by Paul Cherry
“What did you mean by that?” Carrière, the prosecutor, asked.
“To win points, to get me higher [in the gang’s hierarchy], to skip steps. André told me it was not impossible and that what would help most would be to get information on the other side.”
“What does that mean? What did you understand from that phrase?”
“Personal information on the Rock Machine and their affiliates.”
Sirois said that shortly after his conversation with Chouinard he was able to contact Jean-Guy Bourgoin. They set up a meeting at the Pro Gym, the workout center in the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district where the Hells Angels worked out religiously during most of the biker war. Besides pumping iron, they would take boxing and martial arts lessons from professionals.
“The advantage of the Pro Gym,” said Sirois, “was that it was right in front of a police station.”
“That’s an advantage?” Carrière asked.
“It’s an advantage when it comes to security.”
Sirois said that during his meeting with Bourgoin, he arranged to buy 250 grams of cocaine. The cocaine was delivered by one of Bourgoin’s runners while Sirois waited at a pizza restaurant. The runner brought it in a shopping bag, packed into a box of Ritz crackers. Then Sirois reported the transactions to his police controllers, Roch Coté and René Beauchemin. They gave him money so he could keep buying drugs from Bourgoin. At this point, the jury had to endure listening to recordings of conversations that Sirois had made while talking to Bourgoin. The quality was poor but transcripts had been made to help the jurors along as they struggled to make sense of what they were hearing.
Sirois met with Bourgoin again on December 15, 1999, at a tanning salon on Sherbrooke Street East in Montreal’s east end. Sirois told Bourgoin that he needed a kilo of hashish. Bourgoin agreed to the deal and told him he could get him Viagra and ecstasy “in industrial quantities.” Two days later, Sirois tried to arrange a meeting with Chouinard, but the Hells Angel couldn’t attend because his son was involved in a Christmas pageant.
In the next taped conversation presented to the jury, Sirois got Bourgoin to reveal what the Hells Angels were planning in terms of their expansion westward. During a December 23,1999,0m-versation that Sirois secretly recorded, he and Bourgoin discussed the province of Ontario. Bourgoin said the Hells Angels considered it virgin territory. Prosecutor Roger Carrière asked Sirois to interpret what Bourgoin meant when he said “there’s a damned huge market over there.”
“The province of Ontario was a virgin territory and that the drug market was open. First come, first served,” Sirois explained.
Days later, Sirois met Bourgoin at a fast-food restaurant and arranged to buy four kilos of hashish from him. Bourgoin appeared to be opening up to Sirois. He asked Sirois if he was interested in renting an apartment for him in Montreal’s Plateau district where he could stash and sell drugs. Bourgoin later surprised Sirois by delivering the drugs himself. Sirois began to learn more about the Hells Angels and how their ways of dealing had evolved since he had left.
The Hells Angels now had a tight-knit group that made decisions regarding where they would buy their cocaine. The Hells Angels appeared to be only interested in purchasing large quantities of cocaine and only if they could be assured of its quality.
“I started by saying that I could put my hands on 20 kilos of coke, [asking] if I could bring it to the Table, to sell it to the Table. Because at the beginning of our conversations, André [Chouinard] told me that the new rule was that everything had to go through the Table. I proposed that I could get 20 kilos of coke and could I sell it to the Table. Excuse me, I told him I could get kilos of cocaine. He asked me how many kilos. I told him about 20. He said it was not enough, the Table was only buying between 100 and 1000 kilos, so my guy would be stuck with his 20 kilos.”
Bourgoin informed Sirois that if he wanted to start selling ecstasy in Montreal, he needed the permission of the table that had been formed years earlier with Normand Bélanger, who was, at that point, a member of the Rockers.
The Prices Paid
Jurors were soon treated to some of the more illuminating evidence heard during any of the megatrials. It came during a secretly recorded conversation Bourgoin had with Sirois at a sushi restaurant in downtown Montreal. By now, Bourgoin appeared to fully trust Sirois, but the fact that he was drinking potent sake during the dinner possibly helped loosen his tongue. At the beginning of the recorded conversation, the pair is overheard discussing mundane things like the flavor of the California rolls. Sirois is heard complimenting Bourgoin as an expert on ordering sushi and complaining that he hadn’t eaten it in a long time. Then the conversation turned to gang business, doing guard duty or little things like “the watch” While secretly recording what Bourgoin was saying, Sirois assured him that he would never disrespect the Rockers name.
Bourgoin became worried at one point that someone seated near them in the restaurant was a cop. But he soon calmed down enough to start talking about how the Plateau was his territory. Bourgoin also asked about a problem Sirois had had with a member of the Mafia over the rights to sell drugs in a bar. It was around that point that Sirois asked about how he could move up quicker in the gang. Bourgoin then revealed that the Hells Angels had a price list. The gang was willing to pay up to $100,000 for the murder of a full-patch member of the Rock Machine.
“During the same conversation, Jean-Guy [Bourgoin] told me it was $25,000 for a hangaround, $50,000 for a striker and $100,000 for a full-patch member of the Rock Machine. In the same example he said that if you killed two strikers and a member, it was $200,000 in your bank account,” Sirois said. Right from the mouth of someone who had served many years as a Rocker had come solid evidence of how far the Hells Angels were willing to go in their war.
Shortly after that bomb was dropped, Sirois’ testimony ended, and the defense was left to try to clean up the mess. Defense lawyer François Bordeleau began the cross-examination by asking Sirois about how he had been prepared as a witness. Sirois complained of having to provide “too much” information on how he came to be a Rocker, that his handlers required too much of him. The conversation then turned to Sirois’ past. He described how he had started working in bars as a young teenager. As an adult, he continued to work in bars. He was once a busboy at Montreal’s infamous Chez Parée strip club, a lightning rod for tourists and gangsters. Sirois’ criminal record was actually very light, but he had confessed to several things he had never been arrested for including several robberies and a home invasion.
“During that period, with certain people, we heard news that someone had $70,000 in their home. We decided to go there, to get in the home. We made threats. Unfortunately, yes, the person was a 70-year-old woman. She was tied up. We searched the house and found nothing and left. And while on the road I convinced my partner to pull over to call the police to make sure the woman was okay,” Sirois said. Bordeleau continued to grill him.
“And to untie her?”
“To untie her and make sure she was okay. And to this day it was something that bothered me.”
“You were trying to find money and you threatened her?”
“We threatened her dog.”
“Do you know what a dog represents to a 70-year-old woman?”
“Yes.”
“Voilà, so then you threatened her.”
“I don’t deny it.”
“Voilà.”
“I’m 33 now. I was 18 then.”
9
Stéphane Gangé:Trigger Man
On the surface, Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné might appear to be a man of little consequence. He speaks with a nasal voice and an accent that immediately gives away the fact he was raised in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, historically one of Canada’s poorer areas. His face often seems fixed in a goofy grin giving him the appearance of being dim-witted. Even his nickname, Godasse, a French expression for old shoe, suggested he was more of a folksy type than an aggressive street dealer looking to
become a millionaire.
But that might also have been his strength for it may have led people to underestimate him. Gagné apparently enjoyed playing that card. He once pretended to be mentally challenged during an examination by a psychologist, while serving a federal sentence during the early 1990s. He had hoped the act would get him an early release, but a corrections official caught on. The corrections official made sure the National Parole Board was aware the psychologist had been tricked.
After he turned informant in 1997, Gagné originally was told he would only be expected to testify in two trials — one against Maurice (Mom) Boucher, involving the murders and attempted murder of prison guards; and another that was supposed to be the trial of the gang members who had attempted to level a Rock Machine hangout in Verdun with a powerful bomb. But Gagné had been a witness to the biker war from the early disputes that in 1993 until his arrest near the end of 1997. Gagné had been a successful independent drug dealer and it was made clear to him that he would have to choose sides. He chose the Hells Angels. He would later admit he liked the idea of joining a gang that offered the chance of climbing a ladder toward prosperity.
When the first murder trial against Boucher ended in an acquittal, however, many observers blamed Gagné, saying it was apparent the jury could not believe the word of a trigger man looking to get a lenient sentence.
Taking the Stand Again
Newspaper editorials began to question the value of using witnesses like Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné. In Boucher’s first trial, Justice Jean-Guy Boilard had instructed the jury that they had a very important decision to make. If they didn’t believe Gagné, they should acquit Boucher on all three of the charges, which they did. When the Crown appealed the acquittal, part of the prosecutors’ argument was that Boilard’s instructions were misleading and did not allow the jury the opportunity to assess the merits of the evidence concerning all three charges as required in Canadian law. Investigators had gathered significantly more supporting evidence in one of the prison guard murders, and, the Crown argued, the jury might have given it more weight had Boilard instructed them properly.
By the time Boucher’s retrial rolled around, Gagné was a much more polished witness, and this time, elements of his testimony were now backed by other former Rockers, like Serge Boutin, who turned informant after he was charged in connection with Operation Springtime 2001. The former Rockers supported Gagné’s testimony by showing how the Nomads chapter functioned as a highly structured drug trafficking network. With other former gang members attesting to the hierarchy’s existence, Boucher’s motive for murdering the two prison guards in order to destabilize the justice system, especially to keep that multi-million dollar network running, seemed more plausible.
Gagné himself would acknowledge, while testifying during the trial of the nine Rockers and Hells Angels before a jury and Justice Pierre Beliveau, that his previous experience being cross-examined had polished him into a much better witness. He was now testifying for the fifth time in a major trial. He had been schooled by police investigators who practised with him while taking on the roles of aggressive defense lawyers. Gagné had also survived the experience of being grilled twice by Jacques Larochelle, Boucher’s lawyer in both murder trials and a man recognized as one of the best defense attorneys in the province. Gagné started testifying in the Beliveau trial in August 2003, detailing how ten years prior, he had been partners with another drug dealer named Tony Jalbert. They were independents, but Gagné said it had been obvious to him who would inevitably win the war. He claimed he could already sense that the Hells Angels would stop at nothing to win.
Gagné had first met Jalbert in 1991, while they were both serving federal prison sentences. At that point, Jalbert was serving two federal terms. In 1985, he had been convicted for armed robbery and sentenced to six years. Then, while out on parole in 1990, he was caught dealing drugs and saw almost six years tacked on to his sentence. Right around the time they met, Jalbert was doing a good job of convincing the National Parole Board he was on the road to rehabilitation.
“It’s like he has realized, bit by bit, the pain he has caused as a drug trafficker,” a psychologist wrote of Jalbert in 1991.
Gagné met Tony Jalbert again in 1993. By then, Jalbert was out on day parole, having convinced the parole board that he wanted to help handicapped people and even attend university. But according to Gagné, during that same period of time, he and Jalbert were talking of the possibility of dealing drugs on St-Hubert Street, a diverse roadway that runs north-south for several kilometres through Montreal. One section of St-Hubert is shopping central for brides-to-be looking for wedding dresses, other stretches run through low-income neighborhoods like the one where Jalbert and Gagné discussed dealing their quarter-grams of cocaine. But eventually Gagné told Jalbert he preferred dealing in Hochelaga Maisonneuve. It was where he had grown up and he knew people there. Jalbert agreed, and they became equal partners in a plan that saw them sell cocaine out of apartments rented specifically for that purpose. They would hire small-time dealers to work shifts from noon to midnight while the more serious dealers would handle the tougher late-night hours.
Things were going well until Jalbert was arrested again and Gagné was left to run the business for both of them.
“When Jalbert went in for the second time, the war had just about started. So we had a choice. Go with the Hells Angels or go with the Rock Machine. And the Rock Machine had a lot of guys in groups like the Palmers and the Alliance, things like that. So Tony told me that he had met Mr. Maurice Boucher,” Gagné said during the Beliveau trial, explaining how it was Jalbert who had arranged the fateful introduction.
Jalbert’s first instinct was to join the Hells Angels’ side in the war. He instructed Gagné that they should start buying their drugs from Boucher, and he gave Gagné a contact to set up the meeting. Before that, the pair had been buying from whomever was known to be carrying the best quality cocaine. They dealt with the Mafia, the Hells Angels, the Pelletier Clan and important independent dealers like Jean Duquaire, who would later become a member of the Rock Machine.
The Hells Angels had already demonstrated their power to Gagné. Their underlings in the Rockers robbed one of his apartments, commonly known as a piquerie in the milieu, relieving him of about 15 hits of cocaine. That was about the most cocaine the clever dealer would leave in one spot at any given time. Even though Gagné had lost less than three grams of cocaine, it still stung, and he insisted on confronting the thieves, which was easy because the Rockers had let it be known they were behind the heist. Gagné contacted the gang and got his drugs back with an explanation that the Rockers didn’t know who was running his drug den. Shortly after meeting one of the Rockers, Gagné paged the contact he was given by Jalbert. He said Boucher called him back within a day and set up a meeting.
The two met in an alley where Gagné boasted that he was able to move three kilos of cocaine a month in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, Boucher’s stomping grounds before he became a high-level drug dealer. They arranged a deal where Gagné would pay for a kilo of cocaine with cash and then take a second sur la bras, slang among drug dealers for credit. Gagné left Boucher with an address, and shortly afterward, a man carrying what appeared to be a case of beer showed up. Inside the box were the two kilos of cocaine. Gagné said he paid Boucher $34,000 the next day. They continued to deal together, but sometimes Boucher was out of stock. It was then, when Gagné was looking for more cocaine, that it was made clear to him that he had to deal with the Hells Angels exclusively.
“After a while, I wanted more coke, and I went to see Mom, and Mom said, ’Look, you know who is with us’ because he didn’t have any. He said, ’Get it from a guy who is with us.’ I went to see Pierre Quintal because he was getting it from Steven [Bull] Bertrand and Steven Bertrand was a friend of Maurice Boucher. In the Hochelaga Maisonneuve neighborhood, everyone knew each other before the war started. When I said I knew Sylvain Pelletier, it was because I had bought cok
e from him. Before the war started he was wearing an Alliance ring,” Gagné told the jury.
“What was the Alliance?” asked Crown prosecutor François Briere.
“The Alliance was a group that formed at the start of the war with the Pelletier family. They wore rings. They were a part of a group of independents who did not want [to buy drugs] from the Hells Angels,” Gagné said, adding he was asked to join the Alliance. “I never wanted to join the Alliance or the Rock Machine because I knew they were going to lose.”
“To lose?” Briere asked.
“The war.”
“Okay and this was in 1993?”
“Yes.”
Gagné said that after they had been dealing together for a while, Boucher seemed impressed by his ability to move cocaine. At around this time, Jalbert was still serving his sentence. Gagné was faithfully forwarding his partner’s share of profits from their business to an elderly woman — Jalbert had introduced her to Gagné as his aunt. Perhaps not so coincidentally, the parole board had taken note that Jalbert seemed to spend a lot of his free time, while out on day parole, at an aunt’s house. He went there to eat on weekdays and then returned to his halfway house at night. On weekends, he would sleep over at her place.
The business relationship with Jalbert deteriorated when Gagné was caught with a kilo of cocaine after selling a quarter-gram to an undercover cop. He was arrested and, Gagné said, Jalbert was not interested in paying his bail, having just gotten out of prison himself.
Gagné said he later learned that Jalbert had spent his time behind bars getting to know Jean Duquaire and had decided to join the Alliance. With no one else in the milieu to turn to, Gagné said he called Paul (Fon Fon) Fontaine from the Rockers and was told the gang would help him out. But when Jalbert caught wind of this, he rushed to pay off Gagné’s bail instead.
