Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Guindon was often accompanied by Carmen Neal, a Native ironworker, and Reg Hawk, a legless accountant who rode a three-wheeler motorcycle converted from a milk delivery vehicle. The plastic ghost cartoon crests on the backs of their jackets gave off an otherworldly glow from the street lights and headlights. “They’d have scarves around their necks.… I just thought it was the coolest fucking thing I’d ever seen.”

  Sometimes Campbell would see Neal riding in the early hours of the morning, fearless and alone, on guard against a rival club, the Black Diamond Riders. “Carmen Neal was a very proud guy. He rode through Oshawa like a sentry. He set up his Harley so that flames would come out of the pipes when he turned it on. He’d rev it up and flames would come out of the stacks on one side. At two in the morning I’d look out and see Carmen patrolling the downtown.”

  Guindon felt something special too as he rode down the street at the front of the line of Phantom Riders as if on some unspoken mission. He had grown up in the city’s gut, helping his father peddle moonshine from their apartment in the back of a store at 502 Simcoe Street South, which was later levelled to make way for a shopping complex. Guindon’s dad alternated hours of operation with another bootlegger so the city would never have to be without cheap booze. Often his father overindulged himself, leaving Bernie and his brother Jack (Banana Nose) in charge. For this, the Guindon boys were paid twenty-five cents each, enough for a bottle of pop and a seat at the movies, where Guindon particularly enjoyed Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger and Hopalong Cassidy. “I wanted to be a cowboy,” he told me when we met.

  Sometimes customers would urge Bernie and Jack to fight each other for their drunken entertainment. Jack was ten months older, but Bernie was clearly the better fighter. “That’s how I learned to fight. They’d get me and my brother to fight and say they’d give a quarter to the guy who won.”

  Guindon wasn’t too impressed with the booze-seeking customers who frequented his home, which helps explain why he was close to being a teetotaller in later years. “Every day you’d see guys coming into the house. Guys would be fighting with [my father].”

  He also wasn’t too impressed by the local cops who showed up expecting discount—or gratis—liquor. He and his father were stopped once by a police officer while picking through the remains of a burned electrical store, looking for something worth lifting. The cop seemed ready to arrest them until he recognized Guindon’s father. “I found out later the old man used to pull b and e’s [break and enters] with the guy. The guy was a cop now and drove us home.”

  What did impress Guindon when he was a boy were motorcycles, and that feeling would never leave him. When Guindon was just fifteen, a member of the Golden Hawks named Bill let him ride his 1955 Harley-Davidson, with Bill on the back, thirty-eight kilometres, from Peterborough to Pontypool. Guindon’s own first bike was a British AJS single-cylinder model, and he soon became good enough to leap cars and trailers as a member of Canada’s Hell Riders, a trick-riding troupe nicknamed “the original crash test dummies.”

  So it had been a big deal for Guindon when he was allowed to become a hangaround for the Golden Hawks in 1959 and then a full member at just seventeen years of age. “It wasn’t like today. It was totally different. You didn’t have to kiss ass. You didn’t have to strike [become a probationary member]. They had to get to know you. Know how you rode a bike.”

  It was a time when clubs formed and folded quickly, and Guindon was still in his teens when he helped found the Phantom Riders Motorcycle Club. By day, he worked on the assembly line at General Motors, but at night, as head of the pack of Phantom Riders, Guindon was free of bosses and schedules, making his own laws and daring anyone to say otherwise. “We always felt powerful. You’d go by the old Cadillac Hotel and all the rubbies and nobody ever knocked us. If they did, we’d be knocking them. You always felt like you had a club behind you, a bunch of guys that were friends.”

  One of those friends was Wayne Willerton, a fellow General Motors assembly line worker who had been making Chevelles and Novas ever since he dropped out of school at age sixteen. Willerton felt transformed at night as he tied a dirty rag over his head and pulled out his dental plate, leaving a tough-guy gap where he’d lost four teeth. Atop his 750 Norton Commando in Guindon’s Simcoe Street parade, Willerton felt like a somebody: “I felt like I was on top of the world. I felt like we ruled the world. I just felt the power.”

  Power wasn’t something the Willerton men had been familiar with since Wayne’s father had arrived in Canada at age fourteen to work on a farm near Port Perry, north of Oshawa. Willerton’s father was a “Barnardo boy,” a ward of an organization started in Victorian times to transport ragged orphans and neglected and disabled children from London’s slums to Canadian farms. The original goal of founder Thomas Barnardo was noble, but by Willerton’s father’s time the organization’s practices were often shoddy, or worse. Barnardo boys worked for near slave wages, and many later complained of physical and sexual abuse. For his part, Willerton’s father arrived in Canada with no more than a black briefcase and a severe limp from the polio that had left one leg shorter than the other. The experience left him with bitter memories of making just five dollars a month and having nothing more than a bible to read under a bare light bulb. Willerton’s father also harboured severe misgivings about people in authority, those who purported to be looking out for him. “He used to always say the Queen’s shit stinks like the rest of us,” Wayne Willerton recalls.

  Impressive as his club was in their late night parades, Guindon dreamed of creating something far bigger than the Golden Hawks. He wanted to eclipse the semi-mythical head of the Black Diamond Riders, a Toronto biker known as “Johnny Sombrero,” or “Sombrero” for short.

  Sombrero was nothing if not a cocky adversary for Guindon and his followers. His real name was Harold Barnes, but he preferred to be addressed as “Supreme Commander” of the Black Diamond Riders, apparently not blushing as he lifted Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Second World War title. “I never seen him with a sombrero,” Guindon said in an interview years later. Whatever you thought of Supreme Commander Sombrero’s name and title, you had to be impressed by his spunk. He once wrote to the Queen asking her blessing for himself and his minions to rid Canada of outlaw motorcycle clubs—except for the BDRs—much like seamen in centuries past would seek a monarch’s blessing to rid the high seas of pirates. For reasons Her Majesty kept to herself, she declined to get involved.

  Things got off on the wrong foot between Guindon and Sombrero, and deteriorated from there. “He told me to call him the Supreme Commander,” Guindon says. “I wouldn’t do that. I called him John.” In 1961, even without the sought-after royal charter, Sombrero was in the midst of his campaign against lesser biker clubs. The struggle was for status and bragging rights, since there was nothing to actually take from the other clubs. In Sombrero’s world you defined yourself by your rivals, and by your ability to send those rivals running in fear. Sombrero had shut down a biker club of teenagers called Satan’s Choice, yanking their patches of a grinning Satan from members’ backs. Then he set his sights on the Golden Hawks, Guindon’s first club.

  Young bikers who had never heard of the Battle of Hastings or the War of 1812 would later learn about the treachery that took place at a field day one afternoon in 1962 at Pebblestone Park outside Oshawa. It was supposed to be a fun event, with bikers partying, carousing and racing around on their motorcycles. Guindon thought it odd that members of the Black Diamond Riders were not joining in the play but instead carving down branches from trees in the park. Guindon alerted fellow Golden Hawks that something nasty was afoot that afternoon but, as he recalls, he was told, “ ‘They would never do that at a field day.’ It was unheard of.”

  Not long after his warning was dismissed, the Black Diamond Riders charged, doing passable Mickey Mantle impersonations with their freshly cut clubs. One Golden Hawk suffered a brain hemorrhage. At least one member barricaded himself in a car. Others sprinted f
or safety. At the end of the day, Sombrero had a fistful of Golden Hawk patches and the once proud Golden Hawks had been rechristened the Chicken Hawks.

  Guindon answered by forming a new club he called the Phantom Riders. Many of the members, like Wayne Willerton, were recruited from the General Motors assembly line. Soon, Guindon heard that Sombrero had placed a bounty on them, offering a case of beer for every Phantom Rider patch that was delivered to him. “After what they did to the Golden Hawks in ’62, when they did take some patches, I had a hard-on for them.”

  Hope for Guindon came in the unexpected form of a young moviemaker. It was in 1965 that Guindon got wind that director Donald Shebib planned to make a film about outlaw biker clubs. Shebib sniffed around the Vagabonds, Para-Dice Riders and Canadian Lancers, with no success. “They either weren’t interested or their clubs weren’t big enough,” Willerton recalled years later in an interview. Guindon was different. He loved the idea of being in a film.

  Guindon was able to convince the Canadian Lancers, the Plague and the Apostles from the Toronto/Oshawa area, the Throttle Twisters from the Galt/Hespeler area and a few Red Devils from Hamilton to come together to form a super-club worthy of the camera’s attention and perhaps even Sombrero’s fear. For almost half a year they struggled to come up with a suitable name for the new club. Guindon liked the sound of “Satan’s Choice,” as did the other club presidents. He had been friends with the Satan’s Choice’s original founder, Don Norris, since they were teenagers, and Norris was ecstatic when Guindon arrived at his door with the presidents of the Canadian Lancers, Plague, Apostles and Throttle Twisters and a request. Says Guindon, “We wanted to amalgamate the four clubs under one set of colours and he wanted the SCMC [Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club] colours to be the banner they would all ride under. I told him we would never, ever lose it to the Black Diamond Riders.” As Norris remembers, “I was ecstatic. It pulled me out of a funk. The folding of the original SCMC had depressed me for some time. I knew if anyone could pull off a resurrection of SCMC, it would be Bernie.”

  With that, Guindon’s new mega-club stitched the image of a grinning devil on the backs of their jackets, a blunt statement that his pack of bikers weren’t to be fucked with.

  It was also an unmistakable fuck you to Sombrero.

  That summer, when the Satan’s Choice arose from the dead, Shebib and his National Film Board camera crew turned their story into a documentary, although some members had hoped for a feature film like The Wild One that would play in movie theatres. “They were everywhere we went,” Willerton recalls. “They seemed to be having as much fun as us.”

  If the Choice were somewhat of a media creation, that wasn’t a first for bikerdom. As Hunter S. Thompson wrote in Hell’s Angels, massive publicity about the biker world in the mid-1960s changed both the nature of policing and the biker subculture as well. “The Hell’s Angels as they exist today were virtually created by Time, Newsweek and The New York Times,” Thompson wrote in 1966. (Back then, the Angels spelled their first name “Hell’s,” but it changed along the way to “Hells” after a protracted internal debate about how many hells might exist.) There was something fitting about life imitating art in the rebirth of the Choice. Like most kids of his generation, Campbell had seen The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin. He especially loved the opening, with a rumbling pack of motorcycles riding right at the screen, as if attacking it head-on. He wasn’t so impressed with Brando’s main character, who seemed more pouty than menacing, even though Brando became the public face of youthful rebellion when he was asked, “What are you rebelling against?” and he replied, “Whaddya got?”

  For Campbell and many in the outlaw biker world of one-percenters (the estimated one percent of motorcyclists who don’t feel particularly confined by the law), the real star was Marvin’s character, Chino, who rode an American-made Harley-Davidson as opposed to Brando’s British Triumph. More importantly, Marvin’s character was based on a real-life biker, Willie (Wino) Forkner, a member of the old Boozefighters gang. “That’s the guy in that movie,” says Campbell. “Marlon Brando acted like a faggot, a sissy. ‘What are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whattya got?’ What’s that?” While he loved the movies, Campbell wasn’t big on superfluous drama. His screen heroes while he was growing up weren’t moaners and criers and hand-wringers, and they didn’t speak unless they had something to say, like Lee Marvin in The Wild One and Cat Ballou and John Wayne in just about anything. They were characters who played the hands they were dealt without bellyaching. And when Campbell’s onscreen heroes gave a warning, they didn’t repeat it.

  So it was with considerable pride that Guindon rode up to Sombrero’s clubhouse near Steeles and Yonge in Toronto’s north end as the head of the new, bigger-than-ever Satan’s Choice. Backed up by some of his tougher members, Guindon marched up to the Supreme Commander and reintroduced himself. “We went into the clubhouse and we told him, ‘You’ll never take our patches again.’ ”

  Sombrero seemed strangely uninterested, looking behind Guindon.

  “There’s a rabbit on the front lawn,” he said.

  Guindon suspected this was a ploy by Sombrero to get him to turn around so Sombrero could jump him. “I’m not turning around for that sucker thing.”

  He kept his eyes on Sombrero, but his head shifted ever so slightly. In his peripheral vision, he saw a bunny go hopping by. Campbell was at a dance at Gord’s A Go Go, on the eastern outskirts of Oshawa. He was seventeen and living on his own, hanging with a close group of friends. One of his buddies had been beaten up that night by three guys from Hamilton, and Campbell was now circling the building, looking to exact revenge on the trio.

  When he returned to the front of the building, he saw two of his childhood heroes: Bernie Guindon and Carmen Neal. There were also the three guys from Hamilton he was looking for, and they were clearly talking about something serious to the Satan’s Choice leaders.

  CHAPTER 3

  Growing Pains

  I thought he was dead.… He just lay there. You could see the whites of his eyes.”

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  Campbell could hear one of the Hamiltonians, named Scotty, asking: “Do you know any martial arts guys? Any karate guys?” Campbell had heard that Guindon ran a fight club, long before that term became a part of popular culture. The fights were held in the makeshift boxing ring in the basement of Guindon’s red brick bungalow at 480 Browning Avenue, in an enclave of non-rental brick homes that was definitely a cut above anywhere Campbell had ever resided. Guindon’s house was alternately known as the Satan’s Choice clubhouse and the Oshawa Boxing Club.

  “I said to Bernie, ‘Them three guys just beat up John. Can I come with you? I’d like to fight one of those guys.’ ” It was the first time they had ever spoken, and Guindon said yes. Within a few minutes Campbell was in the back of Neal’s car, heading to Guindon’s home.

  Neal took a quick liking to Campbell, and said with a wink, “Even if you lose, you don’t lose.”

  Willerton remembered the Hamilton visitors looking queasy when they walked down into Guindon’s basement, where they saw a “splasher”—a girl eager to provide sex to club members—a boxing ring, a heavy punching bag, a few dumbbells and a motorcycle repair area. Getting out of the basement intact would be far more challenging than they’d thought.

  The first match of the night was boxing, with three-minute rounds, and it featured Guindon and the Hamiltonian named Scotty. Halfway through the second round, Guindon dropped his gloves and let Scotty hit him as hard and as often as he wanted. Guindon just grinned back, as if he was immensely enjoying his up-close view of the oncoming fists.

  In the third round, Guindon got down to business and starched Scotty with a sharp, short hook. “He was just smiling at him and then he knocked him out. I was impressed. He was exactly the way I was brought up. He confronted everything. He was a far better fighter than I ever was.”

  Reg Hawk was also keen to fight, despite the f
act that he had two artificial legs, donated by the local Kiwanis club. Hawk had powerful forearms, the result of walking on double canes his entire life. The grocery store bookkeeper was keenly sensitive about the fact that he had never had legs, lest people write him off as a born loser. “He kind of let people think it was a motorcycle accident,” Willerton said. “That kind of made him look tougher. I guess people would think, ‘What a huge man he would have been before the accident.’ But he was born a little guy with no legs.” Hawk had devised his own form of self-defence based on cane swinging, Willerton recalled, and his unique fighting skills would do a ninja warrior proud. “He was brutal. He knew how to use those canes.”

  Perhaps word had already travelled to Hamilton about Hawk’s prowess with his canes, as one of the visitors immediately rushed him. There was no room to swing them and Hawk’s artificial legs splayed as the two men hit the floor. Unfortunately for the Hamiltonian, Hawk’s backup plan was just as formidable as his caning powers. “He grabbed the guy and it was all over,” Willerton remembers. “He had big arms. He just grabbed him and started squeezing.”

  Campbell was up next with a bout against a Hamiltonian called Billy. It was a modified street fight. Kicking was allowed, but not when the opponent was down on the floor. Campbell’s father wouldn’t have approved as he opened with a hard boot to Billy’s groin. He had practised the move often, and it worked as planned that evening, tenderizing Billy considerably for Campbell’s next shot. “He threw a right. I ducked once and came across with a left. He went down.”