The Last Gang in Town Read online

  Formally coined as the Task Force on Youth and Park Problems, beat police referred to the special squad as the “Heavy-Squad,” or “H-Squad” for short. It was made up of a mix of young and older officers, pulled mostly from the Hastings Street and Granville Street beats. Many already had some plainclothes policing experience or worked undercover in the drug squad, but all knew this would be a unique detail. The existence of the eleven-man team was not formally made known to the public, though the group was no secret in police quarters or according to police memoranda.

  For his part, Paul Stanton joined the new squad without reservation. “I was young at the time, and open to pretty well anything,” he says. “You have to understand that policing in the 1970s was a lot different from now. Almost all our supervisors and sergeants had military experience—they’d served in the war—[and therefore] there was a different attitude and tone about policing, a sort of ‘just get the job done’ attitude. Everything regarding oversight was looser. There weren’t really internal investigations back then. It was a wilder time.”

  Police Superintendent Tom Stokes (pictured here in this undated photo) was aware of the H-Squad and may have assisted in selecting members of the team.

  PHOTO: Deni Eagland, Vancouver Sun

  The 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms significantly strengthened the rights of criminal defendants and tightened rules around how police procured evidence. In general, police rules and oversight were more rigorous. But in those wilder, pre-Charter years, sometimes police took shortcuts on blatantly guilty suspects. However, the mandate of the new unit raised eyebrows even then.

  “The fear was it was only going to get worse,” says Corbett. “So our job was to go after the gangs, and one way or the other have them stay out of the parks and no longer allow them to be the problems they’d become. Jail wasn’t a strong enough deterrent, and if that meant doing something else, so be it.”

  “They were tough and strong,” says seventy-four-year-old retired constable Vern Campbell. “Christ, if you were under six-foot-three, you were only able to serve coffee to these guys.” He’d spent most of his policing career on robbery and homicide squads, but knew the H-Squad members personally and professionally over the years before he retired in 1994.

  Paul Stanton was one of the bigger men on the squad, but not as big as “Big John” Flaten. At age forty-one, he was one of the older men in the H-Squad, but standing six-foot-three and weighting about 280 pounds (127 kg), his size more than made up for his age. A long-time weightlifter who could have given Doug Hepburn a run for his money, Flaten held the dead-weight lift record in Vancouver for years. With his Norwegian ancestry, at another time in history he might have been a Viking. Flaten joined the Vancouver Police Department in 1953, and was a personable and well-liked police officer whose career lasted thirty years. As one retired constable who worked alongside Flaten recalled, “Everybody agreed that he was the kind of guy you’d like to have around when the shit hit the fan.”

  Not all of the squad were as big as Flaten or Stanton, but almost all were strong and had athletic backgrounds. Three had been present at the Rolling Stones riot and sustained scrapes, cuts, and bruises.

  The leader of the new unit was Joe Cliffe. Cliffe had spent most of his early career in robbery and homicide investigations and his later years in the major crimes division. He is remembered as a well-respected member of the police department, a good investigator, and a man who could get results. “Joe was a serious guy when he needed to be, but had a good sense of humour,” said one police officer (who does not wish to be named) who worked with him. A handsome outdoorsman and avid fisherman, Cliffe was equally at home policing the streets of Vancouver as he was fishing on the Chilcotin River at his cabin in the British Columbia interior.

  “He was our boss, and the corporal. Everything went through Joe,” Stanton notes, recalling that Cliffe also perhaps shielded the squad from internal politics. “If there was any negative feedback or complaints about what we were doing, we didn’t hear it. Maybe Joe never even saw it; it was quickly handled up the ladder.” Cliffe and the squad were protected and isolated so they could get the job done, and as quickly as possible.

  The VPD’s H-Squad remains one of the more guarded secrets in the history of the Vancouver Police Department. Little information was recorded or filed about its mandate. The poor filing techniques and an absence of digital records makes material from the early 1970s difficult to find in the VPD archive; only major crimes such as unsolved homicides are retained from that era. In 2016, the author filed a Freedom of Information request to the VPD, but no surviving records or reports from the H-Squad appear to remain. This is the first time members of the squad have spoken publicly about the posting.

  Curiously, the only record from the Heavy Squad can be found in the public archives of the Vancouver Police Museum. It is a photo of the eleven-member plainclothes squad in a mock police line-up. Many of the officers are smiling or laughing for the camera, giving the impression that the photo was taken for their own amusement, not for official records. How this photo of the squad ended up in the Museum’s collection is unknown.

  The VPD H- Squad, 1970s. Among them: #16 John Flaten, #17 Joe Cliffe, and #20 Jim Maitland.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, PO2892

  Perhaps one reason why the squad seems amused is because they were being photographed as undercover plainclothes officers—though donning some of the clothing of the period means their clothes were hardly plain. “Polyester shirts were big back then of course,” Stanton says with a laugh. “Some of the officers wore flared jeans and sort of hippie-style clothing. It was very early 1970s counterculture.” He says that he would rarely have gone out in public dressed that way if off-duty. “The idea was, we’d dress to fit in with the park, and if anybody saw in us there and a fight broke out, we’d just look like another gang. The main thing was that we fit in—and it was no different from undercover drug work that way.”

  In keeping with the ’70s fashions, Stanton also recalls that everyone in the squad grew beards, goatees, or Fu Manchu style moustaches. While Joe Cliffe’s daughter, Holly, never spoke with her father directly about the H-Squad, she says: “My memories are of how they all had to grow beards and ‘look scary.’ There was lots of kidding around about how these normally clean-cut policemen had to look like thugs!”

  Stanton recalls carrying a small flashlight with him on some nights in the park, but adds, “The two things you never went without were your firearm or your handcuffs.” Squad members often had their guns in a shoulder holster or underneath their shirt.

  The H-Squad worked the evening shifts almost exclusively, but rarely was the entire eleven-man team on duty all at once. Instead, four to six officers at a time would do a shift, breaking up into two-man teams that drove in unmarked cars past houses where the Clark Parkers lived. “There were a lot of hangers-on, so we went looking for the core gang members,” Stanton says. “If we found them on the street or if they were in a car driving around, we’d radio it in to our guys and set up a surveillance to see what they were up to. If they gathered in Clark Park, we’d show up, park our cars, and take a walk in there.” Police sirens and lights (hidden from sight in ghost cars) were never used unless it was to pull over a car. Nor did the squad ever run into the park yelling “Police!” They didn’t need to—everyone knew that the H-Squad were cops.

  The Clark Parkers do not remember them fondly. “They’d show up and just say, ‘Okay, who are we taking in tonight?’” recalls Gary Blackburn. “But a lot of us back then could slip out of a pair of handcuffs. You’d flex your wrists as they put them on, and then relax them once you had them on. But then they started putting handcuffs on so tight that they’d cut into your skin, or else use two pairs at once.”

  Blackburn and the others were used to cops arresting or questioning them in the park, but noticed that the attitude of police changed after the Rolling Stones riot. One evening, the squad raced into the park
in their ghost cars, slamming on their brakes in front of the gang. “They were like bikers,” says Mac Ryan. “They almost ran us over! We knew they were cops, but not at first, when they showed up like that. I had some weed on me, and I didn’t feel like going to jail, so I ran around to the back of the field house. The weed was in a cigarette pack, and I threw it on the roof. When I walked back, one [squad member] grabbed me and hit me in the gut.” Tossed into one of the ghost cars, Ryan was driven down to the waterfront. “They threatened me that they could do this and that or just kill me and dump my body somewhere and it would never be found.”

  The H-Squad initially used scare tactics, tough language, and all manner of verbal intimidation to get their message across, but sometimes the interactions turned more vulgar—and more physical. “There were three of them in the car—one driving and the two who had me sandwiched in the back seat,” says Ryan. “One next to me let go a big fart, and he started to laugh, saying, ‘Oh man, smell that one. I had too much beer last night!’ They’re all laughing and then they start to hit me over the head with little blackjack clubs they had. I thought, Fuck, these guys are crazy.”

  Sometimes more devious techniques were used. Bradley Bennett remembers when members of the H-Squad would walk past a group of Clark Parkers and single out one person to thank them for information they’d supposedly provided to the cops. This was done loudly, so the rest overheard; it was part of a strategy to foment discord and questions of loyalty amongst the gang members.

  Many surviving Clark Parkers who recall this period insist that they were given overly hostile treatment, especially when the squad’s initial scare tactics didn’t persuade them to quit hanging around the park. “They would pick you up, drive you out to Steveston or someplace hard to get back from, kick you out of the car and leave you there. If that didn’t work, you’d just get an old-fashioned beating,” Bennett says. Clark Parker John Twynstra encountered the H-Squad one night and received a beating that kept him recuperating at home for a week.

  From this sudden change in tone of policing around the park, rumours began to spread that off-duty police officers had formed a vigilante squad to go after the Clark Parkers. It was difficult for some to fathom that such a squad was officially sanctioned. Allegations of police abuse raised by Clark Park gang members are not to be wholly disbelieved. Paul Stanton candidly admits, “I don’t remember [picking up suspects and kicking them out of squad cars far from the park] personally. But I do know it was done in general back then. That sort of thing wouldn’t have been uncommon for the time. If you had a problem and you couldn’t do anything about it, you’d pick them up and drop them off in one end of town and let them walk back. That certainly isn’t done anymore. But, obviously, the whole squad itself isn’t the kind of thing that would or could be done anymore.”

  Occasionally, the tactics backfired. Clark Parker Mark Owens recalls being picked up one night at the park by the squad, “Some B & E had just happened in the area, so they went to grab whoever they could grab,” he says dismissively. “They took me down to the Fraser River, threw me in, and took off. I was so far away from the park, I had to steal a car just to get back home!”

  How aggressive the H-Squad, or police in general, became with the Clark Park gang is difficult to ascertain. The police didn’t admit to several of the accusations made by the Clark Park gang, and some individual allegations may be exaggerated. Many living members of the H-Squad, who have long since retired, declined to be interviewed for this book. Some now have children or family members in the Vancouver Police Department and don’t wish to make them feel uncomfortable. Others declined to speak about the H-Squad, arguing that they were using typical policing methods of the period. Most feel that they now have little to gain by publicly answering criticisms for their actions in the Wild West days of policing.

  Rumours and allegations persist that police in the squad used rough treatment and intimidation to control gang members. Stories abound about gang members being thrown off the docks into Burrard Inlet, and live rounds shot into the water. Once they’d been pulled out, they were told never to enter the park again. Another unconfirmed rumour has it that one evening, the H-Squad marched into the park with baseball bats to fight with the gang members.

  The most extreme stories and incidents are difficult to corroborate. Paul Stanton disavows rumours about battles or serious physical altercations with the gang. And he insists that as soon as the H-Squad began its raids into the park, “They were intimidated right from the beginning, and stopped hanging out [there]. They got low-key pretty quickly. In fact, soon they were spread out all over the place and we had trouble finding them.”

  Certainly, any physical abuse alleged by the gang members could have occurred at the hands of squad members other than Stanton or on shifts for which he was not on duty. He does not recall the kinds of altercations that some Clark Parkers say occurred. Other police officers, including regular patrols, the undercover drug squad, and even the RCMP, were all active in the area at the time and may have played a hand. The gang members themselves make little distinction between those known to be beat police and H-Squad members, and tend to lump together all police they encountered at the time.

  H-Squad member Howard Corbett does recall a significant fight at the Drake Hotel on Powell Street. One night an altercation that began in the bar spilled out to the parking lot, and a crew of pool cue-swinging Clark Parkers were subdued with an “aggressive response” by the H-Squad—a response that Corbett declined to elaborate on.

  Bradley Bennett with Roger Daggittt and friends at the Biltmore Hotel pub, 1973.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Bradley Bennett

  “They always came in bunches,” former gang member Gary Blackburn says. “They didn’t have the balls to come two at a time. They had better sense. One time, we fought back. That freaked them out. So they never came in looking for us with just two people.”

  By July 1972, the heat from police was so great that the gang refrained from hanging out at the park. Members either gathered at individual homes or, now that many were of legal age, at bars like the Biltmore Hotel, the Eldorado, Lasseter’s Den, the Blue Boy Hotel pub, or the Vanport Hotel. As a result, the H-Squad began to harangue individual Clark Parkers on the street.

  “They always wanted to know who ‘the leader’ was,” Blackburn says. “That was always the biggest fucking joke—there was no leader. We never had one. The scene was, if you wanted to do something, you just went ahead and did it. There weren’t any rules or some code to go do this or that. We were ‘organized’ to the extent that we stuck up for each other, and if you tried to fuck with one of us, you were going to fuck with everybody.”

  “The H-squad knew where everybody lived. You couldn’t go anywhere after a while,” remembers Mac Ryan who, even at the worst of times, dealt with the squad irreverently. “They’d come into the nightclubs that we’d started to go to and stop and question me. I’d say, ‘I’m the leader on Tuesday. No, wait a minute, I’m on Thursday, somebody else is tonight, and another guy is tomorrow.’ I’d tell them the leader’s name was ‘Jack,’ and when then the cops would ask what his last name is, I’d say ‘Me-off.’” Ryan’s impudence inevitably earned him another rough midnight ride in the back of an H-Squad car.

  However aggressive the squad’s tactics might have been, their success was also quickly noted by many who lived around the park who had seen their neighbourhood decline. Retired constable Vern Campbell remembers, “An old lady who lived across from Clark Park was talking to a uniformed officer one day and he asked her how things were going in the park. She said things were much better since the ‘older’ gang arrived!”

  While the Clark Parkers might have temporarily abandoned the park, the H-Squad also seemed to embitter the hangers-on and others who were on the gang’s side or who were merely anti-police. It was believed that the police had gone above the law to get rid of the gang. “They couldn’t beat us fairly. So they had to invent a goon squad to try to p
ut pressure on us. That didn’t stop us. It just made everybody more pissed off,” says Mouse Williamson, who thought the tactics of the squad upset what he and others in the East End regarded as the code of the streets. “It’s like cops and robbers; if you get caught fair and square—that’s the way it goes. We’re supposed to be the liars, cheaters, and schemers, not those guys. They’re supposed to be honest, and do things by the book, but they threw the fucking book away on us.”

  Some might have thought that the Clark Parkers were now getting a taste of their own medicine. If there was any doubt that the gang was under more police scrutiny, there was no question after June 27, when, at 8:30 in the morning, police began a roundup of drug traffickers across the city. By lunchtime, twenty offenders were in jail. Eighty-two warrants were issued in one day for charges of trafficking heroin, marijuana, hashish, and LSD; the crackdown was the conclusion of a five-month undercover police investigation. More arrests were made in the following days.

  The arrests were front-page news in the evening edition of the Vancouver Sun; the article stated that while those arrested included some residents of Gastown, the overwhelming majority was from East Vancouver. Their names, occupations, and the charges against them were listed. Cooks, longshoremen, housewives, and landscapers were among those accused, as well as two who were well-known to Clark Park: a thirty-year-old Vancouver fireman by the name of David Ashlee and twenty-nine-year old Robert McIvor, the caretaker of Clark Park, both arrested for trafficking hashish.

  McIvor and his girlfriend were a well-liked hippie couple who lived in the caretaker’s house in Clark Park (which later burned down). It was no secret around the park that they could buy hashish from the couple. The Clark Parkers also knew that Ashlee was a hash and marijuana dealer as well as a city fireman.

  The officer primarily involved with the investigation might have stayed undercover longer than the five-month period he’d managed, but police began to be concerned that he would soon be found out. When his identity was revealed, those in the Clark Park scene were surprised to discover that the officer was a twenty-five-year-old police constable named Ken Doern. Those around the park had known him by a different name. In the months before the Rolling Stones riot, he was seen around the park trying to buy marijuana. Then, he was known as Ken Bell.