New File: Satan’s Choice — the Club That Handed Ontario to the Hells Angels, and Came Back

A new organization profile is live: Satan’s Choice. It is the seventeenth profile on the site, and it covers the club that owned Ontario for thirty-five years, gave it away in a single afternoon, and re-formed last year under the founder’s son.

For most of the period people now describe as the Hells Angels’ era, the Angels were barely in Ontario. The club that mattered was homegrown — founded in Oshawa in 1965 by a national-team boxer named Bernie Guindon, and at its peak, on Peter Edwards’ account, the second-largest outlaw motorcycle club in the world. Then, on 29 December 2000 at a clubhouse in Sorel, Quebec, 179 bikers patched over in one ceremony and Satan’s Choice ceased to exist.

Why This One Took Longer

More of this club’s history lives in books than in court files, and the profile says so at the top. Mick Lowe’s Conspiracy of Brothers and Peter Edwards’ Hard Road and Unrepentant are the standard accounts, and a great deal of what gets repeated about Satan’s Choice traces to them rather than to a judgment or a police record. Where a claim is book-sourced, we mark it.

That matters most in the Port Hope case — the 1978 killing of Bill Matiyek and the eight men charged over it. It is the file the club is best remembered for and the one most often reported wrongly. Two men were acquitted at trial. Six were convicted. One of those convictions was quashed on appeal, and on retrial that man was acquitted of murder and convicted of a lesser offence. A section 690 application was rejected. Nobody was exonerated, and accounts describing the Port Hope 8 as cleared are simply wrong. The profile sets out each man’s outcome individually, including Lorne Campbell’s later claim that he fired the shots and was never charged.

There is also a footnote almost nobody connects: every federal prisoner in Canada can vote because of Sauvé v. Canada, 2002 SCC 68 — a case brought from inside by a Satan’s Choice member convicted in that killing.

And a correction we owed. Mario Parente is routinely described as the Satan’s Choice leader who refused the Hells Angels patch. He was not. He took Hamilton out of Satan’s Choice and into the Outlaws in 1977, and refused the Angels in 2000 as the Outlaws’ national president. Two different clubs, twenty-three years apart.

The Current File

The club is active again. It has an Abbotsford chapter, confirmed in November 2025, and the OPP have gone on record about its recruitment. In May 2026 a Windsor-area arrest produced firearms charges and a Satan’s Choice vest. Those are charges only — nobody has been tried, and the profile treats them that way, as it does two circulating claims about the club’s leadership and alliances that we could not corroborate and have deliberately not printed.