The Last Gang in Town

by Chapman, Aaron;

  Haney Correctional Institute in 1976.

  PHOTO: Dan Scott, Vancouver Sun

  Williamson is proud of his accomplishments in later life, particularly after he took more of an interest in his Métis heritage. He has spent much of the last twenty years going to schools as a volunteer to teach kids how to create Métis-style carvings and talking sticks. He’s also helped to organize a restorative justice program in cooperation with the city of Grand Forks in the Kootenays. “I suppose it’s my way of giving back a bit,” he says. “When we grew up, we were told that we were poor, from the wrong side of the tracks, and after a while you don’t try to do better when you can. It took me a long time to figure that out.”

  If the H-Squad didn’t drive out the Clark Parkers, the rising cost of living in Vancouver certainly did. Rick Stuart and Wayne Angelucci still live in BC, but Mac Ryan is the only Clark Park gang member still living in East Vancouver. On a pleasant summer afternoon in 2016, he stops in Clark Park to sit on one of the park benches. As he looks around, the memories flood back. “I do feel bad for all the poor neighbours we must have driven crazy, raising hell out here,” he says and laughs apologetically, then turns wistful. “I remember sitting right here forty years ago and saying to the others, ‘Do you think any of us will live to see thirty?’ Christ, not many of us did … People got murdered, had car accidents, did drugs—there aren’t many of us left.”

  Mac Ryan, 2016.

  PHOTO: Erik Iversen

  Ryan continued his wild ways long after the Clark Park era. In the mid-1980s, he ran a profitable marijuana grow-op in a residential home in East Vancouver. One night as he walked home from a pub, he caught a whiff of marijuana. “It got stronger and stronger as I neared my house, and I thought to myself, Man, somebody else must have a grow-op in this neighbourhood too, or they’re having a hell of a party somewhere. But as I turned the corner, I suddenly saw police all over my yard with flood lamps, pulling out all my plants, and I realized that the smell had come from my place!” Ryan fled the scene and crashed at a friend’s house for a few days. One morning, his friend showed him the newspaper. It had Ryan’s photo in a Crime Stoppers ad; he was one of “Vancouver’s Most Wanted.” Ryan turned himself in.

  After spending time in jail throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Ryan now leads a quieter life and works “here and there, staying out of trouble … I used to joke around that I had a tattoo that said, ‘Death Before Employment.’ But I work every once and awhile digging ditches. I was at a job site once and a guy asked me, ‘Do you know how to use a shovel?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve hit a few people with one.’ I made the foreman laugh, and they took a liking to me.”

  Ryan remains sentimental about his Clark Park days. Like many of the surviving Clark Parkers, he doesn’t focus on the criminal activities they participated in as much as he remembers the friendships and camaraderie. Coming from poverty and troubled homes, they found a family of friends who supported each other when, in many cases, their own families weren’t able to.

  Ryan tries to visit Danny Teece’s grave once a year. Last time, he bumped into the cemetery groundskeeper who told him there had been rumours that the Clark Park gang snuck into the cemetery at night and did drug deals there and that there were drugs stashed underneath Teece’s tombstone. “I had to tell him it never happened.”

  Rick Stuart (here in 2016) moved to Quesnel, BC, where for many years he worked as a first-aid attendant at a pulp mill. “Instead of shit-kicking people, I ended up as the guy who patched them up. It’s pretty strange how life turns out.”

  PHOTO: Erik Iversen

  “There’s too many people here now,” he says of East Van. “There’s more coming. It doesn’t feel like my town anymore. The city’s gone now—it’s changed so much.”

  The Clark Park Gang was not the last gang in town, but it was perhaps the last of its kind. By the mid-1970s, the park gangs had all but disbanded and were no longer a concern to police. Key gang members who didn’t recognize the winds of change were like the dinosaurs before the comet hit. That comet was the rise of a new generation of Vancouver youth gangs.

  As immigration patterns shifted, Vancouver became more multicultural and so did its crime problems. New Asian gangs such as the Lotus and Red Eagles, Latino gangs like Los Diablos, and Indo-Canadian gangs such as the Dosanjh brothers emerged in the 1990s. In Chinatown, traditional Asian gangs had focused on gambling, but the younger generation of Vietnamese youth gangs displayed a propensity for gun violence in public.

  Where the Clark Park gang members had prided themselves on their ability to fight, the new gangs preferred guns to bats, bike chains, or bare knuckles. Extortions and kidnappings superseded less profitable household burglaries or fisticuffs over street turf. Vancouver’s new gangs were motivated by the considerable profits to be made in the international drug trade. Newer gangs, such as the Red Scorpions, the United Nations gang, and Independent Soldiers, have been involved in prominent murders, especially in the suburbs of Vancouver.

  Danny “Mouse” Williamson, 2016.

  PHOTO: Erik Iversen

  “We had a code back then,” says Mouse Williamson. “We stuck together, but it wasn’t money that brought us together like these new gangs of kids that have no brains, just killing each other over greed.” The old-fashioned notions of gang solidarity and brotherhood that were taken seriously by the Clark Park gang weren’t valued by the new gangs, for whom the park-gang era was as old fashioned as the zoot suit era had been to the Clark Parkers.

  While many Clark Parkers grew out of the scene, got straight jobs, or moved away, others continued their criminal exploits. Police believe that several graduated into membership of the Hells Angels, which officially established itself in Vancouver in 1983. However, many Clark Park gang members prefer not to say just who from their old ranks had joined the motorcycle gang. A strong respect for each other’s privacy remains tantamount, as does discretion. While some Clark Parkers remain on friendly terms with the Hells Angels (they are, if nothing else, ‘old friends from the neighbourhood”), none of them advertise it.

  A reunion at Clark Park, 2016: Danny “Mouse” Williamson, Bradley Bennett, Rick Stewart, Gary Blackburn, Mack Ryan, and Wayne Angelucci.

  PHOTO: Erik Iversen

  There’s barely a trace of 1970s Vancouver that still exists today. The city’s downtown is now filled with residential towers of concrete and glass, and industrial districts such as Yaletown or False Creek are now also densely residential. The old decrepit homes of East Vancouver that had little value in the 1970s are now occupied by affluent owners; their refurbished character homes are spotlighted in city architectural history and heritage walking tours.

  The Juvenile Detention Home was demolished in 1976. Both Oakalla prison and the District, the VPD substation in Oakridge, closed in the early 1990s and were replaced by new housing developments. Even the police have left their station, Vancouver’s main police headquarters since the 1950s, at 312 Main Street. In late 2016, the city-owned building will re-open as an office building.

  But it’s not just the buildings that have changed in Vancouver. The generational divide that separated the law-and-order generation from the counterculture youth no longer exists. While a “smoke-in” turned into the Gastown riots in 1971, the annual 4/20 festival (marijuana rally) now attracts thousands of people. Where police once charged into the pot-smoking crowd with nightsticks, they now stand on the sidelines, smiling and shaking hands with festival-goers.

  Clark Park is still there, in Vancouver’s East End. But it’s nearly impossible to picture it as a former haunt of a neighbourhood street gang. There’s no late-night trouble in Clark Park these days. If you do enter the park late at night, you’re more likely to encounter a dog walker than a threatening gang member. Although some say that Vancouver was better in the 1970s, the demise of the park gangs and the chaos they brought with them is one change for the better.

  Mac Ryan, however, misses some of the grit that the neighb
ourhood used to have. As he leaves Clark Park in the late afternoon, neighbours with frolicking children enjoy sundown there. Ryan heads down Commercial Drive to Broadway, where he passes some young men wearing “Lords of Gastown” shirts made by a local clothing company whose name recalls the park gang era. Their trendy, ’70s street-gang-inspired clothing line allows wearers to adopt gang fashions without paying the price of gang membership. Ryan keeps walking and doesn’t notice them, and they have no idea that the older man they pass is the real thing.

  A couple who look like they’re on their way to a yoga class leave the Starbucks carrying a pair of designer coffees and hurry past Ryan. Just then, an early-’70s brown Chevy Impala heading southbound on Commercial slowly passes. It’s a little rusted and not in mint condition, but as it heads up the street, you can hear the Rolling Stones “Rocks Off” from the 1972 Exile on Main Street album blasting from the car’s open windows. Mac Ryan doesn’t get a good look at the driver, but he smiles as the car drives past. Perhaps no matter how much the neighbourhood has changed, there are still a couple of greasers left in East Vancouver tonight.

  PHOTO: Julian Fairfax Russell, 2016

  66 Independent Investigations Office of BC, http://www.iiobc.ca

  67 Gordy Racette, “The Story,” http://www.gordyracette.com/the-story.html

  68 Neal Hall, Hell to Pay: Hells Angels vs. The Million Dollar Rat (Mississauga, ON: John Wiley & Sons Canada, 2011), 55–57.

  69 Jerry Langton, The Notorious Bacon Brothers: Inside Gang Warfare on Vancouver Streets (Mississauga, ON: John Wiley & Sons Canada, 2013), 33–34.

  AFTERWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s said that history is written by the winners who make certain that only the most tourist-friendly version is remembered and represented—and for municipal histories, the winners are often found in boardrooms or on chambers of commerce. Thieves and policemen are rarely consulted, but they offer a unique perspective that other citizens are seldom privy to. We can learn more about our city’s forgotten history and mythology by looking not only at its tycoons and traders, but also its cops and robbers. That’s what I’ve presented here: history told by voices often unheard.

  I must acknowledge many debts for this book. First to everyone at Arsenal Pulp Press: Brian Lam, Robert Ballentyne, Cynara Geissler, and especially editor Susan Safyan and production manager Oliver McPartlin who took to the task as if both the H-Squad and Clark Park gang themselves were hot on their trail, working under the once-again tight deadlines to finish. The text is immeasurably improved by their attentions.

  The Last Gang in Town began in part when I wrote an article in the Vancouver Courier titled “Gangs of Vancouver” that detailed the history of some city gangs going back 100 years. It included a focus on the “park gang” era and connected it to issues of modern gang crime problems. The well-received piece came out when a number of shocking gang-related daytime shootings were taking place right in the city. For the first time since the era of the park gangs, Vancouver’s citizens were thinking about the very public presence of gangs in their midst, and this led me to believe that a book on the untold history of this era would be of interest.

  The publication of the Courier story eventually made it possible for me to meet some of the original Clark Park gang from the 1970s. Through in-person interviews, email, and phone calls over the course of much of 2015, I began to learn more of their stories. Interviews with former gang members and retired police revealed the fascinating thread of events from 1972 told in this book.

  My thanks go to Wayne Angelucci, Gary Blackburn, Bradley Bennett, Mark Owens, Mac Ryan, Rick Stuart, Robert Wadsworth, and Danny “Mouse” Williamson for telling me their stories. I am grateful for their time, trust, and candid discussions as I got to meet and know them over the course of the year. I have attempted neither to glamourize nor criticize the gang. They speak as participants from a different time and therefore a different city—and they speak only for themselves. They are not the only surviving Clark Park gang members—efforts to reach others were made—but it is remarkable, considering the lives they once led, that they are still alive to tell their stories when so many others are not.

  Like every history writer in Vancouver, I give daily thanks for the City of Vancouver Archives and its peerless staff. I must also note my great thanks to Kristin Hardie, curator at the Vancouver Police Museum, who trawled the museum’s photo collection to discover a number of surveillance and arrest photos—many never previously published—which coincidentally documented pivotal events in the Clark Park gang story, from the Rolling Stones riot to the Fraser Street party arrests. She had a hunch about several photos, and I was therefore able to discover that some of the same Clark Park gang members whom I’d been interviewing were captured by police flashbulbs more than forty years earlier.

  My gratitude also goes to Sara Wotherspoon at the Vancouver Police Information and Privacy Unit for her diligence in tracking down the difficult-to-find, decades-old items I required. The photos of the investigation on the night of the Teece shooting are presented here for the first time.

  My deep thanks and appreciation go to Sandra Boutilier and Carolyn Soltau at the Pacific Newspaper Group Library whose own detective work provided many images from the Vancouver Sun and Province throughout the book.

  I am grateful to Jennifer Rosen who read and commented on the early draft, much to the advantage of the final text.

  I am particularly fortunate in recent years to have been welcomed by a number of retired Vancouver police constables who have shared their stories—either on the record or off—as well as benefiting from their help with introductions and information, all of which have been invaluable. These encounters have been significant in helping me to understand the nature of policing in the 1970s and what an extraordinarily different world it was for the average police constable in a low-tech world. My thanks to retired constables Al Arsenault, Vern Campbell, Wayne Cope, Chris Graham, Bill Harkema, Esko Kajander, Grant MacDonald, Al Robson, and Paul Stanton (name changed by request), as well as retired chief constables Bob Stewart and Jim Chu.

  There are a few surviving members of the H-Squad, including one constable who was promoted as high as deputy chief, who all declined to be interviewed for this book. Unless those interviewed agreed to use their names (as in the case of retired constable Jim Maitland) or they are now deceased (as with Joe Cliffe and John Flaten), I have declined to publish their names. Some gang members preferred to have been left out of the story; surely the same consideration and respect should be afforded to those on the other side.

  I must certainly express my gratitude to retired constable Brian Honeybourn for trusting me to tell his story about the remarkable night in 1972 when he suddenly went from being a young policeman on night shift to—in an instant—being thrust under the glaring scrutiny of the news media. This is the first time he has spoken publicly in detail about the Teece shooting. During the course of our interviews, he was candid, honest, and respectful. While the shooting was an undeniably significant incident, I learned that Brian Honeybourn was involved in many newsworthy events during a long and remarkable police career.

  Honeybourn also entrusted me with his personal archive of court and police documents, court transcripts, witness subpoenas, newspaper articles, and personal correspondence during the investigation and preliminary inquiry into the death of Danny Teece, all which he has kept for more than four decades. It would have been difficult for me to have accurately told the story without access to official original documents. With the publication of this book, as per his request, those documents will be donated to the Vancouver Police Museum and will be available for public review.

  Lastly, I must thank a number of others for various leads, helpful advice, and support: John Atkin, Squire Barnes, the Belshaw Gang, Rebecca Blissett, Gyles Brandreth, Mike Culpepper, Tracey Davis, John Denniston, Danny Filippone, constable Randy Fincham, Damon Gavin, the Honourable Judge Thomas Gove, Fred Herzog and Sophie Brodovitch
at the Equinox Gallery, constable Toby Hinton, Rich Hope, Ken Johns, Verdon Jotie at Vancouver Provincial Court, Michael Kluckner, Jak King, Grant Lawrence, John Mackie, Laurie Mercer, Glen Mofford, Malcolm Parry, RCMP constable Franco Pirritano, Vince Ricci, Red Robinson, Erika Rodela, Rebecca Russell, Lani Russwurm and his Past Tense blog, Jason Vanderhill, Vaughn Worden, Lana Williamson, the Rolling Stones, the Clash, and everyone at Live Nation Concerts and the Vancouver Courier.

  Today, Vancouver very much prides itself on its natural beauty and aims to become the greenest, cleanest city in North America—concepts far from the minds of those who lived in Vancouver in the early 1970s. Vancouver was grittier then—not the tragic grit still seen in the Downtown Eastside, but a tough, industrial, blue-collar grit that spread from Clark Park to Dunbar. Vancouver then had its Mean Streets. The reader may decide for themselves if Vancouver is now better off without them.

  REFERENCES

  BOOKS AND ARTICLES

  “4 Policemen Hurt in Gang Attacks by Young Hoodlums.” Vancouver Sun, February 25, 1963.

  “7 Arrested on Drug Conspiracy Charges.” The Province, June 24, 1972.

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

  Arnason, Al. “Shot Kills Youth.” The Province, November 29, 1972.

  Bachop, Bill, and Honeyman, Scott. “Police battle mob at Stones’ concert as firebombs, rocks, bottles hurled.” Vancouver Sun, June 5, 1972.

  Barnholden, Michael. Reading the Riot Act: A Brief History of Riots in Vancouver. Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2005.