Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

My name is Lorne. I’m a Satan’s Choice. I’m not a coward.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  In the early 1980s, Campbell put his doubts aside and jumped with both boots back into the life of an outlaw biker. The Oshawa chapter of the Choice had folded after a spate of jailings and members quitting, and Campbell was a Toronto member now. His new home away from home was a two-storey red brick house on Kintyre Avenue near the corner of Broadview Avenue and Queen Street East. It looked like another comfortable family residence in South Riverdale, Toronto. No one, however, could remember when an actual family had last lived there. It had been an illegal booze can and the Vagabonds’ clubhouse in previous incarnations. Now it was the Satan’s Choice clubhouse.

  At one club get-together, Campbell was in the backyard and saw Choice member Tony Valentine about to go inside.

  “Grab me a drink when you’re in there,” he said.

  “No.”

  Valentine didn’t sound like he was kidding, but Campbell gave him another chance.

  “Grab me a drink when you’re inside.”

  Apparently Valentine thought he had risen above fetching drinks for fellow club members, but there was still a chance he was just joking. When he reappeared a few minutes later, though, he wasn’t carrying a drink for Campbell. He had been asked just a small favour and he had denied it. Worse yet, he had done so in front of other members, who would be watching what Campbell did next.

  Larry Vallentyne piped in first. “We should hang you,” he said to Tony. Larry’s last name sounded the same as Tony’s, but they were very different men. Even on his gentlest day, Vallentyne was someone to take seriously.

  The comment about stringing Tony up was an attempt to shock him into good manners, but he remained belligerent and unapologetic and refused to go back inside to fetch a drink. It was as though he was forcing them to take action. For all their outer rudeness and need to startle civilians, outlaw bikers are notoriously thin-skinned when it comes to insults against themselves and their sense of honour. There is logic to this. If you can be disrespected, then you can also be attacked; and if you can be attacked, then you can also be hurt; and if you can be hurt, then you can be killed. So you act quickly and stamp hard on any signs of disrespect. Besides, what’s the point of being an outlaw biker if people are going to treat you like an anonymous piece of crap? You can get that any day in the outside world, without the hassle of earning a patch. So, after the hanging comment itself hung in the air for a couple of seconds, stringing up Tony Valentine sounded like a pretty good way to teach him some manners. Besides, Campbell already considered Tony a conniver. And hanging a conniver took only slightly more effort than it took to go inside and fetch himself a beer.

  There was a strong tree in the backyard and plenty of rope in the clubhouse. Soon, despite some struggling, Tony was dangling by his neck in the backyard, his feet flapping in the air. The clubhouse sat in a densely settled downtown area, where one might expect an open-air lynching to attract some attention. But Tony couldn’t say much once the rope drew tight, and neighbours generally knew enough to ignore odd happenings at the Choice’s gathering spot. “We left him there for half a minute,” Campbell recalls. “We weren’t trying to kill him. We didn’t care, though, if we did kill him.”

  Tony was still breathing when they lowered him to the earth.

  “I’ll never come to this clubhouse again,” Tony said in a scratchy voice.

  “Like we care,” Campbell thought.

  And that was the last they saw of Tony Valentine on Kintyre Avenue.

  No one thought that much about him after that, until someone in the Los Bravos club of Winnipeg reported a sighting of Tony in their city a month or so later. The Los Bravo was curious to know why Tony had come all the way from Toronto and was wearing Choice colours in his club’s city. It was a fair-enough question. The sight of the outsider flying his colours in Winnipeg upset the natural order of things on their turf, and so they made a call to the Choice in Toronto.

  Campbell agreed to head west and deal with the problem. His approach was typically straightforward when he was finally reunited with Tony Valentine: “I beat him up and I took his colours.” No one considered the banishment of Tony any great loss. If he was too rude to get a drink for a brother, he didn’t deserve to hang around with them anyway.

  One Sunday morning, Campbell was nursing a hangover. Every twitch brought him pain. He was reminded of Kris Kristofferson’s lyrics for “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” and especially the line about having “no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt.” Then his buddy Larry Vallentyne walked in. “I hear him grab a drink. He comes up behind me. He’s holding a pistol. He fires it right by my ear. It scares the fuck out of me. That’s Larry’s sense of humour. I jump and he’s hysterical, laughing. I said, ‘You know what, Larry? I have to catch up with you.’ I ran to the bar and had a shot of whisky. I drink it. Within half a minute, my nerves settle down. He couldn’t stop laughing.”

  Vallentyne was at the clubhouse another day when Choice officers approached him to say: “You’re going to have to slow your partner down. He’s getting out of hand.” They were referring to Campbell. The Choice didn’t officially have partners, but it seemed that Vallentyne and Campbell were always together.

  Just then, Campbell arrived and opened the fridge. Jars of mustard and relish fell out and smashed on the floor. Campbell was convinced this was set up as a practical joke and he had a habit of taking all sorts of things personally, even falling condiments. So he scooped up mustard and relish and threw them around the room. “I threw everything all over the place. Then I got on my bike and rode away.”

  “You talk to him,” Vallentyne replied.

  The Hamilton clubhouse of the Choice was a steel-reinforced two-storey brick house in a grotty industrial stretch of Lottridge Street in the city’s east end, about ten minutes’ drive from Ivor Wynne Stadium, where the Tiger-Cats play football. During one visit with Vallentyne, Campbell found himself perched on the roof, lobbing eggs at bikers down below. When his supply was depleted, Campbell sent a striker to buy up all the eggs he could find.

  A little later, Toronto chapter vice-president Michael John Everett rode in on his Harley, wearing a natty long fur coat. Everett was capable of putting on airs, like a rock star, and this day he was particularly insufferable as he squired about Hamilton with a new girlfriend. Sometimes when Everett got this way, Campbell took it as his club duty to let the air out of things. “I’d have to tell him to get down to earth with the rest of us,” Campbell says.

  Campbell looked down at him from atop the clubhouse roof and decided he would let his eggs do the talking.

  “Watch this.”

  The first egg Campbell dropped hit Everett squarely on the top of his skull. Everett looked up and saw Campbell’s grinning face where the sun should have been. Campbell was delighted. “He didn’t have a clue what was going on. He hopped on his bike and took off. He was so fucking embarrassed. We almost got kicked out of the club.”

  It wasn’t just the egg dropping that almost got Campbell expelled from the club. The real problem arose the next morning, when he, Mike (Jungle) McCullough and Larry Vallentyne thought it would be amusing to start a small, controlled fire in the Hamilton clubhouse. Everett had returned, presumably after washing the yolk out of his hair, and now Vallentyne siphoned some gas from the Toronto VP’s bike. It was poured around somebody who was sleeping soundly, with the aid of drugs or alcohol or both, and lit. Campbell and McCullough were amazed at the amount of smoke this generated. It also amazed them that the Hamiltonians failed to see any humour in their prank. “We put it out within minutes. We didn’t know there would be that much smoke.… We didn’t set fire to the clubhouse—we set a fire in the clubhouse and we put it out. Fuck, were they ever mad.”

  It also didn’t help that Campbell and Jungle were both stoned on mescaline and that they followed up the fire with tossing beer bottles around the property. Campbell’s hijinks weren’t to
tally without malice. Aside from the drugs, Campbell was fuelled by resentment for having to step in and provide muscle for the Hamilton chapter after they ran afoul of a local club called the Red Devils. The president of the Red Devils had been shot to death in his home and his club had blamed the Choice. Campbell was left to wonder: “Why didn’t they look after their own problems? Would they do the same fucking thing for me if I had a problem?”

  After the eggs and the clubhouse fire, it was tough for Everett to defend Campbell to the Hamiltonians. Further ratcheting up tensions was the fact that someone had recently attempted to torch the Hamilton clubhouse. “We did explain that we had no idea that two weeks before it was set on fire by an enemy.”

  Not surprisingly, at the next club meeting Campbell’s fate was once again the topic of discussion.

  “It was me too,” Vallentyne piped up in a show of solidarity. For all his considerable wildness, he was loyal and unquestionably brave. Both men were demoted to striker for three months, while Jungle was spared any discipline at all, since the fire was considered solely another Campbell–Vallentyne caper. Despite the demotion, others in the club were wise enough not to give Campbell and Vallentyne a rough time.

  Campbell had temporarily moved to Alberta in 1981 to work in construction in Redwater, north of Edmonton. He made the trip with a fellow ironworker who wasn’t in the club. It wasn’t uncommon for Choice members to work out of town for a stretch then get back into the routine of attending meetings once they returned home. During a break from work, Campbell headed into Edmonton for a house party, where he met up with Larry Vallentyne’s younger brother Lyle, who wasn’t in the club, and Gord Van Haarlem of the Peterborough Choice, one of the Port Hope Eight. Both of them were working construction jobs in Alberta.

  “Where are you from?” another construction worker at the party asked Campbell.

  “Ontario.”

  “You know any bikers there?”

  “Yeah, I know some.”

  “Do you know any Choice?”

  “Yeah.”

  He didn’t expand, providing no names.

  “Do you know Jungle? Mike Everett?”

  “Yeah, I know those guys.”

  “Oh, I had them all against the wall one time with a shotgun.” The man was clearly pleased with himself as he continued: “They just showed they’re a bunch of cowards.”

  “Well, my name is Lorne. I’m a Satan’s Choice. I’m not a coward.”

  Brotherhood meant sticking up for your clubmates, no matter what. It also meant sticking up for their reputations when they weren’t there to do it themselves. And so Campbell pummelled the man. “I just beat the fuck out of him.”

  Campbell had brought a three-litre Texas mickey of whisky to the party and it was now clear he wasn’t going to be able to enjoy it. The badly beaten construction worker had left the party looking like a freshly tenderized slice of round steak, and it was a safe bet that if he came back, he would be accompanied by friends. A little later in the evening, Lyle Vallentyne announced the inevitable: “They’re coming.”

  Moments later, the beaten-up man and his friends barged in. They weren’t bikers, just angry construction workers who thought they were sticking up for a buddy. Van Haarlem dropped one of them with a baseball bat.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” he shouted.

  “I can’t,” the man whimpered from the floor. “My legs are broken.”

  Another of the men was Bill Yardley from around Keswick, north of Toronto. He was gripping a heavy chain.

  “What are you going to do with that chain, buddy?” Campbell asked. “I’m going to rip your face off.”

  “You have to come towards me, buddy. You have to make the first move.”

  Campbell was thankful that he had been working heavy construction and felt in good shape. He was also grateful for the baseball bat in his hands. “He took a swing and I broke his arm, collapsed his lung.”

  Campbell and his friends could hear a police siren coming their way and took off out the door. Campbell went up the street and then walked back, as if he were arriving at the party house for the first time.

  “Who are you?” a police officer asked.

  “I’m here because I was invited to a party.”

  It wasn’t a lie, exactly. The cop looked at the blood on Campbell’s cowboy boots.

  “What’s with the fucking boots?”

  “I’m an ironworker. I must have hurt myself.”

  “What happened?”

  The officer wasn’t referring to the state of Campbell’s footwear. “I don’t know. Ask the neighbours.”

  Campbell was driven to the police station, where his cowboy boots were confiscated as evidence. A few hours later, an officer arrived at his cell.

  “We’re cutting you loose.”

  It was winter in Edmonton and Campbell didn’t know where the station was, but at least he had his cowboy boots back. “I don’t know where I’m going. You want to give me a ride?”

  The officer didn’t feel like playing taxi driver.

  “I said we’re cutting you loose.”

  With that, Campbell walked away into the Edmonton winter.

  Later, his friend Ken Goobie of the Choice heard about the fight and said he wished he had been there too. Goobie was good at that sort of thing, when the bats and chains and fists were flying. Campbell liked Goobie, but he was glad he missed the party. Goobie was the type of guy who preferred heroin to alcohol, and his presence that evening would only have made things bloodier. Even for an outlaw biker, Goobie had a hard reputation, although he would later leave the Choice for the Salvation Army, where he became an officer.

  Bernie Guindon would one day have something to say about that fight too. He told Campbell that he wished he hadn’t taken the baseball bat to Billy Yardley, since Yardley had served prison time with him and Guindon considered him a friend. Campbell understood. The bigmouth who started the brawl had likely lied to Yardley and claimed he was jumped by a group of men. Yardley probably thought he was just defending his friend, as a friend should. “I told people that if we had met under different circumstances, it would have probably turned out different. This guy went and told them that a bunch of guys jumped him and beat him up. He was trying to help out his friends. That was my code too.”

  One of Yardley’s brothers told Vallentyne that the matter wasn’t settled yet, and that Campbell should expect some people to deal with him. “Larry warned them, if you’re going to go after Lorne, he’ll shoot every one of you.”

  With that, Yardley’s friends backed off. Campbell was able to save his bullets for other enemies.

  Back in Ontario, Campbell fell into the stripper business. Now there are elaborate criminal operations in which women are transported from Asia and eastern Europe to dance and work as prostitutes, but this wasn’t one of them. Campbell’s plan was to work with his friend Joe Napolitano, supplying local dancers to strip clubs. “We weren’t that serious. We were just dabbling. We’d book the girls and take a cut—that’s how simple it was.” For some bikers, the stripper business was a chance to make real money, but for Campbell it wasn’t about dollars or even sex. He had enough money, and things were going well with Charmaine, who was also a dancer now. “It’s the lifestyle. Bikers are outside of normal civilization and so are strippers. That’s the actual bond between strippers and bikers.” Aside from the bookings, Campbell and Napolitano offered security. “It has to be that way. You have girls out there without protection, they’re open season. They have us and nobody fucks with them.”

  There was also plenty of club business on his mind around this time. After the Outlaws split, the Choice had a lot of rebuilding to do. It would have been nice to pull in more members, but it was important that they be the right members. All members in a chapter had to agree before they would permit someone new into their ranks with full brother status. One biker Campbell couldn’t see himself ever voting for was Patrick (Tulip) Roberts, who rode a Harley with a pin
k tulip painted on the gas tank. For Campbell, there was just something unsettling about riding in a pack alongside a bike with a pink tulip, even if it was a roaring Harley. Tulip had problems with others in the Choice too, for other reasons. One night in 1982 he was punched in the head and ordered to leave the Gasworks rock club on Yonge Street by a Choice member who worked there as a bouncer. When they eventually left the bar that evening, the Choice members found their motorcycles had been damaged.

  Hours later, a member of the Para-Dice Riders saw flames coming from the front of the Choice clubhouse on Kintyre Avenue. Sleeping inside were Larry Vallentyne and a biker Campbell knew only as Jamie. The Para-Dice Rider was a strong man and managed to run in through the smoke and drag them both outside to safety. It was no mystery to Campbell who was behind the attack that almost killed his best friend and destroyed his clubhouse. He had never wanted Tulip as a clubmate, and now Campbell reasoned that the damage to the bikes and the fire were Tulip’s conniving revenge for the beating in the bar.

  Tulip stupidly returned to the clubhouse a couple of days later, on October 21, 1982 around five in the afternoon, as if nothing had happened.

  “That fucking guy’s nuts,” Toronto chapter president Larry McIlroy said. And McIlroy had seen plenty of nutty things, since he had been a Choice member longer than anyone else still on the street.

  “Nuts? Watch this,” Campbell replied.

  Not long after McIlroy left for the evening, Campbell began hitting Tulip hard and often. For reasons even Campbell didn’t understand, he also poured whisky down his throat.

  Then Campbell ordered him to confess to the fire.

  Tulip denied he was guilty.

  Campbell put Tulip’s hands on the bar. Larry Vallentyne made sure that Tulip couldn’t squirm away as Campbell smashed each hand hard with a hammer.

  Tulip screamed and cried and continued to deny he set the fire.

  The beating continued. “I wasn’t angry at all. It’s called retaliation.” Finally, Campbell began to march him away. “I was taking him out. Yes, that does mean killing him. He was probably hoping I was dropping him off.”