Table of Contents
Showdown
How the Outlaws, Hells Angels and Cops Fought for Control of the Streets
Jerry Langton
Introduction
Im really sorry I have to miss our ball game tonight, I told my nine-year-old son. I have to take a biker out to dinner.
Aware of what I do to make a living, that made perfect sense to him. For as long as my son could remember, his dad had been an author who wrote about crime, particularly bikers. Actually, he thought it was pretty cool. Immediately, he asked me if the biker had ever killed anyone. Yes, I told him, he had.
So I called up Nick, my assistant coach, to take over the game for me, and made plans to meet one of the most important and influential figures in the history of Canadian outlaw motorcycle gangs.
It had all started with an e-mail about a week earlier. It read: Ive got your next bestseller.
Ever since I started writing books, Ive gotten a lot of e-mails like that, so I was prepared to ignore it. I didnt recognize the name of the person who sent it, so I was within a second of hitting the delete button when I read further and saw that the person in question was promising to get me in contact with Mario The Wop Parente. That really caught my eye.
If the subject of my first book super-secretive and incredibly powerful former Hells Angels national president Walter Stadnick represents the Holy Grail of Canadian bikers from a reporters standpoint, Parente is at least the Ark of the Covenant.
While Stadnicks Hells Angels were building a coast-to-coast organization that dominated the drug and vice trades from Halifax to Vancouver, they were, for the most part, stopped at the Ontario line.
While it was well established and common knowledge that Ontario is by far the most lucrative market in Canada for organized crime, Hells Angels just couldnt make anything substantial happen there for a very long time. After fighting and winning two bloody wars to conquer Quebecs underworld, leaving hundreds of people some of them totally innocent, one of them an 11-year-old boy dead, they swept through B.C., Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Atlantic provinces with relative ease. But, even after that, the mighty Hells Angels couldnt do a thing in Ontario.
According to many people on every side of the situation, the main reason was Parente. He grew up in the same place as Stadnick my own hometown; a decaying former industrial hub called Hamilton, Ontario and they werent very far apart in age. They both became bikers in high school. In fact, they even sort of ran together in the 1970s when Parente was a member of Satans Choice, and Stadnick was in charge of a gang called the Wild Ones who worked off and on for the Choice, among others. Stadnick, according to many sources, desperately wanted to become a member of the Choice (or any other major gang), but they wouldnt have him.
It wasnt because he wasnt a good biker. He was tough and smart and from what Ive been told repeatedly extremely talented at selling drugs. But he had one serious shortcoming in the eyes of Satans Choice. He was just five-foot-four. Because of his height, or lack of it, lots of people bikers, cops, Mafia, media disrespected him. And they totally underestimated him.
But few who knew Parente withheld their respect. Hes not really tall, but hes rock solid. While nobody has ever tracked down a legitimate job held down by Stadnick (and I have spent many hours trying), Parente had worked in construction and welding and regularly served as a bouncer at some of Hamiltons most notorious bars and strip joints. It was a profession that put him head-to-head with Hamiltons street toughs and members of such esteemed local organizations as the Ball-Peen Hammer Boys. And he always came out on top.
The dude was, indeed, hardcore. Hed taken a bullet for the club and had more than once fired one. In a city and a province (and a country for that matter) in which bikers were eclipsing the traditional Italian and Irish Mafias for organized crime supremacy, Parente held considerable sway. And when the Outlaws the oldest and second-most powerful motorcycle gang in the United States came north to expand, they spoke with him.
The Hamilton Chapter of Satans Choice became the Outlaws, and Parente was their president. The affiliation with the giant American organization only added to his power.
And its not like Stadnick disappeared, either. Eschewed by the Ontario bikers, he was, ironically, accepted by the more powerful, more established Hells Angels in Quebec. Despite his size and utter lack of French-language skills, he was so well liked by them, that he eventually became the Hells Angels national president a post far above the dreams of the hardscrabble Hamilton bikers who wouldnt let him into their clubs.
And he did it, some say, without firing a shot or even throwing a punch. While its unlikely that Stadnick rose to such prominence in the world of outlaw bikers completely without violence (and a great deal of evidence contradicts that theory), there is consensus among bikers and cops alike that he was extraordinarily nonviolent for a biker chieftain. He managed to build a Hells Angels empire stretching from Vancouver Island to Halifax with very little bloodshed. And he stayed well under the radar while doing it. Rarely arrested and never convicted of anything worse than a traffic ticket during his reign, he refused to speak to the media and was monosyllabic with the police, never giving them anything they could use against him or anyone else.
He was a new kind of biker national president as stoic, secretive, outlaw CEO. Stadnick built the Canadian Hells Angels as a giant corporation with mergers, acquisitions and the occasional hostile takeover. He had strategic alliances, franchises, branch offices and even subsidiaries.
But he was stopped in Ontario. The Ontario bikers an uneasy alliance between the Outlaws, the Para-Dice Riders, the Vagabonds, what remained of Satans Choice after the Hamilton merger and others knew Stadnick had his eyes on their province. Not only was it Canadas richest market for drugs and vice, it was where he was from. Imagine how galling it must have been for him to control a mighty nationwide criminal organization, but not be able to walk the streets of his own hometown without bodyguards. It was so bad for him that, when he was in hospital in Hamilton recovering from severe burns received in a motorcycle accident, Hells Angels actually sought and received police protection for him. Significantly, even though Parente was behind bars at the time, his name came up in a phone conversation between Stadnicks common-law wife and police.
And thats how it stood for many years: Hells Angels reigning basically unopposed after putting down the Rock Machine rebellion in Quebec throughout Canada. Except Ontario. While the Outlaws stood at the top of a multi-headed monster that ruled that richest and most desirable of provinces.
But things changed. And years later, Im taking Parente out for a bite to get his side of the story.
I make the plans with Luther, the guy who e-mailed me in the first place. He suggests we meet in Burlington. Since they both live east of Hamilton and Im in downtown Toronto, Luther says they are meeting me half way. I tell him Im looking forward to it. He describes a restaurant located opposite the gas station across from Spencer Smith Park. He cant remember the name, but his directions are succinct. I know the area well. My wifes from Burlington, and we were married in a church about three blocks away from the restaurant. I ask how Ill recognize them. Well, Im about six-foot-four ... says Luther.
