Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Given his decades of experience, perhaps it wasn’t surprising that Scott seemed a little blasé as he scanned Campbell’s lengthy rap sheet of assaults and other bikerish misdeeds.

  “What are you here for?” the doctor asked.

  Campbell was sure he must already know, but he answered anyway.

  “Do you have any remorse for beating a man with a hammer?”

  “Actually, no. He deserved what he got.”

  Campbell’s reply didn’t seem to faze Scott even a bit. Finally, the doctor looked up and said, “You’re all right.”

  “I’ll never forget him saying, ‘You’re all right,’ after I was telling him about beating a guy with a hammer and selling dynamite,” Campbell says.

  Dr. Scott dropped his head again, the cue for Campbell to leave. With that, Campbell was dispatched to A-Unit, where he would spend half of each day in a cell measuring 3 metres by 2.1 metres. The other half of his new life was to be spent outside his cell, alongside inmates who were often happy, or at least indifferent, at the thought of slitting his throat.

  The only other biker in A-Unit was Ken Logan of the Lobos Motorcycle Club in Windsor. Logan ran a sports betting enterprise in which the payoff was money and cigarettes. The rest of the penitentiary’s bikers, including Rick Sauvé and Gary (Nutty) Comeau, were in J-Unit, Millhaven’s other general population wing. They were all classified as part of the “Big House Crew” by their clubs, the biker term for members behind prison bars. None of the bikers in the prison were from the hated Outlaws.

  Less than twelve hours after he arrived on the range, Campbell stood in the gymnasium with John Dunbar, also of the Lobos. Dunbar was a smallish, trim man whose appearance belied the enormity of his crime. He and fellow Lobo Ken Logan had gone into a house to kill a former Lobos president over a drug beef, and ended up also murdering another man and a woman when they showed up unexpectedly. Campbell and Dunbar had never met before, but as outlaw bikers they naturally gravitated to each other.

  It was a little after nine in the morning when Campbell and Dunbar watched as an inmate picked up a baseball bat and walked briskly towards them.

  “Stand here, Lorne,” Dunbar said, and Campbell obeyed.

  Seconds later, the man with the bat clubbed Michel Lafleur, a member of the Front de Libération du Québec, to death. Lafleur was thirty-three and he had been behind bars for fourteen years, sentenced to a term of more than forty-one years for an assortment of crimes relating to the Quebec separatist group, including armed robbery and discharging a firearm with intent to kill. His role with the FLQ was to raise money through robbery, and he was already an inmate when fellow terrorists kidnapped Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross, eventually murdering Laporte.

  Lafleur’s murder was never solved, as no one in the gymnasium spoke with investigators, but it’s doubtful there were any great political undertones to his death that morning in the exercise yard. Killings at Millhaven often happened for reasons that would seem petty to outsiders but which had a peculiar logic to someone inside the prison. “I was amazed that it happened so fast,” Campbell says. “I heard he was a good guy. I never talked to him. I saw him a few minutes and then he was dead.”

  “Within six months, you’ll have a sixth sense,” Dunbar told him, describing a heightened awareness akin to how birds know to hightail it before a storm. “You’ll know when something’s going to go down,” Dunbar continued. “It’s a feeling. So you just clear out.”

  As Campbell settled in, he thought about something Mike Everett had said when he’d dropped by to see Campbell, alluding to a potential threat. Everett had said something cryptic to the effect of: “If you’re classified for Millhaven, you have a problem with somebody there.” He declined to expand, leaving the impression it was an inter-club problem in which he couldn’t take sides.

  There was a barbecue at the prison during Campbell’s first week there, one of four held each year. It gave him a chance to look into Everett’s warning, and so he walked up to Sauvé. “I saw him and Nutty for the first time in five years. They had been in jail for five years.” Campbell had always confronted beefs head-on and that’s what he planned to do right now. “I asked Rick and Nutty in the first half-hour, ‘Who in this prison has a beef with me?’ They didn’t know. If anybody had a beef with me in Millhaven, they would have known about it.”

  Sauvé and Nutty talked about it between themselves later in the day. The next day, Sauvé told Campbell that they still didn’t know of any real beef against him. Perhaps Everett was mistakenly referring to an old and false story that had circulated during the trial. There had been an unfounded rumour, started by one of the Port Hope Eight’s lawyers, that Campbell had balked at the prospect of pleading guilty to the Bill Matiyek shooting. It wasn’t true, but it was as dangerous as a shank to the ribs. Perhaps that’s why Everett was so cryptic: he felt he was caught in a beef between brothers. Whatever the case, things were fine now. “That was the rumour,” Campbell says. “They had found out the truth long before I got there, but it was never discussed again. There wasn’t a beef.”

  Over time, Campbell learned there were shanks hidden throughout Millhaven. They were made out of anything that could be sharpened enough to cut into a human body, with pieces of metal from the machine shop, toothbrushes and hobby craft tools all fashioned into instruments of death and protection. “The nicest and largest shank I ever seen belonged to my close friend John Dunbar,” Campbell recalls. “He had it machined to be part of his window frame so it was not detected during the frequent cell searches.” Dunbar called it Excalibur, and he sometimes smuggled it from his cell by dropping it into his pant leg. “It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship,” Campbell says. “After work hours the odd day, John would retrieve it from his cell and before the doors closed for the count he would come to my cell and start swinging it within inches of my face while I was lying on my bed. As calmly as I could, I would ask, ‘Is this John or the other guy?’ This was insinuating that he had a split personality.”

  Both men found this a fine example of jailhouse humour. Even for a tough and relatively grounded inmate, Millhaven was a hard place to endure day in and day out, twenty-four hours a day. Inmates sometimes took a break by going “fishing” for seagulls. They’d put little bits of food on safety pins so a gull might swoop down and grab it. The payoff came when the gull reached the end of the line and its guts were suddenly ripped out. “That’s the most humane thing that happened in Millhaven,” Campbell says. He once watched as two inmates were shot by guards as they tried to scale the inner fence. It was like live theatre, as the shotgun pellets hit them and they went tumbling downwards, seemingly in slow motion. “It was like spiders falling,” Campbell recalls.

  A voice came over the loudspeakers: “Clear the yard!” One of the inmates who’d been hit wasn’t about to give himself up and face charges for attempting to escape, so he ran back inside with the crowd. “He threw his coat down,” Campbell says. “Somebody else gave him another coat.” Once back in his cell, another prisoner treated his buckshot wounds. It was simple enough for guards to figure out what had happened, but they didn’t press the matter. “They asked if he wanted to be treated. He said no. He didn’t admit to it and was never charged. That was Millhaven.”

  Campbell didn’t play hockey as a kid, but he was recruited as an assistant coach of a Millhaven inmates team anyway. He was replacing Nutty Comeau, who seemed on the verge of getting maimed or murdered by the Green Team’s other coach, Gary Barnes, who was also a player. “This guy would eat Nutty,” Campbell says. “I was asked to be coach in case he tried something.”

  As expected, things got ugly in a hurry. Behind the Green Team’s bench, Campbell turned to Barnes and said, “I’m not Nutty, so go for it.” What might have happened next could have taken hockey violence to a new low. “I had a skate in my hands. I was going to cut his throat. He still had his skates on. He could just kick me. He just wouldn’t go.”<
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  Finally, Barnes eased up, saying, “Fuck it, I’ll go to the Red Team.”

  The Green Team was a formidable bunch in the corners, and none of its players was more feared than its clean-cut defenceman John Drummond. He only weighed about 170 pounds and looked like a schoolteacher, but folks who knew him considered him a truly dangerous man, even for Millhaven.

  Some one hundred inmates routinely gathered around the boards to watch games, and during one shift when Drummond was on the ice, a voice from the spectator section screamed out, “Kill the sonofabitch!” It may surprise habitués of mainstream hockey games, but there were unwritten rules about what you just didn’t do at a Millhaven shinny game, where a large percentage of the players were convicted killers. Hollering “Kill the sonofabitch” was one of those things. “You don’t scream that to a rink full of lifers, of killers,” Campbell says. “You don’t yell ‘Kill ’em’ in Millhaven.”

  The words hit Drummond like a hard slash across his back. Everyone went silent as he immediately skated to the boards and surveyed the spectators with cold eyes.

  “Who the fuck said that?”

  The moment couldn’t have been more serious. The prisoners watching the game couldn’t have gone more silent. It was a long-time inmate who finally dared to reply. “It’s a guy who don’t know better. I’ll talk with him later. It’s a fish. A new guy.”

  Drummond was still fuming as he skated away.

  When the game was over, Drummond’s mood wasn’t any better. “Me and so-and-so and so-and-so are coming out tomorrow and we’re bringing steel. The first guy that says anything is getting it.”

  Assistant coach Campbell found himself in the unaccustomed role of peacekeeper. “It’s an expression,” Campbell said to Drummond. “There ain’t nobody going to die.”

  People who weren’t familiar with prison hockey might have been surprised by the scarcity of fighting in the games. Things in Millhaven were too hard-core for the kind of brawling typical of how the game is often played in the free world. If violence anywhere in the prison were allowed to gradually escalate, people were killed. “In Millhaven, you don’t often see a fight,” Campbell says. “If there’s a beef, somebody’s died.”

  There were no disputes among Green Team members or coaches that resulted in murders—which was a victory of sorts. On the ice, success was more modest. In the three-team league, the Greens settled for bronze.

  Christmas in Millhaven saw three drag queens in Campbell’s unit slash themselves. These weren’t superficial slashes, intended only to gain attention. They were deep, dangerous, potentially fatal cuts, which meant the three queens were carried from the unit on stretchers.

  Campbell and Sauvé found themselves speculating about how it had happened. Did the drag queens decide on a particular order of who would be slashed first, second and third? Did one do it and the others thought it was a good idea and joined in? Campbell couldn’t help but smile as he ran over his alternate theories with Sauvé, surprised that he could be so glib about something so grim, involving people who had never done anything to hurt him. Was it possible that prison was making him an even harder man? “We’re not that fucking cruel, me and Rick.”

  Campbell had been behind bars plenty of times, but this was super maximum security and he was still a newcomer; there were plenty of things to absorb. He learned that he needed to be constantly on guard, especially in the mornings. The craziest, angriest inmates often stew about grievances all night, and by daybreak they’re in a murderous rage, ready to bolt out of their cells to avenge some perceived slight that others have often forgotten. “You’re on point as soon as your cell doors open,” Campbell says. “Almost all murders there happen when the doors open. Even if you had only two hours’ sleep, you’re on point when the door opens, if you had any sense about you.”

  Campbell learned it was a dangerous thing to say hello to someone for ten consecutive mornings and then forget to do so on the eleventh. This could well be taken as a slight that must be avenged with violence. He learned that a 120-pound man can kill you just as dead as a 300-pounder, with a shank to your heart. Sometimes that 120-pound man will be more prone to using that shank than a bigger man, since he can’t handle himself with his fists.

  Campbell learned to walk with his eyes straight ahead and look slightly downwards and never peer into an open cell. Peeking into a prisoner’s cell and catching him choking the chicken potentially invites a death sentence. Campbell recalls how one inmate warned another to control his wandering eyes. “Don’t look in my cell,” he ordered. The lesson didn’t sink in. The next time the offending inmate looked into the cell, he witnessed a shank being rammed into his own heart.

  Campbell learned that you do your time without complaining. Whining about a five-year term to someone serving life with no eligibility for parole for twenty-five years comes across as taunting, and taunting invites a violent response. You also don’t ask anyone why they’re in prison. They can tell you if they want, but there’s a good chance you don’t want to hear anyway. “It’s doing your own time,” Campbell says. “It’s just none of your business.” Once, he did venture to ask an inmate if he had any regrets about stabbing his wife seventeen times.

  “Would you change anything?” Campbell asked.

  “No, she was a fucking stool pigeon. I would do it all over again. She deserved every stab.”

  With that, the conversation ended. Campbell didn’t want to hear another word about it.

  Rather than pepper a prisoner with questions or random observations, Campbell understood that it was generally best simply to shut up. Prisoners were often one sharp glance or one clumsy word away from exploding. Campbell often felt like blowing up too, especially when he got the sense that someone figured his prison time was somehow easy because he didn’t whine. “They’d think this was rolling off my back,” Campbell says. “That it was not affecting me. Listen, I was doing every fucking minute. Think this doesn’t bother me? That I don’t have a life? That you’re the only one that doesn’t deserve to be in here? Go fuck yourself.”

  In prison, crazy was normal. A convict from the United States one day volunteered to Campbell why he was behind bars. Until that time Campbell had known him primarily as a guy who was good at making wooden flowerpots, a pleasant-enough way to pass the hours. Deciding to unburden himself, the flowerpot man told Campbell how he came home one day and caught his wife with another man.

  “Oh yeah?” Campbell replied, not really wanting to know the details.

  “She came after me with a pistol.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I tried to get it from her and then it went off and then the trigger guard got stuck on my hand.” He gesticulated wildly, trying to demonstrate how easy it was for a hand to get stuck in a pistol and how the stream of bullets that filled the air and ended the life of his cheating wife was a horrible—but totally understandable—accident that could have happened to anyone.

  At this point, Campbell couldn’t control his laughter. At first, he had thought the flowerpot man just had a dry sense of humour. When he realized he was deadly serious, somehow it got even funnier.

  “Tell me that, but don’t tell a judge,” Campbell advised, leaving without a flowerpot.

  Campbell was on the incline bench in the gym not long after his arrival at Millhaven when he got chatting with a prisoner from the Kitchener area. The prisoner, whom Campbell calls Bow, began explaining how his partner in the drug world was ratting on him, so he tricked his partner into believing he had a deal for them. They drove out into a wooded area and he directed his partner to walk ahead of him as he took his hunting bow out of his car’s trunk. Campbell recalls, “As he was telling me all of this, he was getting angrier by the minute, calling his partner a stool pigeon.”

  Bow was soon totally lost in the moment of the murder. “I shot him in the back with the arrow and the fucker didn’t die, so I had to run over with my knife and stab him till he died. That motherfucker, that cock-sucki
ng rat. He deserved to die.”

  Campbell feigned outrage too and looked for the next possible exit point from the conversation.

  Then Bow abruptly halted his rant. “Do you know how they got me?”

  “No.”

  “So he proceeded to tell me,” Campbell says. “He cut off his partner’s head and buried it. His reasoning was that the bugs would eat away the flesh and he would be able to take the skull home and use it for an ashtray. I’m thinking, ‘Of course, why didn’t I think of that?’ He kept going back to check on the skull, and—wouldn’t you know it?—the police had him under their radar and the bastards followed him one day. Ain’t life a bitch?”

  “I gotta go back to my cell,” Campbell told Bow.

  “I had to tell the guy to get the fuck away from me a few times after that before he got the hint,” says Campbell.

  Campbell learned that inmates are safer with the right friends. “Guys that don’t have anybody are preyed upon a lot.” That said, it’s often better to stick to yourself rather than get involved with just anyone, since you’ll inherit all of your new friend’s enemies. Anyone suspected of being an informant or a sexual offender, or someone who’d been convicted of crimes against children, was a prime target for a shank in the exercise room. So was anyone who looked like a friend to a diddler or a rat. There is a theory that convicts are so tough on sex criminals because they feel powerless to protect their own families on the outside from people like that. Whatever the reasons, rats and diddlers were forever targeted. Campbell’s advice to a newbie inmate was simple: “Just stay to yourself and do your own time. Don’t get involved with groups. If you do, see what they’re up to.”

  Some inmates, such as a bodybuilder named Nick Nero, grated on Campbell’s nerves because they acted somehow surprised and offended to be behind bars. “He was a wimpy motherfucker,” Campbell says. “I liked Robert Blake’s line [from the 1970s TV show Baretta], ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’ … You’re a fucking drug dealer. Suck it up. Shut up and do your fucking time.”