The Avenging Angel
Yves Lavigne has risked everything - his
work, his life, even his friends - to get the inside story on
organized crime
By Alexandra Leggat
On March 24, 1985, the Hells Angels held a party in Sherbrooke, Quebec where they wiped out one of their own chapters. Killed their own brothers - shot them, wrapped them in sleeping bags and dumped them in the St. Lawrence Seaway. That's when Yves Lavigne became interested in a pack of so-called misunderstood mavericks that simply like to ride motorbikes. At the time, he was crime reporter for the Globe and Mail. He thought, "these were the guys that since the 60s have been telling us they love each other, they're brothers. They've been sucking each other's tongues in public." The question that came to his mind was, what happened to this brotherhood? It was the question that drove him and the more he looked into it, the more he realized "that the brotherhood had been supplanted by the almighty dollar."
That questioning led to Hell's Angels - Taking Care of Business,
his first of four books on, or related to, the notorious biker
gang. The process of writing that first book will always stay
with Lavigne. After signing his book contract and accumulating
an abundance of information on the Hells Angels, he locked the
doors, drew the blinds and pounded out the book in six weeks.
That's why, he says, it's so intense. He planned the book meticuously.
He drafted a style manual and wrote down what it was he hoped
to achieve and figured out how to achieve it. He recalls the night
he wrote the first paragraph for the first chapter, "Born
To be Wild" at one in the morning. It was the first thing
he had ever written for a book and he recalls the feeling as powerful
- tremendous.
Writing non-fiction and making it interesting isn't an easy task
even when you're dealing with colourful subjects. And Lavigne
believes that not enough attention is given to non-fiction writers
- to the art and craft of writing non-fiction. When I attempted
to contact him to do this article, I thought he wouldn't be interested.
I thought I'd have to go through myriads of red tape to be turned
down. I was shocked when he said he would love to do it because
I was the first person in the 13 years he's been writing these
books that actually wanted to talk about the writing of the books
instead of their infamous subject. And with the isolation and
scrutiny that he discovered comes with writing books of this nature,
I think he was happy to have the opportunity to simply sit back,
relax and have a nice long chat about writing.
***
Lavigne hadn't really been interested in biker gangs. As a child with an interest in motorcycles, he wasn't hypnotized by the biker myth. He didn't have aspirations of donning a black leather jacket with a grinning death's head on the back, drinking, screwing strippers, boarding a Harley Davidson and riding into the horizon on a lonesome highway with a gang of rebel outlaws. He wanted to be a writer.
When he was about two, he would scratch out stories in the windows.
He'd mumble stories as he scrawled illegibly into the frost on
the pane. Lavigne grew up in the French speaking community in
Timmins, Ontario and learned English from comic books and from
kids on the street. He studied at Lakehead University then Ottawa
University where he decided to major in psychology. "I was
in the master's program but I realized you had to be a real fruitcake
to be a psychologist. You really had to be nuts and I wasn't nuts."
From there he took a one-year journalism program at the University
of Western Ontario.
Throughout university he read intensively - the best way, he believes,
to learn how to write well. He read mostly poetry in the beginning,
as his workload was so heavy that he didn't have time to read
novels. "Reading one or two great poems before going to bed
gave you the same emotional and intellectual impact as a novel."
He accumulated a great collection of poetry by the time he left
university, consisting of favourites Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Yeats
and Eliot. He found the workload for the journalism program much
less taxing, so he had more time to catch up on his digestion
of novels - about three box loads by the year's end. That's when
he caught up on reading the likes of Steinbeck, Kerouac, Knut
Hamsun and Erskine Caldwell.
Ambitious from the start, he swore he wouldn't work in journalism
if he didn't get hired at the Globe and Mail. At Western, he managed
to get himself an interview in the last five minutes of the day
the Globe was recruiting with then-editor Clark Davey. When he
walked into the office, Davey asked Lavigne to excuse him for
a minute, he had to call the police. His son had been arrested
on marijuana charges the night before, "I thought, all right,
here's a story already."
He was about to embark
on a writing career at the Globe, but not writing what he truly
wanted to, which was literature. "The great destructive power
of journalism is you get to write something everyday, you see
your name in print everyday and you delude yourself into thinking
you're really writing - when you're not." He says there isn't
really an art to writing journalism, it's a craft, one with many
different shades. And if you recognize that you won't delude yourself.
On the positive side, he says what journalism does give you is the ability to think quickly and work to deadline. It gives you the opportunity to research and to learn what's going on in the world. And you work on a variety of assignments, which he certainly did as a young journalist. He was the parliamentary correspondent in Ottawa from 1979 to 1982, which brought him to Toronto frequently, where he would report on stories happening there. In 1986 he was made crime reporter. One of the first things he did was expose the coming to Canada of the Chinese Triad, who were moving billions of dollars out of Hong Kong into Canada and setting up their empires here. After the story appeared, the Globe came under pressure from activist groups and the Triads themselves and they took Lavigne off the crime beat....
Alexandra Leggat is the managing editor of Write magazine.
Read the full text of this article in our Winter 2001 issue.