Hard Road Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2017 Peter Edwards

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2017 by Random House Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  (All photos are property of Bernie Guindon or the author, unless otherwise noted.)

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Edwards, Peter, 1956–, author

  Hard road : Bernie Guindon and the reign of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club / Peter Edwards.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780345816085

  eBook ISBN 9780345816108

  1. Guindon, Bernie. 2. Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club. 3. Gang members—Ontario—Biography 4. Motorcycle clubs—Ontario. 5. Organized crime—Ontario. I. Title.

  HV6491.C3E39 2017    364.106′6092    C2016-906069-1

  Book design by Andrew Roberts

  Cover images: (biker) © Glyn Jones/Corbis/VCG; (tire tracks) © Rustamank / Dreamstime.com

  v4.1

  a

  To Winona and Kenneth Edwards

  Thanks a million

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 BEGINNINGS

  CHAPTER 2 LOCAL CELEBRITY

  CHAPTER 3 BRANCHING OUT

  CHAPTER 4 SUPREME COMMANDER

  CHAPTER 5 FIGHT CLUB

  CHAPTER 6 EXPANSION

  CHAPTER 7 NATIONAL PRESIDENT

  CHAPTER 8 PIGPEN

  CHAPTER 9 YORKVILLE

  CHAPTER 10 DARWINISM

  CHAPTER 11 SHOCK VALUE

  CHAPTER 12 BIG APPLE

  CHAPTER 13 RING WARS

  CHAPTER 14 EYE ON MONTREAL

  CHAPTER 15 SKIN BEEF

  CHAPTER 16 PROUD RIDERS

  CHAPTER 17 THUNDER BAY I

  CHAPTER 18 RIOT

  CHAPTER 19 OLYMPIC CONTENDER

  CHAPTER 20 EXPANSION TROUBLES

  CHAPTER 21 THUNDER BAY II

  CHAPTER 22 PIGPEN GOES SOUTH

  CHAPTER 23 LAST OLYMPIC HOPE

  CHAPTER 24 STRANGE CLUBMATE

  CHAPTER 25 MOUNTIE RADAR

  CHAPTER 26 BODY SELLER

  CHAPTER 27 THE BIG SPLIT

  Photo Insert

  CHAPTER 28 PRISON BLUES

  CHAPTER 29 QUIET EXPANSION

  CHAPTER 30 REUNITED

  CHAPTER 31 RECONNECTING

  CHAPTER 32 ANGEL

  CHAPTER 33 HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY

  CHAPTER 34 NIGHTMARES

  CHAPTER 35 BIG BROTHER

  CHAPTER 36 HUMAN

  CHAPTER 37 BLACK DEATH EYES

  CHAPTER 38 MOVING ON

  CHAPTER 39 UNWELCOME GUESTS

  CHAPTER 40 BIGGEST PARTY EVER

  CHAPTER 41 REGROUPING

  CHAPTER 42 CULTURE SHOCK

  CHAPTER 43 HOME FIRES

  CHAPTER 44 PRISON REPUTATION

  CHAPTER 45 REMARRIAGE

  CHAPTER 46 GLADIATORS

  CHAPTER 47 “A LITTLE HISTORY”

  CHAPTER 48 CRIMINAL DUTIES

  CHAPTER 49 FATHERS AND SONS

  ENDNOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children.

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Merchant of Venice (3.5.1)

  INTRODUCTION

  The first time I met Bernie Guindon, he was swearing at a string of Christmas tree lights. We were in the house of Lorne Campbell, one of his former clubmates from the Satan’s Choice and Hells Angels motorcycle clubs. I was writing a book about Campbell called Unrepentant: The Strange and (Sometimes) Terrible Life of Lorne Campbell, Satan’s Choice and Hells Angels Biker, when Guindon paid a visit. It was December, and soon he was trying to help his old friend put the lights on his Christmas tree. He clearly wanted them just right, but they kept getting tangled and were not lighting up as they should.

  If the uncooperative lights had been uncooperative human beings, the situation wouldn’t have been so tricky for Guindon. Though in his seventies now, he was a former world class boxer and head of a major outlaw motorcycle club. He could have settled things as he had many times before, with a crisp left hook. It would have been lights out.

  I noticed during his visit to Campbell’s house that Guindon didn’t drink any liquor, even though plenty was available. I have met with him scores of times since and have never seen him touch alcohol or use any kind of drug, prescription or otherwise. He’s a confirmed teetotaller and strongly opposed to drug use, which doesn’t jibe with his image as an old-school, big-time outlaw biker who served prison time for his role in an international drug trafficking ring.

  Guindon impressed me that day as a polite, complex man who had lived a hard life and had probably seen and done some truly horrifying things. That initial impression only deepened after he decided that he, too, would like to co-operate on a book about his life and we began getting to know one another.

  This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with Guindon and those around him, including family members, bikers, former bikers, police and former police, boxers, a former bitter rival, and a couple of people who have had murder contracts on their lives. (I’m not sure when an unfulfilled murder contract expires. I’m not sure it does.) The book also draws upon various written and online archives as well as my three decades of reporting on outlaw motorcycle gangs.

  Throughout my research, Guindon never told me what to write or whom I could and couldn’t speak with. He only asked that I not go out of my way to stir up trouble with the Hells Angels, but that’s generally a wise philosophy. He never missed or was late for an interview. If a book was going to be written on his life, he clearly wanted it done right, so his place in outlaw biker history would be properly recorded before the memories totally fade or too many participants die off.

  Guindon’s memory is not what it once was, which made the supporting interviews all the more necessary. The perspectives of others proved to be a good thing. I heard the full spectrum of opinions about him, from reverential to damning. Some of the people who know him best have the most nuanced views of him, blending strong positives and negatives. Several of the people interviewed for this book can’t stand each other for reasons that will become evident. (I have actually wondered how we can have an inclusive book launch that doesn’t end in a punch-up or shootout.) Undoubtedly, some of my interview subjects will be upset with me for giving space to their rivals and enemies, but I hope they will respect my effort to get as close to the truth as I can.

  I was surprised to find that Guindon can be quite critical of himself, which may also surprise some who knew him in his heyday. And so this book is not an attempt to either glamorize or demonize Bernie Guindon. That he was a major figure in Canadian biker history is beyond dispute. As the leader of Satan’s Choice, once the second-largest club in the world after only the Hells Angels and exemplars of the old-school biker lifestyle, he is arguably a major figure in the global history of biker clubs, too. My goal, however, is to humanize him, with all of the good and bad that goes with that—to learn what kind of a man makes a biker club, and what club life ultimately makes of a man.

  I have learned some things through my research that go far beyond Bernie
Guindon’s personal story. Some of what I have learned, obviously, is about the development of outlaw motorcycle clubs in Canada, from their beginning to the present day. But the more I worked on this book, the more I realized it’s also about something far bigger and wider reaching than how outlaws on motorcycles organize themselves in one country. The further I got into the research, the more I was pushed to think about the vital role of fathers. In particular, I understood the devastating multi-generational effects of domestic violence. The prolonged and intense cruelty inflicted upon Guindon, his mother and his brother in their home has had a painful ripple effect that’s still being felt today throughout their families and communities.

  There is a recurring pattern in this book of boys witnessing their mothers getting beaten, and then eventually, between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, defending their mothers against their fathers. I didn’t seek out this pattern but I kept finding it. After a while, I came even to expect it.

  Small wonder that these boys often grew into men who have little respect for authority. The system didn’t protect them or their mothers, so why should they respect it? Also, small wonder that those boys often grew into men who greatly value violence as a way to solve problems.

  That said, much of my research has been fun and some has even been inspiring. A true hero in this narrative is the stepmother of Guindon’s son, Harley Davidson Guindon. (The fact that he would name his son after what he considers the world’s best motorcycle speaks volumes about the man.) She has selflessly nurtured a sense of family under extremely difficult conditions. Out of respect for her request that her name not be included in these pages to protect her professional life, I have referred to her as simply “Harley’s stepmother.”

  I have also benefited from the unpublished writing of Harley Guindon and his father’s former clubmates Verg Erslavas and Frank Hobson. I am extremely grateful to them for sharing their work with me and allowing me to quote from it.

  Most of the comments from Harley Guindon in this book come from his own writing, which impressed me. I think he has the potential to develop along the lines of Roger Caron, the former inmate who won a Governor General’s Literary Award for (English) Non-Fiction. I hope that one day Harley will write his own book and I can write its introduction.

  Conversations in these pages are taken from the memories of participants. Obviously, they are not reproduced precisely word for word. What appears in these pages is solely my responsibility. I have included endnotes for those who want to check sources or take some of the many Dickensian side roads that spin off from the main story. Nothing you are about to read has been made up. The true story of Bernie Guindon’s life is more interesting than anything I could imagine.

  CHAPTER 1

  Beginnings

  My old man was a good boot man. I knew when to shut the fuck up and get away.

  BERNIE GUINDON

  Lucienne Guindon gave his youngest son a twenty-five-cent weekly allowance when he was growing up in the early 1950s, but there was a catch. Bernie could only collect it if he punched out his older brother, Jack, in front of often-drunk customers of the family bootlegging business. Lucienne peddled his booze from the Guindon family home on Simcoe Street South for double the going price after Oshawa’s bars and liquor stores had closed. “Bootleggers have to be available at all hours,” Bernie recalls. “He’d get woken up early in the morning and late at night.”

  Punching out Jack with his bare knuckles wasn’t that tough a chore for young Bernie, even though Jack was ten months older and scrappy. Bernie had a natural grasp of the footwork, balance and leverage that help make a great fighter, which contributed to his paralyzing left hook. He also possessed a fighter’s inborn desire to be the last one standing, so it wasn’t a particularly emotional thing to put a beating on his only sibling.

  Jack was hobbled by a short leg that had never healed correctly after a bad break. He also wasn’t a fighter at heart. In Jack’s perfect world, he would be an altar boy in a grand cathedral and a recreational bodybuilder. No part of him took joy in trading punches with his younger brother for the promise of a coin he never won.

  The spectacle of the battling Guindon brothers helped draw paying customers to the family’s living room, and there was never a time when the Guindons didn’t sorely need the money. Their mother, Albini (Lucy), didn’t like the family business but she didn’t really have a say in the matter. “She didn’t like us fighting too much,” Bernie recalled. “The old man would love it, and the people drinking with him would like it. Give them some entertainment.”

  Lucy Guindon was illiterate, having completed only Grade 1 in French school, and spoke virtually no English. Guindon later heard that she had some Métis blood, although he wasn’t clear on how much or whom exactly it was from. Isolated and far from where she’d grown up in the Gatineau district of rural Quebec, she could only find work as a housekeeper.

  Her husband was a scholar by comparison, with a Grade 5 education and the ability to read and write in English as well as his native French. Lucienne Guindon was a smallish man but a commanding presence, who supplemented his bootlegging income by fencing stolen goods, sometimes working with crooked Oshawa cops. As much as he enjoyed a rare quiet day spent fishing, his sons remember their father more as a merciless and efficient fighter and a tyrant about the home. “I saw my old man kick a few guys in the head,” Bernie Guindon said. “He could really kick. He could jump up and kick the ceiling. I saw my old man kick a guy in the face once and boot him down the stairs. He wouldn’t take shit from nobody. He was maybe 135 pounds.”

  The Guindon brothers didn’t fight just for the twenty-five cents. They also exchanged punches to keep their dad happy. “Being that he was a bootlegger, he’d be in a bad mood if he didn’t get many customers. He’d use his fists and his boots on us. My old man was a good boot man. I knew when to shut the fuck up and get away.”

  Bernie didn’t know too much about his father’s father, except that he was also a violent man from Buckingham, Quebec, who also liked his liquor. Bernie’s father was a twin, and Bernie heard rough things about his father’s brother Denis. “He was a drunk. That’s how I knew him. ‘He’s your uncle the drunk.’ ” Bernie’s uncle Denis was also a police officer for a short period of time, something that wasn’t bragged about in the Guindon household. “I think they fired him. Then he ended up driving a cement truck.” That career came to an even worse end when the cement truck got stuck on a train line in Angers, Quebec, and was cut in half by a train, killing Denis.

  Guindon didn’t talk much about his father, but stories circulated about him nonetheless. There was one about how he threw Guindon’s mother through a plate-glass window. He put her in the hospital more than once. There was another story about Bernie and Jack coming home dirty once, from an afternoon of play. They were placed in a tub of near scalding water and then scrubbed with the cleaner Comet until their skin felt like it might peel off. “He had a terrible temper. He had a worse temper than I did. It must have rubbed off on me.”

  Authorities in Oshawa must have known about the violence in the Guindon household, but they didn’t interfere. Everybody looked the other way.

  Personal shortcomings aside, Lucienne did attempt to provide his boys with direction, summarized by Bernie as: “Shut your goddamn mouth and keep your ears open.”

  Coming from their mother, the same message was less direct and more affectionate. “She tried to keep me on the straight and narrow,” Bernie said. “She didn’t want me to take after my dad…She didn’t drink. I don’t drink. She was sort of quiet. Tried to take care of business her own way. That’s how I usually like doing it.”

  Not surprisingly, considering the regular bouts in the family living room, the Guindon boys developed a nasty case of sibling rivalry that never really went away. Jack blamed Bernie in part for his weakened, shortened leg, which was severely broken in a childhood rumble. Bernie maintained this was a bum rap, since he was only one of several people wh
o played a role in Jack’s frequent leg injuries.

  Before they landed on Simcoe Street South, the roughest part of a tough town, the Guindons bounced from town to town as Lucienne scrounged about for money, which he seldom found. Jack was born on January 8, 1942, in Buckingham, the birthplace of their mother. She had precious little time to rest up after Jack’s birth, as Bernie was born on November 19 of the same year in nearby Hull. His mother was just nineteen when she gave birth to her second boy in ten months.

  Being unsettled was a family tradition for the Guindons. Lucy had been raised in Montreal by her grandmother because her own mother was unable to raise a child. The first time Lucy spoke with her mother, she was fifteen or sixteen. “She [grandmother] just couldn’t keep my mom, I guess,” Jack said. Family relationships were a bit hard to explain to an outsider and confusing enough even for insiders. “My mom’s mother was an aunt,” Jack said. “My aunt was my grandmother, but nobody ever told me that.” It all made sense to a point, and no one outside the family particularly cared. For all of the complexity of their relationships, Bernie said he had no doubt exactly where he stood in relation to Jack. “He was the favourite. I was the little bastard.”

  Lucienne always seemed on the run from poverty and alcoholism. He supported his young family for a time in Quebec as a log-roller on the Ottawa River, hopping from log to log and using a hook to break up logjams. That’s a tough occupation at the best of times and particularly demanding when you can’t swim. “He was afraid of water. In those days, you did what you had to do,” Bernie said.

  Lucienne’s fear of water helped explain why he next tried his hand on dry land as a lumberjack in the hamlet of Red Rock, fifty-six miles east of Thunder Bay, on the shore of Lake Superior. The Guindons arrived shortly after the closure of Camp R, a prisoner-of-war camp for a diverse population that included captured Nazis, merchant seamen and even German Jews in the early 1940s. It was a prime location for isolating prisoners, since the camp wasn’t reachable by any sort of road. Anyone wanting to shop had to be game for a five-mile walk along the railway tracks to the town of Nipigon, while mailing a letter at the post office meant a three-mile hike to Everard.