If the truth be told, Serge LeClerc’s autobiography Untwisted: From Lawbreaker to Lawmaker is a singular actualization of crime, punishment and redemption.

 

Untwisted’s storyline has the plot and drama of a novel: an insensitive juvenile court judge sends a young boy into the harmful custody of predatory keepers; the boy absorbs every blow and indignation and never surrenders.

 

At age 18 he is a cunning, wily and violent career criminal. Yet it is a career that will grind to a halt in the 1980s when his most sophisticated criminal conspiracy is unravelled by the Mounties. LeClerc negotiates a plea-bargained sentence of nine years and sits in solitary confinement in a six-by-nine cell in a super maximum security jail – he is a worn-out criminal without a dime to his name.  It will lead to his redemption.

 

LeClerc’s gives his readers a profound image of his mother, a young teenage aboriginal girl, pregnant by rape, birthing in an abandoned building with the help of another pregnant girl. Turning away from a band riddled with alcoholism and violence, she finds a housekeeping job with a Lebanese family. Within a year, mother and son are in Toronto’s Cabbagetown and soon she is working at two jobs. Sundays become their only day together, and LeClerc remembers being told that because he was a “half-breed” life would be harder for him, but even so he must always do the right thing.

 

Despite his mother’s admonition eight-year-old LeClerc joins a group of boys playing hooky from school and is caught shoplifting. In hindsight he recognizes it as a choice that launched him on a destructive path of untold pain and damage to himself and thousands of others.

LeClerc’s description of proceedings in juvenile court in the 1950s convinces me that it was not a court of justice – it was a court of predisposition and expedience. His mother sits in the courtroom, but Leclerc is not allowed to go near her. He hears the authorities calling his mother “unfit” and himself a bastard whose mixed blood is a factor in his delinquent behaviour.

 

LeClerc gives a searing account of incarceration in Ontario’s St. John’s Training School, staffed by Christian Bothers, notorious for brutalizing and sexually abusing inmates. Instinctively he rebels against verbal and physical abuse of his keepers and other inmates. When threatened by an older boy with group violence, LeClerc responds (as he did over the next 32 years) with immediate pre-emptive violence, lashing out with a fork and stabbing the boy in the face. It marks the beginning of a two-year odyssey of brutish punishment, long stretches in isolation, escape and arrest – 20 times in two years.

 

St. John’s lit a raging fire in LeClerc, raising his innate and unbending stubbornness to a flashpoint of inexplicable reflexive violence. LeClerc says that without it he would have been sexually abused during his tumultuous stay at St. Johns and later on, in adult jails, that it terrified guards and other inmates: “You either left me alone, or you went the full mile with me.”

 

At age 10, unmanageable LeClerc is transferred to the Ontario Training School, a supposed escape-proof Ontario jail for teenagers. In two years Leclerc escapes three times and is transferred to a privately operated group home for the unmanageable. After a first-day brutal strapping Leclerc escapes to Toronto where he is back on the street, in and out of his mother’s home and school and doing whatever he wanted to do: he is an adolescent career criminal.

 

Hardened and streetwise, LeClerc becomes a gang leader, his crew engaging in significant burglary, transporting stolen property, running gambling joints, distilling bootleg whiskey and occasionally armed robbery of banks.

 

It is stranger than fiction: a 15-year-old gang leader giving orders to about 70 members in their 20s. “One reason was my ‘I don’t care’ attitude. I didn’t care how tough he was or how tough he looked, if he came against me I was quite prepared to kill him. What I lacked in size I made up with viciousness and weapons.”

 

Leclerc moves his gang into production and distribution of LSD and methamphetamine. He begins using drugs excessively. A fouled up burglary leads to plea-bargained sentence of twenty-two months in the Guelph Reformatory, “this time on the adult side. …I spent more time sleeping on the cold cement floor of a solitary confinement cell thanks to my violent and aggressive behaviour.” He is quickly transferred to Millbrook Reformatory, Ontario’s first maximum security prison.

 

Over the next 20 years LeClerc engages in a frenetic roller coaster of crime, inside and outside jail, with each release on supposed rehabilitative parole being his ticket to freedom and immediate reactivation of his gang.

 

During his last penitentiary sentence, a middle-aged LeClerc accepted that he had lost his zeal for crime and that his life was wasted. By chance, a Christian proseletyzer, a regular visitor to jail, engaged LeClerc in a brief conversation and shoved some literature into his cell. It included a story of a friend, a convict who had found freedom and peace of mind in Christianity. It planted a seed in LeClerc’s mind; nine months later, on Dec. 25, 1985, he became a Christian.

 

LeClerc resumed his schooling in penitentiary taking courses in psychology, social work, sociology, and deviant behaviour. On Aug. 26, 1988, LeClerc left prison for the last time.

 

In 1991, LeClerc earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology; and two years later was awarded a double honours degree with a major in sociology and a minor in social work. “My thesis was on drug dealing, something I knew a good deal about, having been a drug dealer at the beginning of the drug culture in Canada, and a manufacturer and distributor of designer drugs.”

 

In 2000, LeClerc applied for a pardon. It was supported by Crime Stoppers, police chiefs, sheriffs, RCMP superintendents and law enforcement officials across Canada. In August 2000, LeClerc was granted a full national pardon by the House of Commons.

In November 2007, LeClerc was elected as a member in the Saskatchewan legislature for the riding of Saskatoon Northwest. After investiture, LeClerc was appointed Legislative Secretary: Corrections; with a special mandate to deal with drugs and gangs in the province.

 

LeClerc says his story is one of overcoming and redemption, of hope and second chances.

 

You can meet him on www.sergetalks.com.