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were looking forward to getting far more once they were Outlaws. Besides, having that well-known and respected patch on their back meant a lot more respect than the comical one they sported now. The Outlaws were the big time, and they wanted to be part of it.
    But many of the gang’s veteran members were against the merger for exactly the same reasons. Increased sales and increased visibility meant more attention from cops — potentially a different kind of cop, like the RCMP — and other bikers. Those old guys, those who joined the club to ride and party, didn’t mind making a few bucks off weed or whatever, but most of them had real jobs and families, they didn’t want to become full-time gangsters.
    Marsh’s guest — Stanley “Beamer” McConnery, a full-patch member of McEwen’s old St. Catharines Chapter of the Outlaws — delivered the hard sell. He warned that without a concrete deal with the Outlaws, the Iron Hawgs could see their drug supply dwindle down to the same pathetic level as the Para-Dice Riders had. For those still unconvinced, Marsh reminded them that full-patch members of Hells Angels had been seen partying in Toronto with the Para-Dice Riders for the last year or so. Everybody in Canada knew they had their eye on Ontario. If they were to patch over the much-loathed Para-Dice Riders — and it looked likely — the Iron Hawgs would have to be well armed and well allied.
    That was the clincher. The Iron Hawgs became the Outlaws Toronto. It was one of many occasions in which the fear of a biker war in Ontario forced a decision.
    It wasn’t the Outlaws’ first success in Ontario after the Satan’s Choice patch-over. In 1982, they negotiated to have one of Ontario’s oldest clubs — the Queensmen of Amherstburg, just across the river from Detroit — change their name to the Holocaust, relocate up the 401 to London and serve as a puppet gang.
    Meanwhile the Outlaws were facing serious competition on other fronts, namely Quebec. They were not the only ones who came to Montreal in 1977. And while the Outlaws’ presence in the city was simply a fortuitous outgrowth of the club’s general desire to establish itself in Canada, Hells Angels targeted Montreal specifically.

    While the city fathers would probably prefer to be known for hosting the 1976 Summer Olympics, late ’70s Montreal was also well known for being a hotbed of organized crime, racketeering, loan-sharking, smuggling, drug sales and prostitution.
    And it was a town full of Mafia. The Cotroni, Violi and Rizzuto families represented the Italians, and the less organized, but still plenty powerful West End Gang represented the Irish. Among them, they controlled most of the crime in town, with an uneasy equilibrium occasionally interrupted by violence.
    As in many other places, the gangsters tended to use bikers to do their toughest jobs. It made sense — there were dozens of biker gangs in and around the city looking for easy money, and their presence allowed the gangsters a layer of protection from law enforcement. None of them was especially dominant or all that organized, so if things didn’t work out with one club, they could easily switch to another. The almost unlimited supply of competing labor also kept prices down.
    But there was a problem. There was a growing resentment among the majority francophones in Montreal towards the anglophone minority who — unfairly, they felt — dominated business in the city. And things were no different among the bikers. While all the gangsters spoke English (when they weren’t communicating in Italian), the only English-speaking biker gang of any consequence was Satan’s Choice (which became the Outlaws in 1977). That meant most of the time, the powerful English-speaking gangsters were hiring the French-speaking bikers to do their dirty work and paying them a fraction of what they made off them. It was no