79. founded a club most people would never have the nerve to start.
Their story
Francesco "Frank" Lenti, known across the Ontario biker world as "Cisco", was one of the most enduring and most talked about figures in the history of Canadian outlaw motorcycle clubs. Over roughly four decades he wore the colours of Satan's Choice, the Rebels, the Loners, the Diablos, the Outlaws and…
Francesco "Frank" Lenti, known across the Ontario biker world as "Cisco", was one of the most enduring and most talked about figures in the history of Canadian outlaw motorcycle clubs. Over roughly four decades he wore the colours of Satan's Choice, the Rebels, the Loners, the Diablos, the Outlaws and the Bandidos, founded the Loners Motorcycle Club, survived a 1995 car bombing and a 2016 shooting attempt, and in 2006 shot dead a senior Toronto Hells Angel in a Vaughan strip club, a killing he later admitted as manslaughter. He died of natural causes on October 31, 2026, at the age of 79.
Lenti was born on June 21, 1947, in Woodbridge, Ontario, to Italian immigrant parents, Cosimo and Aquila Lenti. He began his biker life with Satan's Choice, the dominant Ontario club of the 1970s, where he was close to Cecil Kirby, the biker who later became a Mafia hitman and police informer. Lenti never rose above prospect in Satan's Choice and left in 1978 for the Rebels. When Kirby began testifying for the Crown in the early 1980s, Lenti went to Italy for about two years, living in Perugia. He later joked about it: "When he started singing I said, 'I'd better go take a tour.'"
Back in Canada he founded the Loners in York Region in 1984 (after an earlier club of the same name had collapsed in 1981), recruiting heavily from Italian-Canadian men in the Toronto suburbs. Under his leadership the Loners grew to chapters in Toronto, Woodbridge, Richmond Hill, Windsor and London, plus chapters in Portugal and Italy, and by the late 1980s were one of the three largest outlaw clubs in Ontario. In 1993 and 1994 the Hells Angels, led in Canada by Walter Stadnick, repeatedly asked Lenti to "patch over" the Loners as their route into Ontario. He refused each time.
Journalists who covered him for decades described a vain, quick-tempered and restless man who changed clubs so often he was nicknamed the "Velcro biker". In 1994 he was expelled from the Loners he had founded and set up the Diablos, with a clubhouse half a block from the Loners on Kipling Avenue in Woodbridge. A violent feud followed. On August 25, 1995, a bomb exploded under his Ford Explorer outside his Woodbridge home, across the street from a primary school. He survived but walked with a cane for the rest of his life. No arrest was ever made.
In 2002 he joined the new Canadian Bandidos, quit in November 2004, and rejoined in May 2006, weeks after eight Bandidos were murdered in the Shedden massacre, emerging as the effective head of what remained of the club. Court later heard that the Hells Angels had plotted to kill him after he refused to leave the Bandidos and join them in 2006. Shortly after midnight on December 2, 2006, at the Club Pro Adult Entertainment lounge near Highway 7 and Jane Street in Vaughan, where Lenti worked security, David "Dred" Buchanan, sergeant-at-arms of the West Toronto Hells Angels, confronted and struck him. Lenti drew a handgun and fired seven shots in six seconds, killing Buchanan and wounding other Hells Angels members. He turned himself in the next day. In 2008 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and aggravated assault and was sentenced to six years in prison, which he served in Millhaven and Warkworth penitentiaries. In 2007 he dissolved the Canadian Bandidos through a statement on the club website. The separate Crown case against two Hells Angels accused of plotting his murder collapsed and they were acquitted in January 2009.
Released in 2014, Lenti survived one more attempt on his life on December 20, 2016, when a young gunman's weapon jammed after the first shot outside his Vaughan home. In a 2019 Toronto Star interview, wearing a jacket marked "Criminal", he said he now worried more about slipping on the ice than about his enemies.
Lenti was married to Maria and was the father of nine children, one of whom, his daughter Jessica, died before him. His son Jessi made national headlines in 2007 when the Canadian Army rejected him because of his father's associations. "I'm the criminal, so why punish him?" Lenti said. He was a grandfather of 14 and a great-grandfather of one. In his last years he lived in long-term care. A funeral Mass was held at St. David's Roman Catholic Church in Maple, Ontario, on November 5, 2026, followed by burial at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Thornhill.
His life is documented at length in the work of crime reporters Peter Edwards, Jerry Langton and Yves Lavigne, and in Cecil Kirby's memoir Mafia Enforcer. He remains a central, and deeply controversial, figure in any account of the Ontario biker wars.
Biography adapted from Toronto Star (Peter Edwards, Nov 4 2026; Apr and Jun 2008; Mar 2019): https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/frank-cisco-lenti-outlaw-biker-who-killed-a-hells-angel-and-survived-two-assassination-attempts-d. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“The day I worry about bad guys is the day I (expletive) kill myself.”
Toronto Star interview, 2019
“I'm the criminal, so why punish him?”
On his son Jessi being rejected by the Canadian Army, 2007
“I had a lot of fun but in the end you end up in a place like this.”
Speaking to the Toronto Star from jail, 2007
“I could have killed them all, but I didn't.”
On the 2006 Vaughan strip club shooting, Toronto Star
“I don't like wearing leather no more. You look like a hoodlum.”
Toronto Star, 2019
“Me and Kirby used to be together a lot. When he started singing I said, 'I'd better go take a tour.'”
On leaving for Italy in 1982, Toronto Star, 2019
Photos
1Frank Lenti, obituary portrait
by People Forever
From social media
5Posts by Frank, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.