The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  “I pulled up, and there were two young patrolmen who were checking him up out—they busted him for a little bit of heroin. He was looking pretty rough. So I went over to him and said, ‘Hi Bob, do you remember me? It’s Brian Honeybourn.’

  “‘Hi Brian,’ he said.

  “‘Are you going to be ok?’ I asked him.

  “‘Yeah, I’ll be alright,’ Wadsworth said.

  “I moved to walk away, and Wadsworth turned, saying, ‘Hey Brian, I hope you had a good life.’

  “I said, ‘You too, Bob. There’s a lot of water under the bridge.’”

  Robert Wadsworth was one among many in the Clark Park set who found themselves getting deeper into serious drugs in the years after 1972. “Hash, weed, and booze had always been the thing with us,” says Mac Ryan. “But by around 1975 or ’76, the other shit started coming in.’

  “I first tried heroin when I was fifteen,” says Bradley Bennett. “But by the time I was seventeen, I was using it more regularly.” Heroin wasn’t difficult to find in Vancouver, and East Enders didn’t need to look far for it. While Gerry Gavin’s mother Ruth had been one of the most well-known heroin dealers in East Van, she refused to sell to any of her son’s friends. More often than not, Bennett went to known locations where dealers hung out, some of whom even operated brazenly out of restaurants on Granville Street in the mid-1970s.

  Bradley Bennett, 2016.

  PHOTO: Erik lversen

  “There was a diner right across the street from the Austin Hotel called the Chick and Bull Restaurant. There were dealers who were regulars there. Another restaurant seemed to be just a front. The owner sold heroin from behind the counter. You’d go in and ask for a ‘super-deluxe chicken dinner’ or something like that—this plate that wasn’t on the menu but sounded like it was—and you’d get a cap of junk for it,” says Bennett.

  Bennett had been on probation from a halfway house when he began working at a downtown gas station. When he realized he wasn’t making enough money to make his car and insurance payments and support his heroin habit, he started to supplement his income by “pumping gas”—robbing gas stations with two other accomplices from Clark Park. “It was really easy back then. I had the car, and we’d drive out to Burnaby or New Westminster to do the rounds. You could get about sixty dollars from each holdup. There would be three of us, so we’d split it three ways, and we’d do three a night. Sixty dollars was more than enough to keep you going. One night, I had to work at my job at the gas station when the other guys wanted me to drive them someplace. I told them I couldn’t leave the station, so they just decided to rob me and save themselves a trip, and they just cut me in later.”

  Bradley Bennett’s Oakalla mug shot.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Bradley Bennett

  Eventually Bennett and the others were caught and arrested, and he was sent back to jail. The sentence for the string of gas station robberies was two years less a day in the Haney Correctional Institute. Bennett recalls that it was an unpleasantly long separation from his new wife Irene, whom he’d married just before turning twenty-one. But Bennett had always been capable of capitalizing on circumstances—legally or illegally—and this time, he made the best of a bad situation. Haney Correctional maintained a full trade and technical school so inmates might learn a trade while they did their time. “You could take welding, auto-body, butchering, barbering, or automotive mechanics. You could pick whatever you wanted or, like Gerry Gavin, who was in there with me then, you could just push a broom and swing a mop. He had no interest in furthering his education or anything like that; he just wanted to do what he wanted to do.”

  On the recommendation of a teacher at Haney, Bennett signed up for a heavy-duty mechanics course. By the time he finished his sentence with a mechanics certificate, he was able to find well-paid work at heavy-industry job sites. Today, Bennett is surely the most well-travelled Clark Parker. The skills he learned in jail would take him all over Canada and even as far as Libya and Mongolia where he managed the maintenance of heavy equipment and diesel engines.

  Noticing that many of his friends from the old neighbourhood hadn’t survived to grow older, he also quit doing recreational drugs many years ago. Now aged sixty-two, he and Irene live in the south central interior of BC and recently celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary. Like Gary Blackburn, he often remembers those of his Clark Park friends and acquaintances who were killed, overdosed, or simply died before their time.

  “I always knew when I was doing something wrong. People who say, ‘I was brought up in a broken home, I was abused, I never got any toys for Christmas’—fuck you. I made a conscious decision—am I going to steal it or not? Is that wrong? You’re goddamn right it was, but I wanted it. I did it because I wanted money and I didn’t want to work. At the time, it all seemed normal. I look back now, and [I see that] it was completely crazy,” he says. “A lot of the stuff I did I’m not proud of. When you get older, your way of thinking changes. Back then, that’s just what you did. We were just having a good time getting into trouble. You never thought about the consequences or the problems you were causing.”

  He’s pleased about where his life has taken him, and it’s evident that many of his old friends from Clark Park admire him for turning his life around and learning a useful trade that served him well when he got out. “Heavy-duty mechanics pays really well. I made more money working in that job than I ever did working as a crook—and it was a lot easier!”

  By adulthood, Roger Daggittt developed into even more of a physical force than he’d been as a teenager. Years of dedicated weightlifting, both during stints in jail and on the outside, enabled him to break lifting and benchpress records in local gyms. Daggittt worked as a bouncer at the Biltmore Hotel pub and later became a professional wrestler under the name “Buddy Knox.”

  Described as the toughest man in East Vancouver, Wayne Angelucci “trained for the [“So You Think You Can Fight?”] event by running up and down the hill on 1st Avenue off Commercial Drive every day.”

  PHOTO: John Denniston

  In the late 1970s, Daggittt showed up as a competitor in “So You Think You Can Fight?”, a local boxing competition held at Vancouver’s PNE Gardens, home to amateur boxing. The fights attracted a motley assortment of nightclub bouncers, loggers, bikers, and roustabout bruisers of varying fighting ability from East Vancouver to Williams Lake who travelled to compete for the $2,000 in prize money. Wayne Angelucci also entered into a competition in Vancouver, and Bradley Bennett participated in a match held in Kelowna, BC: “I didn’t compete in Vancouver,” Bennett says. “I didn’t want to get matched up with [Daggittt and Angelucci]!”

  Among the beer-bellied truckers and bad-tempered longshoremen who filled the ranks of the competition, Daggittt was known as a colourful competitor who liked to punch and head-butt lockers in the change room between bouts. In the ring, he employed a bit of the aggressive showmanship that would serve him well as a professional wrestler. His immense energy, whether it was an act meant to intimidate or part of his real personality, scared even seasoned fighters. Daggittt’s evident rage would sometimes get the better of him, and he’d be beaten by more strategic boxers. However, he fought to the finals, losing against Gordy Racette, then a young boxer who would become a BC heavyweight legend. Racette later said, “I suppose that fight put me on the map … as no one believed I could ever win [against Roger Daggittt]”67 Later, Daggittt even squared off with his old VPD nemesis John Flaten from the H-Squad when both men competed in a local arm-wrestling tournament. But after Flaten insulted Daggittt, the ensuing war of words apparently broke out into a shoving match, and security guards had to separate the two giants.

  Daggittt also continued his involvement in the Vancouver criminal underworld as “muscle” for Gerry Gavin. A new generation of police learned the name Roger Daggittt from a series of assaults and crimes for which he was arrested and jailed in the 1980s. “Roger sure didn’t like jail that much,” says Mouse Williamson, recallin
g a period when Daggittt was in Oakalla with him. “It wasn’t so much the fact that he was being held in prison, it was because there wasn’t enough food to eat, and he was still trying to maintain his protein intake and weight-lift as much as he could, even in jail.”

  In the 1980s, Daggittt became an enforcer and debt collector, acting as an independent operator who worked for anyone would pay him—including Hells Angels associates. One of these was a quick-tempered local stockbroker named Ray Ginetti, who’d been a financial advisor and money launderer for biker clients and for the Russian organized-crime figures who began to emerge in Vancouver at that time. Ginetti had been in a number of public fights (including one with actor Sean Penn) and had come to believe that he needed a bodyguard, so he hired Daggittt.

  Police believe that when the Russian mafia apparently ripped off the Hells Angels in a $250,000 cocaine deal in May 1990, Ginetti’s partnership with the Russians proved fatal. On May 9, 1990, Ginetti’s wife opened a closet in their West Vancouver home to find her husband’s body. He’d been shot once in the back of the head. A Cuban-American career criminal named Jose Raul Perez-Valdez was later convicted of the murder, but he claimed that Daggittt had hired him to do it. Daggittt never had to answer for the crime.68

  In his day, he might have been one of the most feared Clark Park gang members and enforcers in the Vancouver underworld, but Daggittt came from an era of brass knuckles and bike chains. Now he was running with—and against—some serious organized-crime operators who did their enforcing with bullets. On October 6, 1992, Roger Daggitt, sat with his eighteen-year-old son over beers, watching strippers at the Turf Hotel, a run-down strip club in the suburb of Surrey. A man approached him from behind and shot him in the head three times before he fled the bar.

  Wayne Angelucci c. 1970s.

  PHOTO: John Denniston

  Daggittt’s murder received considerable media attention. There was no mention that he’d started his criminal career in the Clark Park gang—the news reports said merely that he was “known to police.” The RCMP, who were handling the investigation, told media that although the bar where he’d been murdered was busy at the time, witnesses were not immediately forthcoming with a description of the shooter. Some speculated that he’d been targeted because of his connection to Ginetti.

  “I wasn’t very surprised when it happened,” says Bradley Bennett, who first heard about the shooting on the news. “Roger very likely killed some people himself. He never talked about what he did. He was always on his own and a loner like that. But everybody knew people hired him for certain things.” “He got involved in some wild shit,” agrees Gary Blackburn. “He forgot one of those things we all learned, which was always put your back to the wall.”

  Days after Daggittt was killed, a man from Montreal, Quebec, named Serge Robin was arrested for the murder. A professional hit man, Robin also killed a small-time cocaine dealer named Ronald Schofield and another street-level dealer named Ronald Pelletier.69 While Robin pleaded guilty at his trial in the 1990s, he refused to say who had ordered Daggittt’s murder. Robin remains in prison, and he still isn’t talking.

  Gerry Gavin continued on much the same trajectory he’d begun at Clark Park, getting drawn into more serious criminal activities as the years went by. “Gerry always swore that he would never do heroin, but he began to deal it on the side,” says Mouse Williamson. “One time, I helped him cap up a bunch of it. I told him that he had better start sticking his arm to look like he was doing heroin. When you got caught back then with heroin, if you said you had it for your own use, you’d get a lesser charge than if you were just strictly selling it. But Gerry was hanging around with some rough people then and got pulled in deeper.”

  Vancouver police remained well-acquainted with Gavin into the 1980s. “Gerry was one of those leader-of-the-pack guys,” says retired constable Al Robson. “He became a heroin trafficker just like his mother and a lieutenant to [local crime boss] Fats Robertson. Gavin was in Oakalla the same time as Robertson, and they met there.”

  “Gerry was kind of an extremist,” recalls Gary Blackburn. “He’d go on some benders—drinking, blow, too much partying. We remained friends, but I saw less and less of him around then … I think he had some enemies.”

  Maybe it would always have been difficult to imagine Gavin as a pensioner, sitting around at East Van reunions, reminiscing about old times. Many of his friends from around Clark Park had taken a step back as they got older, while he seemed to careen closer to the edge. “When Gerry died in the early 1990s, he was thirty-six,” Williamson says. “Which is a shame. He had a son, Damon, who grew up to be a great kid. Gerry was in jail and off doing his thing when Damon was growing up; he didn’t really have him around as a father as often as he should have. Gerry never had his own father around. But Damon had a really great support system of other family and friends, and we all tried to keep an eye on him. Gerry would have been really proud of the way he turned out.” “He wasn’t always around, but I remember him being a good dad when I saw him,” Damon Gavin says. “I have good memories of him. It was a sad time when he passed.”

  Other members of the Gavin clan have not been as fortunate as Damon. Gerry’s twenty-one-year-old sister Lisa Marie Gavin was strangled to death in 1980. Her body was found in an alley in East Vancouver, and her death is believed to be connected to a group of killings known as the Alley Murders, which remain unsolved. But Gerry’s mother outlived many of those who bought heroin from her, and she would also live to see the tragic deaths of her two children. Ruth Gavin died at age sixty-two in November 1993. Her death certificate stated that she had been a “Homemaker.”

  Rumours about the Clark Park gang continued for years after they’d essentially disbanded, and stories circulated throughout the 1980s and early 1990s about them showing up at house parties or storming local punk rock squats and stomping everyone in sight. The stories are difficult to verify. But if the Clark Park gang had indeed re-emerged in the 1980s, those who were described in those stories were young enough to have been the little brothers or sons of the original members. Perhaps a new generation of street hoodlums figured they could take the Clark Park name and reputation—but members of the original gang took issue. “We heard that there were these idiots who worked down at the PNE calling themselves the Clark Park gang,” says Wayne Angelucci. “A bunch of us went down and straightened them out. They were really pathetic … flashing their knives at people, bullying them. Just trash guys, and we sorted them out,” he says without further elaboration. The Clark Park gang had a brand to protect.

  The gang’s look also endured as part of their legacy. The East Van cross, with which they’d tagged many buildings, would continue to be graffitied on walls all over the city, and their trademark red mack jackets would later be adopted by many local rock bands, from Joe Keithley of DOA to Bryan Adams and others.

  After the death of Danny Teece, Mouse Williamson found himself in and out of jail for a few years, serving sentences for offences ranging from assault to running a marijuana grow-operation. Williamson spent more time in jail than others from the gang, and to survive he did his best to stay positive. “I was never ashamed to be a convict. Inside, I made the best of it so I wouldn’t have to think about the outside world,” he says. “He was a funny guy in jail,” recalls Bradley Bennett. “He even had the jail guards calling him ‘Mr Mouse.’”

  Williamson and other members of the gang all served time in Oakalla prison; it was not unlike their days in juvenile detention in that a number of Clark Parkers filled the tiers of the jail. Some even started to recruit new members, and inmates from all over BC who had never even been to Clark Park were suddenly calling themselves Clark Parkers.

  Williamson married and divorced and has six children and seven grandchildren. His eldest child, daughter Lana Williamson, admits that it wasn’t always easy growing up in East Vancouver as the child of a well-known hell-raiser. “God knows I rebelled a bit myself, thinking I knew everything, but my
father was always there for me,” she says. Like many children of the original Clark Parkers, she grew up to distrust police. When Lana was about five or six years old, police came to the Williamson home to arrest her father on an outstanding warrant. “My dad asked me to get his cigarettes. I went to the kitchen table and ran back into the living room with them, and the cop said, ‘He’s not going to need those where he’s going.’ They just dragged him out of the house right in front of my face. He wasn’t fighting them, and it wasn’t necessary to do it that way. It seemed like they had no concern about what I saw or how I took it all in. I started to cry my eyes out. I knew he wasn’t innocent, but all I saw was them being rough with my dad. It wasn’t right to act that way in front of a child. They could have handled it completely differently. From that day forward, I didn’t have much time for the police.”

  Mac Ryan and Gerry Gavin at Trout Lake in the 1980s.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Mac Ryan

  Today, Mouse Williamson lives more than 300 miles (500 km) away from Clark Park in the West Kootenay area of BC. His life is a little quieter in recent years. After his wife passed away, he considered moving back to Vancouver to be closer to some of his children and grandchildren. He has an air of dignity and charisma and a strength of character that many people who had less turbulent childhoods do not possess. He is very much at peace with himself.

  “Would I do it all again? To be honest, ninety percent of me would. I suppose that ten percent of me—that everybody has—wishes that I’d done things a little differently. I was always an observer. I learned from the way I grew up and some of the situations I found myself in. Maybe if I’d been a millionaire running some corporation from behind a desk, I would never have learned those life lessons. I would have missed a lot of things. Even the bad times were valuable. No matter where I was in life, in jail or out, I was never ashamed of who I was.”