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  Although the party went off without a hitch, things got ugly soon thereafter. Many of the reluctant members of the chapters that had patched over were chased off. Within days, the once-mighty Satan’s Choice was reduced to about 45 members spread between Toronto, Oshawa, Peterborough, Kitchener, Thunder Bay and one very divided clubhouse in Montreal. Making matters worse, the police arrested 40 members and associates of Satan’s Choice on 191 charges in August. They were almost totally broken.

  Of course, when Guindon found out his empire had been sacked, he was enraged. Effectively powerless behind bars, he issued a $10,000 reward for McEwen’s head. It went uncollected.

  But that doesn’t mean McEwen succeeded with his plan. His bosses from the U.S. caught him skimming $30,000 from club coffers, stripped him of his Outlaws membership and exiled him from Ontario. He later emerged in Calgary, working at a menial job at a hotel.

  The local bikers, a gang called the Chosen Few, recognized him, but they didn’t know about the bounty on his head and accused him of trying to recruit local bikers for the Outlaws. He assured them he wasn’t, using his lowbrow circumstances as a dishwasher to indicate his lack of power, and so they let him be. But McEwen wasn’t done. He was caught stealing again, and one of the Chosen Few beat him nearly to death with his own artificial leg. Tail between his real and prosthetic legs, he limped back to Ontario in 1980 and never did anything of note again.

  Although broken by a hostile takeover, defections and arrests, the essentially leaderless Satan’s Choice was not quite dead.

  On October 18, 1978, a fat man named Bill Matiyek sat at a table in the bar at the Queen’s Hotel in Port Hope, Ontario, a quiet and twee little town just east of Toronto. With him at the small, circular table were two other men — a local kid named Richard Sauve and a seasoned Toronto tough guy named Gary Comeau. Matiyek was both drunk and stoned on a combination of marijuana and amphetamines. He had two guns. One was pointed at Sauve’s head. The other was stuffed into his left boot.

  Comeau was a member of Satan’s Choice, Sauve was a prospect. Matiyek was a member of the Golden Hawks, a club many thought had been forcibly disbanded. Further complicating matters was the fact that some representatives from the Outlaws (now the sworn enemies of Satan’s Choice) had told Matiyek earlier that day that they were very interested in patching over the remaining Golden Hawks and making him president — if he could get the club back together.

  But unbeknownst to Matiyek, the bar was full of armed members of Satan’s Choice who had been tipped off by Sauve earlier that day. One of them, a man named Lorne Campbell, had obtained a .38-caliber handgun when he was going through the belongings of Sauve’s boarder, Gordon van Harlem, who was away on a big-time bender in nearby Peterborough.

  Comeau had originally campaigned to be the one who carried it, but his friends considered him too hotheaded. Campbell, older and more experienced, was chosen instead.

  Realizing how serious the situation was, Campbell sent trusted lieutenant Michael Everett over to sort things out. Everett was a big strong man, but he was shocked by what he saw. Matiyek was sloppy drunk and holding a gun on Sauve and Comeau. In his opinion, they were about to die. Instead of talking to Matiyek, he turned around and returned to Campbell, informing him of his view of the situation.

  Campbell passed the table and surveyed the situation himself. Matiyek recognized him and the danger he presented and instinctively tried to hide his weapon. As his handgun got caught in his jacket, Campbell (now closer to the bar’s exit than he was to Matiyek) drew his gun and fired three shots.

  The first passed through Matiyek’s thick neck, took a chunk out of his jaw, grazed his left arm and eventually lodged in Sauve’s arm. The second penetrated Matiyek’s skull and bounced around inside his cranium, killing him. The third also hit him in the head, but he was already dead.

  Pandemonium. Everyone who could, stampeded out of the bar. Somebody stopped to relieve Matiyek’s body of the cash and drugs stuffed in his pockets.

  Police arrived eventually, but not before the bar had been revisited and, according to the guys associated with Satan’s Choice, “cleaned up a little.” The body was removed by authorities, but not before the crime scene had been grossly contaminated.

  The trial was just as comical. Several witnesses changed their testimony three and even four times. One witness’s car was shot full of holes while parked in front of his house. The cops were confused. Nobody could explain why Matiyek’s gun was never fingerprinted. Much of the Crown’s evidence contradicted itself. The forensics were questioned.

  But it didn’t matter in the end. Six of the eight members of Satan’s Choice accused were found guilty of first- or second-degree murder. They received sentences ranging from 25 to 10 years. Campbell was not one of them. Sauve and Comeau each received twenty-five to life.

  But the pathetic spiral into oblivion the once-mighty Satan’s Choice went through was all just a sideshow to the real attraction. When the Outlaws patched over at least some of Satan’s Choice, it was a bold strategic and the first step in what would eventually become a war for organized crime supremacy in Canada fought between two rival American motorcycle gangs.

  The Outlaws had gotten there first and they eventually succeeded in Toronto. Almost as soon as McEwen announced that the 1977 edition of the Satan’s Choice annual party would be a patch-over ceremony, anti-Outlaws forces in the city mobilized. The members of the Toronto Satan’s Choice who did not want to become Outlaws teamed with other established gangs — most notably the Para-Dice Riders and the Vagabonds — to help keep the Outlaws out of their territories.

  It worked for a while. By the summer of 1984, both big American clubs had put a virtual embargo on drugs imported into Ontario. Through intimidation, they prevented the normal suppliers from selling to the Toronto clubs. Most of them — especially the Para-Dice Riders — began to feel a significant financial strain.

  One Toronto club, though, was enjoying business as usual. The Iron Hawgs, a large club with more than 30 full-patch members, were selling as much as they had before the big clubs put the hammer down. They had been handpicked a year earlier by the Outlaws to be their beachhead in Toronto. The Outlaws in Detroit supplied the Iron Hawgs with a decent supply of drugs when the rest of the city was practically dry.

  They were a wise choice. They were sworn enemies of the Para-Dice Riders because of a 1979 bar fight that got out of hand and ended when an innocent woman was injured when a Para-Dice Rider was beating the Iron Hawgs’ president with a loaded shotgun and it discharged. The perception at the time was that the Iron Hawgs were less cohesive and more easily led than many of the other local gangs.

  That summer, newly elected Iron Hawgs president Robert “Pumpkin” Marsh put the concept of a patch-over to the Outlaws before his collected club. Unlike McEwen’s dictatorial approach, he opened the prospect up to discussion.

  As with countless other clubs, the crowd quickly split into two factions. The younger, more ambitious Iron Hawgs were all for it. They had gotten used to the income from drug sales and were looking forward to getting far more once they were Outlaws. Besides, having that well-known and respected patch on their back meant a lot more respect than the comical one they sported now. The Outlaws were the big time, and they wanted to be part of it.

  But many of the gang’s veteran members were against the merger for exactly the same reasons. Increased sales and increased visibility meant more attention from cops — potentially a different kind of cop, like the RCMP — and other bikers. Those old guys, those who joined the club to ride and party, didn’t mind making a few bucks off weed or whatever, but most of them had real jobs and families, they didn’t want to become full-time gangsters.

  Marsh’s guest — Stanley “Beamer” McConnery, a full-patch member of McEwen’s old St. Catharines Chapter of the Outlaws — delivered the hard sell. He warned that without a concrete deal with the Outlaws, the Iron Hawgs could see their drug supply dwindle down to the same pathet
ic level as the Para-Dice Riders had. For those still unconvinced, Marsh reminded them that full-patch members of Hells Angels had been seen partying in Toronto with the Para-Dice Riders for the last year or so. Everybody in Canada knew they had their eye on Ontario. If they were to patch over the much-loathed Para-Dice Riders — and it looked likely — the Iron Hawgs would have to be well armed and well allied.

  That was the clincher. The Iron Hawgs became the Outlaws Toronto. It was one of many occasions in which the fear of a biker war in Ontario forced a decision.

  It wasn’t the Outlaws’ first success in Ontario after the Satan’s Choice patch-over. In 1982, they negotiated to have one of Ontario’s oldest clubs — the Queensmen of Amherstburg, just across the river from Detroit — change their name to the Holocaust, relocate up the 401 to London and serve as a puppet gang.

  Meanwhile the Outlaws were facing serious competition on other fronts, namely Quebec. They were not the only ones who came to Montreal in 1977. And while the Outlaws’ presence in the city was simply a fortuitous outgrowth of the club’s general desire to establish itself in Canada, Hells Angels targeted Montreal specifically.

  While the city fathers would probably prefer to be known for hosting the 1976 Summer Olympics, late ’70s Montreal was also well known for being a hotbed of organized crime, racketeering, loan-sharking, smuggling, drug sales and prostitution.

  And it was a town full of Mafia. The Cotroni, Violi and Rizzuto families represented the Italians, and the less organized, but still plenty powerful West End Gang represented the Irish. Among them, they controlled most of the crime in town, with an uneasy equilibrium occasionally interrupted by violence.

  As in many other places, the gangsters tended to use bikers to do their toughest jobs. It made sense — there were dozens of biker gangs in and around the city looking for easy money, and their presence allowed the gangsters a layer of protection from law enforcement. None of them was especially dominant or all that organized, so if things didn’t work out with one club, they could easily switch to another. The almost unlimited supply of competing labor also kept prices down.

  But there was a problem. There was a growing resentment among the majority francophones in Montreal towards the anglophone minority who — unfairly, they felt — dominated business in the city. And things were no different among the bikers. While all the gangsters spoke English (when they weren’t communicating in Italian), the only English-speaking biker gang of any consequence was Satan’s Choice (which became the Outlaws in 1977). That meant most of the time, the powerful English-speaking gangsters were hiring the French-speaking bikers to do their dirty work and paying them a fraction of what they made off them. It was no different, they contended, from the way all business was conducted in Montreal.

  But an alternative emerged. In the working-class neighborhood of Saint-Henri, nine of a French-speaking bartender’s ten sons began to throw their considerable weight around (the other lived his life as a government employee, and was never accused of any crime). The Dubois brothers — Raymond, Jean-Guy, Normand, Claude, René, Roland, Jean-Paul and the twins Maurice and Adrien — formed a cohesive group of toughs who eventually expanded their individual efforts into organized crime, rivaling the most powerful Mafia families in reach and scope.

  It started in the 1950s, when the four oldest brothers — Raymond, Jean-Guy, Normand and Claude — began leaning on local bar owners for protection money and other forms of extortion. They were very good at it, each individually acquiring a few bars by the end of the decade. But they were so good at it that they developed swelled heads. The Quebec Police Commission described them as “ruling like feudal lords.” All four were charged with the murder of a waiter who had the nerve to argue with them about their dinner bill, but a lack of evidence and suddenly reluctant witnesses led to their subsequent acquittals.

  After that, the Dubois brothers expanded their empire. They had a simple — actually, a crude — business plan, but it was truly effective. A Dubois brother and his cronies would start frequenting a bar. They’d show up every night. At first they’d be friendly. Then they’d start picking fights with other patrons, harassing the staff, vandalizing the establishment and assaulting the owner. It got progressively worse until the owner invariably gave in. Most of the time, they settled for $100 a week. That may not sound like much, but $100 in the early ’70s is more like $1,000 today, and each Dubois brother was collecting from literally dozens of bars.

  And they did more than that. After the Dubois brothers got their claws into a business, they forced the owner to hire gang members and associates. Of course, they would steal the establishment blind and work for the bar intermittently at best. And they would also operate loan-sharking, gambling, fencing and drug-trafficking businesses from the establishment while they were on the payroll.

  Their expansion wasn’t always easy. Early in their careers, the Dubois brothers recruited three old friends — Pierre, Jacques and André McSween — to work for them. The francophone Irish-Canadian brothers proved very effective, performing a number of burglaries, truck hijackings and stickups for the Dubois brothers.

  But the McSweens were nothing if not ambitious. By the early 1970s, they no longer worked for the Dubois. Instead, they had recruited their own gang and controlled an area bordering their old bosses’ territory. They took what they had learned from the Dubois brothers about extortion and loan-sharking and set up those businesses in their own territory. They even had a deal with the official scorekeeper for the Montreal Canadiens under which he would alter game statistics to ensure the McSweens would always collect on bets.

  As they got rich, both the McSweens and the Dubois brothers saw that the highest profits came from drug trafficking. And the best drug to traffic, they soon found out, was methamphetamine. It was cheap and easy to make and highly addictive. Once a user was hooked, he or she would give anything to get more.

  By 1973, the competition was too much for the Dubois brothers to tolerate. After a McSween dealer named Real Lepine insulted Adrien Dubois by refusing to sell his drugs, the Dubois brothers declared war on the McSweens. The resulting “West End War” left nine members of the McSween gang — including Jacques McSween — and five Dubois associates dead. With their brother dead, the surviving McSweens surrendered and quickly went back to work for the Dubois brothers.

  With the McSweens out of the way and back in the fold, the Dubois brothers began a plan to control all of downtown. Claude, who had worked as bouncer at clubs owned by both the Cotronis and Violis and had learned much from them, was firmly in charge.

  His next target was a very profitable trade in marijuana, LSD and particularly meth that operated in Saint-Henri Square. Like Yorkville in Toronto, the area is now quite wealthy and quiet, but in the early and mid ’70s, it was a hippie hangout and an open-air drug market.

  It was run by a particularly tough biker gang called the Devil’s Disciples. Don’t be fooled by the name. Of the more than 350 motorcycle gangs identified in Quebec history, a handful — maybe a couple dozen or so — had French names. Even fewer had anglophone membership. The Devil’s Disciples were pur laine (the Quebec expression for “purely French”) through and through. They were, at the time, Montreal’s most powerful biker gang.

  But because they were operating in what Claude Dubois considered his territory, it just wasn’t going to last. The Dubois brothers hired some local tough guys in an effort to get rid of the Devil’s Disciples. They succeeded. By January 1976, 15 Devil’s Disciples had been murdered and plenty more had been roughed up. In a phone conversation recorded by police, Claude “Johnny Hallyday” Ellefson, leader of the Devil’s Disciples, described how he panicked and fled Saint-Henri Square when he found out that Claude Dubois (who he called “the big one”) wanted his business. They were gone for good. Ellefson later re-emerged selling drugs from a wheelchair in Quebec City.

  What was interesting about that particular battle was that, instead of the usual hired muscle of basically i
ndependent tough guys they knew from their neighborhood, the Dubois brothers hired a different biker gang for much of the rough stuff.

  They were called the Popeyes. Based in Laval — a large suburb located on a pair of islands just north of Montreal — the Popeyes were a brutal bunch of beer-drinkers who frequently made the short ride into the city on business. They liked working for the francophone Dubois brothers. The Popeyes specialized in muscle for hire, but — inspired by the Dubois brothers — were expanding into other activities, including drug trafficking.

  A lot of their success was due to their charismatic and strategically minded president, Yves “Le Boss” Buteau. Tall, strong and blonde, Buteau strove to have a disciplined crew. He forbade the use of stimulant and injected drugs and he encouraged his men to shave, cut their hair occasionally and wear their colors only when necessary. But he was not above using violence when he deemed it necessary. With his statesmanship, though, he rarely needed to. He started a small network of biker gangs, some as far away as Trois-Rivieres, 80 miles down the St. Lawrence. And he had the enviable ability to deal on positive terms with other biker gangs, particularly the Missiles of Saguenay and the ridiculously named Sex Fox of Chibougamau, often inviting them to parties or hiring them for tough or distant jobs.

  After they had chased out the Devil’s Disciples, the Popeyes began selling Dubois drugs in Saint-Henri Square and the surrounding area. But a large and well-organized police task force had been formed to combat the Dubois brothers, who — after exterminating the McSween gang and the Devil’s Disciples — were regarded as the primary threat to the safety and security of the people of Montreal. They were constantly tailed, stopped and searched for minor violations and arrested by police. They all went down pretty quickly.