by Paul Cherry
“Hey that’s some province,” Provencher said of the Hells Angels’ newly acquired territory.
“Oh yeah, it’s a big province,” Boucher replied.
What Boucher and Provencher didn’t know was that the final preparation of years of work was underway in a special office for prosecutors at the Montreal courthouse. Their recorded conversation was going to be one small part of the evidence. Transcripts of hours of wiretaps were already being carefully read and reread. Secretly recorded videotapes of meetings the Rockers had held were being scrutinized carefully. It was all in preparation for a well-kept secret; the network Boucher and the rest of the Nomads had built over the years was about to crumble.
Only three months later, before the sun emerged on March 28, 2001, more than 2,000 cops from all over Quebec began pounding on doors and arresting dozens of people, including any members of the Nomads chapter who could be found. The roundup was dubbed “Opération Printemps(or Springtime) 2001”
All of those arrested were named in warrants on charges that ranged from drug trafficking to first-degree murder. Of those charged, 42 were singled out for an indictment accusing them of 23 of the most serious crimes, including a failed plot to level an entire building in Verdun with a bomb, and 13 specific counts of first-degree murder. Those charges stemmed from the Project Rush investigation. Another 49 were named in another warrant, generated by the Project Ocean investigation, accusing them of either supplying or dealing the drugs that fueled the network.
Paul (Schtroumpf) Brisebois
Brisebois, the short man who had worked security at the Sorel party only weeks before, was among the 42 gang members included in the Project Rush indictment, including the Turcotte murder in Verdun. By now Brisebois knew the drill. During the spring of 1990, when he was 18, the RCMP had received a complaint from someone living on the same street where Brisebois was selling. Too many people were coming and going to the apartment. The Mounties asked an undercover officer from the Montreal Urban Community Police to buy drugs from Brisebois. The officer knocked on a door and was greeted by Brisebois. He only asked who had referred him to his illicit pharmacy. Then he walked through the apartment to a living room table where the officer watched as he pulled out a little bag of cocaine from a margarine container that had been shoved inside an empty beer pitcher.
With the purchase made, the RCMP got a warrant to search the apartment. Inside, they found several more of the little bags along with a small quantity of hashish. Brisebois was arrested, charged and released on bail to await a possible trial. But while his case was still at the preliminary stage, Brisebois was caught again, selling quarter-gram bags of cocaine, just a few doors down from where the RCMP had nabbed him a year earlier. He eventually served a combined 13 months in prison for the two busts.
Ten years later, Brisebois was rising quickly through the Hells Angels’ ranks. But to the investigators who had spent years targeting the biker gangs, the real coup that day were the arrests of almost all the full-patch members of the Nomads, including some who had been Hells Angels for more than a decade.
Denis Houle
At 47 years old, Denis Houle, whose nickname was once Pas Fiable (Not Reliable), had 20 years as a Hells Angel under his belt and had already done serious jail time while wearing the gang’s patch. Years before the March 2001 roundup, Houle made it clear to authorities he was committed to the gang.
“With the Hells, I have found a family,” Houle once told a prison psychologist while serving a nine-year sentence for being an accomplice after the fact in the 1985 murders of five fellow Hells Angels’ members. The sordid event became known as the “Lennoxville Purge” or the “Lennoxville Slaughter,” as the five members were invited to the Hells Angels’ Sherbrooke chapter bunker on March 24, 1985, where they were gunned down. After the bloodbath, the bodies were stuffed into sleeping bags, weighed down with barbells and dumped in a river. The Hells Angels had purged their own members in part for consuming cocaine the gang intended to sell for profit. Houle had a small role in this purge, an event that awoke Canada to the violent potential of the Hells Angels. The same psychologist told the National Parole Board that Houle, while serving his sentence, found a source of personal value in the gang, and described him as a well-structured individual “in his delinquency.” Life in his adopted family would permit Houle to live a lifestyle that, by 2001, according to court documents, was clearly incompatible with his declared revenue. He allegedly managed to hide $4.5 million in the Antilles and was believed to own $800,000 in real estate in Nova Scotia. During the early part of his sentence, Houle was caught selling drugs in a federal penitentiary and intimidating other inmates, so he was transferred from a minimum-security institution to Donnacona, a maximum-security penitentiary near Quebec City. The parole board held back on granting Houle full parole during the early 1990s because he refused to discuss the details of his role in the Lennoxville murders. In 1993, he told the board he would not discuss the slayings because other Hells Angels found guilty of taking part were still appealing their sentences. The parole board reports filed during Houle’s sentence revealed a fierce gang loyalty that belied his nickname. In 1994 that loyalty would be paid off as he was picked to be one of the founding members of the Nomads chapter despite having spent the past several years in prison.
The police half-jokingly referred to the Nomads chapter members as the “elite” of the five other Hells Angels’ chapters chartered by the gang in Quebec by 2001. The newly created Nomads represented some of the gang’s most influential members in eastern Canada. At the helm was Boucher, a man who had become so influential as a drug dealer in Montreal’s east end that a short stint behind bars during the mid-1990s caused panic, uncertainty and shortages among his many drug dealers in the Rockers. Like some of the other founding members of the Nomads, Boucher had held prominent positions within the gang including president of the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter. Because of details Dany Kane, a Hells Angels’ underling who turned informant in 1994, was feeding them, the police were already aware of the existence of the Nomads well before it was chartered on June 24,1995. Also, just months before it was chartered, Houle’s parole had been revoked because it was clear he had been involved in setting it up.
Houle had been arrested for drunk driving, possession of drugs and uttering threats to the police officers who had arrested him. Inside his car, the police had found the brand-new Nomads patches. Now they knew what those patches were for.
One parole report revealed that even though Houle had dropped out of school by the age of 15, while he was in grade 8, tests he agreed to undergo in prison indicated he had a superior intellect. Behind bars, he worked to complete high school and took accounting courses. While on parole, he told the board that he was working as a sales representative for a company with a salary of $30,000. He also was involved in a small recycling company, owned by other Hells Angels’ members, that the police believed was actually selling recycled products to small municipalities in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. Houle made it clear that when his sentence ended and he was no longer subject to parole conditions he would rejoin the Hells Angels.
Near the end of his sentence, Houle returned to the minimum-security penitentiary closer to Montreal, where members of the Alliance tried to eliminate him. He and a fellow Hells Angel were hanging out in the prison yard while men positioned outside the prison fence fired 11 shots from a semi-automatic rifle in their direction. The assassination attempt failed. One month later, four men tied to the Alliance were arrested and charged with attempted murder. All four eventually pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison terms of less than three years. Two of the men arrested turned informant and alleged that members of the Dark Circle, leaders in the Alliance, had given the green light on Houle’s murder and had provided support.
Testimony the informants gave in court opened a very public door on the biker war. If the Hells Angels didn’t already know who was pulling the strings in the Alliance, they did now. Those memb
ers of the Dark Circle, a collection of the province’s more influential drug traffickers who opposed the Hells Angels and their monopolistic attitudes, were arrested a month after the botched attempt on Houle. They were charged with conspiring to commit murder. The names of the Dark Circle members charged in the conspiracies would become a Hells Angels’ hit list. At least 6 of the 17 men charged in a series of conspiracies and attempted murders would later be targets themselves.
Within a two-year period, two would be killed, three would be wounded by gunfire and another would escape death only because the hit men shot the wrong person (Serge Hervieux, 38-year-old father of two and one of several innocent victims of the biker war). One Dark Circle member ended up asking the National Parole Board if he could fully serve his seven-year sentence because he feared for his life if he got out while the biker war was still being waged.
The first of the two successful hits would take place the night of September 25, 1998. Jean Rosa, 32, was gunned down in front of his home in Laval, a Montreal suburb. He was found lying near his Pontiac Grand Prix covered in blood and barely alive, but was declared dead at a nearby hospital where a doctor found seven entry and exit wounds, the fatal ones to his head. Less than a month later, on October 22,1998, Pierre Bastien, a hot-tempered bar owner and member of the Dark Circle, was shot, also outside his home in Laval. Just after 8 p.m., he parked his car and was still behind the wheel when someone shot him several times. All the while his eight-year-old daughter crouched in the back seat, fearing for her life. One bullet lacerated Bastien’s heart and he died quickly. Only a few months earlier he had completed his 30-month prison sentence for the conspiracy to kill a Hells Angel.
Houle was not arrested at home during Operation Springtime 2001. He learned of the charges he faced while behind bars, just like Gilles (Trooper) Mathieu, who at 50, was also a longtime member of the Hells Angels. Mathieu had gone more than a decade without being charged with a crime. Until February 15, 2001, just weeks after the Sorel party, Mathieu and Houle, along with six other men who were members of the Nomads or the Rockers, were arrested as they held a meeting in a downtown Montreal hotel suite. They had been looking over photos of their enemies in the Bandidos.
Alain Brunette, president of a Bandidos chapter
“We can assume they were not exchanging hockey cards,” Commander André Durocher of the Montreal Urban Community Police said at a press conference after the arrests. One photo found on a table in the hotel suite was that of Alain Brunette, president of a Bandidos chapter, who just days earlier, had been wounded by gunfire while riding in a car along a highway north of Montreal.
While members of the Nomads chapter held their meeting, underlings in the Rockers stood guard at various strategic points in the hotel. When the police arrested the eight, they found that each was carrying a loaded handgun and about $10,000 cash. Mathieu and the others quickly pleaded guilty to the weapons charge and were sentenced to a year in prison. In exchange for their plea, Crown prosecutor André Vincent agreed not to charge the eight with new federal anti-gang laws created specifically to target Quebec’s violent biker gangs. Vincent remained tight-lipped about why he had accepted the guilty pleas. But at the time, Vincent was one of a handful of people who knew that Operation Springtime 2001 was about to be launched. Pursuing potential three-year prison terms for gang members like Houle and Mathieu would have been a waste of time for a prosecutor who knew what was going to happen to the Nomads in a matter of weeks.
Gilles (Trooper) Mathieu
While Boucher was under constant police surveillance during the late 1990s, Mathieu always seemed to have the ear of the president of the Nomads chapter. To some, he appeared to be one of Boucher’s most trusted advisors.
During the investigations that led to the Operation Springtime 2001 arrests, the police used double agents to infiltrate the lower ranks of the gang. Betrayal by double agents was nothing new to Mathieu. More than twenty years earlier, the RCMP had used one such agent to catch Mathieu and a few other people who were part of an LSD trafficking ring. The double agent arranged to buy 5,000 blotters of the drug at $1.45 per unit from a Montreal drug dealer. Mathieu appeared to be working as protection for a man who delivered the LSD to Montreal from a town about an hour’s drive west of the city. The double agent was told to go the drug dealer’s house. Once there, he was told by the dealer’s wife he would have to wait because the drugs were in transit. Eventually, a gray Pontiac pulled up to the house and a man got out. He carried the LSD blotters with him. A small group of RCMP officers moved in and arrested him. Mathieu and another man were waiting in the grey Pontiac when they saw the RCMP apprehend the delivery man. But before they could flee, they too were arrested.
When the case went to court, Mathieu pleaded ignorance. Backed by testimony from the delivery man and the driver of the Pontiac, he told the judge he was merely a 31-year-old maritime inspector, from a small town in western Quebec, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In reality, Mathieu had joined the Hells Angels on December 5, 1980. While testifying in his own defense, Mathieu told Judge Patrick Falardeau that, in the hours before the drug deal, he and his wife traveled to a friend’s house for a visit, where he happened to find one of the men he would end up getting arrested with. Mathieu claimed he piled into the Pontiac with the others because they were heading to Montreal where he wanted to visit a friend about having car parts painted. While inside the car, the delivery man never mentioned anything about a drug deal, Mathieu told the judge.
“He denies any participation in this affair. Plus he has no criminal record,” Falardeau wrote in his June 26, 1981, judgement of the LSD case, but he made it clear he was not impressed with Mathieu’s testimony.
“The explanations he supplied lack logic and plausibility,” Falardeau wrote, noting there were several holes in Mathieu’s story, namely that before making the long trip to Montreal, Mathieu never called the man who was supposed to paint his car parts to make sure he would be home. Mathieu would claim he ended up with a one-year prison sentence and two years probation for bumming a ride into Montreal.
Mathieu is likely to have stashed away millions while he was a Hells Angel. During the preliminary hearing in Operation Springtime, evidence presented indicated that he owned a company worth $2.3 million based out of the West Edmonton Mall. A source had also told the police that Mathieu had hidden $1 million in a tax haven.
In the years that followed his drug conviction, Mathieu managed to avoid prison. He was among the few Hells Angels who got off on the Lennoxville Purge murder charges — he was able to prove he had shown up at the bunker sometime after the slaughter.
But Mathieu and other Nomads members like Houle and Boucher were accused of having a role in all 13 of the murders the Hells Angels were charged with in Operation Springtime 2001.The Crown’s theory was that the gang members were like pirates on a ship, all sharing the same goal and aware of what was happening to achieve those goals.
Normand Robitaille
Another pirate on the Nomads ship was Normand Robitaille, who was at that point only 32 years old but already a full-patch Hells Angel in the Nomads chapter. Robitaille had risen to the top ranks of the gang at a rate that raised some eyebrows. When he was 27, while out on bail in a 1995 drug trafficking case, Robitaille was arrested for extortion, forcible confinement and possession of a weapon. By the time Robitaille appeared before a parole board he had been a member of the Rockers for only a year. He was placed in a minimum-security penitentiary on May 23, 1995, and by November was alleged to have been running a small drug network inside it.
While in prison, Robitaille told the parole board that his decision to join a biker gang was influenced by his desire to expand his clientele and make more money. He told a prison psychologist that he realized if he didn’t quit the Rockers, he would end up dead. After getting out of prison, Robitaille obviously decided the risk of being a Hells Angel was still worth taking. He quickly ascended the ranks of the Hells Angels�
�� network and was a Nomad by October 5, 1998. On June 9, 1999, his own prediction to the parole board almost came true. As Robitaille dined at a Montreal restaurant that night someone fired two shots at him, striking him in the right shoulder and the lower back. He was taken to a hospital where he was treated, but he refused to tell the police anything.
Jean-Guy Bourgoin
Jean-Guy Bourgoin was an accomplice in the same extortion case Robitaille had served time for. A member ofthe Rockers, Bourgoin was involved in the biker war from the very start, according to informants.
Like Robitaille, Bourgoin would tell the National Parole Board he blamed his criminal life on heavy drug consumption. A psychologist who met with Bourgoin during his sentence filed an assessment to the parole board and wrote the following: “He behaves like an immature individual whose masculine identity has not been assured. On a base of aggression towards an absent father, he made certain compromises with his proper image of the good father of a family.” The psychologist recommended Bourgoin reinforce his family life if he wanted to avoid the criminal life. But almost as soon as his two-year sentence had ended, it became obvious that Bourgoin, a high school dropout, considered the Rockers his family. To him, the other members of the gang were brothers while he and other members of the underling gang referred to their superiors as mon oncles, my uncles.
It was a 1998 incident involving Bourgoin that brought the Rockers considerable public attention. On September 15 of that year, Bourgoin and other members of the gang were partying at a trendy bar on Saint-Laurent Blvd. when an argument broke out on the dance floor. Stephen Reid, a six-foot-two linebacker for the Montreal Alouettes, was exchanging words with the bikers when Anthony Calvillo, the team’s quarterback, and another Alouettes teammate joined in. Everyone involved was tossed out of the bar, but the dispute continued on the street and became violent. Bourgoin struck Reid with a metal post used to line up customers outside the bar, and Reid suffered cuts to the back of his head, neck and elbows.
