“I work with a man in California named Dr. Timothy Leary,” he said. “Dr. Leary has come up with the chemical formula for manufacturing ‘acid’—LSD. I know how to do that, and I want to set up some laboratories in Canada.

“You have plenty of contacts and a really good enterprise going,” he continued. “You’re the man, Serge. We know all about you. You control a large part of Toronto—all the West End and a good part of the East End. Between your alcohol and fencing all your stolen goods, you have an impressive distribution network. What if I give you another product?”

“Really?” I said. I was very skeptical. “What’s the product?” “Drugs.” I laughed. I knew all about the drug scene that existed at that point.

There was no marijuana, no hashish. It was all heroin and pills— uppers and downers. Truckers used bennies or uppers; prostitutes and grifters took the downers or bombers. It was a very negative scene with no money to be made. Besides, I didn’t want to mess with the Inner City.

“Trust me,” I said. “You can’t make any money with drugs. The people who use them are prostitutes, pimps, petty criminals, and bums;
it’s for mooches, garbage people.” Ian tried another tactic. He began telling me about the United States and what was going on there. “You read the newspapers?” he asked. “I don’t read the newspaper,” I said. “I read books.” “Surely you watch TV.” “No, I don’t watch TV. There’s nothing on TV that interests me.” The truth was I didn’t have much opportunity to watch television. I was into gambling so heavily that I was lucky if I saw daylight three or four times in a month.

Then Ian commenced to give me a lecture on the Vietnam War. It meant nothing to me because I had no idea where Vietnam was. I knew about the United States and Canada, but that was the extent of my world knowledge.

“The young men in the United States don’t want to fight in the war,” Ian said. “There are draft dodgers, and protests, and a revolution happening down there with the young people. The kids are letting their hair grow long. The music is changing, and so is the way they dress. They want to make love, not war. They’re shedding the values of a generation and they want to party hearty.”

All of this was news to me, especially the part about dress. I was into suits and ties, straight-laced shoes, and overcoats. I saw myself as a gangster like the ones I saw in the movies, and I dressed like one. What he was talking about sounded like something out of a story book. It was completely foreign to me. Besides, what did I care about hippies and flower children running around in Volkswagens singing protest songs? My music was Rock and Roll, black music, Elvis Presley, and the Blues. In The District, we were strait-laced and anti-drug. This wasn’t for us. I was very, very skeptical.

“Kids in Canada are watching all this on TV,” he went on, “and they want to be cool like the Americans.”

“Really?” I said again. I didn’t believe a word of it.

“Let me show you,” he persisted. “Give me a week and I will prove it to you.”

I was an entrepreneur. It wasn’t like I had a nine-to-five job and couldn’t take time off from work, so I said, “Okay, I’ve always got time for something that looks like a money-making enterprise.”

“You’ll give me a week?”

“Sure…” I was known as a man who kept his word, and in giving my word here, I was promising him a week of my time to show me this scam. For his part, he was agreeing not to approach any other crew with the opportunity.

The next morning Ian drove me to a high school in a nice middle- class suburb of Toronto. I had never been to a high school before, and certainly not to one in suburbia. I was out of The District and out of my comfort zone. There were no streetcars or buses here, nothing with which I was familiar.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “You gave me your word,” Ian countered. “Yeah,” I said, “but somebody’s gonna phone the cops and we’ll
get busted. This is not a good idea. C’mon, let’s get out of here.” “You said you’d give me a week. Now watch.” “Okay.” Everybody smoked in those days, and schools generally had smoking pits adjacent to the school grounds for student smokers. Because I was a boxer, I did not smoke, and the last thing I wanted to do was be around a bunch of smokers, especially these kids with their penny loafers and straight white teeth and their hair neatly combed in the Pat Boone style. Everything about me was the antithesis of the Pat Boone style. I was way out of my element.

The first day Ian handed out weed to some of the kids in the smoking pit. Marijuana was a new thing and a big time drug. I watched while Ian rolled up the weed for these kids and showed them how to smoke it. They soon got giggly.

The next day we went again and Ian did the same thing. On Wednesday, Ian started handing out little capsules. I said, “What’s in the capsules?” “LSD—acid.”

I knew about LSD. People who took LSD saw walls melting; it made them jump off buildings. “We shouldn’t be playing with this stuff,” I said.
“It’s okay, Serge. There’s only a little bit in here, and it’s mixed with icing sugar. You watch.”

On Thursday he told students, “We’re only going to be here one more day. If you want to buy some of this acid or marijuana, it’ll be five dollars a hit.”

Later that day I said to my guys, “He’s crazy. Nobody’s going to buy this garbage.”

On Friday, Ian was flooded with buyers. I noticed that three would come together; one kid would buy and then split it up with his friends. It seemed that everyone was turning several others on to the drugs.

I went back and called my boys together. “This is big business,” I said. “We’re in.”

It was still hard for me to believe this could happen because we in the Inner City lived by a very different kind of philosophy. When we saw our friends screwing up, we tried to stop them. We said, “Hey, you’re drinking too much. You’re doing a little too much dope. Man, you are messing up. You’ve got to pull it together.” Yet here were these middle-class kids, who had everything in the world going for them, encouraging their friends to jump headlong into risky and uncharted waters.

But then, what did I know about middle-class kids? I had a Grade Five education. I had never met anyone from my district who went to high school, never mind college. Here were these kids with so many advantages using their money to buy dope.

Well, I may have been brain-damaged, but I wasn’t stupid. I said, “This is a big money-making enterprise. All we have to do is get three or four kids in each school and they’ll do the pushing for us.”

Thus I embarked on an odyssey that would make me the first and ultimately one of the most powerful drug dealers in all of Eastern Canada.
I brought drugs into The District, and that caused quite a rift because drugs were not that well accepted there. People stopped talking to me, especially some of the older crowd. There was a stigma attached to dealing drugs, but I didn’t care. This wasn’t a popularity contest, and I saw it as a way to make some serious money.

Since it was a relatively new game, we had to feel our way along. I began selling marijuana in matchboxes, as Ian had done. We charged ten dollars for a small matchbox of weed and twenty dollars for a large one.

When we first began peddling LSD, we had no idea how to sell it. We manufactured LSD powder from chemicals we got from the University of Toronto. It was a case of just winging it and putting together our own formulas.

As the authorities made certain drugs illegal, we invented new ones. That is how methamphetamines (crystal meth) and MDA or methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (also known as the Love Drug) came into being. Common names for crystal meth are meth, speed, crank, and crystal. We made it in our laboratory. It was a much more sophisticated drug than the one used today, and a lot safer for users, even though it still brought on the same hallucinogenic state.

We made the transition from marijuana and LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) to MDA, a mixture of LSD and crystal meth. MDA was the precursor of MDMA or Ecstasy, which has just one molecule different from MDA.

We started dealing in the West End, but I quickly realized that what I had seen happening in the high school was not being echoed in The District. Obviously, the students in suburbia were watching television and were more plugged in to this counter-culture movement. I figured they must be more in tune with the idea of rebelling against parents and The Establishment and doing their own thing. That sort of thing didn’t resonate with us in the Inner City.

I decided to use my contacts and see what was happening in the rest of the city. It was about that time that I broke with the majority of my people in The District and moved Uptown, taking a select handful of gang members with me.

I very quickly learned that the centre of all the action Uptown was Yorkville Village in the heart of Toronto. Yorkville Village was created when the street was closed off to motor traffic and houses and buildings in the immediate district were turned into clubs and boutiques. This is where the hip crowd gathered. On Friday and Saturday nights, it was flooded with people.

These were the days when Neil Young played on street corners, when Gordon Lightfoot was in The Riverboat, and Jose Feliciano played at the Mousehole. Bands like Steppen Wolfe and singers like Janis Joplin were in their heyday. A whole new era of clubs and discos was opening up, and the club scene very quickly became the drug scene.

It was also the beginning of biker gangs like the Vagabonds and the Paradise Riders. That wave came on the heels of the American draft dodgers who ran to Canada and gravitated to Toronto’s Yorkville Village and Rochedale College where the dominant talk was about the Vietnam War, the Protest Movement, and the Psychedelic Revolution. It was here that I centered most of my drug-selling activities.

With the money I made, I bought a house on nearby Madison Avenue and made investments in several businesses and other pieces of real estate. I went into partnership with a whole new crew of guys, amongst them a gang of bikers known as the Paradise Riders. The sergeant-at-arms and his brother became my business partners. Along with a fourth person, we pretty well dominated the market for speed and acid.
My partners were, by and large, guys just like me who came out of the different districts. I had known many in the crew before they became bikers, especially the ones who started the Vagabonds and the Paradise Riders, the precursors of Hell’s Angels and Satan’s Choice. Now I was into formal gang action, networking with associates and the many contacts I had made during my early years as a runaway, crossing the lines into other districts. All of this stood me in very good stead as our drug empire expanded.

In introducing marijuana and speed to The District, it was inevitable that I would start using it myself. Very quickly, I graduated to using it intravenously, as did many of my guys.

I began to change. I started hanging out in the clubs, and changing my style of dress. Instead of being the neat, clean-cut, ‘American Gangster’ sort of kid in a pin-striped suit, I switched to cowboy boots, jeans, black shirts, leather jackets, and long hair. I took up riding motorcycles. My mentality began to change, too, as I got more and more wrapped up with drugs and the twisted world of the drug culture. I became more and more violent.

Before, in the West End, I was into what might be called traditional ‘corner boy’ crime: gambling, bootlegging, and B&Es, but there was no drug use. Now, as a drug dealer and a heavy user myself, I was in another realm altogether. My crime went from multi-dimensional crime to a single criminal activity—drug dealing.

I became well-known in the Village. It didn’t matter which club I went to, whether it was the In Crowd, Devil’s Den, Chez Monique, or Charlie Brown’s, there were always people there I knew.

Toronto had only two or three gay clubs at the time, and when I found out that the gay population was way ahead of the curve in terms of drug use, I began supplying drugs to the gay scene by putting pushers in each club. It was a fairly innovative move since straight people never went near gay clubs or gay people in those days. But it was a lucrative market that I would hold onto for many, many years during my criminal career. I even owned a piece of the clubs.

While I was buying houses, businesses, cars, and motorcycles, I was steadily spiraling out of control with my personal drug use. I became a hardcore intravenous crystal meth user. I would use crystal meth to get high, then mainline heroin to bring myself down, then take speed to bring me up again. It was a vicious and dangerous circle, and quite frankly, it fractured my personality.

Drugs were so new that we had nothing on which to gauge our use. We didn’t realize that doing too much acid could fry your brain. In fact, when we first began distributing acid, we bought gelatin capsules at the drugstore, mixed liquid LSD with the powder, and recapped them. Sometimes people got a little too much concentrated LSD and the walls began to melt on them.

We didn’t know the pitfalls, and many of us, including myself, ended up contracting Hepatitis C from shared needles. In those years, it was very difficult to get needles. In the United States, especially in Upper New York State, if you were caught with a glass set of works16, you were automatically sentenced to five years in prison. As a result, we learned to do it with eyedroppers until we found a way to acquire syringes.

The more strung out I got, the more outrageous I became. It was nothing for me to shoot a full syringe of crystal meth into my body, followed by a full syringe of downers so I could do it all over again to experience the high. Sometimes I didn’t sleep for weeks at a time. There was no limit to the amount of drugs I would use, no consciousness of the destruction it might wreak on my body and my brain, no cognitive thought that this behavior could kill me. I knew there was such a thing as overdosing because people overdosed on heroin all the time. I just didn’t know it could happen with speed and acid. I have absolutely no idea why my brain did not melt inside my skull, and how I made it through that part of my life without permanent brain damage.

In retrospect, I believe I was functioning in a dimension somewhere between drug-induced insanity and psychosis. For a large part of the time, I was completely out of touch with reality. Hallucinations were routine, especially at night. I saw ‘people’ hiding behind bushes and garbage cans and in shadows so frequently that I didn’t pay attention to them any more. On one occasion, I walked off a second storey roof and landed on my back. My buddies picked me up, took me inside, and I immediately did some more dope.

There was one episode where my partners and I went to see a guy who owed us a lot of money. When we caught him, I proceeded to pistol-whip him, then we took off. The police stopped us about five blocks away. I had dropped the gun in a sewer, but for some reason, I still had the bullets in my pocket. Out of the three of us, I was the only one they could pin anything on because I had the .38s in my pocket. I was higher than a Georgia pine when they took me to the police station, but I remember thinking: “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to smash my head against the cell walls and split it open. Then they’ll have to take me to the hospital and I’ll run away.”

The plan didn’t work out quite that way, although I did split my head open in several places. I became so psychotic that the police were afraid to come into the cell. (By this point, I also had a reputation for extreme violence and unpredictable behavior.) The officers ended up letting my partners into the cell to bring me milkshakes and hopefully, to calm me down.

Eventually I was transported to a hospital where the staff put me on an intravenous valium drip to try to bring me down. It didn’t work.
The doctor said, “If we give him any more of this stuff, it will stop his heart. He has so much crystal meth in his system, his blood is crystallizing. It looks like syrup. We’ve taken blood samples and you can actually see crystals in it.”

In fact, there was so much crystal meth in my body that crystals came out of my tear ducts and broke through my skin in different spots, especially inside my mouth.

“We’re not saying he’s going to die if he doesn’t stop,” the doctor told police. “We’re telling you we don’t know how he is still alive.”
They released me, but of course, I didn’t stop. I continued using drugs to the degree where I was completely irrational and fearless to the point of stupidity. There was no limit to what I would do.

Everyone thought I was crazy. Guys who knew me well said they always knew when a switch had clicked inside my head. I would go silent; my face would turn white with no trace of emotion. As long as I was screaming or bellowing, they knew things were cool. But when I went silent, I was apt to do something irrational like beat someone up, or stab them, or shoot them for no reason at all. I believe those episodes were due in large part to the immense rage that I carried around with me in those days.

In my drug-induced state, it was hard to differentiate between what was real and what was not, so I kind of ignored it all. My life disintegrated to the point where I couldn’t even drive anymore, and people stopped doing business with me because they were afraid of me.
One bad drug deal here and another there lost me all three of my houses, my motorcycles, my cars, and my money, as well as a lucrative silent partnership in a fire extinguisher business. Basically, I lost two- and-a-half years of my life.

It wasn’t until I broke into a house just to raid the refrigerator that I realized I was at rock bottom. Intuitively, I knew I needed to dry out. I said to my partner, “Give me a room in your house and lock me in. Let me out in two or three days.” He locked me in the room with five gallons of water and a plastic bucket. All I did was sleep. I probably hadn’t slept at all for about a month prior. When they finally let me out, I devoured a dozen hamburgers, cheeseburgers, and milkshakes, then went back inside and slept again.

When I was feeling more like myself again, two guys came to me and said, “Hey, Serge, we’ve got this scam happening. You used to do this with us before; why don’t you join us again?”

The scam was breaking into businesses, usually in industrial malls in the suburbs, and stealing blank checks out of the middle and bottom of their company cheque books. We would use their own perforating machines to make out the cheques for varying amounts. They were big cheques—made out to Susie Jones or Barbara Smith, all fictitious women’s names, but names for which we had identification cards. On Fridays, we would take some women to the grocery stores—Dominion or Loblaws—and give them the cheques and the corresponding ID cards. The women would buy twenty dollars worth of groceries, sign over a ninety dollar cheque, and get back seventy dollars cash. I had run a crew that made a lot of money with that kind of scam, so when these guys asked if I’d be interested in partnering with them
again, I said, “Sure, let’s go.” We broke into a company office in Milton, just outside of Toronto, removed some checks, and printed them up. However, when we came out of the building and got into the car, lights came on all around us. The police were waiting. Obviously they knew what was going on.

The two other men took off running. I just stood there. I thought, “They can’t pin anything on me.”

There were two cops, and boy, did they lay a beating on me. They choked me out, broke my nose, and tried to thrash the names of the other two guys out of me, but I refused to talk.

Ultimately they brought out the dogs and tracked down my partners- in-crime. The three of us were taken to Halton County Jail and charged with B&E and a number of other offenses.

The other two fellows had already done penitentiary time, and one was actually on parole. I, on the other hand, had no adult criminal record, so I said, “I’ll swallow the beef17 and plead guilty. You guys plead not guilty. They can’t hook you into this, and that’ll be the end of it.”
Being as cocky as I was, I didn’t realize they would jam me18 with a very heavy sentence for what was a relatively minor offense. At least, to my mind it was minor.

I got twenty-one months, an unusually harsh sentence for B&E, considering that a life sentence for killing somebody was only twenty years. The other reason I felt it was out of proportion was because my only criminal record as an adult consisted of convictions for attempted theft, possession of stolen property, a previous B&E, and possession of a weapon—all of which had been withdrawn.

The charges were withdrawn because I always made deals with the police. I’d say, “You want to charge me with possession of a handgun? Well, I know where you can get twenty-five handguns off the street. Wouldn’t you like to do that? Aren’t those twenty-five handguns better than throwing me in jail for a couple of years?” The bargaining always worked, and as a result, I had only one adult conviction to that point, an attempted theft in 1968. Everything else was dropped.

My hope this time was that the sentence would be suspended, or if they did give me jail time, it would be minimal. I certainly hadn’t figured on twenty-one months. What’s more, because I had a concealed weapon—a straight razor—and some dope on me, they added another twenty-eight days to my twenty-one month sentence.

When the Oakville Police checked with the Toronto Police, they discovered there were some other unsettled convictions on my record. So while they jammed me in Oakville, they also withdrew a lot, like two more charges of possession of weapons dangerous to the public, seven B&Es, six charges of impersonation, six charges of stolen property, and public mischief. In all, there were more withdrawals than convictions.
I was nineteen or twenty at the time and old enough to go to adult prison, so off I went to serve the twenty-two month sentence in Guelph Reformatory—this time, on the adult side.

I got shot twice. The first bullet went into my left hip, ricocheted off the bone and came out my left buttock. It knocked me back about six feet and lifted me into the air. I went down shooting, spraying bullets all over the place, shooting out windows in buildings as far as a block away.

The second bullet went in the front of my left thigh and exited through the inside of my leg.

My partners grabbed me and dragged me to the car. All the while, I was still spraying bullets in every direction.

We got away, and my partners brought in someone to treat my wounds. I don’t know who it was, maybe a veterinarian or somebody. Whoever it was, the wound got cleaned and we figured that was that.

Unfortunately, a fragment of cloth from my trousers was carried in with the bullet and became lodged against the bone. The wound soon became infected.

My partners did their best for me. They got some penicillin and pain pills, but the problem was much more serious than that. Within a week, my thigh was swollen almost to the size of my waist and gangrene was setting in. The leg was blue and green, and starting to smell. Pus oozed from the wound in putrid ropes.

Some of the guys in the Montreal gang were American, so they made some connections and transported me to an underground abortion clinic in Vermont. By this time, I was delusional and running a dangerously high fever.

The doctor at this illegal clinic was a little man with a big hook nose and Coke bottle glasses. He opened the wound and went in with forceps to remove the scrap of fabric. Then he started me on an intravenous antibiotic drip.

Shaking his head, he said to my partner, “We may have to amputate the leg to save him.”

Even in my delusional state, I understood the implications of that.

“No, you won’t,” I said. “Here’s the deal. If you take the leg off, my partner is going to shoot you in the head. Got that? You either save me with my leg on, or I die with my leg on, but this leg ain’t comin’ off.”

We stayed a while in Vermont, then headed back to Ontario and dug in around the Cornwall and Thousand Islands area. It took about three months before I fully recuperated.

The experience persuaded me to give bank robbing a pass, and I eventually returned to Toronto.

We probably stole two hundred bikes from everywhere in the city—except our own district.

At thirteen, I got the first of my five tattoos. For me, I believe it was a rite of passage to manhood. I chose a peacock because I arrogantly believed I was ‘as pretty as a peacock.’ I considered the tattoo to be a piece of art that I could carry around with me.

At thirteen, I also had my first sexual experience. I moved in with a hooker who was about ten years older than me. I don’t remember her name, but I do recall she had a little blonde-haired daughter who was about five at the time.

Through my relationship with the hooker, I got a first-hand look at the human face of prostitution, and I acquired a deep hatred of pimps8. I became known as a protector of girls on the stroll. I learned that no girl ever wakes up one morning and thinks: ‘My life’s goal is to become a prostitute.’ No, it is always a survival thing.

I lived with the hooker off and on during those years, with my mother off and on, or with friends. I also had a place of my own that nobody knew about. It was where I went when I needed solitude and down time.

I think I was born generous. As a young teenager, when I walked down the streets of The District, I was continually surrounded by little kids. They knew I always had a pocketful of nickels which I gave out liberally. In those days, five cents could get you a pop or an ice cream; two could get you into a movie.

That same generosity was expressed in the way I protected prostitutes and underdogs. I hated bullies with a passion, and liked
8 Pimp – a person who solictis clients for a prostitute nothing better than beating them up because they were mean-spirited people who enjoyed making life miserable for others. I believe that fervency was developed in St. John’s Training School and later in OTS where I was forever championing the underdog. Often at St. John’s, I would intervene for a little kid and get a beating from the staff for my efforts, but I was willing to take the beating if it got their attention off the other kid. Later on, as my life became more and more twisted, being a champion for the underdog was one of the few things that allowed me to maintain my sanity and sense of self-worth.

In my early teens I got involved in gang action and soon became a gang leader. What I lacked in size, I made up for with viciousness and weapons. Though this was an era when guns were almost unheard of, I carried a handgun. I also carried a straight razor up my sleeve, so perhaps it is easy to see how I assumed leadership in The District.

In addition, I was an amateur boxer and gained a strong reputation as a street fighter. I trained and worked out at a number of community centers including Hart House which is part of the University of Toronto’s sports complex. My trainer was Tony Canzano who later became the Boxing Commissioner for Canada.

Boxing served as a survival skill for me, but I found I loved the sport. I had excellent eye/hand co-ordination, and even won a couple of Golden Glove Awards.

My life in those days followed a pattern. For most of the night, I hung out with my guys at a 24-hour hamburger joint on the corner of Queen and Bathhurst called The Deco. That became my territory, my place. With The Deco on one corner and taverns on the other three, the location was quite a hot spot.

Early evening would find us at the Gorevale Restaurant until it closed around 2 a.m. The Gorevale was further west on Shaw and Queen, and served as neutral territory between the two tough districts in West End Toronto where there was a lot of poverty and gang action. The Gorevale was my headquarters in the neutral zone, and it was there I met a lot of guys from the Parkdale area.

My gang and I made a lot of money in those days from stealing. I had a lucrative B&E9 operation going where I would break into a place through the roof with a drill and bit, then come down and steal whatever they had inside: clothing, suits, televisions, hi-fis. We took the stuff out the back door and loaded it into trucks.

To transport the stolen goods, I bought a garbage truck and redid the back hinge so it would open up and we could pack the loot inside. It was an ingenious plan. Whoever stops a garbage truck?

We also stole transport trailers from loading docks. I knew a fellow named Bronco who worked as a dock man. He would tip me off whenever a good load was coming in. Maybe the trailer would be filled with silverware or bolts of cloth. We had a fence just outside Toronto who paid me cash—as much as $5000—for each load. We simply drove the rig into his barn, collected the cash, and left. He got rid of the rig and the merchandise.

At one point, I rented the top floor of a mini-warehouse building and started running gambling games. This was the inner city part of the West End and we had plenty of people coming to gamble: boxers, drinkers, and lots of Irish, Ukrainian, and Polish immigrants.
The first time I walked into the warehouse, I noticed some odd- looking contraptions on the ground floor level.
“What are those?” I asked the owner.

“They’re stills,” he said. He used them to manufacture and distill dry cleaning fluid for the commercial dry cleaning industry. It was a legitimate business operation and he explained the process to me.

“I’ve seen movies where they make whiskey out of contraptions like this,” I said.

“Yeah, those stills are exactly like these, and you do it exactly the same way.”

In no time, I had built myself a couple of stills and was running potato mash through them, adding caramel coloring to the distilled liquid to make it look like whiskey.

By the time I was fifteen, I was running a string of alcohol stills, selling raw potato mash to the majority of bars in the city of Toronto. They bought my whiskey for one-third of what they had to pay Seagrams, and no one knew the difference because it was sold as bar stock, anyway.

I also sold whiskey to a number of blind pigs10 and bootleggers11.

10 Blind pigs – afterhours booze houses 11 Bootleggers – illegal suppliers of alcohol

There was a vigorous bootlegging industry in Toronto in those days and I supplied quite a few of them, as well as having a couple of my own bootleggers.

I had been drinking alcohol since the age of thirteen. By fifteen I was also doing drugs, sticking needles into my arms to lose myself in a strange netherworld in which you are neither dead nor alive.

I was becoming a very good criminal with good criminal contacts. I was an expert at picking locks, breaking and entering places, and peeling safes12.

I also had some extortion rackets operating. There were a number of the stores in the district, and around ten o’clock at night one of our crew would walk past a store and throw a brick through the window. The next day, I would stop by and say to the owner, “For a fee, I can make sure that never happens again.”

They knew exactly what was going on, but they would pay the twenty dollars or so a week anyway to make sure we wouldn’t break their windows again or burglarize their store. Multiply that by seventy or eighty stores and we collected a tidy sum each week.
The merchants were safe because our gang controlled that area. But there were many other gangs in Toronto like the Parkdale Crew, the Dundas Crew who were all Italians, and the College Crew which had a lot of Jewish kids in it.

We were an inner city type of gang, not ethnic, though there were a number of Irish in the group. Mostly we were all poor whites. We didn’t have a name. In fact, I didn’t even go by the name LeClerc then. (That’s because I didn’t know my last name.) I was simply known as Serge.
There were about seventy members in my street gang. Many were in their twenties. Why, you ask, would a twenty-year-old take orders from a little fifteen-year-old kid? One reason was my ‘I don’t care’ attitude. I didn’t care, and I made sure everybody else knew it. I didn’t care who he was, how big he was, how many people he had in his family, how tough he was, or how tough he looked, if he came against me, he had better be ready to kill me because I was quite prepared to kill him. I didn’t particularly care about dying. That’s what happens when life has no meaning; you really don’t think or care about death.

And when death means nothing, living has no particular value, either. The second reason people took orders from me was because I had discovered the wonderful world of money and I had a natural talent for making it. I bought my first house at the age of fifteen and paid $63,000 cash for it. Yes, you can buy a house at fifteen. All you need is the money. Early on, I learned the truth of the adage: ‘Money corrupts.’ I found that even though people thought I was garbage, they called me ‘Mister’ because I had money. I discovered that people worship money. I discovered that there really was a god and it was on the hundred dollar bill. I discovered that the world revolved around money and that I could buy lawyers. In fact, I could do whatever I wanted because money gave me power and people followed me and obeyed me because I had money.

I had developed many criminal contacts throughout the city and eventually began taking my crew to The Junction where there was another big gang. The Junction guys were the ones who started up some of the big motorcycle gangs that are still operating today.

In further expanding my territory to The Village, Yorkville, and uptown Yonge Street, I crossed a number of influential boundaries that opened the door to a whole new world of criminal activity.

I also acquired contacts in Montreal, and my crew and I liked to go there to party. In Montreal, even if you were underage—as I was—you could get into any club you wanted. I had two favorites: the Americana and the Playgirl Club.

It was in Montreal that I met up with an American clique that was into robbing banks. I tied in with them and some Quebec guys, and we did some Montreal-style bank heists. In a Montreal-style robbery, you took over the whole bank. You didn’t just rob one teller, you robbed the whole bank. You set it up or ‘keyed in’ in the morning just before or just after the Brinks armored truck had unloaded the day’s money supply. Our goal was to get in before they double day-locked the bank vault so we could clean out everything in the vault and the tills.
On this one particular occasion, I was the gunman, armed with a sawed-off M1 with two taped-together banana clips. We had customized the gun by filing off the retainer pin so when you pressed the trigger, it became an automatic instead of a single-shot weapon. Upon entering the bank, it was my job to fire shots into the ceiling or into the air.

Why they would be taking me there was rather confusing to me at the time, because I thought what I had done was perfectly normal given the treatment I had experienced at the hands of this Christian Brother.

The courts did not agree.

“The boy must be brain-damaged,” they said. “For a ten-year-old boy to be so violent as to attack a grown man, he is definitely brain-damaged.”

A disastrous psychological process had begun in me. I had developed an attitude that is common to many people when they are messing up their lives, when they’re making wrong choices and getting involved with drugs and alcohol, or suffering a lot of pain. It is the ‘I don’t care’ attitude which becomes a protective armor. We try to pretend that nothing bothers us, that we don’t care. And at the tender age of ten, I was already an expert at it.

Often, when children who are involved with their parents’ divorces hear someone say, “You must be feeling a lot of pain with all that’s going on with your parents,” they respond, “I don’t care.” Of course they care. ‘I don’t care’ is something they do to protect themselves from the personal internal burdens they carry and the turmoil going on the outside.

When I walked into court with my Cabbagetown swagger, I had already become an expert at ‘I don’t care.’

The judge said, “You are brain-damaged. I’m sending you to a maximum security reformatory.”

I said, “I don’t care.”

In fact, I cared so little that as I left the courtroom, I said to myself, “Brain-damaged, eh? That’s kinda cool. Brain-damaged… Gee, I betcha’ there aren’t too many people who are brain-damaged.” And I wore the title almost as a badge.

Fortunately for me, the authorities said I was too violent for St. John’s Training School and they sent me to a place called Ontario Training School.

OTS was a maximum security centre for older boys. It was hooked onto the Guelph Adult Reformatory. At ten years of age, I was the youngest boy there by several years.

Ontario Training School was a tough place filled with tough kids. It was situated in the middle of the countryside outside the city of Guelph and surrounded by barbed wire. Guards on horses secured both the training school and the reformatory.

My first encounter at OTS was with a guard who let me know in no uncertain terms that he had my number. I had a go-boy7 reputation, but there would be no go-boy here, he told me. He assured me the place was escape-proof and that no ten-year-old would get the best of him.

Admittedly, OTS was hard and brutal, but there was none of the sexual abuse that existed at St. John’s. There was physical brutality from older, tougher boys who abused the younger ones and took their goods off them, but that was understandable since everyone in OTS was seriously dysfunctional. Many came out of situations of extreme abuse and poverty.

For a little ten-year-old like me, life at OTS was hard. We were required to do physical labor, generally on a cleaning crew or in the laundry, but living conditions were much better than what I had known at St. John’s. Each of us had a cell-like enclosure in a dormitory, and the staff was consistent. You didn’t have to worry about them raping you at night. If you did what you were told, you got along fine. If you gave them any lip, they slapped you in the head and didn’t hesitate to knock you down. But they were predictable and very easy to deal with, as opposed to St. John’s where the Brothers were completely erratic and violence and brutality could flare up at any moment for no apparent reason.

I remember one incident at St. John’s where we were lining up to go into one of the ugly brown brick buildings. A kid was talking to me and without any warning whatsoever, one of the Brothers took the boy’s head and smashed it into the brick wall. I remember looking at the wall afterward and seeing pieces of the boy’s skin and his hair on the rough bricks. He didn’t deserve that kind of treatment, but the action was typical of the unpredictability and violence that was the norm at St. John’s. In retrospect, I believe it was probably used as an intimidation tool to keep the boys off balance so they wouldn’t resist the sexual abuse.

None of that brutality and violence existed at OTS, which may account for the fact that my memories of the place are largely a blur. Or it may have been that I was functioning on cruise control, quite likely suffering Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome after my time at St. John’s.
I do remember fighting with the older boys. Because I was much smaller and younger than all the rest, I spent a good deal of time defending myself, and for that, I would be sent to solitary confinement.

Solitary at OTS was more like a cell than the dark, Draconian closets of St. John’s, but it was solitary confinement nevertheless.
Another reason I don’t recall many details about OTS was because I spent a lot of my time there as a runaway despite the dire pronouncement of the guard that first day.

Two years after being sentenced to Ontario Training School, I escaped for the third time.

To create a diversion, I started a fire in the gymnasium by dousing the sports equipment with gas I had siphoned from a truck. I put a match to it, and while everyone was rushing about dealing with the fire, I jumped in the truck, drove it through the security fence and about ten miles down the road to Highway #40l, only to find the Ontario Provincial Police there waiting for me. They surrounded the truck when I lost control of it and crashed into the median. I came out with my hands up and surrendered. I was twelve at the time.

They took me back to court and declared I was irreparably brain- damaged. They said they could control neither my behavior nor my violence, and the only solution was to put me in a group home for unwanted children.

I believe that indictment caused me more pain than anything I had experienced to that point in my life. I was unwanted, undesirable, and
unworthy. There was no thought of returning me to my mother. The government had tried, without success, to straighten me out, and now they were sending me to a home for children that no one else wanted to deal with.

I was twelve when they put me in a group home on Boulton Avenue in East End Toronto just above Queen Street. It was a corner house adjacent to a parking lot.

There were a number of other children there, as well, being kept in a regular home by a mother and her grown son who would have been in his late twenties or early thirties. They were East End people doing what they could to bring in some extra income, probably being paid by the city to operate a group home.

I don’t know what I did the first day I got there—maybe swore at the son or something—but they stripped me down to my underwear, stood me on the kitchen table, and the son took a leather belt to me. I guess he put me on the table so he could get a good strong shoulder level swing at me. He gave me four or five good whacks across my buttocks. Then I was sent upstairs to bed.

I immediately escaped through the second floor bathroom window wearing only my jockey shorts. The policy at the group home was to take away your clothes and locked them up on the first floor so you couldn’t sneak out at night and run away. I don’t know if they did it every night; I didn’t stay long enough to find out.

I dropped from the second floor bathroom window to the parking lot below and started running.

After dashing through a few backyards, I found some laundry hanging on a clothes line. I took some clothing, put it on, and headed for the West End of Toronto with which I was much more familiar.

I ended up at my mother’s house and spent the next two-and-a-half years bouncing in and out of her home, trying to maintain some form of normalcy in my life. I attended school for a little while, at least for one or two grades, but basically I did whatever I wanted whenever I wanted to do it.

At thirteen, I devised a lucrative scam that gave me more money than I knew what to do with.

There was always a group of kids hanging out with me, and among them was Stinky Maguire. (We called him Stinky because he really was. I don’t know what his problem was, whether he ate a dozen eggs a day or what, but Stinky had a serious gas problem.) Stinky’s parents reminded me of the couple in the Andy Capp comic strip: a very wide mother and a pencil-thin father.

I spent a lot of my time reading at the public library and always had a book in my back pocket. It was not unusual for me to get on the subway and ride all day—just reading. I would also read at night by candle light. Whenever the police discovered one of my squats, they always found a stash of books and magazines. I loved reading about the Vikings, especially stories that included the Norse god Thor. I read all the Grimms’ Tales and the Greek myths about Hercules and Zeus.

Another thing I loved (and still do) was movies. During my runaway days, I spent whole days in movie theatres. First, I would buy a loaf of warm bread from the bakery. Then I would go to the grocery store for butter (I generally stole that). Then I’d go to the theatre and eat while I watched one, two, and sometimes three movies in succession. Adventure films were my favorites; I loved to lose myself in the world of fantasy.

Museums and art galleries were other beloved haunts. I knew every entrance, every corner of the Royal Ontario Museum. The part I liked best was the basement which housed a First Nations exhibit and a mock- up of a campfire scene. My second favorite place was the Armory Floor with its display of old swords and firearms. I was fascinated, as well, with the exhibits of animals, fowl, and snakes—beautiful, free-roaming creatures that one never saw in the city.

It may have been the thousands of hours I spent in the museum that spawned my life-long appreciation of art and beautiful things. To this day, I love good paintings, flowers, gardening, fine pieces of art, and music. I never learned to play an instrument, but as a young adult I would often lose myself in music—listening to it or dancing to it in clubs. It was nothing for me in my late teenage years to drive across the border to Buffalo, New York, with my black friends simply to spend an evening there listening to music in the black clubs.

Another favorite haunt during my runaway days was the Toronto Exhibition Grounds. I especially enjoyed the Royal Winter Fair. I would sneak onto the grounds via the railroad tracks and head immediately for the food booths and the free food.

It was during Exhibition time that I honed my pick-pocketing skills. In the crush of the crowds, it was ridiculously easy; people would be buying things and leaving their purses wide open. I collected enough money that way to last me for three or four months.

In the off-season, I found a couple of very good squats on the Exhibition Grounds. One was in the control building for the roller coaster on which I spent many a happy hour playing and climbing along the track.

Nearby, in a bank beneath the railroad tracks, I discovered a big steel door with a lock that I soon dispatched. Inside was a little room equipped with a cot and lantern which were probably used by railroad linemen in former years. Naturally, I spent some time there.

For a while I had a squat in an army tank at the Fort York Armories. Fort York is the reconstructed site of the original settlement of Toronto. The site had old wooden palisades and bunk houses complete with soldiers’ uniforms.

Looking back, I see myself as something of a modern-day Oliver Twist or a Huckleberry Finn. When I was hungry, I dug in the dumpsters. If I needed clothes, I stole them off clotheslines or shoplifted them from stores. By the time I reached adulthood, I had become a very accomplished booster5.

My biggest money-making operation in those days was checking newspaper dispensers for coins that hadn’t quite fallen into the collection box. I would walk down Queen Street from east to west, all the way to High Park and then back again the other side, a distance of about ten miles. It took the whole day, but I would end up with a pocket full of change which I spent on meals, clothing, and shoes. The next day I would do the same thing on King Street.

I became a panhandler before people panhandled. I would knock on doors and spin a little tale of woe: “I’ve lost my street car ticket and it’s too late for me to get home. Could I please have a quarter for a sandwich?”

Toronto’s population was probably less than a million people in those days, and I got to know the city intimately as I roamed it from one end to the other. In the process, I met a lot of different kids. Some would skip school and hang out with me, though they made sure they were back in time to go home after school.

Sometimes I would take three or four of them shoplifting. We would go to a store where I would send two of them to the back to knock something over. While the proprietor was hurrying to see what had happened, I tapped the tills6, scooped up a handful of money, and ran.
On one of my escapes, I went to my mother’s place. By this time, she had moved out of the East End of Toronto to place nearer the West End. With all my running away, I guess she figured she would never see me again if she stayed in Cabbagetown. I was sitting on her front porch, waiting while she went inside to make me something to eat, when I spotted the police coming. I took off.

“Yes,” my mother said, “Serge was here on the porch just a little while ago. Someone must have abducted him. I’m sure he didn’t run away. Why would he run away when I was making food for him?” It was her way of protecting me, trying to mitigate my trouble.

I spent one whole summer on the grounds of Casa Loma. The castle—and it really is a castle—was built by a multi-millionaire for his wife in the early part of the last century. It sits on top of a hill surrounded by a castle wall made of big boulders. I climbed over the wall and into the lower yard which was overgrown with lush vegetation and a forest of trees.

My explorations uncovered a tunnel that led to a small house on the grounds, possibly the groundskeeper’s dwelling in former days. I pried open the tunnel door and found a nice little cubby hole inside about five feet long which I furnished with a candle, blankets, and pillows stolen from visitors’ cars. At night, I collected the coins people threw in the huge courtyard fountain. It is so big, I had to dive to get the coins, and this served as my bath time, as well.

Food was no problem; there was a large dairy across the street. Those were the days when dairymen delivered milk, bread, eggs, and cheese to the door. Some days I would go ahead of the dairyman, at four or five in the morning, and collect the money from milk bottles. Other times I went after the dairyman had made his deliveries and collected the milk, eggs, and cheese.

I learned very quickly how to eat raw eggs. You poke a hole in the end of the egg with a nail, put the egg to your mouth, poke a hole in the other end, and suck hard.

At the age of ten, after spending two years at St. John’s Training School, I hit the front page of the Toronto newspaper for the first of many times. The authorities caught me selling cigarettes on a street corner after stealing a station wagon from behind a drugstore. The vehicle was loaded with cartons of cigarettes. The newspapers made a big thing of it: ‘Ten-year-old living beneath the porch of an empty mansion on St. George Street [one of the most prestigious streets in Toronto] hot-wires and steals car.’

The house was near the university and the Royal Museum where I spent so much of my time. Beneath its porch, I had pillows and blankets and a lot of other loot I had acquired, including an expensive bust I removed from the Royal Museum without setting off the alarm system.
I also had the stolen cigarettes. Inside each package were two brand new pennies. I think the packages were destined for vending machines and the pennies were probably the change due the buyer. Anyway, I sold the cigarettes on the street for ten cents a package and used the brand new pennies to buy pop and chips. Eventually, a store proprietor figured it all out and phoned the police.

Zap! I was caught.

Making the front page of the Toronto Telegram caused St. John’s Training School a good deal of embarrassment. Once again, I had escaped. Once again, they hadn’t been able to control this little, undersized, ten-year-old kid. As the police drove me back to the school, I knew I would have to face the head of my barracks, the Brother with his infamous form of punishment. Only this time, I knew the punishment would be much more severe.

When we arrived at St. John’s, they removed my handcuffs and I got out of the paddy wagon. Every other time, we went directly inside to see the head of the barracks. He and the authorities would hold this little court session and I would be sent off to solitary confinement. This time they put me in a little side room to wait.

It was all the opportunity I needed.

The moment the door closed, I crawled out the window and headed for the stable where the cows and horses were housed and the harnesses and garden tools were kept. How many times had I been sent there to clean out the manure? Enough to be very familiar with the stable and its contents. I knew exactly what I was looking for.

I quickly grabbed a big pitchfork and tried to break off a tine. For a ten-year-old weighing all of seventy pounds, this was no easy task. I eventually wedged the handle of the fork into a crack in one of the stalls and pushed on the tine with all my might. When it snapped, there was nothing bracing me and I fell forward, cutting myself on the broken metal. It caused a deep gash across the base of my thumb that laid the palm of my right hand wide open. The wound began to bleed profusely.

I ran up to my sleeping cubicle in the barracks, tore a strip off my flannel pajamas and wrapped it around my hand. Strangely, the barracks was empty at the time; the other boys must have been working or in school.

The rough bandage was soon slippery with blood, but I didn’t care. Nor did I notice the pain. I had a job to do.

The Brother who liked to beat me with his sawed-off goalie stick was in his office. He was a big man, about six-and-a-half feet tall, not particularly fat, but raw-boned and very strong.

I didn’t stop to think about what he would surely do to me. Taking a deep breath, I opened the door and before the Christian Brother could rise from his chair, I rushed across the room and buried six inches of the broken pitchfork tine in his belly.

After having my jaw broken in chapel, I flatly refused to attend services anymore. I spent more time in solitary confinement for that than most kids did for getting into more serious trouble.

Every Sunday the Brothers would say, “You’re going to chapel.”

I would say, “No. You people hurt me while I was in chapel, so I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of seeing me go back. I don’t care what it costs me.”

They would try to force me, I would kick and scream, and they would throw me into solitary confinement again.

That stubborn streak in my makeup definitely made life more painful for me at St. John’s, and at times it could have been perceived as cutting off my nose to spite my face, but in the long run I believe it allowed me to survive. It built a streak of stubbornness in me that just would not bend. And certainly, in St. John’s Training School, it kept me from being a victim of sexual abuse.

Later on, in the adult corrections system, that same unbending stubbornness made guards and convicts terrified of me. Many times people much bigger and tougher avoided messing with me because they knew how stubborn I was. They knew if they came at me, they had better be prepared to kill me. You either left me alone, or you went the full mile with me, something that saved me a lot of abuse and quite possibly, even my life.

I was lucky. I did not get raped at St. John’s Training School, but I certainly heard the cries in the night of those who did. It wasn’t only the staff who did the abusing. The older students did it, too—the ones the Christian Brothers used as bully boys to intimidate and control the younger ones and recruit them for sex. I think the reason I avoided the sexual abuse was because they thought I was crazy. I fought anyone who came near me.

There was one Brother at this place who had a special form of punishment for me because I was something of a thorn in his flesh. He was a big man, the Head Brother in charge of my barracks, the man directly in charge of me. Every time I escaped, he had the Administration’s wrath coming down on him because he couldn’t manage this eight-, nine-, ten-year-old kid.

I don’t remember his name, maybe because I ran away so often that I was out of St. John’s as much as I was in. Or maybe because the whole trauma associated with the place made my memory blank out names and even faces. They all wore the black cassock, and even now they all blur together in my mind into a common image of a big, black, evil raven. Many years after being in the training school, I talked with a friend, who was severely abused at St. John’s, about our experiences there. It was this friend who told me the names of the Brothers, including the one who liked to beat me with a sawed-off goalie stick.

I wasn’t the only boy who received this special kind of punishment from him, but it seemed that I received it more than anyone else during my time there.

He would begin by stripping me naked in front of the other boys. As a child, especially an underdeveloped male child with no body hair, there is nothing more humiliating than being stripped naked in front of your peers and prevented from covering your private parts. I couldn’t do that because my hands were otherwise occupied holding two buckets of sand.

I would be instructed to hold the buckets at arm’s length straight out from my sides at shoulder level. The Brother stood behind me with a sawed-off hockey goalie stick from which he had removed the blade and drilled a series of holes through the wide paddle part.

Keep in mind, this was still the era in which the strap was given as punishment, even in adult prison. The strap they used there was made of leather, generally one inch thick and six inches wide with holes drilled through it. The strap was administered across the buttocks. In reformatory, there was a structure something like a forward leaning crucifix to which you were tied with your pants pulled down. The guards
would shuffle their feet so you couldn’t hear the sound of the strap coming. They applied it two-handed. It was probably from this form of punishment that the Brother got his idea for the wooden paddle.

The deal with the pails was if you couldn’t hold them at shoulder height for the prescribed length of time, you got beaten with the hockey stick. The time really wasn’t a factor, because no matter how hard you tried, you could never beat the clock. The Brother was the only one with a watch, and he set the time limit.

I would stand there knowing what was coming, and pretty soon a sweat would break out. The perspiration would start running down my back and tickle as it went down. My arms began to tremble and a terrible burning developed in my shoulders. Eventually, my arms would droop past the arbitrary level. Only he knew what that level was, and I couldn’t look to see how far my arms were drooping because I had learned from experience that I could keep my arms up longer if I braced my back, kept my head up, and my neck stiff.

All of a sudden, I would hear the whistle of the hockey stick paddle as it whipped through the air behind me. The whistle was made by air rushing through the holes. I would brace myself as he hit me across the buttocks and the back of the legs, knocking me to my knees.
I immediately got back up again because if I didn’t, I could expect even harder blows across my back and shoulders.

Usually the routine was repeated at least three times until the Time Game, as he called it, was over. That happened when his arm got tired or I collapsed and was unable to get up again.

The drilled holes in the hockey stick pulled like little suction cups causing blood blisters across my back and buttocks. I still carry the scars from those blood blisters, but the biggest scars I received came from his mouth. He called me Squaw, Garbage, Loser, Bastard, and many other derogatory names, and every time this so-called representative of God scarred me with his mouth, it went deep into my soul. The more he called me bad, the more I acted out. He would ‘punish’ me and I would await my chance to go-boy3 again.

I ran away often, and each time it became more difficult for the police to find me because as time went on, I discovered different areas of the city in which to hide.

One of my most interesting hideaways was a big wooden electrical spool in a railway shuttle yard at the top of Spadina Road where it curves at Dupont Street. The railway yard had a whole pile of these wooden spools, each one about four feet in diameter.

I spent one entire Saturday, when no one was at work, rearranging the spools to make a safe, secret hiding place for myself. I propped the spools and moved them around until I had a little rabbit warren of a maze for an entrance to the middle spool. I took out a slat so I could crawl into the innermost part. There I put blankets and pillows that I stole from unlocked cars, and a candle to keep me toasty warm. I hid there for about a month.

There was a bakery nearby on Dupont Street, and I ate from the dumpster behind it. You would be amazed at the quantity of discarded cakes, buns, and cupcakes that were deemed unfit for grocery store shelves.

I also stole vegetables from gardens and had my stretch of dumpsters behind restaurants on Upper Yonge Street. There I would find half eaten steaks, pork chops, and potatoes. My favorite restaurant was The Brown Derby.

On another occasion I spent a while somewhere on Yonge Street sleeping on the roof of a building that had a ceiling fan. It kicked out hot air and kept me nice and warm all night. I got to the roof by climbing the fire escape.

I also frequented the subway tunnels. In those days, the Toronto Subway closed at a certain hour. I would go down into the tunnels and come out around the Rosedale area where I discovered a wonderful wooden terrace that afforded a great place underneath to sleep.
I often made use of abandoned houses. Sometimes I would find them completely furnished, possibly belonging to an estate. One was in the West End of Toronto near where my mother had moved.

I thought I had died and gone to Heaven when they began building the new Toronto City Hall. It had a multi-level heated garage underneath with a multitude of cubbyholes where I could hide. All I needed was a couple of blankets under a stairwell and I was safe and warm.

I loved the Jewish Market (now known as Kensington Market) where you could get wonderful ethnic food in the days before stores began to sell such fare. The Market took up four streets. You could buy everything from dogs, live chickens, and rabbits to clothing and food.

I would crawl over the fence at three or four in the morning to steal food.

St. John’s Training School was an ugly place. That was my first impression as we drove through the big steel gates. It had a rural, farm- like setting, but there was nothing peaceful or pastoral about it. The compound consisted of several austere, brown brick buildings and a barn. Much of the complex was surrounded by a chain-link fence. The rest was farm property adjacent to a small town where many of the staff lived.

I was immediately taken to the office of the Head Brother in charge of my assigned dormitory. There I had my hair shaved off, was issued a suit of clothing (blue shirt and pants, both about six inches too long, and black tennis shoes), given a blanket roll, and pointed to my bed.
Having never been hit or screamed at by an adult male to this point in my life, St. John’s Training School came as a new and terrifying experience. I instinctively rebelled against this environment that placed so much emphasis on shouting, hitting, and beating.

The regimen of intimidation and brutality came not only from the Christian Brothers who ran the place, but from the older, tougher boys, as well. They were used by the Brothers to control the younger, smaller children. It was what the older boys had to do in order to survive themselves.

As a small eight year old boy, I was quickly earmarked for ‘special treatment,’ particularly when word got out that I was an Indian, the product of rape, and a bastard with no father.

The first bit of trouble happened the day I arrived at St. John’s. I was sitting at dinner that first evening and a boy leaned across the table and said, “You’re new here. You’re fish2. You’d better make sure you’re in the showers tonight after lights out.” He was informing me they expected me to give them sexual favors.

I looked back at him and said, “Or what?” “You just be there or we’ll give you the Blanket Treatment.” The Blanket Treatment meant they would sneak up on you while you were sleeping and either pull your blankets over you or throw another blanket over top of you, specifically over your head, and pin you down so you could not escape or fight back. Then they would beat you about the body with bars of soap concealed in socks. They wouldn’t kill you or incapacitate you because that would draw attention from the staff; the beating was meant to intimidate you and make you compliant.

Having grown up in Toronto’s Cabbagetown/Regent Park, I was used to taking care of myself. Every day I dealt with drunks in the gutter and drug addicts with needles in their arms. I saw my friends eating ketchup sandwiches because their fathers were on a drunken binge. Almost by osmosis, I had developed a different way of thinking about life, a way of conducting myself that put me in control. I had learned to be street-wise, and I knew from growing up in the Inner City that I could comply and became a victim, or I could attack. My strategy was to make them scared of me, make them think I was fearless, and that if they were going to interfere with me, they would have to pay a price.
That was the attitude I took that first day at St. John’s Training School, and it was the kind of action that would become a pattern for the next thirty-two years of my life.

I immediately went on the offensive. I reached across the table and stabbed the boy in the face with a fork.

Off to solitary confinement I went.

Solitary confinement at St. John’s Training School was a hallway with four or five rooms the size of broom closets on each side. I was stripped naked and thrown into one of these rooms. It was so small I couldn’t lie down straight; I had to curl myself around the corner. There was no window, no light. It was pitch black inside. The door was made of solid hardwood slats. The only furnishing was a plastic bucket for a toilet.

At night, the staff threw in a pillow and a blanket which they snatched away in the morning. I was given one glass of milk and a piece of toast in the morning, and later in the day I got a chunk of bean cake which was popular in all the juvenile correction institutions. They took all the leftover vegetables from meals, baked them in a pan, and cut the tough paste into squares. Bean cake had no taste whatsoever, and probably no nutritional value, either. But it did fill the stomach. Sometimes they gave me a cup of tea, as well.

I was kept in the nude in solitary confinement for seven days. This was meant to correct me. Of course, it only made me angrier.
The same day they let me out of solitary, I ran away. I don’t remember the circumstance, whether we were let out for recreation or if we were going from the dormitory to the school building. In any case, I turned left instead of right and made a bee-line out of the compound.
I was only eight, and I had no idea where I was going other than home to my mother. I may have been angry at her for not speaking out at the trial, but she was the only person I knew to run to.

It took me three days of walking and hitchhiking to make it back to Toronto. The first night I didn’t get very far. I think I slept in a barn or some type of out-building. When I got hungry, I would knock on a door somewhere along the way and tell the people I’d lost my bus ticket or my lunch money. “Could I please have an apple?” I’d say. No one refused a pathetic little eight-year-old.

Once I reached the outskirts of Toronto, I was in familiar territory and knew how to navigate. I caught a street car to Regent Park and home.
Had I been older, I would have realized that going back to The District was not a smart idea. The authorities had already been notified that I was a runaway from St. John’s Training School and they figured the first place I would go was to my mother’s. When I got there, the police were waiting for me. Within an hour, I was re-arrested and taken back to the St. John’s where I was punished again.

Thus began an odyssey of punishment, escape, and re-arrest. I probably ran away from St. John’s Training School twenty times in the next two years. On each occasion I would run to a different part of Toronto where it took the authorities longer and longer to find me. During those times, I became acquainted with the various street gangs in the city, and often made contact with relatives of boys I had
met in St. John’s. It has always been easy for me to interact with people and establish relationships, and I had quickly developed a group of friends at the Training School. I was never a bully, and until I got into heavy drug use, there wasn’t a bit of nastiness in my make-up. I was not a liar, and people seemed to gravitate to me, maybe because I instinctively championed the underdog, something that often got me into more trouble than championing myself.

Each time I ran away, the punishment when I returned to St. John’s was more severe.

Discipline at the training school was immediate and harsh. When I was nine years old, I had my jaw broken for speaking in chapel. Actually, I whispered to the boy next to me. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on the floor, bleeding from the mouth. A six-foot, two hundred-pound Christian Brother had smashed me in the face to quiet me.

For most of that day I floated in and out of consciousness until they eventually took me to a hospital and wired my jaw shut. After that, I was taken back to St. John’s where I was immediately put in solitary confinement.

I have often wondered how it was that I could be taken to a public hospital and treated for a broken jaw without anyone questioning how it happened. Obviously, the hospital staff saw nothing suspicious in the injury. I suppose, with Christian Brothers in charge of the children, the idea of abuse was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind. After all, teachers, social workers, and people from the town came to the Training School all the time. So did the police, especially when they were returning me to the school. No one seemed to notice or suspect that anything wrong was taking place.

Abuse was rampant, not only at St. John’s, but in other institutions like St. Joseph’s, a reform school in Ontario that, later on, was also at the heart of investigations into abuse by the Christian Brothers. Mt. Cashel in Newfoundland was yet another infamous institution run by the same order. Granville Training School for Young Women in the Cambridge area was run by civilians, but rape was prevalent there, too, including rape with broom handles. Like St. John’s Training School, the inevitable legacy for survivors was suicide, imprisonment, drug use, alcoholism, prostitution, and the like.

At noon on Friday, the boy said, “We’re going. Are you coming?” I said, “Yes.” In making that choice, I launched myself on a destructive path
that would result in years of untold pain and damage to myself and thousands of others.

We jumped on the streetcar and rode Uptown for some shoplifting. I was the lookout. The next thing I knew, the police were there and everybody was running. Being the youngest, with the shortest legs, I got caught. Everyone else got away.

I was arrested for truancy and taken to 311 Jarvis Street, the secure custody unit of the Juvenile Detention Centre.

I was eight years old, and I was terrified. And with good reason. This was the early 1950s, and under the Canadian Juvenile Delinquency Act, there were a number of punishable status offenses. They included having sex under sixteen, drinking under twenty-one, hanging around pool halls under eighteen, playing hookey from school, and being incorrigible, though I’m not exactly sure what ‘being incorrigible’ entailed.

It also needs to be said that in this era of the early Fifties, it was generally accepted that First Nations people were little more than savages and definitely inferior to the white population. It was during this time that Native children were ripped out of their cultures and placed in residential schools in an effort to assimilate them into ‘civilized’ society. In my case, the idea that a child had been created from the union of a First Nations woman and a Caucasian man was disgusting to many.

There was another strike against me. In the opinion of the courts, the politicians, and the social engineers of the day, if a male child from a single mother got into trouble, the child was obviously being improperly parented and must be taken away. If the single mother was poor, or of First Nations blood, there was an even greater stigma. If she was poor, she must be lazy. If she was single, it meant she was a tramp, a drinker, and definitely incapable of properly caring for a child. Therefore, it was the responsibility of the state and the government to intervene and protect the child from this incompetent parent.

The practice of the courts was to place the delinquent boy in a training or reform school for an undetermined length of time. Prior to the revamping of the Young Offenders Act, any young offender charged with a status offense was given an indefinite sentence, meaning the child could be kept in reform school from age seven until he was twenty-one. Only the chief jailer or director of the training school had the authority to make the decision regarding when the young person would be released. He could not appeal; he had no advocate. No lawyer spoke on his behalf. Basically, the law gave the jailer unlimited and unmitigated power over the child.

Since my mother was single, Aboriginal, and illiterate, we were placed in another category altogether.

Upon being arrested and taken to 311 Jarvis, I was locked in a secure room in the detention centre. My memories of the place are as clear and as painful as if it were yesterday.

The room had a concrete floor. Its furnishings were a steel bed, a table, and a concrete seat with a slab of wood on the top. The big steel doors were locked tight. There was a window with safety glass looking out on an inner courtyard where the kids were allowed to exercise. I saw some boys playing with a basketball, but I was not allowed outside because I had to appear in court on Monday.

I remember pounding, punching, smashing, kicking the door, screaming to be let out, but nobody came. Eventually, exhausted, terrified, and cried out, I fell asleep on the cold cement floor.

On Monday, they took me to court. For a little eight-year-old, the courtroom was an extremely frightening place. People in long, flowing black robes were running in every direction, and above everyone was the judge, also dressed in black, seated on a raised dais. He looked like a big black raven, and he scared the life out of me.

The only other person in the courtroom was my mother. She sat on the opposite side, but I was not allowed to go near her. She had a baseball bat, a ball, and a glove on her lap. I don’t know why; maybe she wanted to demonstrate to the court that she was a good parent. I kept looking at her and wondering what the heck she was doing with all that stuff.

I don’t remember much that was said that day, but several things will never leave my mind. One was hearing the authorities call my mother an ‘unfit mother.’ They called me a bastard and inferred that my 16 race and my mixed blood were somehow big factors in my delinquent behavior.

I remember being very angry at my mother because she didn’t speak up and defend herself. I was also angry that she didn’t tell them she was not an unfit mother. In retrospect, I realize she probably felt as powerless and as disadvantaged as I did, and thoroughly intimidated by the black-robed judge sitting on the pedestal.

The judge asked my mother if we were Protestant or Catholic. “Catholic,” she said. It was a simple and honest response, but a tragic one for me.

Being Catholic meant I was destined for St. John’s Training School for Boys.

Had my mother said we were Protestant, I would have been sent to Bowmanville Training School. Bowmanville was a tough and brutal place, but brutality and corporal punishment were what you could expect if you were deemed a juvenile delinquent. Obviously, you were a bad kid who needed a hard, firm hand.

St. John’s Training School was located near Uxbridge, Ontario, about an hour’s drive from Toronto. It was operated and staffed by the Toronto Christian Brothers, a branch of the Irish Province of Christian Brothers who had a long-standing tradition of administering harsh corporal punishment.

In the history of Ontario, St. John’s Training School became synonymous with violence, brutality, sexual abuse, rape, aggravated physical beatings, and assaults. It was probably the most violent training school in the entire country. Children were physically crippled at the hands of the Christian Brothers, and there are claims that some were killed. Incarceration there as a youth inevitably led to unrestrained drug abuse and suicide as young men grew into adulthood. I don’t know anyone who survived St. John’s Training School and was not horribly scarred for life by the experience.

Later on in my life, I would meet many former St. John’s students in prisons, penitentiaries, and drug circles where we sat around together and got high on heroin and crystal meth.

Allegations of widespread sexual abuse at St. John’s Training School during the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties surfaced in the 1980s. In 1990, the Ontario Provincial Police conducted a full-scale investigation and laid two hundred charges against thirty Christian Brothers. There
would have been more, but some of the Brothers had already died. Seven hundred former students came forward with claims of abuse, saying they were punched, kicked, clubbed, denigrated, groped, and sodomized during the years they spent at the school. Ninety-eight percent of the claims were determined to be legitimate.

One witness was sentenced to St. John’s for stealing four dollars worth of food from a grocery store because his father was gone and his mother was an alcoholic.

“I got four years in St. John’s for my crime,” he told the inquiry. “I ran after I was sexually molested by one of the priests. With hands tied to the front of the bed and my feet to the back and a pillow underneath to prevent damage to the spine, they beat me. We bear these scars on our hearts and will take them to our graves.”

Another testified, “I ran away eleven times. After the third time, I was beaten so badly they brought me to the infirmary and the Brother in charge there cried… I showed the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) the scars left by the blisters and cuts that took six weeks to heal from the infected wounds and they cried… But they wouldn’t charge him.

“I gave confession and told the priest about a Brother who sexually assaulted me and he came out of the confessional and took my hand and took me directly to the Brother and told him what I had confessed…. Then the priest sexually assaulted me.”

“I saw many young children beaten up and strapped,” reported yet another. “I saw Brother ——— wake up young children and take them to a room to sexually assault them. I saw children handcuffed to a pillar in the basement. They would be pushed and kicked. I saw Brother — —— use a pool table stick to hit children if they would not have anal sex with him. Children were given cold showers, then strapped. If I told any Brothers that another Brother tried to have sex with me, I would be strapped.”

This was St. John’s. This was where I was headed at the tender age of eight.

Cabbagetown was not a dangerous place—if you were a resident, but it was a rough neighborhood with cobblestone streets and tough Irish beat cops who knew everybody by name.

The row houses we lived in were interconnected by dirt tunnels that we kids dug through the adjoining basements. Using the tunnels, a person could go from one end of the street to the other without detection. The parents didn’t stop us from digging these tunnels, because if the police came to the door with an arrest warrant for the man of the house, it was very convenient for him to slip into the tunnels and disappear.

Outsiders were not appreciated in Cabbagetown. We didn’t steal from anyone else in The Projects, nor did we let anyone come in and steal from us. The police had learned from hard experience never to park on the street; they knew full well the Cabbagetown kids would be on the rooftops dropping stones and bricks on their patrol car.

It was a district that took care of its own. You knew every shopkeeper on the cobblestone street by name, and they knew you. Families purchased meal plans from restaurants. If you didn’t purchase your meal plan immediately after the welfare cheque came, chances were good that someone would drink the money away.

We had ice vendors who came with horse and cart to deliver big blocks of ice to the door for your icebox. We kids were always on hand to get a sliver of ice from the vendor to suck on.

This was also the era when vegetable people came to the door; milkmen delivered milk, eggs, and cheese; and knife-sharpeners came down the street with their big whet wheels. It wasn’t unusual to see men on the street with music boxes and monkeys, and itinerant photographers who would take your picture on a pony.

And then there were the Sheeney Men, Jewish men with long black coats, black hats, and curls, who came down the street with their horse- drawn wagons calling, “Rags and bones, rags and bones.” You could go to their wagons and trade things. Mothers with clothing their kids had outgrown could go out to the Sheeney Man and trade, maybe two shirts for one. The Sheeney Men had depots and yards where they took their wagonloads of merchandise at the end of the day.

Backyards often housed the family’s chickens and clotheslines strung with garments that flapped in the wind.

People sat on the front stoop in the evenings and paid attention to everybody else’s business. They conducted conversations with each other by yelling across the street. It was nothing to see an Irish mother beating her kid on the head with a broom. Nor was it unusual for that same Irish mother to beat me on the head with a broom.

Cabbagetown was the kind of place where a kid could walk into anyone’s home and sit down with them for dinner. I often did that because my mother worked two jobs, a day job and a night job as a dishwasher at a diner called Lou’s, where she eventually advanced to the position of waitress. The owner, Lou, had two sons, but I never met them because Lou wouldn’t think of bringing his family into a neighborhood as tough as ours.

I didn’t go to kindergarten. I went directly into Grade One at the age of six after the truant officer paid us a call. The visit frightened my mother deeply. She didn’t know I needed to be enrolled in school and thought she had done something terribly wrong.

After school, I would go to Lou’s and wait for my mother. I often had my supper there. I remember a waitress named Loretta who worked with my mother. Loretta chain-smoked and drank a lot, and had an apartment above the restaurant. She was a very nice lady and I used to stay with her when my mother was busy. I called her Auntie Loretta. Her husband was Marcel. He was a little guy. Both Loretta and Marcel were what I know today to be alcoholics.

Between Lou, Loretta, and Marcel, everybody had a piece of me, and there is no negativity attached to my memories from those days.
On Sunday afternoons, my mother would take me to a little store- front church, a Baptist inner-city mission under the bridge that spanned the Don River. They used to do puppet shows for us kids at the mission. The one I recall most clearly is the Jesus puppet.

The mission gave out sandwiches and soup, and on Sunday afternoons we would take a pot of something my mother had cooked up—maybe pork feet and shells—and deliver it to a couple of families on the street who were going through tough times. I was considered lucky in the neighborhood because I didn’t have a father. Many of my chums had fathers who were alcoholics or drug addicts. They took the welfare check or the grocery money and the kids went hungry. In my home, we always had food and the basic essentials.

I don’t remember having much of a relationship with my mother, nor do I recall her ever being affectionate. On the other hand, she was a good provider and a great cook. Our home was always clean and I had clean clothes to wear. My mother taught me proper hygiene and the habit of wearing clean clothes, and she also tried her best to teach me good morals.

My mother was neither a drinker nor a doper, and I was considered lucky in my neighborhood because my mother didn’t beat me. She yelled at me a lot and often pulled my ear. When she lost her temper, she would take a swing at me, not caring where her hand landed or if she had something in it at the time. I learned to be quick on my feet.

In spite of all that, my mother was not a mean-spirited woman. I think I frustrated her a lot. She was little more than a child herself, thrust into a confusing world of adult decisions and responsibilities.

I hardly ever saw my mother during the week. She went to work in the morning before I got up, and I was in bed and asleep when she came home. On Sundays, we spent the whole day together. It was during those times that my mother tried to teach me that I had value and worth. She encouraged me to believe I could be anything I wanted to be. She knew that as a ‘half-breed’ I would have a harder time in life than most. She taught me that I should always do the right thing.

Because I was left pretty much to my own devices, I became a solitary child, entertaining and caring for myself.

The street car was free for kids in those days, and my mother claims I was four when I began riding to Riversdale and the Don River. I do recall a lot of happy times swimming in the Don and roaming the streets. I also remember going to the park and talking to people there. Fortunately, we lived in an era when, by and large, people looked out for children.

My play included a good deal of reading, and I spent a lot of time reading books at the library. I don’t know when or how I learned to read—it certainly wasn’t from my mother—but I can’t remember a time when I could not read. I have a vivid recollection of eating a bowl of Cheerios and milk in the little house with the dirt yard and readingwhat was on the box. I also remember a little movie theatre and a second hand store or pawn shop that I used to visit. I was fearless, outgoing, gregarious, and extremely social. My friends’ parents loved me. Even when I was a teenage gang leader, they would say to their sons, “Why can’t you be like Serge?”

I hung out a lot with my friends’ families. One friend, Kenny, came from an Irish family with thirteen children. I would go to see Kenny and think nothing of sitting down with them for dinner. The food wasn’t as good as my mother’s, but in retrospect, I think I probably went more for the warmth, the family environment, and the company, than the food.

I had no family outside of my mother, though I do have a vague recollection of my grandmother, a big woman, coming to Toronto once and staying with us. I believe she came to the city for an eye operation. Grandmother couldn’t speak English and although I understood French, I didn’t speak the language so we couldn’t communicate. A strange little banty of a man came to get my grandmother. I presume he was my grandfather.

Memories of school are somewhat patchy. My only real recollection is getting the strap in Grade Two. I remember the nun being very angry because I kept pulling my hand away and she would hit herself on the leg with the strap.

My vivid memories begin when I was eight years old and probably in Grade Three. I made a bad choice that would affect me for the rest of my life: I played hookey from school.

I wasn’t the only one to skip school. There was a group of boys in the school who I thought were pretty cool. They were older than me, and I thought it would be great to be part of their gang. Since I knew one of the boys, I asked him if I could join.

“Sure,” he said, “you’re a pretty cool kid. But you have to do the things we do.”

I said, “Okay, what do you do?”

“Every Friday afternoon we skip school and go Uptown. We do a little shoplifting to get some money for the weekend.”

“Okay,” I said. “Are you in?” “Sure.”

Solely by my mother’s account, she was Cree and Micmac on her mother’s side and German and French on her father’s.
Her immediate family lived around coastal New Brunswick, but the larger family stretches out from the Micmac reserves on the east coast of New Brunswick all the way to the Crees in Northern Quebec.

My mother was born into a family with a lot of alcohol abuse. Because she was the only girl in a family of alcohol abusers and residential school survivors, for her own safety, her maternal grandmother took her away from her parental home and brought her up in the traditional Cree way.

I once saw a picture of this woman, my great-grandmother. She was probably in her nineties, raw-boned and leathery, a small little gal and as Indian as she could be, sitting in a rowboat smoking a corn cob pipe.

When my mother was thirteen, her grandmother died and she was forced to return to her parents’ home. Shortly afterward, she ran away. Being young and Aboriginal, she was sadly vulnerable to all sorts of difficulty and danger. She was raped and became pregnant with me.
It is interesting that my mother decided against going back to her family home to have her baby. Despite her tender age, she knew intuitively that if she went back home, the likelihood was strong her child would become enslaved in the lifestyle of alcoholism and abuse that prevailed there. So she stayed on her own as a runaway.

I was born in an abandoned building. As far as I can figure out, it

was a motel-type of building, perhaps a collection of seasonal cabins that people would have rented during the summer. Apparently the place had gone bankrupt and was now abandoned.

My mother lived in one of the cabins and scrounged for food. There must have been a lake nearby and ice fishing going on because my mother would go around and collect the fish that were discarded or left behind. At one point during the pregnancy, she got severe food poisoning from eating some of the discarded fish, and almost died. She suffered endless vomiting for days and feared she would lose her baby.

It appears there was another young First Nations woman, also pregnant, living in the room or cabin next door. When my mother went into labor, she began banging on the wall in a prearranged signal that she needed help. It was this girl who brought me into the world and cut the umbilical cord with a pair of scissors. They were like two babies having babes of their own.

I don’t know exactly where the abandoned building was, and I’m not certain of my exact date of birth because it was never registered with the government. In later life, I was able to track down my baptismal certificate from a Catholic church in New Brunswick. Going by the baptismal certificate, my best guess is I was born October 24 of either 1948 or 1949. I chose 1949.

I know very little about my mother’s early life other than the fact that she was very strong, very resourceful, and obviously had a will to survive. For a time after I was born, she worked as a housekeeper for a Lebanese family. She remembers them as being very nice people with a big family. My mother and I had living quarters in their house, and she saved all the money she made.

I couldn’t have been much more than a year old when my young teenage mother decided to take the money she had saved and migrate to Toronto. I don’t know what she was thinking, because Toronto was an English city and she spoke only Cree and French, and could neither read nor write. Perhaps she just wanted to be as far away as possible from her former life. Or was it the rumor of gold-paved streets that lured my mother to Toronto? It was generally believed that no matter where you came from, you were guaranteed to ‘make it’ in Toronto.

My earliest recollections centre around living in a rooming house on the corner of Sherbourne and Gerard, right next to George’s Spaghetti House. The rooming house was run by an Oriental family, and according to my mother, before I was five years old, I could speak French, Cree, and Chinese—but no English. We had a bed-sitting room that was basically one large room equipped with a two-burner hotplate.

Two memories of that time stand out. One is taping a tablespoon to a stick and leaning out a second floor window to scoop pigeon eggs from a nest below. Had I fallen out, I would probably have splattered like an egg myself. Don’t ask me what I did with the eggs.
The second memory is taking the doorknobs off all the apartment doors in the rooming house. Understandably, it caused a fair kafuffle in the building.

On one occasion, I apparently went out on my own for the whole day and came back naked with a little girl in tow. When my mother asked where my clothes were, I told her I had thrown them down the sewer. I clearly remember my punishment: being made to kneel in the corner on dried peas.

From the rooming house, we moved to a little house with a dirt yard. It was directly across the street from Sherbourne Park. I would go to the park and hang out at the library which also served as a community center and the armory. I remember climbing on a pair of big metal lions that guarded the entrance steps to the building, and seeing a lot of drunks and homeless people sleeping under the bushes in the park.

Our next move was to the fringes of Regent Park. This was ‘The Projects’—Canada’s experiment with the American-styled ‘Let’s-put- ’em-all-in-one-place’ agenda. Regent Park could only be described as a concrete jungle of four-storey, flat-roofed apartments with probably twenty suites to a building. Two dozen or so of these apartment blocks were squeezed together on five or six acres of land with only concrete between them—no trees, no flowers, no grass.

Because the land on which the development stood had formerly been a cabbage farm near the Don River at the east end of Toronto, the Regent Park area became known as Cabbagetown. The City purchased the farm when it needed a place to put its poor people.

Cabbagetown was where migrants and new immigrants came. It was where the docks and the waste processing facility were located. It was a smelly place with an almost Bowery-type of environment. Cabbagetown was a melting pot for Germans, Ukrainians, Scots, and Irish—predominantly white, with the odd black. There were few Orientals, no East Indians, and no Aboriginals.