Frank Lenti

Francesco "Cisco" Lenti (born 1947) is a Canadian outlaw biker and gangster, best known as the co-founder of the Loners Motorcycle Club.

Lenti was born in Woodbridge, Ontario to Italian immigrant parents.

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.

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".

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 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".

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.