Bernie Guindon

Bernard Dieudonné Guindon (born 19 November 1942), better known as "Bernie the Frog", is a Canadian former outlaw biker, gangster and boxer, best known as the founder and national president of Satan's Choice Motorcycle Club from 1965 to 2000. He was later a member of the Hells Angels until his retirement in 2006.

Youth Guindon was born in Hull, Quebec (modern Gatineau) to French-Canadian parents. His mother, Lucy, was an illiterate woman from rural Quebec who dropped out of school in Grade 1 while his father, Lucien, was a petty criminal from Buckingham who worked as a bootlegger. The Guindon family were itinerant in his early years, living at various locations in Quebec and northern Ontario. In Ontario at the time, bars and liquor stores closed very early, and Lucien Guindon, who ended settling up in Oshawa, sold alcohol out of his house to those who wanted to drink past the closing time, charging double the price in the liquor stores. In his native Quebec, the bars and liquor stores stayed open late, causing Lucienne Guindon to relocate to Ontario, where bootlegging was more profitable. Guindon pere also served as a fence for corrupt Oshawa policemen who wanted to sell items that they had stolen while performing their duties.

Guindon fils grew up in Oshawa surrounded by criminality and violence, recalling his father as a thuggish man who was very good with fists and whose favorite form of entertainment was watching his sons punch each other out. To amuse his father, Guindon constantly fought his older brother Jacques "Jack" Guindon, and usually got the better of him, causing a lifelong sibling rivalry. Guindon's father often beat his mother. Guindon's mother was the main emotional support as he grew up and tried hard to pass on her Catholic faith to her son. Guindon later defined his attitude towards Catholicism: "There's somebody up there, but I don't know who the fuck He is...I'm not at all religious. I used to hate being on my knees all the time, saying prayers and losing a couple of hours every Sunday".

As a Catholic and French-Canadian in Ontario, a province that at the time was largely English-Canadian and Protestant, Guindon was constantly involved in brawls while growing up, remembering how "I used to go across the street and fight all the Protestants". At the Holy Cross Elementary School, Guindon was a poor student who failed at everything. Guindon's first language is French, but he became fluent in English due to growing up in Oshawa. Guindon was frequently beaten by a nun he called "Dirty Gertie". As a young man, Guindon excelled at boxing and ultimately came to be trained by the Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo. When Guindon was 15, he came to the defense of his mother who was being beaten by his father, and proceeded to beat up his father in turn. Lucienne Guindon abandoned his family shortly afterwards. Lucy Guindon found a boyfriend who owned a motorcycle and who allowed his stepson to ride it. Guindon later recalled about his first time riding a motorcycle that "it was unbelievable", marking the beginning of a lifelong love of motorcycles. As a teenager, Guindon met another French-Canadian teenager living in Oshawa, Suzanne "Nicky" Blais, while working at a gas station, whom he bonded with as he spoke to her in French. Blais was from Montreal, but her mother, dissatisfied with the education offered to girls in Quebec's collèges classiques (which only trained girls to be housewives and mothers) had moved to Oshawa in 1958 to give her a "modern" education in English. Upon first seeing Guindon, Blais recalled saying to her mother "qui est ce mec mignon qui pompe le gaz?" ("who is that cute guy pumping the gas?") and insisted that her mother pull over to that gas station so she could talk to him. Guindon was to have on-off relationship with her that lasted decades before marrying her in 2009.

As a youth full of machismo and a rebellious streak, Guindon was fascinated with the outlaw biker lifestyle and purchased a motorcycle which he named the "Wild Thing". In 1959, at the age of 17, Guindon joined the Golden Hawk Riders outlaw biker club. Guindon's biographer, Peter Edwards, described him as riding his motorcycle down the streets of Oshawa like "a conquering hero". Although bike helmets were not mandatory in Ontario until 1969, Guindon always wore one as his "punch-enhancer". In November 1961, Guindon married for the first time after his teenage girlfriend Veronica became pregnant with the first of his many children, but he continued his womanizing and continued to insist that Blais was his true love. In April 1963, Blais married someone else. Despite being French-Canadian, Guindon did not object to his nickname "Bernie the Frog".

Rise to power Starting in 1961, Guindon came to be involved in a feud with Harold "Johnny Sombrero" Barnes, the self-proclaimed "Supreme Commander" of the Toronto-based Black Diamond Riders. It remains unclear even today why Barnes's nickname was "Johnny Sombrero" as he never wore a Sombrero. Guindon refused to address Barnes by his title of Supreme Commander, causing much offense to the latter. Barnes was the son of a working class Englishman from the north of England and an Italian woman who was related to the Commisso 'Ndrangheta clan. Barnes took more to his British descent and portrayed himself despite being an outlaw biker as the defender of traditional British values against upstart "Frogs" such as Guindon. Barnes in his interviews with the media rather bizarrely claimed that his criminal activities were somehow related to his self-proclaimed mission defending the monarchy and Canada's British heritage. Guindon came to embrace the nickname "Bernie the Frog" as a way of countering the attack and later in life run businesses with names such "Frog's Fresh and Frozen Sea Products".

In 1962, the Satan's Choice club led by Don Norris were forced to disband following attacks from the rival Black Diamond Riders club. The Black Diamond Riders followed this up by attacking the Golden Hawk Riders during a field day in the summer of 1962, beating up the Golden Hawks. Under the outlaw biker code, field days under which bikers show off their motorcycles are supposed to be immune from violence. On the field day at the Pebbestone Golf Course in Courtice hosted by the Golden Hawk Riders, Guindon noticed that the Black Diamond Riders were keeping to themselves and were arming themselves with tree braches, leading him to predict violence was coming. The other Golden Hawk Riders dismissed his concerns, saying that no violence would happen at the field day. At the signal given by Barnes, the Black Diamond Riders attacked. Guindon punched out the sergeant-at-arms of the Black Diamond Riders. Guindon recalled in a 2015 interview: "I started with the sergeant-at-arms and knocked him out, and then Johnny Sombrero chased me down the field with a log. I wasn't going to stand waiting until he hit me. I ran". Guindon came out of the Golden Hawk clubhouse with a piece of lumber and manically attacked the Black Diamond Riders. During the "Battle of Pebblestone" as the fight was called, Guindon came to face to face with Barnes and exchanged blows. Guindon punched out a Black Diamond Rider, Tom Bird, and forced Barnes to retreat. The "Battle of Pebbestone" damaged the prestige of the Golden Hawk Riders, who came to be called the "Chicken Hawks", and Guindon ended up leaving the club. For a time, Guindon went to Montreal to work in a factory to before returning to Oshawa in late 1963.

Guindon was furious with this violation of the biker code by the Black Diamond Riders at the "Battle of Pebblestone" as the media dubbed the brawl and vowed revenge. Guindon, who was considered to be more intelligent than the average outlaw biker, devised a strategy of seeking to humiliate the Black Diamond Riders by amalgamating several outlaw biker clubs into one and forcing the Black Diamond Riders to retreat by confronting them with overwhelming numbers. Guindon knew from his experience of street fights that there was a strength in numbers and the side that had the most fighters always had the advantage. Under the outlaw biker code, cowardice is considered the supreme vice, and for Guindon forcing the Black Diamond Riders to retreat from a fight by confronting them with overwhelming numerical superiority would be far more satisfying than merely beating them up. As part of his strategy, Guindon founded a new club called the Phantom Riders, of which he became president. Guindon founded the Phantom Riders in either late 1963 or early 1964. The Phantom Riders were a successful club who mostly rode British motorcycles such as the Triumphs, Nortons and BSAs. During the early 1960s there had been a short-lived Amalgamated Riders Association, which inspired Guindon with the idea of creating a "super-club" with chapters in several cities that would overwhelm the Black Diamond Riders. The success of the Black Diamond Riders lent urgency and appeal to Guindon's plans, and many of the other club presidents who were also threatened by the Black Diamond Riders were interested.

Satan's Choice In 1965, Guindon founded the Satan's Choice outlaw biker club in Toronto by merging his Phantom Riders of Oshawa with three other outlaw biker clubs based in what is now Cambridge, Mississauga, and Toronto. The other clubs were the Canadian Lancers of Scarborough (modern Toronto), the Wild Ones of Port Credit (modern Mississauga) and Throttle Twisters of Preston (modern Cambridge). Guindon chose the name Satan's Choice and adopted the patch of the disbanded club because he knew it would enrage the Black Diamond Riders. Guindon had read a newspaper article where Barnes had listed Satan's Choice as one of the clubs which he had forced to disband, which inspired him to choose the name. Guindon asked and received permission from Norris to use the name and patch of Satan's Choice. With four chapters, Satan's Choice became the largest outlaw biker club in Canada, and Guindon became the president of the new club.

With his numerical superiority, Guindon humiliated the Black Diamond Riders by forcing them to retreat from fights that they knew they would lose. To humiliate Barnes, Guindon rode up to the clubhouse of the Black Diamond Riders with his followers. Guindon challenged Barnes and his followers to come out and fight them, causing his prestige to rise and theirs to dwindle when they did not. Guindon followed up his triumph by dictating terms to the Black Diamond Riders, ordering them to stop attacking other clubs and to stick to their territory in Toronto, whose borders were defined by him. The humiliation caused the Black Diamond Riders to lose face and by 1968, what had once been the largest outlaw biker club in Toronto had declined to only 15 members.

The American journalist Mick Lowe described Guindon in the 1960s as: "He was widely respected for his self-discipline, and his athleticism, but was admired in other ways, too. The Choice founder combined courage and a quick intelligence and a keen sense of diplomacy. Bernie always seemed to know how to get things down without ever appearing manipulative. He was a dreamer who would prove time and again his ability to act on and achieve his visions. The young Oshawa biker radiated energy and self-confidence. To be around Bernie Guindon was to feel utterly and irrepressibly alive, living for the moment and yet moving towards some grand and glorious future". For many of the young people in the 1960s, Guindon was a folk hero.

First term as national president Later in 1965, Guindon was featured in the documentary Satan's Choice about outlaw bikers directed by Donald Shebib, which made him into something of a celebrity in the Toronto area. Charismatic and handsome, Guindon was the "star" of the documentary. Toronto before the 1960s had a very staid image of "Toronto the Good", a city inhabited by hard-working, conservative God-fearing Protestants of British descent, a city that was prosperous, safe and well run, but rather boring. In the 1960s, many of the younger people in Toronto embraced a "hip" image, consciously choosing lifestyles that were contrary to the traditional Anglo-Protestant values that had previously defined Toronto. The outlaw biker subculture came to be seen as a symbol of rebellion with many of the younger people romanticizing the bikers as a symbol of "authenticity", people who were dangerous, but "cool" and "hip" in their rejection of "Toronto the Good" values. One young woman interviewed in the documentary said she liked riding with Satan's Choice because they were "not phony". The Ontario outlaw biker subculture was violent, but the violence was generally limited to brawling, and murder was extremely rare in the 1960s. The unwillingness of outlaw bikers to testify against one another in court following their code made it difficult for the authorities to prosecute them for their frequent street fights, which contributed to their "cool" image as men who successfully broke the law. Shebib said of Satan's Choice in 1965: "It was a lot of booze, broads, and bikes. It wasn't organized crime as it became. But I don't think you wanted to cross them." Adding to the appeal of Satan's Choice was that the music for the film was performed by The Sparrows, the band that later in 1967 became Steppenwolf.

In Satan's Choice, Guindon and the rest of his club professed to reject materialism, claiming that the only possessions they valued were their motorcycles, and maintained that they were rejecting the conformity of Canadian society. That Guindon and his club were rigidly conforming to the code of outlaw biker subculture that originated in California apparently escaped them. Shebib's documentary Satan's Choice, with its sympathetic picture of Guindon and his gang as rebels against "Toronto the Good" values, gave him an immense amount of attention in 1960s Toronto. Although the values of outlaw biker subculture with its focus on violence, macho masculinity and the acquisition of wealth contrasted with the counterculture values of the hippies, the two subcultures saw themselves as united by a common rejection of the values of Canadian society, and it became common for hippies to glamorize outlaw bikers as the 1960s progressed. Guindon and his gang were often in trouble with the law owing to their frequent brawling with other outlaw bikers, but in general Satan's Choice were not into organized crime in their first three or so years, engaging only in petty crime. Police raids in the 1960s discovered that Satan's Choice members possessed guns, brass knuckles and marijuana, the latter which were as much for their own use as to sell.

The authorities made it clear that they disapproved of Guindon and, starting in late 1966, a police cruiser was almost permanently parked outside of Guindon's home in Oshawa as a way of reminding him that the police were watching him. Visitors to the Guindon home were questioned by the police as they entered and left. In 1967, Guindon was present at a Satan's Choice field day in St. Catharines attended by other biker clubs as well with a total of about 200 people. The anti-riot squad of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) showed up in their riot gear and began to advance on the bikers, banging their nightsticks against their shields. Guindon organized a response with a microphone saying: "Be cool, be cool, let 'em come." As the anti-riot squad numbered only 100 while the bikers and their girlfriends numbered about 200, the police phalanx found themselves surrounded on the open field. Realizing that they were in an untenable situation, the police retreated while Guindon ordered the bikers to charge once he saw the police were out of formation. Once out of formation, the anti-riot equipment became a hindrance instead of a help as the policemen were forced to retreat to their cars.

In 1967, a black outlaw biker from Montreal, Rod MacLeod, contacted Guindon at a biker's convention at Wasaga Beach and asked to form the first Satan's Choice chapter in la belle province. Guindon granted the request, making MacLeod the first black chapter president anywhere in Canada, leading in Montreal a multiracial, multilingual chapter made of blacks and whites, English-Canadians and French-Canadians of about 20 members. Outlaw biker clubs tended to shun non-white applicants, and Guindon was highly unusual in allowing a black man to lead a chapter. At the same time, Martin K. Weiche, a German immigrant, Wehrmacht veteran and a fanatical Nazi who had grown rich as a property developer in London, Ontario, tried to recruit Guindon and Satan's Choice to provide security at his Nazi rallies, a request that Guindon rebuffed under the grounds that he was a Canadian "patriot."

On 25 September 1967, Guindon held the first national convention of Satan's Choice at a farmhouse in Markham Township just outside of Toronto, which was also attended by the Vagabonds club. Amid much riotous drinking in a barn, 23 police officers attempted a raid on the Satan's Choice convention about midnight but were forced to retreat under a shower of empty beer bottles. About 4:00 am that night, the police returned with a greater force of 84 officers who, after much brawling, arrested 55 bikers including Guindon and nine women who also attending the party. The raid attracted much media attention, as did the police's seizure of weapons including sawed-off shotguns, handguns, axes and bike chains, together with an immense quantity of alcohol and marijuana. Arrested with Guindon at the barn were his second wife Barbara Ann and his right-hand man Howard "Pigpen" Berry. Much to Guindon's chagrin, the "Wild Thing," as he named his motorcycle, was wrecked by the police.

By 1968, the Toronto chapter of Satan's Choice had about 50 members, making it the largest outlaw biker club in Toronto. In 1968, Guindon was approached by the Hells Angels for the first time with the offer to have Satan's Choice "patch over" to become Hells Angels. Guindon was an ardent Canadian nationalist and rejected the offer, saying he did not want his club absorbed into an American club. Towards the end of the 1960s, Guindon started to move into organised crime, turning Satan's Choice into one of the leading distributors of illegal drugs in Ontario and in Montreal. The drug trade was profitable and a rivalry with the Cross Breeds biker club of Niagara Falls grew increasingly bitter. On 1 June 1968, Guindon led an attack by Satan's Choice members on a Cross Breeds meeting that saw the latter savagely beaten and their motorcycles trashed, an incident that so badly damaged the reputation of the Cross Breeds that the club disbanded. The change of outlaw biking from being a lifestyle to being more of a business caused many of the original Satan's Choice bikers to leave the club in the late 1960s. In August 1968, Guindon attracted national notoriety by holding a bikers' rally in Wasaga Beach that featured a contest that involved having Choice members chase down and run over live chickens with their motorcycles. Under Guindon's leadership, Satan's Choice grew rapidly, opening up chapters all over Ontario and one in Montreal. Guindon had an obsession with "rats," as he called police informers, and most of the victims of his violence were fellow Choice members he suspected of being informers. Guindon continued his womanizing as many women considered him attractive, which amazed him as, by his own admission, his penis was very small. Guidon recalled that it was said by his lovers that he was "hung like a stud field mouse." Guindon explained his sex appeal to women as due to the "bad boy", observing that many women in the 1960s and 1970s were sexually obsessed with outlaw bikers as the ultimate "bad boys," saying: "Maybe they like the wild side. He's not straight up and down like her father was. Who knows?"

The Canadian scholar Gordon Melcher wrote: "In a culture where violence, toughness, and assertive masculinity were so highly prized, Guindon succeeded as a leader because he was tougher and smarter than the next guy." Although Satan's Choice and the other Canadian outlaw biker clubs all slavishly copied the American outlaw biker clubs, Guindon was adamant about keeping American clubs out of Canada, arguing the American clubs would destabilize the biker scene and cause too much violence. Though Guindon was willing to use violence to achieve his aims, in general he was against biker wars, arguing that the Canadian public would tolerate street fights, but not murder, and that excessive violence would lead to a police crackdown. Guindon argued the outlaw biker clubs should respect each other's territories to avoid violence. Melcher wrote there was an element of self-interest to Guindon's strategy since Satan's Choice was the largest club and his strategy for peace by mutual respect for each other's territories enshrined the dominance of his club by preventing challenges. Melcher further noted that as a business strategy, Guindon's peace strategy was quite rational as the lack of a police crackdown allowed Satan's Choice to make greater profits than would be the case if the police were cracking down.

Guindon was described as extremely charismatic and was idolised by his followers. In 1970, Satan's Choice had about 300 members in 12 chapters, making Satan's Choice second largest outlaw biker club in the world, being exceeded only by the Hells Angels. Found on the island on Oba Lake were nine pounds of PCP ready to sell and 236 pounds of PCP waiting to be completed. On 16 March 2021, Strong was convicted of murdering Hache. Guindon is at present living in Oshawa with Blais.