OFF THE WIRE
BY: John Colebourn
Source: theprovince.com
Former Hells Angels member, who battled drugs and addiction, now mentors at-risk students.
Joe Calendino has turned his life around since he was booted from the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club and has worked to become clean and sober. He's now working with youth to teach them the perils of drugs and gangs, as well as using his athleticism to teach martial arts to students at a Vancouver-area high school.
Joe Calendino’s two cellphones tucked inside a gym bag ring non-stop as he barks out commands during an early-morning martial-arts class at Templeton Secondary School in East Vancouver.
Calendino is a popular man these days. Clean and sober, the one-time full-patch Hells Angels Motorcycle Club member and martial-arts expert is taking 22 students through a 45-minute workout before they head off to class.
The phone calls, many from at-risk youth from around the Lower Mainland, go to his voice mail. He’ll return the calls later.
Calendino was a competitive kick-boxer who practised Jiu Jitsu and Tae Kwon Do and, more recently, Tai Chi.
He is gruff, animated and tough, and his students seem to thrive on his no-nonsense workouts.
With his long, curly, greying hair tucked into a ponytail, Popeye-like arms, barrel chest and piercing brown eyes, Calendino looks like he just stepped off the set of the Sopranos.
“Stop letting your feet touch the ground,” Calendino bellows at one student as the class lies on the floor doing crunches with him. “What are you doing, man? “DON’T let your feet touch the ground.”
***
About five years ago, life unravelled quickly for Calendino.
A full-patch member of the Hells Angel and a point man in the elite NOMADS, he was frying his brain daily with crack cocaine and had lost 50 pounds. The drugs, his erratic behaviour and a nasty incident in a Kelowna casino had earned him the boot from the bikers. A team of Vancouver police officers arrived at his door to charge him with assault, the start of a process that was to eventually become life-altering.
***
Vancouver police Const. Kevin Torvik was among the arresting team who transported Calendino to Kelowna in shackles for a date with a judge.
Ironically, Torvik had once attended Templeton Secondary with Calendino, and the two had been friends. He was shocked to see how far Calendino had fallen.
Torvik, a member of the VPD gang squad, wanted to help, but he knew Calendino had to face his own demons first.
“I said to him, ‘When you hit rock bottom, then I will see you,” Torvik recalls.
In 2006, after being hospitalized twice for overdoses, Calendino was nabbed for selling crack cocaine to an undercover cop near a SkyTrain station.
Torvik remembers hearing that his old school chum was dying.
While Calendino was in jail and going through major withdrawal, Torvik paid him a visit.
“He was a mess,” says Torvik. “It was a different person than I knew before. He had lost 40 pounds and he was gaunt and obviously crack-addicted and very sick. That night we talked and it wasn’t me being a policeman — it was me knowing this guy from Templeton.
“I could see a guy I went to school with who was dying and I told him that. He listened and that’s where it started, his journey.”
Torvik spent four hours talking to Calendino that night. Once released, Calendino began to change. Withdrawal was not easy, but he stuck with it.
In time, Torvik contacted Templeton school vice-principal Walter Mustapich and drama teacher Jimmy Crescenzo to let them know about Calendino.
He said he wanted to be clean and help youth,” says Torvik. “We told him, ‘That’s great, but you are absolutely not ready.’”
After hearing this honest truth, Calendino entered drug counselling, reunited with his family and started taking university-level courses so that one day he could work with teens.
Under close supervision, Crescenzo and Mustapich allowed Calendino into their Friday afternoon Good Fellaz Boys Club meetings.
Calendino was frank with the kids at the Friday after-school sessions in which guest speakers are invited to provide some mentoring and support to the boys, giving them encouragement and hands-on advice on coping with life’s problems and staying clear of drugs and gangs.
“Jimmy and Walter helped Joe immensely,” says Torvik. “There were certain requirements he had to abide by to gain our trust.”
Tall, with rugged, movie-star good looks, Torvik has played hockey almost all of his life. In his minor-league days, he once played on a team with NHL great Joe Sakic.
Torvik is part of a group of Vancouver police officers, including Mark Steinkampf and Chris Graham, who are volunteers with the Odd Squad, a charitable organization that has produced a number of award-winning educational documentaries and programs.
Since 2002 the Odd Squad, with the help of RCMP detachments around Western Canada, has run the Junior Hockey Drug Awareness Program.
Torvik managed to get Calendino a gig to address a select group of WHL hockey players on the evils of drug abuse and gang life.
“I brought him in to talk to the teams and with these kids the impact was immediate,” says Torvik. “His message was quite powerful. It didn’t glorify the criminal world and it didn’t glorify drug use. It was then I knew we had something with Joe.”
***
The Kelowna assault charge was dealt with in 2007. In a video that captured the assault, Calendino was shown wearing full Hells Angels colours and because of that, the Crown argued his affiliation with the bikers should be viewed as being intimidating and relevant to the sentencing. Calendino’s defence lawyer argued it was nothing more than a common bar fight and his client just happened to be wearing the club’s colours.
During the trial, both the victim and casino staff refused to testify.
In the end, Calendino was convicted and ordered to do 50 hours of community service.
The wounds of the entire Kelowna casino dust-up ran deep. Calendino was hauled out of his home by police with his crying son in the background.
Then, to the horror of his already beleaguered family, Calendino’s uncle, Pietro Calendino, who was running as an NDP candidate in Burnaby in the 2005 provincial election, was broadsided with a slew of negative publicity when word got out he was the close relative of a Hell’s Angels member who had been arrested for initiating an ugly fight in a casino.
Blood runs thick among the proud Italians in the Calendino clan, but this became too much.
“They charged me the day of the provincial election, and that created a lot of tension in the family,” Calendino recalls. “On the one side there was this educated man with a doctorate running for public office, yet here’s his f---ed up nephew with a gang lifestyle,” he says. “In no way shape or form did I want to see my uncle hurt in a negative way, but it happened.
“The casino incident started the downward spiral of my life.”
***
Templeton Secondary has a long, rich academic history and has a mixed bag of students from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. The neighbourhood around Templeton has middle-income families with million-dollar homes to the south, while to the north and stretching down to the waterfront, there are pockets of subsidized housing and low-income apartments.
Calendino somehow managed to graduate from Templeton, and his picture with the graduating class of 1985 hangs on a wall near the front doors.
Crescenzo heads Templeton’s drama program and is a veteran actor who has had many roles in TV and film productions shot around the Lower Mainland. He was on staff during the years Calendino attended Templeton, and remembers him as a reasonably good but restless kid.
“Joe had 300 fights by the time he left school,” Crescenzo, who also went to Templeton as a student, recalls. “He was the alpha dog at Templeton. He couldn’t sit still. He had a spirit that had to keep moving.
“Every Monday he would come to school and have a black eye, scars on his face and cuts on his hands.
“This is all about rebuilding a man. I never anticipated Joe to be where he is today. Nobody at first wanted to touch him, They were saying, ‘He is a former gangster,’ and ‘Why let him into the school system?’ But here he is, and it is a magnificent miracle.”
Mustapich admits Calendino was on everybody’s radar. “I took a huge risk introducing him here,” he says. “I was told if anything went sideways I’d be responsible.”
Templeton principal Ellen Roberts watched Calendino interact with the students during some summer gym sessions. “This is a work in progress,” she says. “We watched Joe very closely and what he was doing and saw how engaged the students were.”
Vancouver police department Supt. Rob Rothwell also went to Templeton as a student with Crescenzo and he was the Vancouver police school liaison for that same school in the mid-’80s. He remembers Calendino well. “He was a rebel, and had an axe to grind with anyone of authority,” says Rothwell, who is the incoming president of Odd Squad Productions.
Rothwell recalls how they felt Calendino should be given a second chance when he bottomed out. “For us, we felt if we could turn Joe into a law-abiding citizen it would make our lives easier,” he says. He emphasizes Calendino’s story to them is all about prevention, not who he was. “He is useless to us from an intelligence perspective,” he adds.
No one is more aware he is under the microscope than Calendino himself.
“My journey now, for sure, is one that I know will forever be scrutinized,” he says. “I have to cope with that.”
Students at Queen Elizabeth Secondary School in Surrey have nothing but praise for the gruelling pace Calendino put them through during the summer.
Brian Duong, 17, has a yellow belt in martial arts thanks to Calendino’s guidance over the past year. “Before I met Joe, I was getting very bad marks,” he says. “Joe came in and taught me a lot of things about life. He was like a father to me. l am motivated in school now. I am getting As in school. I’m happier, more motivated and more focused.”
Queen Elizabeth vice-principal Navshina Savory has seen first-hand how Calendino is making an impression on some of the at-risk students.
“I have no doubt one student would never have lasted without Joe,” she says. “He had access to the gang life. He had dismal academic performance, a terrible attitude and horrible attendance,” she says.
“Now he’s here every day and he’s doing excellent . . . In a heartbeat I would keep Joe’s program going.”
There was careful thought by school administrators when Calendino came knocking to promote his “Yo Bro Initiative.”
The red flag on his file was about as big as it gets when the Surrey school district’s Safe Schools program manager Theresa Campbell looked at where he could fit in.
As a past associate and producer with the Odd Squad and a former youth worker in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Campbell had been given the heads-up by that group of passionate law enforcers that Calendino was the real deal and wouldn’t waste her time.
Calendino is quick to point out Campbell has been a huge help and allowed his program to flourish. “There are so many misconceptions kids have about gang life, and Joe has a double message on drugs and gangs,” says Campbell. “It is rare to have a reality-based presenter who can talk on both topics with such authority.”
Calendino has found support for his program from some blue-chip companies. A funding agreement with CIBC is now in place.
At BCIT, Pat Matthieu is the director of enrolment planning. They have given Calendino free admission into courses he needs to become an effective social worker and are working with him to help at-risk kids continue with their education after they leave high school. She hopes through their financial connections to get Calendino further funding.
“Joe has a huge compelling story and we are interested in his work as a community issue,” she says.
Another big asset Calendino has, she thinks, is the drive to make changes.
“I would say he has got tenacity. He just doesn’t give up.”
There are others lining up to help Calendino and he asks that they all get recognition as he appreciates the support and knows if he is to succeed he has to make inroads into the private sector.
“Please mention them all,” he asks. “They have been good to me.”
Vancouver police Sgt. Toby Hinton sits in an editing suite in the Odd Squad Productions’ bustling office on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. For nearly two years they’ve had a cameraman filming Calendino.
Calendino arrives at the Odd Squad office where a photo shoot is planned. He good-naturedly asks them to film the good side of his face, not the one with the long scar along his jawbone from the baseball bat he took to the face during a drug-fuelled donnybrook.
“Your good side?” someone jokes. “Have you looked in the mirror lately, Joe?”
Hinton is reviewing a piece of footage in which Calendino is telling some WHL junior hockey players what they can expect if they do dangerous drugs.
The former bad boy talks to them about one cop who had it in for him, and about the night he was found on Granville Street in 2001 with a loaded .45 handgun stuffed down the back of his pants. The officer in that takedown happens to be standing in the back of the room. He comes forward at Calendino’s request.
“We hated each other,” Calendino tells the hockey kids. “I think there was about 12 of them that took me away. They were having a heyday on my head.”
Calendino was banned from possessing a firearm for 10 years, fined $8,000 and thrown in the slammer for three months.
In this day and age, a person’s criminal history is all right there with a few touches of the computer keyboard.
On Calendino’s rap sheet, his alias is “Johnny Seatbelts.”
Calendino lets out a big roar when asked about the ridiculous moniker.
“How did you find that out?” he laughs.
Calendino does not talk about his days as a rogue full-patch biker, but does offer the reason his nickname was stored in a provincial judicial database. That rare glimpse into his netherworld of drugs and violence is almost comical.
“Whenever I was a passenger in a car and we were pulled over by the police and they asked me my name, I would always tell them I was ‘Johnny Seatbelts,’” he says. “I was not driving and did not have to show them any identification. It is hilarious that they [the police] put that down as my alias.”
At Simon Fraser University, Ray Corrado is a criminology professor and specializes in youth gangs and teen violence. He says it is unusual to see someone so entrenched in gang life and drugs make a break from the past.
“It is not common, but it does happen,” he says. “If you have left in good standing and haven’t ratted anyone out, it can happen.”
In most cases, Corrado said, gang members get older and want a change. “It is a dynamic, exciting lifestyle if you are a risk-taker,” he says of being a gangster. “But the tragedy is it involves a tremendous amount of violence.”
He says it is not surprising to see someone get the boot when they are deeply addicted.
“The trouble with taking drugs when you are a gang member is you are unreliable. There is a point where you are going to make mistakes if you are ripped. If you are taking hard drugs, you are risking the whole group and if it threatens the business, you’re going to cause trouble.”
Next month, Calendino starts a new venture with Crescenzo, Torvik and Vancouver scriptwriter Peter Grasso, who is putting together a gritty, one-hour play based loosely on Calendino’s story.
When finished, the play will be taken to schools around B.C. as a tool to spark discussion on drugs and gangs. After each performance, Torvik and Calendino will appear on stage — but not together — to speak to the audience.
“I will not be addressing any specific past or current gang situations at all,” says Calendino. “I am all about prevention only.”
Tears stream down her face as Nerina Calendino sits in the family’s Lower Mainland home talking about her son. She recalls the torment of knowing her son was sick and on drugs.
“He’d come home and he would be starving. He was cold, hungry and shaking. We couldn’t reach him. He had an excuse for everything.”
“We told him we loved him all the time, even when he was on drugs. In the end I said, ‘This has to stop.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You’re right.’”
Her advice to others: “Never give up on them. Give them a hug. With love you can bring them back.”
jcolebourn@theprovince.com
Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/news/Hell+Back/3753329/story.html#ixzz13xtA6eQd
