Francesco "Cisco" Lenti (born 1947) is a Canadian outlaw biker and gangster, and the founder of the Loners Motorcycle Club.
Satan's Choice Lenti was born in Woodbridge, Ontario to Italian immigrant parents. The journalist Jerry Langton wrote in 2010 "...that even by Canadian biker standards, Lenti was a strange guy. Vain, constantly preening, and prone to violent temper tantrums, he had a habit of giving up on projects that didn't exactly go his way". The journalist Yves Lavigne wrote in 1999 about: "...that social butterfly of the biker underworld, the promiscuous Frank Lenti, who over twenty years wore the colors of nearly half a dozen Toronto gangs. The temperamental Lenti flitted from gang to gang when he didn't get his way". Lenti's frequent changes in membership of outlaw biker clubs gave him the nickname of the "Velcro biker". Lenti was never a member of the Mafia, but he had friendships with several Mafiosi over the years such as Domenic Musitano of the Musitano family of Hamilton.
Lenti started out as a member of the Satan's Choice Motorcycle Club and was one of the first members of Satan's Choice together with his friend Cecil Kirby to visit the Satan's Choice's national president Bernie Guindon in jail at the Algoma Treatment and Remand Centre in Sault. St. Marie after he was arrested at an Oba Lake drug bust in August 1975. Lenti had Mafia connections and it was he who recommended Kirby as a hitman to Cosimo Commisso, saying that Kirby was good with bombs and guns, though he also warned that Kirby was not to be completely trusted as he was of non-Italian descent, saying "Remember, he's not one of us". According to Kirby, Lenti was involved in "million-dollar burglary" in 1977 and recruited him. However, the plot ended with Kirby getting "nothing". An ambitious man, Lenti never rose above the rank of prospect in Satan's Choice, causing him to leave in 1978 and join the Rebels.
Kirby turned police informer in 1980. In 1981, Kirby told Lenti that he should leave Toronto for a while as he was about to reveal much to the Crown. After leaving the Satan's Choice, Lenti joined the Rebels before founding a new club, the Loners, which collapsed in 1981. In 1982, when Kirby started to testify against the Mafia figures who employed him as a hitman, his friend Lenti fled to Italy where he lived for the next two years. Lenti recalled in an interview in 2019: "Me and Kirby used to be together a lot. When he started singing I said, ‘I’d better go take a tour.’" Lenti lived in Perugia, where he associated with the Italian Hells Angels.
The Loners Lenti founded a new club, also called the Loners in 1984 in York Region after his return to Canada, recruiting mainly from his fellow Italian-Canadians. Lenti designed the "rather elaborate and bizarre" patch for his club featuring a half-werewolf, half-horned skull creature. A disproportionate number of the Loners were Italian-Canadians from middle-class families who saw themselves as being more polished and sophisticated than other outlaw bikers. By start of the 1990s, the Loners had chapters in Toronto, Woodbridge, Richmond Hill, Windsor, and London. Unusually for a Canadian outlaw biker club, the Loners had chapters abroad with one in Portugal and seven in Italy, having chapters in Naples, Messina, Salerno, Reggio Calabria, Brolo, Avellino and Isernia. The Loners were a successful club under Lenti's leadership despite the way that other gangs predictably mocked the Loners as "the Losers". By the late 1980s, the Loners were the third largest biker gang in Ontario, being exceeded only by the Outlaws and Satan's Choice. Langton wrote that Lenti was also personally successful in two "industries bikers tend to admire-a stripper/escort talent agency and a tow truck firm".
On 16 June 1993, Lenti was approached by Walter "the Nurget" Stadnick, the president of the Canadian Hells Angels at a bikers convention in Wasaga Beach with an offer to have the Loners "patch over" to the Hells Angels. Stadnick was looking to have the Hells Angels expand into Ontario by "patching over" one of the stronger existing Ontario outlaw clubs, and after being turned down by Bernie Guindon of Satan's Choice, decided to make a friendly takeover offer to Lenti of the Loners. Joining Stadnick was David "Wolf" Carroll who wore a T-shirt with the SS runes reading "Filthy Few Denmark", which Lenti understood as Carroll's way of saying he committed a murder in Denmark. Lenti refused the offer to "patch over". The Hells Angels offered Lenti further chances to "patch over" several times in 1993 and 1994, but he declined, instead offering Stadnick a chance to join the Loners. Lenti found Stadnick arrogant, noting that Stadnick had told him that two Loners were police informers, a report that was true, but grated with him as he felt that Stadnick was trying to control the Loners from afar. Lenti has been faithful to the outlaw code, serving prison sentences rather than accept offers of immunity from the Crown in exchange for testifying against other outlaw bikers, making him a figure of respect within the outlaw biker world.
The Diablos Subsequently, Lenti was expelled from his own club for the second time in 1994, and founded a new club, the Diablos Motorcycle Gang that lost a biker war later in 1995 against the Loners. Langton wrote that Lenti was expelled for stealing from his club while Lavinge stated that his expulsion was due to him throwing a "temper tantrum" too many. Lenti called the Diablos a motorcycle gang instead of a club, saying: "I'll show them who the real fucking gang is". After being expelled from the Loners, Lenti located the clubhouse of Diablos only a half block away from the Loners' clubhouse on Kipling Avenue in Woodbridge, which was considered a provocation. The Diablos were courted by Satan's Choice as the competition for the control of the drug trade in the Toronto area had grown very intense, and even the small territory controlled by the Diablos made them worth courting.
On 18 July 1995, a Diablo threw a homemade bomb at a tow truck owned by a Loner while two Diablos were shot and wounded by the Loners. Attacks were made with rocket launchers on clubhouses owned by Satan's Choice and the Loners. On 25 August 1995, Lenti was badly wounded by a bomb planted in his car, which gave him the unflattering epithet of "the half-assed biker" as he lost one of his buttocks. Lenti was lucky to survive the car bombing, but ended up facing weapons charges afterwards as the Toronto police discovered a handgun and a loaded machinegun in his car. Lenti told detective Angelo DeLorenzi about the loaded submachine gun and 9-millimetre handgun found in the ruins of his car: "I was using them for my kinda people. I wasn't using them for law-abiding citizens". Ever since the 1995 bombing, Lenti has walked with a limp and has often had to use a cane. The attempted assassination marked the end of the biker war, but the mayor of Toronto, Barbara Hall, unaware that the war was over, attempted to ban all outlaw bikers from Toronto. In an interview in 2019, Lenti claimed that the Rizzuto family of Montreal tried to recruit him in the 1990s, an offer he declined on the basis that he was an outlaw biker, not a Mafiosi.
The Bandidos In the fall of 2002 Lenti joined the Canadian Bandidos, which they regarded as a gain as he was a more experienced outlaw biker than the national president Giovanni "John the Boxer" Muscedere. Another experienced outlaw biker who joined the Bandidos was James "Ripper" Fullager, who had been active in outlaw biking since the 1960s and whose home in Toronto was a favourite gathering place for the Bandidos, where Fullager recounted his past adventures and gave them advice. The Victoria Day weekend in May is the normal start of the riding season for outlaw bikers in Canada. For Victoria Day in 2003, it turned out that of the Bandidos only Muscedere, Lenti, Glenn "Wrongway" Atkinson and George "Crash" Kriarakis actually owned working Harley-Davidson motorcycles, which humiliated Lenti who bitterly complained about "bikers without bikes". Lenti was close to the Bandidos' mentor James "Ripper" Fullanger, who always called him "Old Frank" despite the fact that Fullanger was the older man. However, Fullanger was annoyed when Lenti called the Bandidos a biker gang rather than a club.
In June 2003, when Kriarakis was eating in a restaurant in Woodbridge where he was surrounded by a dozen Hells Angels and was ordered to go out to the parking lot to be beaten as Woodbridge was considered to be "their" territory. One of Kriarakis's friends called Lenti on his cellphone, who promptly raced off in his tow truck to help his biker "brother" while Kriarakis was badly beaten up in the parking lot. Upon arriving, Lenti was furious to see that Kriarakis had called the police to report the assault, telling him that outlaw bikers never report to the police a crime committed by other outlaw bikers, even against themselves. At a meeting at Fullager's house, Kriarakis was taken to task for his violation of the outlaw biker code, which just publicly humiliated the Toronto Bandido chapter. An outlaw biker from Edmonton, Joe "Crazy House" Morin of the Rebels, who was considering "patching over" to join the Bandidos expressed much doubt after the Kriarakis incident, saying the only members of the Toronto chapter who impressed him were Atkinson and Lenti. Lenti disliked Frank "the Bammer" Salerno, the president of the Bandidos Toronto chapter, who was a heroin addict while Lenti refused to even smoke cigarettes, saying using drugs was for weak men. When Salerno gave himself a bastone tattoo, which Lenti saw as his own personal mark, Lenti proceeded to beat up Salerno and told him to have the tattoo covered up. When Lenti found insulting comments about himself on the Bandidos website, he discovered that the IP address of the poster was located in an area where Salerno lived, which led him to accuse Salerno of posting the comments. Salerno broke down in tears and told Lenti "please, please, please" not gouge out his eyes as a punishment.
When Michael Sandham of Winnipeg joined the Bandidos in 2004, Lenti was highly suspicious of him, saying he kept hearing rumors that Sandham used to be a policeman and that he had been rejected by the Outlaws for that reason, and assigned the Bandido national sergeant-at-arms Wayne Kellestine to investigate him. Lenti further noted that Sandham had no tattoos, which was unusual as almost all outlaw bikers have many tattoos on their bodies, his demeanor was like that of a policeman doing a very clumsy impression of an outlaw biker, and that Sandham seemed like the sort of man who would have "sucked up" to the high school bully rather than stand up for himself. However, Kellestine reported that the rumors were not true, and Sandham had never been a policeman.