by Paul Cherry
“The Rockers, even if they weren’t the actual authors of murders, participated in the war effort as a resource. Be it through the gathering of information on the rival clan, the protection of the Hells Angels’ Nomads, the possession of firearms, the distribution of drugs, the payment of an obligatory contribution of ten percent of all their revenues that came from their criminal acts, which served to purchase firearms and stolen cars, to the prison cantines of jailed members, payments to lawyers in case of arrests and to members of the organization.”
Because they were pleading guilty to gangsterism charges, the six who pleaded guilty that day would have to serve at least half their sentences before being eligible for parole. Prosecutor Giauque then proceeded to do a breakdown of the participation of each. The sentences would appear light when compared with later cases, but Giauque admitted that among the six before Beliveau that day, the Crown had no evidence of direct participation in a murder.
Kenny Bedard, a full-patch member of the Rockers, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking and participating in the criminal activities of a gang. He had joined the Rockers as a hangaround in April 1997 and only a few months later was arrested in possession of an assassination kit: a Luger pistol, a mask and documents with personal information on several members of the Rock Machine, including Peter Paradis, Simon Lambert and Nelson Fernandez. He was a cog in the Hells Angels’ extremely violent expansion into western parts of Montreal Island like Verdun and Lasalle. By March 1998, he had impressed his bosses enough to be made a full-patch member of the Rockers.
Prosecutor Giauque also noted that Bedard was one of the eight gangsters arrested on February 15, 2001, when some of the members of the Rockers and Nomads were caught looking over photos of members of the Alliance. Bedard was carrying a loaded . 357 Magnum while standing guard at the hotel. Based on a joint recommendation on sentencing, Bedard was ordered to serve ten-and-a-half years in prison on top of what he had already served since March 2001.
Maurice (Mom) Boucher’s son, Francis, pleaded guilty to the same charges as Bedard. He had become a striker on September 28,1998, and a full-patch member of the Rockers on March 26, 1999. Giauque said that Boucher’s son had participated in the conspiracy to kill members of the Alliance, and she noted that the police had found photo albums of rival gang members at his home. Françis Boucher would be ordered to serve a sentence of ten years starting from the day of his guilty plea.
“Mr. Brunnetti’s is a case that is a bit distinctive,” Giauque said in an understatement. Salvatore Brunnetti had managed to sidestep anything resembling a murder charge and pleaded guilty only to drug trafficking and gangsterism. The police could find no proof that he had participated in a murder conspiracy, Giauque said.
Brunnetti had been a member of the Dark Circle until December 2000 when he decided to be one of the first Alliance members to jump ship and join the Hells Angels after their leaders made a “patch-for-patch” limited-time offer. Brunnetti had been with the Nomads chapter for only a few months when Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out.
“It is evident that Mr. Brunnetti did not conspire to kill, himself, and he was not involved in drug trafficking between 1995 and 1997 because he was in the other group,” Giauque said, adding that Brunnetti joined the Hells Angels during a cease-fire in the war.
But there was evidence that Salvatore Brunnetti quickly benefited from being in the Nomads chapter. He had an account in the Nomads Bank, and, while carrying out a search warrant on January 30, 2001, the police linked Brunnetti to $70,000 that had gone through the gang’s accounting system. At his home, the police found $3,000 U.S. and more than $10,000 Canadian in a safe, along with a loaded .38-calibre gun. Because of his limited involvement in the biker war, however, Brunnetti was sentenced to only three years on top of the time he had already served.
Brunnetti’s defection to the Hells Angels was remarkable because only five years earlier the police had information that the Nomads chapter considered him high on their hit list, if not number one. He was believed to have been the leading force at one point among the Alliance. He had been arrested in 1994, along with a dozen other people, including some tied to the Rock Machine, in a major drug trafficking and counterfeit conspiracy, but the charges against Brunnetti were withdrawn. By the fall of 2004, Brunnetti had already reached his statutory release date after having served two-thirds of the sentence he received in the Project Rush case. The parole board had no choice but to release him, even though corrections officials saw no change in his attitudes toward organized crime while behind bars. For the last year of his sentence, Brunnetti was forbidden from hanging out with known criminals and from using things like pagers or cellular phones. He was the first person arrested in Project Rush to walk out of a penitentiary.
Like Brunnetti, Stephan Jarry had not been with the Rockers long. He had been recruited into the Rockers and made a full-patch member instantly on August 24, 1999, when the Hells Angels welcomed five experienced drug dealers into their network to help them expand into western Montreal.
Before joining the Rockers, the most serious time Jarry had done was three years for a series of armed robberies he had committed in the early 1980s using a fake gun. Prosecutor Giauque said there was evidence Jarry had participated in the murder conspiracies, and was one of the people caught, on March 28, 2001, possessing a binder full of the Sûreté du Québec’s intelligence photos of Alliance members.
Although there was some feeling among the Rockers that Jarry had been imposed on them, he was at one point made the gang’s treasurer. Also, Faucher gave the police a statement alleging Jarry had purchased a semiautomatic for the Rockers using money from its ten percent fund. The police also had information that Jarry was able to move ten kilos of cocaine a month.
But Jarry had helped incriminate himself as well. During the Project Rush investigation, a bug planted in a car recorded him complaining about the way the Hells Angels cut his cocaine. During a Rockers meeting, he was also recorded comparing the gang’s pursuit of Rock Machine members to a hunt for animals. Jarry pleaded guilty to the same charges as Brunnetti, but the best he could get out of a plea bargain was 11 years, not including the time he had already served.
Vincent Lamer, one of the six to plead guilty before Beliveau, had been arrested several times as a member of the Rowdy Crew. He had become so blasé about being arrested that he once asked a police officer to take a new mug shot of him because he didn’t like the ones that were being run in the newspapers.
He left that Hells Angels’ underling gang the Rowdy Crew to join the Rockers. He had become a striker on March 2, 2ooo,but somehow earned his full-patch in less than two weeks. He was even president of a Rockers chapter for a month. By December 2000, he graduated to the level of prospect in the Nomads chapter, but for some reason he was demoted back to the Rockers the following month. Because of his heavy involvement in the Rockers, Giauque wanted a heavy sentence for Lamer. She noted that when the police searched his home, they found two video cassettes that contained evidence the Hells Angels were planning a hit on Sun Chin Kwon, a member of the Rock Machine and a martial arts expert. Lamer was sentenced to a ten-and-a-half-year term starting from the day of his guilty plea.
Pierre Toupin had been involved with the Rockers since April 1997 and was made a full-patch member on March 20,1998.He was suspended from the gang on December 16, 1999,butreturned on April 3, 2000. Prosecutor Giauque said that besides doing guard duty and participating in messes, Toupin primarily sold cocaine for the Rockers. During the investigation, the police had overheard him on wiretaps bragging about buying a speedboat and building a new house in Sorel. He was sentenced to 11 years.
While they were the first group of gangsters in Project Rush to plead guilty, they were not the last.
Sentencing the Profiteers
While the trial carried on for several months before a jury and Justice Réjean Paul, the judge originally chosen to preside over the entire Project Rush cas
e, the lawyers involved in the case were holding closed-door meetings at the specially built courthouse, working out plea bargains. For several weeks the judge and lawyers involved would meet, sometimes after a full day in court.
The trial came to a halt when some of the accused were allowed to enter guilty pleas on the condition that the murder charges against them be dropped. On September 23,2003,Crown prosecutor André Vincent informed Paul of the sentences that everyone had agreed to. Vincent was seeking sentences of 20 years for full-patch members of the Nomads chapter, 18 for prospects and 15 years for Rockers.
“You have to look also before 1995, that is to say before the biker war, and after 2001. What was the situation in Quebec? I don’t think that we can say the arrests of the accused put the brakes on the sale of drugs in Quebec and more particularly in Montreal,” Vincent said. “Before 1994 it was known that there were several groups or dealers that I would describe as being independent or tied to certain people to sell drugs.”
The prosecutor then went on to say that by the end of the war, the only groups tolerated in Montreal by the Nomads chapter were Hells Angels from other chapters and the Mafia. To help convince Judge Paul to accept the joint recommendations on sentencing, he brought up other conspiracies that the Hells Angels or the Rockers were involved in, which the jury would have had to hear if the trial continued. He mentioned how the Hells Angels got information on their enemies by buying off two people who had access to Quebec’s automobile insurance bureau. The gang would supply the pair with names and they in turn would find out the licence plates and addresses of Alliance members. The same methods were used to get information on Journal de Montréal journalist Michel Auger before he was shot in the newspaper’s parking lot.
One of the Rockers being sentenced that day, Jean-Guy Bourgoin, was the man connected to the people who were leaking the information. Vincent said the police had gathered two elements of proof that Bourgoin was buying the information the first being that informant Stéphane Sirois testified that he had overheard Bourgoin telling another person that he could easily get a person’s address if he had a licence number.
“The other element came from the investigation after the arrests of Ginette Martineau and Raymond Turgeon. Ginette Martineau was an employee of the SAAQ[Société de l’assurance automobile du Québec] and Raymond Turgeon, her boyfriend, related information to Mrs. Martineau who was in charge of finding the people she was asked to.” Martineau was paid $200 for each piece of information.
Turgeon was sentenced to five years in prison and Martineau was sentenced to a little more than two years for selling information to the Hells Angels that likely helped the gang kill several rivals.
“The only raison d’être of these groups was to take part in the trafficking of drugs,” Vincent said, making reference to things like the Hells Angels’ “church,” or messes, and how the discovery of the Nomads Bank had opened the door to Project Ocean. “It permitted [the police] to discover, I wouldn’t even call it a small business. I would call it a business involved in very large volumes.” To make the point of how sophisticated the Hells Angels were, Vincent noted that even though Project Ocean was highly successful in turning up drug money, as well as the gang’s customers and suppliers, none of the drug caches indicated on their accounting ledgers were ever recovered.
“The criminal organization was structured so that the compartments were detached between the different operations. We know from information obtained that a person who wanted to order drugs had to contact someone and it was never a member of the organization who delivered or transported the drugs,” Vincent said. “When you talk of legal businesses in Quebec, these are figures that correspond to something much higher than a medium-sized business can hope to have. The sales for the 39-day period are in the order of $18,104,000. That amount corresponds to the sale of 452 kilos of cocaine and 115 kilos of hashish”
It was during the sentencing hearing that Vincent brought up an interesting detail concerning Normand Robitaille and the Montreal Mafia. Vincent went over the details of a meeting the Rockers had with Robitaille at a restaurant on July 4, 2000. Robitaille told his underlings that there were new territories available to be taken over. He also mentioned that the going rate for a kilo of cocaine was now $50,000. Vincent noted that Robitaille made these announcements shortly after the police spotted him meeting with Vito Rizzuto at a Montreal restaurant called Onyx.
“A young dealer who decides to take part in illegal activities today, who places himself at the corner of Sainte-Catherine and Saint-Laurent to say ’it should be worth it to sell drugs. I’ll start selling drugs.’ How long could he stay on the corner? The answer, according to the witnesses who have turned [informant], ’if you do ten minutes it will be great,’” Vincent said.
“The Rockers were formed in 1992. Mr. Maurice Boucher, who was a member of the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter, located in Sorel, started the Rockers club in Montreal. In 1995, certain members from Montreal and Trois Rivières, formed the Nomads chapter, Hells Angels’ Nomads. After that you have an explosion, in the literal sense of the term and figurative sense, in the number of people who will gravitate to the organization.”
Being part of the organization required loyalty, and Crown Prosecutor André Vincent had no better proof than René Charlebois’ wedding video. During his wedding reception, Charlebois told his guests that his “heart and his blood” were pledged to the Hells Angels.
“The organization went before everything and anything,” Vincent reiterated, “and if the organization needed or sensed the need to physically eliminate an individual, the person who participated in that physical elimination received benefits.”
The prosecutor said this was made clear during a messe meeting the Rockers held in April 2000, where Vincent Lamer announced there were new rules concerning what it took to advance beyond being a hangaround in the Rockers. What Lamer said indicated that if someone eliminated an enemy, they would not have to go through the eight-month probation to move up in the network’s hierarchy. Vincent also noted that Daniel Lanthier, another Rocker who was being sentenced that day and the owner of a small pager company, was able to find out the pager numbers of the Hells Angels’ enemies. It was believed that the Hells Angels used that know-how to lure unsuspecting dealers to their deaths.
The Involvement of René Charlebois
As the trials took their course, one name other than besides Maurice (Mom) Boucher’s that seemed to come up in every major conspiracy discussed was that of René Charlebois. He appeared to have been involved in everything, including Boucher’s plot to kill prison guards, the conspiracy to blow up a Rock Machine hangout in Verdun and several murders.
According to one informant, Charlebois got his start as a drug dealer while delivering pizzas, submarines and cocaine out of a restaurant in the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district just before the biker war started. By April 1997, Charlebois was a Rocker, but he had already been around the gang for a long time. Other underlings in the gang took note of the fact that Charlebois was willing to pay into the ten percent fund even though, as a striker, he wasn’t expected to. Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné, who became an informant late in 1997, claimed that Charlebois had asked him to take photos of Martin Dupont and later had offered Gagné $10,000 to kill him. Early on in the war, Dupont and a few other men had been arrested in connection with some stolen dynamite that was tied to the Rock Machine. Dupont was eventually killed in Montreal.
From left to right: Gregory Wooley, Pierre Provencher, Sylvain Laplante, René Charlebois, Guillaume (Mimo) Serra, Jean-Guy Bourgoin, Ronald (Popo) Paulin and Daniel Lanthier.
In January 1999, about five months before Charlebois was made a prospect in the Nomads chapter, Charlebois was himself the target of an attempted hit. It happened while he was in his car, parked behind a bar where the Rockers had been known to hang out. He was not seriously hurt but told one of the Hells Angels’ lawyers that he had no plans to make a statement to the police.
By the time of his wedding on August 5,2000, Charlebois was a full-patch member of the Nomads chapter. His wedding caused a major stir in Quebec as the Hells Angels had managed to hire popular singers Ginette Reno and Jean-Pierre Ferland to perform at the reception. By then, Charlebois had come a long way from his days delivering pizzas and cocaine. Informants would say that he was an important drug dealer for the Hells Angels in the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district, the area where Boucher began his dreams of a monopoly.
They also said Charlebois was partners with Robitaille, Paul (Fon Fon) Fontaine and Robert Johnson, a member of the Rockers who avoided being investigated in Project Rush only because he was behind bars for its duration. Early on in the biker war, Johnson and Stéphane Blaquiere, another man tied to the Rockers, had been caught making a deal for 350 kilograms of cocaine. When the police searched Johnson’s home, they found more than a kilogram of an explosive called Syntex and 15 detonators.
The trial heard before Réjean Paul was bogged down by several delays, including one caused by Charlebois’ teeth. During the trial, he had to ask for a recess because his dental implants were causing him severe pain. Visibly frustrated by the delays, Paul asked Charlebois to be patient while they tried to find a dentist who was willing to travel to the Bordeaux detention center to treat him. Paul even tried to offer the Hells Angel some advice saying: “There is nothing like 600 milligrams of Motrin”
