A biker looks back
Frank Lenti killed a Hells Angel and outlaw life won’t let him go
Biker Frank “Cisco” Lenti says he’s not looking over his shoulder or losing any sleep even though police still haven’t caught whoever appeared on his Vaughan driveway two winters ago and fired a bullet at his head.
“He was aiming right at my face,” Lenti, 71, said in an exclusive interview at a York Region café. “He grazed my collar.” Lenti sounded upbeat as he discussed the latest attempt on his life, his onagain, off-again, on-again relationship with the Hells Angels, prison life, local mobsters he has known and the dangers of eating too many eggs.
Times have changed for the longtime biker, who’s looking back on an outlaw life that won’t let him go quite yet.
Ten years ago, Lenti was adjusting to prison life after killing a Hells Angel.
He was also upset his association with outlaw biker clubs had kept his son from the military.
Now, Lenti can finally see the day when he leaves the biker club life behind — although he can’t imagine ever parting with his all-black, 1999 Harley Road King with a sidecar.
“I’m going to retire soon,” he says — but he’ll only leave his current club, the Loners, when he wants to, not because he’s scared.
He said he didn’t recognize the 20-something would-be hitman in a heavy green coat, whose gun jammed after the first shot on Dec. 20, 2016.
Lenti said he swore loudly and made a move, as to reach for a gun. The hooded attacker appeared to panic and sprinted away, he says.
“He was running like a robot. I can’t run.”
Lenti says he’s more worried nowadays about a slip on the ice than a return of the would-be killer, who he suspects was hired by an associate.
“The day I worry about bad guys is the day I f---ing kill myself,” he says.
The attack wasn’t the first — or second — time there has been an attempt on his life.
“You can’t ever let your guard down,” he says.
Lenti has walked with a cane since he survived a 1995 car bombing outside his former Woodbridge home, across the street from a primary school and half a block from his old Loners Motorcycle Club clubhouse.
No arrest was ever made for that attack — which left him a bit wary about icy sidewalks.
“I didn’t want to slip and hurt my f---ing hip,” Lenti says.
He said he doesn’t suspect the Hells Angels were behind that recent murder bid, even though he has had numerous run-ins with them during his stints with the Loners, Satan’s Choice, Bandidos, Diablos and Outlaws motorcycle clubs.
He says the recent murder attempt wasn’t the style of the Hells Angels. “I’m positive,” he says. “Usually they come in pairs.” He said he hasn’t had any problems with local Hells Angels since he got out of prison in 2014 on parole after serving six years of a 10-year manslaughter sentence.
He pleaded guilty to killing David “Dred” Buchanan, a high-ranking member of the West Toronto Hells Angels, at a strip club near Hwy. 7 and Jane St. after midnight on Dec. 2, 2006.
Lenti, who’s no longer on parole, also pleaded guilty to aggravated assault for shooting Carlo Verrilli and Dana “Boomer” Carnegie, both also connected to the West Toronto Hells Angels.
It was kill-or-be-killed, Lenti says, when Buchanan became the first Ontario Hells Angel member slain since the club moved into Ontario in 2000.
At Lenti’s trial, court heard the Hells Angels decided to murder him, leave his body on public display after he spurned their offer to quit the rival Bandidos and join them at a June 2006 meeting.
Three members of the Hells Angels were assigned to carry out the slaying, according to the agreed statement of fact. “Lenti couldn’t just disappear; he had to be found to prove a point,” the agreed statement said.
On the morning of the shootings, Buchanan yelled at Lenti about the Bandidos, and then struck him in the face, giving him a black eye, according to the agreed statement.
Seconds later, Lenti drew a handgun from his belt and opened fire on the bikers.
A security video recorded him firing seven shots in six seconds.
“I could have killed them all, but I didn’t,” he says.
While serving time in Millhaven and Warkworth penitentiaries, Lenti said he peacefully co-existed with Hells Angels.
“I talked to a few. We became good friends, actually.”
He said he also made other friends while playing in a drum circle with Indigenous inmates.
“I had my own little crew in there — lifers.”
Lenti said he also got along well with Hells Angels in Europe, after he bolted for Italy in 1982, when his old Satan’s Choice clubmate Cecil Kirby became a police witness and testified against York Region mobsters.
“Me and Kirby used to be together a lot. When he started singing I said, ‘I’d better go take a tour.’ ”
He said he has often bumped shoulders with the Mob in southern Ontario, but never wanted to actually join. “Everyone was my friend.” He says Hamilton mobster Domenic Musitano, who died in 1995, used to give him free auto parts from his scrapyard and pastries from his bakery.
And Montreal Mob boss Vito Rizzuto, who died in 2013, used to occasionally drop by the strip club where Lenti worked, he says.
Rizzuto supporter Juan Ramon “Raymond” Fernandez once tried to recruit Lenti into his crew when he pushed into the Toronto area from Montreal in the 1990s, Lenti says.
“He said, ‘From now on you’re with me.’ I said, ‘I’m a biker. If I wanted to be a mafioso I would have been one long ago.’ ” “We just stayed friends.” Fernandez, 56, was murdered in Sicily in 2013, alongside Mississauga man Fernando Pimentel, 36.
Lenti says he thinks he has sorted things out — verbally — with the man he suspects of sending the gunman to his door.
He jokes that his friends sometime warn him about the dangers of cholesterol, since he starts each day with six scrambled eggs in olive oil, with salt, pepper and no cheese.
He used to have the big egg breakfast in prison, he says — “I was like The Egg Man there. I knew the guys in the kitchen.”
Lenti wore a black nylon jacket with the word “Criminal” on the left chest area to the interview. He says it was a gift from American Hells Angels years ago. “I don’t like wearing leather no more. You look like a hoodlum.”
“You can’t ever let your guard down.” FRANK “CISCO” LENTI BIKER WITH THE LONERS MOTORCYCLE CLUB