The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  Born on Remembrance Day in 1953, Daggittt developed an early interest in weightlifting, and as he matured, his size would complement his growing strength. Those who knew him personally insist that Daggittt could be friendly, even funny, but it was his association with the Clark Park gang that would first bring him to the attention of police.

  Mac Ryan recalls an early encounter with Daggittt. “Gerry Gavin brought Roger around. They had known each other a long time. We were at a party, hanging out on the fire escape, when they came in. Daggittt leaned out the window and said, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ He grabbed me by the ankle suddenly and hung me off the balcony, four floors up. I’m screaming and looking down at the ground—I had no idea if he was going to let me go. He was showing off and kidding around, but I wasn’t too impressed. There was just something that went wrong with him; he could turn on you.”

  “Roger was a good guy, but he could be very mean,” says Gary Blackburn. “He was big. I think he became one of the strongest guys in Canada. But he wasn’t the one you needed to worry about. That was Wayne [Angelucci] or Gerry [Gavin]. Wayne was considered the toughest guy in the East End. When Wayne and Gerry were out together, it was just devastating. And when Roger was with them, they could really be trouble. I wouldn’t want to be the one to have crossed them.”

  Captured playing hooky in the 1970s by legendary street photographer Foncie Pulice: Gerry Gavin (left), Roger Daggittt (centre), and Wayne Angelucci.

  PHOTO: Foncie Pulice

  Born in 1952, Wayne Angelucci grew up around the Trout Lake area and had left school by grade seven. “I wasn’t interested in what the difference was between the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean, or how far away Neptune or Pluto were,” he says. “I liked shop class, but I wanted to get out.” He would spend his afternoons roaming the streets with other East End kids. “We would hang around the railyards, hopping the trains or putting stuffed sleeping bags on the train tracks to scare the engine drivers.” He eventually fell in with the Clark Park scene where he gained notoriety for his considerable skill in climbing the tall trees in the park exceptionally well—a skill that came in handy when police constables unexpectedly showed up to raid the park at night.

  As far back as he can remember, Angelucci recalls that the police and the courts had it out for the Clark Park gang. “The cops seemed to target Clark Park like … all the crime in the East End came from there. And if you went to court for an assault charge or for fighting, and the [prosecutor] said, ‘He’s a Clark Park member,’ that was it—you’d get sent away just on that basis.”

  Angelucci first met other Clark Parkers at Ben’s Café, an old diner that stood next to the Rio Bowling Alley where he worked as a pinsetter. The café was a focal point for a number of Clark Parkers, in part due to its jukebox filled with the sort of rabble-rousing music that appealed to them, from “Itchycoo Park” by the Small Faces to “I Fought The Law” by the Bobby Fuller Four. “East Enders from all over would come [to Ben’s Café]. ‘Who’s got the stolen car tonight?—Hey, I’m going with you,’ it was like that,” he says, punctuating his sentences frequently with a laugh as he recalls the good old, bad old days.

  Angelucci remembers first meeting Gerry Gavin at Ben’s. At age twelve or thirteen, the two of them would head downtown, climb up the telephone poles in the alley behind the Orpheum Theatre, and break into one of the windows at the back of the building to watch movies. Of medium height and somewhat stocky build, Gavin gained a reputation as someone who could take a punch then come back at you twice as hard—a reputation that grew as he got older. “Gerry was solid,” Angelucci says. “You know if you got into a fight, he’d stick with you and wouldn’t run.”

  For Gerry Gavin, the die had been cast long before the day he’d invited Mac Ryan to Clark Park when he got out of the JDH. Gavin’s family extended back at least two generations in Vancouver’s criminal history and were known to police from districts all over the city. Gavin’s father and uncle, the Burns brothers, were two downtown rounders who had “run” Granville Street as mid-level organized crime figures in the 1960s. When Gavin was still an infant, his father left the family, and the boy was given his mother’s maiden name.

  Gerry’s mother, Ruth Gavin, rose to become one of East Vancouver’s most notorious and well-known heroin dealers. “When I later ended up in jail in Oakalla, all the old hypes [heroin addicts] knew Ruth Gavin,” says Bradley Bennett. Ruth dealt heroin directly out of the family home at 1363 East 5th Avenue. “She was from the Hastings Street crowd,” adds retired constable Grant MacDonald, who began his policing career on the Hastings Street beat in the mid-1960s. There, he and other beat police had known Ruth to be a prostitute who worked the area. “In those days, Hastings Street was practically the heroin users’ capital of Canada. Ruth Gavin was using heroin, but she was also trafficking. Personally, she wasn’t unpleasant to deal with, but she’d spawned this wild kid always in trouble and getting arrested. Everybody knew Gerry Gavin.”

  Even Gerry Gavin’s grandmother Lilian had been a part of the family business—she was an old Polish-born bootlegger from prohibition days. “She had a little hideout behind the stool where she sat in their home,” says Wayne Angelucci. “She’d hit a spring and a door would open and out would pop a mickey of booze if you wanted to buy one.”

  “Gerry was the most feared out of all of us,” says Gary Blackburn. “He wasn’t afraid to do anything. He was the most extreme. You could fuck around with Wayne, you could fuck around with Roger even, but Gerry—I say this with him being a close friend—you had to toe the line. He could be a very dangerous dude.”

  By the late 1960s, complaints from neighbours about disruptive youths in Clark Park were on the rise. And many local residents began to voice concerns that the area was going downhill fast due to increased burglaries, vandalism, and violence.

  “My grandmother used to go to bingo nights on Commercial Drive,” Rick Stuart says. “One night she was walking home by the park when I wasn’t there. Some guys saw her and were going to steal her purse or mug her. I heard later that one of them recognized my grandmother and said, ‘Hey, don’t do it—that’s Stuart’s grandmother,’ and she made it home, oblivious to the whole thing.” There were at least some neighbours of Clark Park who enjoyed immunity from the gang, even if they didn’t realize it.

  “If you weren’t from there or around the area, you’d get beat up,” adds Gary Blackburn. “That’s the way it was then. Little kids were safe and protected by us a lot of the time, but if you weren’t part of the people at the park and found yourself around there, you’d be in trouble.”

  Vancouver police began to respond to complaints but with limited success. The very size of the park made it difficult for just a pair of officers to properly respond to an incident. “Nobody could catch you in Clark Park,” explains Blackburn. “There were too many exits. They would have to surround the park with practically 100 police cars, and you’d still find your way out. You were safe there.”

  If the gang members were in the park, they were fairly easy to spot. Many of the Clark Parkers donned red “mack” jackets. Durable, inexpensive, and warm, the mack could be worn as both a shirt and jacket. It became popular in the 1970s, and not only among East Vancouver youth. The jacket had long been worn as work clothing by loggers in the province throughout the 1950s and ’60s. When they returned from work outside the city to their family homes in East Vancouver, they left behind hand-me-downs for growing boys to wear, as they could easily and affordably be replaced.

  “The red mack jacket was pretty common with all of us,” says Bennett. “They made them green and black or red and black, but I had one that was blue, red, and black. So I stood out a little,” he says, laughing. “Everybody was always asking me where I got it. Some Main Street guys even tried to steal it off me.

  “We used to cut the sleeves off so they were even, and we’d wear our cut-off jean jackets on top,” says Mac Ryan. “We looked like quite a force. If you see thirty guys
in mack jackets coming down the street, you don’t give them too much trouble. We protected our turf. Everybody in Vancouver knew not to come to Clark Park.”

  Patches with gang logos weren’t worn with the jackets, but several Clark Parkers considered designing some. Taking a page from the motorcycle clubs who often had an M.C. abbreviation on their logos, they contemplated making Clark Park S.G. “street gang” patches.

  Clark Park would enter its most notorious period in the early 1970s. Petty vandalism, minor theft, and assaults continued, but the reach of the gang extended itself as never before. Soon headline-making civil disorder compounded fears that the chaos that the new gangs brought with them was something for which Vancouver wasn’t prepared. No longer dismissing them as teenage ruffians, police prioritized their dealings with the Clark Park gang as a criminal problem they could no longer ignore.

  Vancouver Mayor Tom Campbell (here in 1972): “When people take to beating up the police or throwing rocks at them and breaking windows, they’re nothing but punks. And it’s the punks I’m out to get rid of.”

  PHOTO: Ralph Bower, Vancouver Sun

  21 Stevie Wilson, “You Should Know: The History of the City’s Grandview-Woodland Neighbourhood.” Scout Magazine, May 23, 2013. http://scoutmagazine.ca/2013/05/23/you-should-know-the-history-of-the-citys-grandview-woodland-neighbourhood/

  22 “A Real Estate Dodge,” Montreal Gazette, June 27, 1907, 9.

  23 Richard (Mike) Steele, The First 100 Years: An Illustrated Celebration (Vancouver, BC: Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, 1988), 41.

  24 Clark v. City of Vancouver, [1904] 35 S.C.R. 121.

  25 “A Real Estate Dodge,” Montreal Gazette, June 27, 1907, 9.

  26 Rick Ouston, “It’s a ‘Frightening Name’ but Police Can Cite No Links,” Vancouver Sun, October 29, 1983.

  FIVE: GENERAL ADMISSION

  Few figures in the history of Vancouver civic politics are remembered for causing as much political discord as Mayor Tom Campbell. Campbell rose from serving as an alderman in the 1960s to replace Bill Rathie as mayor in 1966, just as the city’s counterculture was flowering. But he was not a fat-cat, septuagenarian, pre-war politician distanced from youth by a significant age gap—which might have made his conservative values understandable. Campbell became mayor at the age of just thirty-nine, though this was the era when young hippies distrusted anyone over thirty, and anyone over thirty distrusted those with long hair or a beard. Despite his relative youth, he appeared to unabashedly represent an old-guard, chamber-of-commerce mindset and believed that Vancouver’s future would be safe in the hands of local property-development interests. There was no question about his passion or sincerity, but it often seemed to get the better of him; he was not a rousing speaker, and his replies could be marred by a stammer when he was personally criticized over public policy.

  Campbell would seemingly spend his final term as mayor—and whatever political capital he had—with an axe to grind. He was repeatedly at odds with not only the city’s significant population of young people, but entire neighbourhoods. He attempted to shut down the weekly counterculture newspaper The Georgia Straight, championed proposals that would have brought a freeway through Chinatown, backed the proposed demolition of the historic Carnegie Centre building, and supported the construction of a luxury hotel at the entrance to Stanley Park. Campbell lashed out at anyone who failed to support his development plans, labelling them “Maoists, pinkos, left wingers and hamburgers.”27 (Campbell apparently defined a hamburger to mean anyone without a high school education.) He once claimed that any development proposal scuttled by city council would mean a victory for the Communist Party of Canada.28 Many regarded him as a publicity hound who would pose for any photo as long as it raised his or what he considered the city’s profile. Today, history does not remember Campbell kindly. Generations of civic historians will continue to wince at the photo of the smiling face of Tom “Terrific” sitting in a bulldozer wearing a hardhat, celebrating the demolition of historic buildings including the Lyric Theatre—the original ornate Vancouver Opera House, built in 1889—in order to usher in the Pacific Centre mall complex.

  Tom Campbell (manning a bulldozer in 1972) once claimed that any city development proposal scuttled by city council would mean a victory for Communism.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Sun

  In a famous interview with the CBC on the steps of the Vancouver courthouse, Campbell addressed the arrests of hippies who’d been charged with loitering in that same spot. In a lengthy statement delivered in a tone tinged with disgust, he called out barefoot hippies, lazy louts, draft dodgers, and parasites who had come to Vancouver, as well as the youth counterculture as a whole. “We’ve got a major problem facing the city of Vancouver,” he told the CBC. “We’ve got a scum community’ who are organized … These people don’t deserve any support. I think the support should go to our good youth, our Boy Scouts, the organizations in town—the church, the decent children… I’ll show you good, decent, clean citizens that need help,” he continued. “The majority of us are decent, hard-working people … What would happen if our country continued this way? Within the next two generations, there wouldn’t be a country. And if these young people do get their way, they will destroy Canada, and from what I hear across the world, they will destroy the world … The fact that our youth are a part of it, it’s decaying and it’s rotten.”29

  Vancouver police surveillance photo of a hippie “Be-In” at Stanley Park in the 1970s.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, P01782

  Today, Campbell is regarded as a somewhat cartoonish figure for his stance against Vancouver hippies and their contribution to the moral decline of Vancouver, but it’s easy to forget that many citizens at the time agreed with him. Many—especially older Vancouverites in the late 1960s and early ’70s—looked on any bearded or longhaired youths as suspicious dope-fiends, dropouts, or radicals.

  While Campbell began his diatribes against the hippies who had infested Vancouver, he would soon shift his target to youth gangs. Police and the public also began to notice that the park gangs weren’t just causing trouble around their immediate turf, but had shown up all over the city and become a general threat. “We didn’t just hang around the park,” admits Bradley Bennett. “We’d go all over the city. But there was no sitting down at a big boardroom table and saying, ‘What’s our plan tonight? What are were going to do?’ We were never that organized.” And on many nights, aimless and looking for somewhere to go, the gang could show up anywhere, and often in the most unlikely of places.

  One weekend in February 1970, Bennett and several other Clark Parkers attended the annual Variety Club telethon at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre where actor Leonard Nimoy was a celebrity guest host. There were no Trekkies among the gang, nor was there a plan for a daring raid to steal from the cash donation boxes. The twenty-four-hour-long event was simply a way to stay out all night and misbehave.

  “We’d all gone down there and got stoned on acid,” Bennet recalls. “You can imagine what it’s like being in the middle of something like a telethon on LSD. But then we saw these other guys in leather jackets, and we realized there was a bunch of Riley Park gang guys there as well. It’s really easy to get confused on acid—you think, ‘I think those guys are gonna get us, we should kick their ass first’ sort of thing.” Seated in the studio audience, Clark Parker Paul Melo got into a dust-up with one of the Riley Park gang members, and a fight broke out in the middle of the broadcast. All of them got kicked out of the theatre, but they laughed like hyenas on the way out the door.

  Given their behaviour, it’s rare to find anyone who can recall the Clark Parkers being invited guests anywhere. A fight was almost always expected to take place, whether the gang showed up to crash a university frat party or a high school house party at some residence on the west side where the parents were out of town. These were opposite worlds colliding that exploded the moment the gang entered the front door.

  They were al
so rarely welcomed as guests to counterculture events in town. While the hippies might have shared the Clark Parkers’ general anti-authoritarianism and interest in getting stoned, peace and love didn’t necessarily extend to the gang. “We heard about some party on 4th Avenue near Granville Island. So about two or three carloads of us headed down there,” explains Rick Stuart. “Some of our girlfriends were with us too, and we just showed up to enjoy ourselves, have a few pops, and hang out. Well, I guess these hippies didn’t like the cut of our jibs—maybe mackinaws weren’t the fashion, and the problem was we didn’t have tie-died shirts? But sure as shit, some fight starts breaking out and we’re throwing guys through windows. It was crazy. Doors were getting ripped off their hinges. We tore that joint up bad, and took off before the police showed up.” The hippie Be-Ins taking place in Stanley Park in the late 1960s where hippies played music, blew bubbles, smoked pot, and danced barefoot in the mud, were also a draw for curious Clark Parkers. But when the gatherings turned into political rallies—something that the gang had little interest in—it further differentiated and distanced the greasers from the more socially conscious hippies.

  By the beginning of 1970s, the gang’s reputation for causing trouble was beginning to make headlines. And the police had noticed that the Clark Parkers had been at a number of notorious city battles. “Punk Gangs Take Over English Bay” was the July 16, 1970, front-page headline of The Province, reporting on the week-long Sea Festival. The free annual festival attracted thousands of peaceful crowds to English Bay during the summer for live entertainment as well as the legendary bathtub races. During the 1970 event, however, police had to deal with instances of violence and vandalism—on one evening alone, ten people were injured and thirty arrested—that marred several nights of the event, forcing the cancellation of some of the outdoor street dances, which had become focal points for the disturbances. One night, thirty-six members of the Vancouver police riot squad were dispatched to the festival.