WEB EXTRA: Police believe slain bikers wanted to defect from Bandidos gang

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/04/2006 (7433 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — The working theory among detectives probing the massacre of eight Bandidos outlaw bikers last weekend is that the violence erupted after the men announced plans to break away from the group, the Globe and Mail reported Friday.

It remains unclear whether the intended defection was to include a “patch-over” to the Hells Angels, the Bandidos’ long-time archrivals and the dominant outlaw bikers in Ontario and the rest of Canada.

The breakaway thesis was echoed independently Thursday by a former Hells Angels associate who used to run drugs for the gang and remains in touch.

Several of the Bandidos had been talking to Ontario’s Hells Angels about a patch-over, the man said.

“They wanted to join the HA, but the old guard said no. And the rest is history.”

The investigation has been hampered by the fact that the five accused killers — Bandido Wayne (Wiener) Kellestine and four associates, including a woman — aren’t telling police much.

Well-known to police dedicated to investigating bikers, Kellestine lives a few kilometres from where the eight men were found shot dead and stuffed into four vehicles in a farmer’s field in southwestern Ontario last Saturday.

A search warrant for Kellestine’s isolated, rural home was obtained after police flew over the area and spotted signs of suspicious activity on his property.

Ontario Provincial Police maintained their cordon around Kellestine’s white-and-black two-storey farmhouse, where the five suspects were arrested on Sunday.

Six of the dead men were full-patch Bandidos. All were attached to the Bandidos’ Toronto chapter, which until last weekend had 12 members and was the only Canadian Bandidos chapter of any size.

Since the Hells Angels began expanding west from Quebec in 1999 and 2000, many Bandidos have switched sides and joined the Angels, which has 34 chapters, Canada-wide, and roughly 500 full-patch members or associates.

Kellestine, however, is known to have a long-standing antipathy toward the Hells Angels, two of whose associates once tried to kill him in a drive-by shooting.

Another source, meanwhile, told the Globe and Mail that as some of the Bandidos drove along Highway 401 late last week for a meeting at Kellestine’s farmhouse, they were tailed by Durham Regional Police undercover officers investigating an apparently unrelated slaying — that of reputed Keswick-area drug dealer Shawn Douse, whose beaten body was found in a field northeast of Toronto in December.

After the bikers reached the farmhouse, the officers returned home, the source said.

The gunfire, marking the worst gangland slaying in Ontario history, erupted later and has spawned multiple theories as to its cause.

One is that it involved a cocaine rip-off. Another is that the slayings were ordered from the Bandidos’ headquarters in Galveston, Tex. A third — swiftly discounted by the provincial Biker Enforcement Unit — was that it was the work of the Hells Angels.

An alleged plan by members of the Bandidos to break away, however, fits in with the only solid piece of information investigators have released — that the mass killings stemmed from “an internal cleansing.”

The manner in which the bodies and vehicles were abandoned, with no effort to conceal them, suggests as well that the bloody confrontation was spontaneous rather than planned.

Other irritants may have contributed to the violence, including some unfinished business involving cars and a motorcycle.

As a thin fog lifted Thursday from the fields surrounding Kellestine’s farmhouse, at least seven cars could be counted outside the old house and nearby barn. Some appeared to be of 1950s or 1960s vintage.

An area resident told the Globe he helped Kellestine move several vehicles to the farm last May from a rural property near Newmarket, Ont. The Bandidos had rented that property but had to leave after the rent went unpaid, the man said.

Several vehicles, which the man said “belonged to Bandidos,” were stored on the property and when the landlord threatened to get rid of them, Kellestine hired the man to help him haul four of them away: a 1959 Ford Fairlane, a 1967 Dodge convertible, an early-1970s Chevrolet El Camino and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

“I was supposed to get the ’67 Dodge convertible (as payment),” said the man, who refused to give his name. “I didn’t get paid.”

En route to Kellestine’s farm that day, police pulled the man over and fined him for a missing tail light on his trailer, he said. Kellestine told him the ticket would be taken care of by John (Boxer) Muscedere, the Bandidos’ Canadian president and one of the eight massacre victims, but that didn’t happen either.

The man did not press the issue, but said he heard later that Kellestine had upset his biker brothers by taking the vehicles — especially the Harley-Davidson — to his farm.

“In mid-summer, I heard somebody wanted to shoot him,” said the man, adding that Kellestine “was staying away” from his home last fall because “he knew the hit was on him.”

–Globe and Mail