Unrepentant

by Peter Edwards

  Members of the parole board weren’t smiling as they looked down at files before them. “They told me that I was an enforcer for the Satan’s Choice. I said, ‘I know what you have in front of you because I have already been told, and it just isn’t true.’ ”

  Then they asked about Port Hope and the night Bill Matiyek’s life ended.

  “I’m not here for anything like that,” Campbell replied.

  At this point, Campbell got up from his chair and started out the door. Even in prison, some things were just a waste of time. To Campbell’s surprise, they called him back before he made it out of the room. To his further surprise, he got his parole.

  Charmaine picked him up from Collins Bay in her Chrysler K-car and drove him to a Peterborough halfway house.

  “We didn’t expect you for a couple hours,” the house’s director said. “Go to a restaurant.”

  They found a nice place by the highway, where Campbell put down most of the two bottles of wine they ordered. After prison hooch, whatever they ordered tasted full-bodied and satisfying. Finally, back at the halfway house, Campbell took a tipsy nosedive over a hedge before reporting in.

  Campbell was ready to head off to another halfway house, in Gravenhurst, north of Toronto, which would put him close to Charmaine and the old stomping grounds of Larry Vallentyne. Just as he got his mind around the pleasant possibilities of the move to cottage country, that idea was nixed. The story, as he understood it, was that he wasn’t wanted anywhere near the Gravenhurst cottage of Ontario premier Frank Miller. Campbell was told he would be moved to Peterborough instead. It was irritating, but at least he was out from behind bars.

  Up in Peterborough, Campbell told his parole officer that he was eager to get down to the Ironworkers Local 721 hall on Queen Street West in Toronto so he could line up some work.

  His parole officer balked. “Lorne, if you could read your record, you wouldn’t let you out either. You’re suspected for twelve homicides.”

  “I’m going down to the hall anyways.”

  At the Local 721 hiring hall, he was given a job even farther from Peterborough—1,900 kilometres to the east—on a two-month contract with his old chapter president Peter (Rabbit) Pillman of the Choice, who ran a construction company repairing smokestacks in Conception Bay, Newfoundland.

  Once Campbell got to Newfoundland, he gave his parole officer a call. “I’m in Newfoundland and I start work tomorrow.”

  “You can’t do that. They might pull your parole.”

  “If they do, they do.”

  His parole officer alluded to how outlaw bikers had been getting particularly bad publicity in eastern Canada ever since the decomposed bodies of five North charter Montreal Hells Angels were pulled from the St. Lawrence River, wrapped in sleeping bags along with weightlifting plates. They had been invited to a meeting at the Angels’ Lennoxville clubhouse on March 24, 1985, where they were beaten to death with hammers. Their crime was being considered too wild and uncontrollable, even by Hells Angels standards. Their corpses were proof that if you’re surrounded by tough people with loaded guns, you’re either very safe or very threatened.

  Campbell was heading out to the job one day when he passed some idle ironworkers.

  “We’re not going to work today.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  No answer was given.

  Campbell later got an ironworker drunk in a pub, and learned that the problem behind the work stoppage was tensions between the ironworkers’ and boilermakers’ unions. “One of the guys [a boilermaker] said, ‘If you go on that stack, I’ll shoot you off the stack’ to another worker [an ironworker]. I got him to point the guy out to me.”

  Three hard punches to the head later, the offending boilermaker lay unconscious. A much larger man, accompanied by three semi-huge slices of humanity, stepped in front of Campbell.

  “Who punched him out?” the huge man asked.

  “I did.”

  He immediately stuck out his hand to Campbell. “Good for you. It’s time somebody punched that guy out.”

  That settled, he bought Campbell a beer.

  Once back in Ontario and free of the halfway house, with his sentence expired, Campbell fell fast and hard into the life of a cocaine dealer. There was plenty of money to be made selling coke, and members of all the clubs seemed to be cashing in. Since he had been sent away to prison, the Choice had set up an Oshawa chapter again and bought a clubhouse of its own: a squat red-and-white bungalow at 487 Ortono Avenue, near Wilson Road South and Highway 401. It had “S.C.M.C.” boldly spelled out in black shingles on its red roof, lest anyone accuse them of hiding out. Campbell was its new president.

  As Campbell moved back into the Choice fold, he was taken aback by how many of his old cronies and acquaintances seemed reluctant to approach him. Ultimately, he concluded that he shouldn’t take offence, as this was a product of his fearsome reputation, not rejection. “I had punched out a lot of members.”

  At the same time, others who didn’t know him at all pretended they were lifelong friends. When Campbell walked into a bar in Scarborough with Larry Vallentyne, he was stunned by how familiar some of the patrons acted towards him. “I was not used to guys sitting down and babbling on like they knew me for a hundred years.”

  Campbell met with suppliers to pick up kilos of cocaine at a time. They’d meet in parking lots for quick transactions, when he’d ride in on his Harley, not wearing club colours so that he wouldn’t attract attention. “He’d throw it to me. I’d put it in my pack. I’d say, ‘See you later.’ It would take ten seconds.”

  Once, he had seven ounces of cocaine in his vest when he was pulled over in Orillia at a speed trap. Three or four cruisers were there, and he had to reach around the Baggies of cocaine to extract his ID papers for a female cop. “I said, ‘I haven’t been pulled over for a speeding ticket for ten years.’ ” He rode away with the ticket and the cocaine.

  The money was nice, but he couldn’t help but worry, when he stopped to think about it, that drug money was changing life in biker clubs. Increasing numbers of members were missing club activities such as meetings and runs because they were in jail or too screwed up on drugs to take part. Maybe Guindon had been right back in the sixties when he threatened to take a baseball bat to anyone in the Choice who used drugs. Says Campbell, “When people are on drugs, there’s no participation.”

  Campbell hadn’t been on a Harley for three years, and now he made up for lost time by riding with a vengeance. Harley-Davidson had come out with its Evolution motor on its touring bikes, which used rubber to absorb road vibrations and smooth out the ride. “It was a pleasure after riding bikes that break down, rattle and leak oil for so many years.” He and his associates bought seven new Harleys, worth between $15,000 and $20,000 each, within a two-week span from the same Toronto-area dealership, paying with cash. He expected the dealer to at least smile when they peeled back the bills to pay for the seventh bike, but he didn’t. “I said, ‘Have a sense of humour, buddy.’ The implication was that we were drug dealers. He seemed to get it, as he smiled back a little bit.”

  Joking aside, he had a queasy feeling about the effects of all those drugs on people around him. “I’ve seen guys and women do things they would never do for cocaine. A lot of them don’t come out of it. Some do. I like to see a happy ending.” Although he was now a full bore drug trafficker, Campbell still prided himself on pulling a few girls off drugs. One was at a party and ready to stick a needle in her arm. “She was going to do a hit and she could not find the vein. I threw her down on the floor, grabbed the fix and hid it.”

  ———

  Throughout the 1980s, the Choice got along well with the Lobos from Windsor and the Vagabonds from Toronto. During Campbell’s prison stay, the Vagabonds had sent him Christmas cards, which counted for something in his books. For all their outward gruffness, outlaw bikers are nothing if not sentimental. Anniversaries of special days in club history—such as the formation of chapters�
��are dutifully marked with parties that all members are required to attend. Alliances between friendly clubs were also something close to sacred. That was part of what rankled Campbell about the 1977 split, when half of the Choice patched over to the Outlaws. The Choice and the Outlaws had an alliance before that split, and they went so far as to create a special brotherhood patch, with a crossed piston and sceptre. So when some members of the Choice connived with the Outlaws behind the backs of members like Campbell, it was worse than disrespectful. It was treasonous.

  The Vagabonds only had one Canadian chapter, but they were also in a brotherhood with the Scorpions Motorcycle Club in the States, which made them more than just another local Toronto club. In effect, if you were a Vagabond, you were a Scorpion, and vice versa. As a novel twist, the “Vags” wore patches with 100% on their vests, rather than the 1%er patches other outlaw clubs wore. It was a declaration that they considered themselves 100 percent biker.

  Campbell was riding to Windsor for a party with about a hundred other bikers in the mid-1980s, where they planned to meet up with the Vagabonds and Lobos, among others. Bikers in packs ride at clips of a hundred kilometres an hour, with just a bike length between them. Many of the bikes didn’t have front brakes and there was no room for mechanical errors, stupidity or bad luck, or there’d be broken bones and grated skin—or worse. “One cop was trying to pull us all over. He was in a cruiser, going up and down, trying to pull us over. It’s very dangerous doing that. Experienced cops know how to do it. They go up to the front of the pack and signal for everyone to turn off somewhere, like a truckers’ weigh station. This guy obviously wasn’t that experienced and it was really dangerous what he was doing. Once we were pulled over, this guy’s fucking trying to get IDs. He’s screaming and yelling. He shouts at [Choice member] Dougie Hoyle, ‘Who the fuck’s in charge here?’ Dougie said, ‘You,’ and tapped the cop’s hand.

  “One cop went into a truck and pulled out a shotgun. Tee Hee Hoffman was back with us then. He was let out of prison after four and a half years because a police wiretap showed he was in Kitchener the night of the Port Hope shooting. Tee shouted at the cop, ‘Put that fucking shotgun back in the truck or I’ll shove it up your ass.’ All of us were shocked. Tee Hee never shouted at anyone before that.

  “All of a sudden, here come the Vagabonds. The cop who tried to pull us over at first ran in front of them. Snorko [Vagabond president Ralph “Snorko” Melanson] just kept ploughing through and hit the cop. They [police] jumped him and started giving it to him. They beat the shit out of him. Put him in the cruiser and arrested him.

  “Then finally a sergeant showed up and ordered the cop who had been in charge, ‘Get these fucking guys off the road.’ ”

  That was one of the last times Campbell saw Snorko, who could be a one-man spectacle even on a quiet day. Snorko got his nickname for his nose, and his propensity for hoovering up long lines of cocaine through it. He was also good at buying large amounts of cocaine on credit. He wasn’t so good at selling it off so that he could repay his debt. That perhaps explained why someone shot Snorko to death in September 1987 in a Toronto hotel room. By the time of Snorko’s murder, Campbell had noticed a sea change in biker attitudes towards drugs, as businesspeople started to squeeze out party people. “It turned good guys into greedy people. I’ve seen friendships fall on the wayside.”

  Through all his hard riding and partying, Campbell continued to be followed by the unresolved matter of Port Hope. He couldn’t get it off his mind that Gary Comeau and Rick Sauvé were both still serving life terms for a crime he had committed. Campbell needed the legal establishment to believe that he was the real shooter. In 1988, he talked about his crime to a University of Ottawa law school class that studied miscarriages of justice and wrongful convictions. It was their first and last lecture by a chapter president of the Satan’s Choice.

  After the class, Campbell rode his Harley down to Port Hope with a female law student on the back. It was his first trip to the Queen’s since the shooting, and he was still on parole. “Nobody recognized me. I introduced myself under a different name. A guy walked over and asked me if I wanted to play pool. Two or three guys who were there in ’78 [the night of the shooting] were there. I recognized them. They didn’t recognize me.… I played as bad as usual. A pool player I’m not.”

  By the time he turned forty, in 1988, the clean eating and spirituality that had been inspired by Sauvé were but a memory, as was the fitness derived from workouts with Guindon and long jogs around the prison yard. In their place were junk food, cocaine and whisky. There hadn’t been parties for his tenth or twentieth or thirtieth birthdays, but his fortieth was different. His September 2 birthday coincided with the Labour Day weekend that year, and the two events collided to make a monster event at a big dance hall in cottage country north of Huntsville. “I had just done a big line of cocaine. We had a good band. Somebody said, ‘Go sing, Lorne.’ My fingers weren’t working when I was playing one of their guitars. It was probably ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ ” His playing and singing that night weren’t his best, and when he left the stage a friend advised: “Lorne, don’t quit your day job.”

  In 1989, he was riding his Harley down the QEW to St. Catharines to see and hold Jemelie, his first grandchild, who had been born on August 6, when he felt something wrong in his chest. It didn’t ease up when he tried the deep breathing exercises he’d learned in prison. Campbell eased his bike through the heavy traffic, which couldn’t have been going more than fifteen miles an hour, towards the right lane. It wasn’t a sharp pain, but it was a serious, crushing one, and it wouldn’t go away. “It’s like a thousand pounds on your chest. I was just in so much pain, I have my eyes wide open and I still couldn’t see anything.”

  He rode on to St. Catharines, where he described the experience to his daughter. “You just had a heart attack,” Janice said. She was right, although a stress test showed there was no heart damage.

  Campbell resolved to cut out the drugs and stay away from junk food. The temptations of freedom were threatening to cut short his life. “I was partying, let myself go. It didn’t take long.”

  ———

  By the end of the 1980s, newspapers were often branding outlaw motorcycle clubs as organized crime syndicates, second in power only to the Italian Mafia. The dire warnings in the press about the threat posed by outlaw bikers were never shriller than when police were trying to pump up their funding at budget time. Such reports often grossly overestimated the level of planning in outlaw biker camps. While biker criminality was a constant, the amount of thought involved was often darkly comical. One needed look no further than Campbell’s Oshawa chapter of the Choice for proof.

  At the end of summer 1989, Campbell’s friend Stan was looking for a place to hide an M1 carbine near the clubhouse when he had a brainwave that struck him as both simple and effective. He tucked the assault rifle into the branches of a tree in the clubhouse backyard. All was well for the last few weeks of the summer, but then the leaves started falling. Meanwhile, the stashed rifle had faded to the back of Stan’s mind. In October, police raided the Choice clubhouse and Stan found himself charged with possession of an illegal firearm—the M1 carbine.

  “How the fuck did he find that?” Stan asked, genuinely baffled.

  “He just looked up,” Campbell told him.

  CHAPTER 20

  Bo

  I couldn’t keep a guy and break his fingers all night. Things were done more diplomatically.

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  Campbell had heard of Brian (Bo) Beaucage long before 1985, when he met him at the tiny Choice clubhouse on downtown Weber Street in Kitchener. Beaucage’s name came up whenever convicts or prison staff discussed the Kingston Penitentiary riots of 1971, back when he was in the third year of an eight-year prison term for manslaughter. And police in his hometown of London, Ontario, knew of him long before then. He was about fourteen when he was pinched for a break and enter, but the crimes that stood out
were the violent ones. “You always knew Brian wasn’t going to die a natural death,” retired London police superintendent Don Andrews once told a reporter.

  The defining day of Beaucage’s long criminal career came on April 18, 1971, or what prisoners called Bloody Sunday. That’s the day Beaucage and other inmates known as the “Dirty Dozen” forced fifteen convicts—including child molesters—to sit in a circle, tied up, with sheets over their heads, and face judgment by a kangaroo court as other prisoners screamed, “Kill the baby molesters! Give them a taste of their own medicine!” Then they executed two of them with sticks that had nails hammered through them. That done, Beaucage assumed another role with the rioters. “Of all the guys, he was designated to protect the guards. That [killing a guard] would be too serious. All they wanted was better food, and they didn’t want the bell to be ringing all of the time. That wasn’t worth a first-degree beef.” His role in the brutality added just twenty months to Beaucage’s prison term.

  As a biker, Beaucage showed a flair for making passionate enemies, especially when he was revved up on speed. He moved on from the Holocaust Motorcycle Club, which was run by sociopathic hillbilly Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine of tiny Iona Station, west of London. Kellestine later attained infamy as architect of the Bandido Massacre, when he led the slaughter of eight of his clubmates and associates. Beaucage graduated to the Satan’s Choice, where he adopted the Choice’s hatred of the Outlaws with the fervour of a true zealot.

  He disrespected the London Outlaws in any way he could, from running strippers and selling drugs on their turf to trying to rip down the Outlaws sign from their clubhouse. On that occasion, he was shot before he could get the sign down but escaped unbloodied because he was wearing a bulletproof vest. The Outlaws had a separate policy for dealing with Beaucage. Rather than waste time on hand-to-hand combat with him, they were simply to “take him out.”