Brian Beaucage
Brian Leslie Beaucage, better known as "Bo" Beaucage, was a Canadian gangster, outlaw biker and convicted criminal best known as one of the leaders of the 1971 Kingston Penitentiary riot. His plea bargain with the Crown in 1971 is one of the most controversial plea bargains in Canadian legal history.
Entry into crime
Beaucage was born in St. Catharines and grew up in London, Ontario. His parents were Leslie Beaucage and Margaret Beaucage. Beaucage came from a loving middle-class family, and was very close to his mother, who always paid to hire the best defense lawyers to represent him in his trials.Beaucage was first arrested at the age of 14 for the break and enter into a London house. As a young man, Beaucage accumulated a lengthy criminal record for various violent crimes starting in 1964 as he joined an outlaw biker gang. One policeman from the London police department, Don Andrews, said of Beaucage: "You always knew Brian wasn't going to die a natural death". A prison report described him as: "Beaucage is an intelligent person who resorts to assaultive, aggressive behavior without remorse or provocation. He is considered to be very manipulative and a potentially dangerous person".
The Kingston Penitentiary riot
Beaucage was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 8 years in prison on 8 February 1969 after killing a man in London. Initially sent to the Collins Bay Institution, he was reassigned to the Kingston Penitentiary after he attacked a prison guard with a sledgehammer. At Kingston Penitentiary, Beaucage was regarded as a "loner" and as one of the most violent prisoners. Roger Caron, a prisoner at Kingston penitentiary turned writer, described Beaucage along with Wayne Ford and Barrie MacKenzie as being "natural leaders". Caron also wrote that Ford, MacKenzie and Beaucage were the three most toughest prisoners at the Kingston Penitentiary who were "not to be fucked with" by the other prisoners. Caron wrote that most prisoners accepted abuse from the guards in order to be left alone, but that Beaucage was a "rebellious" prisoner who was constantly being sent to solitary confinement, clubbed with nightsticks and being bound with chains owing to his tendency to attack the prison guards.On 14 April 1971, a prison uprising organized by the prison barber, Billy Knight, began and six guards were taken hostage. Knight regarded the purpose of the uprising as improving conditions in Kingston Penitentiary, but Beaucage was more interested in using his newly acquired freedom to murder the "undesirables" such as the child killer and child molester prisoners who were kept in a separate wing, 1-D, for their own safety. Beaucage especially hated another prisoner, Brian Ensor. Ensor, whose nickname was "the Camel", was an immature child-like man of extremely low intelligence and a pedophile. Ensor was serving a life sentence imposed in 1962 for raping two young girls, both under the age of 10, following testimony at his trial from two psychiatrists that Ensor was unable to control his sexual urges against children and would rape again if released. Ensor was in marked fear of his life after the uprising began and Knight and MacKenzie forced him into a cell for his own protection. Knight who had a rather grandiose view of himself saw the prison riot as a protest that would force the government of Pierre Trudeau to change its policies towards prisoners and was against violence being inflicted on the "undesirables" held in the 1-D wing out of the fear of losing public support. Knight argued in a speech to the prisoners that he wanted the Canadian public to see the prisoners as men instead of "animals". Caron described Beaucage as: "Muscular and athletic, he seemed to operate on the principle that he either liked or disliked you according to your face. He obviously found Billy's profile entirely to his disliking and was itching for the opportunity to rearrange it".
Beaucage disliked Knight, but was assigned by him along with Ford and MacKenzie to serve as the inmate "police force" in charge of keeping order. One child molester prisoner had become the lover of a powerful prisoner, Harold St. Amour, and lived outside of 1-D wing. The man testified at Beaucage's 1971 trial that Beaucage had told him "you don't belong in the general population" and beat him bloody. When a prisoner, Dave Shepley started a fight with another prisoner, John McBride, Beaucage broke up the fight by shouting at Shepley "let the kid go!" Shepley suffered a broken jaw, was released to be treated, and chose to return to the Kingston penitentiary to be with his friends. Upon his return, Sheply aligned himself with Beaucage against Knight.
Knight called for a meeting where he used a megaphone to address the other prisoners about the status of his talks with the government. Beaucage was present in the front row of the meeting and made it his opposition to Knight's leadership by glaring angrily at him. As Knight stated that the talks were going well, Beaucage stormed up onto the stage, told Knight "you're full of shit!" and attacked him, leading to MacKenzie to restrain him. Beaucage screamed at MacKenzie "he's just so full of shit, gambling our lives away like that". Beaucage seized the megaphone and shouted to Knight "you've had it, you're through talking!" Beaucage then mentioned that the Solicitor-General, Jean-Pierre Goyer, had just given a speech saying he would not negotiate with Knight, which the prisoners were aware of by listening to their transistor radios. MacKenzie grabbed the megaphone back from Beaucage. The prisoners shouted "let Knight have his say", but it was clear from that point onwards that Knight was no longer the leader of the uprising. Caron described Beaucage and his followers as becoming more dangerous and unpredictable, and stated that Goyer's speech destroyed Knight's creditability with the other prisoners. Caron wrote in his 1985 memoir Bingo! The Horrifying Eyewitness Account of a Prison Riot: "What was building up inside the dome was a mass suicide pact orchestrated by the insane element". During the uprising, MacKenzie eclipsed Knight as the leader. MacKenzie feared Beaucage as one of the leaders who were intent upon escalating the uprising into a bloodbath and who would veto his plans for a "silent vote" to end the uprising. MacKenzie knew that Beaucage would insist upon an "open vote" and that most of the other prisoners would not oppose him. MacKenzie also knew that in an "open vote" that most prisoners would vote against surrendering out of the fear of appearing cowardly, but in a "silent vote" the surrender option would prevail as most of the prisoners were hungry, tired and terrified of being killed if the soldiers surrounding the prison stormed the penitentiary. After MacKenzie left to negotiate with the citizens committee formed to mediate the crisis, Shepley shouted "the fun is about to begin!" and led a gang into the 4-B wing where the hostages were held, but were blocked by Ford, a man whom none of the other prisoners wanted to fight. Sheply joined by Beaucage and others then turned their attention to the prisoners in the 1-D wing.
Beaucage organized a kangaroo court that sentenced 16 "undesirable" prisoners to death. The "master of the ceremonies" was Sheply who used a megaphone to ask the other prisoners "what shall we do gentleman?" and received such replies as "castrate them!" and "kill them!" Three prisoners who were the lovers of St. Amour tried to hide in his cell when Beaucage stormed in to take them to be tried by the kangaroo court. One of the three, Ron McCorkel, ran away and was chased by Beaucage who seized him. As Beaucage marched McCorkel for his "trial" under the dome, he was heard to say: "I've been waiting four and a half fucking years to get you". On 18 April 1971, the "undesirables" were tied to chairs, had their heads covered with bedsheets and with Beaucage shouting orders were beaten bloody by the other prisoners. Beaucage personally broke the noses of all 16 of the "undesirables". He encouraged the other prisoners who beat the condemned men with their fists, metal bars, hammers and anything else that would inflict pain, which caused the area under the dome to be socked in their pools of their blood. Beaucage used a narrow board with a protruding nail hammered through it to attack the "undesirables" tied into their chairs.
One of the prisoners tied in the circle and beaten bloody, Richard Moore, recalled that he was in intense pain and could barely see as too much of his own blood oozed over his eyes. At that point, his head was dosed in lacquer from the wood workshop while Shepley suggested that Moore be burned alive. Beaucage vetoed that suggestion under the grounds that Moore needed to be tortured more. Moore was not a child molester, but rather a 21-year old automobile thief who had been sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing a car in 1968, but had received six years in prison and was sent to Kingston penitentiary as a punishment after he escaped from Burwash prison. As Moore was a very attractive young man, many of the other prisoners at Kingston penitentiary had wanted to rape him, which led him to ask to being transferred to the 1-D wing for the "undesirables" for his own safety. Because Moore lived in the 1-D wing, he was widely assumed to be a child molester. One of Beaucage's friends, Robbie Robidoux, asked Moore how many ribs there were in the human body; when Moore replied that he did not know, Robidoux answered by saying that he did not know either and he was about to find out as he was going to break all of Moore's ribs. Robidoux then proceeded to use a metal bar to break all of Moore's ribs. Moore recalled that besides for the pain that it was almost impossible for him to breathe as his ribs were smashed in.
To the tune of blaring rock music, a child molester, Brian Ensor, was beaten very brutally and finally had his throat slashed with a homemade knife. Beaucage seemed to take a sadistic pleasure as Ensor screamed and sobered in pain under the shower of blows to his body while his hood was soaked in his blood. The next prisoner to be killed was Bertrand Robert, a man convicted of murdering his five children by slowly boiling them to death via his hot stove burner, who was beaten with metal pipes with the prisoners told him: "That's for boiling your kids". Although not a child molester, the coroner's report showed that all five of Robert's children had suffered extreme physical abuse which along with the sadistic method of killing his own children had made Robert one of the most hated men in Kingston Penitentiary. To put a stop to the impeding massacre as Beaucage was intent upon torturing and killing all of the "undesirables", MacKenzie, who had returned to the 4-B wing, agreed to release the hostages. MacKenzie spoke on the telephone with Ron Haggart, the crime correspondent of the Toronto Telegram newspaper who was serving on the citizens committee, and agreed to release the hostages at once in exchange for a promise that the prisoners would not be beaten by the prison guards. As Kingston Penitentiary was surrounded by the Ontario Provincial Police along with a detachment of the Canadian Army who were readied to storm the prison, the prisoners had no other choice, but to surrender after the release of the hostages.