by Paul Cherry
Meanwhile, Gagné kept his mouth shut about the purpose of the stolen Jeep and faithfully did his time for the Hells Angels. He was out by February 1997, eager to resume working with the Rockers. He said that the same night he got out, he headed to the Rockers bunker. There he met Falls and Pierre Provencher. They asked if he wanted to join the Rockers football team.
“What does a football team do for the Rockers?” Briere asked.
“The football team is a team of killers.”
“They kill who?”
“They kill members of the Rock Machine.” “Did you agree to be part of this football team?”
“Yes.”
Gagné said his first task on the football team was to head out to Verdun with Gregory Wooley to locate a particular Pontiac Bonneville. They were given an address in Verdun and found the truck easily. Gagné wasn’t told who the target was, only that the vehicle’s owner was tied to the Rock Machine. They were to do surveillance work on the Hells Angels’ next target in the biker war.
But Gagné became concerned when he realized how brazen the Rockers had become, especially in their attitude toward conquering Verdun. He said he heard Pierre Provencher tell a Verdun drug dealer that for every 500 grams of cocaine he sold he was to pay ten percent to Gagné. The drug dealer asked why and Provencher informed him that “Godasse is going to open some doors” for the Rockers in Verdun. The drug dealer was still puzzled, so Provencher laid it out in plain French. He said that Gagné was going to kill anyone not selling for the Hells Angels in the dealer’s territory.
Gagné said he was completely caught off guard by the statement. He said he didn’t know the drug dealer and didn’t like the situation Provencher was placing him in. The way he saw it, his name was being mentioned to every drug dealer the Hells Angels were friendly with in Verdun. “Who are these people?” he thought to himself, and what was to stop them from informing on him if they ever got into serious trouble with the police? Gagné said he headed straight to Bennett Street to talk to Boucher, but instead ran into Fontaine and Tousignant. He told them he wanted off the football team. Fontaine said he was glad to hear it because he wanted Gagné to join his newly formed team of drug dealers who were assigned to continue their dominance in Montreal’s Gay Village. Serge Boutin, a drug dealer with remarkable business acumen, had already been sent to prison, and the Hells Angels were restructuring their network in the Gay Village, a section of Montreal packed with bars and after-hours clubs.
By his own admission, Gagné said he worked on the Gay Village project from February to March 1997. He said his partners were Fontaine, Danny Decelles and two men who would later play a major role in his decision to turn informant: Steve Boies, the man whose pager had been recovered after the botched bomb attempt in Verdun, and Christian Bellemare.
He said that Fontaine had told him to set up apartments, or piqueries, in the Gay Village where they could sell drugs 24 hours a day. He said the majority of the clients were prostitutes. “A piquerie is a place where someone goes to by a quarter (gram), consumes it there and then goes out to do more prostitution or petty thieves, people like that,” Gagné said.
When Boutin got out, Fontaine made the decision to keep the team together. Boutin was assigned to do the accounting. Decelles and Boies were in charge of the piqueries and two municipal parks. Jean Roch Lussier was going to be in charge of PCP. Gagné said Decelles was supplying pot and cocaine to dealers in the parks.
“Me and Paul [Fontaine], we had the same job. The same job was to kill people for the Hells Angels organization and the Rockers.”
“You were being paid how much at that moment?” Briere asked.
“I was paid about $1,000 per week. Sometimes it was more. Sometimes it was less.” Gagné said he and other gang members began doing close surveillance on two brothers who were dealing on St-Hubert Street. He said the Hells Angels began taking photos of the brothers and “created a file on them.”
“You know if you kill the guy who is the head, and you don’t know who else is working for him, you don’t advance much more,” Gagné said. “You have to create a file, take photos, hide cameras inside vehicles.” Gagné went on to say the gang used Mazda 323s and Chryslers for their surveillance-camera operations. They used boat accessory batteries to plug in their video cameras so they could run for hours. They would hide the video cameras in a tissue box mounted in the back seat of the vehicle. They would connect the cameras to a videotape machine hidden in the trunk which allowed them to tape for several hours.
Once they got someone on video, the gang wanted photos of their targets as well. For this they used a mid-sized truck. They used tinted windows on the truck but, Gagné said, realizing that a drug dealer might be suspicious of such a vehicle, they had signs made up to make it look like an electrician’s vehicle. They even had a fake company registered to match the truck’s lettering and assigned a cell phone number and pagers that was to be used only for the phony contractor. The company was registered in the name of Gagné’s wife. Gagné said that the phone would always stay inside the truck and that sometimes they would get calls from curious people asking why their truck had been parked on their street such a long time. Sometimes, Gagné said, they would reply that the truck needed to be towed and then they would call a Hells Angel associate who would come over and help them in their subterfuge by towing the truck away. They also had police scanners inside the truck to listen if anyone called in to report a suspicious truck.
Gagné said that he was also asked by André (Toots) Tousignant to do surveillance on a guy in Laval. It turned out to be a member of the Dark Circle. “To my memory, we did it as well in Montreal North, around Langelier. We did surveillance and even tried to follow the guy. What Paul Fontaine told me was that he was a rock. In the milieu, when we talked about the Rock Machine we called them the Ducks. We didn’t call them rocks. A rock in the milieu was an informer for the police, an informant or a police witness,” Gagné said. Fontaine told him that killing the informant would be worth $50,000. Gagné said they often followed the man as he drove in his Jeep Cherokee to an industrial park in Rivière-des-Prairies.
“The morning that we decided to do it, we were waiting inside a Dodge Caravan,” Gagné said. At this point, prosecutor Briere interrupted Gagné.
“Stop. I’d prefer it if you’d use the term . . . instead of using ’we’ talk about who.”
“Me and Paul Fontaine. We prepared the getaway because we were always going to this shop. We said we would cut him off on the street before he went in the shop. Paul was going to get out and shoot him and get back in our truck. We were going to dump it and set it on fire, climb into the legal car and drive away. That morning we went to the shop and nothing was happening. We returned to his place and he didn’t leave for a week. After a while we said let’s forget it, the plan is dead. After the police had arrested me and I took them there and they told me the man had died of a heart attack.”
That man turned out to be Domenico Rossi, an informant for the Montreal police’s anti-gang squad. As they were checking out Gagné’s potential as a credible witness everything he had told them about the planned hit pointed to Rossi being the target.
The Crown prosecutor then asked if Gagné had done surveillance on prison guards. Gagné testified that by the summer of 1997, Maurice (Mom) Boucher had apparently hatched his plan to kill prison guards in a twisted plot to knock the justice system on its back. Gagné said he was told, by Paul Fontaine, to do surveillance on a provincial detention center in Rivière-des-Prairies, on the eastern tip of the Montreal Island and was instructed to follow vehicles that might be carrying three or four guards.
“The first time that I went there I left my truck on St. Jean Baptiste [Street] because one of my aunts lives there. After that I went to the prison on foot,” Gagné said. He began his surveillance from a wooded area near the detention center and soon noticed that an employee would cross a railway track nearby to get to work. Gagné thought he might make a good
target but he soon realized the man was likely a prison cook because he always dressed in white. There was little progress to report. He had done about eight or nine days worth of surveillance when suddenly plans changed.
“At the beginning, when Paul Fontaine asked me to do surveillance on the prison guards at Rivière-des-Prairies, a few days later André Tousignant paged me and asked me to meet him on Bennett Street. He said we were going to take a walk, so I left my pager behind. He took me by the ear and he said, ’We have a screw to do at Bordeaux and I thought of you.’ In our milieu, ’a screw’ is a prison guard. Why do we use the term screw? It’s because they lock and unlock the door on our cells like turning a screw,” Gagné said.
“From there, I said I’d have to talk to Paul because I was occupied with something. Toots said he would take care of it. At one point I was at Fontaine’s because Tousignant paged me. When I got to Paul Fontaine’s, André Tousignant was already there. Toots asked Paul Fontaine if he wanted to go in with him and Paul said ’No, no.’ So Toots said ’I’m going to do it with Godasse.’”
Gagné and Tousignant held several meetings to discuss possible ways of murdering a prison guard. They decided on a plan in which they would leave their getaway car in the parking lot of a Laval shopping center. Tousignant then decided they would do the hit while both rode on a stolen Japanese motorcycle, a Katana Suzuki. But the first one they tried had mechanical problems and Tousignant considered scrapping the Japanese motorcycle idea all together.
Diane Lavigne
On June 26, 1997, Gagné was paged by Tousignant and told to meet him at a pizzeria. They parked their getaway car, a Ford Escort, in the Laval shopping center parking lot as planned. They then headed to a garage on St-André Street in Montreal where another Japanese motorcycle was waiting. The pair left on the motorcycle with Tousignant driving and Gagné riding on back. When they got near the Bordeaux prison, they quickly spotted a Jeep Cherokee which had several prison guards inside. They followed, it but quit the chase as soon as they realized the Jeep wasn’t heading in a path that would easily let them get to their getaway car. So, they waited near the prison for another potential target.
Diane Lavigne had just finished her shift at the prison, and she drove past them in her Plymouth Caravan. Tousignant spotted the guard insignia on her uniform. They followed her to the highway on the motorcycle and accelerated once she was on it. Tousignant brought the motorcycle to the driver’s side of the Caravan and Gagné opened fire on the tinted window. He would later claim he had no idea his target was a woman.
Danielle Leclerc, another prison guard, was following close behind Lavigne’s car and noticed Tousignant and Gagné on the motorcycle. She watched as they made the dangerous maneuver next to Lavigne’s minivan and heard the shots fired, but she assumed the pair had left something on the highway that had caused Lavigne’s tires to blow. Tousignant hit the gas and Gagné tossed his firearm away. They rode to the shopping center where they had left their Ford Escort. They took off the clothes they had been wearing during the hit, and Gagné dumped them in the back of their getaway car. They returned to Montreal where Gagné collected all of the clothes and the helmet and burned them at another location.
Gagné said he got his orders for the murder from Tousignant. He said that Fontaine and Tousignant were by then hangarounds in the Hells Angels, which made them his bosses. Briere asked if he had received compensation for the event. Gagné said he was in the hospital in July because of an accident, but that he received his striker patch in the Rockers in August as a reward for what he had done. He also said that the day after the murder he received congratulations from Mom Boucher.
“The morning after, Paul Fontaine came to pick me up. He said we should stick together,” Gagné said. The pair drove to the Bennett Street hangout where the Nomads chapter members did business.
“Mom was there with Trooper. Mom asked me to go to a florist with him and Trooper.”
“Who is Trooper again?” Briere asked.
“[Gilles] Mathieu. I always knew him as Trooper, but afterwards, the police told me that Trooper was Mathieu,” Gagné explained. “After that we went to the florist. We waited while Mom Boucher bought two or three bouquets. He put them in his truck, and we went for a walk. I was looking around because I had on a kangaroo [a jogging jacket with a pouch] and I had my hands in my kangaroo for my piece.”
Gagné was jittery about the police rushing in on him at any moment for killing the prison guard. He said that he, Fontaine, Boucher and Mathieu walked to an alley to talk and they were whispering into each other’s ears. Gagné said that he whispered to Fontaine that it was he and Toots who had murdered Lavigne. Fontaine then went over to Mom Boucher to whisper it into his ear. “I continued to walk towards them, between Mr. Boucher and Trooper. Mom told me, ’It’s good, my Godasse, it doesn’t matter if she had tits.’”
Gagné said Boucher went on to warn him, because whoever talked to the police would likely end up getting 25 years, even if they came forward as an informant. He also said that if the death penalty existed in Canada the murderer would get that instead. Gagné said that Mathieu appeared to approve of Lavigne’s murder as well.
After that, everyone headed to Chez Parée, one of Montreal’s oldest strip clubs, for lunch. Gagné said he didn’t ask many questions after the murder. He said he knew it was the best way to get up in the Hells Angels — do a job, do it as fast as possible and don’t talk about it afterwards. Gagné said he knew murdering prison guards would be strongly approved by the Hells Angels and that he was ready to do anything to move up in the hierarchy. Tousignant was already on his way.
On June 30, 1997, Gagné was injured in a motorcycle accident caused by a member of the Rock Machine. As he lay in his hospital bed recovering, he was visited by Tousignant and Robitaille. Tousignant then informed Gagné that he had received his bottom patch in the Nomads chapter, giving the underling something to aspire to. After recovering from the accident, Gagné was quickly placed back on duty, continuing the surveillance of the Rivière-des-Prairies prison that Fontaine had asked him to do before Lavigne’s murder. After a few days, Gagné told Fontaine about how most of the prison guards heading home would turn right as they exited the detention center’s parking lot. They would often end up jammed at a busy intersection. Gagné described how there was a pedestrian button that could be used to change the traffic light at the intersection.
Fontaine decided that it would likely be there that they would carry out the next hit. Fontaine and Gagné put a plan in place that involved using motorcycles and a bicycle path to help in their getaway. But Gagné said that when they were ready to do the next hit on a guard, Fontaine called it off at the last minute. It was the first indication that Fontaine was worried about the fact they were killing innocent people.
“Paul said it didn’t feel right, that the getaway wasn’t good and all that. I said, ’Yeah, but we have to do it.’ He said, ’Yeah we have to do it, but you’re not ready to do 25 years for a prison guard who has done nothing. Rock Machine guys don’t bother me because they’re trying to kill us and we’re trying to kill them,’” Gagné recounted. Fontaine decided that they should wait for another chance.
At this point they selected a Mazda B2000 pickup as their legitimate vehicle, to be used after they torched the vehicle used in the shooting. They also had a green Dodge Caravan ready for the hit. Gagné prepared that vehicle by wiping it down with gas to get rid of fingerprints. He also put on fake licence plates. He said he took down the licence plate number from the same model of vehicle and then made a copy of that plate by using a blank plate and some paint.
“If a cop was following us and checked the plates, he would think it was not stolen,” Gagné said. The pair set off on another day, prepared to do the shooting. By now, Fontaine had selected a bus used to transfer inmates on trial to the courthouse. He noticed that it always had two prison guards in it. Gagné was positioned near the detention center waiting for the vehicle w
hile Fontaine was waiting near the intersection where it would have to stop. But the bus didn’t show up that day.
Robert Corriveau and Pierre Rondea
On the day of the actual hit, September 8, 1997, Gagné and Fontaine went to Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the eastern tip of the Montreal Island, and picked up the stolen Caravan that had been prepared for the job. Gagné drove that vehicle and Fontaine followed in a Mazda 323 as they headed to the Rivière-des-Prairies detention center.
They got to their designated spot near the prison around 6 a.m. and waited in a bus shelter for the prison bus to arrive. At around 6:10 a.m., Robert Corriveau and Pierre Rondeau pulled out of the underground garage of the Montreal courthouse and headed for the prison to pick up inmates who had cases in court that day. They were alone on the bus. The passenger seat was positioned perpendicular to the driver seat, and as they drove along the two men chatted. They had no idea what was waiting for them.
“Paul Fontaine asked me if I felt okay. I said, ’Yes’ and asked him how he was doing, he said, ’Yes.’ I said, ’Hey, there’s two guards in there and one of them is armed, one of the two guards.’ He said, ’You’ll get out with me and when they make their stop we will open fire, both of us.’ He was going to take the driver and I was going to take the other [guard]. When they arrived at the stop, Paul took the lead. He took out his piece and I took out mine. He opened fire and I opened fire.”
Gagné had said in earlier trials that Fontaine carried a .357 Magnum. He opened fire on Rondeau, who was driving the bus. Gagné testified he fired one or two shots with his semiautomatic in the direction of the passenger, Robert Corriveau. He said Fontaine continued to fire and climbed onto the hood of the bus to get a better angle. Gagné said that at this point, his 9-mm semiautomatic jammed on him. “During the time that I unjammed the firearm I could hear shots fired. When I unjammed it Paul Fontaine was already running away. I went to the side [of the bus] and continued to shoot,” Gagné said. A ballistics expert who showed up at the crime scene afterward gathered evidence that would later confirm Gagné’s story about his weapon jamming. But Gagné had still managed to unload a full clip on the bus and the victims.
