The Last Gang in Town Page 11

  Doern was born in Winnipeg in 1946. He joined the Vancouver Police Department in 1971, and early the following year, when his face was still not yet known on the streets, he was appointed to the undercover vice-squad to infiltrate the Clark Park gang. “Ken was a good guy, but he’d rush into things,” said one officer who worked with him. “He once interrupted a stake-out that he stumbled into and rushed to make arrests, not realizing what had been going on.”

  Dale Matthew, then a teenaged girl who hung around the park with the gang, recalls Doern being around that spring. “He was a really nice guy. I always wondered why at the end of the night at parties, he would drive me and my friend Sue home; he’d always just happen to be in the area,” she says. Dale was unaware that Doern was an undercover policeman. “He was always asking ‘Why are you hanging around those guys?’ We told him that they were like our brothers or our family. I think after a while he knew that he wouldn’t get any answers from us about what the guys were up to, but he still wanted to make sure we got home okay.”

  Doern’s cover story, apparently, was that his job was to drive around the streets and report problems with the roads, such as potholes. This allowed him the mobility of a car and the ability to surveil around Clark Park and East Vancouver at large, making friends and contacts, and later reporting back on activities involving the drug deals in and near the park.

  Before the Rolling Stones concert, Doern learned that the Clark Park gang had met with the Youngbloods at their home, and though he wasn’t present at that meeting, he reported to his superiors that the gangs had connected and were all going to attend the concert. Either suspecting that the gang had a master plan, or having just overheard that some individual gang members were going to try to crash the gates, Doern apparently reported that an incident should be expected. Acting on this intelligence, Vancouver police officials decided in advance that the riot squad would be ready and waiting for whatever happened that night at the Coliseum.

  “I remember meeting Ken,” says Mouse Williamson. It wasn’t long after the Stones concert when Doern visited the Williamsons’ home. “I was down in my basement sleeping when some people brought over this guy who said his name was Ken Bell. They vouched for him and said he was cool. Doern wanted to buy weed. I didn’t sell it. I didn’t even have any to give him, but one of my friends there named Jimmy Smith told Ken he could buy from [David] Ashlee, who lived up the street.” Police records suggest that Williamson’s family home had come under the radar of Doern and the H-Squad.

  In a confidential VPD surveillance report addressed to Staff Sergeant Devries of the drug squad, Doern states that ten members of the gang met in the Williamson home to discuss the amount of recent police activity in the area. Doern notes that “Dave ASHLEE and Robert McIVOR are reportedly selling large amounts of hashish to members of the gang.” The report also states that Williamson was in possession of a gun owned by one Doug Flood, a doorman at the El Dorado Hotel beer parlour: a .45 semi-automatic with two clips of bullets.48

  This confidential 1972 VPD memo details ongoing surveillance of Mouse Williamson and other members of the Clark Park gang.

  SOURCE: Courtesy of the author

  “When I got picked up by the goon squad, they’d push me around and say, ‘So, you think you’re tough and you’re going to shoot a cop?’ But I didn’t know what they hell they were talking about,” Williamson says. Williamson saw the information in the report for the first time during interviews for this book, and was shocked to discover both its existence and its details. “Suddenly, it all makes sense to me what the goon squad had been telling me all those years ago. They thought I had a gun and was ready to use it.” It wasn’t his, and he insists he’d swear under oath today that he had never had a gun in his possession at the time.

  But it didn’t matter. As far as the police were concerned, he had a gun and they felt he was ready to shoot the police. Danny “Mouse” Williamson was a marked man. And now, they wouldn’t wait around for the Clark Park gang to show up at the park or at another concert. They would take the battle to the park themselves.

  47 Mike McCardell, “Stokes Recalls Days of Street Justice” The Province, October 7, 1975.

  48 “Vancouver Police Memorandum: Confidential: June 13th, 1972. To Sgt. Devries, Drug Squad. Re: Clark Park Gang.”

  EIGHT: THE SUMMER OF ’72

  On Friday, June 23, 1972, a party was in full swing in a ground-floor apartment near Fraser Street and East 59th Avenue in South Vancouver. Among the thirty to forty men and women who filled the apartment were some well-known Clark Parkers, including Gary Blackburn, Mac Ryan, Mouse Williamson, Gerry Gavin, Wayne Angelucci, Rob Thacker, Coke Singh, and Albert Hill, as well as few guys from the Renfrew Park scene who’d come along with them. The party had reached that late-night stage when enough strangers had shown up that no one in attendance seemed to be quite sure whose party it was or if the host was still there.

  Something different seemed to be happening in each corner of the room: One couple made out by the avocado-green curtains that covered a screen door; two men sat on a harvest-gold couch, rolling joints and debating about what was happening in Vietnam, including the famous New York Times photo that had come out just a week earlier of a young girl running naked on a road after being severely burned by napalm; another man lay passed out in a chair near the hi-fi stereo. On the white kitchen counter, amidst a forest of empty stubby beer bottles, was an ashtray filled to the brim. And all around, people talked and laughed, drank, smoked weed, and danced to the music.

  At one point, Gerry Gavin took over the hi-fi and put on R. Dean Taylor’s 1970 criminal-on-the-lam AM radio hit “Indiana Wants Me,” then a favourite on the jukebox at Ben’s Café. Gavin yelled, “This one’s for Bennett!” which brought laughter and toasts among the East Enders in the room, as Bradley Bennett was in jail. Gavin then orchestrated the party-goers to wildly chime in with the chorus.

  But the drunken smiles soon broke into looks of confusion when there was a loud pounding on the front door. Constables Bob Munro and George Izatt had been dispatched to the address in response to a noise complaint in the building. “They came to the door and told us to break the party up,” recalls Mouse Williamson. “Of course, we didn’t think we were making all that much noise, and we didn’t want to end it.”

  The din was hushed for a few minutes after the police had delivered their warning. But by the time the constables returned to their car, the noise from the apartment had returned to its original level. Munro and Izatt looked at each other and turned to go back into the building when two bottles exploded by their vehicle—someone at the party had hurled a couple of stubbies out of the window at the police car. With so many people inside, there wasn’t much sense in the two of them heading back to the apartment on their own, so Munro and Izatt radioed dispatch and called for backup. Dispatch sent a team of officers, including constable Esko Kajander, who had joined the police department four years earlier at the age of twenty-two.

  A Vancouver police constable on Granville Street, 1970.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, P02027

  Born in Tampere, Finland, Esko Kajander moved with his family to Canada in 1959. He became a police officer because “it was something I’d always wanted to do,” Kajander says, his English still inflected by a slight Finnish accent.

  Kajander was given the usual treatment that a wet-behind-the-ears police officer can expect in the first year of duty. “You were called a ‘piss kid’—but usually only by officers a couple of years older than you. The older ones were more relaxed; some of them were veterans of the war, tail gunners or pilots. As long as you realized that you didn’t know anything and you just listened and got along, you were made to feel like one of the crew. Anyone fresh out of the academy who started to order other officers around didn’t go far.”

  Kajander entered the world of policing at a time when technology played far less of a role in the job than it does today; 1970s police equipment was comparativ
ely rudimentary. While constables had radios in their patrol cars, on their beats they needed to carry large walkie-talkie-style radios. Kajander’s first beat was on Granville Street downtown. If he encountered suspects or noticed suspicious activity, he would take down names by hand in a notebook. “Later, you’d go for a coffee break and use the café phone to call for a criminal record check on the names,” Kajander explains. “There was a VPD criminal records office, but it was closed at night, so most of the time you had to call the RCMP Crime Index at the old post office building at 15th and Main. They had giant rolodexes there; they could look up a record for you and give you extra information over the phone, or compare dates of birth to make sure you had the right person. If you wanted a photo, they could mail a black-and-white photo to you, which you’d pick up at the police station the next day. That’s how we had to do it back then.”

  In the late 1960s and early ’70s, new constables were provided with a belt for the police-issued .38 handgun worn on the left, a belt pocket for handcuffs, and a bullet loop that held six extra rounds of ammunition. That, along with two pairs of uniform pants, a shirt, and a tunic, were required dress from September to May. They were each given a heavy wool peacoat for bad weather, and whenever officers were outside, they had to wear their hats.

  For a time, Kajander worked under the command of Sam Andrews, a VPD legend from the homicide department, known as an-old school master investigator. Andrews assigned Kajander to do the specialized kind of undercover work called “cell sitting,” which required considerable patience and confidence. Sitting in a jail cell with an offender, acting as if he had been arrested himself, Kajander would draw out details of the crime in conversation, which could result in a confession.

  “The best was if you were in a cell overnight. I would at first just ignore them. As soon as I was in the cell, I’d climb onto my bunk and go to sleep. It would drive people nuts if you didn’t want to talk, especially if they’d been in there for hours by themselves already. Sometimes, if they started talking, I’d even tell them to shut up at first. They’d always ask what you were in for, and you’d always tell them it was a violent crime or something they could relate to or considered serious. Eventually, you’d ask them what they were doing there, and then the whole story, with all the details, would pour out. It always worked.”

  By 1972, Kajander was stationed at “the District,” a police substation at 45th Avenue and Ash Street in South Vancouver that had opened in 1961 to meet the expanding demands of policing beyond the downtown core. Kajander was at the District when the call came on the radio that Munro and Izatt needed additional officers to attend to the party on Fraser Street.

  Called “the District” by VPD officers, the Oakridge Police Substation stood at 45th Avenue and Ash.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, PO7970

  “When we arrived, there were already a half dozen police there,” Kajander recalls. “The party-goers were still throwing bottles from the windows of the apartment. There was a lot of chatter on the radio while this was going on, so police all over the area heard about it, and others started to show up, including the guys from the H-Squad.” As additional police readied themselves on Fraser Street, Joe Cliffe, John Flaten, and two other members of the H-Squad joined them. Police held back for several minutes, according to Kajander, waiting for a supervisor to arrive and give orders.

  The party crowd began to taunt police from the apartment windows and behind the screen door. Mac Ryan yelled at police, “You’ll never take us sober!” causing a burst of laughter from inside the apartment, and perhaps even eliciting reluctant smiles from the police. While a few people inside sensed trouble and headed for the back exit, most remained—not sober enough or perhaps too stoned to realize that they were teasing a cobra. More bottles were thrown from the apartment, hitting the street and sidewalk, as the noise inside continued unabated. Someone put “Down on the Street” from The Stooges’ Fun House album on the stereo and turned up the volume while a stoned couple danced in the living room, oblivious to what was happening outside.

  Taunts and bottles continued to fly as police car headlights aimed at the front of the apartment building illuminated the faces of those at the windows. Neighbours began to peek out from behind curtains to see what was happening. On the party’s stereo, Iggy Pop’s voice whooped and hollered, underscoring the tense and unpredictable summer evening.

  For a moment if felt like a standoff until it was suddenly interrupted. Both Wayne Angelucci and Mouse Williamson believe that police finally charged when one officer was struck with a bottle. Kajander remembers that a supervisor ordered police to start making arrests. Regardless, all of a sudden police began to flood into the building. “I don’t know what caused it,” says Gary Blackburn. “But the next thing you know, police were all over the place and all hell broke loose.”

  “We kicked the door in. It was total chaos and packed in there,” remembers Kajander. “They were all fighting back. Nobody went quietly, and furniture was flying everywhere. We fought for half an hour.” At one point, Kajander was barricaded in the bathroom while fighting two men, the door blocked by others fighting and pushing outside it. He wrestled his opponents in the narrow space until he finally managed to shove the door open enough for fellow constable Stan Joplin—who was handcuffing someone—to toss him a rubber truncheon. With weapon in hand, Kajander was able to subdue, handcuff, and arrest the two men.

  When the chaos hit the living room, the record player was finally kicked over, cutting the music as police attempted to grab and handcuff as many as they could. As Mouse Williamson was fleeing the living room, a police officer rammed him head-first through the screen door. “It almost knocked me out. I was still stunned from the knock on the head, but I ran outside, and everybody was running in every direction.” After getting away from the building, Williamson realized that he’d left his jacket behind. Fearing that his jacket with his ID would be found and he could be picked up, he ran back around the corner to Fraser Street.

  Meanwhile, uniformed police and H-Squad officers outside were fighting to arrest Clark Parkers on the front lawn. “I’ll never forget it,” says Wayne Angelucci. “One of the police dogs had me, and I don’t know if I kicked at it or pushed it away, but that’s when a cop kicked me in the chest. I went down. I could hardly breathe.”

  Williamson somehow evaded detection and entered the apartment, grabbed his jacket, and rushed out the back door. With regrettable timing, he turned the corner just as another man was running in the opposite direction. “I saw a cop had been chasing after a guy, but he’d run out air. The guy took off, and the cop stood with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, when he looked up and saw me right in front of him. I said, ‘I guess you’re taking me in?’ and with that he threw the handcuffs on me, and that was that.”

  Police wagons driven by constables Pat Laughy and Ron Palm arrived, and those arrested were taken to the District. Handcuffed with his hands in front of him, Williamson was taken into one of the wagons where another of the arrested party-goers produced a bag of MDA. The men passed the bag around in an effort to dispose of the drugs before they arrived at the station. “We were already high and drunk, but by the time we got to [the station in] Oakridge we were high as kites.”

  The District had only five jail cells, each connected to the other, and was not equipped to hold large numbers of prisoners at one time. As those taken away from the Fraser Street party showed up to be booked, they were placed in cells with four to five people already in them. From there, police escorted each person to a booking room and photographed them with an arresting officer for evidence to be used at a later court hearing.

  “If, as an officer, you were in a picture, you had something to do with the arrest,” Kajander says. But to Mouse Williamson, the booking process seemed much less coherent. “It felt almost like an auction.” Williamson recalls that police loudly called out the name of each prisoner as he was about to be booked. “They were all say
ing ‘Who wants this guy,’ ‘I’ll take him,’ or ‘No, I want him!’”

  The photos of the booking, discovered in the archives of the Vancouver Police Museum during the research for this book, are published here for the first time. Some show Clark Parkers Angelucci, Williamson, and Thacker photographed next to their arresting officers as well as H-Squad’s Joe Cliffe and also John Flaten, who is shown with a young offender who appears to have urinated himself—perhaps not an uncommon reaction from offenders arrested by the big man.

  Constable Jim Yohimas looks on as constables Gary Hayworth (left) and Gary Campbell (right) stand near Wayne Angelucci for an arrest processing photo.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, N00582A

  Constable Pat Laughy stands with Danny “Mouse” Williamson.

  PHOTO: Vancouver Police Museum, N00582N

  “Back in our cells, we started raising hell,” Williamson says. “They got so pissed off they shut the lights off. We went apeshit, so they turned them back on again. That’s when they brought Gerry in.”

  Gerry Gavin and Wayne Angelucci’s ride to the District had taken a strange turn. “Gerry had all this LSD and mescaline on him. He didn’t want to get busted for it, so he just took it all,” Angelucci says. “By the time they got him to jail, he went nuts. He was so high, they couldn’t stop him.” As Gavin was escorted out of the police wagon, he fought back, and it took four officers to hold him. He struggled with his handcuffs, trying to hit the officers, who started to punch him. Gavin, now completely smashed, yelled, “I love you guys. I’m the Lord Jesus Christ! You can’t hurt me! Jesus loves you!” The jail cells erupted in derisive laughter as those already booked watched police try to contain Gavin, who tried to light a bunkbed on fire as soon as he was put in a cell.