Baglickers, gulpers, and my pal Randy

Let me stress off the top that my pal Randy was neither. Instead, we were both welders from Ontario who found ourselves working on the frigate program that kept the Irving shipyard in Saint John busy for the better part of twenty years. After getting the contract, Irving had to go on a massive hiring spree. Once they'd scooped up every unemployed shipyard worker and welder in the Maritimes, they started recruiting in Ontario. That's how me and Randy both ended up in New Brunswick. Randy was an interesting character. Unlike me, he had actual shipyard experience under his belt. In fact, he did his apprenticeship at the Collingwood shipyard, building the last thing of consequence that yard ever launched, the Chi-Cheemaun ferry that to this day delivers tourists from Tobermorey to Manitoulin Island. With his shipbuilding experience Randy was an obvious hire for Irving, whereas I was just a guy who could study a blueprint and make stuff look like the picture. Anyway, we soon learned some nuances about how the locals saw the guys from Ontario, and there were dozens of us; "baglickers from Upper Canada." I shit you not! Working class Maritimers talked like that. Once you got to know the nuances you realized "baglicker" was loosely applied to anyone who did anything to please our bosses. Sooner or later, if youre gonna keep your job, you're obviously gonna please the boss, so eventually everyone was to a greater or lesser extent a "baglicker." What you didn't want to be labelled as was a "gulper." Generously speaking, that was the kind of employee who, when shit upon, said "thanks" and asked for more. Neither Randy or I fit that profile, but I gotta say Randy came with a big dose of over-confidence that got him in hot water from time to time. When Randy was doing his apprenticeship his father was the manager of that yard. Randy himself told me his family had expected much more from him. In high school he was a track & field star, an A+ student, and an all-round man-about-town. And, from his own telling, a completely arrogant and spoiled young man. Collingwood is but a short hop from Wasaga Beach, where every spring your outlaw biker types like to make a pilgrimage. So one fine sunny spring day Randy finds himself in a bar in Wasaga, and there's several pretty gals at the bar, and they're all wearing T-shirts proclaiming "property of Hells Angels MC." Now, if it was me, I'd nod politely and move on. Not Randy. He fancied himself a "ladies man," and set about charming those gals in spite of the fact a half-dozen full-patch Angels were sitting at a table on the other side of the room. Long story short, when Randy emerged from his coma a couple weeks later, he left behind twenty or thirty IQ points. What he carried with him, however, was his over-weening arrogance. I should mention that my time at Irvings yard totalled a little under two years. Those two years can be neatly cut in half. After the first year, my wife absconded with our children back to Ontario. In that first year I had never set foot in a Saint John bar. In the second year, I got kicked out of every bar in Saint John, and Randy was my trusty sidekick in every one of those adventures. But getting back to Randy's arrogance; we were on the same crew of about a dozen or so, and we all sat together for breaks. One of the young guys was a black belt in some sort of eastern martial combat stuff. This kid was early 20s, if that, whereas Randy had a good 15 years on him. Nevertheless, Randy was convinced he could lay a whuppin' on the young whipper-snapper. They had a couple of jousts right there, which were indecisive. It was decided they would square off after work one day. So they did. After our shift, around midnight, two dozen guys head down the railway tracks that lead from the yard into town. I gotta say I'm feeling like a bit of a dorkshit just being there. I mean... two adults having a rassle on the train tracks at midnight? What the fuck am I doing here? Anyway, as any betting man would have wagered, the kid won and the old guy lost. It wasn't long after that I reluctantly left that shipyard job so I could be closer to my children. That eventually led to teacher's college and, in the fullness of time, the pension that now pays my bills. As for Randy, his dad was by then the boss of the yard in Welland. Randy always promised me he'd get me a job there. Never heard from him again, but hey dude, if you're still out there, I salute you, Randy!

Hells Angels strike blow for freedom

Most Canadians never give a thought to civil asset forfeiture. That's the odious bit of legal presumption that enables authorities to steal your stuff if they think, no proof required, that you may be up to no good. Then it's up to you to prove your innocence and get your stuff back.

In most cases people never get their possessions back because of the massive expense of fighting their case in court. One of the human rights outrages we seldom talk about in Canada is that our legal system is effectively out of reach to all but the wealthiest Canadians.

"Outlaw biker gangs" have been a useful foil over the years whenever law enforcement is lobbying for more laws and more money to fight organized crime. Everybody knows those guys are bad dudes - just looking at them you know they're hardened criminals, right? Authorities in BC figured they had an open-and-shut case when they seized Hells Angels clubhouses in Nanaimo, Kelowna, and Vancouver.

To the government's dismay, the Hells Angels mounted a thirteen-year-long legal challenge against the seizure of their property. One can only imagine the number of fund-raisers and bake-sales they had to do to raise the money, but it's paid off. Last week the BC supreme court decided in their favour.


This is a great victory for justice and the rule of law. Hopefully the HA will now pursue a legal action against the province to have their expenses reimbursed. Justice demands at least that much.

That was never about justice; it was a crime against humanity

Big news out of Texas yesterday; all outstanding charges in the four year old Waco biker ambush outrage have been dismissed.

Suffice it to say the charges being dismissed should never, in a free country governed by the rule of law, have been laid in the first place. By dumb luck I happened on the live broadcast that Sunday in May, 2015, where Waco police spokesman Sgt. Swanton was hyperventilating about the evil of "outlaw bikers." My first reaction was, this guy is full of shit.

I've never owned a Harley and my only knowledge of "outlaw bikers" is that it wasn't unusual to find yourself working next to one in one of the two dozen or so welding shops I did time in over the years. I never knew any of those supposed biker drug kingpins you read about in the papers. "Satan's Choice" was the crew we had in the K-W area back in the day. They eventually amalgamated with the Hells Angels. The guys I knew were just regular folks working in the welding shop to pay their bills, same as me. If they were big-time criminals, they hid the fact very well.

The best source by far on the Waco tragedy is The Aging Rebel. I've never read anything there that would lead me to believe those guys caught up in this Waco business were any different than the guys I used to work alongside. Regular working folks trying to make their financial obligations. You know, pay their bills and feed their kids, that kind of nefarious stuff.

Even if it's true that it wasn't police bullets that killed every one of the Waco casualties, there is no question that the entire incident was orchestrated by law enforcement agencies. A local cabal of smug law enforcement careerists took it from there. Many otherwise law-abiding people who were guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time had their lives destroyed.

And now they get a "oops, sorry, guess we'll drop the charges..."


That's not nearly good enough.

Outlaw biker gang plumbs depths of depravity

Talk to any police expert about "outlaw" MC clubs, and they'll happily fill you in on why these bad hombres are a threat to society.

They're brutally violent. Mere membership is proof of criminality, because these guys are into everything...

Prostitution? Yup.

Drug trafficking? Yup.

Gun running? Check.

Human trafficking? Check.

Extortion? Uh-huh.

And they're violent, don't forget that; extremely violent. Ask any police expert.

But apparently all that is not the worst of it. In fact, that's just the tip of the iceberg so to speak, as it were.

If you REALLY piss them off... well, just check out this headline from the CBC.

Manitoba Hells Angels target businesses with 1-star reviews.


You've been warned!

Forget about those towelheads 'o terror; YOU MUST FEAR THE BIKERS!!!

Laura Stone has a front pager in my Globe today about retiring RCMP Commish Bob Paulson.

Paulson has been Canada's top cop for the past five years, heading up the 30,000 strong Mountie outfit.

After we're told that "organized crime" is a bigger threat to Canada than the various strands of Islamic militants, he gets around to naming names; "he said the national police force has noticed a resurgence in outlaw motorcycle gangs , such as the Hells Angels, across Canada."

Really? Do you think that might be due to the fact that the only actual "Islamic terror attacks" in Canada have been carried out by a couple of Frenchie nutters? And that most of the anti-terror operations that the RCMP have squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on have been around whack jobs like the infamous "tards 'o terror," Nuttall and Korody?

It's not just the bikers we must fear... you know, those dastardly demon-seeds who are so secretive their clubhouses are on Google Street-View. Nope, it's our Italian neighbours too!

Oh, give it a rest, Bob!

You guys have been waving the bikers and the mafia at us forever to sow fear and raise your budgets! If the pols did the sensible thing and treated addiction as a health problem instead of a law enforcement problem, 99% of "organized crime" would be out of business overnight.

Other than that, Paulson seems to be a reasonable enough guy. He speaks against the militarization of police forces and for community policing, initiatives that the think tank here at Falling Downs has long been in favour of. Good on you, Mr. Paulson!

But I wouldn't be too hasty in writing off the towellers. Just in the past few days we've seen all manner of chest-thumping in our national media about how great one of our snipers was for setting a new world record for a long-distance kill. Of a Muslim, of course.

There's got to be a Muslim refugee somewhere who takes umbrage with all that gloating...

Charbonneau Commission piddles away 45 millions to discover Hells Angels and Mafia control construction industry

Hmm...

It's certainly good to see that the think tank here at Falling Downs isn't the only site sceptical about the Charbonneau Commission.

Frankly, we lost all faith in the Commission when they pulled that Donnie Brasco stunt. Yup, here's this government inquiry into corruption in the Quebec construction industry, and they pay to fly in this guy who wrote a memoir about his time in the New York City Mafia?

Thirty years ago???

That's when we knew the Charbonneau Commission was guilty of what they were accusing everybody else of; sucking too hard on the government teat.

But yes, they did manage to stretch things out for four long and lucrative years, and they did manage to shine the spotlight on those mostly irrelevant corners of "corruption" wherein some bikers and some Italian guys might have made a bit of pocket change.

Those are the folks who made it into the headlines now that the final report has been released.

The SNC Lavalin guys and Arthur Porter, both vetted at the highest levels in the PMO, who scammed the system beyond the wildest and greediest dreams of those Italian guys and the bikers, are totally lost in the fine print.

Nice cover-up, Madame Charbonneau!

And nice job stretching a redundant "inquiry" out to four long years and $45 millions!

I say we need another inquiry to get to the bottom of the Charbonneau inquiry...

Police get biker crime boss off streets... by arresting him in his jail cell!

The big story out of Montreal today is that the police, after many years of undercover investigations costing the taxpayer millions of dollars, have busted up a major organized crime ring.

Yup, you won't be able to score a bag of weed or a gram of coke in Montreal for years.

They bagged the big dogs for sure this time. They even got the biggest of the big dogs off the street; Hells Angels Quebec boss Maurice Bouchard.

But wait a minute... wasn't he already doing a double lifer in prison? So an alleged crime boss can continue to run his alleged crime syndicate whilst behind bars?

Does it not stand to reason that the other alleged crime king-pins arrested today will be able to maintain their networks while in prison also?

So what was accomplished today?

Well, nothing really, but it did help the public get their filthy minds off that story about Montreal cops boinking under-age girls while on duty.

Police State suffers setback in War on Bikers

As you may recall if you've been paying attention, the War on Bikers is a close cousin of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror.

In fact, you may be forgiven for assuming all those wars have seamlessly melded into one war.

Here's a rare spot of good news for the MC community; five Hells Angels have walked on murder and conspiracy charges, due to a Quebec judge getting totally pissed off that matters have been dragging on since 2009. The same judge threw out lesser charges against another 31 bikers four years ago. All the charges came out of a major anti-biker investigation that culminated in 156 arrests back in 2009.

For the folks ensnared in the Waco farce, this is a good-news bad-news story. The good news is that some semblance of justice may eventually prevail. The bad news is that these guys had this shit hanging over their heads for six years.

So if you're aghast that the worthies in McLennan County have managed to drag their feet for six months, they can obviously drag things out a lot longer.

Prime Minister Harper confined to suite, forced to order room service due to outlaw bikers staying in same swank hotel

Seems Big Steve and the Hells Angels have similar tastes and budgets when they're on the road. Check out the hilarious comments on this story at CBC.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-election-2015-harper-hotel-hells-angels-1.3182917

NPR discovers Texas Biker Ambush

Almost two months after the fact, the news hounds at National Public Radio have sniffed out some incongruities in the Waco Biker Massacre.

What? There was tons of just "regular folks" at that biker show-down?

What? There was Christian biker gangs at that biker shoot out?

What in hell does a "Christian biker gang" even look like?

Well, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and postulate that they probably look like "bikers" who have either "Jesus" or "Christ" or both emblazoned on their biker kit. I don't know enough about the minutia of biker regalia to determine what the difference is between a patch and a cut, but it seems to me that Christian bikers are respected among the biker community.

Respect is of course the common currency in biker culture and among bikers.

I remember a guy who was in my rehab program at the Homewood, one of the premier rehab/ detox destinations in North America to this day, the first time I was going through that shit. He showed me his photo album. He was a full-patch dude in the Satan's Choice, who back in the day were the "outlaw motorcycle gang" to "fear" the most in Southern Ontario.

Every Satan's Choice eventually became a Hells Angel back in the great Ontario patch-over, but that's another story.

A bit of his photo album was biker stuff, the rest was him at Christian revival meetings and doing family stuff with his wife and kids.

There was absolutely nothing scary about the guy once you got to know him. At the same time, things probably wouldn't go well for you if you crossed him.

Respect.

I've never (yet) owned a Harley but I've had respect for biker culture ever since I got to know that guy.

So NPR discovers there may be a element of bullshit in the official Waco story. That doesn't stop them from giving Pinocchio Swanton a free pass on spreading more bullshit.

But it's better than nothing.

Hells Angel sues blogger for defamation

That wouldn't be this blogger. As the regular reader will know, we're biker friendly in these quarters.

As I've said elsewhere, most so-called outlaw bikers are just regular guys who go to work every day.

Ya, there's guys who take things to the dark side, but there's real estate agents who take things to the dark side too.

And doctors.

And accountants.

And teachers and athletes and auto mechanics.

A Hells Angel who tired of being hounded by an anonymous blogger has filed suit over being characterized as a criminal when he isn't one.

He's a regular guy with a family to support.

I have to say I'm not much for the "anonymous" in anonymous blogging. It's easy to talk a lot of shit when you're anonymous. For the record, anybody who wants to can find D. Neumann in the phone book in about five minutes of google time.

But Buddy out there in Surrey, who was happy to spew a lot of shit about a guy he never even bothered to talk to before defaming him on his blog, now claims to be paralysed with fear at the prospect of the Hells Angels coming after him.

Get a life, dude.

Son of Hells Angels big released by mistake

Well, I guess this is what's known in the criminal justice system as an "oopsie."

I'm not too concerned.

If Junior has even half the integrity of his dear daddy, he's got way more than the typical Canadian senator.

BC cops try to pin Guildford Mall terror ride on Hells Angels

You gotta check out the video in this story!

Buddy steals a Wide-Glide (or is that a Dyna-Glide?) and has an afternoon of fun leading the RCMP on a wild goose chase through Surrey... and through the Guildford Mall!

Notice the libellous insinuation at the end of that lame CBC story; they're trying to pin this on the Hells Angels!

Whatever...

Nice drive dude!

Long may you wheelie...

The six mile piss

Can't really remember the first time I met Kipling.

I think it was the night he ran his Chevy ll SS into a tree outside my parent's place out on the 86 dragway... or just about a half mile south of the 86 dragway to be precise.

I was the second person to come upon the accident scene, whereupon the first person informed me that the guy driving the Chevy ll was bleeding all over the interior of his new Deville.

So young Kipling plows his car into a tree at 100 mph, and a life-long friendship started.

A year later we both turned up at Budd Automotive, which was at that time the primary employer of niggers of all skin tones, including white, in the entire region.

That's where we really bonded.

I'd pull hilarious pranks like "borrowing" his 340 Duster from Budd's parking lot while he was on the night shift. The cops would be looking for that lime green Duster for months, and he got pulled over relentlessly.

But I always made up for it by returning that car to the Budd parking lot before the end of his shift with a case of beer under the hood. I'd unplug the distributor to make sure he had to open the hood to find that case of beer!

Oh, those were fun times!

There were a lot of real characters at the Budd plant back in the day. The Jamaicans, and there were tons of them, always had a line to really good weed.

That pretty much made them our best buddies.

There was a Polish guy who always showed up in a three piece suit. He didn't want his neighbours to know he worked in a factory. He'd change into work clothes when he got to work. Drove a 'Cuda.

Then there was Frenchie, who rolled his Javelin into the ditch with five brothers inside while trying to make it to the beer store before closing time.

Lotsa characters and lotsa fun! Who has jobs like that anymore?

Anyway, Kipling's dear daddy had a scrapyard in nearby Guelph, and holy shit, was he ever a character!

He was Fred to Kipling's Lamont... through that scrapyard Kipling got to know all sorts of interesting characters.

Like bikers.

This one guy in particular was to leave a lasting impression on me. Married to a native woman, and living on a reservation, he had a finger in pretty much any pie in the local economy, whether that pie was legal or illegal or in that grey zone between.

Used to be a big cheese in the Satan's Choice before they morphed into a Hells Angels franchise in the great patch-over.

So one day me and Kipling are sitting in the diner at the Woodstock Truckstop, and this guy happens along, and before you can say "no thanks, maybe some other time..." we're in Buddy's Peterbilt heading west at 70 mph, jug of Jack Daniels and a hash pipe going round on a too regular basis for my tastes.

An hour later we're on the 403 heading Sarnia way. I'm fucked, and I really really really have to have a piss.

Dude, can ya pull over so I can have a piss?

Buddy looks at me like I'm the most retarded retard he's ever seen in his life.

Ten minutes later; Dude, can you pull over so I can have a piss?

By now I'm practically exploding and having major bladder leakage...

Dude and Kipling are busting out laughing... nobody's going to pull an 18 wheeler over so some dumbfuck passenger can take a piss...

So I did what I had to do. Opened the passenger door, stood on the side-tank, pulled out my wang, and had a six mile long piss along the 403 at seventy miles an hour.

Best piss I ever had.

Mick Jagger plays a mean harp

Check it out.

King Biscuit Boy would approve!

I play a pretty mean harp myself. In fact, there used to be a bar in Guelph called the Chooch. One night I was sitting at the bar and sporadically pulling out my Hohner and bending a few notes.

There was a few biker types in the place. I happened to know one of them as a nearby neighbour. He was loosely affiliated with the Satan's Choice motorcycle club. "Loosely affiliated" would probably be a bit of an understatement.

Many years later the Choice all became full-patch Hells Angels in that great biker corporate merger known as the Ontario patch-over.

Anyway, Buddy passed the hat among his pals, and lo and behold, I got nearly twenty bucks for my harp work! That was my one and only paid gig as a musician!

While I was flattered, I was also a little disconcerted by what he said to me when he handed me the fistful of change and small bills;

you can fuckin stop that shit now or I'm gonna shove that fuckin thing so far up your ass its gonna take ya a week to shit it out.

I stopped.

Top Montreal cop linked to Hells Angels

Here's a juicy story!

Top Montreal anti-biker-gang cop busted for supposed links to the Hells Angels.

I'm a little leery about how this story is being spun. Biker gangs are just next to terrorists in the popular mythology that underpins the War on Terror.

It's a continuation of that war-on-drugs segues into the war-on-terror propaganda that's been pushed for a few years now. The great HMSC Toronto, which I personally built, made a major drug bust a few days ago.

By the way, when I say "I" built the HMCS Toronto, I'd also like to thank the thousand or so guys who helped.

That was a good gig, eh?

But anyway, we now see the complete harmonization of the two great wars of our era.

Drugs.

Terror.

This story seeks to glamorize and magnify the power of these "outlaw" biker gangs

We are led to believe that the Hells Angels are such a bad bunch of almost-terrorists that Benoit Roberge was obviously guilty of something really bad just because he talked to Rene Charlebois.

We really need to have more information before we rush to judgement.

Hells Angels

Ya, they're the most evil biker gang of all time, and they are determined to bring their evil to a town near you, yada yada yada...

The Angels make a convenient foil for any law-and-order politician looking for easy votes.

And the sycophantic media is right there to push things along.

Here's a typical media hatchet job. I especially like the part about the bikers "intimidating" the general populace.

Generally speaking, folks are about as intimidated by a convoy of "outlaw" bikers riding through town as they are about the circus coming to town.

This story is about a group of motorcycle-riding taxpayers taking umbrage because they were being singled out for harassment by the RCMP.

Nothing more, nothing less.

SQ are Quebec's most dangerous gang

There is more than a little irony in today's reports that the SQ are busy raiding Montreal City Hall. 

I have seen the SQ's routine bully tactics first hand. Somewhere in my voluminous archives is a video I took back in the early '90's on one of my regular trips between Ontario and New Brunswick. 

I was on the highway between Montreal and Quebec City, and there was an SQ convoy of about two dozen SQ motorcycle cops on the road in front of me, together with a couple of SQ vans and 4X4's.

Unlike a normal biker run on a four lane highway, these guys wouldn't let anyone pass.

So for a good half hour traffic just bunched up behind these guys making a gratuitous display of their power.

But they have the moral bona fides to raid the office of Montreal mayor Michael Appelbaum today.

It's part of the Charbonneau Inquiry into "organized crime" in Quebec.

That's where every construction contractor in the province with an Italian name gets hauled in to get quizzed about what they know about the Mafia.

Not much, as it unsurprisingly turns out. 

When not exposing massive Mafia plots, Quebec's moral arbiters like to pursue a largely pointless vendetta against the Hells Angels. Apparently some of the Angels, or "Hells" as they like to call them in Quebec, are involved in the drugs trade.

Insofar as that is true, it is only due to the stupidity of Quebec's and Canada's drug laws. Remember, prohibition made some Quebec citizens rich and famous, and the illegal trade in booze ended when prohibition was rescinded. 

Hells Angels involvement in the drugs trade will end when Canada's idiotic drug laws are rescinded.

At which point in time Quebec's morality police may have nothing left to investigate other than their police.

And a thorough investigation of the SQ is long overdue.

Policing for headlines

In these days of austerity and budget cutbacks it's important for law enforcement to nab some splashy headlines once in awhile.

Hence the great Super Bowl Party caper at Le Parc Banquet Hall on Sunday. Four hundred cops, many kitted out in full SWAT regalia, to make six arrests.

The six suspects had been under investigation for some time. The police knew where they lived. It would have taken a couple of officers to go their front door and make the arrest.

But that wouldn't grab newspaper headlines. That wouldn't lead the eleven o'clock news. As law enforcement it would be a quiet success. As PR it would be an abject failure.

So instead of doing the job with two officers they did it with 400.

Overkill? Absolutely!

But great PR!

Then they hold a news conference where "Mafia" and "Hells Angels" are name-dropped  into every other sentence, and the public soon realizes that the only thing standing between them and the complete collapse of civilization are the men in blue.

And those pending budget rollbacks just magically disappear.

400 cops bust Superbowl party, six arrested

Read this story. What comes to mind?

Overkill?

Busy work?

Massive waste of taxpayer dollars?

Every one of those cops cost the taxpayer over $100,000 a year.

Supposedly this raid was the culmination of "years" of investigation of a internet gambling operation.

"Years?"

I'm detecting lots and lots more busy work.

And take note how they tipped off the media before raiding the banquet hall. These guys are no slouches in the PR department.

Take note also how the words "organized crime" and "Hells Angels" are dropped in there just to juice up the story.

But Toronto is a safer city today, thanks to those 400 policemen and women giving up their Sunday afternoon to take six gamblers off the streets.

Maybe what's driving this is the fact that the Province of Ontario is big-time into the gambling business and sent the cops in to shake down the competition.