Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  And there was more; Stadnick had even more reason to be popular. According to most people who knew him in high school, he made friends by selling drugs. It was the ’70s and drugs were everywhere. High school kids had grown up with almost heroic stories of drug use in the ’60s and were anxious to try them out. “I never took drugs myself, so I can’t really say,” said Kelly. “But I had lots of friends who did, and they told me they always got them from Wally.”

  It wasn’t just fellow students who knew about Stadnick. The police were aware of him, but not because they ever caught him doing much. “It was hard in the ’70s,” said a Hamilton police officer who was very familiar with the Hill Park students of the era and wanted to be identified simply as “Bob the cop.” “Before that, and again afterwards, it was easy to tell the bad boys from the good boys, but in the ’70s, they all looked alike—skinny kids with long hair and denim jackets.” But a dedicated officer could tell the difference by driving the streets, seeing who had an improbably affordable new bike or car, by looking into the faces to see who was putting on a tough-guy attitude or by talking to principals and vice-principals. “Of course we knew who Stadnick was,” he said. “We were sure he was distributing hash, but unless you see him doing it or someone tells on him, there’s nothing you can do about it.” Stadnick was arrested once in 1971 for possession of a small amount of hashish. He spent four months in the old Hamilton jail and was put on two years’ probation.

  Hashish is a dark, putty-like substance made from resin collected from the cannabis plant. It contains the same active ingredient (tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC) as marijuana, but in far lower quantities. It is often smoked in pipes, but younger and/or poorer users tend to inhale the smoke of hash burned on the end of a needle or on the blade of a heated knife. While marijuana is stronger, easier to smoke and less likely to be contaminated with impurities, hash is popular in places where cannabis is hard to grow because it can be molded into almost any shape and is very easy to smuggle over borders. Back in 1970, before the days of hydroponics and grow-lights, growing cannabis in Eastern Canada was virtually impossible and hash was king. Cheaper and easier to conceal than weed, it was the perfect drug for high-schoolers. In the 1970s, big pieces of hash were called cakes and smaller ones were called nuggets.

  By 1970, people who knew Stadnick well were calling him “Nurget.” Although this nickname has mystified police and journalists for years, its origin is pretty clear to some. “People in Hamilton have a funny way of talking; they like to play with words,” said Bob the cop. “They’ll call Tim Horton’s ‘Horny Tim’s’ or they’ll call a bargain a ‘bargoon’—they’re not trying to be funny or anything, it’s just the way they speak.” After Stadnick was arrested in Jamaica a quarter century later, confused Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers and lawyers asked him why the other Hells Angels called him “Nurget.” He simply smiled and kept quiet, helping further a reputation he had for being secretive and mysterious. They should have asked Bob the cop. “That’s an easy one,” he said. “He was called ‘Nurget’ because he always had a nugget—or, as the kids in Hamilton would say, a ‘nurget’—of hash on him.” Others say his name had nothing to do with hash but that it actually stemmed from his small size.

  Whether he was dealing hash or just carrying it for a friend, as he maintained in his 1971 trial, he certainly appeared to have lots more spending cash than the other kids in the neighborhood. Looking for something more thrilling than a ten-speed or the old man’s Delta 88, Stadnick bought a motorcycle. It was old and needed work—that was no problem for a mind like his—but it was really something. A few of the kids at Hill Park had cars, mostly junkers, but nobody else had a motorcycle. Even though the Canadian climate makes motorcycles useless for about six months a year and the summer vacation means that you can only ride to school for a few weeks, a motorcycle can turn an otherwise forgettable guy into a big man on campus. Stadnick’s star was clearly rising.

  The start of the ’70s was a hard time to be coming of age. After Altamont, the hippies, with their peace and love, were beginning to be seen as ridiculous. It was a cynical and pessimistic time. More important for teenagers in Hamilton, the Canadian economy was suffering through the beginning of its worst period since the Depression. For the first time since then—and in defiance of basic economic law—it was undergoing a combination of stagnant growth combined with runaway inflation. While retail prices were getting higher, wages were not keeping up and the level of unemployment was staggering. Hamilton was hit particularly hard. After years of feasting on the success of the auto, aerospace and military goods industries as a primary supplier of steel, Hamilton’s economy took a nosedive as those businesses slowed down considerably. With fewer users and plunging prices, the market was flooded with cheaper steel from places like Japan, Iran and Taiwan. Layoffs were the only way to keep the factories alive, but it put hundreds of men out of work and effectively closed off the only natural employment opportunity for many young people.

  “The days when they opened their doors to anyone who showed up were long gone,” said Justin Pietzcerak, whose dad had worked at Stelco and brought his sons up to believe they would too. “Even when they weren’t laying people off, you had to have an ‘in’—someone like a father or uncle who already worked there—just to push a broom.” Frustrated by the lack of factory work, young people in Hamilton looked to other industries and other places where the recession hadn’t hit as hard. Thousands sought work in Toronto or the United States and even more, like Pietzcerak, went to Alberta. “At the time, it seemed like the thing to do,” he said. “While the steel and car factories back East were getting rid of people, the oil and gas drillers in Alberta were hiring all the time.”

  For those who stayed behind, real opportunities were scarce. College and university graduates were having trouble finding work and those who had banked on a guaranteed factory job or just hadn’t planned ahead were in a far worse state. A city that was built around and dependent on a single industry, Hamilton suffered a domino effect when the steel factories were idled. Stores, restaurants and other services that were accustomed to a steady stream of customers now had to make do with long stretches of inactivity and minor spikes in business twice a month when government assistance checks arrived. “It was a joke at the time that the biggest employer in Hamilton wasn’t Stelco or Dofasco, but the Unemployment Insurance Commission,” said Bob the cop. “It wasn’t far from true.”

  For young people, the effect was devastating. With no jobs or opportunity, with boarded-up stores and houses and massive government cutbacks, many of the most law-abiding young people were beginning to believe that the system had failed them and their faith in it foundered. A large number of them turned to things like welfare fraud, cigarette smuggling and under-the-table labor to supplement their incomes. Some went a bit farther. The market of stolen items, especially car stereos, became a big business. Flea markets, where nobody asked where the merchandise came from and all transactions were cash-only, flourished. But there was an even easier way to make money for those with guts. “Of course it’s wrong, but you can understand why they’d sell drugs,” said Bob the cop. “It seemed like no matter how little money was around, people could always scratch up enough for a little hash or weed—the opportunity to make a quick buck was definitely there.”

  Although nobody will go on record to admit ever having bought hash from Stadnick, he was widely reputed—by both his peers and police—to have been a major seller. By the end of high school, he had two motorcycles and an impressive wardrobe of clothes and jewelry despite there not being a scrap of evidence of him ever having held a job. He looked like he was doing better than his peers who had paper routes or put in a few shifts at McDonald’s. Wherever it came from, Stadnick had a flamboyant way of showing off his new wealth. The hippies themselves may have been dying out, but their wild styles, often with black, Latin or far Eastern roots, began to filter down to Sears and Kresge’s.

  At the s
ame time, Alice Cooper and other hard-rock musicians were experimenting with their own shocking looks and, as they always had and still do, teenage boys began to imitate their heroes. The result, in Stadnick’s case, was an eye-catching mismatch of colors, styles and messages. “Walter wore some pretty strange clothes; you could tell they were expensive, but they looked bizarre with his regular outfits,” Kelly recalled with a chuckle. “He’d wear tight, tight jeans and have like this really expensive purple and black patterned silk shirt underneath an old denim jacket with patches all over it.” And he began a lifelong love affair with ostentatious jewelry. “Oh, he loved jewelry; very few of the other guys would ever wear more than a simple chain,” she said, “but Wally always had rings and chains.”

  Silk shirts and jewelry notwithstanding, it’s unlikely the other boys would question Stadnick’s masculinity. “He wasn’t much to look at, but he was a tough little guy,” Kelly said. “He had a fight with this one really big guy—Stewart, I think his name was—and totally destroyed him; after that nobody ever thought of challenging him.” Besides, it wasn’t always easy to get to him. By 12th grade, Stadnick was usually surrounded by a group of friends, associates and other hangers-on. In the smoking area, at the mall or anywhere else, Stadnick could be seen with a group of guys clad in cheap versions of the same denim-and-leather uniform young toughs have been wearing since The Wild One.

  After school ended, when the other graduates were headed for college, looking for jobs or moving to more prosperous cities, Stadnick and his pals were hanging out and enjoying life. One by one, they got motorcycles. They didn’t have Harleys, mostly old British bikes actually, but they were all on two wheels. The bikes were financed at least in part, Bob the cop suggests, by Stadnick. “He was a biker; they were his friends,” Bob said. “If they wanted to keep up and he wanted to keep them, they had to get bikes.” Before long, they were riding together, dressing alike and holding regular meetings. But they weren’t a gang until they had a name. They found their identity through Stadnick’s other interests. It was an iconoclastic time, and heroes were out. Young men no longer idolized fighter pilots or cowboys or anyone who could be judged in historical context. Instead, Stadnick and his followers went further back in history.

  “Like the kids who are into Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings today, they loved the medieval stuff,” said Bob the cop. Proud of his Ukrainian roots, Stadnick called his group the Cossacks. Derived from the Turkish word “kazak,” meaning “free man,” the Cossacks are historically considered to be a group of men from Southeastern Europe who banded together after denying the authority of their local leaders. Famed for their independence and fighting abilities, the Cossacks, particularly their cavalry, were frequently used as mercenaries. They developed a reputation as vicious, bloodthirsty fighters who answered to no ruler. Perfect heroes for a teenage motorcycle gang.

  So great was Stadnick’s influence that he actually convinced his followers to wear a sort of ponytail on the tops of their heads in the mistaken belief that this was how Cossacks looked. He even figured out a way to put holes in the tops of their helmets to pull their hair through. “Yeah, we knew about the Cossacks, we didn’t think much of them,” said Bob the cop. “They were pretty small-time, a little bit of trafficking, a little fencing, but we never really caught them doing anything important—it really seemed like all they wanted to do was make noise and look tough.”

  Normally a group of criminally intent teenagers on motorcycles with their hair pulled through helmets would garner a bit of attention, if not fear, on the streets of any city. But this was Hamilton in the 1970s. The Mafia under the control of Johnny “Pops” Papalia still held sway and what was left of the organized crime spoils was divided up by the Satan’s Choice and Red Devils motorcycle gangs. Although the Cossacks were easy to identify by their hair, the rest of the look was pure biker with the leather, denim and patches that had been made the industry standard by the Hells Angels. But it’s unlikely they were intentionally copying them. Without any Canadian chapters, the Hells Angels seemed distant, foreign and even mythical when the Cossacks were formed. They were more likely emulating the local gangs, who in turn were imitating the Hells Angels. Unlike the odd, almost comical Cossacks on their low-horsepower British bikes, the members of the senior gangs were the real thing. Satan’s Choice had a membership and reach approaching that of the Hells Angels and the Red Devils were the oldest motorcycle gang in Canada. Both were headquartered on the Beach Strip, a narrow isthmus of land that connects Hamilton with Burlington and is dominated by the Queen Elizabeth Way superhighway that brings traffic from Toronto and the Niagara region. With their focus on the north and east sections of the city, the members of the Satan’s Choice and Red Devils tolerated the existence of the Cossacks. “The big guys weren’t bothered by them,” said Bob the cop.

  Although Stadnick was clearly pleased to be in charge of his own creation in the Cossacks, most police officers who knew him at the time agree that he’d much rather move up to the major leagues. As tough and charismatic as he was, neither the Satan’s Choice nor Red Devils ever called, so he jumped at the chance to join the Wild Ones. Named, probably unwittingly, after the movie that helped spawn the entire outlaw biker phenomenon, the Hamilton mountain-based Wild Ones were a much more serious and sophisticated gang than the Cossacks, but still a step below the big boys. Closely associated with Satan’s Choice, the Wild Ones acted as a sort of minor-league farm club, sending prospects up to the parent club once they had proved themselves at a lower level. According to Hamilton cops, members of the Wild Ones could make names for themselves by performing tasks for members of Satan’s Choice or the mafia. Members would often act as hired muscle, either protecting debt collectors or serving as a warning to those who didn’t want to pay protection money. The most effective way a member of the Wild Ones could earn his stripes, cops have said, was to punish a recalcitrant debtor. One of their favorite methods was to plant bombs in small businesses. Not only was this said to be an excellent scare tactic, but it also allowed the bikers a chance to make another visit after the insurance settlement. The system worked exceedingly well. The mafia hired the bikers who intimidated the businessmen who paid the mafia or suffered from the bikers. “It was quite a sophisticated operation,” admitted Ken Robertson, a Hamilton-Wentworth police sergeant who investigated some of the bombings and later became the force’s chief. And they were never short of business.

  But in the fall of 1978, the ever-ambitious Stadnick began to realize that he and his gang were on a treadmill. He and his fellow Wild Ones did all the hard work, took all the risks and got only a tiny portion of the proceeds. Satan’s Choice got their share simply by hiring their underlings out and also got the glory of being the top of the local biker heap. Tired of doing all the hard and dangerous work so someone else could get rich, Stadnick decided to take matters into his own hands. He took aside a few of his best friends from the Wild Ones and told them what he thought. Using his abundant charm, Stadnick did his best to convince them that they were being used and that if anyone should benefit from their muscle and courage it should be them. He told them about another gang, a much bigger gang, called the Hells Angels. They were cool; they wouldn’t exploit them like the Satan’s Choice did. He said he’d talked to some Hells Angels and that they had it easy—they rode, they partied, they made money and had a good time. He told them that he’d set up a meeting with them in Montreal.

  Two of the Wild Ones were sold on the idea; the rest told Stadnick it was too dangerous. So on October 12, 1978, the three of them took off up the QEW to the 401 and on to Montreal.

  Le Tourbillon is as seedy as most bars in the east end of Montreal. Other than a few old rummies and the dancing girls who work there, the Hells Angels usually have the place to themselves. With a low-intensity war against the west end-based Outlaws heating up, the nondescript little bar near Jarry Park in the heart of Hells Angels territory seemed the most safe and appropriate place to hold a me
eting. Stadnick and his fellow Wild Ones—Gary “Gator” Davies and George “Chico” Mousseau—took a table in the back and pretended to watch the girls on stage. A round of beers didn’t take the edge off them. This was the biggest night of their lives. Yesterday they were just a bunch of Hamilton mountain street toughs who were busting their asses to be noticed by the Satan’s Choice, and today they were being courted by the mighty Hells Angels.

  At exactly the time agreed upon, the delegation from the Hells Angels appeared. Despite the war, the Hells Angels conspicuously wore their full colors. The men they sent were big, hairy and well decorated—they were trying to make an impression on their potential recruits from Hamilton. Louis “Ti-Oui” Lapierre, Bruno Coulombe and Jean Brochu squeezed into the booth with the Wild Ones and had beers placed in front of them before anyone said anything. Neither Stadnick nor Davies spoke any French and the Hells Angels at the table had only rudimentary English skills, so Mousseau did the translation. A few jokes were told, partially with facial expressions and hand signals, and the ice was broken.

  They were just about to get down to business when they were temporarily blinded by a shaft of sunlight as the door opened. In the glare they could make out the silhouettes of two men.

  As the door closed and their eyes adjusted, they saw two young, muscular men they didn’t recognize. With short hair, nylon wind-breakers over golf shirts and no visible tattoos, they obviously weren’t Outlaws. Lapierre almost certainly would have recognized their faces if they had been. Instead, he identified them as undercover cops and, transcending the language barrier, put his index finger on his lips to indicate to everyone at the table not to say anything incriminating.

  Everyone understood and the conversation switched over to the weather and the differences between women in Ontario and Quebec. The jovial group fell silent as the short-haired men stood up and turned towards the booth.