Biker Trials, The

by Paul Cherry

  Gagné went on to explain that Fontaine was supposed to do the murder of Lavigne with Tousignant, but Fontaine had refused, apparently bringing him down several notches in Boucher’s opinion. Fontaine was frustrated afterward and he let Gagné know it, saying he hadn’t got his patch with the Hells Angels because he hadn’t participated in the Lavigne murder.

  “After my arrest, when the investigator told me that Steve Boies was an informant, I asked to see the cassette. In effect, Steve Boies was talking about me,” Gagné said.

  “When I did [Diane] Lavigne, it was Paul Fontaine who was supposed to do it. After that, I was in a motorcycle accident. But just before the bike accident, we went to Saint-Marguerite, me and Paul Fontaine because it was the anniversary of the Trois Rivières chapter, on July 1.” Gagné said he and Fontaine were doing guard duty for members of the Hells Angels. They had stopped in Saint-Sauveur to fuel up their motorcycles when Fontaine told Gagné he wanted to go for a walk.

  From top left to right: Michel Rose, Donald (Pup) Stockford, Gilles (Trooper) Mathieu, Richard (Dick) Mayrand, Denis Houle, David (Wolf) Carroll. From bottom left to right: Walter (Nurget) Stadnick René Charlebois, Normand Robitaille, Maurice (Mom) Boucher

  “Paul Fontaine took off his pager and I took off my pager and we went for a walk. He told me he had met Mom Boucher earlier that day and that he was not going to get this [Gagné said, motioning to the lower part of his back]. He was talking about his bottom [patch] as prospect because he didn’t [kill Lavigne].” Gagné said that when he got out of the hospital he discussed the situation with André Tousignant. A meeting was called. In attendance were Maurice (Mom) Boucher, Denis Houle, Gilles (Trooper) Mathieu, Normand (Biff) Hamel, Normand Robitaille and Paul Fontaine. At the meeting, Fontaine admitted to his comments to Gagné. Since he had exposed Fontaine in this way, Gagné figured, Fontaine already had a grudge against him and would likely give him little financial support in fighting two first-degree murder charges.

  Gagné said he also started to think that if he didn’t turn informant, Fontaine was going to kill him. He said that Boucher had at one point specifically asked who else knew of the murder that Gagné and Fontaine had committed together. “So it was there, when the police were asking me all these questions and I wasn’t answering I thought of those events in my head. It was there that I changed sides, that I became an informant.”

  Switching Sides — Not So Simple

  Gagné would be cross-examined by some of the defense lawyers in the Beliveau trial. They attacked his credibility but appeared to have little success. In fact, some of the cross-examination only opened new doors for Gagné to provide more incriminating information. Defense lawyer Guy Quirion, who represented Rocker Éric (Pif) Fournier, started the cross-examination by bringing up the history of Gagné’s testimony in Boucher’s two murder trials as well as his testimony in the trial overseen by Justice Jean-Guy Boilard which was scrapped.

  “Does it happen that you make up some details while recalling events?” Quirion asked.

  “No.”

  Quirion brought up a previous statement Gagné had given concerning a truck that was going to be used in one of the aborted attempts to bomb the Rock Machine hangout in Verdun. Gagné had told the police that he had dumped the truck at the Place Versailles shopping center but that Tousignant had forgotten to remove the large quantity of dynamite inside it. Tousignant asked Gagné to go back and get the vehicle but Gagné had refused.

  “Well, yeah I refused. It was obvious. I had parked it at Place Versailles and I explained it to Toots. I said, ’Look, I dumped the truck at Place Versailles shopping center around 10 or 11 in the parking lot. The truck was left there and there is dynamite inside. So I’m sure someone has called the police to see why the truck was still parked there.’ That is what happens in shopping centers. Leave your car there, and see what happens. You’re going to get a call. And there was dynamite. If the police saw that it was a stolen truck they might leave it there and then spot me when I get into it, with that dynamite, and they would arrest me,” Gagné said.

  Quirion brought this up to make the point that underlings could refuse orders from the higher-ups in the gang. He suggested that Gagné conveniently forgot to mention this during a trial where it would challenge the theory of how the gang works. But the question did not faze Gagné in the least. In fact, he appeared to turn it to his favor. He countered that it was only logical to turn down such a ridiculous assignment.

  “I’d be better off calling the police and saying, ’Hey I left a truck there. Come arrest me,’” Gagné said, which caused many people in the courtroom to laugh.

  But still, Quirion appeared to score small points. He got Gagné to admit he had trouble recalling little details, just like anyone else might. He also got Gagné to admit that when Boucher was plotting to level the Rock Machine hangout he gave strict instructions that no civilians should be hurt, something Gagné had left out of his earlier testimony.

  But Quirion’s questions also opened a few doors that had not been pursued by the Crown. In responding to one question, Gagné revealed that during the time the Hells Angels were trying to kill prison guards, he was at the Imprevu Bar with René Charlebois and Normand Robitaille. He said someone was asked to turn up the volume on a television to hear a news story about a man who had been shot just as he left a prison in Laval. Robitaille and Charlebois appeared happy because it appeared that a prison guard had been killed, Gagné said. “But when it turned out that the guy was still alive and was not a prison guard, they were no longer in a good mood.” This was in reference to an incident on June 28, 1997. The group leader of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was shot as he came out of the Montée St-François Institution in Laval. The police would later learn that the man drove a car very similar to one driven by a prison guard at the federal penitentiary. Charlebois and Robitaille were never charged with the attempted murder.

  Richard Vallée, a founding member of the Nomads chapter.

  Quirion asked Gagné about the moment he decided to become an informant. Gagné admitted that he didn’t tell the police everything right away. He said that during this first 45 minutes of spilling his guts, he told the police about Lavigne, Rondeau, Christian Bellemare and the escape of Richard Vallée, a member of the Nomads chapter. Vallée had been sprung from a Montreal hospital room on June 5, 1997, while he was under tight guard, awaiting a possible extradition to the U.S. He had been charged in a northern New York court with murdering a man named Lee Carter. On July 29, 1993, Carter was killed after a bomb placed under the driver’s seat of his car went off as he started the engine. Carter’s death and the possible extradition meant the Sûreté du Québec had to drop drug trafficking charges against Vallée.

  When Serge Quesnel turned informant, he told the police that Vallée had made comments to him about Carter’s death, and he was able to describe the bomb that killed him in detail. Carter had tipped off the New York State Police and the U.S. Customs Service about a drug smuggling operation he was asked to help out with in 1992. He was willing to testify that Vallée had conspired to smuggle 54 kilograms of cocaine into Canada through the U.S. border, but he was murdered before he could.

  After being on the RCMP’S most-wanted list for six years, Vallée was arrested in Montreal in April 2003 after having undergone plastic surgery to his face. His brazen escape from the hospital six years earlier was still a mystery to the police but Gagné had managed to give the police some clues as to who was involved. Quirion pointed out that it took Gagné a while to tell the police what he knew about Vallée’s escape and tried to portray him as a liar.

  But the experienced witness didn’t take the bait. Gagné openly admitted to lying throughout his life, something any juror could understand was part of the life of being a career criminal. Gagné said gangsters lie about everything, and added that by the age of 13 he was already a frequent liar. He admitted to lying to get welfare and about cutting down cocaine that he sold to make $2,000 more off
a $32,000 kilo of coke. The day ended with the defense failing to score any major blows, and the jury headed home for the weekend, their heads full of days worth of Crown testimony from Gagné.

  With a fresh start the following Monday, Quirion took a new approach. He brought up a statement Gagné had made to the effect that criminals don’t lie to each other, that there is honor among thieves. The defense lawyer then asked why if there is such honor, Gagné would have turned so harshly on his former partner Tony Jalbert to the point of wanting to see him dead — he had given Jalbert’s address and licence number to Maurice (Mom) Boucher.

  Quirion’s questions began to sound familiar to Gagné. He had answered several of them before. Quirion brought up the fact that Gagné had told the provincial parole board in 1994 that he wanted out of the criminal world because he wanted to take care of his family. He also told the parole board that he dealt drugs because his wife was pregnant.

  “I wasn’t going to say, ’I want to sell drugs and become a Hells Angel and make lots of money dealing in drugs.’ [The parole board] would have said, ’Well, you go back to prison,’” Gagné explained. “When I started to sell drugs and I saw that it was profitable, my goal was to become a big boss in drugs.” At this point, Gagné realized where his déjà vu was coming from and turned the tables on Quirion, accusing him of merely repeating the same questions asked by Jacques Larochelle, one of Québec’s best defense attorneys, during Boucher’s two murder trials. Gagné’s allegation that Quirion was liberally borrowing from Larochelle’s work drew a few laughs in the courtroom.

  An Experienced Criminal

  Unfazed, Quirion dug in his heels and started asking tougher questions and brought up Gagné’s violent past. If he couldn’t make him look like a liar on the stand, he could at least show how Gagné was a violent thug. Quirion brought up details like how he had beaten a prostitute because she had stolen from a dealer of his who had fallen asleep. After soundly beating the woman, Gagné dragged her around by her hair.

  “Look,” Gagné replied, “in the milieu, if you let that kind of thing go, all the druggie girls are going to steal from you. They’ll think, ’there’s no problem with it.’”

  Quirion also scored points when he got Gagné to admit he lied to penitentiary officials to get into a medium-security penitentiary in the early 1990s because he wanted to avoid doing time with possible snitches. Gagné had learned from others that dealing drugs in a minimum-security penitentiary is difficult because that is where so many snitches end up.

  “Ah, because your intention was to sell drugs, even though you were in prison?” Quirion asked.

  “Yes,” Gagné replied. Gagné had also lied about the number of cars he had stolen in his life, to ensure he got into medium security. But it came back to slap him in the face and corrections officials grilled him on it. So, to cover that up, he made up a story that a police officer had advised him to lie to get into medium security.

  But Gagné also made it clear that life in the penitentiary system is another world, where inmates lie frequently to manipulate the quality of their lives. He recounted how he once got himself tossed in “the hole” in order to meet up with someone who was smuggling drugs for him inside his body. Gagné said that to accomplish this he started screaming at a guard, accusing him of incest and sleeping with his children. The trick worked. Gagné admitted to acting like a mentally challenged person because he wanted to appear “like a guy who wasn’t too bright.” But his parole officer noticed the psychologist’s test in Gagné’s file afterward and made sure to point out to the parole board that the results did not jibe with what he knew of Gagné.

  Quirion also tried to bring up a new motive for the prison guard murders and asked questions that suggested Gagné hated prison guards long before he joined the Rockers. Gagné admitted to having once thrown a homemade bomb at a prison guard; he seemed even a little proud of his creation. “Yes. It was with a battery. You take a battery, you take out all of the inside. You take matches and crush them until they become nothing but powder. You mix this together and you wrap it in Saran Wrap. You stick a rolling paper in it and put your powder inside. Then you light it. Sometimes it will go psssst... Or sometimes it’ll go POW! Like a gunshot.” Gagné also admitted to hitting a female guard who had grabbed him by the throat during a cell search.

  Then Quirion brought up another infamous detail that had come from a previous trial. Gagné called it the shit-pen. He said he came up with the idea when members of the Rock Machine were being walked right past his cell and those of other inmates who sided with the Hells Angels in the war. Gagné said that at the time, inmates could purchase large bottles of shampoo from the prison cantine. At first, Gagné just used water to spray the Rock Machine inmates who passed by. He said that he and other inmates then decided to urinate and defecate into a tobacco can. They left the mess to ferment in the can for a week and then transferred the liquid into the shampoo bottle. Gagné said he sprayed Rock Machine members with it and ended up splattering the guards as well. Again, instead of being ashamed of his actions, Gagné laughed as he told the story.

  Prepared for the Stand

  Defense lawyer Quirion then zeroed in on a moment in the trial that had seen Boucher acquitted of the prison guard murders. Larochelle had gotten Gagné to agree that he had no scruples and lied often to get what he wanted. Gagné told the jury in the Beliveau trial that he had been referring to his life before he had been arrested in 1997. He was better prepared to answer the question this time around. That brought Quirion to his next line of questioning. He got Gagné to openly discuss how he had been prepared as a Crown witness.

  “What we do is the police officers act like defense lawyers. They ask me questions,” Gagné said.

  “This was where?”

  “It was in a room. There was a desk. What we would do was the intercom was the judge or jury. There was a little intercom. The police officers acted like defense lawyers. They took notes, they talked.”

  “Am I right in saying that one acted as a Crown and another as the defense?”

  “No, both acted as the defense.”

  “Both were the defense?”

  “Yes, and they would say things like [clearing his throat in an exaggeratedmanner], ’Is it not true that after ...’ and they would ask me all kinds of questions. I would answer.” His imitation of the police acting as defense lawyers drew laughter in the courtroom. Gagné said the preparation took place over at least a few days. He was given a book. It was from a police-training course and had been written by a Crown prosecutor. The book warned that defense lawyers will ask suggestive questions, and it is dangerous to answer them. Quirion then asked if Gagné was coached on how to address contradictions in his testimony. At this point, Gagné got a little frustrated.

  “You want to know who taught me how to testify? It was Jacques Larochelle [in the Boucher trials] during my testimony. He’s really good,” Gagné said. By now, he was drawing howls of laughter in the courtroom.

  Quirion tried a different tack, asking if Gagné was coached by the police to bring up the contract on Panaccio during this trial. He claimed that he wasn’t. Well, said Quirion, had Gagné helped the Hells Angels plot to kill other lawyers? Gagné admitted that he once did surveillance on Gilles Daudelin, an attorney who had represented several bikers. He said Fontaine later told him that any plans the Hells Angels had for Daudelin had been called off.

  The defense lawyer found it curious that Gagné could remember things that suddenly applied to the trial he was about to testify in and accused him of having a selective memory. Gagné said that it was difficult for him to consider all the conspiracies he was privy to or all the crimes he had been part of.

  “Look, even Michel Auger is included in that,” Gagné said in reference to Journal de Montréal crime reporter Michel Auger, a veteran journalist who broke many stories about the biker war. Auger was shot in September 2000 while he was in the newspaper’s parking lot. The attack came shortly after
he had written a group of stories shedding new light on recent developments in the biker war, in particular the loan-sharking scene. He survived the attempt on his life and eventually returned to writing for the newspaper, continuing to follow organized crime, including the Hells Angels.

  The man who manufactured the firearm used in the attempt on Auger had ties to the Hells Angels. Later on, two people tied to Quebec’s licence bureau were arrested for selling information to Jean-Guy Bourgoin, a longtime member of the Rockers. Included among the list of people Bourgoin had requested information on were several members of the Rock Machine and Auger. Now Gagné was providing even more information that pointed toward the Hells Angels having a role in the shooting.

  “What? Michel Auger?” Quirion asked, seeming surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “You have knowledge of this?”

  “Yes, I even called Michel Auger to tell him we were supposed to kill him.” This was something Gagné had done after he turned informant.

  “You knew this?”

  “Yes.”

  At that moment, Judge Beliveau called for a break. When the jury returned, Crown prosecutor Briere used the opportunity to make a few things clear to them. He pointed out that Gagné had mentioned the plots on the lawyers’ lives in his previous statements to the police. Beliveau also told the jury that it was normal for any good lawyer to prepare a witness to testify. After a while, Gagné’s cross-examination testimony touched again on what the Hells Angels had planned for journalist Michel Auger.

  “We were at the courthouse the first time we talked about it. [Auger] had come out of a courtroom. So then André Chouinard said, ’Do you know Auger?’ I said, ’No . . .’ I looked at his face. [Chouinard] said, ’It’s possible that we’re going to do him.’ Paul Fontaine also told me that once we had Auger’s address, we were going to do him.”