How A Hells Angels Associate Took Wings, Met Disaster
A few days ago, RCMP divers pulled the wreckage of C-GKGY out of the cold water of West Hawk Lake, closing the book on the life of Joel Maguet.
The fuselage and wings of the small plane were ripped apart when rookie pilot Maguet and passenger Dan Atkinson hit a power line and crashed into the lake around the dinner hour June 11.
Maguet, 33, and Atkinson, 42, were killed instantly. They were longtime friends, bonding more than a decade ago when they were members of the long-gone Spartans motorcycle gang. With them died any answers as to why they were flying so low over the Whiteshell and the Lake of the Woods.
A drug run? Pilot inexperience? Or just outright stupidity?
Maguet, a pilot for only two months, may have simply been showing off his so-called flying skills for Atkinson when his Mooney Mark 21 hit the cable, according to Atkinson's family. They say that day was Atkinson's first ride in Maguet's single-engine plane.
What didn't die in the lake were the roles Maguet and Atkinson played in Manitoba's outlaw motorcycle gang world and the courting of the Hells Angels during the 1990s.
You could say both had a hand in deciding who got to be chosen to be Hells Angels when the world's largest outlaw motorcycle gang finally came calling.
And if you believe what some say, one of them also had a hand in who didn't.
THE BEGINNING
THE Spartans were created in 1967 in Elmwood by Graham Sylvester, the older brother of Darwin and Kevin.
One of the Spartans' rules was you had to be 21 to join.
Soon after, the Los Brovos sprang up in St. Boniface, with no age requirement. It was created by two men who soon went into other things. One is now a respected businessman in Winnipeg.
Both gangs started off more as a lark, mirroring what was happening south of the border and in pop culture at that time. Bikers, like hippies, were anti-establishment, but more focused on motorcycles, women and beer.
But even then, some bikers had an eye on something bigger. The Hells Angels were a decade old by then, created in Oakland, Calif., in 1957 by gang godfather Sonny Barger.
Jump forward about 20 years and it became obvious to everyone in Winnipeg that the Spartans and Los Brovos weren't just about bikes, babes and beer anymore.
THE 1980S
THE Los Brovos and the Spartans merged in 1982 -- when Joel Maguet, growing up in western Manitoba, was only eight.
The Spartans were led by Darwin Sylvester, a biker who had dreamed of being a Hells Angel since he was a boy.
Sylvester was 25 years old.
The reason for the biker merger was to present a united gang that could be taken over by the Hells Angels.
"They're the big boys. They're the No. 1 motorcycle gang in the world. If you want to advance your career in this business, that's where you go," Sgt. Ken Shipley, head of the city police biker unit, said in a 1996 interview.
By then, the Hells Angels had expanded from California up the West Coast to British Columbia, and east across the United States and up to Quebec.
The Hells Angels have a rule about not expanding into areas where rivals are fighting -- they only want one gang to worry about. Nice and easy. No fuss.
With the merger, the Spartans ceased to exist.
There was peace for a while, but it was uneasy.
A faction within the Los Brovos didn't care about the Angels. They believed by being independent, they had power. They didn't have to answer to anyone in another province or state and could better control the local drug market.
That tension between the two sides flared up when a Los Brovos member was charged with rape in 1983.
The crime made headlines after a deputy police chief was brought in to mediate between the bikers and the victim's angry brothers and father. A van owned by the rape victim's sister was found rigged with dynamite.
Sylvester and his fellow former Spartans wanted the accused man kicked out of the merged gang. He was bad for publicity and brought too much heat. The Los Brovos refused.
In disgust, Sylvester turned in his gang patch. The merger was over, but Sylvester was far from out of the picture.
The Silent Riders
On Aug. 1, 1984, police got a report of a man being shot to death in the back yard of an Alexander Avenue home.
Police and ambulance arrived to find Ron Gagnon's body. He was wearing a Silent Riders T-shirt. Few people had heard of the club.
Later, police learned that Gagnon was one of the founding members, along with Darwin Sylvester. The Silent Riders was Sylvester's answer to the refusal of the Los Brovos to see things his way.
The Los Brovos didn't like the fact there was a new gang in town made up of old enemies.
What followed was Winnipeg's only real gang war. Bombings, shootings and death were the order of the day.
Sylvester, in particular, was singled out for retribution; a bomb blew off the roof of his house Sept. 30, 1984. Two months later, four bombs exploded at properties connected to the Los Brovos.
A year later, Silent Rider member David Gagnon, the brother of Ron Gagnon, was stabbed to death by a Los Brovos member, a killing later accepted in court as an act of self-defence.
Despite a massive police raid, dozens of arrests, and bikers from both sides being sent to jail -- including Sylvester -- the gang war continued for another year.
It then petered out, quietly ending in the back lot of a West End autobody shop when the remaining Silent Riders agreed to burn their gang colours in front of the Los Brovos.
Spartans Rise Again
It was 1990 and Darwin Sylvester was out of jail. Everything that had happened until then had not diminished his dream of being a Hells Angel.
In his attempts to woo the gang, he had come to know Hamilton's Walter Stadnik, national president of the Hells Angels and a frequent flier to Winnipeg. Stadnik also worked closely with the Quebec Hells Angels and saw it as his mission to unite the gang from coast to coast. By working as one, the gang could control the movement and street price of drugs, guaranteeing the Hells Angels and their associates a tidy profit. ( Stadnik's vision would come to pass: Police now say Hells Angels and Asian gangs dominate the drug business in Winnipeg. )
Sylvester knew Stadnik and the Hells Angels wanted Winnipeg, and that they wanted to do it by taking over an existing gang.
Trouble was, some in the Los Brovos viewed their independent status as a trump card. Along with Satan's Choice in Ontario, the Rebels in Saskatchewan and the Grim Reapers in Alberta, many bikers in Western Canada didn't believe signing up with the Hells Angels was a smart move.
Sylvester decided to stir the pot. On New Year's Eve 1991 at the Continental Motor Inn on McPhillips Street, Sylvester and a bunch of other ex-cons, independent bikers and longtime local rounders partied the night away.
When they woke up, they called themselves Spartans. There was another new gang in town and again Sylvester was their leader. They started out slowly in Brandon before moving on to Winnipeg and the Los Brovos.
Spartans Fall Again
Less than two months after the Spartans were reborn, Darwin's younger brother and fellow Spartan Kevin walked into a McPhillips Street nightclub and got into a gunfight with a Los Brovos striker. Both Sylvester and Darren Hunter were hit -- Hunter once, Sylvester seven times. Two other people were shot.
Hunter drew a 12-year prison sentence despite his testimony the shooting was in self-defence. Charges against Sylvester were dropped.
Following the bar shooting, the city faced another violent biker war. If Sylvester was counting on Stadnik and the Hells Angels helping him, he was mistaken.
In late 1994, Stadnik flew into Winnipeg and demanded a truce between the two gangs. By then, the Angels were making money in the local drug trade and didn't want anything to change that.
At that time, Winnipeg was the second most violent place in Canada for biker bloodshed. In Quebec, the Hells Angels were about to battle the Rock Machine in what would prove to be a long, murderous gang war claiming more than 150 lives.
Stadnik's truce didn't solve the problem of setting up a Hells Angels chapter in the city.
So in time he set up a third motorcycle gang, the Red Liners. It also consisted of independent bikers and known drug dealers. The thinking was that by throwing a third gang into the mix, the pot would really start to boil. Whoever rose to the top would become a Hells Angel.
The decision hurt Sylvester, and by the spring of 1995, the Spartans were in disarray.
Key members quit as they saw their chances of becoming Hells Angels evaporate.
Each day Sylvester and his Spartans had less influence than the day before.
Sylvester soon retreated to Brandon, where he worked at a motorcycle repair shop.
Two Spartans still close to him were Joel Maguet and Dan Atkinson. Or so Sylvester thought.
The Housecleaning Begins
In May 1996, long-time Los Brovos member David Boyko was murdered in Halifax while attending a Hells Angels event.
There was a knock on his hotel room door and he left with a man he had met years earlier, Walter Stadnik's bodyguard Donny Magnussen.
Boyko was part of the old guard who believed staying independent was the best way to go for the Los Brovos.
It's believed Magnussen shot Boyko to death to move himself up the ranks of Hells Angels.
He went the other way instead.
On May 23, 1998, Magnussen's bound, decomposed body was pulled out of the St. Lawrence Seaway. After killing Boyko, Magnussen became the bodyguard for Scott Steinert, a flamboyant, high-ranking Montreal Hells Angel and would-be porn star.
It's believed on Nov. 4, 1997 Steinert called on Magnussen to go to a meeting. Both were later beaten to death with a ballpeen hammer, wrapped in plastic and dumped in the seaway. Steinert's body wouldn't surface until about a year later. No one knows why the two were killed, although it's believed to have been part of an internal gang purge.
The Next To Go
By the 1990s, Joel Maguet had grown up and knew all about the Hells Angels.
He and Dan Atkinson were players in the Spartans, which by this time was essentially a spent force, save for the aspirations of Darwin Sylvester. Maguet and Atkinson had been around the gang for several years. Despite his youth, Maguet had racked up a longer criminal record than Atkinson, nine years older.
Maguet was convicted in 1992 of assault causing bodily harm, possession of a weapon in 1994 and improper storage of a weapon in 1998.
Charges against him of assault, sexual assault, assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon were dropped in 1994.
Atkinson, on the other hand, had only a traffic violation on his rap sheet -- a sheet that listed his address as being on Chalmers Avenue, about a block away from the Spartans' clubhouse at 650 Chalmers.
By the spring of 1998, it was becoming clear Stadnik and the Hells Angels were going to put down roots in Winnipeg. Those plans did not include Darwin Sylvester.
Ever the plotter, Sylvester did the unthinkable -- he started talking to Hells Angels rival Rock Machine about a possible alliance.
A Hells Angels source recently told the Free Press Maguet was doing some plotting of his own.
Maguet had served as president of the Spartans while Sylvester was in jail on a year-long jail sentence for extortion.
In late May, that sentence was up. Sylvester left a Regina halfway house and returned to Winnipeg, expecting to head up the Spartans once again.
On May 29, a week after leaving Regina, Sylvester vanished, shortly after leaving the Spartans clubhouse to go to a meeting.
The Hells Angels source said two of the last people to see Sylvester alive were Maguet and fellow Spartan Robert Rosmus. Rosmus is said to have driven the car to take Sylvester to his death. Whether Sylvester knew he was going to see Maguet is not known.
What is known, the biker source said, is that Maguet killed him and with Rosmus's help, got rid of the body.
It's long been rumoured Sylvester was ground up for animal feed.
The same source also said it's common knowledge in the biker world that Maguet killed Rosmus in January 1999, shooting him in the head and leaving him face up in the middle of an access road in a construction site east of the Perimeter Highway.
"He couldn't be trusted to keep his mouth shut ( about Sylvester's killing )," said the source.
There was also the possibility Rosmus planned to break from the Spartans and head up a new gang to compete against the Los Brovos and its plans to become Hells Angels.
Whatever the reason, the killings of Sylvester and Rosmus effectively ended any chance for the Spartans to ever become a farm team for the Hells Angels.
One of those present in January 1999 when a decision was made by the West Coast Hells Angels to accept the Los Brovos ( and one Red Liner ) as Canada's newest Hells Angels was Dan Atkinson. The same meeting saw the disbandment of the Spartans. ( Stadnik was now out of the picture as he was busy dealing with the gang war in Quebec ).
The decision did not prevent Maguet from working for the Hells Angels. In fact, by the time the Los Brovos were accepted into the Hells Angels' fold in July 2000, at a weekend ceremony at the former Spartans Chalmers clubhouse, Maguet was already gearing up to grow marijuana for them.
At least until October 2001.
That's when a tip led RCMP to Maguet's massive underground pot bunker on a farm near Dauphin. Also found inside were membership lists of the Hells Angels in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
RCMP said the pot-growing scheme, involving eight buried railway boxcars, took at least two years to plan and build and could produce $1.4 million worth of weed a year. Police seized about 2,000 plants and believe the operation had been running for about one year.
Maguet was described as the "governing mind" of the elaborate operation and was sentenced to five years, three months in prison. He got day parole by September 2002 and full parole a year later under Ottawa's accelerated review process.
"During your incarceration, there has been no indication of or evidence of violent behaviour," the National Parole Board said in September 2002.
"Your case management team continues to support your release as they do not feel that you have the potential to become violent."
Maguet also acknowledged his involvement with the bikers, but said since the Spartans had disbanded, he had had no contact with any gang members.
The Hells Angels source told the Free Press Maguet never left the drug world.
He had recently got his pilot's licence and bought his plane to transport drugs for the bikers around the country because moving it along the Trans-Canada Highway had become too risky.
"He knew taking up that plane would equal a hell of a lot more money," the source said.
Loose Ends
This summer, the Hells Angels will celebrate seven years in Manitoba.
In those seven years, a lot has changed.
Of the 12 original Manitoba Hells Angels, one has been deported, one has retired and at least three have been expelled by the gang.
Two more are in prison, convicted of drug trafficking after RCMP placed an undercover mole within the club. A third is waiting for his trial.
Police raids and arrests over the past seven years have also revealed some gang members aren't well organized; they'd just as soon undercut one another than outside rivals.
Younger bikers, moved up the ranks from puppet club the Zig Zag Crew, are trying to change that. They're slowly changing how the club operates, bringing in more top-down control. The Manitoba club now also has an alliance with Regina's Hells Angels.
Though the gang remains one of the primary sources of cocaine in the province, some say the local Hells Angels are a spent force and ripe for picking if a rival gang, like the Bandidos motorcycle gang, were to set up shop.
They point to the recent stabbing of a 34-year-old Hells Angel in a Corydon Avenue bar as an example, but that might be stretching things. It turns out the assailant was the same man who was beaten with a baseball bat by two Hells Angels in June 2000 outside the Chalmers clubhouse. Bad blood doesn't mean full-out gang war.
The fact is, the Hells Angels have adapted themselves to work with whomever they need to get the job done.
And until the plane hit the lake, two of them included old foes Joel Maguet and his pal Dan Atkinson.
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