by Paul Cherry
A decade later, the police had intelligence that the Cazzetta brothers, Salvatore and Giovanni, were the heads of the Rock Machine and that the gang had its hands in drugs, prostitution and loan-sharking. Although Salvatore was one of the leaders in the biker war, he was actually behind bars for practically all of it. Arrested in 1994 for attempting to smuggle 200 kilos of cocaine into Canada through the U.S., Cazzetta was extradited to Florida and convicted. He spent three years in the U.S. penal system, earning a high school degree, and then was transferred back to Canada to serve out the remainder of his sentence. After serving two-thirds of his sentence, he was paroled and released from a medium-security penitentiary in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines in June 2004. Salvatore Cazzetta smiled broadly when he learned the National Parole Board would not require him to live in a halfway house for the rest of his sentence. He told the panel of three commissioners that he ultimately planned to move to Ontario. “I am less known there,” he said adding that the violence of the biker war was “not my style.” He blamed the biker war on other members of the Rock Machine who took over after his arrest in 1994. He described his vision of the Rock Machine as “an association of businessmen” who merely planned to sell clothing through boutiques.
Like his brother, Giovanni Cazzetta denied involvement in the biker gang war. When he was up for parole in May 2005, Giovanni said the Rock Machine was formed years before the war started, and he pointed out that he too was behind bars when it began. He added that when the Rock Machine was formed, its members already had a sizeable share of Montreal’s drug turf, at least enough to keep them satisfied, he said. Appearing before the parole board, Giovanni Cazzetta said the Hells Angels started the war and that if he hadn’t been behind bars at the time, things might have turned out differently.
The 48-year-old Giovanni Cazzetta, who was greying at the temples but had managed to stay trim while serving a lengthy sentence for drug trafficking and possession of the proceeds of crime, said he planned to move to Calgary and start his life over in the construction industry.
“It was my choice. It was mine,” Cazzetta said when asked about how he had become an influential drug dealer after spending his younger years “basically raising myself.” Now he wanted to disassociate himself from members of the Rock Machine who by then had joined the Bandidos. He told Correctional Service Canada the same thing in 2004 when he was transferred from a maximum-security penitentiary to a medium-security one in Laval.
In 1997, while he was out on statutory release for a drug trafficking sentence, Cazzetta was arrested for the same offence again. He told the parole board in May 2005 that his original plan was to leave Montreal because he wanted no part of the war. He claimed his arrest in 1997 was the result of him feeling obligated to help out his old friends who needed his influence to score large quantities of cocaine. “I had the contacts. I had the good contacts,” he said, adding he also stayed close to the Rock Machine for his own protection.
Giovanni Cazzetta argued that he had had little to do with the violence of the war, but he was asked, by parole board commissioner Paul Mercier, whether he had ever considered the other victims of the war, like all the junkies both gangs had helped to create. “There must have been many,” Giovanni Cazzetta acknowledged, but added later, “I made a decision. Crime is finished for me.” The parole board turned him down.
Despite the fact that it would produce some of the major players in what would eventually become the biker gang war, the SS amounted to little and disbanded sometime during the mid 1980s.
Maurice Boucher — Full-Patch
Maurice Boucher’s criminal career was about to take a violent turn. During the summer of 1984, he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl while threatening her with a gun. He was arrested shortly after and pleaded guilty within days. He was sentenced to 23 months in prison. After spending only a few days in a Joliette, Quebec, detention center, he was transferred to Montreal where he served most of his sentence behind bars and was released sometime in January 1986. But being behind bars didn’t prevent Boucher from committing crime. While incarcerated, Boucher managed to receive unemployment payments on a biweekly basis. His little scheme was discovered around the time he was released.
On May 1,1987, Boucher’s days of petty schemes, like cheating the unemployment office, were over. He received his full-patch as a member of the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter. The Montreal chapter was the first one ever established in Canada, and by the time Boucher joined it was a decade old. In the aftermath of the Lennoxville Purge, several members from the Montreal chapter were either fugitives or behind bars. A heavy recruitment process was on in Quebec. Boucher’s buddy from the SS, Normand (Biff) Hamel had joined the Montreal chapter only months earlier. The police would later find it curious that Boucher received his patch just three days before 23-year-old Martin Huneault, the young leader of a biker gang called the Death Riders, was gunned down in a Laval brasserie on Cartier Blvd. At that point, the Death Riders were considered rivals of the Hells Angels.
In the minutes before he was gunned down, Huneault had been drinking a beer with his girlfriend and watching a hockey game on television. There were about six people in the brasserie at the time and a waitress was at the cash register. Someone walked in through the front door, strolled about twelve feet, stood facing Huneault from no more than three feet and opened fire. Three bullets struck Huneault — one square in the face, another went through his right arm and ricocheted through his upper body. Huneault fell to the floor and bled to death. What caught the within days of Huneault’s death, members of the Death Riders were suddenly seen hanging out with Boucher and Hamel.
Normand (Biff) Hamel and Gilles Mathieu, members of the Nomads chapter.
By then Boucher and Hamel were close friends. Hamel would ultimately be described by at least one of their associates as being more of a businessman than Boucher. But Hamel also had a violent streak. In 1986, as he was just about to become a Hells Angel, Hamel was detained at the Parthenais holding center, which used to be part of the Sûreté du Québec headquarters. Hamel was in the holding cell with about a dozen other inmates when one started to shout that he wanted to undergo a lie detector test. The inmate was soundly beaten by Hamel, who didn’t appreciate the shouting.
If their criminal records are any indication, Hamel was involved in high-volume drug dealing long before Boucher was. During the summer of 1978, the Montreal Urban Community Police were investigating a major drug network operating in the city. It had taken them a long time to penetrate the network and their investigation took them to a Montreal bar called El Cid, where an informant had told an undercover officer he could buy some PCP. The undercover cop was able to buy 46 capsules from Hamel for $115. All the officer had to do was walk into El Cid where he was told he could find Hamel, who was easy to spot, thanks to the thick beard he would keep throughout most of his adult life. Hamel was seated under a television hung on the brasserie wall when the informant made the introduction. Hamel and the undercover cop went outside and made the deal in the investigator’s rented car.
Hamel wasn’t arrested right away. He was picked up later as the police busted the network. He was charged with the PCP sale. While he was awaiting trial, Hamel was arrested a second time. In this case, the police found almost the same amount of PCP as he had sold the undercover cop just months earlier. The drug was hidden in a closet in an apartment where Hamel lived with a girlfriend. The couple also kept a very precise scale in their bedroom. In October 1979, Hamel pleaded guilty to all the drug offences and was sentenced to a year in prison.
According to Ronnie Harbour, an informant for investigators in Project Rush, Hamel was already a major drug dealer when he joined the SS gang. Harbour admitted that he himself worked out of El Cid, the same brasserie where Hamel once sold. Harbour was able to move 20 grams of cocaine a night for Hamel. Harbour also told the investigators that by the early 1990s, Boucher, Hamel and Gaetan Comeau, another Hells Angel from the Montreal chapter, had graduated
to major drug trafficking and were working as a unit.
Boucher’s criminal record after he joined the Hells Angels began to reflect his involvement with the violent gang. In 1988,he was arrested by the Peel Regional Police after attempting to hijack a truck in Mississauga, Ontario, using nothing more than a board with a nail hammered through it. Boucher had the case transferred to Montreal in exchange for a guarantee he would plead guilty. When the case was transferred, Hamel posted a $10,000 bond to secure Boucher’s release. Boucher arranged for the bond through his own company, Irazu Inc., which was involved in importing. According to court records, the company was involved in shipping legitimate products from Costa Rica. However, one of its sales representatives in 1991 was Richard Muselle, a senior citizen. Years later, Muselle would try to help the Hells Angels hide millions of dollars in his home when the Nomads learned the police were aware of the apartments they were using to store the millions in cash from drug sales. On the surface, at least, Irazu Inc. was run like a legitimate business and even took a company to court over a dispute concerning coffee beans from Costa Rica. Irazu had sold a large quantity of coffee beans on consignment to another Montreal company and felt it had been cheated $3,300. Boucher’s company actually won its case, and a judge awarded the money they were seeking.
Boucher kept his promise to the Ontario court and was sentenced to five months for trying to hijack the truck in Mississauga. He was also placed on two years’ probation. A year later, he was arrested for lying to a police officer in Sorel, where the Montreal chapter kept its bunker. Boucher quickly pleaded guilty to the offence and was given the choice of paying a $200 fine or spending a few months in jail. For some reason, Boucher chose jail and on New Year’s Eve, he welcomed a new decade while in the Bordeaux detention center in Montreal. He was released in March 1990. Seven months later he was arrested while carrying a .38-calibre revolver. Again he pleaded guilty. But this time he chose to pay a $900 fine over doing another five months in a provincial detention center. Shortly after his arrest, Boucher claimed to be residing in Halifax. But he later changed the address he provided to the courts to the location of the Hells Angels’ bunker in Sorel.
For his 39th birthday, on June 21, 1992, Boucher decided to treat himself and some friends to a ride on his boat. The pleasure craft was stopped by police patrolling the Saint Lawrence River in Sorel, and Boucher was fined $200 for not having a permit for the boat and because some of his passengers were not wearing life jackets. It would be Boucher’s only run-in with the law that year, which was remarkable considering he had created the Rockers only months before, a gang of drug dealers who would take his orders and sell his drugs, an indication that his drug trafficking business was flourishing in Montreal.
Two of the first members of the Rockers were Richard and Patrick Lock, a father-and-son team of drug traffickers. Even before they were members of the Rockers, the Locks had reputations as big-time drug dealers in Montreal, and, according to a man named Jean Dubé who turned informant, they were even able to move large quantities of drugs to dealers in Ontario.
Months after forming the Rockers, Boucher was picked up again for a weapons violation. In May 1993, he was pulled over in Anjou, a Montreal suburb, and when the police searched his car they found a prohibited martial arts weapon, a telescopic bar. Again he pleaded guilty before the case went to trial and agreed to pay a $500 fine. During this time in the 1990s, Boucher frequently listed his address as being at or near the Hells Angels’ Sorel bunker. If this was true, Boucher’s son, Francis, spent his formative years living either in or next door to the Hells Angels’ bunker. In 1994, days before his 19th birthday he proved he could be just like his old man and committed an armed robbery while breaking into a home with two other adolescents. In August 1994, Francis Boucher pleaded guilty and was fined $500 plus 100 hours of community service. Boucher’s son, his accomplice Martin Brizard and an unnamed minor got off easy considering they were initially charged with armed robbery and confining the man they were robbing.
But in 1994, Boucher, the father, had a lot more on his mind than his son’s petty crimes.
Lines Are Drawn
As informants would later spell out in court or in statements, 1994 was the year very clear lines were drawn in what would become the biker gang war. The Hells Angels and in particular Boucher were giving drug dealers an ultimatum: either buy drugs exclusively from us or face dire consequences.
For some, who would later shed light on the early years of the war, a key date was October 19, 1994. Maurice Lavoie had been shot dead in Repentigny just after he made a decision to begin buying his drugs from the Hells Angels instead of the Pelletier Clan. It appeared that the Pelletier Clan was sending a message to the Hells Angels. A 22-year-old woman who was seated in his vehicle next to him survived the attack despite being struck three times by bullets. Just months earlier, Pierre Daoust, a member of the Death Riders and close ally to the Hells Angels, had met with a similar fate. On July 13, 1994, around 10:30 a.m., he was working alone in the motorcycle repair garage he co-owned. He was inside the garage when three people walked in wearing masks and motorcycle helmets. Two of them walked toward Daoust and, after they made sure it was him, opened fire. He was taken to a hospital where he died about an hour later. At least eight bullets from one gun entered Daoust’s body between the shoulder blades, ripping through his lungs and heart. Another six bullets from a different gun went through his stomach and part of his chest. Shots fired from a third gun went through his scrotum and his left thigh. He quickly went into cardiac arrest and bled to death.
Daoust’s death is considered by many to have been the first in the biker war. When Lavoie’s death followed, it meant two dealers who had chosen to side with the Hells Angels were dead and the conflict was about to boil over. The generally accepted version of events in the underworld is that things really heated up after Lavoie was killed. Some alleged that Boucher retaliated by ordering Sylvain Pelletier dead. Pelletier’s friend Patrick Call had been arrested a day after the Lavoie murder, and the Pelletier Clan’s fingerprints were all over the homicide scene. Nine days after Lavoie’s murder, Pelletier was killed by an explosion from a bomb that had been planted in his Jeep. His girlfriend, who was seven months pregnant at the time, had just stepped out of the SUV before it was destroyed.
Several months later, informant Dany Kane would tell his handlers in the RCMP that he had heard members of a Hells Angels’ puppet gang called the Rowdy Crew, structured along the same lines as the Rockers, had killed Pelletier. The police were already looking at the gang’s members as possible suspects. A member of the Rowdy Crew had rented an apartment in front of Pelletier’s home and then quickly canceled the lease the day after Pelletier was killed. The Rowdy Crew was a biker gang based in a small city east of Montreal and controlled by various members of the Hells Angels. Exactly who had actually carried out the bombing was an irrelevant point to street dealers in Montreal’s east end. Pelletier’s death signaled that, after months of rumors about a possible war, it was now a reality.
Within weeks of Pelletier’s death, members of the Alliance called a meeting in a Montreal bar in November and hatched a plot to kill Boucher. The plan was to park a truck full of explosives in front of a restaurant where Boucher was known to hang out and detonate the explosives the moment he got close. Sylvain Pelletier’s brother Harold was part of the Alliance meeting along with about a dozen drug dealers interested in seeing Boucher eliminated. Martin Pellerin, a member of the Alliance, was left in charge of placing the dynamite in the truck and making sure the bomb went off when Boucher arrived at the restaurant. Martin Simard, another Alliance member, was willing to finance the operation by paying for the dynamite. Also involved in the conspiracy were Alliance members René Pelletier, Bruno Lévesque, Hubert Lanteigne and a man named Normand Tremblay. The truck was parked in front of the restaurant and the Alliance members waited for Boucher to show up. But he never did. Or at least not before someone working for the city notice
d the truck was parked illegally and towed it to a municipal lot. The dynamite was detonated in the lot by someone in the Alliance when no one was around.
By this time Dany Kane had been feeding information to the RCMP for a few months. He had been hanging out with Scott Steinert, an aggressive American who appeared to be willing to do anything to be a Hells Angel. Even before the Pelletier bombing, Kane had informed the RCMP that Steinert was gathering C4 explosives for the Hells Angels. He also told the RCMP that the Hells Angels believed the failed truck-bomb attempt was an effort to kill Boucher and Steinert together as they often met to discuss business at the exact spot where the truck had been parked.
Dany Kane (center, bottom row) hanging out with fellow members of the Rockers. Also in the photo are René Charlebois (right, bottom row), Jean-Guy Bourgoin (left, bottom row).
Informant Dany Kane
During his first meeting, in which he decided to turn informant, Kane told his RCMP handlers that he had been recruited by David (Wolf) Carroll and Walter (Nurget) Stadnick to preside over three chapters of an Ontario puppet gang called the Demons Keepers. The plan failed miserably. Kane said Carroll had a serious drinking problem and was constantly broke, so the Demons Keepers didn’t have the support they needed to intimidate drug dealers in cities like Ottawa, Cornwall and Toronto. Kane also described the men recruited to be Demons Keepers as “imbeciles.”
The plans were shelved during the spring of 1994, and shortly after that, Kane was introduced to Steinert who, by then, was a prospect in the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter. Steinert told Kane about plans he had to expand into places in Ontario like Belleville and Kingston. It was during Kane’s second meeting with the RCMP, held in the parking lot of a hotel in Ottawa, that he started to talk of what the other Hells Angels thought of Steinert. The American, who apparently had the backing of Robert (Tiny) Richard, the Hells Angels’ national president, and Boucher, was considered greedy and impulsive by the others.
