Biker Trials, The
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The Biker Trials
The Biker Trials
Bringing Down the Hells Angels
PAUL CHERRY
Copyright © Paul Cherry, 2005
Published by ECW PRESS
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E IE2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW PRESS.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Cherry, Paul, 1968–
The biker trials : bringing down the Hell Angels / Paul Cherry.
ISBN 1-55022-638-x
1. Hell’s Angels. 2. Trials (Narcotic laws) — Québec (Province) — Montréal. 3. Drug traffic — Québec (Province). 4. Motorcycle gangs — Québec (Province). 5. Organized crime — Québec (Province). I. Title.
HV6491.C32Q4 2005A 345.71′277′971428 C2005-904372-5
Editor: Emily Schultz
Production: Mary Bowness
Cover Photo: Photonica
Printing: Transcontinental
This book is set in Minion and Scratch
With the publication of The Biker Trials ECW PRESS acknowledges the generous financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, for our publishing activities.
DISTRIBUTION
CANADA: Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Ave., Georgetown, ON L7G 5S4 UNITED STATES: Independent Publishers Group, 814 North Franklin Street, Chicago, IL, USA 60610
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To S and C
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Peak
2 Mom
3 Arrests en Masse
4 The Hits
5 An Ocean of Cash
6 Santa Claus aka Gerald Matticks
7 Project Rush: Guilty Pleas and Surprises
8 Stéphane Sirois: A Man Inside
9 Stéphane Gagné: Trigger Man
10 Serge Boutin: Nowhere to Go But Out
11 The Colombian Connection
12 The View From the Other Side
13 A Jury Decides
Conclusion
Cast of Characters
Acknowledgements
Seeing as how this book is about crime and the courts it is fitting that this begin with a confession. I was not able to attend all of the court procedures covered in this book. The three main trials mentioned in this book stretched out over a period of months and in one case more than a year, all while I covered crime on a daily basis for The Gazette. Writing about some key parts required a thorough listening of digital recordings after the hearings took place.
Keeping informed of what was significant and interesting would not have been possible without help from several people, including the journalists who followed the trials on a daily basis like Isabelle Richer of Radio Canada, Marc Pigeon of the Journal de Montréal, Charles André Marchand and especially André Cédilot of La Presse who, along with Michel Auger of the Journal de Montréal, gave much support through their encouragement.
Writing this also would never have been possible without the support of author Lee Lamothe. Antonio Nicaso, author of several books on organized crime, also lent support through his advice.
I also want to thank everyone at ECW Press who helped, especially Jack David, David Caron, Mary Bowness, Crissy Boylan, Emily Schultz and Emma McKay.
It goes without saying that writing a book requires time and I wouldn’t have had that valuable commodity without Ross Teague and George Kalogerakis, the current and former city editors at The Gazette, who both juggled complicated schedules while allowing me to dedicate time towards this book.
The other valuable commodity that was always in supply while writing this was advice and information and for this I would like to thank Guy Ouellette, a retired Sûreté de Québec sergeant and the province’s foremost expert on biker gangs, Gary Francoeur, Rita Legault of the Sherbrooke Record, Peter Edwards of the Toronto Star and Adrian Humphries at the National Post.
Researching this material required the patient help of many clerks at courthouses across Quebec.
There are several other people I would like to thank including several friends and family members who would rather not see their names appear in such a book.
Introduction
Not Garbagemen
Most disputes over criminal matters like drug turf appear nebulous to the average, law-abiding citizen. “Who were the people behind this explosion?” or “What could have motivated someone to gun down that young man on my street?” are questions often left hanging as two criminal organizations battle it out in a metropolitan area like Montreal. It took a while, but eventually the war between the Hells Angels and a group of criminal organizations called the Alliance, which started in 1994, held little mystery for the average person.
By August 1995, after a series of explosions and murders, and in particular the death of an innocent boy, many people in Quebec were aware of what the war was about and who the two sides were. Unlike most shadowy criminal organizations the Hells Angels and a rival gang called the Rock Machine advertised who they were with patches on the backs of their leather jackets. Like politicians or corporations eager to generate name recognition, both sides handed out T-shirts and baseball caps to drug dealers who sided with them.
Operation Springtime 2001 signaled the beginning of the end of what came to be known as the biker gang war. On March 28, 2001, more than 2,000 police officers across Quebec were dispatched to carry out more than 130 arrest warrants and seize gang assets, including 20 buildings, 70 firearms and $8.6 million Canadian and $2.7 million U.S.
The massive police roundup was the result of two police investigations, “Project Rush” and “Project Ocean.” Project Rush was put together using what was, at that point, recently adopted federal anti-gang legislation. Investigators and prosecutors built a case geared toward charging gang members with the murder of their rivals, even if they had a limited role the gang’s affairs.
The primary target of Project Rush was the Hells Angels whose members were the leaders in the war. The lengthy police investigation involved years of gathering evidence like wiretaps, countless hours of police surveillance and working informants. It began in 1998 with the police zeroing in on people who were members of the Montreal-based organization and its underling gang, the Rockers. For the latter part of the investigation the officers involved were part of Regional Integrated Squad, which grouped together Montreal-area investigators from the RCMP, La Sûreté du Québec and the Montreal Urban Community police. The squad was based on an earlier model called the Wolverine Squad, an elite investigation unit focusing on the biker gang war.
Project Rush spawned another investigation, Project Ocean, during which the police learned how incredibly organized the Hells Angels had become. It was through Project Ocean that police discovered how the gang managed its drug money. Though Project Ocean was an almost accidental offshoot of Project Rush, it produced evidence that led to the arrests of more Hells Angels than any other police operation in Canada in more than a decade.
The end result of these investigations was dubbed “Operation Springtime 2001.” It created a brief void in Montreal’s drug trade that year. But the gangsters who were part of the battered and bruised Alliance would regroup and join the Bandidos, an international biker gang similar to the Hells Angels. Sporting new patches, the Bandidos would mount an effort to take over the drug turf abandoned by the jailed Hells Angels
. These efforts would be short-lived since anyone in Quebec associated with the Bandidos was arrested on June 1, 2002, in “Operation Amigo.” This police investigation produced 62 arrest warrants and resulted in charges of drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder.
While most Quebecers knew what the biker war was all about, the details that spilled out in the subsequent trials from Project Rush and Project Ocean would raise eyebrows as they revealed just how much money was involved and how fully the Hells Angels assumed they were immune to prosecution. The tough question to answer is how did it all get started, what chain of events could have precipitated a conflict that would end up taking more than 160 lives, including those of several innocent victims? To that end, this book benefits from the notes on a person who was there when it began. More specifically, they are the notes of Dany Kane’s handlers in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The RCMP began to use Kane as a window into a world to which the police had very little access when the conflict between drug dealers erupted in 1994.
Predictably, Kane’s reports to his police handlers clearly included self-serving lies. For example, he tried to pin a murder he himself had committed on someone else through the “tips” he was supplying to the police in 1995. Though they later realized his duplicity, the police were still willing to use Kane as a way to infiltrate the Hells Angels. If one can accept Kane as a partially reliable narrator of the start of the biker war — and there is corroborating evidence to indicate that he was — then his dispatches serve as the most accurate version of what was going on with the Hells Angels in Montreal in 1994.
Kane also offered insight into the men who were assembling the Nomads chapter with two goals in mind: to win the war against the Alliance and to expand “business” into those areas of Canada not already dominated by other Hells Angels.
Needing help with this westward expansion the Nomads chapter was interested in using Kane. That is what the Hells Angels were preparing him for when he first contacted the Interpol office in Ottawa during the autumn of 1994. He asked to speak to someone knowledgeable about biker gangs. He was put in contact with RCMP Sgt. Jean-Pierre Lévesque, an analyst for Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC). As part of the Ottawa-based bureau, Lévesque was sent intelligence reports on biker gangs collected by police forces in cities and towns across Canada. Lévesque seized the opportunity and set up a meeting with Kane. He then contacted Corporal Pierre Verdon, an RCMP investigator in Montreal.
At that point, Kane had had about seven years’ experience as a criminal working inside and outside the biker gang world. He had been a member of a gang called the Concordes, based in Saint-Hubert, a town in Montreal’s South Shore region. The Concordes was later fused into a Hells Angels’ underling gang called the Evil Ones, also based in the South Shore.
Instead of becoming part of the Hells Angels’ growing criminal enterprise, Kane decided to go out on his own, concentrating on his own activities, like drug trafficking, contraband cigarettes and weapons. He kept good ties with the Evil Ones but began to notice that without gang ties, he lacked influence. During the summer of 1993, he accepted an offer from two members of the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter to preside over a new affiliated gang in Ontario. The project didn’t go well and Kane ended up behind bars, later blaming the debacle on “the imbeciles” he was asked to work with. But when he was released, he had no trouble making contact with the Hells Angels again.
Kane told Lévesque and Verdon that he was willing to work with the RCMP for a long time. His ultimate goal was to become a member of the Hells Angels, which he estimated would take between three to five years, while supplying the police with information. In Verdon’s notes from the first meeting, the only motive mentioned was that Kane expected to be paid well for his information. Lévesque and Verdon knew that having someone like Kane working for the police was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and they decided he should be kept as a paid informant. Kane was code-named “C2994” to protect his identity.
On November 4, 1994, Kane made his first mention of Maurice (Mom) Boucher. He had serious concerns about working for the police and betraying such a powerful head of a criminal organization. Verdon noted the concern at the end of 20 pages of notes generated from that November meeting. He wrote: “The source is worried about the possibility of leaks coming from our department. The source is worried about the fact that a police officer who makes $55,000 per year can be bought by the other side. According to the source, a member of the Hells Angels, like Maurice (Mom) Boucher, one of the richest and most influential of the group, is ready to pay double a police officer’s salary for those who provide them with information.”
At that point, Boucher was far from being the household name in Quebec he would eventually become. But any police detective involved in organized crime in the province knew his name. By 1994, he was an elusive figure to some frustrated investigators. He appeared to be involved in the Hells Angels’ large-scale drug deals, but never in a way that generated enough evidence to implicate him in a major offense. As 1994 neared its end, Boucher, who was then 41 years old, had been head of the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter, which was actually based in Sorel, a city 60 kilometres northeast of Montreal. He had joined the Hells Angels seven years earlier.
The Montreal chapter was chartered on December 5, 1977, becoming the first Canadian chapter of the Hells Angels, joining several others already established in Australia, England and the U.S. at that point. The first chapter had been founded in San Bernardino, California, on March 17, 1948. Even before the Hells Angels opened shop in Quebec, the province already had its share of biker violence thanks to gangs that plagued Montreal and smaller cities or towns. The Hells Angels in New York were friendly with a gang called the Popeyes in Montreal. The Popeyes had already garnered headlines in Quebec with their violence long before becoming Hells Angels. They were engaged in a bloody war with a gang called the Devil’s Disciples. And about a year before they became Hells Angels, several members of the Popeyes were arrested in a small town northwest of Montreal after trashing a hotel and taking three women hostage inside. The Popeyes were friendly with similar Quebec-based biker gangs with names like the Missiles in the Saguenay region and the Sex Fox in Chibougamau (the gang actually used the Looney Toons’ character Wile E. Coyote for its patch, instead of a fox). Originally, 17 members of the Popeyes were chosen to be part of the first Hells Angels’ chapter in Canada and they later recruited members from other gangs.
One of the Popeyes who joined the Hells Angels was Yves (Le Boss) Buteau, an influential biker who maintained good ties with other gangs in the province. According to news reports after his death, Buteau was a charismatic man and a natural leader, traits that helped him spread the Hells Angels’ dogma to other parts of Canada. Buteau would be killed in 1983 while he was the Hells Angels’ Canadian national president. The shooter, a 22-year-old drug dealer named Gino Goudreau who had ties to a rival biker gang, went into hiding but was arrested months later. He said he had been dealing hashish in various Sorel parks and in a bar called Le Petit Bourg, the place where he shot Buteau and another biker named Guy Gilbert on September 8, 1983.He testified during a coroner’s inquiry that the Hells Angels threatened him on several occasions in the four months before the murder.
Goudreau said he had been shooting pool in Le Petit Bourg when Buteau threatened him yet again and told him to leave the bar. As Goudreau exited the bar, three bikers followed him outside, confronting Goudreau as he and his girlfriend were preparing to leave on a motorcycle. Goudreau said Buteau threatened him again, saying it was his last night in Sorel as he unzipped his jacket and reached for a revolver tucked under the front of his belt to make his point. Like some cowboy in a Hollywood western, Goudreau claimed he merely beat Buteau to the draw. He pulled a revolver out of a storage box on his motorcycle and opened fire, shooting Buteau, who was the closest. Earlier that summer Goudreau had traded a large quantity of hashish for the gun with one of his customers. Buteau was struck fo
ur times, the bullets entering his heart, a lung and a major artery. Buteau and Gilbert were killed. Another Hells Angel was wounded in the shooting. Goudreau was charged with two counts of second-degree murder but was acquitted after claiming self-defense.
The day after Buteau’s funeral, a young boy found a bomb, equipped with a remote control detonator, placed along the route where the funeral procession, made up of many bikers, had passed. As the police investigated the bomb, composed ofdynamite and 50 pounds of nails and gravel, they theorized that it had been placed on the side of the road and camouflaged the night before the funeral. At the time of his death, Buteau was considered a key player in the plan to bring the Hells Angels’ name and ideology to Quebec and then expand into other provinces in Canada.
Buteau was replaced by Michel (Sky) Langlois, another influential Hells Angel who helped the gang gain notoriety in the years to come. But by then, with the violent people he had selected to wear the Hells Angels’ patch, Buteau had already laid the foundation for the gang’s take-no-prisoners philosophy.
Luc Michaud was among the members of Missiles selected to join the Hells Angels. The Missiles were based in the Saguenay village of Saint-Gedeon, where they terrorized the 1,750 residents. They openly trafficked in drugs, and used firearms for target practice in residential neighborhoods. During the late 1970s, Michaud ran a stripper agency for the Hells Angels before becoming a “full-patch” (or full-fledged) member in 1980. He would become part of the gang’s second chapter in Quebec, based in Laval, an island city north of Montreal. But two years later, he asked to return to the Montreal chapter as he and other Hells Angels began to realize some members of the Laval chapter were unwilling to discipline themselves into a well-tuned, organized gang. Michaud would later be described as a zealot of the Hells Angels’ doctrine and he was believed to be a driving force behind the March 24, 1985, slaughter of five members of the Laval chapter, dubbed the Lennoxville Purge. He was convicted on five counts of first-degree murder for his role in the murders and sentenced to life with no chance of parole until he had served 25 years.