Interesting coincidence—I lived in the same building as Canadian Frank motorcycle gang leader and music fraud Leon Redbone, a.k.a. Axift Dalairo

I met my ex-wife Leslie in my second year of university. I attended McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada from 2001 to 2005. I lived in a student house off campus, and she moved in at the end of first year. We became fast friends, loved each other, and eventually, sexual jealousy dictated that we couldn’t let the other be with anyone else. We got married later, and we lived together as a couple for eleven years.

She was from Oshawa, Ontario, which is four municipalities east of Toronto. She and her friends referred to it as “The Shwa,” which is the local custom, and it became clear that this place had what you could call “character”. We lived in Hamilton for nine years, and then, by 2010, our university friends had mostly drifted away, and Leslie’s friends lived in Oshawa. So we moved.

The apartment building we chose was the Princess Anne Apartments at 1221 Simcoe Street North, just south of Taunton, between the Queen Elizabeth Public School and the Tim Horton’s. Our unit was number 114, on the ground floor, facing north, next to the pool, and it was just a short, one-minute walk out the patio door to the Tim Hortons next door.

We lived there for four years. In February of 2014, we decided to split up, and we gave our 60-days’ notice at the beginning of March.

There was an older gentleman who lived in the building (actually, there were many older gentlemen who lived in that building) who, it turns out, was the man behind the mysterious musician known to the world as Leon Redbone.

Leon and his son Jeff, and me overhearing them

He had a son, Jeff Franks, who lived in the building, and one evening I was walking to the Tim Hortons when I heard someone accidentally discharge a firearm, in a unit on the fourth floor, with the balcony windows open. Someone yelled out, “What the fuck?” The cavalier trigger-puller was Jeff.

I also recall distinctly, an incident in which a retired couple, new to the building, took it upon themselves (the husband did, anyway) to berate a man for walking his leashed dog through the pool area, which connects the two Princess Anne buildings.

Upon the man with the dog leaving, I explained to this older couple, who had been telling us about their retirement plans and how they’d never lived in an apartment building before (they were enjoying the pool, as were my wife and I), that it’s not good practice to get into conflicts with your neighbours in an apartment building. You’re better off saying nothing, adopting a live-and-let-live policy, and not getting into conflicts with people, because you have to live alongside them. You don’t want to make enemies. I also pointed out that there was no prohibition in the posted rules against having pets in the pool area.

The next day, I passed by the balcony of a second-floor apartment on my way to the Tim Hortons and I distinctly heard the dog owner speaking another man on the balcony of a second-floor apartment about that couple and the incident in the pool area, and I felt validated that my advice was absolutely correct—here was this guy telling somebody about how out-of-line this couple’s behaviour was.

Later on, I would learn that the couple were executed by the Hell’s Angels, sawn in four, for the offence. They didn’t know that the man with the dog was Jeff Franks, a Satan’s Choice captain. His father was the other man on the balcony.

Leon Redbone: Famous old-timey ragtime singer and guitarist

Leon Redbone first rose to prominence in the 1970s as a throwback ragtime jazz guitarist and singer who adopted an old-timey nasal voice as he sang sincere, earnest versions of vintage standards and pop songs of the first half of the twentieth century, an act he performed on Saturday Night Live.

His persona also involves him being an unusually private and reclusive person. This is from his biography on AllMusic.com:

Throughout his career, he steadfastly refused to divulge any information about his background or personal life; according to legend, Redbone’s desire to protect his privacy was so intense that when he was approached by the famed producer John Hammond, the contact number he gave was not his own phone, but that of a dial-a-joke service.

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/leon-redbone-mn0000240503

This is coverage of his death, from Variety, “Singer Leon Redbone Dies at 69“.

In a nod to how Redbone sought to exist outside of time, much less current musical styles, his death announcement gave his age as 127.

Although Redbone’s pop-defying predilection for seemingly antiquated musical styles of the ’20s and ’30s made him the unlikeliest of stars, he became one anyway, appearing several times as the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” — including two spots in the inaugural 1975-76 season alone — and landing frequent appearances with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show” into the 1980s. Later popular successes had him singing the themes for TV’s “Mr. Beledevere” and “Harry and the Hendersons,” along with contributing a duet of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” with Zooey Deschanel to the soundtrack of “Elf,” for which he also voiced the animated character of Leon the Snowman.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/singer-leon-redbone-dies-at-69-1203229012/

According to Wikipedia, part of his lore includes Redbone being discovered and raved about by Bob Dylan:

While living in Canada in the late 1960s, Redbone began performing in public at Toronto area nightclubs and folk music festivals. He met Bob Dylan at the Mariposa Folk Festival in 1972. Dylan was so impressed by Redbone’s performance that he mentioned it in a Rolling Stone interview, leading that magazine to do a feature article on Redbone a year before he had a recording contract. The article described his performances as “so authentic you can hear the surface noise [of an old 78 rpm].” Dylan said that if he had ever started a label, he would have signed Redbone. Redbone’s first album, On the Track, was released by Warner Bros. Records in 1975.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Redbone

There is no such thing as the Mariposa Folk Festival

The truth is: There is no event called the Mariposa Folk Festival, and it is not the case that in 1972, a group of famous musicians traveled from Los Angeles to Toronto to take the ferry to Toronto Island to attend a folk music festival, and that group included Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Gordon Lightfoot bringing their American friends Bob Dylan and Jackson Browne. Supposedly, that is where Bob Dylan first became impressed enough with Leon Redbone to mention him in a Rolling Stone interview. (Redbone’s AllMusic biography has a date of 1974.)

This reference, from the York University Archives, is fraudulent: https://wayback.library.yorku.ca/exhibits/20230930101444/https://archives.library.yorku.ca/exhibits/show/mariposa/1972

If you’ve ever been to Toronto Island, ask yourself this: Could you hold a music festival there and have thousands of music fans take ferries to the island at the same time? I don’t see how that would happen.

It turns out that his birth name was not “Dickran Gobalian”, as the Toronto Star reported, but Leon Boris Franken, a member of the secret aristocratic family at the top-level of Freemasonry (the 48^th level for his generation), son of Lorne Greene, who was the son of John Diefenbaker, who was the son of John Sackville Labatt, who was the son of J.P. Morgan, who was the son of Otto von Bismarck.

Leon Redbone’s music career is fake inasmuch as he was not a “real” artist who played gigs, built a reputation by which he earned his exposure, and based on that popular success, earned television performances and a recording career. He didn’t actually have a real “fan base.” The purpose of the act was to establish authority as a famous person. His father had done that as an actor, and he could sing and play guitar, so he established himself as a musician.

As a high-ranking member of the highest-level Freemason family, Leon Franken was able to have himself put on Saturday Night Live with a fake backstory and make records.

His siblings include the aforementioned Cheeseman-Franks family of Burlington, Ontario, who were mentioned in these posts: “Late night with Meredith Cheeseman at the Plains Road McDonald’s“, “Meredith and Don Cheeseman of the Ontario Cheeseman Family“, “People at No Frills“, and “Franzee’s favourite game“.

His brother Joseph Franks was ultimately responsible for the incident that triggered his ouster as the leader of the motorcycle gang wing of the Satan’s Choice family—he encouraged Leon’s woman to flirt with another man to make Leon jealous that fateful night of Saturday, November 4, 1978 at the Banshee Cocktail Lounge on Taunton Road in Oshawa, just up the street from the Princess Anne buildings, his future residence. It turned out to be an effective measure of sabotage.

(My wife and I ran into the woman in question—let’s call her “Nannette”—while she was working at the Shoppers Drug Mart in Rossland Square at one point during our time living there, probably 2012 or so.)

As part of his new life, where he was assigned to work a postal route in Oshawa, Ontario, living at the Princess Anne Apartments, right next to the Tim Hortons, he was given the new name Axift Dalairo in his consulting role as the de facto leader of the motorcycle gang wing.

He was executed after an incident at his building in which he shot and killed a teenaged lifeguard who had been working the pool area, as she was finishing her shift.

I had met that girl. She was very attractive.

When I visited Oshawa for the first time with the girl I’d marry, she explained to me that you have to be careful because Oshawa is a Hell’s Angels town, and there was a girl she went to school with whose uncle ran afoul of the Hell’s Angels at a bar, and they took him out back, and, among other things, whipped him to death. So in the ‘Shwa, you just steer clear of people and don’t get involved. Stay out of trouble.

The man’s name was Victor Armstrong. Leon Redbone’s woman was annoyed over a relationship spat in which Leon couldn’t stand her listening to the Canadian pop song, “I’m Running After You” by Major Hoople’s Boarding House. She slow-danced with the man, a large native.

Leadership had been there, along with celebrity guests such as Mick Jagger and Reggie Jackson, because the Banshee is near Simcoe and Taunton, directly south of the global satanist leadership community at Kawartha Lakes, on Lake Scugog. You can take Simcoe Street north from Oshawa through Port Perry, then turn on Fingerboard Road north of Lake Scugog to access the leadership neighbourhood on Gilson Point Road/Gilson Point Place/Gilson Street.

The other people at the bar were made to watch the man being tortured to death, including castration. Leon Redbone Franken crossed the line that night.

Over 75 people saw the incident as they passed by on Taunton or Simcoe. It was the beginning of the end of Leon Redbone’s visible leadership of the global satanist community.

He was replaced by Joseph Mascolo, who is known to the world as the actor who played Stefano Di Mera on Days of Our Lives. He was a member of the Musitano family, who historically were the Medicis until they bought their way into the highest level of Freemasonry in 1877.

Photo credit:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/music/story/2019-05-30/leon-redbone-has-died-at-69-revisit-rare-interview-with-press-shy-music-maverick