Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  “Get the fuck out,” McEwan shouted at Campbell, who recalls: “He hit me six times. I said, ‘You have no idea what you’re getting into.’ I thought, ‘You fucking coward.’ ”

  Even without the nasty aftertaste of the Guindon trial, Garnet McEwan had never impressed diehard Choice members like Campbell. Mother seemed no more than a caretaker president, and a weak one at that. Where Oshawa had always been fiercely Canadian, McEwan appeared a traitor to the very club he was supposed to be protecting, eager to sell them out to the expansion-minded Americans. No Canadian club had ever folded into an American one before, but Campbell was certain there was going to be a split in his beloved Choice, with the Outlaws taking several of their chapters. There were grumblings that McEwan had been wined and dined by the Outlaws in the States and was sacrificing his old club for compliments, booze and women. “He was given young girls, things that he would never get as a big, fat, stinky guy selling pencils on the corner. When Bernie was sent to prison, it made it easier for Mother to sell out. It paved the way for the Outlaws to groom Mother.”

  When Guindon was around, the Oshawa chapter was not to be fucked with, in the same way that bikers had a particular respect for the Oakland Hells Angels, one of that club’s original chapters and long-time home of Angels icon Ralph (Sonny) Barger. “Nobody fucks the Oakland guys wherever they go. You fuck with one Oakland member, you fuck with them all, and when they rode to somewhere, you know it’s Oakland. You just don’t fuck with Oakland.”

  Campbell had never been one for grey areas and he had often made it patently clear that he didn’t respect McEwan, whom he considered a waddling insult to everything the Choice in particular and mankind in general should represent. Aside from teasing him about his very real pencil-selling past, he had occasionally ribbed McEwan about the fact that he wore a plastic leg, saying, “You never had a leg to stand on.” There was no love lost between them that night in Montreal, as McEwan ejected him from the party after his dust-up with Séguin.

  Shunned, Campbell walked twenty kilometres towards Dorval airport through the snow and sleet, wearing cowboy boots and just a T-shirt under his sweater. He hitchhiked some of the way, getting a ride with an elderly couple who wanted to take him to their farmhouse. He also walked on the median, and finally settled for the night in an abandoned, unheated house. “It was very, very cold.”

  A few weeks later, the Choice held an official meeting about the punch-up. Campbell travelled to the two-hundred-acre property owned by the club near a cottage town called Coboconk, northeast of Oshawa, along with most of the club’s two hundred members. They were asked to decide whether Campbell should be allowed to remain with the Choice after his pummelling of fellow member Dave Séguin. Campbell didn’t have any hopes of an impartial hearing. Presiding over the meeting was Mother McEwan, who had taken a half-dozen shots at Campbell before kicking him out of the Montreal clubhouse. Mother said no guns were allowed, but Campbell didn’t recognize Mother’s authority and packed a loaded .38 anyway. He wasn’t expelled from the club that day, which was fortunate for all involved who weren’t suicidal. “If I was kicked out, I was dying that day.”

  In true Canadian fashion, the matter was deferred until a later meeting back in Montreal. Again, it was open to the club’s full membership. There, Campbell challenged Séguin to skip the formalities and settle the matter between them.

  “Knives, guns or fisticuffs,” Campbell said. “Keep in mind that I am good at all of them.”

  Seguin declined all three options. Campbell went up to the second floor of the clubhouse to await the result of the debate. In the end he was demoted to striker, a middle ground that wasn’t a real expulsion. It was enough to keep Campbell from leaving the club—and the world—with guns blazing. “If I had been kicked out, I’m sure I wouldn’t have come out of that clubhouse.”

  One day in the spring of 1977, Campbell was working on the carburetor of his Harley panhead outside the latest clubhouse, on Baseline Road in Oshawa. His driver’s licence was suspended for unpaid fines and he wasn’t supposed to operate any motor vehicle. That afternoon another club member rode on the back of the motorcycle during a test drive, to help push the bike if it stalled. Campbell was well-known in the area, and was wearing his Choice colours in case anyone had forgotten who he was.

  When they were back at the clubhouse, two cruisers pulled up.

  “You were riding your bike,” an officer told Campbell.

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “Yeah, we saw you.”

  The biker who was with Campbell piped up: “I was driving it.”

  They told Campbell he was under arrest for driving under suspension.

  “Can I go in and get my boots?” asked Campbell, who had been working barefoot.

  The officers obliged, which wasn’t surprising. “Even though I had problems with them, they knew I would never run.”

  At the police station, Campbell learned he was also charged with conspiracy to commit perjury. In effect, he was accused of counselling the other biker to lie about driving the motorcycle. At the time it seemed like little more than a nuisance. There was no way of knowing that such a seemingly trivial incident would soon affect his life and the lives of a half-dozen others in a massive way.

  Campbell got a hint that things might be going south when he saw two ex-girlfriends of club members in the Whitby courthouse, ready to testify for the Crown. In the outlaw biker world, as in many cultures inside or outside the law, an angry ex-lover is not a force to be taken lightly.

  One of the two women had gone out with a biker named Randy. They had no children, but during their breakup they had a particularly ugly dispute over custody of their fridge, which Randy had taken. The other woman at the courthouse was just plain angry about her own breakup with Larry Hurren. Campbell could sense it was going to be messy if they hit the witness stand, although he still didn’t understand exactly what the Crown was intending by getting the two women involved. He had plenty of experience with the courts, but he had never even heard of a conspiracy to commit perjury charge. “That’s like thinking about telling a lie,” he says.

  The women’s hard feelings threatened to drag Campbell down if they took the witness stand and started spouting off about him and the club. His lawyer persuaded him it would be wise to plead guilty to the perjury-related charge, which carried a maximum fourteen-year term. He wasn’t particularly concerned about it, so he followed his lawyer’s advice. Friends organized a party for that night, anticipating his release from jail. Instead, in May 1977, he found himself starting a one-year term in the Whitby jail. It seemed like a joke, but it was a bad one and it was on him. “That fridge cost me a year of my life. He [Randy] took the fridge. I took the brunt.” Within a few years, that perjury conviction would haunt the club big time.

  At the Whitby jail, Campbell settled into a job in the kitchen. “It’s a clean, good job and the food would be a perk.” Jail staff planned the meals and inmates prepared the food. One day the menu read, “Fried liver or baloney.”

  “What do you think that means?” Campbell asked a co-worker.

  “I don’t know,” the other man said. “It’s kind of ambiguous.”

  “Let’s just give them the baloney,” Campbell decided. “I don’t feel like cooking.”

  Not long after that, there was trouble in the cells. “The guards told me everybody was throwing their baloney through the bars.”

  Campbell got one of the guards to let him onto the range, at the epicentre of the bologna tossing.

  “Anybody got a problem with me, bring it on,” Campbell said.

  No one did. Despite the bologna incident, Campbell prided himself on his kitchen work and didn’t let the near mutiny get to him. “It was all fucked-up food in jail anyway.” He decided there was simply too much fat in pork roasts to prepare them for his fellow inmates. “I refused to cook it up. Refused to even touch it.” He also refused to serve powdered milk, telling fellow inmates, “If you get powdered
milk, it’s not me, guys.”

  He took particular pride in his mashed potatoes. Preparing them in a large metal pot afforded him a chance for a vigorous workout. “There was no lumps in my mashed potatoes. I was really proud of that. I was sweating in them, putting in the milk and butter. There was sweat in them, but there were no lumps. People loved them.”

  While in Whitby jail, he was given a psychological survey that included questions about whether he had ever had sex with his mother, father or siblings. He checked yes to all of them, which amused at least one guard, who could see it was a joke. Campbell says he should also have added: “I fart in the bathtub too and I bite the bubbles.”

  Friday, July 1, 1977, was Black Friday in Campbell’s world. That was the day half of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club patched over—or switched membership—to the Outlaws. The club’s Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston, St. Catharines, Hamilton and Windsor chapters joined the American-based club. Remaining loyal to the Choice were the Toronto, Kitchener, Oshawa, Peterborough and Thunder Bay chapters. Like his mentor, Campbell was stuck in jail, powerless to do anything but fume and grieve. “The split never would have gone down if Bernie was still out. Bernie Guindon’s influence was not to be challenged. When he talks about people having parts, he’s got all kinds of parts.”

  On a happier note, Campbell was voted back into full membership in the club. Never before had a member had his full status returned while he was still behind bars, but Campbell wasn’t a typical member—if there was such a thing—and these weren’t typical times. “I took it that they had finally seen the light.”

  Campbell was into the final month of his perjury sentence when he got news that the Hells Angels had also expanded into Canada. Not to be outdone by their bitter rivals the Outlaws, the Hells Angels awarded death head patches to members of the Montreal-based Popeye gang on December 5, 1977. This move to turn the Popeye (there was no s in their name) into Canada’s first Hells Angels charter (as the Angels call chapters of their club) made sense in the biker world of realpolitik. The Popeye were tough but isolated. Patching over to the Angels provided the former Popeye members no small measure of support and protection.

  As the American-based clubs moved in, Guindon still faced several years before he could even hope for parole. The days when their biggest threat was the likes of Johnny Sombrero were long gone. At least Sombrero was local. Now, Campbell and Guindon could do little more than grind their teeth and curse the existence of Mother McEwan, who got the whole cross-border expansion mess started. “Bernie and I never wanted American clubs. We never wanted American influence. It wasn’t a good feeling.”

  The Choice had a practice of holding general meetings, which were open to all members and not just ranking officers. Someone got a warehouse in the west end of Toronto for the Choice’s general meeting in the summer of 1978, which focused on heroin.

  Lookouts were posted at the windows at the top of the building as members debated whether they should be allowed to deal in heroin. Cocaine hadn’t really made a major impression yet and heroin was the drug that attracted the most heat from police.

  The two members most in favour of dealing heroin were Ken Goobie, a lanky, balding former Maritimer, and his friend and partner in crime Armand (In the Trunk) Sanguini, a fellow Choice member with tight Toronto mob ties. “Their argument was that they snorted heroin and they didn’t have a problem with it,” Campbell says.

  The debate was still under way when a lookout shouted from his perch at the windows, “Here comes the cops.”

  Cruisers filled the lot as the bikers attempted to bolt from the warehouse. Campbell didn’t make it out of the lot before his car was pulled over. “Every one of these cops has got his gun out.”

  Campbell got out of the car with Larry Vallentyne. Nobody ever called Larry calm or discreet.

  “You’d love to shoot me, wouldn’t you?” Vallentyne shouted at the cops.

  “No, we’re here to look after things,” an officer replied. “We don’t want to shoot anybody.”

  “Fuck off,” Vallentyne retorted, and slapped off the officer’s cap.

  Campbell walked up to the officer who seemed to be in charge and motioned towards Vallentyne. “Can I talk to him?”

  “I wish you would.”

  Campbell approached Vallentyne and gestured towards another officer who was holding his cap in front of his body so that it covered his other hand. “The guy in the front of the cruiser has his throwaway right under his hat. I saw it.”

  A “throwaway” is an untraceable firearm that some officers carry. It’s clearly illegal, but useful in a pinch. It can be dropped beside the victim of a shooting to make him look armed when he wasn’t. It can also be used to shoot someone, since it’s not easily traceable like a service revolver.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Do me a favour and get back in the car.”

  It felt like a lifetime as Vallentyne considered his friend’s advice. Most likely it wasn’t more than a few heartbeats. “It’s only about three seconds of my life,” Campbell says. Then Vallentyne got back in the car.

  It was clear that many police officers despised the bikers, just as many bikers hated the police. Just how far the officers would go to stick it to them was anybody’s guess.

  Campbell was shaving one morning when Charmaine took a phone call saying that his father had cancer of the pancreas. Treatment wasn’t advanced at the time, and his father’s chances of survival were slim. The call signalled a brief window to reconnect, and Campbell seized it.

  Campbell was impressed by how his father refused to complain as his life painfully withered away. Once, Campbell offered him a joint in hopes that smoking it would improve his appetite.

  “I don’t do it myself, but I know it gives you an appetite,” Campbell said.

  It appeared to have the desired effect, as his father downed half a sandwich and a glass of milk. “It was a really happy mood.”

  As an adult, Campbell hadn’t met with his father much, but the feeling was good as they finally sat together. “He was proud of me then.… He was proud of me that I didn’t take any shit from anybody.” He hadn’t lost his feistiness. “He could always give me a slap in the head,” Campbell says. “He was pretty fast. He would kind of smile and give me a slap.”

  Campbell’s father grumbled that he was taking shit from plenty of people now, like when strangers cut in front of him in the betting lines at the racetrack when he went to watch his nephew Sandy Hawley ride.

  “Nobody would cut in front of me if you were there,” he told his son.

  CHAPTER 10

  Three Bullets

  The provincial cops searched far and wide

  And the outlaws ran but they could not hide

  And they brought em in every single one

  Save the man who actually fired the gun …

  singer-songwriter STEVE EARLE, “Justice in Ontario”

  The Golden Hawks didn’t become extinct that afternoon in 1962 when they were tricked and chased and humiliated at Pebblestone Park by Johnny Sombrero and his Black Diamond Riders. It just looked that way, as they never regained the status they once held, back when no one dared call them Chicken Hawks. They were still one-percenters, and their parties were better than nothing, which explains why one evening in 1976 Campbell was drinking with some Golden Hawks in the Choice clubhouse in Oshawa. He was in the basement bar when Augie, the Golden Hawks’ sergeant-at-arms, said right out of the blue: “You fucking asshole.”

  “What did you just call me?”

  Augie was trying to joke, but Campbell wasn’t in a joking mood and Augie wasn’t a particularly smooth comic. Augie also wasn’t the apologetic sort. Now that Campbell had got his dander up, Augie wasn’t about to back down from the challenging tone.

  “A fucking asshole,” he repeated.

  With that, Campbell dropped Augie with a shot to the face. The Golden Hawks’ vice-president rushed in to help his fallen clubmate and Campbell dropped him too
. “I fucking backhanded him. It was like something John Wayne would have done. He went right over the table. I thought, ‘Lorne, good one.’ ”

  Clearly, Augie hadn’t been the perfect host and Campbell hadn’t been the perfect guest, but what had happened up to this point wasn’t that unusual. What followed was. Little did anyone at the Satan’s Choice clubhouse that evening realize that the spat with Campbell set the stage for events that would dramatically alter the lives of at least nine men and contribute to the death of a tenth. The fallout would also make it into university law classes, under the subject heading Miscarriages of Justice.

  A couple of weeks later, there was a party at the Golden Hawks’ clubhouse on Baseline Road between Whitby and Ajax, the town immediately west of Whitby. This time, some members of the Saddle Tramps Motorcycle Club from Owen Sound showed up. Campbell was enjoying himself when he was abruptly told by a Golden Hawk named Bill: “You’ve gotta leave.”

  “Why?”

  “You’ve gotta leave.”

  “Was it because of what happened?”

  “You, you just gotta leave.”

  “I ain’t gonna leave.”

  Bill wasn’t about to back down, and they couldn’t continue this back and forth all night. It’s not much of a party when no one wants you to stay, even if the beer is cold, so eventually Campbell left. But he returned shortly before daybreak with John Foote, John Harvey (the man who later killed Foote), Wayne (Hobo) McCall and Peter (Rabbit) Pillman. The party was still under way, although considerably less sober than when Campbell was ejected. Campbell called out: “Everybody on the floor.”

  Some of the Golden Hawks were too drunk or stunned to appreciate that their visitors were armed.

  “On the fucking floor!”

  Campbell then asked, “Where’s Bill?”

  Bill’s brother pointed at his sibling.