Unrepentant by Peter Edwards

Author:Peter Edwards [Edwards, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36258-2
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2013-04-30T04:00:00+00:00

When Campbell arrived in Collins Bay, some guards there still chuckled about a story from Guindon’s boxing days back in the 1970s, when two guards from the prison took him to Windsor for a bout. After Guindon won his fight, they all retired to a party at the Choice clubhouse. “I wanted to get a broad down there,” Guindon recalls. “I said to them, ‘I’ll get you one too.’ ” The guards thought this was a fine idea. “We partied at the clubhouse on a pass,” Guindon says. When it was done, the guards were so partied out and exhausted that it was Guindon who drove them all back to Kingston.

Guindon took it upon himself to train Campbell. He told Campbell that hard abs were the key to protecting his kidneys from body blows. To toughen his core, Guindon coached Campbell to do plenty of hard calisthenics, including the tough core work the Cubans had so impressed him with back at the 1971 Pan Am Games. Then there was twenty minutes of skipping and a 6½-mile run. Guindon sometimes tried to spice things up during workouts. Once, he kicked Campbell hard when he was doing push-ups, just because he felt the urge. “Everybody backed away. They thought it was a fight. I couldn’t stop laughing.” Another time, Guindon smacked Campbell across the stomach with a board while he was doing leg raises. “I had him in the best shape of his life,” Guindon says.

Campbell paid the experience forward, pushing a fellow Collins Bay resident, career thug and former pro boxer Joe Dinardo (a.k.a. Gabor Magaostovics and Joe Simon), to get back in shape. Dinardo was in his early forties and had packed on about twenty pounds since the 1960s, when he boxed under the nickname “Ironman” and enjoyed moderate success as a heavyweight out of Toronto’s Lansdowne Athletic Club. He was described in the press during his ring days as “211 pounds, 6-foot-4 inches, wedge-shaped from shoulders to waist.” His trainer, Vince Bagnato, was quoted as saying, “We’re teaching him to keep his hands in his pockets when he doesn’t have them in someone’s kisser.”

Dinardo was in prison this time for the robbery of a jewellery store in Toronto’s swanky Yorkville neighbourhood, but his criminal record also included stretches for arson, forgery, assault, theft and weapons offences. His body bore the scars of an arson gone wrong, when he had to drive himself to hospital for treatment of burns. In the murder trial of Peter Demeter, a Mississauga millionaire developer, Dinardo told the court that in July 1973, Demeter’s wife, Christina, a former model, offered him ten thousand dollars to kill her husband. A week after she allegedly made the offer, she was found in the garage of their home, bludgeoned to death with a crowbar.

It was part of prison lore how, back in the 1970s, Dinardo and Ken Goobie of the Choice had a bare-knuckle brawl worthy of John L. Sullivan. Perhaps they were angry at each other, or

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