As bikers filed out with their freshly attached winged skulls, the scale of the patch-over became evident. More than 150 Ontario bikers had become Hells Angels that day, without having to prospect or serve as puppet clubs first. “When Walter was hanging around with them, it became clear that he was after the Para-Dice Riders; and with Guindon retired, getting Satan’s Choice made sense too,” said John Harris. “But some of those other guys—they were useless, drug-addled wastes—it seems like he was getting desperate, letting anyone on a Harley wear the patch.”
The cops did their best to regain some composure. A few of them started chanting “I’ll live and die a Para-Dice Rider,” the club’s motto. It did nothing to dampen the bikers’ enthusiasm. Freshly minted Hells Angels began to trot out of the Sorel headquarters. Some of the veterans ran over to cops and reporters they knew and showed off their patches like students displaying their diplomas to their families at graduation.
And nobody was happier than Walter Stadnick. Although it had taken years and there were a few close calls, Stadnick had managed to expand the Hells Angels across the country from their power base in Quebec. British Columbia? Hells Angels dominated. East Coast? With the rapid deployment of puppet gangs from Quebec and a few well-placed assassinations, Hells Angels once again dominated. The Prairies? Hells Angels dominated by chapters and puppet clubs throughout Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. And Ontario? Although a few pockets of resistance remained—mostly the four small Rock Machine chapters and the dozen or so Para-Dice Riders who refused to patch over—even Canada’s richest province was now Hells Angels territory.
And while the successful prosecution of the war against the Rock Machine and the genuine fear he had sown in Quebec’s government and population had made Maurice “Mom” Boucher a headline regular and a household word, it had also made him a target. He’d been in and out of prison so many times that he had an entire maximum security wing reserved only for him. And police and prosecutors were working 24/7 on a way to get him back in there. The only thing that kept him free was a strict adherence to the rules of insulation he’d learned from Stadnick when they set up the Nomads.
But through stealth, intelligence, charm and luck, Stadnick had managed to build the empire of his dreams. From sea to sea, he had a legion of bikers wearing his colors, selling his drugs and making him millions. He had hundreds of men at his disposal. Men who would work for him, go to prison for him and even kill for him. And all the police could do was follow him around and give him meaningless traffic tickets.
The little guy from Hamilton who didn’t speak a word of French had not only taken over the Hells Angels, but, from an underworld standpoint, he ran the country. The wily Wild One had outlasted the Outlaws, the Rock Machine and his old bosses in the mafia. He’d subdued the Grim Reapers, the Rebels, the King’s Crew, Los Brovos, the Spartans, Satan’s Choice, the Para-Dice Riders, the Apollos, the Loners and dozens of others into becoming his men. He’d outwitted and outmaneuvered the police in such a way that he’d made them someone else’s problem. Walter Stadnick, the horribly scarred little biker who preferred Armani to leather, had won.
Chapter 12
The other waitresses thought Hélène Brunet was nuts. She hated bikers and refused to serve them whenever they ate at Eggstra, the Montreal-Nord strip-mall café where she worked. The rest of the staff loved it when the bikers came in. Not only did they leave better tips than the few coins most of the deadbeats in the area gave them—so much so that they began to use a code name for bikers: “five bucks”—but they were exciting. It wasn’t just Rockers or Death Riders from across the river in Laval, but real Hells Angels. Even Maurice “Mom” Boucher, the “baddest” and most famous of them all, would stop by every week or so for a plate of sausage and eggs. The other waitresses would often compete to serve the bikers, especially the ones they recognized from the newspaper.
But Brunet was adamant. She wanted no part of the bikers. She wasn’t afraid of them, she maintained, just disgusted with their attitude. But on July 7, 2000, she didn’t have a choice. Two guys she thought were bikers sat in the smoking area, and she was the only waitress on duty that morning who could work in that section. It didn’t matter; anyway, there was a long-haired guy with a moustache in the non-smoking area too. If he wasn’t a biker, he was a wannabe and they could be worse. Just as Brunet approached the bad guys’ table to take their order, she heard a commotion and turned around. What she saw at first confused her. A masked man had come into the restaurant and joined the longhaired man and both of them were carrying handguns. “I thought it was a joke,” said Brunet. “You see that on TV—I didn’t even think it was a real gun.” They both were.
Before anyone could react, the masked man shot Bob Savard three times in the head. His face was in his eggs before Brunet realized what was going on. The other biker leapt to his feet and grabbed Brunet by her collar and the waistband of her pants. He held her in front of him and used her as a human shield. The long-haired man emptied his clip. Three bullets hit Brunet in the right leg and another one penetrated her right arm. The man who hid behind her, Normand Descôteaux, fled unharmed.
Savard and Descôteaux weren’t bikers. But the assassins were. The hit that involved the unfortunate Brunet was a bit of Hells Angels strategy. Savard and Descôteaux were independent loan-sharks, eager to take over the business left over when André “Dédé” Desjardins was killed. It was just a little housecleaning for the Hells Angels. There was no room in Montreal for anyone who didn’t play ball with the new lords of the underworld.
After recovering in hospital, Brunet became an anti-biker advocate and even sued Descôteaux and Boucher for the shooting. She has frequently been seen since with Josée-Anne Desrosiers, mother of the slain Daniel, at rallies, functions and media events. The Montreal tabloids have since named them the “Elles Angels.”
Traditionally, women don’t mean much to the Hells Angels. According to the club’s original rules, a woman ranks far below a member’s Harley and on a rung somewhat below his dog. That’s why it’s ironic (or perhaps fitting) that so many Hells Angels were brought down by two angry women.
France Charbonneau, a lawyer based in Montreal, had been working night and day since Boucher’s acquittal for the prison guard murders. She pored over the court transcripts and compared them to precedent. Like many in the Québec legal community, she was horrified by the speech Judge Jean-Guy Boilard made just before sending the jury to deliberation, in which he described star witness Stéphane Gagné as “not credible” and pointed out that lying in court would probably save his life. On October 10, 2000, Charbonneau’s dedication paid off. A three-judge panel for the Québec Court of Appeal unanimously agreed that there should be a new trial for the case against Boucher for the murder of the prison guards.
It was no problem for the police to find him, as they had him under constant surveillance. The hard part was deciding who would arrest and then hold him. Both the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) and the Montreal police claimed jurisdiction. Both wanted to be seen as the force that caught the mighty Boucher and neither side would back down. Finally, they worked out a deal in which two Montreal officers and two SQ men would apprehend him. The city cops would search and frisk him, but he would be held at the local SQ headquarters at Parthenais.
The following morning, Boucher got a call from his lawyer, Benoît Cliche. After telling him about the court decision, he set up a lunch meeting at a South Shore restaurant. Boucher was surprised. He did not expect to lose the appeal. But now he was going back to jail.
He had just worked out a plan with Cliche and Gilbert Frigon over lunch in which he would quietly surrender himself at a West End police station, when they spotted the cops outside. At 1 p.m., Boucher left the restaurant, was arrested, searched and cuffed before being stuffed into an SQ car and taken to Parthenais. According to police officers, he was so upset about the public arrest that he didn’t stop swearing until after he was put in his cell.
The ot
her woman would show up somewhat later. Before Dany Kane died, he managed to give the SQ an immense gift. Normand Robitaille, the Nomad he served as a de facto valet, had some business in Québec City, so he gave Kane his briefcase to protect. “It is extremely important this does not leave your sight,” his boss had told him. “The contents are very important.” As soon as Robitaille’s car was out of sight, Kane got on the phone and set up a meeting with the SQ. He handed over the briefcase, the police photocopied every document inside, put them back in exactly the order they had found them in, and returned it to Kane.
Robitaille was none the wiser, but the cops found out more about the inner workings of the Nomads than they could have imagined. The papers inside the briefcase were accounting records for The Table and, although they were not entirely incriminating on their own, they indicated an immense amount of both drugs and money passing through the organization. They also contained the name of Jean-Richard “Race” Larivière, whom Kane had mentioned as a major drug distributor for The Table.
Carcajou immediately started tailing Larivière. When he stopped at 7415 Rue Beaubien Est, the cops were pretty sure it was a social call because Larivière came from Anjou. But then the police noticed that the front door of the high-rise was almost spinning with traffic. When they looked closer, they noticed that the overwhelming majority of people passing through the lobby were young and almost every one of them was carrying a bag of some sort clutched closely to their bodies. When the first set of officers were replaced by a more experienced group, reports began to be called in about the presence of well-known drug dealers and Hells Angels associates from Laval, Québec City, Trois-Rivières, the Eastern Townships and other parts of Québec.
Finding the apartment in the 75-unit high-rise wasn’t difficult. An officer stationed in the lobby noticed that almost all elevator rides—and all that contained known or suspected drug dealers—stopped at the fifth floor. Armed with that information, the police checked utility records. They were suspiciously low for unit 504; clearly nobody lived there. Further, more specific surveillance showed the police that the Hells Angels had installed no extra security for the apartment that many would later refer to as “the Nomads National Bank.” After acquiring the proper warrants, they copied the superintendent’s key to the front door. Inside, they saw a setup more closely resembling an office than a home. As quickly as possible, they set up bugs, phone taps and video cameras.
The following day, they saw the inner workings of the Nomads’ banking and drug distribution system. Time after time on grainy black and white video, the police saw dealers or their runners drop off bags of money and receive bags of drugs in return. Once the customer was gone, a Nomads associate named Robert Gauthier would take the money to another apartment in the same building for safekeeping. Another check of utility bills indicated they were using unit 403. Police broke in that night and found more office-style furniture, two PCs and a large safe—they quickly installed more video cameras and bugs.
A few days later, SQ Sergeant Pierre Boucher, commanding officer for what was now being called Project Ocean, had an idea. When the bank was closed, he got a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) agent to sneak into 403 and copy the contents of both PCs. He was disappointed at the results. Although both computers had identical accounting software, neither had any data. But further examination of the videos showed that Nomads associate Stéphane Chagnon carefully inserted what looked like a disk or CD into one PC when he arrived in the morning and ejected it and then hid it every night. Boucher went into 403 that evening and recovered a 100 Mb Zip disk from under a rug, copied it and then returned it to the hiding spot. Jackpot. The disk contained spreadsheets revealing a massive amount of trade in what the police assumed was cocaine and hashish. Although code names were used for every transaction, it was clear what was going on. And a quick look into their records showed that both Gauthier and Chagnon were related to Nomad Michel Rose by marriage. Project Ocean officers broke into the 403 every night to copy the updated disk and to photograph the contents of the vault.
Although evidence was piling up, there was little the police could do unless they could tie the money to drugs and find out who the people hiding behind the codenames were. They got both when the second angry woman walked into the RCMP Montreal headquarters on January 24, 2001. Sandra Craig had survived two attempts on her life when the Hells Angels were removing their competition from the streets of Montreal. She’d lost her husband and her livelihood as a drug trafficker because the Nomads were making sure every dealer in the city bought from The Table. Now it was her turn to ruin their lives. After asking for and getting assurances from Sergeant Tom O’Neill that nothing she said would be used against her, she presented him with copies of some spreadsheets similar to what the police had found in apartment 403. He asked her to explain what they meant. She told him that they were records of cocaine and hashish sales between the Craigs and the bikers. He asked who her customers were. “André Chouinard and Michel Rose,” she answered. O’Neill asked her to repeat what she had just said. “André Chouinard and Michel Rose,” she said calmly. Police knew these names of the members of The Table.
Less than a week later, they struck. At night, police raided the Rue Beaubien apartments and two others that were used for nothing other than to count and store huge sums of cash. Altogether, they confiscated more than $5.6 million of the Nomads’ money. When they arrested Chagnon as he showed up for work the following morning, they took his two cell phones, three pagers and his little black book of phone numbers. Inside, they got what they were looking for—a directory of who held each coded account. One of them, amusingly named Gertrude, belonged to Walter Stadnick and Donald Stockford.
Jean-Guy Bourgoin and Stéphane Sirois were two old friends going in different directions. Both were founding members of the Rockers, but Sirois had left the club in 1997. Police learned from informants that he left because his wife was afraid he’d get hurt. None of the other Rockers held it against him. “It’s always that way,” one of them told him. No hard feelings. Bourgoin, on the other hand, stayed in and went hardcore. According to police, he controlled the drug trade in Plateau Mont-Royal. In February 1995, he and Normand Robitaille were arrested for extortion. They demanded $450,000 from a local businessman with a severe cocaine habit and drove him to his bank to clean out his savings account. As they waited in the car, the intended victim told the bank manager what was going on. The police grabbed Bourgoin and Robitaille and charged them with forcible confinement, unauthorized possession of a firearm and concealing evidence. They were sentenced to 26 months in prison. In September 1998, Bourgoin was in trouble again. He was charged with assault after he attacked Montreal Alouettes linebacker Stephen Reid with a metal pipe in a bar fight, and spent 20 days in jail.
About the same time Bourgoin came out of prison, Sirois returned to the Rockers. His two-year tenure out of biker life had been moderately successful, but the news of massive payouts to informants at the height of the war caused him to rethink his career. Sirois—again, some say, at his wife’s urging—called the RCMP about becoming an undercover agent-source. The cops jumped at the chance. Sirois was articulate, fearless and well-respected by the other bikers. The police knew he could not only infiltrate the bikers at the highest level, but he could also be a sympathetic character on the witness stand.
The Rockers welcomed him warmly and it didn’t take long for Sirois to be reacquainted and trusted by heavyweights like Bourgoin. The RCMP put a recording device on his chest and asked him to talk to Bourgoin about three topics: money-laundering, drug sales and murder. He delivered on all three.
After a few beers at an East End strip club, Sirois told Bourgoin he had a little problem. Getting back into business had made him a lot of cash very quickly, and he needed a way to keep it from drawing too much attention. Bourgoin laughed and gave his old friend a playful punch on the arm. He told him he’d set him up with an accountant. “He’s a hell of a guy, worked 25 years for the
government and he was Rizzuto’s accountant. He’s always worked for those Italian guys,” Bourgoin said. “You give him the cash, say ‘here wash this for me’—and he will play with your money.” While he said it, he made a washing motion with his hands.
A few weeks later, Sirois met with Bourgoin again, this time at the clubhouse. He didn’t have to ask him for anything. Trusting his old friend, Bourgoin offered to cut him in on the action of a popular new product—bootleg Viagra. “I have it in industrial quantities,” he said. Feigning skepticism, Sirois asked if it worked. Bourgoin laughed and told him that he should try it himself, saying: “You’ll be as big as a horse.” Using RCMP money, Sirois bought some. He never said if he tried it.
The RCMP learned a lot about the makeup of the Rockers through the Sirois tapes and his verbal reports. He told them about two associates who claimed to be full-patch Rockers to impress some girls. As soon as Bougoin found out, four real Rockers dragged the boasters into the clubhouse and beat them so severely that “they were on the floor, in convulsions.” Sirois couldn’t help looking shocked and disgusted. Bourgoin tried to calm him down and explain the situation by pointing out that some of the Rockers would do anything to get ahead and they knew that the straightest road to the top of the Hells Angels’ enforcer unit was through displays of savagery. “These guys all want to get promoted.” Bourgoin told his old friend. “They’re all mental cases, psychopaths.” Even more revealing was the conversation Sirois had with Rocker Sébastien Beauchamp, who told him what bikers thought of ordinary citizens. “I look at people who get up at seven, get stuck in traffic just to work for ten bucks an hour, then come back at night,” he said. “They’re the fools; we’re the ones who are sensible.”
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 54
