March 9, 2019
On a quiet residential street in St. John's, the chief of police fields questions from reporters about a drive-by shooting that went wrong.
It's May 2013. Robert Johnston, at the time the chief of Royal Newfoundland Constabulary, is describing a case of mistaken identity, in which an area of the family-friendly subdivision of Kenmount Terrace was sprayed with bullets.
According to Johnston, it was an act of retaliation between rival drug dealers.
The Dauntless Street shooting, in which hit two homes and a vehicle were hit with bullets, missed the intended target, Johnston revealed. The people who lived in the homes were innocent bystanders.
Johnston noted that an assault rifle was found on the street.
Gunshots rang out in the quiet neighbourhood around 11:45 p.m. on May 31, 2013. About 10 hours earlier, across the city, police were called to the scene of another serious crime.
Al Potter's home on Hamilton Avenue had been firebombed.
"Outlaw motorcycle gangs may be involved in these events. Persons interviewed through the course of this investigation to date indicate an association to the Hells Angels," Johnston told reporters at the time.
"One person interviewed said he was in the process of establishing a Hells Angels chapter in St. John's."
Three years later, driving on a long stretch of highway in Ontario, Al Potter was seated next to an undercover officer. The clandestine Mountie was tasked with getting a confession from Potter about Dale Porter's death.
During the drive, Potter began talking about those 2013 events in St. John's.
And what Potter told the police officer wasn't revealed until three years after that.
Previously unknown details about past crimes have spilled out in a trial that captured the public's attention this winter.
Potter, who was born in Ontario but had Newfoundland roots, was charged in September 2016 with the stabbing death two years earlier of Dale Porter, a fisherman from North River.
His trial began last month, and with it, hours upon hours of recorded conversations played in the court. Those conversations related to a narrative that stretches back years.
In order to make an arrest in the Dale Porter investigation, RCMP conducted an elaborate undercover operation as a way to gain Potter's trust and to learn information on a violent death that had been unsolved for more than two years.
During a long drive from Minden to Belmont, Ont., Potter struck up many conversations — including his enthusiasm for biker gangs — with the undercover officer. Potter was just out of jail, and was told the man was his new boss.
"I joined the Choice [Satan's Choice] almost 25 years ago, Oshawa chapter, right?" Potter explained, his voice growing higher at the end of each sentence.
"[I] went to prison, they patched over to Hells Angels."
Satan's Choice Motorcycle Club operated in Ontario and Quebec.
Potter was given the opportunity to come back, he said, and wear the Hells Angels colours.
He tried — and failed, he admitted, to stay away.
"I said, 'Listen, I just did a lengthy prison term. I want a ... time with myself, and to tell you the truth, I tried to live without it. OK, I found that I couldn't."
Potter then boasted that he disbanded the Bacchus, a so-called one per cent motorcycle club from New Brunswick, which he said had infiltrated downtown St. John's. [One per cent refers to the small fraction of motorcyle clubs that commit crimes.]
In doing so, Potter said he was fulfilling a promise he made to his former Satan's Choice allies who offered him access back into the biker fold.
"I got out of prison, I went downtown Toronto, had a meeting with the Toronto chapter. I said, 'OK, I'm going to make you guys a promise," Potter told the officer, the conversation picked up by the RCMP's hidden camera.
"I'm going to keep Newfoundland red and white."
"So now, St. John's belongs to the Vikings, instead of the Bacchus." — Al Potter
Red and white refers to the Hells Angels.
The day after the meeting, Potter said, he returned to St. John's and shut down the Bacchus operation. He didn't specify how.
In retaliation, he said, his home was firebombed.
"The next day my house was on fire, and I think you saw that on the Google," he said.
"[A] $120,000 Mercedes got melted into my driveway. $40,000 Harley got melted into the side, and the front of my house on fire."
No one was charged for either offence.
Enter the Vikings MC
From there, Potter tells the officer he decided to start his own club.
"I started a red and white chapter," he tells the officer. "Not a Hells Angels, not under the name Hells Angels but our vests are exactly the same as the Hells Angels."
Enter the Vikings Motorcycle Club, a group of mainly middle-aged men in downtown St. John's and Conception Bay North.
"It was a matter of fulfilling a need for a brotherhood," said Potter, who says he never had a "position" in the club but often offered advice on how to follow the rules of being a biker.
"Friends of mine started the motorcycle club and they asked me to join.”
For the next several years, Potter would become even more acquainted with the justice systems in Newfoundland and Ontario.
Potter was sent to trial 2015 for an alleged assault on a resident in a bedsitting room on Charlton Street in downtown St. John's on Sept. 25, 2014.
Three witnesses expressed concerns about testifying because of Potter's links to "biker gangs." Members of the Vikings Motorcycle Club religiously attended Potter's trial, taking up the back row of the courtroom.
He was later found not guilty after the victim failed to identity his attacker.
Potter is nothing if not ambitious.
That's something Newfoundland and Labrador Supreme Court Justice Garrett Handrigan noted in a court decision leading up to Potter's first-degree murder trial.
Potter expressed "aspirations," including plans to set up a Hells Angels-affiliated motorcycle club in central Newfoundland, the judge wrote.
It was never made clear how connected Potter and the Vikings Motorcycle Club ever were — or are — to the Hells Angels.
During a conversation between Potter and a police agent — someone who provides information to police in exchange for money — Potter expressed his anger at the media for drawing a line connecting him and the gang.
He feared he'd get beaten or face repercussions once he met members on the mainland for having his name and the Hells Angels mentioned in the media.
There were references in both recorded phone calls and testimony from the police agent that members of the Vikings were set to meet with the Hells Angels the September that Potter was arrested.
However, both police agents — former Vikings — described a club lax with the rules, where members drank and did drugs during club business, and at times, couldn't even pay the $30 membership fee.
Potter lamented his anger with the way the St. John's chapter was run, and told his so-called confidant of plans to open his own Vikings chapter in central Newfoundland.
He said he'd only recruit the cream of the crop, "Not a bunch of f--king yahoos who can't pay their $30 a month in f--king dues … riding f--king Honda 250s."
Outlaws MC
Potter explained to the undercover officer that the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, rivals of the Hells Angels, had two chapters in central Newfoundland.
He said the groups had the support of many in the community.
The RCMP said there are currently two Outlaws chapters operating in central — one in Bishop’s Falls and the other in Grand Falls-Windsor.
And there are two Bacchus chapters, with one in Conception Bay South and the other in Grand Falls-Windsor.
"You come out my dad's driveway, turn left for 30 miles, you're in an Outlaw chapter," Potter said.
"And there's me," he laughed, "flying my colours, big red and white cherry, right in the f--king middle of them!"
Potter has connections to the region. Though born in Ontario, Potter's father grew up on an island in Notre Dame Bay, and Potter spent a lot of time in Lewisporte.
Despite that element of criminality that appears ingrained in Potter's lifestyle, much of his conversation during the drive that September day was of a place he held dear.
"My family's wealthy, you see," Potter said.
He talked of Sampson's Island, a piece of picturesque land in Notre Dame Bay, that he said belonged to his father.
Island of Peace
Indeed, CBC TV's Land & Sea profiled Potter's father and his island in a 2011 episode titled "Island of Peace."
The episode depicted a serenity and calmness that's a far cry from the weapons, drugs and violence with which Potter is now affiliated.
At times sounding more like a tourism commercial narrator than biker club member, Potter makes his best pitch for his new boss to come visit.
He spoke fondly of his father, the patriarch of the family and head of Country Gate Homes, a development company based in Ontario.
“We developed a subdivision on St. Thomas Line," Potter told the court when he took the stand in his own defence.
He said he signed off his 50-per-cent share in the business to his only sister.
He wanted to open a Vikings chapter in central Newfoundland that would bring him closer to that piece of paradise.
The plan, he told the undercover officer, was to take four of the "best from what's there" in the Vikings chapter in St. John's, along with himself and a man he met in jail in Lindsay, Ont.
"And from [there], patch that Vikings chapter to the Hells Angels chapter."
One of those trusted Vikings he planned on bringing to his new chapter was a man who'd ultimately deceive him.
Ironically, it was that brotherly bond and trust that was Potter's downfall.
He put faith in his friend and fellow Vikings MC member. He write letters that detailed personal aspects of his life, including his family, and accepted visits while he served time in Ontario.
Potter even defended the man when friends warned he was a police informant.
That trust bit him in the back.
The man, whose identity is protected, had been feeding the RCMP with information about Potter. He let him believe he had a new job, then became part of a police plot to get information on the Porter homicide.
Potter was convicted of first-degree murder on Friday morning. He will serve a mandatory 25 years in prison before he's eligible for parole.
His former friend is in witness protection.