Crime exposé on Bandidos gang frustrating

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This article was published 14/11/2009 (6155 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Fat Mexican

The Bloody Rise of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club

By Alex Caine

Random House Canada, 222 pages, $32

IF the premise of this frustrating crime exposé is correct, the April 2006 executions of eight bikers in a barn in Shedden, Ont,. had less to do with greed, stupidity and evil than it had to with few ounces of cocaine that belonged to the Hells Angels.

Whatever happened to that cocaine, no one knows.

Author Alex Caine suggests that the Toronto Bandidos killed on Wayne Kellestine’s farm met their maker as part of an elaborately planned scheme by Bandido higher-ups in the U.S. first to placate the powerful Hells Angels for their wayward cocaine, worth about $400,000, and, second, to purge the troublesome Bandidos Toronto chapter.

That cocaine, Caine writes, was found in a trunk of an abandoned car in March 2006. The Oldsmobile was parked on the wrong side of a street in Rexdale and towed to an impound yard. The tow drunk driver was Jamie Flanz, one of the eight to die on Kellestine’s farm.

And it was H.A. coke on its way somewhere. But Flanz, a Bandidos prospect, found it before the H.A. could move it. Somehow, some way, the H.A. found out about it and weeks later a plot was hatched not to get the cocaine back, but to slaughter Flanz and seven other guys.

Or so says Caine. He is billed as a Quebec-born, retired contract police agent who penetrated numerous criminal organizations on both sides of the border. This is his second book. The Fat Mexican refers to the Bandido’s logo, a pot-bellied bandit wearing a sombrero and holding a pistol and sword.

Give Caine credit for coming up with a theory that makes the Shedden killings more exciting than reading the recent trial coverage. At the trial of the six accused, the Crown said the six killers (three from Winnipeg) were knuckle-dragging sociopaths who only wanted to eliminate the Toronto chapter of the Bandidos so that the fledgling Winnipeg chapter could take over as the main Bandido club in Canada.

The jury agreed and on Oct. 29 convicted each of first-degree murder.

Caine also has a few ideas about star witness M.H., a bouncer at the Zoo in Osborne Village who fell in with the Winnipeg Bandidos and was at Kellestine’s farm that murderous night. M.H. was also a police informant, and when he got back to Winnipeg he called his handler, Winnipeg Police Service Const. Tim Diack, right away to blab what he had seen.

Caine theorizes M.H. may have been a double agent. Not only was he working for Diack, but he might have been working for the H.A. too. Sounds like a stretch. From his testimony at trial and comments from others, M.H. doesn’t exactly come across as diabolical criminal mastermind.

Diack, a former Winnipeg mayoral candidate, also doesn’t fare well in Caine’s book. He comes across as a rogue cop.

Caine’s research is mostly based on transcripts from the preliminary hearing of the six accused held about two years ago. With the verdicts, testimony from the preliminary hearing, even though not admitted at trial, can be published.

At one point Caine mentions the old Winnipeg Spartans honcho Darwin Sylvester. In June 1998, Caine writes, Sylvester met up with an unnamed Hells Angel and was later found dead in a ditch with his dead driver.

In truth, Sylvester’s body has never been found. Word is he was ground up into animal feed.

With Sylvester gone the H.A. took over in Winnipeg. Too bad Caine missed that. It shows the Winnipeg Bandidos likely never stood a chance, even without the bloodshed at Shedden.

Free Press legislative reporter Bruce Owen spent many years covering Winnipeg biker gangs.