BANDIDOS IN CANADA ARE DONE -- FOR NOW

BANDIDOS IN CANADA ARE DONE -- FOR NOW (as of Sept 2010 it looks like the Bandidos have recovered & are back In Winnipeg. A Member was seen sweeping out his Driveway wearing a Club T-Shirt)

The eight bodies dumped in Shedden, Ont., were all Bandidos. The primary suspect for their murder is also a Bandido. Although the murders appear to be the result of an internal conflict within the U.S.-based gang, the implications in this country go much further.

With most of its manpower in the morgue or in jail, the Canadian Bandidos have effectively ceased to exist. Although there may officially be some members still lurking in the province, they are unlikely to be able to form any coherent chapter. And, although the Bandidos are the world's second-biggest biker gang, it's going to be very difficult for them to rebuild in Canada. Gangs rely on their credibility to recruit new members and the image of Bandidos killing their own kind won't attract many worthwhile prospects. When the memory of the Shedden massacre fades, the Bandidos may return. But for now, they are gone.

The result is that Ontario -- the most lucrative market for drugs, prostitution and other vice in the country -- now has no effective biker crime organizations other than the Hells Angels. The Bandidos have now joined the Rock Machine, Satan's Choice, Para-Dice Riders, Loners, Vagabonds and dozens of others that have tried to hold onto a piece of the action and either been recruited, pushed out of the way, exterminated or imploded on their own.

Although the virtual elimination of the Bandidos' only Canadian chapter by its own hand may seem nonsensical, it's not unprecedented. To understand why eight bodies showed up in Shedden, it's necessary to understand how bikers work. While being a biker may seem like a glamorous life of freedom and brotherhood to some, it is actually a tortuous life of hard work, rigid obedience and never knowing when or why your own "brothers" will kill you.

On March 24, 1985, the members of the Hells Angels' first Canadian chapter were invited to a party by their brothers-in-arms from the other side of Montreal. As is biker custom, the guests surrendered their weapons as they entered the clubhouse. A few minutes later, most of them were dead. According to police, the chapter in the Montreal suburb of Sorel massacred the chapter from nearby Laval because they were snorting cocaine instead of selling it, costing the entire organization money.

But they missed the man they wanted most. Yves "Apache" Trudeau had served the gang well by murdering 41 people on their behalf. He was the gang's primary weapon in their battle with the upstart Outlaws, but was targeted for death because of his drug use, constant boasting and increasingly random violence. But he didn't attend the party because he was in rehab.

The Sorel bikers made him a deal -- all he had to do was murder two more people and he was free to go. He did, but was arrested on an unrelated weapons charge. In jail, he realized he was still a target and agreed to testify against the gang in exchange for a drastically reduced sentence and government protection. Most of them went to prison.

Years later when prominent Hells Angel Louis "Melou" Roy dared to defy his superiors and sell cocaine for less than their set price, he attended a party and was never seen again.

With the Outlaws out of the way, the Hells Angels declared war on their last remaining rivals in Quebec, the Rock Machine. In a protracted conflict that left more than 160 people dead -- including a few bystanders, two prison guards and an 11-year-old boy -- the Rock Machine were virtually wiped out. The few remaining veterans relocated to Ontario and joined gangs not aligned with the Hells Angels. But when the Hells Angels, under the charismatic leadership of Walter Stadnick, moved in and patched over the majority of Ontario bikers, the desperate remnants of the Rock Machine teamed with a few other independents and joined the Bandidos.

Based in Texas and widespread throughout the southern and western United States as well as Scandinavia, the Bandidos welcomed a chance to establish a beachhead in Ontario's lucrative drug market. It never really took off. With a loose-knit chapter based in Kingston and made up of assorted bikers from all over the province, the Bandidos never wielded much clout here.

But they were, like the Outlaws and Rock Machine before them, an annoyance to the Hells Angels and that made them a target. The primary suspect in the murder, Wayne "Weiner" Kellestine, is a longtime biker who formed his own gang, the Annihilators, in nearby St. Thomas in the 1970s. Later, as most Ontario bikers were choosing sides between the Outlaws and Hells Angels, Kellestine opted for the non-aligned, Toronto-based Loners. While on his way to a friend's wedding in 1999, he was shot at by two Hells Angels prospects but survived. In 2001, when the Hells Angels took over the Loners, Kellestine joined the fledgling Bandidos.

Now he is in jail awaiting trial for the murder of eight men -- six full-patch Bandidos, another a Bandidos prospect and the other a known associate. According to police, this isn't the first time the Bandidos have cleaned house by killing off undesirable members, nor is it something the Hells Angels are above.

But the few Bandidos were the last remaining obstacle to Hell Angels' hegemony in Ontario. While the Hells Angels -- who hastened to proclaim their innocence -- may not have blood on their hands, they can't be too upset about the elimination of what little competition they had left.

Slain biker 'prospect' hailed from Cote St. Luc

Slain biker 'prospect' hailed from Cote St. Luc

One of the eight victims of Ontario's worst mass murder grew up in Montreal and will be buried here tomorrow.

By The Gazette (Montreal) April 12, 2006

One of the eight victims of Ontario's worst mass murder grew up in Montreal and will be buried here tomorrow.

Jamie Flanz, 37, a resident of Keswick, Ont., was among the eight people tied to the Bandidos outlaw motorcycle gang killed as a result of what the Ontario Provincial Police described as an internal conflict within the gang.

Leonard Flanz, a Montreal lawyer, said he had difficulty believing his son was a prospect in a biker gang. "It just doesn't fit the image of Jamie.

"He did affect the image of the motorcycle crowd, but not that of a motorcycle gang. He had a Harley-Davidson and liked to wear a leather jacket and shades. He was a big guy. But as is often the case, image is not the reality.

"There were an awful lot of positive things about Jamie."

Flanz was not known to police investigators who probe biker activity in this province. Flanz did not have a record in Quebec.

But police recently searched Flanz's home in Keswick, about 50 kilometres north of Toronto, for evidence in the beating death of a man whose body was found in a woodlot in Pickering, Ont., four months ago. No charges were laid against Flanz, and police are still investigating.

Flanz was described by Ontario police as a "prospect" of the Bandidos. That status meant he was one step away from being a full-fledged or "full patch" gang member. Shortly before he was killed, according to the Globe and Mail, Flanz had told a friend he had plans to leave the gang.

Aerial photos taken Sunday of the area where the eight men were found Saturday showed Flanz's luxury SUV abandoned with its hatch open and a large man in pyjamas lying dead in the back.

The OPP would not confirm whether the body pictured was that of Flanz.

Flanz grew up in Cote St. Luc with his two younger sisters and a younger brother.

He graduated from Wagar High School and attended Dawson College while playing hockey and baseball on teams in Cote St. Luc. He coached hockey and was an ambulance technician with Cote St. Luc's Emergency Medical Services.

His father said Flanz once saved the life of a man who had been shot at a bar in downtown Montreal. He was working as a bouncer at the time but used his life-saving skills to keep the man alive until ambulance technicians arrived.

"In many respects, he could have been a role model to many young people while he was growing up," Leonard Flanz said.

Jamie Flanz moved to Ontario nine years ago. He helped a U.S. computer services firm set up a Canadian company but left the job in 1999 and moved on to direct a Toronto company called Onico Solutions.

Leonard Flanz said he spent weeks with his son this year in Florida. They were in regular contact when they returned and, Flanz said, he spoke to his son on Friday, presumably just hours before the homicides occurred.

Flanz said his son did not express any concerns about his personal life.

The slayings, and the arrest of a full patch member as one of the suspects, have generated media speculation that the Bandidos are on the verge of disappearing in Canada. The international biker gang, which originated in Texas, has several chapters in many countries. But the Bandidos are "steering clear" of the funerals for the slain former members, Texas police said.

"When they have a funeral for a Bandido here in Texas, they come from all over. They have Bandidos represented from all over the world," said a Bandidos specialist based in Houston.

The gang's decision not to rally supports the allegation by police in Ontario and Texas that the eight Bandidos were killed in a matter of "internal cleansing" after a deal cut between their gang and the Hells Angels that surrendered Canada to the Angels.

But Guy Ouellette, a retired Surete du Quebec investigator and an expert on biker gangs, said it's too early to write off the Bandidos in this country.

The gang's chapter in Toronto had 20 members, including those who were killed and Wayne Kellestine, the Bandido charged in the slayings, Ouellette said, citing recent analyses.

Several Bandidos serving lengthy sentences for drug trafficking and other offences related to Quebec's biker war might eventually join the chapter in Ontario when released, he said.

That option was part of a pact the Bandidos reached with the Hells Angels when the former agreed to shut their chapters in Quebec, Ouellette said.

Another slain Bandido with a Quebec connection was Luis Manny Raposo, 41, of Toronto, who was arrested during the Surete du Quebec's Project Amigo in June 2002. Although he spent more than a year in prison - and though several of his co-accused pleaded guilty or were convicted - Raposo was not brought to trial because, the prosecution said, the main police informant in the case refused to co-operate.

Witness named biker as killer in home Invasion 28 Yrs Ago

Witness named biker as killer


04-15-2007


Accused Bandidos killer Wayne Kellestine was once named in court as the man who gunned down a Toronto clothier during a brazen home invasion 28 years ago.

But in spite of the dramatic courtroom accusation, Kellestine was never charged in the Toronto murder.

A senior Toronto police officer said at the time that the man's testimony was the only evidence against Kellestine.

Kellestine, one of five people charged after eight dead bikers were found 20 km from his farm on the weekend, was accused during a 1982 trial of fatally shooting John DeFilippo, 31, and wounding his father-in-law Vito Fortunato, then 53, in a 1978, North York home invasion.


BULLETS MISSED WIFE

Bullets just missed DeFilippo's wife and their infant son.

A one-time Kellestine associate -- a former London man whose role was to lure DeFilippo to the door by posing as a pizza delivery man -- was convicted of second-degree murder in the slaying and spent 10 years in prison.

The man, known as John Goodwin, testified that he came to Toronto with his drug supplier boss Kellestine for fun and had no idea the trip would end in murder.

He told his first-degree murder trial he was struggling with DeFilippo inside the door when Kellestine burst in and pumped bullets into DeFilippo and then into Fortunato.

He also testified that he had kept quiet in the four years prior to the trial because Kellestine had threatened him and his family.

"All my life I've grown up knowing that you don't squeal ... because squealers get killed," the man told a jury, which ultimately agreed with prosecutors that he was part of the killing anyway and should be convicted of second-degree murder.

"I didn't want to get killed and end up in a cornfield somewhere ... I had nothing to do with it. I'm innocent."

Kellestine, 56, himself a Bandidos bike gang member, and four friends -- Eric Niessen, 45, Brett Gardner, 21, Frank Mather, 32, and a woman, Kerry Morris, 56 -- face eight first-degree murder charges in the executions of six full-patch Bandidos, a prospect member and an associate.

Autopsy findings have still to be released in what OPP have said are the shooting deaths of John "Boxer" Muscedere, 48, Frank "Bam Bam" Salerno, 43, Luis Manny "Porkchop" Raposo, 41, George (Gus) "Crash" Kriarakis, 28, Paul Sinopoli, 30, George "Pony" Jesso, 52, Jamie Flanz, 37, and Michael Trotta, 31.

Their bodies were found, along with four vehicles, near the small Ontario hamlet of Shedden, about 20 km from Kellestine's Iona Station farm.
Contacted last night, the former London man who was convicted and imprisoned in DeFilippo's slaying said he still fears for his safety.

The man, who has moved elsewhere in Canada and keeps a low profile, maintained his innocence in the DeFilippo murder.

Library files show the man was 23 when he said he and his construction company boss Kellestine came to Toronto to collect a drug debt.

He testified he and Kellestine, then-owner of Triple-K Construction in London, met up with a man named "Mike" in Toronto and drove to Fortunato's home. DeFilippo and Fortunato were watching a hockey game when a man, posing as a pizza man, knocked on the rear door.


WRESTLED WITH HIM

The man testified at two trials - the first was declared a mistrial - that when he told DeFilippo "Mike" wanted to see him in the car outside, DeFilippo wrestled with him.

"He grabbed hold of me, knocked the pizza out of my hand and we sort of struggled ... I heard a bang, a gun, and he let go off me and fell down."

The man testified that "Mr. Kellestine came in shooting."


http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Law/200...533068-sun.html

MASSACRE A DRUG RIPOFF

MASSACRE A DRUG RIPOFF

The night started with the transfer of $400,000 worth of cocaine to Wayne Kellestine's farmhouse and it ended with Ontario's largest mass murder.

Hours before Ontario's largest mass murder, Durham Region police officers followed three of eight Bandidos from the Toronto area to a southwestern Ontario farmhouse belonging to the man now charged with killing them, sources have told the Toronto Star.

Suspecting a major drug deal could be in the works, investigators tailed the trio west along Highway 401. But they were unaware the men were transporting a cargo of 200 kilograms of cocaine that night to fellow Bandido Wayne ( Weiner ) Kellestine's London-area farm, law enforcement sources say.

After watching the three men enter the farmhouse, the officers left, assuming the bikers were there for a party, the source said.

What transpired was a deadly drug ripoff that left the three Bandidos shot dead, their bodies stuffed into cars that were driven into a field. It's believed five other Bandidos arrived separately later that night, only to be systematically killed and their bodies similarly disposed of.

It's unclear whether the ripoff of $400,000 worth of cocaine was planned. It's believed the killings were going to be justified to fellow bikers as punishment for refusing to participate in a national "run," an outlaw motorcycle tradition involving members riding in formation according to club hierarchy.

Four others, including a woman, were each charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. They were to appear in a St. Thomas courtroom today.

More details, meanwhile, are emerging about Kellestine, who relished playing the role of a dangerous man.

The 56-year-old loved to pose in front of his collection of Nazi memorabilia in his rundown farmhouse, near Dutton, about a 20-minute drive from where police discovered the bodies of eight Toronto-area members of the Bandidos motorcycle gang on the weekend.

"His reputation is being an absolute renegade," said someone from the area who knows him well. "A dangerous, dangerous guy. He's always had that reputation."

Michael Simmons, who worked undercover for the Mounties and the OPP against motorcycle gangs 15 years ago, said he purchased cocaine and guns from Kellestine on several occasions and that his work helped put away 18 bikers, including his own brother, Andrew "Teach" Simmons -- onetime president of the Outlaws.

"I witnessed him shoot his girlfriend in the back with an air pistol just for a joke," said Simmons, who entered the witness protection program in 1992. "He pointed a .45-calibre at my big toe and asked me if I could blow it off, when I was trying to buy some cocaine off him."

On another occasion, Simmons said he witnessed Kellestine "come flying down the stairs" in a combat arctic suit, armed with an Uzi, after a motion detector was set off on his rural property during a party.

"There was a big party and he freaked out, went upstairs, and he was down and ready for full combat, and that scared the s--- out of me," Simmons recalled.

Before Kellestine was sentenced to two years in prison in 2000 for weapons offences and running a marijuana operation, the court was shown photos of him posing with his personal arsenal, which included machine guns and Luger pistols like those the Nazis used.

"He always had lots and lots and lots of guns," the person who knows him well said. "He had quite an arsenal of guns."

Kellestine loved to dress the part of a dirty biker, with lots of leather. But in court, he tried to dress like former New York City mobster John ( the Dapper Don ) Gotti.

"He always wore a three-piece suit to court," said the person who knows him well. "When he came to court, he presented himself as a professional gangster."

Kellestine was president of his own local bike gang, the Annihilators, which evolved into the Loners and was affiliated with Toronto-area Loners.

That group eventually evolved into the Bandidos, and Kellestine remained a member.

While considered a dangerous force in southwestern Ontario, he wasn't on the level of those in bigger bike gangs such as the Outlaws and Hells Angels, the person who knows him well said.

"He was never in with them," the person said. "He stuck with his own crowd. ... He's always been a renegade kind of guy."

Billy Miller, who was once part of the Loners with Kellestine, went on to become president of the London Hells Angels.

Kellestine's houseguest, Frank Mather, 32, is a far different man. He has a lengthy criminal record that includes eight break-and-enters but no violence. He served a three-year term in prison in his native New Brunswick and was on parole for possession of break-and-enter tools when arrested while trying to steal a truck.

He has never been a biker, and his consistent record of arrest suggests he would be a liability to any organized-crime group.

"He'd be a follower, not a leader," said someone from the area who knows him.

He did land a six-month sentence in 2002 for growing marijuana near London, and was convicted again in 2005 for possession of break-and-enter tools.

The person who knows Mather's criminal activity well said he can't see him taking the lead in any kind of organized-crime hit.

"It's not his play," the person said. "Frank Mather is no biker."

Guy Ouellette, a retired Quebec Provincial Police biker expert, said the Bandidos were irritating for the Hells Angels in southwestern Ontario.

He said it's too easy to pronounce the Bandidos dead, even though they have only a dozen members in Toronto -- who meet in a Parkdale social club -- and five members in Manitoba with a puppet club called Los Montoneros.

Drug rip-off triggered Bandidos slayings: author

Alex Caine knows well the world of outlaw bikers.

The retired criminal investigator spent years of his life infiltrating biker gangs and spilling their secrets to law enforcement.

At different times, the Quebec-born Caine has lived among Hells Angels and Bandidos, repeatedly worn a wire and helped to bring down dozens of bikers on criminal charges.

In the 1980s, Caine infiltrated a Bandidos chapter in Bellingham, Wash., working his way up from a prospect -- the equivalent of being an intern in the biker world -- to the position of secretary treasurer at the national level.

He even got an official membership card that warns that Bandidos are "the people our parents warned us about."

It's given him a unique insider's perspective on the Bandidos -- the powerful worldwide motorcycle club that saw six of its members and associates convicted for the murders of eight bikers at an Ontario farm in April 2006.

Just over 5 months had passed since the Oct. 30 verdict, when four of the convicted men -- Dwight Mushey, Michael Sandham, Frank Mather, Wayne Kellestine, Brett Gardiner, and Marcelo Aravena -- launched appeals from inside prison.

In a new book, Caine has put forward a version of events that he believes spurred the massacre that took place near the small hamlet of Shedden, Ont., three-and-a-half years ago.

Caine's theory begins with an opportunistic drug rip-off that left a young Bandidos prospect open to retaliation and it ends with the well-known murders that made headlines across the country.

"There are eight dead guys and there are six guys accused of doing it," Caine said in a recent telephone interview with CTV.ca.

To Caine, those are the undisputed facts in the case.

"It's like layers on an onion," said Caine, explaining that he believes the real Shedden story to be a complex narrative with many storylines connected to one another.

In addition to taking a look at the Shedden killings, Caine's "The Fat Mexican: The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club," provides a detailed history of the 43-year-old club.

The book is named for the Bandidos logo -- a chubby cartoon character who wears a sombrero and is armed with both a knife and a gun.

Since it was formed in 1966, the motorcycle club has grown to global proportions, and now includes Bandidos chapters in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia.

The worldwide club's official website no longer lists any chapters in Canada and Caine's book suggests that any of the Canadian Bandidos that remained after the Shedden massacre "patched over" -- the biker-world term for switching allegiances -- to a rival motorcycle club.

Caine believes the trouble for the Ontario-based Bandidos started about a month before the infamous killings, when a young prospect was working a shift as a towtruck driver in west-end Toronto.

He says that Jamie Flanz, a 37-year-old man who lived in the town of Keswick, on Lake Simcoe, was the person who found the drugs.

An ex-bouncer, Flanz was working a shift for 52-year-old George Jessome, another one of the soon-to-be-victims of the Shedden massacre.

According to Caine, Flanz found a car parked illegally on the street in March 2006 and decided to tow it.

The car had Quebec plates and a gym bag inside its trunk filled with cocaine "in a quantity that had to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars."

But the drugs were owned by the Hells Angels, and Caine believes Flanz happened upon a delivery vehicle that was left alone for too long.

"The car ended up sitting unwatched for much longer than it should have -- long enough for a tired, bored, part-time tow-truck driver to come around and check it out," Caine writes in The Fat Mexican. "As soon as they realized their coke had gone missing, the Hells Angels started kicking down doors in Toronto looking for their lost product."

Caine says Flanz tried to broker a deal with another Bandidos member to sell the drugs.

From there, Caine describes a complicated series of biker-world interactions, which he believes eventually led to a group of Winnipeg-based Bandidos coming to the Shedden-area farm and wiping out the eight bikers from Toronto.

The last day Flanz was seen alive was the day he drove to the farm owned by Kellestine, the place where the eight men were murdered, placed in vehicles and dumped a few kilometers away.

Flanz travelled to the farm with Paul Sinopoli, 30, where both men would end up dead within a few hours, along with Jessome; George Kriarakis; 28, John Muscedere, 48; Luis Raposo, 41; Frank Salerno, 43 and 31-year-old Michael Trotta.

Flanz was actually followed to the farm by Durham Regional Police, who were watching the prospect as part of a murder investigation into the death of a 35-year-old Keswick drug dealer named Shawn Douse.

While the Durham officers never entered the farm that night, many of the phone conversations they had been secretly listening into for their investigation were later used in the trial that convicted the six men in the Shedden killings.

Douse's murder was later solved, with four other bikers connected to the Toronto Bandidos members pleading guilty to the act in January 2008. Flanz died before the first arrests were made in the case.

Caine admits that his theory about the cocaine theft was not explored at the recent trial which four of the convicted men are now appealing.

"What I would like people to understand is that I've presented an alternate set of events," he said, explaining the context of his book.

In any case, Caine stands by his research.

"Everything I say in that book is backed up, or else I wouldn't have said it," Caine said.

Joey Morin aka Joey Campbell

Joey Morin aka Joey Campbell, 34, was shot to death January 30th, 2004.

Case status is open and active.

Late in the evening of January 30th, 2004 gunshots erupted in the parking lot of the Saint Pete's strip club at 11125 156 Street. Two men died as a result of the attack and police at the time feared the start of a war between rival motorcycle gangs.

Shot were 34-year-old Robert Charles Simpson, who died at the scene, and Joey Morin, who died in hospital the next day. The double homicide were Edmonton's third and fourth murders of 2004.

Police did not release any information on what calibre of weapon was used, how many shots were fired or how many times each man was shot.

Media reports quoted sources as saying there were multiple shots to almost every part of their bodies.

Morin was reported to be hit with as many as seven bullets, with one arm almost severed.

A criminologist speculated "Two guys, maximum four bullets, that's a professional hit and if the whole place was sprayed, then it was either done by really frightened amateurs or by another group trying to make a very serious point."

Witnesses reported seeing two vehicles speed away after the shooting.

Peter Bodenberger, Saint Pete's owner, said his club had no affiliation with gangs and said the shooting happened about 20 metres away from the club's entrance.

"We as a club had no involvement with the incident," he said. "We don't even get fights in the bar so this is very unusual. The staff is pretty upset."


Joey (Crazy Horse) Morin -- who changed his name from Joseph Robert Campbell in 2001 -- was a probationary member of the Bandidos motorcycle club, a Hells Angels' rival which was setting up a chapter in Edmonton.

Morin was long associated with the defunct Rebels club, which closed down in 1997 soon after the arrest of Scott Jamieson, the club's secretary-treasurer. Morin was also briefly a Hells Angel.

Sources close to the investigation suggested that Simpson was also associated with the Bandidos gang and was in Edmonton to help set up shop.

At the time of the killings the Bandidos web site identified Joey Morin as a "probationary" member and Robert Simpson as a "hangaround."

Morin worked for a floor-laying company and as an agent for Independent Artists, an Alberta-based firm that booked nude dancers for clubs throughout Western Canada.

The Saint Pete's club where he was murdered was an IA client. The exotic dancing industry has been traditionally been controlled by the Hells Angels.

In October 2004, the Bandidos patched over to the Angels in a quiet Red Deer ceremony. The Angels-Bandidos detente was already in place when Morin was shot.


More than 200 friends, family and business associates attended Morin's funeral held at an south-side Edmonton chapel on February 6th, 2004. On a flatbed outside the chapel was displayed Morin's chopper.

In attendance were a half-dozen Bandidos in full gang colour -- including John Muscedere, Paul Sinopoli, and George "Crash" Kriarakis.

Muscedere, Sinopoli and Kriarakis were among eight Bandidos murdered on April 8th, 2006 near Shedden, Ontario.

On March 23rd, 2001 a friend of Joey Morin was killed in a collision with a train.

Ken Mire, 46, drove his 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee into a southbound train at a marked level crossing on 114th Avenue west of 142nd Street.

Mire had been a member of motorcycle clubs for 20 years. He was a long-time Rebels motorcycle club member before he joined the Nomads chapter, which fell under the umbrella of the Hells Angels organization.


In July 1997 Morin and Rebels associate member Kevin Dale Ostaszewski were charged after a police raid on the gang's club house at 115th Avenue and 85th Street. Both faced one count each of obstructing a peace officer.

Acting on word that alcohol was allegedly being sold illegally, police obtained a search warrant for the club house.

Seized were more than 660 bottles of beer, 50 bottles of hard liquor, about $165 and two shotguns which were located behind the bar and not legally stored.

The arrests were made when Morin and Ostaszewski allegedly interfered with a police officer's attempt to locate money believed to have been obtained from the illegal sale of liquor.

Morin received a medal of bravery from the Governor General in 1991 for his role in the rescue of three people from a burning truck in October 1989 in Edmonton.

Morin and a friend, Eugene McLean, noticed that the back of a truck was on fire as they were driving through the Oliver district.

Morin grabbed Ron Pazder and pulled him to safety. Pazder said his son was also in the truck, so Morin and his friend returned to rescue the son, who said his friend was also in the truck. Morin went back a third time and was able to pull the friend from the flaming vehicle.

Bikers Linked To Gym Shooting

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

The Bandidos began their move into Canada a decade ago, when they were wooed by members of the now-defunct Rock Machine gang, who were in the midst of a bloody war with the Hells Angels in Quebec over drug turf.

The Bandidos expanded into Ontario in the early 2000s, setting up their Toronto base in the basement of a Queen St. E. restaurant in south Riverdale.

They called themselves "The No Surrender Crew," a name they copied from a faction of fighters in the Irish Republican Army.

The King Township man who was shot dead outside a Richmond Hill fitness club Wednesday morning had dangerous enemies in biker gangs and the mob, sources say.

Jason (Jay) Pellicore, 34, of King Township, was also facing mortgage-fraud and weapons offences in Peel Region.



He had run afoul of a biker, who has since been drummed out of the Hells Angels for erratic behavior, after the biker accused him of taking his girlfriend. Pellicore’s contacts included York Region mobsters, sources say.

Pellicore had also talked about reviving the Bandidos biker gang north of Toronto, according to sources close to the York Region underworld.

In this week’s shooting, York Regional Police were called to 354 Newkirk Rd., south of Major Mackenzie Dr., after the sound of gunshots were heard.

Pellicore had no vital signs when his body was found by police and Emergency Medical Services personnel.

Sources say tensions are high between the local Hells Angels and Bandidos Motorcycle Clubs, especially since the shooting of three Hells Angels at a Vaughan strip club last December.

In that incident, David (Dred) Buchanan, 32, the sergeant-at-arms for the Hells Angels' west Toronto chapter was shot to death around 1 a.m. on Dec. 9 at the Club Pro, formerly the Pro Cafe, near Highway 7 and Jane St.

Security camera photos released by police show a suspect on a motorcycle or scooter.
Francisco (Frank, Cisco) Lenti, 59, faces second-degree murder charges for the shooting. His trial begins Sept. 7 in Woodbridge, and local Hells Angels may be called to testify about tensions between the clubs.

Lenti had been a member of the Bandidos, quit the club, and then tried to revive it after the murder of eight Bandidos in April 2006 outside London, Ont., in what police called “an internal cleansing” of the gang.

Two Hells Angels from the club’s Oshawa chapter face charges of attempting to murder Lenti, and police warned him last fall that his life was in danger.

Buchanan was the first Ontario Hells Angel member slain since the club moved into Ontario six years ago.

Carlos Virrilli, 28, a prospect in the west Toronto Hells Angels, and Dana Carnegie, 33, a full member of the same chapter, and former semi-professional hockey player with the Flint Generals, were both treated in hospital and released after the shooting.

Police are asking the public for help in identifying a suspect who was seen in the area at the time of this week’s homicide.

The suspect wore dark-colored clothing and rode a scooter or small motorcycle. His face was covered by a full face cover, mounted on a grey or light-colored helmet.

Jason (Jay) Pellicore, 34, One of the last Bandidos members on the GTA streets, was shot gangland-style outside Richmond Hill fitness club in August.

Pellicore was a former probationary member of the West Toronto Hells Angels, who quit the club after becoming irate about having to do menial chores at biker functions.

In the summer of 2006, he received a serious beating from West Toronto Hells Angels, the biker said.

Pellicore went to York Regional police two weeks before his murder to say he felt his life was in danger, the Star has learned.

He was about to stand trial in a mortgage fraud scheme. He had also run afoul of York Region mobsters by collecting mob debts without permission of local mobsters, the biker said.

Sometimes, Pellicore would pocket some of the money for himself and other times he would keep it all, the biker said.

Other times, people approached by Pellicore would contact police, which "burned" the mobsters, since it was then considered too risky to collect the money.

His murder remains unsolved.



They were originally calling this person a 'person of interest', but he now appears to be more than that. And the vehicle he was driving wasn't your usual van or automobile. He was operating a moped or a motorbike. Police also don't have a motive and no other information has been released about the victim, Jason Pellicore.

Police are hoping video surveillance will allow them to hone in on the man. But they're not hopeful it will show his face. He was apparently wearing a helmet with a full cover down over his visage.

UPDATE: People interviewed at the Fitness Club indicated that he used to talk about the Bandido bike gang although he was not a member of the club but a "friend." If this is true it might explain the "hit".

FURTHER UPDATE: The Star suggests through "underworld" sources that Pellicore had gotten jnto the bad books of a former Hells Angels who had accused him of taking his girlfriend. Pellicore had also talked about reviving the Bandidos biker gang north of Toronto. Pellicore was also facing mortgage-fraud and weapons offenses in Peel Region. Not such a nice guy as earlier reported.

Massacre of Bandidos Motorcycle Club members sheds more light on the lives of several York Region residents connected to the club.
Friday, 5 February 2010

The Bandido Massacre: A True Story of Bikers, Brotherhood and Betrayal, was compiled after three years of interviews and trial coverage said author and Toronto Star crime reporter Peter Edwards. The book published Tuesday.massacre of Bandidos Motorcycle Club members sheds more light on the lives of several York Region residents connected to the club. The outlaw biker club is perhaps best known publicly in Ontario for a mass murder and subsequent trial, which concluded late last year with the conviction of six men, after the bodies of eight bikers were found near Shedden, ON.
Among those murdered in 2006 were York residents Paul "Big Paul" Sinopoli, 30, of Jackson's Point, the secretary-general of the Bandidos Toronto chapter and Jamie "Goldberg" Flanz, 37, of Keswick.
The book offers a rare glimpse into the often insular biker realm. But rather than just its seedy, dark image, Mr. Edwards paints a different picture of some of the men.For instance, Mr. Flanz, owned a computer business and was a Bandido prospect for six months before his death, and Toronto's George Kriarakis, who reportedly had a strong marriage, likely wanted camaraderie, according to Mr. Edwards.In late October, six men, Wayne Kellestine, Frank Mather, along with Winnipeg residents Marcelo Aravena, Brett Gardiner, Michael Sandham - a former police officer - and Dwight Mushey were found guilty for their roles in the killings.The Texas headquarters of the club was upset with the Canadians for breaching club rules. The night of the murder, there was an attempt to rescind the membership of several men, Mr. Edwards wrote.Even before the Bandidos massacre, Mr. Flanz's home was connected to another violent incident.In December 2005, a 20-year-old woman, who is now in witness protection and who Mr. Edwards referred to as Mary Thompson, was in a home on Hattie Court, in Gerogina, owned by Mr. Flanz.Ms Thompson had experienced a rough home life and a car accident and a high school friend of hers recommended Flanz's home as a good place to stay, he said.
She got a room upstairs and had been there a few weeks when Keswick resident Shawn Douse, who Mr. Edwards described as a husband, father and drug dealer, arrived at the home. Mr. Flanz was not home at the time.After a confrontation about drugs, Mr. Douse was taken into the basement. Upstairs, Ms Thompson could hear Mr. Douse screaming, Mr. Edwards wrote.
Mr. Douse's body was later found in a north Pickering field.Four men, who Mr. Edwards has described as connected to the Bandidos, including Keswick resident Cameron Acorn, a Bandido, and former Keswick resident Bobby Quinn as well as Randy Brown of Jackson's Point, were later convicted in connection with Mr. Douse's death. An Oakville man was also convicted.Mr. Flanz had nothing to do with the death of Mr. Douse, according to Mr. Edwards.Mr. Flanz's home was simply a "good place to meet", Mr. Edwards said.Mr. Flanz had a good rapport with Ms Thompson, the book states."He was like a big brother," Mr. Edwards said. "(Ms Thompson) was terrified the next day, she listened to the beating, which was really traumatic and then the next morning she has to clean up the blood. Her reaction was more emotional more than anything else. There was also a real fear for her life ... that she's a witness and not really part of the group."In the book, Mr. Edwards thanks Mr. Douse's father for reminding him of the human toll the murder took.
Meanwhile, Mr. Edwards said Mr. Sinopoli weighed several hundred pounds and constantly fretted about his health. Mr. Edwards describes Mr. Sinopoli, a former security guard, as having "dabbled in selling drugs".However, he was well like, Mr. Edwards said.While acknowledging the men were outlaws, Mr. Edwards said it was important to show that they were also people."A lot of them are like people we went to high school with," he said. "They might not have been on the honour roll but they were still human. A lot of them, if they stayed around a little bit longer, they probably would have floated out of it. Sometimes it's the situation that makes people the way they are."
York Regional Police is monitoring the activities of outlaw biker groups in the region, investigative services Insp. Richard Crabtree said.Today, there are two outlaw biker clubhouses in York, including one in Keswick and one in King Township, York police said.Meanwhile, Mr. Edwards also writes about Francesco "Cisco" Lenti, a Vaughan man who court records show was the subject of a Hells Angels plot to curb his attempts at Bandidos expansion. In 2008, Mr. Lenti pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the shooting death of David John "Dread" Buchanan the sergeant at arms for the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club West Toronto chapter and aggravated assault for the wounding of another Hells Angel and a then-prospect member of the club. The shooting took place at a Vaughan club."He's what someone would call a one-percenter's one-percenter," Mr. Edwards said of Mr. Lenti, referring to the term by which some motorcycle riders identify themselves or are identified as being outlaws."If Lenti had been listened to, the massacre probably wouldn't have happened," Mr. Edwards said. "Lenti had a really strong, uneasy feeling about Sandham. There was something in his antennae about Sandham that he didn't trust."Mr. Edwards said he finds it unlikely that the Bandidos will make a push to expand into Ontario again soon. According to Mr. Edwards, the club is headquartered in the United States.
"The best of them were murdered and the worst of them went to prison for the murders," he said

The Bandido Massacre: A "So-Called" True Story of Bikers, Brotherhood and Betrayal

Message from Boxer’s Brother
February 20th, 2010

Joe Muscedere, the younger brother of murdered Canadian Bandido president John (Boxer) Muscedere, wasn’t able to attend court to give his victim impact statement in the fall of 2009. He asked me to post it on my website:

Your honor, jury members, people of the court or the Parole board, my name is Joe Muscedere, brother of John Muscedere, also known as Boxer.

What you didn’t hear in this trial, was how my brother John took his factory pay check and provided for Wayne’s [convicted killer Wayne Kellestine's] family when Wayne was in jail on a previous conviction. Making provisions for the same family that Wayne whisked away before the morning of April 8th.

What you didn’t hear in this trial was how the No Surrender Crew [Toronto Bandidos chapter], with their donations, paid up Wayne’s past due mortgage payments so he would not lose his farm house. The same farm house that they would all later be murdered at.

What you didn’t hear in this trial was that Wayne’s motorcycle was a gift from Chopper [Luis Manny (Chopper) Raposo]. Chopper as you all have heard was the first to die, during which Wayne performed his first Deutsch song and dance routine of the night of the killings.

When I decipher the patch’s that these accused wore or tried to wear alongside the No Surrender Crew, the one that stands out the most to me is L.L.R. (Love Loyalty and Respect). I stand here today and know that these accused have never had Love, Loyalty and Respect for anyone or anything. They are liars and a disgrace, with no idea what Love, Loyalty and Respect mean.

During the trial and prior they pointed fingers at each other and everyone else but themselves for self preservation. They don’t care who they bring down or endanger as they try to slither to freedom, as any snake would do.

These crimes were not the result of 8 accumulated errors in judgment or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were planned and calculated executions. The executions were deliberate and spanned over 5 hours to complete. During this time they confined these men and tortured them physically, and mentally. Recall the anti-Semetic abuse of [Jamie] Flanz, the dancing to the Deutsch song, the mock kneeling to join in prayer as some prisoners knelt after the first man shot, Chopper bled to death.

I am not here to dimension the hurt this has caused, or the new memories that will be no more, especially with the kids and grand kids. I am sure the other family members you will hear from will do that. I am here to underscore the fact that these were supposed to be friends and brothers not enemies.

They violated the code of brotherhood and friendship as well as committing cold blooded murder.

These murders were a culmination of a life each one of these accused was living that added no value to society. These men only take. Whether it was being a dishonest cop, drug dealer, thug, murderer or sociopath they only took from our society. Now we the people say ENOUGH! You will not take anymore and you will be punished for taking these lives.

If any of these people are released, would they change and add value to society or their families or would they continue to take? Once these criminals officially graduate to their perspective penitentiaries, another trial may start. There is honor even amongst thieves and a code amongst criminals which they have all violated. In other words this behavior isn’t even condoned by hardened prisoners. Why then should we condone it?

My father Domenico was never the same once John died. No one wants to outlive their children. Even though John was laid to rest 50 miles away, my father would visit him often and cry. Thirteen months after John’s death my father died totally unexpectedly. How does extreme sorrow affect a father’s health, state of mind and will to live? I don’t know for sure but I do know it is a heavy weight to carry every day, every moment and every second.

My mother, the kids; Julie, Tereasa, Angelina, Johnny, Steven; the grandkids; Julina, Anthony, Anasia, Rihanna will never have a Son, Dad or Nonno to turn to in times of happiness or sadness and I have lost my big brother. John was a one of a kind; he loved with all his heart and was loved by all of us.

I know why my brother laughed as he faced his final moments. He knew they were all a joke, especially Wayne. John Boxer Muscedere died with his dignity, his honor and his values intact. I will never forget John and always Love him. He was my big brother. I will protect and provide for his family just like he would have done for mine.

Please keep these murderers behind bars and stop them from causing more harm.

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About The Book

On the morning of April 8, 2006, residents of the hamlet of Shedden, Ontario, woke up to the news that the bloodied bodies of eight bikers from the Bandidos gang had been found stuffed into cars and trucks by a local farm. The massacre made headlines around the world, and the shocking news brought a grim light to an otherwise quiet corner of the Canadian province. The day after the bodies were discovered, Bandido Wayne “Weiner” Kellestine was arrested for the murders of their own crew in what remains as one of the worst mass murders in Canadian history and the largest one-day slaughter anywhere in the outlaw biker world.

The story of the biker massacre is alternately frightening and pathetic. Like other outlaw bikers, Bandidos portray themselves as motorcycle enthusiasts who are systematically misunderstood and abused by police and feared by the public. However, unlike other biker gangs such as the Hells Angels, who run highly sophisticated criminal empires, the Bandidos were anything but motorcycle enthusiasts—in fact, many of them broke the gang’s cardinal rule of even riding a Harley. Highly disorganized, prone to petty infighting and sabotage of fellow members, and—fatally—dismissive of the warnings of the powerful American leadership, the Canadian club, known as the No Surrender Crew, imploded over one dark night when, one by one, the former brothers were led to slaughter.

Peter Edwards was on the scene as the story broke and has followed the proceedings from the arrests in 2006 to the highly publicized court case in 2009, when all six defendants were found guilty of first-degree murder. He spoke with mass murderer Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine hours after the murders and interviewed outlaw bikers and cops, on the streets and behind bars, to research this story. He also covered the trial of the killers and related trials, from start to finish.

The Bandido Massacre tells, in chilling detail, how Nazi-loving Kellestine betrayed his fellow Bandidos at his farm outside of quiet Iona Station, Ontario; and how Michael “Taz” Sandham, a former theology student and police officer turned biker, found himself in the rafters of Kellestine’s barn with his rifle trained on his former comrades. But The Bandido Massacre also tells the very human side of the story, of John “Boxer” Muscedere, the head of the Toronto Bandidos, who laughed even as he ordered Kellestine to kill him first in a vain attempt to save his brothers; George “Crash” Kriarakis, wounded in the opening volley and shot dead as he sat in a car awaiting a ride to the hospital; and Jamie “Goldberg” Flanz, the only Jewish member of the Canadian crew, made to wait at the end of the line as his brothers were marched out of the barn into the early morning darkness.

As gripping as any crime novel, The Bandido Massacre is the shocking inside story of a crumbling brotherhood bent on self-destruction and betrayal.

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Excerpts
Abbreviated Introduction

THE SHEDDEN MASSACRE WAS NOT THE WORK of criminal masterminds. As a whodunit, the story of the murder of eight members of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club by fellow members in a barn outside London, Ont., could be told in a few sentences. But look at it as a whydunit, and it becomes a mystery of fascinating complexity. Not even outlaw biker insiders have an easy answer for this. Police, family members, even rival gangs can only shake their heads.

On the surface, the slaughter is patently absurd. In order to gain control of the club in Canada, the killers destroyed it. Instead of expediting their dreams of wild freedom and rough-hewn glory, the crimes quickly landed the ambitious Bandidos in prison. It was as though the killers were fighting for a bigger share of nothing. An agonizing irony is that several of their victims secretly wanted to quit the club anyway, but stayed on under the threat of violence. All they would have had to do was hand in their patches, and all the men who converged on Wayne Kellestine’s blighted farm near the hamlet of Shedden on the night of April 7, 2006 – both the betrayers and the betrayed – would today be leading the lives they dreamed of. But some shared underworld code doomed them all. Because the unfolding of this tragedy is so pointless, the why is that much more poignant.

During the more than three years of interviews and trial coverage to prepare The Bandido Massacre, I often thought of the irony of how many rules it takes to run a club devoted to freedom and life outside the law. In the end, the Bandidos were as bound by rules as the rest of us, perhaps more so. As I typed what appears here, I couldn’t help thinking of the lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Gotta Serve Somebody,” where he notes everyone, barbers to presidents, inevitably ends up serving someone or something. He could have added outlaw bikers to his list.

Perhaps the best explanation I could find for the carnage that came to light in Shedden comes from the writings of cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker. He wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death that much of what men do – from fathering children to attempting to produce timeless art to death-defying acts of heroism – is an attempt to win some illusion of immortality. Becker argued men routinely join groups where they can feel uplifted by shared heroic dreams, and which promise an intoxicating rush of power and heroism. Some join sports teams, political parties, faculty clubs, fraternities or religious sects, while some write books. Others, like the men who met at midnight at Kellestine’s barn, join outlaw motorcycle clubs.

Chapter 1

Church

It is now dead midnight.Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh. Richard III, Act 5, Scene 5

Kill ‘em all, let God sort it out - Sign in Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine’s window

JAMIE (GOLDBERG) FLANZ DIDN’T SUSPECT A THING when the surveillance car slipped behind his luxury sport utility vehicle as he drove out of Keswick, north of Toronto. With him in the grey Infiniti FX3 was Paul (Big Paul) Sinopoli, a gargantuan full-patch member of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club, and when Big Paul was around, it was hard to notice anything or anybody else, since he all but blocked out the sun.

Flanz had just been a prospect member of the Bandidos, the lowest rung on the club’s ladder, for six months. His lowly status meant he was required to be on call for round-the-clock errands like fetching hamburgers and cigarettes or chauffeuring full members like Big Paul. Prospective members like Flanz generally performed such grunt work without complaint, in hopes that they too would someday be allowed to wear a “Fat Mexican” patch on their backs to announce that they were full members in the second-largest motorcycle club in the world, behind only the Hells Angels.

Given their difference in rank, it made sense that Flanz had the chore of driving Big Paul to the emergency club meeting at Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine’s barn in tiny Iona Station (population 100) in rural southwestern Ontario on the evening of Friday, April 7, 2006. Club meetings were called “church,” “holy night,” “the barbecue” or “dinner,” and attendance at this particular gathering was mandatory, much to Big Paul’s chagrin. Weiner Kellestine’s barn was a couple hours’ drive from the Greater Toronto Area, where most chapter members lived, and Big Paul was only attending because senior members had made it clear that if he didn’t, he would likely be kicked out of the club.

The York Regional Police surveillance team had been quietly tailing Flanz and Big Paul for almost four months, since shortly after a man walking his dogs in neighbouring Durham Region on December 8, found the body of a small black male bound, gagged and badly burned in a forested area near the York-Durham Region Line. The grisly corpse was all that remained of small-time drug dealer Shawn Douse. The reason Flanz and Big Paul were on the police radar was a simple one: the last time Douse was seen alive, he was stepping out of a cab late on the night of Saturday, December 2, to attend a party at a townhouse in Keswick owned by Flanz.

In many respects, Goldberg Flanz seemed an unlikely target for a police surveillance crew probing a particularly grubby and violent murder. With his shaved head, goatee, pirate-styled hooped earring and muscled-up football lineman’s physique, Flanz looked intimidating enough. However, if you stopped to look into his eyes, the tough-guy effect quickly evaporated. Once you saw his smile and his eyes, his bruiserish appearance seemed nothing more than a carefully constructed persona, much like the performance of his namesake, the professional wrestler Goldberg. He was only playing tough.

Flanz was the rare Toronto-area outlaw biker who didn’t have blue-collar roots or a trade that involved soiling his hands. In real life, he had far more money and social status than his biker mentor, Big Paul. Flanz’s father, Leonard, was a senior partner in a prestigious Montreal law firm, specializing in insolvency cases, while Goldberg ran a small computer consulting business that provided on-site technical support to companies. While most of the Ontario Bandidos didn’t qualify for credit cards and lived on the brink of having their cellphones cut off, Goldberg owned a couple of properties, one for his real family and another as a hangout for his Bandido friends. His “Goldberg” nickname was a not-so-subtle reminder that he was Jewish, which also made him an odd fit in his circle of friends in the outlaw biker work. It was hard to think of any other Jews in Canada’s outlaw biker world, but there were hardcore anti-Semites, including the man they were going to visit that night, Weiner Kellestine, who once ran a gang called the Holocaust.

Weiner Kellestine was under two lifetime weapons bans, but remained an enthusiastic collector of Nazi memorabilia and military weapons, including machine guns, pistols, bayonets, knives and explosives. He encouraged rumours that he was a biker assassin by signing his name with lightning bolts resembling the insignia of Adolf Hitler’s Schutzstaffel, the Nazi murder squad more commonly referred to as the SS. Lest that not be unsettling enough, Kellestine surrounded himself with skinhead white supremacists and once cut a massive swastika onto his farm field with a scythe. He ran a business called Triple K Securities, a not-so-subtle nod to the initials of the Ku Klux Klan. Triple K offered “complete electronic privacy,” “telephone taps,” electronic sweeps for hidden recording devices and “discreet professional service.” When he gave Goldberg a business card, Kellestine wrote “SS” on the back with his phone number.

Many members of the Bandidos are considered by police to be criminals, but there was no sound business purpose for Flanz to be cozying up to the Bandidos. Truth be told, the Toronto Bandidos may have had the ambition, but most of the profitable crime was being committed by other groups, who worked hard at being criminals. Part of Goldberg Flanz’s appeal to the Toronto-area Bandidos was that they could borrow money from him. The attraction the Bandidos held for Goldberg was harder to define. He might be a whiz with computers and have solid business sense, but he saw himself as more complex than that, and something about the dangerous image of an outlaw motorcycle club appealed to him in a way he couldn’t fully understand.

Aside from Kellestine, most of Goldberg Flanz’s Greater Toronto Area biker buddies didn’t have a problem with the fact that he was a Jew. They might have cringed, however, had they read his profile in an Internet chat room, where he looked for love under the code name BigDaddyRogue. At the very least they would have teased him mercilessly, had they read how he wrote, using horrible grammar and spelling: “If you are stong [sic] enough to love you have more strength then most. I have that strength, the will, and the confidence to give what I expect in return. IM a diehard romantic who beleives in giving all of HImself when he finds that somone special.” He went on to describe himself as “a strong Man” who was searching “for something most seem to have forsaken … true love.” He didn’t exactly describe himself as an outlaw biker, but came close, writing, “This Man comes with a Harley.” He also said in the online profile that he believed in happy endings, writing of himself, “He is a romantic diehard who still believes in finding His fairy tale.”

There was no record of his friend and mentor Big Paul Sinopoli also being a diehard romantic, unless one counted an enthusiastic love affair with large plates of food and biker brotherhood. Big Paul was thirty years old, but still lived with his folks in a basement apartment of their ranch-style home, set among a thicket of trees in Jacksons Point, north of Toronto.

No one could remember Big Paul ever having a long-standing girlfriend, or any friends at all, for that matter, apart from other bikers. He was chummy with a few local Hells Angels, but kept this quiet, as Bandidos and Hells Angels were supposed to be mortal enemies. A one-time security guard and salesman at a sporting goods store, Big Paul dabbled in selling drugs, but didn’t make enough money at it to move out into a place of his own. Those who knew him appreciated his quick, easy sense of humour and apparent absence of ego. Those qualities made his bulk less threatening, and some women who knew him called him “the big teddy bear.” Once, he pointed to a black Bandidos T-shirt that was tightly stretched across his abdomen, smiled broadly and asked biker cops who were standing nearby, “Does this make me look fat?”

Privately, Big Paul was extremely insecure about his massive weight, estimated at somewhere on the hefty side of four hundred pounds. He had been teased about it since his childhood, when he emigrated to Canada from his birthplace of Argentina. He had occasionally talked wistfully about returning to South America to rediscover his roots, but his more immediate concern was shedding a couple of hundred pounds to stave off what seemed to be an inevitable heart attack. Although Big Paul was a full member of an outlaw motorcycle club, he wasn’t particularly interested in motorcycles, and still hadn’t paid off his second-hand Harley-Davidson. He was rarely seen on it, since it was in no better shape than Big Paul. Perhaps he also knew he would look like a bear in the circus riding it.

While Big Paul didn’t love motorcycles, he revelled in his version of the biker lifestyle, which offered massive men like himself the prospect of respect, in addition to ridiculous nicknames like “Tiny” rather than the “Fatso” or “Hey you” they might hear in the outside world. A Bandidos patch had a way of covering over some pretty glaring imperfections. As fellow club member Glenn (Wrongway) Atkinson noted, “How many guys that weigh four hundred pounds get laid that often?”

That evening, Goldberg Flanz, Big Paul and the police surveillance team snaked their way south down Highway 404, west on Highway 407, and then onto Highway 401. When the Infiniti pulled close to the town of Milton, northwest of Toronto, the York Regional officers peeled off, leaving the pursuit to a team of five officers from neighbouring Durham Region. Those officers were in a minivan and tow trucks and took turns travelling in front of and behind the Infiniti, making them hard for the bikers to pick out, even if they had been looking.

The surveillance team lost sight of the Infiniti for almost half an hour, before finding it again at an Esso station just west of Woodstock at 9: 30 p.m. The bikers were none the wiser, and when the officers spotted Goldberg once again, he was talking with two other men. A police officer pumped gas into his tank nearby as the two men got into a silver Volkswagen Golf. Flanz didn’t bother to fill his tank as he also drove away. The Volkswagen was already familiar to the Durham Region officers working on Project Douse, and they knew it was registered to Luis Manny (Chopper, Porkchop) Raposo, a full-patch member of the Toronto chapter of the Bandidos, who grandly called themselves the No Surrender Crew. Chopper was with another man they would later learn was Giovanni (John, Boxer) Muscedere, Canadian president of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club.

Chopper Raposo was a different sort of biker than Big Paul or Goldberg Flanz. Even though he was considerably smaller than the other two men, his eyes could take on a glassy, crazed quality, and at those times he looked like a man who would shoot first, and often. Chopper Raposo could be painfully polite and respectful, especially on the phone, but whenever he was photographed in biker social settings, he always seemed to be grinning dangerously and giving someone the finger.

It was a hard-edged image for a forty-one-year-old who still lived at home with his parents, in the upper floor of their brick home in Toronto’s Kensington Market area. With its big-screen television, glass chandelier, full bathroom and kitchen, Chopper’s place seemed like a tony urban loft, and it didn’t hurt things that his parents paid for his motorcycle insurance as well. Chopper was a good-looking man, and there had been a number of women in his life, but none rivalled his mother for strength or love, although no one would dare call Chopper Raposo a momma’s boy.

Raposo held the rank of el secretario, or secretary-treasurer, of the club’s Toronto chapter, the only full chapter of the Bandidos in Canada. Despite his druggy demeanour, there was no doubt that he took Bandido club business extremely seriously and personally. That night, his briefcase contained club paperwork, including a membership list with the nicknames of all of the No Surrender Crew, as well as “Taz” and “D,” referring to Michael Sandham and Dwight Mushey of Winnipeg. There was also a chart showing who owed what in terms of club dues, and a printout of an insulting email he had recently received from Taz Sandham, president of the probationary Winnipeg Bandidos chapter. Also in Chopper’s briefcase was a loaded sawed-off shotgun, which looked like a pirate’s oversized pistol. Club rules forbade such weapons at “church” meetings, but some instinct told Chopper he was justified in carrying hidden and deadly firepower this night.

Boxer Muscedere had agreed for the meeting to be held at Kellestine’s barn, even though it was an inconvenient drive for the Torontonians. The No Surrender Crew didn’t have a clubhouse to call their own, and Kellestine had pushed hard for the meeting to be held in his barn. Boxer and Kellestine had been friends for decades, and Boxer was loyal to a fault where his friends were concerned. In Boxer’s world view, Kellestine was his brother, warts and all, and nothing trumped brotherhood. Boxer could sense Kellestine was tense about something, but didn’t seem too concerned. Kellestine was often tense about something. Unlike Chopper Raposo, Boxer went unarmed to the farm that night.
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Extended Chronology

1936—Outlaws Motorcycle Club forms in Chicago area as a racing, touring and partying fraternity.

1947—After a biker riot claims headlines, the president of the American Motorcycle Association tells the press that 99 percent of motorcyclists are law abiding. The Pissed Off Bastards of Bloomington, a California motorcycle club, love the quote and immediately sew badges on their leather jackets which read “1 %er.” Other particularly rebellious biker clubs join in, also adopting the patches. A year later, the Pissed Off Bastards change their names to Hells Angels, adopting the moniker of American World War II bomber crews.

Summer 1965—Former U.S. Marine Donald Eugene Chambers and fellow dockworkers in the small Texas fishing village of San Leon form a motorcycle club. The next summer, they began calling themselves the Bandidos. Chambers is originally an admirer of the Hells Angels, who have no chapters in the Texas Gulf area.

Friday, July 1, 1977—The U.S.–based Outlaws Motorcycle Club become the first international biker gang to move into Canada, patching over four chapters of the Satan’s Choice club in Ontario and Quebec.

Monday, December 5, 1977—The Hells Angels move into Canada when the Montreal-based gang the Popeyes patch over—or switch allegiances—to their club. Hells Angels and Outlaws have a sometimes bloody rivalry.

Sunday, September 2, 1984 (Father’s Day in Australia)—Three members of the Australian Comancheros motorcycle club, three Bandidos, and a fourteen-year-old girl are killed in brawl involving guns and machetes at at the Viking Tavern in the Sydney suburb of Milperra. The violence flowed from the decision of some Comancheros to leave their club and form the first international chapter of the Bandidos.

Sunday, March 24, 1985—Guy-Louis Adam, Guy Geoffrion, Laurent Viau, Jean-Pierre Mathieu and Michel Mayrand, formerly of the Montreal North chapter of the Hells Angels, are invited to a “church” or club meeting at the Angels’ Lennoxville compound in Sherbrooke, Quebec, only to be slaughtered and dumped in the St. Lawrence River, wrapped in sleeping bags. Their crimes were excessive drug use, violence and stealing money from the club. After the killers go to prison, the compound is renovated and improved. Because of the high level of violence in the province, Quebec becomes known in the Canadian biker world as a “red zone.”

June 1997—The Rock Machine Motorcycle Club is locked in a bloody war with the Hells Angels over drug-trafficking turf, and is badly outnumbered. Rock Machine founders Johnny Plescio, Fred Faucher and Robert (Tout Tout) Léger fly to Sweden to meet with Scandinavian members of the Bandidos, hoping to gain support from the international club. They’re immediately ejected from the country by police.

July 1997—Hells Angels open new chapters in Alberta, based in Calgary and Edmonton, giving them a coast-to-coast presence in Canada.

Thursday, September 25, 1997—A truce is announced in the three-year-old Scandinavian war between the Bandidos and Hells Angels, after eleven people were killed and ninety-six were injured. Canadian Rock Machine members are impressed that the Bandidos stood up to the Hells Angels and survived.

Monday, September 7, 1998—Hells Angels open a Saskatchewan chapter, based in Saskatoon.

April 1999—The Rock Machine bolsters its strength, as the club is given hangaround status with the Bandidos Motorcycle Club. It is sponsored by European Bandidos, who are sometimes at odds with the club’s Texas mother chapter. It is a complicated relationship, as the Canadians are still considered under the wing of Texas, even though their sponsors are from Scandinavia.

June 1999—The tiny Annihilators Motorcycle Club of southwestern Ontario folds into the much larger Loners club of Richmond Hill, north of Toronto. The Annihilators were led by Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine of Iona Station, and members included Kellestine’s longtime friend, Giovanni (John, Boxer) Muscedere of Chatham.

April 2000—Notes from Dany Kane, a Quebec member of a Hells Angels support club and police agent, record that David (Wolf) Carroll of the elite Hells Angels Nomads wants him to kill members of the Loners Motorcycle Club in the Greater Toronto Area, and has given him photographs of Loners to identify his targets. Shortly afterwards, Kane says that Carroll has aborted the plan, saying too many people know about it.

Friday, December 1, 2000—Ontario Rock Machine chapters become a probationary Bandidos chapter during a ceremony at a banquet hall on Jane Street in Vaughan, north of Toronto. The Loners provide security as forty-five probationary Bandidos patches are handed out. Shortly afterwards, Canadian Bandidos president Alain Brunette extends an olive branch to the rival Hells Angels, saying he and his Bandidos “want the situation to stay quiet for a long time.”

Friday, December 22, 2000—The Hells Angels open a Manitoba chapter, patching over an existing club, the Los Bravos. This anchors their status as the dominant club on the Prairies.

Friday, December 29, 2000—Some 168 members of Ontario motorcycle clubs—including the Satan’s Choice, Para-Dice Riders, Lobos, Loners and Last Chance—arrive at the Hells Angels’ bunker-like clubhouse in Laval, outside Montreal, to be granted membership in the Hells Angels. The Greater Toronto Area suddenly vaults from having no Hells Angels clubhouses to having the largest concentration of chapters in the world, with a half-dozen within a fifty-mile radius. Canada now has the second-highest number of Hells Angels in the world, behind only the U.S. Not all of the Toronto Loners or Para-Dice Riders are included in the “patchover.”

Tuesday, May 22, 2001—In what is considered a hostile move against the Hells Angels, twelve members of the Loners chapters in Richmond Hill and Woodbridge, Ontario, become probationary Bandidos.

Saturday, December 1, 2001—Probationary Loners and Rock Machine members become full-patch members of the Bandidos, including Giovanni (John, Boxer) Muscedere, Luis Manny (Chopper, Porkchop) Raposo, George (Crash) Kriarakis, Frankie (Bam Bam, Bammer) Salerno and Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine.

Sunday, March 10, 2002—Police pull over a car on Highway 401 near Kingston, Ontario. One of the passengers, career criminal Daniel Lamer, opens fire and is killed. With him is Marc Bouffard, of the Hells Angels support club the Rockers, who is unharmed. In their car, police find four handguns, a bulletproof vest, silencer, balaclava and pictures of Bandidos Canada president Alain Brunette and his vehicle. They also find photos of several members of the Bandidos from southwestern Ontario, suggesting they were targeted for murder as well.

Spring 2002—Muscedere is promoted to vice-presidente of the Ontario Bandidos.

June 2002—Severely depleted by police raids, the Bandidos promote Muscedere to Canadian presidente. He has only been an outlaw biker for five years.

July 2004—Muscedere tours western Canada, hoping to pave the way for expansion.

August 2004—Kellestine is freed from prison after serving time for gun and drug charges, and is given the title of Bandidos Canada national sergeant-at-arms, or sargento de armas. He’s uncomfortable that he now holds less power in the club than his former sidekick Muscedere.

September 2004-Michael (Taz, Tazman, Little Beaker) Sandham, living in Winnipeg, Manitoba is looking to recruit members for a new Bandidos Chapter.

October 28, 2004-Michael Sandham and 2 of the 3 recruits head to Toronto to get acceptance and the go ahead to start a new Chapter in Winnipeg. They are brought into the fold on October 29th after a Church Meeting but are under Toronto's control due to lack of members.

Thursday, June 9, 2005—As part of a massive sweep, George (Bandido George) Wegers, El Presidente of the Bandidos Nation, is arrested in Washington State and charged with a long list of crimes, including kidnapping, drug trafficking, extortion and witness tampering.

Saturday, June 25, 2005—Michael (Taz, Tazman, Little Beaker) Sandham, president of the Winnipeg probationary chapter of the Bandidos, attends a party at Kellestine’s farm near London, Ontario. Sandham, an ex-cop, goes home frustrated, after failing to elevate his chapter above probationary status.

Thursday, December 8, 2005—The badly burned body of drug dealer Shawn Douse is found northwest of Toronto. Shortly afterwards, police begin surveillance of Bandidos and associates in Keswick, north of Toronto.

Friday, February 3, 2006—Réjean Lessard is given temporary leave from minimum-security facility in Laval, Quebec. Lessard, who had been known as “Zig-Zag” during his Hells Angels days, was serving five first-degree murder sentences for ordering the 1985 Lennoxville Massacre, in which five former members of the Laval chapter were murdered and dumped in the St. Lawrence River in sleeping bags. Lessard says he is now a vegetarian and a devout Buddhist, telling the National Parole Board, “You can’t be a Buddhist and be in that milieu.”

Saturday, April 8, 2006—Bodies of eight bikers connected to the No Surrender Crew of the Toronto area are found in vehicles abandoned off a farm laneway, near the hamlet of Shedden in southwestern Ontario. They had all been shot in the head, execution-style.

Thursday, September 28, 2006—Remond (Ray) Akleh, of the Hells Angels’ elite Ottawa-based Nomads chapter, and Mark Cephes Stephenson, president of the Oshawa chapter, are charged with conspiring to murder Frank (Cisco) Lenti, who had been trying to restart the Bandidos Motorcycle Club in Canada after the Shedden Massacre. Police allege that the would-be hitman is Steven Gault, a Hells Angel who secretly received more than a million dollars as an undercover agent for police.

Friday October 6, 2006—Bandidos presidente George Wegers pleads guilty to conspiracy to commit racketeering and is sentenced to twenty months in custody. With credit for the time he has already spent behind bars, he is released in less than a month.

Saturday, December 2, 2006—Fearful that he’s targeted for murder, Lenti opens fire on four bikers connected to the Hells Angels at Club Pro Adult Entertainment in Vaughan, where he provides security. He kills David (Dred) Buchanan and critically wounds Carlo Verrelli.

April 14, 2008—Lenti pleads guilty to manslaughter for killing Buchanan and to two counts of aggravated assault, for which he receives a six-year prison sentence.

Sunday, January 18, 2009—Akleh and Stephenson are each acquitted by a jury of all charges of plotting Lenti’s murder.

Monday, February 23, 2009—Jury selection begins for the trial of six Bandidos and associates charged in the April 2006 massacre. There is a pool of two thousand prospective jurors, the largest jury pool in memory in Canada.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009—The trial of six men for the Bandido massacre begins, with Elgin County Crown Attorney Kevin Gowdey telling a jury: “There was no gunfight. There was no flurry of bullets… One by one, the Bandidos were led to their deaths.”

Friday, October 29, 2009 – Each of the six men charged in the Bandido massacre is sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years after being found guilty of first-degree murder.
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Cast of Characters

The Victims (“No Surrender Crew”)

Jamie (Goldberg) Flanz
Seemed to be only playing outlaw biker. Murdered last so that he would suffer most because he was Jewish.

George (Pony) Jessome
Wanted to be surrounded by friends as he died of cancer. Dry sense of humour. Few, if any, enemies.

George (Crash) Kriarakis
Nice Greek boy and former rugby player from a good family who thought he could clean up the club from the inside. Briefly the Canadian president.

John (Boxer, Prize) Muscedere
Loved to say “top left”, meaning “from the heart.” Became Canadian president of the Bandidos only five years after he became a biker. Even his killers acknowledged he died like a man.

Luis Manny (Chopper) Raposo
Worried that club standards were slipping dangerously. The bullet that killed him tore off his right middle finger, the one he used to diss the world.

Frank (Bam Bam, Bammer) Salerno
Said he’d quit the club as soon as he became a father, but stayed on and was murdered. Toronto president of the No Surrender Crew.

Paul (Big Paulie) Sinopoli
Unable to talk his way out of attending fatal meeting.

Michael (Little Mikey) Trotta
Barely got into the club before he was killed for being a member.

Killers and Guards

Marcelo (Fat Ass) Aravena
Mixed martial artist and pro boxer, with a habit of taking nasty beatings.

Brett (Bull, Beau) Gardiner
Youngest of the Winnipeg squad. Tried to use a stupidity defense and failed. Didn’t shoot anyone the night of the massacre.

Maurice Hudson (M.H)
Sold out his clubmates for his freedom. Living now under a new name.

Wayne (Weiner, W) Kellestine
Hillbilly biker who loves Nazism and himself (not in that order). Signed his name with lightning bolts, to announce he was a killer.

Frank Mather
Loyal to a fault. Was at Kellestine’s farm at the time of the murders because he needed a place to stay. Habitual criminal but not a gunman.

Dwight (D, Big Dee) Mushey
Didn’t realize his leader Michael (Taz) Sandham was a liar until it was too late. A polite but frightening man.

Michael (Taz, Tazman, Little Beaker) Sandham
Ex theology student, soldier, cop, outlaw biker, pretend martial artist, habitual liar, killer and inmate.

Assorted Other Bandidos

Jason Addison
Longtime President of the Bandidos in Australia.

Glenn (Wrongway) Atkinson
Former national secretary-treasurer of the Canadian Bandidos. Maintained good relations with Americans in Bandido “Mother Chapter” in Texas until leaving.

Carleton (Pervert) Bare
National secretary of the Bandidos in Texas, who shuddered at in-fighting of Canadian Bandidos.

Frank (Cisco) Lenti
Former member of No Surrender Crew who wasn’t a member at the time of the slaughter.

Jeffery Pike
Texas-based El Presidente of the Bandidos.

Bill (Bandido Bill) Sartelle
El Secretario of the Bandidos worldwide.

George Wegers
Washington State former Bandido Presidente.

Lawyers, Judges and Police

Detective Inspector P.A. (Paul) Beesley
Senior Ontario Provincial Police homicide investigator, given the job of investigating the Shedden Massacre.

Detective Sergeant Mick Bickerton
Ace interviewer for the Ontario Provincial Police.

Tony Bryant
High-profile Toronto criminal lawyer whose former clients included schoolgirl sex killer Paul Bernardo.

Don Crawford
Longtime southwestern Ontario lawyer who represented Michael (Taz) Sandham.

Heather Carpenter, Gordon Cudmore
Other members of the defense team for Michael Sandham, the George Costanza of the outlaw biker world.

Louie Genova
Lawyer for Toronto-area biker Frank (Cisco) Lenti.

Kevin Gowdey
Unflappable head of the prosecution team in the Bandido mass-murder trial.

Mr. Justice Thomas Heeney
Superior Court judge who oversaw the trial of eight Bandidos in London, Ontario, in 2009, a task much harder than herding cats uphill.

Fraser Kelly
Crown in the Bandido mass-murder trial. Encyclopedic and quick mind.

Detective Sergeant Mark Loader and Detective Constable Jeff Gateman
Members of the Ontario Provincial Police Biker Enforcement Unit, who spent much time with police agent M.H.

Detective Inspector Ian Maule
In charge of massive forensic file for mass murder mega-trial.

Clay Powell
Lawyer for accused killer Wayne (Weiner) Kellestine, and former top prosecutor who put hockey mogul Harold Ballard of the Toronto Maple Leafs behind bars for fraud. As a defence lawyer, he kept Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones out of prison after the guitarist’s heroin bust.

Peter Westgate
Senior Crown attorney in Newmarket, Ontario, who prosecuted Frank (Cisco) Lenti for second-degree murder in the shooting of Hells Angel David (Dred) Buchanan of the West Toronto chapter.

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Videos

The Party



Visitors From The West



Aerial Surveillance of Arrests



Boozy Alibi