Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (22 page)

On the first day of the show, 110 Hells Angels, Jackals and other associated gang members showed up. They were soon joined by dozens of Outlaws. Just after they arrived, a large group of Bandidos, mostly from the U.S., came through the gate and very openly greeted and aligned themselves with the Outlaws.

Combined, the Outlaws-Bandidos alliance numbered at least 120 members.

Amid all these bikers — all with full patches, some with body armor and many with exposed weapons like knives, chains and clubs — were 40 cops. They quickly put themselves between the two factions and politely asked the Outlaws and Bandidos to leave. They did. Many of the police told local media that they believed their actions narrowly averted a bloodbath. Pooler laughed it off, pointing out that no actual violence took place and any suggestion that it would have was mere speculation. London mayor Ann Marie De Ciccio managed to have Pooler's organization — 2-4 the Show Productions — banned from the London Fairgrounds. He moved the show to nearby Woodstock the following year.

Although much of the leadership of the Quebec Hells Angels was behind bars, that didn't mean they couldn't strike. On March 10, 2002, after a bit of a high-speed chase on the 401, the OPP stopped a Pontiac Sunfire on the Upper Canada Road off-ramp (commonly called the Morrisburg exit by locals). Inside were two men. One was Marc Bouffard, a muscular 27-year-old member of the Rockers who specialized in witness and debtor intimidation. With him was Daniel Lamer, a 37-year-old career criminal who once shared a jail cell with a full-patch Nomad. He was well known from a robbery and 16-hour hostage taking at a Jean Coutu pharmacy in Montreal in 1991. One of his hostages was a police officer whom he shot and wounded in a desperate attempt to escape. He was on parole for a different crime at the time when the OPP stopped him with Bouffard.

When the OPP officer approached the car, Bouffard rolled his window down. The police officer asked for his license and proof of insurance. Bouffard told him that neither he nor Lamer spoke English well enough to continue the conversation. The cop told them to stay put and went back to his cruiser to call a bilingual officer to the scene.

When two more OPP officers arrived, they approached the Sunfire with the original cop. When the bilingual officer — Constable Dan Brisson — began talking to Bouffard, he realized who he was affiliated with, and he asked both men to exit the car. As Bouffard was being seated in the back of the OPP cruiser by two of the officers, Lamer began to get out of the Sunfire to confront Brisson. He was complaining about what he considered unnecessarily harsh treatment by the cops. As Brisson approached him, Lamer pulled out two handguns and threatened him.

When Lamer saw the cops pull out their weapons, he fired at Brisson. The slug hit the cop in the left side of the chest, ricocheted off his bulletproof vest, took a chunk out of his left ear and left a gash in the back of his head. The other officers shot at Lamer. He was also wearing a bulletproof vest, but one of the five bullets fired by the police pierced his head, just above his eyebrows. He later died from the wounds inflicted by that shell.

Besides Lamer's two handguns and bulletproof vest, a subsequent search of the car uncovered two more handguns, a silencer, a pair of balaclavas. Also in the car were pictures of Rock Machine national president Alain Brunette, his customized truck and pictures of every member of the Rock Machine's fledgling Ontario West Chapter, also based in London. Hells Angels and the Rock Machine may have been officially at peace, but it looked very much like Lamer and Bouffard were not coming to Ontario to take in the sights.

In July 2002, John Coates took a call from George “Bo-Boy” Beaulieu, president of the notorious Sherbrooke Chapter that had sponsored London in the first place and still supplied them with drugs. He told Coates to come to a meeting in Toronto with him and some important Ontario guys.

At the meeting, the new power elite of Hells Angels in Canada — North Toronto president Billy Miller and Niagara president Gerald “Skinny” Ward — told Coates and Beaulieu that they couldn't tolerate a Quebec-style war in Ontario. They noted that, in about a year of existence, the London Chapter had made headlines after three of their men (including a full-patch, the president's brother) went to jail for extortion, had lost a very public shoot-out with the Outlaws on city streets, had nearly gotten criminal organization convictions pressed against the club and they had united the Outlaws and Bandidos as a large and viable international force against them.

They told Beaulieu that it was a different time and place, and they wanted to avoid a war like the one he had been part of in Quebec. There was plenty of money for everyone in Ontario and unless they riled the Outlaws and Bandidos into action, they would eventually fade into the background or become Hells Angels as their old guard retired or died off. Miller and Ward didn't exactly say it in so many words, but they were expressing a Stadnick philosophy as opposed to a Boucher one.

Beaulieu said he understood. So did Coates. But they weren't finished with him yet. They told him that they liked him and that he had a bright future ahead of him, but that he was not ready to be a chapter president. They stripped him of his title of London president and relocated him to Ward's Niagara Chapter as a full-patch member.

But the Outlaws and Bandidos didn't know that. Neither did the media, or the politicians or all but a few cops. To all of those people, it looked like the province was a powder keg about to explode, with the events in London acting as the spark.

A couple of the cops started laughing. It might seem incongruous now because most of them were on the biggest raid of their lives. But they had been awake since 2:30 in the morning and they were all very keyed up. It was about 6:00 (the sun wasn't up yet) on the morning of September 25, 2002, and about two dozen cops from a few different forces were about to knock down the door to 420 Egerton Avenue, a nondescript two-story home in London. Most of them were on the big veranda, one of them leaning against the white, metal door that led to the upstairs apartment.

There was a huge rottweiler bellowing threateningly in the backyard. And that's what started the laughter. There were two stickers on the door they were about to break down to get into the main floor. One of them said “Never mind the dog, beware the owner,” and the other said “Next time, bring a warrant.” Punchiness aside, the policemen were laughing because they weren't scared of the dog, and they actually did have a warrant.

A block to the north, another 20 cops were breaking down the door of 434 Egerton Avenue, the much bigger, nicer, field-stone home of London Outlaws president Thomas Hughes. But Hughes wasn't there. He was in jail awaiting trial on four counts of attempted murder for the shoot-out that had taken place right in front of the house.

Hughes' house was the second of three Outlaws-associated buildings that dominated Egerton Avenue at the time. The building next door (and across an alley) from 434 was 440 Egerton Avenue, the clubhouse of the London Outlaws. Other than a solid metal door and grates over the windows, it wasn't really fortified. That was a relief to the cops breaking into it.

A neighbor who didn't want to be identified described what happened next to the local paper: “There was a lot of banging and hollering by the police.” And that's pretty much what happened as the huge team of officers broke into the three unoccupied buildings and removed everything they thought constituted evidence.

At the same time, about two hours up the 401 after you turn onto the 403 at Woodstock, the same thing was happening in Hamilton. Well, not exactly the same. The cops in Hamilton weren't after evidence, they were after suspects.

Although it took place more than seven years ago, a woman I spoke with while researching remembered it like it was yesterday. She doesn't want me to use her name either, so let's call her Stella. She remembers being woken up by the noise. She heard cars stopping, their doors slamming and people talking. She looked at the clock. 5:58. It was still an hour and a half before she had to wake up and get the kids ready for school. Stella rolled over and tried hard to get in some more sleep. But she'd hardly settled back into bed when she heard a concussive bang. She leapt from bed, put on her robe and headed to the front door. When she swung it open, she saw that Carrick Avenue was loaded with cop cars. And not just Hamilton cops, but OPP as well.

As soon as she saw what was going on, Stella was relieved. It wasn't an accident or a murder or anything; she knew exactly who they were after. Mario Parente lived at the end of the block. She, like everyone else in the neighborhood knew who Parente was. “He was a biker, you know, a big-time biker,” she told me. “He wasn't with the Hells Angels, though; it was some other gang, I forget what they were called.”

But while the Outlaws may not have had much resonance in their neighborhood, Parente certainly did. Stella, like pretty well everyone else in the area, knew him by sight. “He was a great guy,” she said. “Really nice — I mean, we all knew he was this important biker — but he was never anything other than polite and pleasant as far as I knew.”

She was right when she looked out her front door and decided the cops were just collecting Parente. About two dozen cops had showed up just before sunrise to arrest him.

There were similar scenes all over Ontario as more than 500 police officers from 13 forces including the RCMP and OPP descended upon Outlaws and their associates in 13 cities. Most of them came in the “meth alley” between Windsor and London. In all, 56 people were arrested including 35 Outlaws, four former members, 10 associates and three members of the Black Pistons.

The Black Pistons are what law enforcement call a “puppet gang” and many bikers call a “support club.” In theory, a puppet gang is a smaller biker gang that does the bidding of the bigger gang — as the Rockers served Hells Angels in Montreal and the Jackals served Hells Angels in London. It's a good system; and the Outlaws strove to copy it, establishing Black Pistons chapters throughout the province. But, in general, the Black Pistons were a far cry from the polished, organized Rockers or even the ambitious and ready-to-go Jackals. Not many of them had motorcycles and most of them were nothing more than small-time hoods. “They were a bunch of pretenders and wannabes,” said a cop who knew them. “They never really put anything together.”

Besides Parente and Hughes, Project Retire — as the cops called the mass raid — netted a number of big-time players. In faraway Kingston, a city best known for its prisons, they grabbed former London president Andrew Simmons for attempted murder and obstructing justice. Also caught was Marcus Cornelisse, wanted on four counts of attempted murder from the same Egerton Avenue gunfight that had put Hughes behind bars. Thomas Harmsworth, who gained notoriety in 1991 when he refused to tell emergency room doctors or police who had put four bullets in his gut, and his son Jamie Harmsworth, who was grabbed for carrying a restricted weapon in his vehicle, were also swept up. There wasn't a prominent Outlaw free to walk the streets in Ontario.

The hammer fell at a very vulnerable time for the Outlaws. Not only had Hells Angels invaded in huge numbers, but they had taken (or scared off) some of the Outlaws' best talent. Making matters worse, just weeks before Project Retire, on August 12, 2002, William “Wild Bill” Hulko, president of the Outlaws Ottawa Chapter, was found dead in his cell in Quinte Detention Centre by guards. He was awaiting trial on sexual assault charges. Despite the fact that he was just 59 years old, Corrections Canada determined that he died of natural causes after finding no signs of foul play.

Besides the 56 people arrested, the cops involved in Project Retire took in quite a haul. On the first day, the OPP reported that they had confiscated five stolen motorcycles and one stolen pickup truck, a huge selection of firearms including an AK-47 assault rifle and a Mac-10 submachine gun (although they and countless newspaper reporters and copy editors working from their press release misspelled it “Mack-10”) and $1.6 million worth of cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy and prescription drugs. The following day, they added the Outlaws' clubhouses in Windsor, London, Toronto, St. Catharines and Sault Ste. Marie along with Hughes' residence at 434 Egerton to the booty. Their warrants also yielded 32 motorcycles, three trucks and a trailer, as well as $156,500 worth of cocaine, ecstasy, hashish, heroin, marijuana and Percocet, $29,000 in cash and what they described as “11 long guns (of various caliber, some loaded), one sawed-off rifle, ammunition, blasting caps, gas masks, [a] sword, body armor, knives, nunchukus and gun magazines.” Clearly, at least some of the Outlaws were up to no good.

Many of those arrested were charged with the still-untested law that could penalize those associated with what the courts defined as a criminal organization. This, the police pointed out, would make getting warrants and making arrests a far less cumbersome process. “It does make it easier, and we're starting to see the results of that now,” said Tony McGowan, Deputy Chief of the London police. “It allows us to more aggressively target and arrest and prosecute them.”

Target and arrest perhaps, but not everyone was sold on the idea that anti-criminal organization laws would be beneficial to law enforcement when it came to court. “This is going to attract national attention, and be of national importance because there is hardly any case law on these things,” said Syd Usprich, a law professor at the London-based University of Western Ontario. “The stakes are a lot higher under these new offenses than they would have been if you had done exactly the same stuff before the new offenses existed.” He also added that constitutional challenges and other legal entanglements were inevitable.