Befriend and Betray

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Ever since I’d started working the Dago Hells Angels, people I trusted had been counseling me to pack my bags and get out of southern California. Things could only end ugly, they’d said. Now, two years later, I was finally taking their advice. And fast.

Goodbyes with my police handlers had been cursory. They’d wanted me to spend one last night in the San Diego area, give us time for a goodbye dinner. I let them book me a room at a local motel. But once I got in my truck and started driving, I wasn’t about to stop.

My adieus to my biker buddies had been even ruder: I’d left them in a squeal of tires and a cloud of burned rubber after Bobby Perez, the most volatile and vicious member of the San Diego—or Dago—Hells Angels, made it clear that things were, indeed, about to end ugly.

A few days earlier, he’d asked me to carry a handgun, a little Bersa .380, back from Laughlin, Nevada, to El Cajon, California, after a shoot-up in a casino had left three bikers dead. I didn’t know whether the .380 had been used in the gunplay or whether Bobby just didn’t want to carry it across state lines himself. He was, after all, on parole and not even supposed to be outside of California, let alone in the company of criminals. Whatever the case, his asking me to drive the gun back to the Dago Hells Angels’ home turf in El Cajon was a major vote of confidence. So when my handlers seized the gun, saying they couldn’t possibly allow me to return it to a known felon, they were blowing a chance for me to work my way even further into the inner sanctum of the gang. “Tell Bobby you had to ditch it,” they’d said. “Or that you lost it. Or whatever. Come up with something.”

It was the stupidest of decisions, all the stupider if they had any idea how important the little gun was to Bobby. When he asked for it back during a late night meeting in an El Cajon parking lot, I put him off, telling him I’d hidden it deep in the engine of my truck and hadn’t yet had a chance to retrieve it.

A memorial ride was taking place the next morning, for another biker killed in the previous days. Christian Tate, a member of the Dago Hells Angels, had been shot off his bike from behind as he headed back to California from Laughlin about an hour before the nastiness broke out in the casino. Bobby, it seemed, wanted the .380 for the ride.

After the scene in the parking lot, I contemplated cashing in the Dago case. It had been going south for a while, from even before the botched—and highly secret—police ambush of a Hells Angels drug run through the California desert had left who knows how many dead. I’d witnessed at least four bikers and two cops bite it before I was dragged out of that particular mess.

The case had never had a clear objective to begin with. It had begun in 1999 as an investigation into a Quebecer who was suspected of running coke from Colombia to California and then up into Canada with the help of the Dago Hells Angels. But the guy had disappeared into thin air the day before I arrived in California. So the case had turned into a basic intel probe of the Dago Angels—accumulating information without a particular goal of making any arrests and putting bad guys in prison. To get close to the gang I opened a photo studio specializing in strippers’ “media kits” and bike porn—shots of chromed-up Harleys against a setting sun and that kind of thing. Eventually gang members and associates began inviting me to parties and gatherings to document their fun for posterity (in an uncompromising way, of course—I knew better than to shoot a member with his nose in a big pile of coke).

After several months I began buying moderate quantities of coke and crystal meth—half a pound, a pound—from criminals affiliated with the gang, along with stolen cars and restricted weapons: fully automatic machine pistols, M-16s, converted SKS carbines, hand grenades and the like. I made myself out to be a criminal middleman interested in pretty much anything that could make me money. Those buys elevated our little intel probe to “operational” status—our sights set on arrests and convictions.

Still, the case had no real focus and my handlers tended to proceed in a dangerously ad hoc way. Over two years I gathered dirt on crooked members of the U.S. military selling government-issue guns, Mexican border runners smuggling arms and humans (both of the very dangerous variety), and Russian mobsters—along with my work on the Hells Angels and their friends. And that created a problem: with so many investigative fronts, we never identified an exit strategy, a predetermined point at which we could say, “Okay, we’ve got the goods. Time to wind things up.”

To make matters worse, I had a vague suspicion from early on that Operation Five Star—the multi-squad task force I was reporting to, comprising the DEA, the ATF and the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, along with the municipal police departments of San Diego and El Cajon—wasn’t an entirely tight ship. It seemed to me that information was leaking out and finding its way to the wrong people. Initially it was really just a gut feeling with nothing tangible to back it up. But in the fall of 2001, I got a call from an FBI supervisor in San Francisco with a storied career busting bikers asking me to visit him for a chat. It turned out he had the same suspicions.

Along with the shoot-up in the desert, all of this should, perhaps, have been enough to convince me to bail from the case long before Bobby Perez ordered me to give him back the .380. But I like to finish what I start, and there had never been any sustained or substantial threat to my safety on this case, and the money was good: US$5,000 plus all expenses per month, enough to buy a new house back in Canada for my second wife and daughter.

The encounter in the parking lot, however, had finally convinced me that the case was almost certainly done for, at least as far as I was concerned. Still, for whatever reason, I thought I might be able to forestall the inevitable with Bobby for at least a day or two. So, the next day at 10:00 a.m. sharp, I drove to the stretch of El Cajon Boulevard that effectively belonged to the Hells Angels: it was home to their clubhouse, Dumont’s—better known simply as “the bar”—and Stett’s motorcycle shop.

At this point, a bad novel might describe a wave of relief washing over me as I headed into the pure, clean desert, away from the danger and treachery of the past two years. Yeah, right. Whatever relief I felt was more like a trickle than a wave. Sure, leaving El Cajon and the San Diego area felt good, as did the fact that it was me, and me alone, who was now in control; I no longer had handlers or Hells Angels telling me what to do. But all the turf between San Diego and Phoenix, Arizona, three hundred miles to the east, is Hells Angels country. There was a distinct possibility that before jumping on his Harley for Christian Tate’s funeral ride, Bobby had picked up the phone and sent word to the Hells Angels chapters east and north of San Diego to be on the lookout for me. But the last ride for a member—any member, even a relatively unremarkable one like Tate—is mandatory for all Hells Angels in the region, and strongly recommended for all affiliated clubs. I had to hope that everyone who might have a mind to get in my way was already behind me.

The fact that no one had shown up at my studio as I packed had been a good sign. But if that had quelled my sense of unease somewhat, the desert exacerbated it. While in the San Diego area I’d spent many a Sunday in the desert, walking and exploring, with Dog or alone, the peace and quiet the best therapy available. Now, however, the desert wasn’t offering serenity: I just felt exposed.

Still, the farther I drove, the farther the mess was behind me and the better I felt. For the first day or two I caught catnaps in rest areas and truck stops and drove all night, trying to put some distance between me and my problems. Later, once into the Midwest and farther east, I slowed down and made regular stops, to see the sights, have a meal or spend the night in a motel.

For almost twenty-five years, almost half my life, I’d been working for an alphabet soup of police forces—the RCMP, the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the RHKP, the RNC—insinuating myself into criminal groups from around the world and then helping police bring them down. Along with outlaw bikers, I’d gone after Asian Triads and Russian mobsters, Pakistani heroin smugglers and garden-variety drug lords, crooked cops and military types. Even the KKK. It had been lucrative, it had been exciting, it had been a job. I may have been doing the work of good, but what had it left me with? Or, more exactly, what had it left of me? Each job required that I create a new persona and inhabit him fully for anywhere from a few months to several years. Sometimes I’d pretend I was all criminal, a border runner, a hit man or a drug dealer. Other times my cover was more complex: a life insurance underwriter also into investment scams and money laundering; an importer who also brought in drugs and sex trade workers and shipped out stolen luxury cars; a concert promoter who was interested in anything that might make a buck.

I made myself into these people, and any number of other characters, and became them completely, putting the real me on the shelf. Always I thought, when the game was over, I’d be able to take that real person down and become him again. But as time went by, it was clear that whoever the real me was was withering away for lack of sunlight, drying up for lack of nourishment, atrophying for lack of exercise.

Even between jobs—a period usually lasting several months—I increasingly resisted becoming myself again. If the operation had ended in a major bust, that time would sometimes be taken up with court preparations; other times it was just pure R & R. In either case, resurrecting the real me became a hassle. It would just get in the way of my next assignment.

I’d thought about retirement on a few occasions during my career. Indeed, until the mid-1980s and my tangle with the KKK, I’d never thought of what I was doing as an actual career, just a series of jobs I’d accidentally fallen into, and which I’d just as suddenly and unwittingly fall out of. But no job had been as unsatisfying as San Diego. None had come up so short of what we could have accomplished. None had left me with such a bitter taste in my mouth.

And so, never had I contemplated calling it quits as seriously as I did on that highway-hopping drive across the south-central states and then up the eastern seaboard to Maine. There, crossing into New Brunswick and heading home to my family in eastern Canada, the allure of retirement grew. Not only had the game changed from when I first started—and not for the better—but I was becoming too old for it, or at least worn out by it. All that put me in a mind to finally do what cops I’d worked with over the years had constantly urged me to do: sit down and tell my story.

Lots of people don’t grow up into the life that’s expected of them. Farmers raise children who end up as artists. Factory workers have kids who become research scientists and university professors. Thugs and criminals have grown up in the silver-spoon homes of diplomats, lawyers and doctors. Still, there probably aren’t many apples that fall as far from the tree as I did. I might as well have landed in a completely different orchard.

I was born into a working-class family in Hull, Quebec, virtually in the shadow of Canada’s Parliament—high on a cliff across the Ottawa River, looking down at us—but a world away. It was a French-speaking lumber- and paper-mill town where the Catholic Church continued to call most of the shots but the brothel and tavern still had their places.

My dad didn’t work at the mills but at the municipal plant that did double duty as Hull’s water filtration works and a generating station for electricity. He’d got the job a year or two after coming home from World War II and shortly before I was born. Prior to the war, music had been his life, and he’d got by playing banjo and guitar at countless weddings and parties. But he came home from the war with my mother—whom he had met in Halifax, his naval base on his way to and from Europe—and he needed real work. He got the gig thanks to a connection made by his brother Alfred, whom we always knew as mon’onc Fred.

My family seemed to be set with all the makings for a life of postwar prosperity and happiness—steady employment, family, peace. Except there was one problem, or maybe three: my mother was half Irish, half Indian, and she didn’t speak a word of French.

In the Québécois world of my father’s family, almost nothing was worse than being English. The English were Protestant conquerors, occupiers and carpetbaggers all rolled into one. They were the bosses, and thus the people who dictated that the French made less money and didn’t get the management or foreman jobs.

But being Irish or Native—or a combination of the two—was worse than being English. The Irish were seen as bottom-feeders, willing to work for nothing and steal French jobs. The fact that the Irish were Catholic helped a little perhaps, but their church was over in Ottawa—more evidence that they were stooges of the English. Indians, meanwhile, were looked down on by everyone, for whatever reason was handy. They were drunks, or poor or didn’t speak French. And even if many of them were Catholic too, well, they were really still heathens at heart.

Maybe his eyes had been opened by his time overseas in the navy, because my father was able to see beyond these prejudices. Otherwise he would never have married Mary O’Connor and brought her home. Especially considering she already had a child, James, by a Swedish sailor who had passed through Halifax and shipped out before he knew she was pregnant. Mon’onc Fred, along with his wife, Émilienne, who for us were the very embodiment of class and dignity, also remained above such pettiness.

But not so my father’s mother and his sisters Cécile, Irène and Laurette. They had all the time in the world and all the room in their hearts for Mary’s half-Swedish son, but none for Mary herself. She was isolated and ostracized, ridiculed and marginalized by the very people whom, in that sort of community, she needed most to look out for her.

For the first six years of my life, however, this was largely invisible to me. We lived in a little house in a part of town called Wrightville but which the locals knew as Ragville because of the rag recycling factory that employed many local women. In socio-economic terms, it was the wrong side of the tracks, definitely, but in terms of community it was a perfectly fine place for my parents to set about having five kids of their own. I was the third, born on a December evening in 1948 after a snowstorm had buried Hull under a foot of snow.

By necessity, we spent much of our childhoods outside—the walls of the tiny house were too close together to contain us all except when we were sleeping. There, among other kids, our being half English wasn’t an issue because we spoke French as well as any of them and because there were enough of us and we were tough enough. But since at home we all spoke English with my mother, my dad included, she never learned much French. Not speaking French (and being Irish and Indian) meant she didn’t make any friends. And even if my aunt Cécile spoke good enough English to be employed across the river as a civilian employee of the Royal Canadian Navy, she made no effort to include my mother in the wider family life.

Cécile lived in the house in which my father had grown up, along with her sisters Irène and Laurette, my father’s youngest brother Laurent and my grandmother. The house was in downtown Hull, and remained the family gathering place. Every Sunday, after Mass and a quick stop at home to change out of our church clothes, we’d head over to the house for a late lunch and a long afternoon of playing. For the first few years of my life my mother dutifully came along, but the tradition must have been not just excruciatingly boring for her but all the more isolating. By the time I was five, she stopped accompanying us on the Sunday outings.

Not long after, she disappeared for a spell, and then another. In the summer of 1955, when I was six and a half, my mother split for good. We were left entirely in the dark about why she had gone, where, or whether she would ever be coming back. It sounds like a bad cliché, but she went to the movies and never came home—or at least that’s what the adults told us.

Right from the start we sensed that this time her disappearance might be final. Our aunts started coming over, managing the household and telling us and anyone else who cared to listen “bon débarras”—“good riddance to bad rubbish.” There was no blame placed on my father, even if at the very least he had been blind to my mother’s unhappiness and deaf to her desires to move back east. Instead, my aunts just made it clear to everyone that they were now going to clear up his mess.

Within a week, all the arrangements had been made. Our house would be sold. My two brothers, Jim and Pete, then aged eleven and nine, would move with my dad into the family home. My two younger sisters, Norma and Pauline, four and three respectively, would go live with a family my dad knew in a small town a few miles away. The middle kids, my sister Louise and I (aged six and seven), would be sent to St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Ottawa.

I wasn’t told of the arrangements until the morning of the day we were to be shipped off, so I had no time to plan an escape. After my dad took me into the kitchen to tell me what was happening, I just bolted. I headed to a secret hiding place my brother and I had in some nearby woods. I figured I’d wait awhile then sneak back into the house and live there by myself till my mom came to get me. But soon enough my two brothers came and dragged me back home. The orphanage had sent a car to pick up Louise and me. Just before we were driven off, my oldest brother, Jim, gave me his golf ball. I kept it for years.

Louise and I were just being warehoused at the orphanage; my dad had told the nuns he fully expected to be in a position to take us back in a matter of months. He’d bring us toys on occasion, but most importantly he brought us hope that we’d soon be getting out. In mid-September of our second year, after a week or so of school, my father came and retrieved us—but not to take me home. There still wasn’t room.

Instead I was sent to live with a colleague of my father’s, Doyle Parent, his wife and their countless kids. Their house had no room for another child—all the boys slept in one room, all the girls in another—but Doyle and his wife were big-hearted and generous. Life there was a chaotic but pleasant adventure after the orphanage.

The proximity to the rest of my family was also a big relief. I was just a couple of street corners away from the family home. Still, I wasn’t a regular visitor for reasons that would be considered bizarre today: my family’s house was actually in St. Bernadette parish while the Parents’ house was in St. Rédempteur parish. In those years, the parish where you lived dictated more than just what church you went to. For the women, it determined which grocery store they shopped at. For the men, it made the difference between taverns. And for kids, it determined who your friends were, what pool hall you frequented, what girls you could pursue, even what streets you could walk without fear of being harassed and chased back to safe territory.

Space opened up for me at the Charbonneaus’. They were good friends of the family. They also had a mess of children, but they were older by then and beginning to move out. Which meant that I could move in, as I did in the late summer of 1957, just before I was to enter grade three.

I didn’t have any illusions that everything would be splendid once I moved back to the family home. I knew my aunts well enough for that. There were upsides, especially living under the same roof as my brothers and having their friendship and support on the street. But tensions between me and my aunts didn’t take long to grow more pronounced.

We’d got our first television when we were living on Rouville Street. Back then channels used to broadcast an Indian-head test pattern when they had nothing else to air. I was intrigued. I started imitating the stoic look of the TV Indian and would practice my version of it on the grown-ups. Whenever they would come down on me for whatever reason, I would glare at them. “R’garde-moi pas avec tes yeux tueurs!” my aunt would yell. “Don’t look at me with those killer eyes!” And then my dad would order me: “Pis change ta face!”

My imitation of the Indian head—and the impact it seemed to have on people—got me interested in facial expressions and body language and what effective and subtle ways they were to communicate. This likely had a lot to do with the fact that I had always been short and slight and knew that, if I was going to be noticed, let alone impress people, I would have to do it in a way that didn’t involve puffing out my chest and standing tall. So I began to work on developing my own non-verbal ways of sending a precise message, whether through an almost imperceptible tilt of the head or a small hand gesture. I also started to study everyone I met to read what they were saying through their movements. I wasn’t necessarily seeing things that other people didn’t see, or even picking up non-verbal messages that they were missing, but I was indexing these sorts of subtle cues. Facial expressions and the like became, in that sense, a third language for me, one that everyone spoke but didn’t necessarily understand, one in which very few people could tell a lie, but I certainly could.

It didn’t, however, help relations with my aunts. I wasn’t any more rebellious or up-to-no-good than Jimmy or Pete, but I was more defiant. Jimmy, when confronted with a misdeed, would fold and apologize profusely; Pete would deny everything. I, on the other hand, wouldn’t speak and just took my licks. After one Friday night blowout Aunt Cécile declared that on the following Monday she would report me to the local priest. Given the weight that the Church swung in Quebec until the late 1960s, the priest was more than just a confessor and sermonizer; he was also an adjudicator and dispenser of community justice. As such, he was only called upon in very serious circumstances. So I knew what Cécile’s threat meant—and it scared me half to death. As an “incorrigible” I would likely be sent to a reform school such as the notorious Mont St-Antoine in Montreal. The Mont was run by “the brothers” and the physical and sexual abuse going on there was legendary, even back then. A friend had spent six months there. When he came back, he showed us the scars on his back from being whipped by a motorized contraption the brothers had rigged up to carry out their punishments for them.

So, the next morning, Saturday, I got up early, went into Cécile’s purse, took forty dollars and left. A friend put me up in his house that night and the next, but on Monday morning his mom forced me to leave. I didn’t have my books and wasn’t in the frame of mind to attend school anyway. So I faked my father’s signature on a note claiming I was sick, met up with Pete on the way to class and had him deliver it. If I hadn’t done that, the truancy cops would have been looking for me and that would have meant the Mont for sure.

It was February and very cold. My dad had an old car in the backyard that he cannibalized for parts, and after a day of lying low I spent most of the night in there. My father and aunts had to know I was in the car—it was just outside the kitchen window and the kitchen was the busiest room of the house. But they let me sleep there anyway, thinking, I suppose, that it would teach me a lesson. I never forgave them for that.

The second night, I found two blankets on the back seat. Pete had left them there. The next day we met up and he told me of a rooming house across from the local arena that would rent to anyone. The rooms were furnished and cost ten dollars a week. With some of the money from Cécile’s purse I paid for two weeks and settled in.

The other tenants were hookers, a couple of old winos and maybe a crook or two. I was the only child. For my first few days there I continued lying low and keeping to myself, venturing out occasionally but spending most of the time in my little room alone. Pete brought me my books and some more clothes, so I was able to get back to school. And after a week or so a friend brought me a bike. He said he’d found it but didn’t really expect me to believe him. Wherever the bike came from, riding it around was better than walking, even in the snow.

By that time I had got to know many of my neighbors in the boarding house, especially the working girls. They’d leave their doors ajar and go from room to room to socialize. It was a couple of days before I talked to any of them. Then an older woman with puffy, bleached blond hair and far too much makeup knocked on my door. She was tall and very solid—not fat, just solid—and, standing there at the door wearing a floor-length pink bathrobe, she struck me as something between forbidding and outright scary. She held a plate of food in one hand.

I cleaned the plate and returned it to Lorraine. On her turf she took the opportunity to ask me some questions and I spilled the beans. It felt good to open up to someone, and we talked for what seemed like hours. Beneath her tough, all-business exterior, Lorraine was still tough and no-nonsense. It was clear she’d had a hard life full of betrayal, disappointment and probably violence. But she took me under her wing without expecting a thing in return, and looked out for me as well as any of my various mother figures had up to that point.

After that first meal she always made sure I was getting enough to eat. Most of the girls, coming home after a long night working, would bring home food. On Lorraine’s instruction—she definitely called the shots, to the extent that in retrospect I think she was more of a madam than a hooker herself—they always brought extra for me. Breakfast was often roast chicken and french fries instead of cereal and toast, but that was fine by me.

Lorraine also had the girls check in with me before doing laundry, to see if I had any that needed washing. There were jobs that she didn’t delegate, though, in particular ensuring I was up in time for school and had my homework done. She also made sure that none of the other girls—who were all younger and more vivacious and sillier—got too friendly with me. I was, after all, still only eleven or twelve.

When my two weeks were almost up, I began to get anxious about where my rent would come from. I was enjoying life and the last thing I was going to do was head back home. My father and aunts knew where I was—I was seeing Pete every day—but seemed content to have me out of their hair. I was too proud and defiant to go back to them. I talked the situation over with a friend and he told me how I could steal fifty dollars easily. He worked after school and on weekends as a grease monkey at a garage, and he knew that at the end of each day the boss hid the next day’s float in an empty oil filter box on a shelf behind the cash. I could just smash a window with a rock and help myself. I was prepared to do it, but only as a last resort: it would almost certainly cost my friend his job.

Within a day or so, the girls were giving me odd jobs. The first was as a timekeeper. Some of the girls would bring their more regular tricks to their room. I would note when they arrived and after forty-five minutes I would go rap on the door and say “Time’s up.” Each time I did that was worth a dollar or so. I also would make runs to the store for them to buy cigarettes and the like. One girl bought her tobacco by the tin and liked her cigarettes hand-rolled; rolling them for her became another source of spare change.

Sometimes my errand running took me farther afield. If condoms weren’t exactly illegal in Quebec in 1960, they might as well have been. Certainly the girls weren’t able to get their hands on them easily. So instead, they would have me bike across the bridge, through downtown Ottawa and to the red-brick house of a greasy old man who ran a surreptitious porn, sex toy and condom business out of his home. I would knock on the side door and the old man would open it a crack. I would tell him which girl had sent me and he would hand me a box. Then I would get on my bike and head back to Hull. No money changed hands; the girls got him his cash—or whatever else they may have paid him in—some other way. A run like that earned me anywhere from two to five dollars, depending on the girl and how rich she was feeling.

One way or another, these odd jobs made paying my $10-per-week rent very doable, and I was perfectly happy living there. Pete was a regular visitor, as were most of the rest of our little gang. Even if their parents wouldn’t have been caught dead in that part of town—and would have been appalled to know their children were spending time there—my friends would run the risk of serious punishment for the thrill of seeing the girls and the fun of hanging around chatting with them.

After about four months came the end-of-year school assembly and kids’ show. Parents were invited, but I certainly hadn’t told any of my relatives about it; I hadn’t even seen my father or aunts since I’d run away that Saturday morning in February. I had, however, told Lorraine and some of the girls. My class didn’t put on an ambitious act: we just sang two or three songs. Still, when our turn was up, the applause was loud and boisterous—most of it emanating from the second row, where Lorraine sat along with three of the other girls. They hooted and clapped and whistled, and I, oblivious to the dirty looks and scandalized gasps, waved at them.

In those days, hookers really looked like hookers—big hair, bright red lipstick, thick makeup, long eyelashes, bright, tight and gaudy clothes, the whole bit. And even if Lorraine and the girls knew they were going to a respectable community event, attended by the priest, principal and teachers as well as the parents of all the other kids, they had made no effort to dress down. On the contrary.

A day or two later, Pete came over to tell me that my father and Aunt Cécile wanted to talk to me. I went home and they came straight to the point: if I promised to behave, I could return to live at the house; if not, they would send me to reform school and have Lorraine and the others charged for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

I’d been dragooned back into the family home after getting a taste of freedom, so it was, I suppose, inevitable that things were rocky between me and my aunts from the moment I returned. But soon enough an uneasy peace was hammered out, a modus vivendi that kept conflict to a minimum.

Within the house my aunts had absolute authority; their word was the law. But their jurisdiction extended no farther than the front door—as long, that is, as my brothers or I didn’t do anything that embarrassed my aunts in front of their neighbors and peers. Our marks at school weren’t important so long as we passed; after all, failing a grade would amount to a public shaming. So our routine became simple: after school we’d rush home, do our homework, have supper and go out until bedtime—out of sight and out of mind.

Sunday lunch with the whole family, however, was an obligation and the place where an important Québécois ritual occurred: the induction into manhood of twelve- or thirteen-year-old boys. Pete had gone through it while I was out of the house and I had the pleasure several months after my return.

After the meal that particular Sunday was over, my father, following tradition, pulled back from the table, reached for a cigarette and lit it up. Then he offered me one. It was the signal that from then on I could smoke in the house, in public, wherever. Needless to say, we were all smoking on the sly by the time the big day came, so we can’t really blame this ritual for creating generations of smokers, but it certainly helped.

In this regard, adults were our role models. But their influence didn’t extend much beyond that. The people we really looked up to were the older gangs of teenagers—more often than not our older brothers—and the most rigid and unforgiving rules in our lives were the rules of the street. These dictated where you could safely venture, what you could say, what you wore, whom you consorted with, and any number of other small and large questions of our lives.

Transgressions of these rules were usually met with swift and painful punishments. Sometimes they were worse than painful. When I was no more than fourteen, my good friend who had done a stint at the Mont reform school was murdered for ripping off some Montreal guys. He had unwisely helped himself to a set of lock picks that weren’t his, so he was taken to a warehouse, tied to a chair and beaten to death with shovels. The Montrealers were making a bid to take over Hull’s organized crime scene and this was their way of saying they weren’t to be messed with.

Happily, the rest of us generally got—or gave—nothing worse than a good beating from time to time. Most of our conflicts were with other French gangs on the Quebec side of the river, and over the usual adolescent stuff: turf and girls. Occasionally, and almost invariably in summertime, we’d get adventurous and cross the river. Then we’d run into English or Italian gangs, with whom any conflicts tended to revolve around the same subjects.

One hot, humid evening in July or August, a friend and I were faced with a problem. We had been to a party in Ottawa and now the guy who had brought us there was dead. He had been playing Russian roulette with a real gun. We were in the apartment’s kitchen getting some pop. Just as we re-entered the living room, he pulled the trigger for a second time. We looked on with amazement as blood and brain spattered the couch and wall behind him. The girl sitting next to him started to scream and just wouldn’t stop. The guy who lived there told everyone to leave and called the cops.

We were out of there and standing in the street before we could think. We didn’t want to be there when the cops arrived. What if they took us to jail? It was a notoriously bad place to find yourself if you were French. It was not much of a hike to Hull, but the Italians ran the area between us and the bridge.

Approaching Somerset, our last major hurdle, we saw them: half a dozen teenagers hanging out in front of the grocery store. They saw us at the same time and quit horsing around and just stood in place. We might have wanted to run or slip into a shadow, but it was too late. As we got closer, my knees began to give on me.

We were, like so many others in every town and city across North America, perfectly typical young hoodlums and punks, breaking the law regularly but rarely in a serious way, more for the thrill of it than out of any real necessity. Some of us died through one mishap or another; almost all of the rest ended up going straight and leading pretty conventional lives. None went anywhere in school—that was something that just wasn’t expected and wasn’t done.

Pete was the first of my siblings to leave home permanently. He had a big fight with Aunt Cécile and was gone. If he hadn’t dropped out by then, he did shortly thereafter. He certainly wasn’t in school long beyond his sixteenth birthday.

Like my father, Pete had the music gene, and as soon as he left home that’s how he earned his keep. He lived with a bunch of guys his age or a bit older, played any gig he and his band could get, stayed out until all hours and had his pick of all the pretty girls. Of course, I spent as much time as possible in Pete’s company—and within a year or so followed his example and moved out, and in with him.

There were classes I kept attending, however. I had developed an interest in karate, and I started studying it in earnest with André Langelier, the only instructor in Hull and the grown-up brother of a friend of Pete’s. Because of the family connection—and the fact that I had no money—he let me join his courses for free. I took full advantage of his generosity, often doing four or more group classes a week. Occasionally I would help him out with odd jobs such as cleaning up the dojo, and I recruited a few paying students, but not nearly enough to pay for all the lessons I took.

Even if I didn’t need to pay for my karate classes, I needed a source of income after moving out. My first stable revenue stream came thanks to a bunch of friends who broke into a local department store. They pretty much emptied the clothes department, lugging out boxes and boxes, carting them blocks away to a safe basement. My job was to find a buyer for all the merchandise.

For as long as I’d lived at home, a door-to-door salesman specializing in kid’s clothes had come by several times a year. He endeared himself to customers by providing credit, as well as reasonable prices. He could do this because he turned a blind eye to the source of his stock. For months I sold him the clothes, making a tidy little profit on every shirt or pair of pants.

Over the next few years I occasionally took part in the illegal acquisition end of the operation, doing break-and-enters of stores, but, largely thanks to my imagination, what I excelled in was the middling: selling whatever needed to be sold and taking a good cut for my services.

I got by middling and doing other jobs that came my way thanks to membership in Hull’s criminal community. There was no violent crime involved, and it was always pretty hand-to-mouth, but no one went hungry. There was usually a dollar or two to be made somehow. If someone didn’t make their buck one day, someone else in the gang who might have made ten bucks, say by turning a trick, shoplifting or what have you, would cover them. The solidarity that has always been a strong characteristic of Québécois society manifested itself among the girls and guys in our gang, however lowlife we might have been considered.

As we got older, however, things began to change. The sense of family that had been second nature for us all began to dissipate as relationships got more serious and conflicts arose over girls, as people got greedier, more ambitious and less generous, as misdemeanors turned into more serious crimes and the police came down harder on us and turned one against the other. Things just slowly became less fun. At the same time, Hull itself began to feel ever smaller and more suffocating. Some people headed across the bridge for the moderately brighter lights of Ottawa. Others had bigger plans and went to Montreal.

As 1967 drew to an end, my friend Andy and I were increasingly intrigued by the reports that had been coming out of the West for a year or so. We might have missed the Summer of Love, but the other side of the continent still seemed like the place to be. So, on December 5, Andy and I hit the road with barely twenty dollars between us, headed for Vancouver.

By then everyone had abandoned the greaser look. We didn’t become hippies—that was more of a middle-class thing; instead, we were happy to be called heads, decked out in ripped jeans and army jackets. The term today suggests a regular drug user, but for us at the time it really just referred to a long-haired, open-minded person. True, hash had arrived in Hull in the preceding year or so and almost everyone had tried it, but I was at best an occasional smoker, rarely more than a couple of times a week.

Still, it was a lot more often than my drinking of coffee or booze, both of which I’ve never touched. The mere smell of coffee put me off; never has a drop crossed my lips. Meanwhile, it was a film that had convinced me to swear off alcohol. After seeing Days of Wine and Roses with Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick when I was thirteen or fourteen, I was convinced never to go near the stuff. It wasn’t that I was sure it would ruin me; I just knew it could, and that was enough.

As time went by, my abstemiousness became a defining characteristic, and it probably saved my life over and over again. It kept me in control of my faculties in risky situations. Many a loose word has been traded for a cold piece of ground beside a railway track or in a ditch. It also probably worked in my favor when bad guys were trying to evaluate whether I was really one of them or perhaps working for the police. Going into a biker bar and ordering a Pepsi tends to make a person stand out. And the police, the bad guys might have reasoned, would never send someone as conspicuous as a 130-pound teetotaler to infiltrate their organization.

Andy and I hung around a couple of months in Vancouver. We both did a lot of work—unpaid—for Cool Aid, a non-profit support network for young travelers and homeless people. I organized sleeping arrangements for them at the various “digger” houses—free flop-houses, generally subsidized by pot dealers.

Andy helped the travelers make a little money, since they were almost all broke. He also worked on increasing his own revenue by beginning to sell drugs. It wasn’t beyond me to steer customers in Andy’s direction in return for a kickback—my middling reflex—but I never sold directly myself. It was the beginning of a lucrative career for Andy; his dealing grew in scope steadily, and the last I heard he was one of Quebec’s cocaine kingpins.

After a couple of months under the gray and rainy Vancouver skies, Andy and I headed south to San Francisco for several weeks to visit the ground zero of the peace and love movement. After that it was back to Vancouver for a while before venturing farther south in California and elsewhere in the U.S. for some of the summer festivals and concerts. We caught Jimi Hendrix in Phoenix, Canned Heat in Tempe, Janis Joplin at the Shrine in L.A., the Grateful Dead, also at the Shrine, and many others I’ve forgotten. There was a lot of just wandering.

I came back to Hull in March or April 1969, with no particular plans. One of the few things I was sure of was that I didn’t want to go back out west or stay in Quebec. I kicked around for the summer, but I was just killing time and I knew it. I also knew I needed something totally different. So, in October, once any trace of summer had disappeared and winter was beginning to whisper, I cut off all my hair, hitchhiked to Montreal and then south to the U.S. border, and signed up to fight in Vietnam.