by Paul Cherry
Richard (Bam Bam) Lagacé
Richard (Bam Bam) Lagacé’s murder was not included in the Project Rush charges, although it appeared that his murder was timed to coincide with Roy’s. About an hour before Roy was killed, Lagacé, a member of the Rock Machine, was shot as he left a workout gym in a small town north of Montreal called Saint-Lin. In that case as well, two shooters were involved, but they were unprepared and had to storm into a woman’s house and threaten her with a firearm in order to steal a getaway car. It was later found abandoned in a cemetery. It was apparent that Lagacé had been a drug dealer for years. In 1994, he had been arrested at this home in Saint-Lin where the police seized cocaine, hashish and PCP. They also found several firearms and a tazer.
Lagacé had been the target of a Hells Angels’ murder plot before, and he had been arrested in Quebec City after the police broke up a meeting in a posh restaurant where the Rock Machine dined with George Wegers, then the U.S. national vice-president of the Bandidos. Wegers had entered the country illegally and was shipped back to the U.S. but the meeting turned out to be the first clear sign the Bandidos were interested in taking over the Rock Machine, something the Hells Angels in Quebec would not tolerate.
Johnny Plescio
A little over a month after Roy and Lagacé were murdered, Johnny Plescio, a founding member of the Rock Machine, was watching television in his Laval home when the cable suddenly shut off. Plescio got up from his chair to find out what had happened and as he neared the television, which was next to a window at the back of his house, he was greeted by a hailstorm of bullets. At least two men were believed to have carried out the hit on Plescio, on September 8, 1998. One had placed a lawnchair underneath the window and climbed up on it. Another cut Plescio’s television cable. Twenty-seven shots were fired at Plescio as he stood near the window. Sixteen of them found their mark.
The gunmen left the scene in a stolen Plymouth Neon that was found abandoned three miles away. It had been doused in gasoline and set on fire. Witnesses watched as the two men headed for a minivan that was parked nearby. The vehicle’s engine was already running and the pair jumped in before it sped away. After putting out the blaze, firefighters noticed two firearms inside the Neon. They turned out to be the two Cobray automatics, equipped with silencers, used in Plescio’s murder. Plescio’s body was discovered in his home hours later.
At his funeral, Plescio was laid out in a shirt with the word “Bandidos” written on it. The international biker gang had also sent floral arrangements, yet another sign that the Bandidos were interested in the Rock Machine. Plescio had been involved in the biker war from the very start. About a year before he was killed, someone had made two attempts to burn down a bar he owned on Bélanger Street in Montreal’s east end. The police had information that the bar was being used as a front to sell drugs.
Plescio had spent the 1980s in and out of jail for relatively minor crimes. But in 1983 he had admitted to preparing to blow up a grocery store in Saint-Leonard, near Montreal. He was exposed by an accomplice who confessed and wanted the whole affair to be kept quiet because he was worried his mother would “freak out” if she caught wind of it. The Montreal police had caught Plescio circling the store apparently sizing up his job. At his house, the police had found seven sticks of dynamite and a 12-gauge shotgun. After his arrest, Plescio told the police he had been paid $1,000 by a rival grocer to get rid of his competition.
By 1993, Plescio’s name was coming up frequently in police reports as they monitored the Rock Machine’s bunker on Huron Street in east Montreal. A police station in the area had made the bunker a priority because investigators knew the gang was selling drugs out of bars in the east end. That same year, Plescio had been charged with uttering death threats to two police officers. During a break one day while his preliminary inquiry was being heard at the Montreal courthouse, Plescio told Serge (Merlin) Cyr that he was going to kill the cop who had just testified against him. What Plescio didn’t know was that a plainclothes cop was standing near him as he said this. Some time later, Plescio was charged with uttering threats a second time. Ironically, he was acquitted in the original case but convicted in the second and sentenced to three months in prison.
Jean Rosa
A month before Plescio was killed, residents in another section of Laval began to notice suspicious vehicles parked in their neighborhood, which was normally quiet. From August 8 to September 14, 1998, the Laval police received five phone calls from people who reported seeing the mysterious cars and minivans parked in their neighborhood.
On September 1, the police decided to check out one of the vehicles, a minivan parked on Gilbert Street. There was no one in it but the officers who responded to the call noticed that it had two licence plates, one on top of the other. The licence plate on top had been stolen and the one underneath it was the vehicle’s proper plate. When they searched the minivan they found a contract from a rental company in Sorel. It had been rented by a man whose wallet was also found in the minivan. The man later reported his wallet stolen.
More than three weeks later, Jean Rosa, a member of the Dark Circle, was shot to death in front of his home just as he got out of his car. The likely motive for the killing was the fact that Rosa had been charged in 1995 with being part of a Dark Circle plot to kill a Hells Angel.
Before joining the Dark Circle, Rosa had worked as a bouncer at a Montreal bar and seemed to enjoy beating up unruly patrons. He once tossed a man out of the bar because he didn’t feel the man’s boots were appropriate attire. On another occasion, he and three other bouncers were charged with pummeling a patron for clogging the bar’s toilet with toilet paper.
The shooter approached Rosa from behind and fired away, causing fatal damage to his skull, liver and a few vertebrae. The gunman then got into a Plymouth Voyageur and fled the scene. The car was found five kilometres away, and as in Plescio’s murder, it had been set on fire. The minivan had been reported stolen a month before. As the police began piecing together the homicide, they learned that the Plymouth Voyageur the Laval police had searched on September 1 had already been the subject of a police report earlier that summer. On June 25, the police had pulled it over, possibly during a spot check as the Hells Angels were heading to a party. Driving the van was Daniel Lanthier who had been a Rocker since 1998. Normand Robitaille and Denis Houle were following Lanthier on their motorcycles.
Pierre Bastien
Like Jean Rosa, Pierre Bastien had also been a member of the Dark Circle and had also pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill a Hells Angel early on in the biker war. He was sentenced to a 30-month prison term for attempted murder and was released after serving two-thirds of his sentence in 1997. Bastien’s days as a drug dealer dated back as far as 1979, when he was caught selling LSD. But by May 1998, Bastien was found to be following the strict requirements of his release to the letter by supplying his parole officials with bank statements and a diary of his daily life.
On October 22,1998, Bastien arrived at his home in Laval at around 8 p.m. His eight-year-old daughter was in the back seat of his car. He parked the vehicle on the street and turned on the dome light to read some papers. Moments later a dark colored Dodge Neon pulled up in front of Bastien’s car. There were two men inside and one stepped out from the passenger side. He walked right up to Bastien’s driver-side window and opened fire. Bastien was struck several times, but one bullet in particular did a lot of damage to his heart, liver and stomach. Two stray bullets struck a nearby house and one went through a child’s bedroom window. Bastien’s daughter was not hurt. She cowered in the back seat until the killers left and then she ran to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor had heard the shots fired and saw Bastien’s daughter run toward his house. He buzzed her in before she even reached the door. Bastien was taken to a hospital quickly but his injuries were too severe, and he died.
The police already knew that Bastien had been targeted by the Hells Angels. In December 1997, when they arrested Stéphane (Godasse)
Gagné as a suspect in the murders of two prison guards, they found Bastien’s home address among his personal effects. When he turned informant, Gagné told the police he had watched Bastien’s house on the orders of André (Toots) Tousignant, a member of the Rockers.
Stéphane Morgan and Daniel Boulet
Gagné told the police that he had done surveillance on Stéphane Morgan as well as on Pierre Bastien. Gagné knew Morgan well from when he was sent to a provincial detention centre and was greeted by him and other Rock Machine members. At the time, Morgan was in the detention center doing a one-year sentence for selling PCP. He had been arrested in 1993 while driving through the east end of the city at 1 a.m. in a rented Chrysler New Yorker with two other men. A patrol officer would later say in court that spotting three young men in a late-model New Yorker driving through a rough part of Montreal at that time of day caught his attention. Morgan was asked for his licence and registration but couldn’t find the latter document in the glove compartment. He got out of the car to open the trunk, to find the registration, but at that point the officer had noticed a white bag on the back seat of the car. The police officer later testified that when he asked Morgan, who was wearing a Rock Machine baseball cap, what was in the bag, Morgan had replied: “You know what it is. Do your job.” It turned out to be 360 grams of PCP.
In 1994, Dany Kane told his police handlers that Morgan had bragged of wanting to kill Boucher when he got out. Kane also told the RCMP that the Rock Machine member might have sold drugs for the Hells Angels’ leader before the biker war ever started.
On November 10, 1998, nearly three weeks after Bastien’s murder, Morgan and his friend and fellow drug dealer Daniel Boulet pulled up to a busy intersection in Montreal North and parked the car next to the sidewalk. Boulet was in the driver’s seat. Morgan sat in the passenger side, a handgun tucked into the pocket of his pants. Morgan was no stranger to violence and had served a two-year term in the 1980s for attempting to kill a man. But he didn’t even have a chance to reach for his gun when a man carrying a Cobray automatic approached the Chevrolet and sprayed it with bullets, leaving 25 spent 9-mm cartridges and an empty magazine on the pavement. Morgan was struck 11 times while Boulet was struck by 13 bullets. Coincidentally, the two 30-year-olds had been born on the same day — they died on the same day, too, within seconds of each other.
In the minutes leading up to the late afternoon shooting, residents in the area had spotted a red Windstar with two occupants, parked on the street. Within minutes of the shooting, the fire department was called in to put out flames in the same vehicle only a few blocks away. Firefighters found the murder weapon inside the van. The Windstar had been stolen the previous May. Its licence plate had been stolen from a vehicle only days before the shooting. When the police searched the car Morgan and Boulet had been killed in, they found enough cocaine to indicate the pair had been summoned to the street corner believing they were about to meet someone for a drug deal.
At the time of his death, Morgan was facing the prospect of a lengthy drug trafficking sentence. He had been arrested during a joint police operation involving the RCMP and police in Kingston, Ontario. The RCMP had been asked to tail an Ontario man when he traveled to Montreal. To do this, the Mounties were advised to monitor the Rock Machine bunker in Montreal and follow anyone with Ontario licence plates. They watched the bunker until the target of their surveillance walked out and got into his car. A man who turned out to be Stéphane Morgan walked out of the bunker with the man, got into his own car and followed the Ontario vehicle to a nearby bar. Morgan went inside the bar and later came out with a brown paper bag. When the police moved in on the Ontario man, they seized more than 8,000 LSD-type pills.
After Morgan’s death, the police found a clear sign that he had been actively involved in the hunt for rival gang members. The day after the double murder, the police searched Morgan’s house and found his Rock Machine ring, some drugs and a weigh scale, along with a photo of Pierre Toupin, a member of the Rockers.
Richard Parent
Several months before Morgan and Boulet were murdered, Richard Parent had been paroled on a four-year sentence for running his own drug trafficking network for the Rock Machine. Parent had close ties to the Cazzetta brothers, the founding leaders of the Rock Machine — he was married to their sister. He had told the parole board that he wanted out of the biker war and had plans to move away from Montreal and work as a painter.
But while he was under investigation for drug trafficking a police wiretap recorded Parent talking over the phone about the bunker Hells Angel Scott Steinert was building on the estate he had purchased on Ile-aux-Pruches. The police would later tell the parole board that it sounded like Parent was planning a strike on the bunker, but he denied this, saying the police took his conversation out of context. The semantics were apparently lost on the Hells Angels.
On August 5, 1999, Parent arrived at his home on Versailles Street in Montreal’s Little Burgundy district at around 12:30 in the morning. He parked his car across the street and headed for his nearby home. Ten minutes earlier, a neighbor had noticed a vehicle that had parked in the darkness. While Parent was walking along the sidewalk in front of his home, a man approached and shot him with a Cobray automatic pistol equipped with a silencer. Parent was struck four times and fell to the ground as the shooter headed for the mysterious car parked in the nearby alley. Before he jumped into the car, he dumped the firearm in the laneway where it was later discovered by the police. It was a clean hit in which the shooter left very little evidence behind.
Serge Hervieux
The next homicide to take place during the biker war, one of the 13 murders included in the charges filed in Project Rush, was a disaster for the Hells Angels from beginning to end. Unlike in the Parent murder and some of the others before it, key evidence was left at the murder scene.
Another mistake was that Hervieux was not the target. Married and a father of two, Hervieux had the misfortune of working at the same location and sharing the same first name with Serge Bruneau, a member of the Dark Circle. Like Bastien and Rosa, Bruneau had done a 30-month sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to murder a Hells Angel. After serving two-thirds of his sentence, Bruneau was released. Besides being a drug dealer, Bruneau had invested his money in real estate and legitimate businesses like a car rental agency.
Three weeks after Parent was murdered, two hooded men walked into the car rental agency that Bruneau owned and where Hervieux worked. Witnesses would later recall that it was a picture-perfect summer day in Saint-Leonard when Hervieux was shot. The car rental agency was located on one of the busier streets in the area but surrounded by rows of tidy duplexes, which are common in Saint-Leonard. One of the masked men called out for “Serge” and Hervieux responded. Mistaking him for their target, one of the men fired off six shots toward Hervieux with a .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver. Hervieux was struck by four bullets and died quickly. Both his lungs were damaged and one bullet severed a pulmonary vein. Hearing the gunshots, Bruneau hid under his desk in his office.
The two hooded men walked out of the rental agency’s garage, the shooter dropping his revolver on the floor. They escaped in a stolen black Chrysler Intrepid. They abandoned the car a few streets away and, as with many of the other murders, they prepared to set the getaway vehicle on fire. But in this case the gas didn’t burn very well and by the time the police located the vehicle, the flames had petered out.
But more important to homicide investigators was the rare find laid out on the car’s seats: undamaged evidence from a Hells Angels’ hit. Crime scene technicians managed to find two balaclavas, a pair of running shoes, two baseball caps and two pairs of gloves. They also found three sheets of paper folded together that made it clear that Bruneau was the intended target of the shooting. Among the papers were photos of Bruneau and intelligence on other members of the Alliance. These sheets of paper also gave the police a remarkable lead. Fingerprints found on them were later matched to
Jean-Richard (Race) Larivière, who months earlier had been made a full-patch member of the Rockers. Another set of fingerprints was matched to Éric (Pif) Fournier who would receive his patch three months after the Hervieux murder. Becoming full-patch members of the Rockers automatically made them targets of the Project Rush investigation. The police also found DNA evidence in one of the balaclavas. The same DNA turned up in a pair of gloves but the police were unable to make a match.
Despite the obvious screw up, witnesses testified that the two masked men appeared to know exactly where they were going, as if they had studied the layout of the rental agency. They walked in through an open garage door and strode right past a mechanic.
Bruneau, who had known Hervieux for seven years, would later be called to testify in one of the trials to come out of Project Rush, heard before Justice Réjean Paul. He appeared uneasy and never looked toward the 13 men sitting in the specially designed, bulletproof prisoners’ dock. The courthouse had been specifically built to try the Hells Angels’ Nomads chapter. Construction began shortly after Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out. It was built on land near the Bordeaux detention center to facilitate the transfer of the many gang members. The new courthouse, which cost taxpayers $16.5 million, featured state-of-the-art equipment. Testimony could be recorded digitally, and lawyers sitting at each table could watch video evidence on computer screens. The dock could seat several of the accused for one trial. Bruneau stood several feet away from the accused as he described himself as a car dealer. Prosecutor Éric Marcoux asked him about what he remembered from Hervieux’s murder.
“I heard shots and I hid,” Bruneau told the jury. “I waited for things to calm down. I saw Serge Hervieux and I called the police.”
