by Paul Cherry
“I was selling drugs, but I was independent.”
“You trafficked in drugs, but you were independent?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have some associates at that time?”
“Not at that time. I had contacts but not associates.” Sirois then gave a little background on himself. He said he had started dealing drugs from the age of either 17 or 18, when he was already working in bars.
“At what moment did you become close to the Rockers?” Carrière asked.
“In 1994, I was close to the Rockers because there was a group of people who wanted to leave a gang known as the Chiefs. I knew those people.”
“Who were those people?”
Sirois rattled off the names of several members of the Chiefs, including Jean-Guy Bourgoin and André Chouinard. He said Boucher was involved in a decision that saw the Chiefs fold as a gang. Members were offered the opportunity to join the Rockers because Boucher could not tolerate the presence of another gang on the same turf as his.
“When did you decide to live this kind of life?”
“It was at what we called a bike show. It was proposed to me a bit more seriously. They told me they had striker patches for starters. I didn’t know what a striker was, or a full-patch.”
“You didn’t know what it meant?”
“I didn’t know what it meant. They said, ’Look, after [being a striker], you’ll become a member.’ A member of what, I still wasn’t sure. At the first show, I started to get interested. I liked it. It was more a temptation. They tempted me with what it would be like. But after that first show, they took back the patches. They decided they gave them out too fast. They didn’t know the people they gave them to.”
“And this was during 1994?”
“Yes, this is still during 1994.”
“Had you been given a striker patch at that moment?”
“Yes.”
Shortly after the Rockers took back the striker patch from Sirois, on December 5, 1994, a drug dealer named Bruno Bandiera was killed in an explosion as he drove along Taschereau Blvd. in Longueuil. The bomb had been detonated by remote control. Bandiera, who was 28 at the time, was ejected from his car and died instantly of severe head wounds. Sirois said it was Bandiera who had brought him into the Rockers fold and his death had some influence in Sirois wanting to join the Rockers. He joined them for his own protection, but Sirois might have thought twice about his choice had he known what Dany Kane had told the RCMP about Bandiera’s death. Kane told his handlers it was the Rockers who had killed Bandiera because he owed them money and had started buying drugs from the Rock Machine to cover his debts. Jean-Guy Bourgoin welcomed Sirois into the gang and proposed to the other Rockers that he be accepted officially.
“I started to get close and after that we became hangarounds,” Sirois explained. “Me, Stephen Falls, Robert Johnson and Alain Chevalier, we became hangarounds the same night.” Sirois was considered a hangaround until March 1995, when he learned that he had graduated to striker and was given his patch, the bottom part that identifies the gang’s territory, at a motorcycle show in Sherbrooke. The Rockers were impressed with how Sirois stuck around after a bomb went off at their Montreal clubhouse on Gilford Street. Most people would have been scared off by the bomb or the police attention that was sure to follow. But Sirois stayed close to the clubhouse making sure no other damage would be done to it.
Sirois said his drug dealing then became more structured and that Bourgoin supplied him with drugs to sell. Sirois in turn would distribute the drugs to a small network of five or six dealers who worked for him.
“And you sold how much drugs per week, per month?”
“At that time, when I was a striker, I couldn’t sell as much because I had to take care of the club. I couldn’t just sell drugs. So I was selling 250 grams of coke per week and a little bit of hash and marijuana.”
“What do you mean when you say you couldn’t work fulltime?”
“It’s because when you are a striker or a hangaround, the club goes before everything else. So you have to have a business that can work without you being there 24 hours a day.”
“What other tasks did you do for the club?”
“When a member goes out, you have to be his bodyguard. You have to do the watch during parties. You have to do any task that you can. It could range from going into clubs and assault people or do intimidation if someone asks you to do it. The particular tasks of a hangaround are to make sure the club runs well. The term I should use is the pig jobs, to do the things others don’t want to do. It’s the only way to get known in the club. It goes from cleaning up the clubhouse to chauffeuring members, even chauffeuring strikers, doing the watch, doing the orders, food and drinks, the dirty jobs.”
Sirois became a full-patch member of the Rockers in March 1996, at the gang’s anniversary party. He said André Chouinard gave him his patch at the clubhouse on Gilford Street.
“Who decided if someone could be held back or make exceptions to the rule?” Carrière asked.
“At the time, the only person who could propose things or make real decisions was Maurice Boucher.”
“Who was he to you?”
“He was the godfather to the Rockers.”
“Did you know him?”
“Yes.”
“From when?”
“I knew him in 1994.”
“When you were an independent?”
“At the moment I became a hangaround, when I joined the club.”
“Did you have conversations with him?”
“I had conversations with him. But at that time they were short conversations.”
“You couldn’t approach him easily?”
“No, he was an approachable guy, but you had to have a good reason to talk to him about something.”
“The functions of a striker, your functions as a striker were what?” Carrière asked.
“The functions of a striker are somewhat like that of a hangaround. A striker has to be more responsible, more available, his social life disappears. If the telephone or the pager goes off he has to answer the call right away. He has to follow the members, that means not one particular member. It could mean that a member says, ’Okay, Charles tonight you’re with me,’ but at 2:30 in the morning another member could call you and you have to follow him and your job is to be his bodyguard.”
“What happened with your drug business while you were a striker?”
“You have to be able to multitask. You have to be able to do both. That is what it takes to move up in the club. That’s what the members want to see. That’s what I wanted to do to become a member. Someone who is able to do what he has to do and able to follow the club, while continuing his business.”
“You became a member in March 1996. It changed what in your life to become a member of the Montreal Rockers?”
“A little more free time,” he said.
Going to Mass and Playing Baseball for the Rockers
Stéphane Sirois noticed the links between Boucher and the Rockers had changed at some point shortly before he left the Rockers to get married. The change seemed to coincide with the timing of the creation of the Nomads chapter.
“There was a time when, for each kilo of coke that was sold by the Rockers, by anyone in the Rockers, you had to pay $500 to Maurice Boucher,” Sirois said. “After that, what happened was that there were two or three members of the Rockers who bought packages of cocaine in bulk. The members would buy it from them.”
Sirois said that when one of the Rockers would buy cocaine from a fellow gang member who was buying in bulk, the Nomads chapter’s cut was already fixed in the price. Sirois said that Montreal’s Hochelega Maisonneuve district was controlled by Paul (Fon Fon) Fontaine, Robert Johnson, Normand Robitaille and René Charlebois. He said the decisions over territory were handled at their meetings, messes or “church,” as the Quebec Hells Angels and Rockers called them. “The serious things were discussed while taking a walk out
side, between the people who wanted to negotiate, who wanted to talk about ’hot’ topics. We didn’t talk about those things at ’Mass.’”
“When you’re talking about big things or hot things, what do you mean?”
“It could be a murder, or a guy that you want to keep an eye on. It could have been someone on their territory. Take, for example, Hochelega Maisonneuve. René Charlebois, Bob Johnson, Normand Robitaille and Paul Fontaine, if there was a [gang] to destroy in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, it didn’t affect me, so they would take a walk and talk about what they were going to do that night.”
“Did you ever participate in a ’baseball team’?” In the language of the Hells Angels, a “baseball team” is an intimidation squad.
“Yes, at one point in particular.”
“On what occasion?”
“I was a member of the Rockers. We went to Saint-Sauveur. Myself, Paul Fontaine, Bob Johnson, Daniel Lanthier and Kenny Bedard, we went there and put masks on our faces. This was requested by Paul Fontaine who got the request from David [Wolf] Carroll. We met Wolf somewhere and he gave his last instructions to Paul Fontaine. Paul Fontaine gave us the instructions. We went in a Dodge Caravan and arrived at the club, placed the masks over our faces. Paul Fontaine bent the licence plate so no one could read it. Bob Johnson was supposed to find the owner and give him a chance. If he didn’t accept, we’d destroy everything with baseball bats. And the club was open and there were clients inside when we arrived.”
“What happened?”
“We did exactly what I just described [smashed up the bar and broke bottles], except that Bob Johnson couldn’t find the owner. That didn’t happen. After that we were gone, and very calmly, like nothing happened.”
“What was the reason for doing this at that club?”
“If I remember correctly, the owner did not want drugs in his club, and the territory belonged to David [Wolf] Carroll. It was a way to persuade him to let the drugs enter.”
Sirois went on to say he knew that Charlebois, Robitaille and Fontaine participated in “football teams,” or murder squads. He said the trio put pressure on him to join them. He said Fontaine in particular asked him to join a football team with Sylvain Moreau but he declined.
While on the stand, Sirois also revealed that he was asked to kill the owners of the Castel Tina, a strip bar on Jean Talon Street in Saint-Leonard. Again he refused. The owners of the strip bar were Paolo Gervasi and his son Salvatore. The father had ties to Vito Rizzuto, but he had sided with the Rock Machine in the biker war, and even had a special table reserved for its members at his strip bar. In April 2000, 31-year-old Salvatore was killed. His body was stuffed into the trunk of his Porsche, which was then parked in front of his father’s home. A few months later, someone made an unsuccessful attempt on the father’s life. Paolo Gervasi survived but nearly four years later, on January 19, 2004, he was gunned down outside a bakery in Saint-Leonard.
As early as the mid-1990s, the Rockers were aware that the Castel Tina owners were financial supporters of the Rock Machine. But Sirois wasn’t interested in killing them, in part because of who was assigned to do the job with him.
“You refused to work with Sylvain Moreau. Why?” Carrière asked.
“At that moment I didn’t have confidence in Sylvain for a job like that.”
“Did you work with René Charlebois?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of work?”
“We sold drugs, and also we took part in what we called ’the hunt,’ two or three times, to find Marc Belhumeur and the father and son who owned the Castel Tina.” Belhumeur had been gunned down on January 24,1997, and was one of the 13 victims many of the Hells Angels were accused of murdering. He was considered an associate of the Rock Machine and was shot at a brasserie called Le Chalutier, a place he frequented. René Charlebois would later brag to Sirois that he was the trigger man in what was considered a well-executed hit.
To avoid being monitored by the cops, the time and location of mass would be written down somewhere in the clubhouse. A gang member doing the watch that day would page all of the members and tell them to come immediately to the clubhouse. Each member would travel to the clubhouse to learn the time and place. This was done so no one would ever have to say out loud where meetings would be held. Sirois was named as the gang’s secretary, which meant he took notes during “church” meetings.
“The ten percent that you paid, it served what, as far as you knew?”
“The ten percent was to give a cut to Maurice Boucher; it served as the administration of the club, to pay the rent; it served as well to the costs of the club; there was a defense fund; the ten percent also bought weapons.”
Sirois said he was able to sell one to two kilos of cocaine per month as well as the same quantity of hash per month while he was a full-patch member of the Rockers. He described the Rockers as being well organized when it came to assigning each member an area where they could sell drugs. He said that members like Daniel Lanthier and Richard St. Armand were assigned the task of finding new turf where the Hells Angels had never sold before. The Rockers were also given permission to sell drugs elsewhere in Quebec as long as someone from another Hells Angels’ chapter was not already there. Sirois said that this allowed him to sell drugs as far away as Chicoutimi and Baie-Comeau.
“I had to leave Chicoutimi because I found out it belonged to someone who sent an associate to our club. It belonged to someone in the Sherbrooke Hells Angels. He came to Montreal and met with Maurice — and when I talk about Maurice, I mean Maurice [Mom] Boucher — he called me and told me to get my guys out of Chicoutimi,” Sirois said.
Sirois said Boucher also advised him to ask the Hells Angels’ Quebec City chapter if it was okay for him to sell drugs in Baie-Comeau.
“Unfortunately I only sold there for a while because it was a long distance to travel when there were problems to take care of there. After a couple of months I left the Baie-Comeau territory alone,” Sirois said. Carrière then asked about the war in Montreal. He asked about all the groups that made up the Alliance and why the Hells Angels were interested in eliminating them.
“It was territory to conquer the sale of drugs. They could take it from us or they had to go, or they had to fall,” Sirois said.
“What were the methods employed for this?”
“Intimidation that ended with murder.”
Sitting at the Ecstasy Table
Carrière then went through the long list of gangsters charged in Operation Springtime 2001 and asked Sirois to comment on what he knew about them. When Sirois was asked about Normand (Pluche) Bélanger, he was able to elaborate at length. He said that before he quit the gang to get married, Bélanger was not a Rocker. He described Bélanger as being close to the club because he was good friends with Boucher and sat at what the gang called the Ecstasy Table.
Sirois said he conspired with Bélanger to kill people who blocked the Hells Angels’ way into the ecstasy market. The owner of a Montreal after-hours club called the Playground was targeted. “We decided to take control of the distribution of ecstasy in Montreal. A table was formed. There were members of the Rockers who were part of the table. There were Hells Angels who were part of the table. There was also Normand Bélanger.”
“And what does an Ecstasy Table do?”
“It was to manage the distribution, the importation and the distribution of ecstasy for each person.”
Sirois said, when he joined, Daniel (Boteau) Lanthier was already a Rocker and he sold Sirois cocaine and ecstasy. He also owned an arcade and a pager company. Sirois didn’t elaborate, but he said he chose not to use the pagers that came from Lanthier’s company. Sirois said Lanthier got into trouble for dealing drugs on the South Shore for a while. He was ordered out because another Hells Angels’ chapter had dealers there. Lanthier was reminded that his patch meant he was supposed to sell mainly in Montreal.
When asked to describe André Chouinard, Sirois said he had started out as a m
ember of the Rockers in 1994 and quickly climbed the ladder to become a part of the Nomads in 1997. Sirois said that during the time he was in the Rockers and not yet working for the police, he could always go to Chouinard for cocaine. That was why he chose Chouinard to be one of the first people he called when trying to get back in as a double agent.
“The contact went well. Chouinard made small talk at first. After that we got on to important subjects.”
“What was that?”
“The important subject, primarily, was still about the person I had married. There were stories she had told certain people in the milieu. I wanted to see how they had been perceived. They told me to forget about it, they were the stories of a slut.”
“You asked about that to know if you could continue with your business?”
“I asked André Chouinard questions about that subject in particular for several minutes. I also told him I wanted to go back to work, I wanted to go back to the club. When I married that person, they told me I didn’t have the right to work. And now I told him I was divorced, so I wanted the permission to work, which meant, to be able to sell drugs in Montreal.”
“What did he say?”
“He gave me the permission and he said he’d put me in contact with someone, because the first point of entry would be to set up a marijuana house. What he said was ’open your marijuana house and after that I’ll introduce you to someone who will buy it from you.’” Although Sirois wasn’t asked to elaborate on what a “marijuana house” was, he was likely referring to the Rockers common practice of renting homes in Montreal suburbs and using them solely to grow marijuana hydroponically.
Sirois said Chouinard put him in touch with Jean-Guy Bourgoin, and things started happening for him. He took notes of every phone call and every meeting between different people. All the while, he managed to buy drugs from Bourgoin. He also set up a meeting with Chouinard at a jewelry store. Using a hidden recorder, Sirois recorded the meeting and began to ask questions more pertinent to the violence in the war. He told Chouinard that he wanted to “score points with the Rockers.”
