Biker may have paid high price for generosity
Vagabonds member slain after giving away drugs belonging to Hells Angels
Donald Isaac (Snorko) Melanson of the Vagabonds Motorcycle Club was generous to a fault.
The GTA biker couldn’t stop himself from giving out large amounts of Colombian cocaine he was getting from the Hells Angels in Montreal.
“He used to give to everyone, but he didn’t remember who he gave it to,” his old friend and fellow Toronto cocaine trafficker Saul S. said in an interview. “He used to give a kilo, half a kilo.”
Snorko also enthusiastically consumed much of the drug himself. No one seemed to snorkel up the white powder like Snorko. “He used to make lines about two feet long,” Saul S. said. “What a big nose he had. He was like a vacuum cleaner.”
(Saul S. spoke with The Star several years ago under the agreement his last name not be used. He later moved out of Toronto, took an assumed name and disappeared into a witness protection program after working with police against several high-level drug traffickers tied to the Medellin cartel in an operation in the late 1980s called “Project Amigo.”)
Snorko gave out the cocaine that arrived from Montreal on the understanding that his party friends would pay him back and he would be able to repay the out-of-town Hells Angels.
“They never paid him back,” Saul S. recalled sadly.
And that was that.
Soon, Snorko was a marked man. It wasn’t as if the Quebec bikers hated him — nobody seemed to hate Snorko.
He was a likeable man, in a rough sort of way. The Quebec bikers even hoped to make him and his 50 fellow Toronto members of the Vagabonds into Hells Angels members someday.
The Vagabonds were a popular bunch in biker circles with a long-standing reputation for throwing memorable parties.
Their clubhouse on Gerrard Street East near Woodbine Avenue was routinely decorated at Christmastime with a mural of a Reindeer riding a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and the greeting, “Harley New Year.”
Their annual Christmas party was a must-attend bash in the biker world. In 1967, it made coast-to-coast news when 27 people connected to the club were involved in an extended brawl with police, that sent five police officers and four Vagabonds — including their Santa Claus — to jail.
While the Hells Angels liked Snorko, they liked their money even more.
Besides, it sent out a bad message to others when somebody didn’t pay his bills.
There were a few meetings between the Angels and Snorko and Saul S., in Toronto strip clubs and a posh restaurant.
“They sent the top men from Montreal and the top men from Ontario,” Saul S. said.
In those meetings, Snorko looked every inch a biker, with his burly build, wild beard, leather jacket and jeans.
The out-of-towners, especially a tall, skinny one who did most of the talking, looked more like businessmen dressed Friday casual.
Despite the difference in appearance, it was clear that rough-looking Snorko was the nervous one.
He was due to be sentenced shortly on drug charges and the Quebecers wanted their money before he went behind bars.
Snorko had already lost some power, having recently given up his presidency of the Vagabonds in anticipation of his time in custody.
“It started to get hot,” Saul S. said. “Snorko didn’t have the money to pay.”
It was a dangerous time to be one of Snorko’s friends and Saul S. took a holiday in Tampa to escape the heat. “I didn’t want to be in the middle of that mess,” he said.
Snorko and Saul S. had a little chat just before Saul left town.
“He told me: ‘I don’t know whether when you get back, if I’ll be alive.’ It’s the last thing he said to me.”
Snorko got $50,000 by remortgaging his Thornhill house and scraped together another $20,000 or so.
He at least had something to pass on to the Quebecers.
He drove his white 1986 Thunderbird to the Novotel hotel on Yonge Street near Sheppard Avenue for a meeting in an 18thfloor room on the night of Wednesday, Sept. 2, 1987.
The next afternoon, a cleaner found his lifeless body with two bullets to the head. He had just turned 40.
The money was gone.
So was the once brotherly relationship between the Hells Angels and Vagabonds.
There were some 200 HarleyDavidson motorcycle escorts for Snorko’s body from a Willowdale church down Steeles Avenue West to the cemetery.
His Harley-Davidson was strapped upright on a pickup truck at the head of the procession.
Bikers came from as far away as Dallas, Chicago, New Brunswick and Edmonton and they wore the colours of the Lobos, American Breed, Penetrators, Scorpions and Outlaws.
No Hells Angels were to be seen.
The killing remains officially unsolved, but Saul S. had no doubt it was someone connected to Quebec Hells Angels, who lured him to the hotel room.
“Who else would do it?” Saul S. asked. “He owed them a big chunk of money.”
On Dec. 29, 2000, there was a ceremony in Montreal in which hundreds of Ontario bikers were absorbed en masse into the Angels’ fold.
The Vagabonds were left out. Saul S. said Snorko was a simple man, who loved his big Harley-Davidson and whose big dream was to someday own a plumbing firm.
Saul S. wasn’t too impressed with Snorko’s old biker friends, who left Snorko high and dry when the Angels came calling to collect their debt.
“They all ripped him off. He was too generous.”
It was shortly after Snorko’s murder that Saul S. gave up on the underworld and became a police agent, working sting operations that netted dozens of traffickers in Project Amigo, Toronto’s biggest drug haul.
Unlike most of the GTA’s established outlaw biker clubs, the Vagabonds never were absorbed into the Hells Angels.