Unrepentant Read online

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2013 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 2013 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

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  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Edwards, Peter, 1956–

  Unrepentant / Peter Edwards.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36258-2

  1. Campbell, Lorne, 1948–. 2. Hell’s Angels. 3. Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club.

  4. Gang members—Ontario—Biography. 5. Motorcycle gangs—Ontario—History. I. Title.

  HV6248.C335E98 2013 364.1092 C2012-904496-2

  Cover design by Andrew Roberts

  Cover image: photo courtesy of Lorne Campbell

  Interior images: all photos courtesy of Lorne Campbell

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  CHAPTER 1 GROWING UP HARD

  CHAPTER 2 SIMCOE STREET PARADE

  CHAPTER 3 GROWING PAINS

  CHAPTER 4 ANGER MISMANAGEMENT

  CHAPTER 5 FRIEND FOR LIFE

  CHAPTER 6 TURF

  CHAPTER 7 BIKER CHICK MAGNETS

  CHAPTER 8 THE BIKER WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO

  CHAPTER 9 FAMILY BREAKUP

  CHAPTER 10 THREE BULLETS

  CHAPTER 11 BUSTED

  CHAPTER 12 STEPPING UP

  CHAPTER 13 FREE AND UNEASY

  CHAPTER 14 SHORT HONEYMOON

  CHAPTER 15 BIG HOUSE CREW

  CHAPTER 16 FIGHTING BITTERNESS

  CHAPTER 17 DISNEYLAND

  CHAPTER 18 SHAPING UP

  CHAPTER 19 FREEDOM

  CHAPTER 20 BO

  CHAPTER 21 THE HARD WAY

  CHAPTER 22 ROCK BOTTOM

  CHAPTER 23 SMUGGLERS’ ALLEY

  CHAPTER 24 MOSTLY HAPPY TRAILS

  CHAPTER 25 MILESTONES

  Photo Insert

  CHAPTER 26 WORLD RUN

  CHAPTER 27 UNWANTED ATTENTION

  CHAPTER 28 RATWELL

  CHAPTER 29 DON JAIL INMATE #0994271886

  CHAPTER 30 CARDS AND LETTERS

  CHAPTER 31 EAST DETENTION CENTRE

  CHAPTER 32 HOLDING PATTERN

  CHAPTER 33 LEGAL SHOWDOWN

  CHAPTER 34 RIDING OFF

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  It was actually pretty simple. They like to make it complicated. People have embellished it a lot. We went to the bar. I sat with one other person. We ordered a drink.… Mike Everett, he said, “He’s sitting with a gun pointed at Rick and Gary.” … I got up right away and went to the table and I said, “How are you doing, Bill?”

  As soon as I said “How are you doing?” he went for it.…

  I totally wish he hadn’t gone for it. I’ve had to live with it. It hasn’t been easy. But he went for it and I happened to be faster.… It happened so fast that I just reacted. When you see somebody going for a gun and you’ve got one, with the upbringing I’ve had, you’ll be fast. I’m glad I had the gun.… I never questioned my decision. Not once. Not for a second.

  You’re kind of helpless to change anything, but I just wish it hadn’t happened. Just a waste of life.

  LORNE CAMPBELL, outlaw biker for forty-six years

  To Barbara, Sarah and James

  For making me feel blessed.

  P.E.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It might sound more authentic, given the subject matter inside these covers, if I said this book was written between snorts of cocaine off a tattooed biker chick’s belly. In reality, the pages that follow are mostly the product of lengthy interviews that were conducted over several months across the kitchen table of a friend of Lorne Campbell’s, between feedings of comfort food such as spaghetti with meat balls or freshly baked lemon meringue pie.

  I heard about Campbell years before we ever spoke. I knew of him primarily from author Mick Lowe’s Conspiracy of Brothers, as the outlaw biker who tried to take the rap for the fatal shooting of Golden Hawk Motorcycle Club member Bill Matiyek back in 1978. I also knew that, to some bikers, lawyers and even police, he embodies the old outlaw biker code of sticking up for your brothers, shunning the justice system and ignoring the press.

  Naturally, I was curious when Mary Liscoumb, a retired educator who’s a mutual friend, suggested a meeting with Campbell in the summer of 2011. In my profession, curiosity often trumps brains, and so off I went. I had written a lot of unflattering things over the years about the outlaw biker world, including the two clubs Campbell had belonged to, the Satan’s Choice and Hells Angels. As I drove to the meeting, I couldn’t stop wondering if I was in some sort of trouble.

  It was immediately obvious when we started talking that Campbell was the real deal. He was sixty-three years old and had spent his entire adult life as an outlaw biker. He joined the Satan’s Choice at age seventeen, the youngest-ever full member of that club, and he had seen and done plenty of things inside and outside the law between that time and his retirement in good standing from the Hells Angels in June 2011. (Yes, you can retire from a biker club and ride away intact.) Campbell had plenty of stories from those four decades on the streets and behind bars. He smiled in a way I couldn’t decipher and said he was thinking about telling them in a book.

  I said to Campbell that I was interested in his story, but I would only want to write a full and honest account. That meant I would double-check the truth of those stories. I would dig up material on my own and I would have the final say on what was published. I also told him that I had co-written a book, The Encyclopedia of Canadian Organized Crime, with one of my journalism heroes, Michel Auger, who survived being shot six times in September 2000. Auger was almost killed for the “crime” of doing his job as a crime reporter honestly, and the gunman was working for Maurice (Mom) Boucher of the Hells Angels in Quebec. I am proud to share this line of work with Auger and I wanted Campbell to know that I blamed some Hells Angels for the near murder of a friend. He needed to be clear that I could never condone or forget that.

  I wouldn’t have been surprised if things had ended here. That’s what I expected and that would have been fine. My curiosity was already at least partially satisfied. Instead, Campbell pleasantly surprised me. I learned quite quickly that he enjoys surprising people, although not always pleasantly. He said he had no problems with me telling a full and honest story about himself, adding, with a smile, “I’ve got plenty of bad stuff.”

  Campbell knows more about what makes a good story than many people who have spent as much time in classrooms as he has spent in prisons and jails. In another life, he could have made a fine editor. I was a little taken aback when he spoke about the importance of character development and the need to present people as rounded human beings—not something I expected from a former drug debt collector who has broken more bones than he can remember.

  As we continued to meet, I found I actually liked him, even though I still shudder at the thought of many things he has done. I often wondered how, with a different start, his life could have turned out far differently. The qualities that made him stand out as an outlaw biker, such as toughness and loyalty and intelligence, would have won him awards in sports or t
he military or business. I also liked how Campbell didn’t whine about the life he did have. We only have this life and have to play the hand we’re dealt. Still, at many points during our meetings he made me think about the important role fathers play in shaping their children’s lives. Many of the saddest stories he told me were about people he knew with missing or abusive fathers. Too often in his own story, Campbell is one of them.

  In time, I came to respect his brand of honesty. Through months of lengthy interviews, I double-checked his stories and never caught Campbell in a lie. He was never late for an interview and always gave his full attention to questions. He also never ended an interview, even though our average weekly talk lasted more than six hours and the questions were often intensely personal. There have been times when I felt he was leaving out a name or two when describing a crime so that he wouldn’t be ratting anyone out, but he is largely comfortable with decisions he has made in his own life and didn’t feel the need to embellish or cover up. He was often tough on himself and volunteered things about himself that I had never even heard as rumours. That included details of the Bill Matiyek shooting and how he came close to executing three other men who ran afoul of the Satan’s Choice. He doesn’t dispute what he has done; he just wants to explain why he did it.

  Throughout our months of lengthy interviews, I found that Campbell has an extremely accurate memory that is aided by novel reference points. Sometimes, when I asked him a question, he would look at one of his many tattoos to try to figure out a date based on when he had had that particular image inked onto his body. He would also think back to how the timing of events related to his entry or release dates from jail or prison. I learned fairly early on in this project that prisoners who are fuzzy on other details invariably have sharp memories when it comes to when they were locked up or set free.

  Most conversations in this book are re-created from his memory, while others are from police wiretaps.

  Now that this project is completed, I find that I genuinely like Campbell and wish the best for him. It’s still hard to reconcile the friendly, intense guy across the kitchen table with the man who appeared in police files and in newspaper stories, some of which were written by me. Both versions of Campbell are true to a point. The more I talked with him, the more I thought of the Catholic idea that we can love a sinner while hating the sin. I never expected my chats with Campbell about his crimes and capers to remind me of lessons from a priest. For all the delight he takes in surprising others, Campbell helped me to surprise myself.

  CHAPTER 1

  Growing Up Hard

  All the time I was being beaten, I thought, “I’m not going to be fourteen forever. I’m going to grow up.”

  LORNE CAMPBELL

  Lorne Campbell has shot and stabbed and punched out and hammered and clubbed more of his fellow human beings than he can remember. It would be easy to conclude that he fell into a hard life. That would be wrong. As Campbell tells it, he didn’t fall into violence; violence is where his life began.

  Campbell recalls a time when he was about six, and his dad was beating his mother yet again. This time, Campbell’s father held a knife, threatening her. “I was screaming at my dad to kill her. It wasn’t because I wanted my mother to die—I just wanted it to stop. I loved her. I just wanted it all to end. All of the violence and the beatings.”

  If the violence that typified his decades as an outlaw biker was bred into his bones, so was the sense of turf. For as long as he could remember, there was something righteous about hating the town of Whitby, a ten-minute drive towards Toronto from his native blue-collar Oshawa, a city that billed itself as “the Automotive Capital of Canada.” He had barely left his mother’s breast when he was hearing stories of how, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Campbells huddled in tents near Whitby harbour, where the poorest of the poor gathered. The family felt abandoned by the town as they shivered by the shore of Lake Ontario. In future years, when someone from the family—like Campbell’s cousin, superstar jockey Sandy Hawley—did well, others in the family would stress the connection to nearby Oshawa and try to omit any reference to Whitby. “It was like the municipality was being two-faced. Like, ‘There’s only two things I don’t like about you, and that’s your face.’ We always fought people from Whitby, Scarborough, Dunbarton. It wouldn’t matter if the person was a nice person. What’s the matter with Dunbarton? I don’t know. They ain’t from Oshawa.”

  Campbell’s father, Lorne Sr., was the youngest boy in a family of thirteen children, who were close in their own way. “They were all living in a tent, my aunts and uncles and father and grandparents.” Campbell’s paternal grandfather, Matthew, was a stonemason who immigrated to Canada from Scotland, where he was a Highlander. His hands were so huge he could pick up Campbell’s father by his head when he misbehaved as a youngster. “My aunts and uncles would often praise him for being a hard worker. The whole family would sit around and play penny-ante poker. He’d spit chewing tobacco in a pail. We didn’t think it was gross then.”

  Campbell’s father was just nineteen when he enlisted on November 11, 1941, and his military records say he was motivated by “sense of duty.” At that point he had already worked for almost five years, having left school after grade eight at age fourteen. He first worked for his father in construction for $18 a week plus room and board, and then for a Pickering construction firm for $43 weekly. Lorne Sr. was a tough man, and his military records show that while training for eight months at Camp Borden before being shipped overseas, he wasn’t a model of discipline. He was punished four times for taking off from camp. In his records, one of these escapes is called “breaking out of camp while under open arrest.” As Campbell puts it, “My father liked his freedom.” He was allowed out another time to marry a nineteen-year-old woman named Rose Patricia Prest.

  Campbell likes to joke that he was born at Oshawa General Hospital in 1948 “right beside my mother.” The point of that joke is that they didn’t really seem connected like a mother and child right from the start. If his mother hugged him and said she loved him on the day of his birth, it was perhaps the last time she did so. “My mother never in her life said ‘I love you’ to me. In that, she was distant.”

  Campbell grew up with two sisters: Lyne, two years older, and Loretta, who was born in 1954. There was also a younger sister named Roberta, who died of pneumonia when she was an infant and he was five years old. His mother took a photo of six-month-old Roberta in her tiny open casket and never mentioned her name again. The picture of Roberta was put away somewhere, safe from eyes and fingers and conversation. “Never was it talked about.”

  In later years, after Campbell jumped with both boots into the brotherhood of outlaw bikers, he was sometimes asked if he wished he had biological brothers as well. “You deal with what you’re dealt in life. People who grow up like I grew up, you don’t realize there is any option. If my parents stayed together, things would have been different. If I had five brothers, things would have been different. If, if, if. It would have been nice to have a more loving family. I envy people—not to the point that I’m depressed—that are brought up with a loving family.”

  One of his first childhood memories is of being decked out in sixteen-ounce boxing gloves when he wasn’t yet old enough to go to school. Those gloves were heavier than the ones adult pros wore for fights, and it was tough for little “Lornie” even to hold them up, let alone punch. Lorne Sr. was only five foot seven and a half on a lean frame, but he seemed massive as he would feint and then hit, feint and then hit, while his son’s skinny arms were weighed down at his sides. “He would punch me in the head and I’d go sliding across the floor.”

  The violence in his home was different from the heroic onscreen kind Campbell loved to watch John Wayne act out in Saturday afternoon cowboy movies at the Biltmore, Marks, Regent and Plaza theatres in downtown Oshawa. The violence in his home was so all-pervasive that Campbell grew up thinking it was normal. He can’t remember a time when he
cried in front of his parents. Instead, he vividly recalls the time he and Lyne laughed hysterically while their father rained down blows on them with a belt as they lay under their covers. “We couldn’t stop laughing. It was hurting, but we were looking at each other and laughing.” Laughter didn’t make the blows any less painful, but it did give Campbell a sense of control in the situation. “When I was getting beatings by my dad, I would never cry. They were often. I got used to it.”

  Until the age of five, he went regularly to Calvary Baptist Sunday school on Centre Street in Oshawa. It wasn’t his parents who took him but rather the next-door neighbours, who were eager to reach out and try to save his little soul. Inside his home, religion wasn’t promoted, but it wasn’t treated with a lack of respect either. “We weren’t taught to fear anything like the devil.” Campbell kids were expected to defer to grown-ups. “Be polite, respect your elders. It was just bred into every Campbell. It was ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ You never called older people by their first name. Never disrespected elders.”

  There was a method, however misguided, to the violence that permeated his childhood home. It was clear from as early as Campbell can remember that he needed to grow up tough. Lorne Sr. had been an amateur boxer, both in and out of the army. In later years his fingers were stained nicotine yellow from smoking three packs of Export Plains a day, but Lorne Sr. could still make a fist and use it with speed and power. “Every time I turned around, I got hit by my dad. He said, ‘When you grow up, you’re going to learn to be a fighter.’ ”

  In the Campbell household, there was no greater insult than to be called a schemer or a conniver. That he should run headlong towards something frightening rather than flee from it was bred into Campbell’s bones. This could mean a spectacular flame-out, but at least he would go out like a man. “If there’s a problem, confront the man,” his father would say. This approach became central to Campbell’s fighting style. A good shot to the solar plexus or a hook to the jaw was enough to take the knees out of most fancy dancers, in or out of the ring. “I wasn’t ever deked by anybody. I couldn’t ever be faked by anybody.”