Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  But the unlikely, mutually suspicious tag team managed to keep the man safe, and when Stadnick was finally released from Hamilton General, the 13th Tribe became the Hells Angels Halifax Chapter. At the same time, the Sherbrooke-based Gitans (Gypsies) became Hells Angels as well.

  And that’s how 1984 ended and 1985 began. Hells Angels now dominated Quebec, particularly Montreal, and had a small, fledgling chapter in Halifax to go along with three, small, isolated and suspicious chapters on the Pacific coast. The Outlaws had been virtually exterminated in Montreal, but were the most powerful of the many gangs that controlled the drug trade in Ontario. Their primary rivals were their former brothers in what remained of Satan’s Choice.

  But nobody was particularly strong in Ontario. Hells Angels — with Stadnick lying at home in bed nursing his horrific wounds — had lost their only hope. The Outlaws — with Parente lifting weights in prison — had lost their heart and soul.

  Chapter 6

  Open Season on Hamilton Bikers

  As 1985 dawned in cold, snowy Montreal it looked like the war had been won. The few Outlaws who hadn’t been killed, injured or who hadn’t quit never wore their colors in public anymore. Some even refused to come out of their houses.

  But that doesn’t mean things were going easily for the still-fledgling Canadian Hells Angels. There was an immense amount of tension between the two chapters in Montreal. And the addition of two new chapters — the 13th Tribe, who had become Halifax Chapter, and the Gitans (Gypsies), who had become the Sherbrooke Chapter — gave Hells Angels more manpower and more territory, but also more responsibility.

  The two Montreal chapters had developed very different cultures. The Montreal North (Laval) Chapter were the old Popeyes and a few like-minded newcomers. They were old-school bikers who wanted to ride, fight and party. They were responsible for almost all the firepower in the war against the Outlaws, with Yves “Apache” Trudeau claiming 18 of the 23 total victims by himself. Without the discipline that had been enforced by murdered president Yves “Le Boss” Buteau, they fell into disarray. They took their lead from new chapter president Laurent “L’Anglais” Viau, a free-wheeling, cocaine-using man-about-town who used violence when he deemed necessary or simply felt like it. Buteau’s group of largely clean-shaven, well-dressed men barely recognizable as bikers had morphed into Viau’s sloppy, hairy, hard-partying gang of stereotypical Hells Angels.

  They could hardly have been more different from their cross-town brothers, the Montreal South (Sorel) Chapter. Manned by newer members and a few older guys who were put off by the excesses of their brothers in Laval, the Sorel Chapter was more disciplined and business-like. Its president, Rejean “Zig Zag” Lessard, kept up the rules established in the club’s better days under Buteau. He forbade the use of stimulant or injected drugs and he was very serious about bikers paying their debts promptly. But, unlike his predecessor, he let the members look and dress however they wanted.

  In the winter of 1984/85, Laval’s sloppy and costly behavior caused a great deal of friction with the other chapters, particularly Sorel, and Lessard felt he had to do something. Not only were the members of the Laval Chapter consuming a great deal of the drugs they should have been selling, but they were also skimming from payments intended for other chapters. Officially, they owed at least $60,000, but nobody knew how much they had really taken from the organization. And their bad habit of getting arrested for small or unnecessary offenses — often unprovoked acts of violence — put the entire organization in jeopardy.

  So Lessard called a meeting with David “Wolf ” Carroll — president of the Halifax Chapter — and Georges “Bo-Boy” Beaulieu, president of the Sherbrooke Chapter. The Hells Angels in B.C. still had little contact with the other Canadian chapters and were not involved. Carroll, in particular, had a grudge against Laval. Just days before the meeting with Lessard, Trudeau had gone to Halifax and demanded $98,000 he told them their club owed Laval. They paid him, only to learn that Laval was entitled to just a one-quarter share of that money, and that Trudeau had actually kept it for himself. And Halifax, by far the poorest chapter, still owed Sorel and Sherbrooke (and potentially even Laval) their rightful shares.

  At the summit, Lessard railed against Laval, explaining that they had to be eliminated for the good of the organization. Carroll and Beaulieu agreed. The plan, then, was to force two members of Laval into retirement, allow two others the opportunity to join Sorel and kill the rest, including Viau and Trudeau. Years later, Lessard confessed that life was cheap to the Canadian Hells Angels back then, and that few of them would have seen death as an unjust punishment for that size of theft from the club.

  After getting permission from his bosses in Manhattan, Lessard put his plan into action. Robert “Ti-Maigre” Richard, the giant, one-eyed sergeant-at-arms of the Sorel Chapter announced that Sherbrooke was holding a party at its clubhouse on Saturday, March 23, 1985. And he said that Laval, Sorel and Halifax were all invited.

  Most of the Laval Chapter greeted the news with indifference, but Trudeau knew better. Sensing that something was up, he checked himself into a detox center in Oka, to the west of Montreal. “I saw what was coming,” he said later.

  Lessard’s plan was to kill the Laval members as they walked through the doors of the clubhouse, but it was foiled when he saw that less than half of the chapter had shown up.

  Incensed, he called a meeting in which he told the members of Laval that attendance at the party, which would now extend to a second day, was absolutely mandatory. The only excuses for not attending were if a biker was in a jail cell, a hospital bed or on a morgue slab. The next day, all of Laval except for Trudeau and Michel “Jinx” Genest (one of the men the Outlaws shot at in Northern Ontario) attended. Trudeau was in rehab, technically a hospital, and Genest was in Laval, protecting the clubhouse.

  Lessard and his men, armed with handguns and shotguns, surrounded the members of Laval and herded them to the center of the room. Then they opened fire. Laval president Viau, Jean-Pierre “Matt le Crosseur” Mathieu, Michel “Willie” Mayrand, Jean-Guy “Brutus” Geoffrion and Guy-Louis “Chop” Adam were killed.

  The three surviving Laval members — Gilles “Le Nez” Lachance, Yvon “Le Pere” Bilodeau and Richard “Bert” Mayrand, who had just watched his brother get murdered — were ordered to haul the bodies outside and clean up the crime scene. When they were finished, Bilodeau and the surviving Mayrand were told to leave. Lachance was offered a choice: leave or join Sorel. He picked Sorel.

  He and two Sorel members — Jacques “Le Pelle” Pelletier and Robert “Snake” Tremblay — rode to the Laval clubhouse. Genest was still there. They told him what happened in Sherbrooke, and offered him Sorel membership. He took it.

  Over the next few days, they looted the Laval clubhouse — grabbing thousands in cash and six motorcycles — and the dead men’s homes. The clubhouse was then burned down. The bodies, stuffed in sleeping bags purchased a week earlier by Beaulieu and weighted down with cement blocks and barbell weights, were thrown into the St. Lawrence off the St. Ignatius de Loyola Wharf.

  An emissary was sent to tell Trudeau he was out of the Hells Angels. He accepted, and negotiated his safety and the return of his motorcycle in exchange for two murders, including that of Ginette “La Jument” Henri, Mathieu’s girlfriend and Laval’s accountant.

  Genest quickly proved his worth by murdering former Laval prospect Claude “Coco” Roy, and recovering five bags of cocaine from his underwear.

  When the Laval Chapter very obviously ceased to exist, the cops knew something was up. The Sûreté du Québec (SQ) correctly surmised from wiretaps that Sherbrooke had something to do with it, and raided their clubhouse. They found little of value.

  It wasn’t until the first body — that of Geoffrion — floated to the surface and was snagged by a local angler that things began to unravel for the Sorel Chapter. SQ divers went down and found remains of the other murdered Laval members and, as an added bonus, the
skeleton of a woman Trudeau had killed in an earlier dispute.

  That find had profound effects on the outlaw biker world in Quebec. The first thing that happened was that the Outlaws took advantage of the PR disaster. Not only did they start wearing their colors again, but they distributed leaflets lampooning “Hells Angels Brotherhood ” with crude drawings of fish-eating (and vomiting) dead Hells Angels. They bought a farm a few miles north of the Vermont border in an effort to get closer to the American border. Before they could host any parties, though, the SQ seized it because of drug and weapons offenses.

  A few Hells Angels weren’t exactly on board with the elimination of Laval. Lachance, who was there when his brothers from Laval were murdered and was still profoundly freaked out, turned informant. So did Gerry “Le Chat” Coulombe, a Sorel prospect who was at what the media was now calling “the Lennoxville Massacre” (even though it happened in Sherbrooke, the name came from the fact that the dead men stayed in a cheap Lennoxville motel the night before they were killed) and he was disgusted and unnerved that any organization would do that to its own members. Some smart SQ work also turned Trudeau into a snitch. Sergeant Marcel Lacoste, who was questioning Trudeau about some unrelated charges, showed him an article in a lurid local tabloid that reported that the Hells Angels were intending to kill him. Trudeau believed it, and spilled everything.

  From that information, 39 Hells Angels and associates were arrested in connection with the Lennoxville Massacre. After an 18-month trial, 21 of them were found guilty and sentenced to between two and 25 years in prison. Lessard, Luc “Sam” Michaud, Pelletier and Genest were found guilty of five counts of first-degree murder and got 25 years. Richard and Halifax’s Michael “Speedy” Christianson was among those acquitted.

  The loss of leadership and manpower in Montreal was huge. Laval was gone and numbers at Sorel and Sherbrooke were greatly reduced thanks to the convictions and the loss of members and prospects who quit or turned informant. Making matters worse, days later, the entire Halifax Chapter was arrested for leaning too heavily on a prostitute they represented. When they demanded a bigger cut of her net revenue, she went to police and the entire chapter went to prison for a year.

  That’s more significant than it sounds, because Hells Angels will pull a chapter’s charter if they have fewer than six members free and on the streets at any time. It had happened in Buffalo some years before, and it eventually did sink Halifax in 2003. It looked very much like the empire Buteau had begun to build was falling apart. Laval was gone, Sorel and Sherbrooke were at no better than half strength and Halifax was teetering on the brink of extinction.

  With Lessard out of the picture, Langlois took over his job without opposition. As president of Sorel, he instigated a recruiting drive for his chapter and Sherbrooke. And, as national president, he started moving members from other chapters — he even reached out to the long-isolated three chapters in B.C., and they agreed to send some of their men — into Halifax to keep their interests and their chapter alive.

  One of the gangs Lessard had been working hard to recruit from was the SS. Named after the universally feared Schutzstaffel (protective squadron) of the Nazi party in World War II, the Montreal SS started as a group of young men who believed strongly in white supremacy. As they grew older, they made money dealing drugs and with muscle-for-hire work. Eventually, like many other white gangs around the world, they started riding motorcycles and wearing black leather jackets.

  And Hells Angels recognized them as very desirable recruits. Not only were they the toughest guys in a tough neighborhood (Montreal’s Hochelaga-Maisonneuve) but they had an enviable drug-selling network.

  Things changed after the Lennoxville Massacre. The leadership of the SS — brothers Giovanni and Salvatore Cazzetta and their 400-pound pal Paul “Sasquatch” Porter — were appalled by what Lessard and his men had done. Not only did they vow never to join Hells Angels, but they eventually became the founders and driving force behind Hells Angels’ fiercest rivals: the Rock Machine.

  But the SS had another prominent member. He was in prison for armed sexual assault at the time of the Lennoxville Massacre, but when he got out, he said he was so impressed by Lessard’s strategic move (and claimed to be genuinely surprised that his friends were not), that he immediately quit the SS and joined the Sorel Chapter. He became a full-patch member in a remarkably short time.

  He was big and strong, not afraid to fight anyone. And he was smart and charismatic, even charming, and could get along with just about anyone. His name was Maurice “Mom” Boucher.

  It was an excellent time for him to join Hells Angels. The old guard — not just the Laval Chapter, but also the leadership of the Sorel Chapter — had been eliminated, and needed replacing. Entry into the Montreal Hells Angels at that time meant quick wealth and rapid advancement.

  Almost as soon as he joined, Boucher befriended another young member. Walter Stadnick had recovered sufficiently from his wounds to rejoin the chapter. Although he still had not learned much French by that point, he was already one of the most popular members of the organization. And he was well respected for the income he brought in, his self-discipline, his ability to get along with others and his strategic planning ability. He reminded some, I’ve been told, of a smaller version of Buteau.

  Although he was not present at the Lennoxville Massacre, Michel “Sky” Langlois heard that there was a warrant out for his arrest. Instead of facing it, he fled to Morocco.

  To replace him, Boucher became president of the Sorel Chapter, and Stadnick became national president.

  Now, I know a cop who maintains that Hells Angels do not have a national president in Canada, and never have. He has even testified to that opinion as an expert witness at a biker trial in Saskatchewan.

  I have to disagree. Prosecutors and other cops have shown me graphic evidence that indicates that Stadnick (and others who have held the same post, like Langlois and Buteau) was treated with inordinate respect during his reign. His bike was always at the front of every procession, and in every posed group photo, he is always front row center or just to the left of the club’s logo. In other countries, those spots are always reserved for the national president.

  And every cop, lawyer, biker and associate I have ever spoken with has acknowledged Stadnick’s standing as the top guy when it came to the club’s national affairs. And when the club sued a publishing company over the illegal use of the death’s head logo, it was Stadnick who represented the club.

  So, even if he never printed business cards with the title “national president” under his name, Stadnick performed the duties of one, and was widely acknowledged as such both inside the club and among interested observers. Those duties were primarily concentrated around recruiting new clubs and fostering communication between existing clubs. When he took over the reins, the dispirited Hells Angels were still flailing in Canada. The members in Halifax had gotten out of prison, but were at best a chapter barely fit to operate. Their leader, Carroll, would later move to Montreal, further weakening the only Maritime chapter. Sorel and Sherbrooke were both rapidly reforming after the arrests had robbed them of many of their leaders. They generally answered to Boucher, although Sherbrooke held Stadnick in very high regard. The three chapters in B.C. had much more in common with their friends in Washington and Oregon than they did with anyone in Montreal. And they felt like they were owed something after they’d lent men to fill in for the jailed Halifax Chapter.

  But Stadnick had a dream. He told a friend who later turned informant that he had a plan to make sure that the only patch in Canada would be that of the Hells Angels. There would be no need for chapters. Instead, the bottom rocker would only read “Canada.”

  But there were some things in the way: the other biker gangs throughout the country. Using the many weapons at his disposal — the mystique of the Hells Angels brand, the promise of easy money and his own charm — Stadnick had a great deal of success bringing them over to his point of view. Star
ting, actually, in Quebec and then in Western Canada, Stadnick managed to bring dozens of clubs into the fold, extending the club’s reach from Pacific to Atlantic. But his success was tempered by the fact that he was unable to establish anything in his home province of Ontario.

  And there was a problem in Quebec as well. The Cazzetta brothers and Porter didn’t join Hells Angels, but that doesn’t mean they left organized crime. Instead, they joined with some local bar owners who distributed drugs from their establishments who called themselves the Dark Circle. The members of the Dark Circle were upset that Hells Angels raised and strictly enforced prices, especially for cocaine.

  The Cazzettas and Porter recruited a number of street toughs in and around Montreal — including a few Outlaws and guys who had been rejected by Hells Angels — to form a new group called the Rock Machine. In the beginning, they were a gang, but not a motorcycle gang. Of course, the Cazzettas, Porter and a few others rode Harleys, but the vast majority didn’t. And, instead of a patch on the back of a leather jacket, members of the organization identified one another with a ring embossed with the head of an eagle. They probably outnumbered Hells Angels, at least on the island of Montreal, and could always rely on the Dark Circle to come up with more foot soldiers.

  Their purpose was to supply Montreal with an alternative to Hells Angels as a source of drugs, especially cocaine. The Rock Machine would often charge less than Hells Angels, and that wasn’t something Hells Angels could tolerate. In August 1994, they declared war.

  In the ensuing years, as the Hells Angels and their puppet gangs killed members of the Rock Machine and their allies with shootings and bombings, more than 160 people, including many innocent people not involved with the drug trade, were murdered. One of them — an 11-year-old boy named Daniel Desrochers, who was killed by shrapnel from a Hells Angels bomb on August 9, 1995 — turned public opinion so far against the bikers in Quebec that it fuelled the government’s fight for anti-racketeering laws.