The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  Speaking of the rioters, Oliver tersely noted: “This was a well-organized effort … And they planned to cause real trouble if they got in [the Coliseum]. Had they got inside, there would have been a holocaust.” Oliver stated that police believed there were up to five gangs involved in the riot, but Superintendent Tom Stokes would later specifically name the Clark Park gang as chiefly responsible.

  When word reached the gang that police considered them the main culprits of the riot, Bradley Bennett says the news was greeted with astonishment and laughter. “The cops blew everything out of proportion. We were never that organized. They made it sound like we co-ordinated everything. It was ridiculous.” Williamson agrees, and believes that it was likely the Youngbloods who had thrown the Molotov cocktails and smoke bombs. He insists to this day that none of the Clark Parkers attended the concert with an agenda to riot. “There were a bunch of Clark Parkers who even bought tickets and were inside when the whole thing happened. There was no agenda. It was all bullshit that we were behind the thing.”

  It seemed as if Vancouver police imagined that all the street gangs had come together that night and decided to attack the police. In truth, there had been no single faction responsible. Among the random East Enders, gate crashers, and drunken concertgoers with no gang affiliations, there were a number of gang members present, including members of the Riley Park gang, and a North Vancouver gang called the Lynn Valley Boys. But while the Clark Parkers were amused by the press attention and wore the badge of villainy with pride, some wondered why the police had been so prepared for the worst that night, with the riot squad at the ready. They were also curious why the police were so quick to accuse the Clark Parkers. Had they seen the photos in The Grape showing them with fists in the air, shouting “Power to the people”? Did the police presume they had joined forces with the Youngbloods and their Marxist revolutionary agenda? Or had complaints to police about the gang finally reached a tipping point so that they were now under greater scrutiny? How closely were they being watched?

  Two days after the riot, a CBC television news interview was held on the Coliseum plaza—the scene of the battle, days earlier. Media liaison Jack Lee of the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE), which owned the Pacific Coliseum, stated, “There is a dissident element in this city who used the Rolling Stones concert as a venue for the trouble they wanted to make and succeed in making. I think had it not been for the bravery and restraint of the Vancouver city police and of the PNE staff, there would have been a lot more property damage and human suffering. We had meetings with police later to go over what had happened, and it was very definite that these were some of the gangs that they know about from throughout the city. So these aren’t Rolling Stones fans—or what you call rock fans—these were a dissident element in the city who came to make trouble.”46

  When asked about the future of rock concerts in Vancouver, Lee said that the PNE board of directors had yet to decide. If Mayor Campbell imposed a ban, as he had publicly suggested, it would mean no large rock concerts would be booked in the city. And the PNE had the only venue large enough on which to stage them. Lee said that he knew Vancouver police were having their own meetings to discuss future strategy.

  He concluded by stating: “Instead of just rock throwing, or throwing sticks of wood, now we have Molotov cocktails—which is a different matter entirely. The police were equipped, as you saw, with riot helmets and sticks. This is little enough to defend yourself from rocks, chunks of wood, and chains, but Molotov cocktails—now we’re into a war situation.”

  Lee didn’t know how true his words were about to become.

  39 Kluckner, Vancouver Remembered, 85.

  40 Swan, A Century of Service, 114.

  41 Kurt Langmann, “You Sense That a Riot Is Brewing? Know When It’s Time to Leave,” Aldergrove Star, June 21, 2011. http://www.aldergrovestar.com/opinion/124322068.html

  42 Jamie Craig, “Stoned Young Bask in Music of the Stones,” Vancouver Sun, June 4, 1972.

  43 Scott Honeyman and Bill Bachop, “Police Battle Mob at Stones Concert As Firebombs, Rocks, Bottles Hurled,” Vancouver Sun, June 5, 1972, 1, 7.

  44 Allan Fotheringham, “Untitled Column,” Vancouver Sun, June 4, 1972.

  45 Allan Fotheringham, (untitled column), Vancouver Sun, June 5, 1972, 29.

  46 CBC Television News, Untitled film strip, dated June 5, 1972 (Vancouver, BC: CBC Vancouver Archives).

  SEVEN: THE H-SQUAD

  It was June of 1972, around the same time that a team of burglars was arrested in a botched robbery at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, and a few days after the Rolling Stones concert. In Clark Park on a warm summer night, Gerry Gavin, Roger Daggittt, Albert Hill, and a kid named Phil Benson (name changed) were all drinking beer near the top of the pathway closest to Commercial Drive. The park was empty at that hour. It was a quiet weekday night, the silence broken only by the sound of the occasional vehicle driving along Commercial. The gang joked and drank and passed around a joint. Benson, more of a hanger-on than a real member of the gang, had brought a small battery-operated radio, and its tinny speaker played music from a local rock station.

  Their conversation turned to various topics. Daggittt spoke of the Muhammad Ali fight six weeks earlier in Vancouver at the PNE where Ali had fought George Chuvalo. Gavin repeated a dirty joke that Mac Ryan had told him, and listed what he’d scored in a house burglary a few nights earlier. They listened to the music on Benson’s radio, finished off the beers, and talked of maybe stopping off at Gary Blackburn’s place on the way home. Gary’s mother was kind and had always been okay with letting her son’s friends crash at their family home rather than stay in the park all night. As Gary’s sister Gail noted, “If we were going to drink and get up to no good, she’d rather have us do it at home, where she could keep an eye on us.”

  In a break in the conversation, Hill walked away from the others to urinate behind one of the nearby trees. As he zipped up his jeans, he turned around and saw a man in the dark standing several feet away, staring at him. “Jesus Christ—what are you doing?” Hill asked. “You watching me piss or something?!”

  The man said nothing and continued to stare at Hill. The others, overhearing their friend’s alarm, quickly walked over to see what was happening. The man stood partly in silhouette, lit unevenly by the street lamps off the Drive, which shone into the park through breaks in the tall trees. He was wearing cowboy boots and a corduroy jacket.

  “What’s your fucking problem, man?” Hill demanded.

  The man moved slowly a few feet forward, stepping more into the light. He appeared older than them, perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties, and had a medium build. Benson turned off the radio he was holding, suddenly dropping the standoff into silence.

  “We’ve met before,” the man said casually. Hill looked around to see who he was looking at, but he seemed to be looking at all of them.

  “Who the fuck are you? I don’t know you, man,” Hill said, now more angry than alarmed. “What the hell are you doing here? Get lost.”

  Benson thought he might be a Riley Parker, or because of the man’s cowboy boots, one of the guys from the Out to Lunch Bunch he’d heard about. Maybe he was from some other street gang, looking for a fight. As Gavin and Daggittt stepped forward with fists clenched, three other men came out of the darkness behind them. In a brief scuffle, they violently grabbed Daggittt and Gavin, locking their arms behind their backs. Another man darted from the trees and grabbed Hill, twisting his arms back the same way. Benson saw that they were all about the same age as the first man, but noticeably bigger, and wearing jeans and boots. One had an old army jacket on and the other an old T-shirt. Roger Daggittt, then only eighteen, was already large and strong, and it took two of the men to hold his arms back. Benson began to panic and wondered how long the men had been there watching them.

  Now, caught in the middle, he felt like he ought to run, but suddenly a firm hand on his shoulder jolted and froze him at the same tim
e. It was the first man whom Hill had encountered in the darkness, but Benson was too scared to look him directly in the face. Instead, Benson looked off to see that Gavin, who had initially put up a struggle, had also given up more quickly than Daggittt had. That’s when Benson noticed that Gavin had a revolver jabbed into the side of his ribs; the light from the street lamps reflected off the gun metal.

  “I was going to tell you to get lost, kid,” the man said to Benson. “But now I think you should stay and hear this.” Addressing the group in a measured voice, he said: “You guys have to stay out of the park now. This is our park. You understand? It’s over. Day or night. I don’t fucking care. You’re not hanging around here anymore. You got it?”

  Daggittt, Gavin, and Hill said nothing, and Benson was too scared even to move. He then noticed that there was another man who must have been keeping an eye on the front entrance of the park in case someone unexpectedly walked up the path. He now came up to join them, but stayed back a distance and kept quiet.

  A few silent moments passed. “Just so you understand … Our gang is bigger than your gang. That’s it,” the man said, then turned to walk down the hill.

  Hill was let go first, then was punched in the stomach by the man who had held him, and he fell forward. Then Daggittt was shoved away by the two men holding him. Gavin was let go last, but not before being backhanded in the head. Gavin swore and stepped forward as all of the men now walked away. One of them muttered, “Don’t fucking be here again tomorrow night,” then disappeared into the darkness of the park.

  Benson, more confused and nervous than the others, watched as Hill stood up, getting his wind back. Gavin rubbed his head and swore. And while Benson didn’t know Roger well, he looked angrier than Benson had ever seen him and made a motion to go after the men, but Gavin put out an arm to hold him back.

  No one said anything for a few moments until Benson broke the silence, nervously at first and then more insistently. “What the fuck, man? Since when did the Riley Parkers pull shit like that or bring guns with them? Right into Clark Park? What the fuck, man? Let’s go get them! They’re probably still down on Commercial!”

  “Shut up, Phil,” Gerry Gavin said, cutting him off. “That wasn’t the Riley Parkers. That was the cops.”

  Paul Stanton (name changed) woke up the day after the Rolling Stones riot to learn that many of his fellow police officers had been injured that night. Stanton himself had been off-duty that evening, and returned to his shift the following day. The riot was still very much the topic of conversation among other officers and around the police station.

  Born in Ottawa in 1946, Stanton moved to Vancouver within a year of his birth. His family settled in South Vancouver at East 41st and Argyle. “I remember when that stretch of 41st Avenue was just two lanes with ditches on each side,” he says. His father had served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and after the war, joined the VPD. Stanton attended Vancouver College, eventually following his father into the police department in 1968.

  He had a strong and athletic build and had played rugby, lacrosse, and semipro football before he became a cop. With his burliness and a beard, Stanton earned the nickname “Grizz” later in his career because of his resemblance to actor Dan Haggerty from the TV series The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams. His first beat was in Gastown in 1969. “There were a couple of beer parlours there that always had problems,” he says. “The New Fountain Hotel and the Stanley Hotel on Cordova Street had some of the roughest transvestites you’d ever seen. But overall, Gastown was pretty quiet then.” By 1971, he was posted to East Vancouver. When he got called in to assist with drug enforcement in the area, he began to see some regular faces from around Clark Park.

  In the early 1970s, heroin use was not uncommon, but cocaine was still too expensive to be seen regularly. More often, drug offences dealt with possession of LSD, methamphetamine, and most commonly, the open smoking of marijuana. Attitudes about marijuana have changed dramatically over the last several years, of course, and while its casual use is less of a priority for police today, in the early 1970s it was still a serious offence and a prosecutable crime. It was prevalent not merely at hippie Be-Ins and gatherings, but also on the streets, and certainly among the youth on Stanton’s new beat in East Vancouver.

  Stanton recalls seeing the symbol of the East Van cross. While the symbol originated in the 1940s, in East Vancouver in the 1970s it was particularly associated with east side gangs. “Nowadays, it seems almost accepted as the logo for East Vancouver,” Stanton says. “But back then it was starting to show up all over the place. We were seeing it as graffiti on walls or among people we were dealing with [who] had it as a tattoo.” Clark Park, too, became a regular focus on his beat.

  “The Park is elevated [from the street], so you couldn’t just drive by and see what was going on inside,” Stanton says. Police usually parked on the surrounding streets and walked into the park, where they’d find the gang, often at the northeast side, near the main entrance. “In the beginning we pretty much left them alone. They weren’t doing that much in the park itself, although they pretty much owned it,” he says. “But the Rolling Stones concert was considered their coming out.”

  In the days after the Rolling Stones riot, Vancouver city council, citing security concerns, denied the permits for an upcoming Led Zeppelin concert at the Coliseum. The tour promoters were forced to book an additional date in Seattle that honoured the Vancouver tickets, and Led Zeppelin fans had to drive three hours south across the border to attend the show.

  In addition, the city granted Vancouver police an additional budget of $21,000 for newer and more protective riot squad gear, and police began more focused training on crowd control. Mayor Tom Campbell personally lobbied for the riot squad to be equipped with longer riot sticks. They got new, thirty-six-inch (92-cm) police batons made from hickory wood to replace their old twenty-four-inch sticks. As far as the city was concerned, the Clark Park gang had nearly upended the Rolling Stones concert, forced the cancellation of Led Zeppelin’s, and now required police to be armed and ready for them as never before. The riot served as a wakeup call.

  As well, Paul Stanton was discreetly approached by supervisors to see if he’d be interested in moving to a special squad to deal with the park situation, and in particular the Clark Park gang. Sanctioned not only at the highest levels of the Vancouver Police Department, but according to former squad member Howard Corbett (name changed), also approved by BC Attorney General Leslie Peterson, the unit was given the responsibility to go after local youth gangs. They were apparently authorized to do so not only through criminal prosecution, but by whatever means it took to eradicate the gangs.

  It is not known who conceived of the special squad. It wasn’t likely the brainchild of then Police Chief John Fisk. “Fisk was a chief constable who had never walked a beat or rattled a doorknob,” recalls legendary CKNW crime beat reporter George Garrett, who in a decades-long career, interviewed every Vancouver police chief who served in the latter half of the century. “He had been the top civilian employee and was promoted to chief when Ralph Booth retired.” As an administrator, Fisk was not exceptionally well-liked by beat policemen; a stickler for etiquette, he insisted that constables wear their hats even while driving in their patrol cars.

  A more likely origin might have been Police Superintendent Tom Stokes. Stokes had joined the police department at the age of twenty-three in 1939 and rose through the ranks to become deputy chief. “It was different on the beat then. If a cop got into trouble, people would come to his aid,” Stokes recalled in a 1975 interview. “It’s different now. I don’t know why. The city’s more dangerous for everyone. Drugs have a lot to do with it. And the whole mentality of the public seems changed. The courts are too lenient. They bend over backwards for a criminal.”47

  George Garrett recalls that Stokes was well regarded within the department. “Tom had an expression he often used” he says. “He called many guys ‘pally,’ as in pal. I knew him wh
en he was a staff sergeant in the investigation division, sometimes working four-to-midnight shifts. I recall a spate of hold-ups that took place in the 1950s. I heard Stokes say to his guys, ‘That sounds like so-and-so,’ and name a suspect. He told his guys to pick him up. I can’t recall if they got the right man, but it showed me that he knew how some criminals likely operated.”

  If there was opposition to the squad being formed, it is unrecorded. Some may have disagreed with the broad powers given to the squad, but there was a general feeling amongst not only the department but the public as well that it was no longer enough for police to simply pick up the offenders and have them taken to juvenile detention. The youthful gang members were becoming adults as well as graduating to more serious crimes. Even if the Clark Parkers had not diabolically plotted the 1972 Rolling Stones riot, hadn’t been the main instigators behind the chaos of the Rock and Roll Revival concert in 1971, even never been the culprits behind the nightly violence that interrupted the Sea Festival in 1970, something had to be done about the burglaries, fights, vandalism, arsons, and general disruption caused throughout the East End. “There were a lot of people living in fear in the [Clark Park] neighbourhood,” said Howard Corbett. “People were being brutalized there, either verbally or physically. Their homes were being broken into, there were assaults and arsons going on.” Because so many police had been injured during the Rolling Stones riot, they decided to focus on the activities of the Clark Park gang, and they could no longer employ half-measures.