The Last Gang in Town Read online

  But after more than four decades had passed since George Chambers had his family photo taken in Clark Park, an altogether different group of people started gathering there.

  Not long after he left juvenile detention again, waving to the guards on his way out the door and promising that, this time, he’d be a model citizen, Mac Ryan took Gerry Gavin up on his invitation—albeit with some trepidation—to go to Clark Park.

  Entering off the Commercial Drive entrance and walking up the crest of the hill, Ryan could hear the noise before he saw what was going on—the sounds of voices as if a party were underway. “I came up the hill, and I couldn’t believe it. I saw about twenty, maybe twenty-five guys there,” he says. “I was a bit scared shitless. I stopped for a second and thought maybe I should turn around and get out of there. But Gavin was there along with other guys like Paul Melo and Chief, whom I’d known in Juvie too, and they called me over. They introduced me around to everybody. And that was it.”

  Clark Park itself, as remembered by neighbours and reports of the time, was less hospitable than it is today; it was more rundown, with more litter, broken glass, and bottle caps along its paths. E.J. Clark would likely have spun in his grave if he could see what his imagined verdant, pleasant city park had become by 1970.

  To any passersby who might have walked through the park that day, the group that Mac Ryan met might have appeared as a bunch of scruffy older teenagers—smoking, drinking, and loitering in the park—not much more than a neighbourhood nuisance. But this collection of East Vancouver boys would not only go on to run amok like no youth gang in the city before them, but as they matured and graduated to more serious crimes, both individually and as a group, they created a wave throughout the British Columbia judicial and correctional system for years to come.

  Gary Blackburn had been a regular at Clark Park long before Mac Ryan arrived. “There was an older group of Clark Parkers there before us,” he recalled. “Guys like Larry Jang who lived near the park. They were an earlier generation who’d hung out [there] since the early 1960s. But they kept to themselves because most of them just lived in that immediate neighbourhood and didn’t venture out. They told us stories of the hell-raising they did, and sometimes we’d even get into some fights with them. I myself had a very bad temper back then,” Blackburn admits.

  Born in 1955, today Blackburn is a soft-spoken, lean figure with an air of cautiousness, perhaps a result of that bad temper which not only got him out of some tight spots, but put him in just as many. As a teenager, he too had found himself in the JDH after being caught for stealing cars and breaking and entering, “That’s how we made our money,” he says matter-of-factly. “When you got caught and ended up in juvenile detention or at Brannen Lake [jail]—those places amalgamated everybody. If you didn’t know them already from around East Vancouver, you sure got to meet them there.”

  Gary Blackburn (left) and Bradley Bennett, early 1970s.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Bradley Bennett

  Blackburn recalls how the ranks of the park gangs were filled by those he’d met in juvenile detention. “Back then all these different regions of town had their own gangs, and a lot of them were our enemies,” he says. “Riley Park gang, Bobolink Park gang, even the Dunbar Park gang out on the west side. But with Clark Park there were people from all over town who made up our thing. We tended to amalgamate the best and the toughest people from other gangs into Clark Park. And after a while, everybody wanted to be a Clark Parker.”

  Danny “Mouse” Williamson, born in 1953, was one who made the cut. He arrived at Clark Park having been toughened at an early age. He was one-quarter Métis on his mother’s side, and largely had a good relationship with her. He was not as lucky with his father. “My dad was an alcoholic and was always telling me not to take shit from anybody,” he says. Along with that admonition, Williamson’s father gave him his nickname; as a young child, Danny often wore a Mickey Mouse shirt. One day, Williamson invited his Clark Park friends over to his house, and they heard his father call him “Mouse”—and the name stuck. “There are people I’ve known in East Van for over forty years, and they still call me ‘Mouse.’ I don’t think they even know my real name.” But the nickname belied his nature; Williamson was always ready for a fight.

  Williamson and his family lived in a number of places around the Trout Lake area in East Vancouver. As a teenager he started to hang out with a gang called the Renfrew Park Huns who gained a reputation for wearing Maltese crosses and swastikas that they also sprayed as graffiti on neighbourhood walls. Despite adopting the controversial symbols, this was done for shock value and to upset older people, rather than due to any fascist agenda.

  Danny “Mouse” Williamson, who joined the Clark Park gang via the Renfrew Huns.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Lana Williamson

  “One day in 1968, the Huns had a rumble with the Clark Park gang, and one of the Clark Parkers whipped one of our guys with a chain,” Williamson says. “We broke it up, but in the fight I looked around and realized that I knew all these Clark Parkers from school and the neighbourhood when I was a little kid. So we actually started to hang out a bit, and I came over from the Renfrew Huns to join. I tell you, soon guys came over from Riley Park, Renfrew Park—a bunch of those guys became Hells Angels years later. It escalated quickly from there. There were gangs before, but not ever like this.”

  A member of the Catwalkers, a motorcycle gang from the 1950s, is ticketed on Georgia Street for not wearing a helmet. Some of the early biker gangs in Greater Vancouver included the Hades Horsemen, the North Van Rogues, and the Misfits, who all fought with the Clark Park gang.

  PHOTO: Ross Kenward, The Province, 1968

  Forty years later, Williamson still maintains a streetwise nature. Looking a bit like an older Matt Dillon, he speaks with a dusky, resonant voice and comes across as a good judge of character, even if he’s made a few mistakes over the years. He retains a good memory for the old days, and like many of the other original Clark Park gang, a sense of humour. Now in his early sixties, he’s mellowed since his wild younger days, but you get the feeling that he could still easily deal with a dangerous situation.

  “Fighting wasn’t the only reason behind Clark Park, but we had a lot of tough guys,” Williamson says. “We beat up a lot of other gangs in town—even motorcycle gangs like the Hades Horsemen, the Misfits from New Westminster, and the North Van Rogues. Everybody wanted to scrap with us, and we beat them. The only ones we didn’t get into fights with were the Satan’s Angels because we were friends, and they were like older brothers to us.” (The Satan’s Angels would later be absorbed into the Hells Angels when they officially arrived in town in the early 1980s.)26

  By the late 1960s, the Clark Parkers were gaining status, “Anybody that was anybody who wanted to be in a gang gravitated to us,” Williamson says. “And it really grew. While there was probably a hard-core group of about fifty or sixty of us, we could get two, three hundred guys together in an hour if we had to. Most of us never had cars, so we’d be left to march through the streets with baseball bats and pieces of picket fences at night, headed somewhere.” Gary Blackburn agrees. “There was a lot of fighting back then. Most of the time it was because somebody was trying to bully us or wanted to start something. But we stuck together. Pretty soon it got to be known: if you fuck with one of us, you’d have to fuck with us all.”

  “In the hierarchy of the parks back then, Clark Park was the pinnacle,” says Bradley Bennett, who was born in 1954. Bennett’s parents had been divorced for as long as he could remember. As a young adolescent, his mother left him in the care of his grandmother. “The 1960s was happening, fashion was changing. If you wanted to wear different clothes, have longer hair, or do different things, strict English nannies like my old British grandmother just weren’t the type to go along with that. And I just wasn’t into [obeying her],” Bennett says.

  As a teenager, he attended John Oliver Secondary School in East Vancouver where he grew a rebelliou
s streak the length of Commercial Drive. In the 1960s, the punishment for teenage rebellion meant more than losing video game or cell phone privileges for a few days. “Discipline was completely different back then,” Bennett says. “I knew some kids my age whose dads had horse whips they’d use on them. Even at school, they’d belt you on your hands or your ass if you got into trouble. I remember kids used to make paddles for the teachers in woodworking class, cutting holes in them for less wind resistance.”

  Out of school, Bennett spent his days wandering the city and embarking on all manner of enterprises to make a little pocket money. “We used to walk underneath the Granville Street Bridge, steal baby pigeons out of their nests there, and bring them down to Chinatown to sell to the Chinese guys that ran the Green Door restaurant,” says Bennett. “He’d give us twenty-five cents apiece, and then the bastard would let us go to the gambling den he ran upstairs and sell us a deck of cards for fifty-two dollars to play solitaire. The object of the game was to get all four aces up and then as you went through the deck you tried to get each suit up in numerical order. Every card you got back up on the ace, you won back five bucks. There would be six or seven of us, and with all our pigeon money we’d go in on a deck of cards together, and that motherfucker would win it all back from us.” Bennett usually declined to eat at the restaurant. “It wasn’t so much the pigeons. There were never any stray animals within a three or four block radius of the Green Door.”

  Bradley Bennett, 1970s.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Bradley Bennett

  In his early Clark Park days, as seen in photographs of the time, Bennett is lanky with red hair and an easy, handsome, roguish grin. While he might have been a menace to society in his younger days, Bennett now seems affable, intelligent, and gregarious, an old-fashioned strong and silent type. He conveys a certain coolness under fire—he has seen much of life—but Bennett also displays a wry sense of humour.

  In his young teens, he ran with the Grays Park gang at 33rd and Windsor, but after he quit school and ran away from home, Bennett began to steal cars and break into houses. He landed in juvenile detention where he met Clark Parkers such as Gary Blackburn and Norman Halliban, who later invited him up to Clark Park as Gerry Gavin had with Mac Ryan.

  “I was more into disturbing the peace than breaking into houses,” Ryan says. “But there was a lot of fighting with other gangs back then. We didn’t always get out unscathed. It seemed like I had a black eye myself every month. I remember somebody asking me, ‘Hey, who gave you that black eye?’, and I told them, ‘Nobody gave it to me—I earned it.’” And if the fights and rumbles were earning the Clark Parkers a reputation in East Vancouver, it was the robberies and B and Es that were quickly bringing them to the attention of the Vancouver Police Department. “We must have cleaned out East Vancouver,” former Clark Parker Rick Stuart says with a guilty laugh. At times, the robberies were concentrated on local businesses. A pizza restaurant at 12th and Renfrew was a favourite target; the gang broke into the shop after hours and took money, cigarettes, or beer that the employees kept there until, after multiple break-ins, the restaurant finally installed an alarm.

  Rick Stuart, 1970s.

  PHOTO: Courtesy of Rick Stuart

  The burglaries of residential homes were riskier, and took on a more reckless nature. “I remember we broke into a couple of houses where people weren’t home, and we sat down and watched TV, made something to eat, and acted like we lived there,” says Mouse Williamson, recalling the darkly comic nature of the scene. On one occasion, Williamson and five other Clark Parkers broke into a home near 29th and Renfrew streets and stole a coin collection with paperwork that put its value at $62,000. Without the connections of professional thieves to fence the coins for their estimated value, the kids “just split it six ways and spent it all at face value,” he says. Cash was always the easiest to steal and to get rid of. “The houses with Chinese families were the best,” Bennett says. “For some reason, they always kept a lot of cash in the house.” The thieves spent their hauls on alcohol, cigarettes, and food.

  Alternatively, if they were light on cash, they would “pump gas”—a term for robbing local gas stations that were easy targets, especially in the days before security video cameras were commonplace. One easy score was from a friendly kid who worked as an attendant at the Esso Gas station that once stood at Main Street and Terminal Avenue. “When the police came and asked for a description of who did it, he would just say it was someone that didn’t look like us at all,” Williamson recalls. “One time when we were robbing [the gas station], the cops came busting through the door, and the kid told the police we were just trying to help him. Talk about a close call.”

  Inevitably each of the Clark Parkers would be caught for one offence or another, and once again be sent back through the revolving doors of juvenile detention. Some avoided being caught more than others.

  Born in 1953, Rick Stuart had attended Gladstone High School and started to hang around Clark Park in 1967. But although he joined the others in various burglaries, he somehow managed to avoid incarceration in juvenile detention or a stay in jail. “The park looks a little different than it did back then,” he says. “There were a few more bushes and places to hide. Maybe I just bobbed and weaved better than the others.”

  Both his father and grandfather were tugboat skippers, and Stuart wanted to join the other men in his family who worked on the water. Finishing his high school education—a requirement for employment on the boats—kept him working and busy, largely avoiding more serious trouble. “I knew some of the other guys from the park like Coke Singh and ‘Greasy’ Keith Holley, but Mouse and I grew up just a few houses apart,” Stuart recalls. “We didn’t have a lot of money; our parents used to give us peanut butter and sugar sandwiches back then. My old man was a drunk and enjoyed using the belt for discipline, so some nights I avoided home as much as possible. The one thing we had in common was that none of our families were well off.”

  With a shaved head, beard, sharp blue eyes, and heavily tattooed arms and back, Rick Stuart might appear intimidating if you met him on the street. But in conversation he reveals himself to be an easy-going character with a ready grin. His time with the Clark Park gang left him with a distaste for the police, but the poverty of East Vancouver in those years is most distinct in his memory. “I remember a crazy guy who was around the park then. His family lived above Ernie’s Grocery at Commercial and Salsbury in a two-bedroom suite. There was a bunch of them in there. Their father was a simple sort of guy who hoarded stuff in their home. The bathtub was full of old engine parts. I don’t know if they ever showered or cleaned. There were grimy pots on the stove, and there wasn’t a clean cup in the house. I don’t think some of the kids went to school.”

  Bradley Bennett recalls the family, too. “The two brothers used to argue and get into fights all the time. One day, they came home from school and the parents had moved away—just packed up and taken everything with them and just left their kids behind. Social services had to come in and take care of them.”

  For many, the park had simply become an easier and more relaxed place to hang out than their own homes, and many boys found more acceptance from friends than their own kin. Girls who hung out with or dated members of the gang came and went, unless they were sisters of gang members. While there were always female friends and hangers-on, the gang certainly remained a boys’ club. “We were all guys born in the 1950s and grew up in those times,” Rick Stuart says. “And with our own parents, sometimes the dads came and went. Nobody had very modern views on women. Everybody had to grow up and learn that a lot later.”

  The makeup of the gang was always changing. “People drifted in and out [of the gang],” Stuart continues. “There wasn’t a continuum of the same guys all the time. But one thing that never changed was that there was zero prejudice against anybody. You were who you were, and nobody was better than anybody else.” The negligible racism among Clark Parkers could be attributed to the low
er-class upbringing that everyone shared; there were members who came from First Nations, Indo-Canadian, and African-Canadian backgrounds.

  By the end of the 1960s, “outsiders were starting to say that Clark Park was an evil scary place, and maybe there was some truth to it,” Stuart says. “There used to be a field house there next to the wading pool—it’s gone now—but they had boxing gloves there we could use. No wonder we got so tough; we were beating the hell out of each other all the time as kids. After a while, nobody could put the fear of God into us. We had done that to each other already.”

  While many of the Clark Parkers were large for their age or could punch above their weight, Roger Daggittt “was a one-man wrecking crew,” says Bradley Bennett. Bennett first met Daggittt and Gary Blackburn in juvenile detention, when Bennett was thirteen. “I don’t remember when he was ever small. Even when we were kids, he was always big. At Juvie, he ripped this big metal door in solitary confinement right off its fucking hinges. Just smashed it right off. They had to call the police, who handcuffed him and took him downtown to jail—he was still a juvenile, but that was the only place they could hold him. He was unstoppable.”

  Not even a bullet could stop Roger Daggittt. He had once been shot three times with a .22 calibre rifle while trying to steal an 8-track tape deck. The owner of the car, a suspected drug dealer by the name of Gord Nakata, interrupted the robbery and fired three bullets into Daggittt, including one that lodged in the back of his neck. It was said that the doctors who treated him thought the muscles in his neck had stopped the bullets and saved his life. Daggittt later wore those bullets on a chain around his neck.

  Vic Sharma, an East Ender who became a Clark Parker, was friends with Daggittt. “Roger’s mother liked to drink,” Sharma says. “I heard that she used to go down to the Marr Hotel pub, across from Oppenheimer Park, and she’d put him and his sister in the trunk of her car, with some holes in the bottom so they could get air. She’d leave them in there with a couple of pepperoni sticks and a twenty-sixer of pop while she’d drink all day—that’s why he was a hard guy. Roger wasn’t someone you messed with. He became a hard-core killer. No one messed with Roger since he was seventeen.”