters considered it a major humiliation. Thrown out of the strip joint, the bikers went to the more biker-friendly Coulson Tavern farther downtown.
As the other bikers drank themselves silly, the two presidents walked across Larch Street to an all-night sandwich shop. Dubé told K-9 that he’d do anything to get back at the owner of Solid Gold, the man who ratted him out to the cops simply for wearing his jacket. K-9 told him he knew a guy, Jerry, who could help him out.
Jure “Jerry” Juretta had been in an airborne unit in the Canadian military and knew a lot about explosives. He also happened to be a Hamilton drug dealer and tough guy who worked for K-9’s Satan’s Choice. Dubé was impressed. He asked K-9 to get his friend to build him a bomb. K-9, always happy to make people happy, smiled and told his colleague that it’d be no problem.
Interestingly, Juretta was an old friend of Parente’s. In fact, his sister was married to Marco Roque, a Hamilton Outlaw and even closer friend of Parente’s. I asked Isnor about this, especially in light of the fact that I knew that Roque is now a member of the Hamilton Hells Angels. He looked at me with a grin just this side of condescending and said: “I can’t believe you still think there’s any loyalty among these people.”
A few days later, Juretta and K-9 went up to Sudbury with the bomb. They met Dubé and Brian Davis, his right-hand man, at the Tim Hortons at the corner of Highway 69 and Notre Dame Avenue in the Lockerby neighborhood in South Sudbury. Juretta handed the bomb to a delighted Dubé. The plan was to put it into the men’s washroom of the Solid Gold. That would teach that asshole to ban colors and call the cops.
A couple of days later, K-9 got a call in Hamilton telling him that the bomb had been a success. There was now a large, smoking hole in the Sudbury police station. “What do you mean the police station?” he shouted. “It was supposed to be the Solid Gold!”
With Cunningham safely taken out of the picture, Isnor put Ed back to work. He accompanied Russell Martin, another Sudbury Satan’s Choice member and Dubé’s primary gofer, on a few cocaine buys. Isnor and his men approached Martin and showed him the evidence they had against him. They also told him they were much more interested in his boss than they were in him. He nodded. He understood. He knew that Dubé was capable of killing him, and as angry as he was these days, he just might.
Dubé was angry at Martin because he wouldn’t do his job. But his job was to help his boss kill his best friend, Brian Davis.
The first time Dubé tried to kill Davis because he was sure he was gunning for his job, he told Martin to tell Davis that he’d found an undefended Hells Angels cottage full of coke. All they had to do was kick in the doors and fill up their pickup trucks. Davis was in.
Martin didn’t have the heart to do it. He drove Davis around back roads for three hours pretending to be lost. The second time Dubé tried to kill Davis, Martin slashed his own tires to get out of it. The third time he was rescued by being caught by the cops.
Isnor knew Martin was nothing more than a tool, so he tracked down Davis. He brought him in. He sat him in the interrogation room chair. He used all the tried-and-true cop tactics. Nothing worked. Davis, a tough guy, wouldn’t talk. Isnor looked him in the eye. He told him Dubé was going to kill him. In that most fleeting of moments, everything came together and made perfect sense. Davis’s face turned stark white. He averted his eyes and said: “You’re absolutely right.”
In exchange for witness protection, Davis spilled. Even though he was the No. 2 guy in Sudbury, he was deathly afraid of No. 1, Dubé. When they received the bomb from the Hamilton guys, Davis asked his boss how they were going to get it into the Solid Gold. Dubé said fuck that, they were going to stick it in the police station. His reasoning was that the police were the real enemy, not some asshole with a phone in the Solid Gold. He also told Davis that his dream, his greatest goal, was to get a tanker truck full of explosives and drive it through the police station, killing everyone inside — and, presumably, himself. Even though he was no schoolboy, Davis found that image chilling.
It was obvious that none of the local guys from Satan’s Choice could plant a bomb at either the Solid Gold or the police station without being caught. But Dubé had a friend who could. Neil Passenen was a local drug dealer, but he cleaned up pretty good and could pass for a contributing member of society. Besides, he was one of the few people he knew who weren’t immediately identifiable to even the least experienced Sudbury cop. His mom had been dating a guy whose last name was Young, so he was going by the name Neil Young in those days. And he owed Dubé a favor, so Dubé called it in. He had Neil Young place the bomb in the alleyway between the police station and the credit union next door. He was to be sure to leave it leaning up against the police station’s wall.
That was enough for Isnor. He arrested the lot of them. In fact, since Operation Dismantle had begun, the fuzz had managed to arrest 109 of the 125 Satan’s Choice members and prospects and seize all of their clubhouses. K-9 went down for his involvement in the Sudbury bombing and for trafficking steroids. Dubé killed himself in jail awaiting trial, hanging himself with a twisted bed sheet. I asked Isnor why he thought that happened. “Johnny K-9 was the only friend he had left in the world, and he knew we had him and he was going away forever,” he told me. “Besides the bombing and the trafficking, we probably could have linked him to the [Sudbury coke dealer Michael] Briere murder and then there’s Alex Atso, who was Sudbury’s No. 1 drug dealer before Satan’s Choice took over; I’m sure Dubé killed him, too.”
In effect, the police had managed to do what politicians, rocket launchers and Molotov cocktails never could. They had eliminated Satan’s Choice from the competition to see who would be the Hells Angels favorites in Ontario. That honor and responsibility now fell squarely on the shoulders of the Loners.
But Isnor, at le
ast, was pretty sure that’s how it would have worked out anyway. “Satan’s Choice were never the big guys, they were nickel and dime,” he told me. “The Loners were always Stadnick’s favorites.”
But, as always, things were not as easy as they would seem. By the time Satan’s Choice was taken out of the picture, things had changed radically for the now financially successful Loners. Two men, Frank Grano and Jimmy Raso, were fighting tooth and nail for leadership of the gang. By the start of 1997, both men had strong factions behind him. And just before Stadnick and Hells Angels were about to give the Loners their blessing as their top puppet gang in Ontario, they split in half.
Grano’s half of the Loners showed up at the door of the Para-Dice Riders clubhouse in downtown Toronto, one of the more powerful of the local, non-affiliated gangs. They were welcomed with open arms, opened up a chapter four blocks away from the Loners’ clubhouse and called themselves the Para-Dice Riders Woodbridge Chapter. At least two knowledgeable sources told me Stadnick was behind the move, hoping to combine two clubs as a single pro-Hells Angels entity. Raso’s Woodbridge Loners stayed where they were and, before long, faded into obscurity. Biker gangs without a steady supply of drugs to sell generally don’t make headlines.
The OPP then deduced that the Para-Dice Riders were the entryway the Hells Angels were going to use to get into Ontario and decided to devote most of their energies to them. They were well served to monitor the situation. The Para-Dice Riders were a long-established club, with at least 60 members. The influx of the former Loners had enriched the club in both manpower and finances. And they had a leader. Donny Petersen, though not the president, often spoke eloquently for the club. In the early ’90s he had sued the OPP — unsuccessfully, but with a great deal of publicity and public sympathy — over their roadside stop policy for bikers. Not only had it generated a lot of much-needed public sympathy for bikers, but it made him some important friends. He even had the opportunity to address Toronto’s prestigious Empire Club, an honor reserved normally for heads of state and titans of industry.
On September 3, 1997, a procession of Quebec Hells Angels roared into Toronto. At one of the roadside stops Petersen had complained about, the police arrested Sylvain Vachon (one of the brothers who ferried Vallée’s drugs into Sudbury) on an outstanding warrant. The rest arrived at the Para-Dice Riders’ clubhouse on Eastern Avenue, not far from downtown. The prospects for both clubs waited outside while the full-patches talked inside.
They could only speculate as to what went on inside, but that didn’t stop the Toronto media from declaring the Para-Dice Riders the Hells Angels’ gateway into Ontario and an all-out biker war a certainty.
But Stadnick wasn’t that simple. He had other irons in the fire, other ways to get into Ontario. Remember the Sherbrooke Chapter? The one that had enough juice to opt out of the Nomads’ cocaine distribution system? Well, they had a friend from London, Ontario, named John Coates, one of the few English-speaking Hells Angels associates to be successful in Quebec.
He was quite a specimen. At six-foot-seven and at least 300 pounds, he was a huge, intimidating presence. He was well liked by the Sherbrooke Hells Angels and was employed by them frequently.
And he had a brother. Back in London, Jimmy Coates (not quite as big as John, but still a massive man) was a member of the Loners, which still had a fairly active chapter there. The Sherbrooke guys asked John to invite his brother and his friends over. They partied, they got along, they were given drugs to sell.
But they had to do it in secret. The Chatham Loners’ most prominent member, chapter president Wayne “Weiner” Kellestine, would never have allowed it. A Loners’ purist (even though his old gang, the Annihilators, had patched over to the Loners just a short time before, while Kellestine was in prison), he had no use for Hells Angels. Like Guindon before him, Kellestine didn’t like answering to a club based in another country, and he did not like how they treated Raso’s Loners. First they backed the enemy, Satan’s Choice, then the Loners and when the Loners divided, they went with the Para-Dice Riders, essentially favoring three different clubs in one town over the space of two years.
Kellestine was a man to be feared, even by behemoths like the Coates brothers. He was the biker described by Isnor as looking like Charles Manson. And he reportedly introduced himself to an old friend’s brother by saying “Hi, I’m Wayne Kellestine. I sell drugs and kill people.”
Although they are often referred to as the London or St. Thomas Loners, the chapter recognized itself as being from Chatham, a small city on the 401 halfway between Windsor and London. The Loners also had a small chapter in Amherstburg, just south of Windsor, and prospective chapters in Oregon and Southern Italy, where many of the Woodbridge guys had relatives.
They were out in Chatham because London was very much an Outlaws town. At this time, Parente was national president and he and his Hamilton Chapter represented the club’s power center in Canada. But the London Chapter could probably have made a very strong case for second place. London’s not a tough town by any standards, but it is a very rich territory for drug sales. And it was perfectly situated between the Outlaws’ world headquarters in Detroit and its Canadian seat of operations in Hamilton, in an area many cops know as “meth alley” because it’s Ontario’s most active area for methamphetamine manufacture and use.
Because the area is so very desirable to biker gangs, it had been the site of many increasingly violent turf wars. But the Outlaws had kept it theirs and largely peaceful since they had taken over. That changed in April 1998, when two prominent Outlaws from London — chapter president Jeffrey Labrash and full-patch Jody Hart — were shot and killed in the parking lot outside the downtown Beef Baron strip joint.
Working from eyewitness accounts, police quickly issued warrants for the Lewis brothers, Paul and Duane (no relation to the Hamilton Lewises who so bedeviled Parente). The pair claimed they had no biker connections, and their story was that they had been sent to the Beef Baron to repair a malfunctioning video game. They were, they said, minding their own business when they just happened to get into a fight with the two Outlaws. The melee continued outside the bar and ended with both of the Outlaws being shot with the same handgun.
After the shooting, more questions were raised about biker involvement. A few days later, immediately after the funerals for Labrash and Hart, a bomb exploded at T.J. Baxter’s, a bar frequented by local Outlaws. And it was full of them that day. Four people, all with some association with the Outlaws, were hurt, one seriously.
While many people in Southwestern Ontario saw it as the beginning of a biker war, police and media biker experts continued to deny any Hells Angels or Loners (who they still incorrectly identified as Annihilators) involvement.
Nine months later, police found the body of locally notorious millionaire businessman Salvatore Vecchio in a marsh just outside London. He was known to have association with bikers of many different clubs, and to have known and perhaps even to have employed the Lewis brothers under the table. Again, police and media downplayed the idea of a biker war.
At their trial, the Lewises claimed that they had gone to the Beef Baron that day for work. When they got there, they said, one of the Outlaws pulled a gun on them for reasons unknown and marched them out into the parking lot. Then, they said, Labrash fired a shot at one of them at point-blank range, but somehow missed (police found no evidence of this). Then Paul Lewis pulled his own gun and fired. He hit Labrash four times in the chest and Hart once in the head, killing them both.
Clearly, the key piece of evidence was Labrash’s alleged gun. It was never found, but the defense pointed out that the bar’s DJ was an Outlaws supporter, and they asserted that he had taken the gun and other evidence with him when he left the Beef Baron before the police arrived. Police had been unable to locate him — he had fled the country and was hiding out in the U.K. — but it didn’t matter. The shadow of doubt was raised, and the Lewises were acquitted of all counts as the killings were a
ttributed to self-defense.
Years later, the Lewises were caught in an RCMP cocaine sting with loads of drugs and cash, including Mexican currency. A subsequent investigation determined that the Lewises had acquired their cocaine from Hells Angels in Sherbrooke. So, while the police and media denied any biker war, the recent killings and the recent influx of drugs into the London area indicated otherwise.
Many Loners — drawn both by security and financial rewards — sought a closer relationship with the Hells Angels, but not all of them did. Kellestine was still adamantly and vociferously against the idea. He made his point at a party late in 1999 when a young Loner was mouthing off about how much better life would be if they were Hells Angels. Kellestine rebutted the argument by beating the man nearly to death with the handle of a handgun.
Kellestine’s reluctance to accept the Hells Angels’ looming dominance of Canadian biker culture did not go unnoticed. On a cold Friday, October 22 in 1999, Kellestine packed up his SUV to attend a friend’s wedding. As he paused at the stop sign where Regional Road 14 meets Regional Road 13, he was surprised to see pickup trucks pull up beside and in front of him, blocking his path. The passenger window rolled down. One of the two Hells Angels associates inside the pickup — David “Dirty” McLeish or Phil “Philbilly” Gastonguay — opened fire at Kellestine’s car. Windows were shattered, but nobody was hurt. Court records didn’t make it clear which was the triggerman. When the Hells Angels associate who had the gun ran out of ammo, both vehicles laid rubber and screeched away. The pickup went north to the 401, and Kellestine went south, back home. If there was any chance Kellestine and Hells Angels could have made peace, it was probably killed that day.
To the people of Southwestern Ontario, it looked like Hells Angels had declared war on the Outlaws and the Loners.
Although the assassination attempt on Kellestine failed, it got one desired result: the Hells Angels had come to Ontario. The Coates brothers and their friends were there to stay. “The deal was partly, ‘If you do this you become a member,’ ” said a London cop at the time. “There was some oversight from Sherbrooke, and when they got out and opened up their club here, John Coates was running it.”
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 14
