Tales from monitoring hardened Hamilton criminals

The man with close-cropped grey hair and beard poses for a photo outside an old crack house on Hamilton's mean streets.

He lives in a place called Pleasant Valley in Dundas.

Out west long ago, just shy of his 18th birthday, he lay in a hospital bed and took stock of what to do with his life.

Crime was one option, Lorne Landry thought.

On a dark and rainy prairie night, he had let his friend drive his father's 1962 Beaumont station wagon and they ended up flipped in a ditch.

Landry was hurt the worst of the seven in the car, fracturing a vertebrae and carving up his chin.

He had teenage friends who did jail time. One of them had stabbed his own stepfather to death.

And Landry had a reputation with local cops in hardscrabble Manor, Sask., a little town one hour from the U.S. border at North Dakota.

He had been in his share of fights, going back to when he was a young boy taking a bare-knuckled approach dealing with bullies mocking his speech impediment.

When Landry was 14 or 15, police had scooped up the bad seed and drove 20 kilometres out of town, trying to shake him down into confessing to blowing up a safe at the credit union. Failing that, they made Landry walk home.

Soon after Landry got out of the hospital, his dad returned home one night from a bar and went off on his son's goddamn hippie hair, ordered his mom to get the clippers, and when the son talked back, beat him. And not for the first time.

But this time Landry stood, looked his dad in the eye, his bandaged chin defiant.

It was like: Is that the best you can do?'" Landry says in a coffee shop on Main Street West, his eyes narrowing, channelling the cold stare from the standoff 51 years ago.

Landry, who has lived in Dundas 32 years with his wife, Sophie, is an aspiring novelist who has finished his first manuscript.

The story is a mystery set in Minnesota and Wyoming, but Landry's life seems the stuff of novels, too.

That crossroads he faced laid-up in hospital? He ended up choosing a career in crime - but on the other side of the line.

And that included supervising some of the most infamous figures from Hamilton's underworld as a federal parole officer.

Landry left home at 18 for Winnipeg, where he worked as a restaurant manager, insurance repo man, and delivered milk in winter when he had to scrape coins left frozen on doorsteps at 4 a.m.: Most horrendous job I ever had. And people would stiff you for the $1.25 they owed."

He attended university two years but couldn't afford to continue, and in 1975 landed work as a corrections officer in a federal pen north of the city.

Landry's easygoing nature and handlebar moustache got him the incongruous prison nickname Pussy Cat." He worked as a plainclothes officer among convicts, and also an armed guard, a mind-numbing task during which he would pass time counting droplets from a leaky faucet in earshot.

He moved to Halifax, ultimately working as a parole officer (PO). A PO supervises inmates released with conditions into the community.

Landry cut a path as maverick. Most POs were jacket-and-tie, 9-to-5 types, but he worked late, wore jeans and sported a ponytail driving a beater 1978 Ford Fairmont, all the better to blend in on the streets checking up on parolees and connect with them.

His pattern was going the extra mile.

One (parolee), he was the laziest, I would pound on his door at 8 a.m., drag him out of bed to get him dressed and drive to a job site. I'd shove him out of the car and tell him: Go say you want a job.'"

Landry ended up in Hamilton with Sheila, who built a career as a librarian; they fell in love back when she too was a corrections officer in Saskatchewan.

Over the years, people would ask, Where did you guys meet,' and we'd both say, in prison.'"

In Hamilton in the mid-1990s, Landry supervised Mob hitmen and every other stripe of paroled felon, including Ion Johnny K-9" Croitoru, Johnny The Greek" Chrisanthopoulos, and Billy Rankin; the latter was convicted for conspiracy to commit murder in the Domenic Racco Mob hit.

He checked on parolees in seedy motels, careful to never stand directly in front of the door when knocking, in case someone inside was primed to shoot the wrong guy.

He rousted ex-cons for required urinalysis drug tests, and tracked them down if they blew town in violation of probation conditions, all in an effort to keep them from returning to jail.

He once carried a semi-comatose, 200-pound Rankin from a crack house that reeked of burnt plastic and cat urine, and checked him into detox.

By the time Landry retired, he says he had 47 cases on the go in Hamilton, far more than any PO in his office, but issues with management shortened his career.

In 1995, he was assigned the case of Mob muscle" Ken Murdock, who was on parole for robbery, two years before he would murder Johnny Papalia.

The PO arrived at a city halfway house to introduce himself. Murdock strolled into the waiting area, sat across from Landry and stared at him wordlessly.

Landry, a fraction of Murdock's size, but with a tough aura of his own, stared right back.

This went on for, had to be almost half an hour and neither one us cracked," Landry says, laughing. Finally Kenny stands up and says I don't know about you, but I need some sleep.' And as he walks out he says, You're all right, kid' and pats me on the shoulder."

Landry taught a police foundations/corrections course at Sheridan College, and invited Murdock as a guest speaker. Murdock looked huge, dressed to the nines in a suit and decorative glasses; Landry, as usual, scruffy in his jeans.

He laughs recalling how a student who didn't know either of the two men figured Landry for the ex-con. He was like, That guy must be a real bad ass, look at the size of the cop they brought in to watch him.'"

Retirement for Landry has meant travelling to 35 countries, and counting, on his bucket list, and taking long solo road trips.

He has been writing for years, and does his best work while flying. He fell in love with reading as a boy, ordering 10 books at a time from the Regina library two hours from his home.

He says he has no regrets, other than the blurred tattoo on his forearm: a tribute to a girl he was briefly married to at 18.

Moments from his parole officer career linger. One day, he was assigned to pick up a parolee who was considered a hard case from the train station. The guy seemed agitated, hostile. Landry knew there was something going on. Instead of delivering him to the halfway house, he took a detour. They talked in a park.

He had watched his best buddy get killed, stabbed to death, in the institution," he says. He had been in his cell at the time and couldn't get out to help."

The battle hardened old PO tears up telling the story. He grew up like some of those guys.

He's shopping around his novel manuscript. The title is Fireworks," and it's about two men tracking down a stolen car; narcoterrorists figure into the tale as does the rifle fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.

He has read that, for every 100 query letters you send publishers you receive maybe 15 to 20 expressions of interest, and from those - perhaps - one acceptance.

He is ready for the long game.

Landry knows of winding roads, and never selling anyone short, including yourself.

Jon Wells is a feature writer at The Spectator. jwells@thespec.com