Satan’s Choice
For thirty-five years Ontario’s outlaw biker landscape was a domestic creation. The Hells Angels had almost no presence in the province; the club that mattered was Canadian, founded in Oshawa, and on one account the second-largest outlaw motorcycle club on earth. Then, on a December afternoon in Sorel, Quebec, it handed Ontario to the Angels in a single ceremony. In August 2025 the founder’s son brought the name back.
Two Clubs, One Name
There were two organisations called Satan’s Choice, and conflating them is the most common error in accounts of the club.
The first ran from 1956 to 1962 — a Toronto club of roughly forty-five members under Don Norris, oriented more to riding and socialising than to crime. It folded in 1962 under sustained attack from the Black Diamond Riders and their leader Harold “Johnny Sombrero” Barnes.
The club that matters is the second. In 1965, Bernie Guindon revived the name by merging four regional clubs into one organisation: his own Phantom Riders of Oshawa, the Canadian Lancers of Scarborough, the Throttle Twisters of Preston, and the Wild Ones of Port Credit. Three years separated the two clubs. What carried over was a name and a crest.
Bernie Guindon
Bernard Guindon, born 19 November 1942, is the reason the club existed and the reason it held together for as long as it did. He is also, unusually for a figure of his kind, a documented athlete rather than a mythologised one.
Trained by Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo. Won the Ontario Golden Gloves, the Eastern Canadian Golden Gloves and the Canadian Golden Gloves in 1971. Canadian amateur light-middleweight champion.
Reported as a bronze medallist at the 1971 Pan American Games in Cali, Colombia — a national-team credential, not a barroom reputation. The claim appears in Peter Edwards’ biography and in his publisher’s material; Guindon is not named in the surviving Pan Am medal tables, which list Canada’s 1971 boxing bronzes without athletes’ names.
He was barred from the 1972 Olympic team because of a 1969 sexual assault conviction. He never turned professional; by his own account he feared that with assault convictions on his record a court would treat his fists as weapons.
15 May 1969 | Convicted of rape. Five years. Served at Kingston Penitentiary, then Joyceville. Paroled January 1971.
6 August 1975 | Arrested at Oba Lake in northern Ontario in the PCP bust that defined the club’s criminal profile. Convicted May 1976. Seventeen years. Served at Millhaven, released early in 1984 for good behaviour.
1992 | Charged with drug trafficking under Project Overhaul. Acquitted, July 1994.
He led the club as national president from 1965 until his retirement from that role in the 1990s, though he spent roughly a decade of that period in custody, and for substantial stretches of it he was not running anything — Garnet McEwen held the office as interim national president twice, in 1969 and again after Guindon’s 1975 arrest.
Guindon later joined the Hells Angels in the 2000 patch-over and retired from that club in April 2006, after coming to suspect that a member named Steven Gault was setting him up. Gault was subsequently confirmed as a police agent. Guindon’s house was destroyed by arson in March 2008.
No death has been reported for Bernie Guindon as of August 2026. This publication searched obituaries and news records and found none; that is an absence of evidence rather than a confirmation, and we state it that way deliberately.
What the Club Actually Did
Satan’s Choice was not primarily a distribution gang. It was a manufacturer.
The core enterprise was PCP and methamphetamine, cooked in remote cabins in northern Ontario and sold under the brand name “Canadian Blue.” A 1975 alliance with the Outlaws made the club, in effect, the exclusive supplier of that product into the American market. The Oba Lake raid of August 1975 seized PCP reported at $6 million and put Guindon away for eight and a half years of a seventeen-year sentence.
Figures circulate for the club’s drug revenue — per-pound prices, monthly sales volumes — that trace to book accounts rather than to seizure records or court findings. The most-quoted of them is implausible on its face, and this profile does not repeat it.
The Big Split, 1 July 1977
With Guindon in Millhaven, the club had no centre. On 1 July 1977, the man holding it in his absence took most of it out the door.
Garnet “Mother” McEwen, president of the St. Catharines chapter and interim national president while Guindon was imprisoned, summoned the chapter presidents to Crystal Beach on Lake Erie. He excluded Guindon loyalists. He brought American Outlaws up from Detroit. And he presented the St. Catharines and Windsor chapters’ earlier defections as an accomplished fact.
The presidents agreed one after another. Patches were burned and Outlaws colours put on.
Eight chapters went: Montreal, Hamilton, St. Catharines, Sault Ste. Marie, Windsor, London, Ottawa and Kingston. Membership fell from roughly 350 to about 110 — the split accounts for most of that, though the standard accounts also credit a sustained police pressure campaign running through the same years. The underlying membership numbers vary considerably between sources.
Four chapters remained: Oshawa, Toronto, Kitchener and Thunder Bay.
McEwen’s stated rationale was what members called “Yankeeization” — that tying the club to an American organisation meant more power and better access to American guns.
There is a harder fact underneath it. McEwen was a police informer. He informed the OPP about the Oba Lake PCP factory, which is what put Guindon in prison and removed the one man who could have stopped him. Some members went further and claimed he ran the whole defection on his handlers’ instructions. That is a members’ allegation and has never been established.
McEwen was later expelled from the Outlaws over roughly $30,000, fled to Alberta, washed dishes in Calgary, joined another club, was beaten with his own prosthetic leg over a theft, and died in Saskatoon on 27 January 2012, aged 66.
Port Hope: the Case That Will Not Close
At about 10:55 p.m. on 18 October 1978, in the Queen’s Hotel in Port Hope, Ontario, William “Heavy” Matiyek, 23, sergeant-at-arms of the Golden Hawk Riders, was shot three times in the neck and head. He had been drinking with two Outlaws. He was intoxicated and carrying a .32 pistol. Earlier that evening he had beaten and ejected a man who then telephoned the Satan’s Choice Peterborough chapter.
Eight club members were charged. The case became the most litigated episode in the club’s history and the subject of Mick Lowe’s Conspiracy of Brothers.
Gary “Nutty” Comeau | First-degree murder. Convicted. Life, 25 years before parole eligibility. Appeal dismissed. Granted full parole 8 September 2000, after 21 years — possible only because the faint hope provision (Criminal Code s. 745.6) let him apply after fifteen. His conviction was never disturbed. Maintains his innocence.
Richard “Rick” Sauvé | First-degree murder. Convicted at 27. Life, 25 years before parole eligibility. Appeal dismissed. Paroled 1995, after roughly sixteen years, again under the faint hope provision. His conviction was never disturbed.
Jeff “Boom Boom” McLeod | Second-degree murder. Convicted. Life, ten years before parole eligibility. Paroled 1989.
Larry “Beaver” Hurren | Second-degree murder. Convicted. Ten years before parole eligibility. Killed in a road accident in July 1996.
Merv “Indian” Blaker | Second-degree murder. Convicted. Ten years before parole eligibility. Paroled 1989.
David “Tee Hee” Hoffman | Second-degree murder at trial. The Court of Appeal ordered a new trial on 13 April 1982 on fresh evidence. On retrial he was acquitted of murder and convicted of accessory after the fact — four years, 21 March 1983.
Armand “In the Trunk” Sanguigni | Acquitted on all counts. Died 8 October 1984 of a heroin overdose.
Gordon “Dog Map” van Haarlem | Acquitted on all counts. Left the club, moved to Alberta.
Trial before Justice Coulter Osborne at London, Ontario, beginning 4 September 1979. Verdicts 24 November 1979.
Two features of the case are why it has never settled.
On 25 October 1979, mid-trial, Satan’s Choice member Lorne Campbell took the stand for the defence and said: “I pulled out my gun and shot him for my own protection. I didn’t want to get shot.” He claimed self-defence, saying Matiyek reached for his weapon first.
Campbell was never charged with the killing. His testimony could not itself be used against him under the Canada Evidence Act, but other evidence could have supported a prosecution. None was brought.
Supporting detail: witnesses described a left-handed shooter. Campbell is left-handed and all eight accused were right-handed. His photograph was never shown to witnesses.
Three shots were fired; three wounds were found in Matiyek; only two bullets were recovered at the scene. Comeau had been shot in the arm.
Justice Osborne ordered the bullet surgically removed on 31 October 1979, during the trial. Ballistics confirmed it came from the same gun that killed Matiyek — and it carried threading from Matiyek’s coat. It had passed through Matiyek before striking Comeau. For Comeau to have fired that round, it would have had to reverse direction in mid-air.
Separately, Comeau’s jacket, with a bullet hole in the arm, was seized on 10 January 1979 and then disappeared from the police evidence locker. It was never recovered.
There were witness problems too. Roger Davey, who had been Sauvé’s best man, admitted under oath in 1985 that his trial testimony was perjury — he had never spoken to Sauvé that night. That admission is a sworn-record event. Davey was never charged with perjury. Other criticisms — no fingerprints taken, witnesses interviewed in groups, red dots on Comeau’s photographs in the array — come from Lowe’s book rather than from a court finding, and should be read that way.
The Footnote Nobody Connects
Richard Sauvé, convicted of first-degree murder in the Matiyek case, spent his sentence litigating something else entirely.
In Sauvé v. Canada (Chief Electoral Officer), 2002 SCC 68, the Supreme Court of Canada held 5–4 that the ban on voting by prisoners serving two years or more violated the Charter. Every federal prisoner in Canada can vote because of a case brought by a Satan’s Choice member from inside the system that convicted him.
Sorel, 29 December 2000
Until the last week of 2000, the Hells Angels had almost no Ontario presence. Then they acquired one in an afternoon.
29 December 2000, at the Hells Angels clubhouse in Sorel, Quebec: 179 bikers patched over in a single ceremony — four clubs went across as organisations (Satan’s Choice, the Para-Dice Riders, Last Chance and the Lobos), joined by individual defectors from the Outlaws and the Rock Machine. Satan’s Choice was the largest component.
It was arranged by Walter Stadnick, the Hells Angels national president, who had opened the approach that summer.
New Ontario chapters created out of Satan’s Choice: Sudbury, Thunder Bay, Simcoe County, Kitchener, Oshawa, Keswick and Toronto East.
Police assessments quoted afterwards rated Satan’s Choice and the Para-Dice Riders as serious organisations worth absorbing, and dismissed two of the smaller clubs in unflattering terms.
This is the hinge of Ontario organised-crime history for the period, and it is why the Hells Angels file and this one are the same story told from opposite ends. Thirty-five years of homegrown outlaw structure was converted into an American franchise in a day, by agreement rather than by war.
Bernie Guindon went across. So did Lorne Campbell, who became president of the Hells Angels Sudbury chapter from 2001 to 2006. David Hoffman retired from Satan’s Choice in good standing rather than take the patch.
Mario Parente — a Correction Worth Making
Mario Parente is routinely described as the Satan’s Choice leader who refused to join the Hells Angels. That compresses two separate things into one.
Parente joined the Satan’s Choice Hamilton chapter in 1967 and became its president in the 1970s. On 1 July 1977 he took Hamilton out of Satan’s Choice and into the Outlaws as part of McEwen’s split. He was a defector from this club, not a loyalist to it.
He then spent twenty-three years with the Outlaws, rising to national president in Canada. It was in that role, in 2000, that he would not take the Hells Angels patch — and the Outlaws under him remained the principal organised holdout against Angels expansion in Ontario.
The refusal is real. The club he refused on behalf of was not this one.
Parente’s own record: six years for illegal weapon possession after Outlaws fired on a bus carrying Hells Angels near Wawa in July 1983; a manslaughter conviction in 1988 over the 1984 killing of Jimmy Lewis, the court accepting a substantial element of self-defence, with a sentence of thirty months. Arrested in Project Retire in September 2002 on seventeen weapons and drug charges, he refused every Crown plea offer. On 12 March 2009 the Crown withdrew all charges, citing no reasonable prospect of conviction after the key informant declined to testify. He resigned as Outlaws national president that month.
August 2025: The Club Comes Back
Satan’s Choice ceased to exist after Sorel. A brief attempt to reactivate the name in 2017 was shut down quickly, and Lorne Campbell publicly called it an insult to the original.
The 2025 revival is a different matter, because of who is behind it.
Born 15 October 1985 in Oshawa. Bernie Guindon’s son. A former Hells Angel who left that club in 2022, he relaunched Satan’s Choice through social media in August 2025.
His stated justification: “It’s my father’s club, and I feel like with his permission, I have the right to do that.”
In November 2025 the club opened an Abbotsford chapter — the revived club’s first presence in British Columbia. The original club had a Vancouver chapter in the late 1960s, which Bernie Guindon shut down himself. Guindon told the Vancouver Sun the group already had a clubhouse at an undisclosed location, and said: “We’re not looking for a problem. We don’t want a problem, right? We just want to have the motorcycle club in every province.”
Membership figures of roughly 400 in Canada and 200 in the United States come from Guindon himself. No police count corroborates them.
CFSEU-BC and the Abbotsford Police gang and intelligence units confirmed in late 2025 that they were monitoring the club’s expansion into British Columbia.
OPP Acting Detective Superintendent Andy Bradford, on the record in May 2026: “In August 2025, Satan’s Choice formed again, and there’s been rapid recruitment in the last 10 months and rapid growth.” And on the difficulty of tracking it: “The membership is highly fluid, but because it’s so fluid, it’s hard to monitor.”
Bradford identified southwestern Ontario as strategically attractive to the club.
On 22 May 2026, at around 2 a.m., Windsor Police executed a search warrant at a residence on the 100 block of Amy Croft Drive in Tecumseh.
Andrew Vincent Bastien, 41, and Angela Jill Simic, 40, were each charged with three counts of possession of a loaded firearm, three counts of possession of a prohibited firearm without a registration certificate, three counts under section 117(h) of the Firearms Act, and failure to comply with a release order.
Seized: three loaded handguns — a Smith & Wesson M&P, a Sig Sauer .45 and a Colt .32 — along with loaded magazines, ammunition, and a vest bearing the Satan’s Choice emblem.
These are charges. Neither accused has been convicted, and both are presumed innocent. Harley Guindon publicly denied that Bastien was a current member, saying he had left months earlier and had improperly kept his patch.
This publication could find no reported court development in the case as of late August 2026.
Agencies on the File
Original Club | Dissolved 29 December 2000 into the Hells Angels
Current Entity | Active. Relaunched August 2025 under Harley Davidson Guindon
Footprint | Ontario and British Columbia confirmed — an Abbotsford chapter since November 2025. The club claims a considerably wider reach; that claim is unverified
Size | Claimed at roughly 400 in Canada by its own leadership. No police figure available
Police Posture | Monitored by the OPP, CFSEU-BC and Abbotsford Police. No organisation-level prosecution announced
Founder | Bernie Guindon. No death reported as of August 2026
Port Hope | Five murder convictions stand; a sixth man was acquitted of murder on retrial and convicted of accessory after the fact. No exoneration. Gary Comeau still seeking one
- Mick Lowe — Conspiracy of Brothers: A True Story of Bikers, Murder and the Law (1988; reissued). The standard account of the Matiyek case and the source of the miscarriage-of-justice reading.
- Peter Edwards — Hard Road: Bernie Guindon and the Reign of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club (Random House Canada, 2017)
- Peter Edwards — Unrepentant: The Strange and (Sometimes) Terrible Life of Lorne Campbell (Random House Canada, 2013), containing Campbell’s own account of the Matiyek killing
- Windsor Police Service — News release on the Tecumseh firearms arrests (23 May 2026)
- CBC News — OPP comment on the club’s recruitment and growth (29 May 2026)
- Vancouver Sun (Kim Bolan) — Reporting on the Abbotsford chapter and the club’s British Columbia expansion (19 November 2025)
- Supreme Court of Canada — Sauvé v. Canada (Chief Electoral Officer), 2002 SCC 68
- The Globe and Mail — Reporting on Gary Comeau’s release on full parole
- Steve Earle — “Justice in Ontario” (1990), written about the Port Hope case