by Paul Cherry
Perhaps realizing that he had opened a door that wasn’t helping his clients, defense lawyer Quirion then switched to Gagné’s attempt to kill drug dealer Christian Bellemare, the crime that actually led to Gagné becoming an informant. Gagné said the Hells Angels had no problem with Bellemare being killed because he had started to owe people money so he had started buying drugs from the Rock Machine to get out of debt. Gagné said he also learned that Bellemare had cloned the Rockers’ cell phones, which he would use while the gang paid the bills.
“I told Paul [Fontaine] to get rid of him because I didn’t need him to open piqueries. I was capable of opening them. Whether it is in the Gay Village or Hochelaga Maisonneuve it doesn’t take long to do it. It is not very hard. You rent a place and you put in a drug dealer. After that you ride around Ontario Street or in the Gay Village and when you see the prostitutes on the sidewalk you stop and you give them the address and you say, ’go to this place.’ In the milieu we called it doing PR. The girls go and they see that the drugs are good. It’s certain she will return and tell her friend and that friend will tell another.”
It was during the cross-examination that Gagné brought up more chilling details of the plot to kill Bellemare. He had met Bellemare at a restaurant and told him the Rockers were interested in setting up hydroponic equipment in a house to grow marijuana. Bellemare agreed to make the trip up north with Gagné and Steven Boies. Gagné said he drove Bellemare and Boies up north at a careful speed because there was a heavy snowfall that day. He even managed to stop to fuel up and change his windshield wipers, although he was a little concerned that Bellemare was about to bolt from the car. Gagné’s testimony suggested that Bellemare knew he was doomed.
“When we got to Des Hauteurs Road I asked Steve Boies to lower the heat because it was too hot. Bellemare said, ’I’m a lot hotter than you guys.’” When they stopped where Gagné had claimed the marijuana-growing operation would be set up, Bellemare got out of the car and ran. Gagné said he and Boies opened fire on Bellemare and he fell to the snow-covered ground. They walked up to Bellemare and Gagné could see their target was bleeding from at least two bullet wounds. Boies then put a revolver to the back of Bellemare’s head and fired. The shot, strangely, was not fatal.
As Bellemare lay on the ground bleeding from his wounds, he asked Gagné why they had shot him. Gagné said he replied by strangling Bellemare. While Gagné strangled the wounded man, Boies proceeded to kick Bellemare. They then heard Bellemare gasp and assumed he was dead. They were wrong. Bellemare regained conciousness. Somehow, he was able to find help and was willing to talk to the police.
After the attempted hit on Bellemare, Gagné burned the clothes they used that day in his fireplace. He then took the firearm he had used and dumped it in a river. He sent someone to Bellemare’s house to collect any money that was there. He and Boies went into hiding, but were back on the streets in a matter of weeks.
Quirion then asked about the murder of Diane Lavigne. He asked Gagné to repeat if he knew whether she was a woman at the time of the murder. Gagné repeated that he did not know. He said the windows of the vehicle were tinted.
“Concerning this murder, do you have any remorse?” Quirion asked.
“Now? Yes”
“Since when?”
“It’s been some time now with the psychologist and all that. With all the murders and all the things I did. If I could start my life again. At the age of 13, I wouldn’t sell drugs. I would finish my studies and . . . it wouldn’t be the same,” Gagné said, adding that in 1999, a psychologist found that Gagné did indeed feel remorse but had a long way to go.
The question of an informant’s remorse in any case before a jury inevitably brings up his contract with the police. Gagne was asked about the list of demands that he prepared for the controller committee who handled his contract. Gagné had asked to do his time in a provincial prison like other informants. He wanted to be able to have family visits in a mobile home during weekends. Gagné said he asked to be paid $500 per week while he was in prison because it was the same amount Serge Quesnel had received after turning informant. He had also asked that his wife and son have their identities changed and he negotiated for $400 a week for his family, which they received until his wife left him. On top of his salary, Gagné said he was getting $140 per month for his cantine. Authorities had agreed to change his appearance upon his release from prison. Following release, he is also supposed to be paid $400 a week for two years.
“They told me, ’You are going to get a life sentence, 25 years, murder in the first degree.’ So I said, ’What do I get out of being an informant?’ [Crown prosecutor André Vincent] said, ’Well look, we’ll withdraw one of the charges because the law had changed,’” Gagné said. Vincent had been referring to Canada’s “faint-hope clause,” where people convicted of murder could have their cases reviewed after serving 15 years and see a chance of parole. Those with two first-degree murders on their hands do not get this opportunity.
Quirion asked Gagné whether he had asked to receive the $100,000 reward for information that led to the arrest of a suspect in the prison guard murders.
“You have to do it like that,” Gagné explained. “I knew that Steve Boies had already asked about it. When I was asking for things like $500 a week, they were saying you’re not going to get this and you’re not going to get that. So I said, ’If you’re not going to pay me the $500 per week like you did with Quesnel, give me the $100,000.’ They said, ’We’re not going to give you the $100,000. You were the murderer.’”
“What was their reaction? They must have laughed in your face. You were asking for $100,000 for a murder you had committed. There must have been an explosion of laughter from the controller committee when you said that,” Quirion said. Gagné replied that they didn’t laugh but rather explained why they couldn’t pay it.
“You didn’t reflect a little bit in your head? It was before the events of September 11th in the United States. Was it not like if [Osama] Bin Laden showed up in the States and said, ’Do you want to give me the $25 million you promised?’”
“There is a huge difference between me and Bin Laden,” Gagné stated.
“A difference between $100,000 and $25 million, eh? That’s the difference to you,” Quirion said in a tone that did nothing to conceal his contempt. Gagné replied that he didn’t consider himself a terrorist. “When you sign a contract, at the base of it all, you really haven’t repented. You’re still a criminal,” Gagné said.
“It takes time, to change mentality and a way of thinking,” Quirion prompted.
“Well look. It had been 18 days since I had been arrested,” Gagné pointed out. “Not even 18 days. I was arrested on [December 5,1997]. From the 6th to the 18th is not a long time.”
“So your mentality hasn’t changed?”
“I still have things to work on. It is evident. When you go as far as committing murder ...you have to consider ...Like my psychologist said, I will have to work on me for the rest of my life. It is very evident, and I am very conscious of that. I made efforts and I have efforts to make to change.”
Gagné was also cross-examined by other lawyers but with little consequence. For the most part, the other defense lawyers let Gagné portray himself as a victim who was ultimately not getting a sweet deal out of testifying in all the Hells Angels’ trials. Gagné said he assumed it won’t be easy to get parole, even after he has served 15 years under the faint-hope clause. He said he lives his life in constant stress because he worries about possible attacks where he would have to defend himself. Gagné said that once, through an error, he was stuck with another inmate, and it was lucky the inmate didn’t have a shiv or he would have had to defend himself. To press his point, Gagné brought up what happened to Aimé Simard.
Aimé Simard, an associate of the Rockers who turned informant.
Simard, a former associate of the Rockers, had turned informant in 1996 and admitted to being a hit man for the gang. His
most important trial as a witness ended in the acquittal of five members of the Rockers, and Simard went on to become a public thorn in the side for the authorities. His contract was revoked in 1999 after he Aimé Simard, an associate threatened another inmate and Simard was left to fend for himself in the federal penitentiary system. Despite this, he had a contract to testify in the Nova Scotia trial of a man tied to the Hells Angels, which was scheduled to begin sometime in 2004. Simard never got to testify. He was stabbed more than 100 times his cell in Saskatchewan Penitentiary and died in July 2003.
During his cross-examination by François Bordeleau, Gagné talked of how he was getting sick of testifying in trials. He said he protested when he learned he was expected to testify in the megatrials but was told that he had a contract he had to honor. “I’m fed up with this. It doesn’t do me any good to be here. Journalists talk about me and my picture appears in the papers,” Gagné said, sounding tired. “And because my photo is in the papers, guys I don’t even know throw shit in my wing and tell me they are going to kill me.”
10
Serge Boutin: Nowhere to Go But Out
Although he was named in the arrest warrants, Serge Boutin wasn’t picked up at home when the police carried out Operation Springtime 2001. He was already in a provincial detention center staring down the possibility of serving a life sentence for helping the Hells Angels kill a police informant. The full-patch Rocker had already spent more than a year waiting for a trial, and now his problems were piling higher. Despite spending the past year in custody, he was named in several of the charges filed in Operation Springtime 2001.
For years, Boutin had dealt drugs in places like the Gay Village and the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district, but he had only once been picked up for a drug-related offence. But in January 1997,11e was picked up for more serious charges: he was a suspect in the 1994 plot to kill Maurice (Mom) Boucher with a truck bomb. Not only did he get off on the charge, on May 16,1997, he managed to become a full-patch member of the Rockers in October 1999. He would later describe his decision to join the Rockers as a part of doing business, devoid of any loyalty to the gang beyond making money as partners.
The Business of Surviving
Becoming an informant seemed to Serge Boutin to be the next logical step in his life because, at that point, the issue was survival. During February 2000, Boutin helped lure Claude De Serres, a man who was working undercover for the Wolverine squad, to a chalet in the Laurentians. De Serres handled marijuana for Boutin. But the Hells Angels learned that he was working for the police after reading a general description of him contained in a confidential document stored in a laptop stolen from the hotel room of an Ontario Provincial Police investigator. Boutin was not the one who would kill De Serres, but he knew who was involved in the murder plot. Months after his fellow gang members were rounded up, Boutin began to feel like a target. So the same survival instincts that had convinced him to join the Rockers were now telling him to leave.
As his testimony would reveal, Boutin was first and foremost a businessman, so his loyalty to the Rockers was as easy to drop as a used tissue. Joining the Rockers was all about money for Boutin, but now there was none to be made, so the smart move was to turn his back on them and become an informant. His first test as a witness was at Boucher’s second trial for the murder of the prison guards, the one that saw the gang leader convicted.
On September 17, 2003, he took the stand in the trial overseen by Judge Beliveau. Prosecutor Madeleine Giauque decided to start off his testimony by letting the jury know Boutin was no angel.
“Why were you arrested on February 16, 2000?” Giauque asked early on in Boutin’s testimony.
“Murder. Murder of an agent source[double agent].”
“And the name of that agent source?”
“Claude De Serres.” Boutin went on to explain how he was behind bars on March 28, 2001, when Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out. He decided to become an informant less than two months later, on May 5, 2001, and by September 27 of that same year, he signed informant contract PB1070. As part of his agreement with the police he managed to plead guilty, on October 22, 2001, to conspiracy to commit murder and manslaughter in De Serres’ death, avoiding the first-degree murder charge he had faced before. Boutin still received a life sentence but would be eligible for day parole by 2004 and full parole by 2007.
Despite the fact that he had been a drug dealer most of his adult life and had sold countless kilos of cocaine for the Hells Angels, he did not have to plead guilty to those charges. When Boutin testified in the Beliveau trial, he talked about selling cocaine the way a proud car salesman might.
By the age of 23, Boutin had become heavily involved in drug trafficking. “I don’t know if I should say whether I was good, not good or extremely good, but let’s say I was in it for ten years and the only case against me is one where they convicted me for selling a gram or two. I never sold a gram in my life. I dealt in kilos. So I think you could say I wasn’t bad,” Boutin boasted. Playing along with Boutin’s braggart manner, Giauque asked if he was able to deal in kilos right from the start. Boutin described his quick ascent up the drug dealer food chain after only six months of dealing on the streets.
“I started out by buying a three-and-a-half ball. Three and a half, that’s three and a half grams. I moved up to seven grams, doubled that to fourteen grams, to 112 [grams], up to the point mathematically where I reached a kilogram.”
Giauque then asked where he got his drugs from early on in his career.
“At that time, when I was 23, there wasn’t a biker war. It was pretty much independent. Everyone knew each other and everybody bought from each other. We bought from whoever had the best price and whoever could supply it,” he said. Boutin went on to explain that almost right away he understood the key to making money dealing in cocaine at the street level was in how carefully you “cut it” or dilute the drug in order to increase the quantity. He considered it his specialty.
“Did you sell it pure?” Giauque asked.
“It depends on the place where it is sold. There are clients where it has to be more pure than with others. If your client is a tavern or an after-hours [bar] then it can be more cut. I started at 23. What placed me in the criminal world was my first after hours [bar]. It was well known.” Boutin said that at the height of his years as a coke dealer, he had about 100 employees working for him, but he only spoke directly to about six or seven close associates. “I think that most of the people knew I was the boss,” he said, adding he had only one true partner before the biker war and that they were buying from Richard Pelletier, a member of the Pelletier Clan. Boutin said he bought cocaine from Pelletier without any major hassles for 18 months.
“[Then] the biker war started,” he said. Giauque asked if the Pelletier Clan was implicated in the biker war.
“Yes. The head, Sylvain Pelletier was killed October 28,1994.”
Boutin’s testimony ended on that note that day. He returned on the next day and Giauque picked up right where she ended, asking if Pelletier’s death had changed things. Boutin said that before the biker war, the Pelletiers had told him they were actually on the Hells Angels’ side. But, Boutin said, Sylvain Pelletier and Maurice Boucher had a serious falling out. Suddenly, everyone was confused about whose side the Pelletiers were on.
Within months of the war starting, Boutin was approached by the Hells Angels and was offered a chance to join their side.
“When you are involved in drugs ...when you start to become a big fish, from the financial perspective in the drug world, there is always a bigger fish who wants to say, ’Hey you’re on my turf,’” Boutin said of his reasons for choosing to join the gang. He said that in 1995, he started buying cocaine from the Rockers through members like Richard (Sugar) Lock and André Chouinard. “After a few months, I became partners with Paul Fontaine who was a guy from the same group,” Boutin said.
Giauque asked Boutin if he and Fontaine did the same job at the time.<
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“No, my qualities were more as a seller of drugs, we call it ’a business guy.’ I was more of the decisional guy when it came to drugs, when it came to my team,” he said. Boutin then went on to explain how Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné had also been part of that team. He described Fontaine as handling the muscle end of it, and he said that if he couldn’t reach agreements with other dealers, Fontaine was sent in to take care of it. He added that some people in the Rockers network were being paid $500 a week just to beat up people. “Let’s say, if you had a problem with a guy who was from a big clique of Italians or someone else, it could degenerate into a big conflict. [Fontaine] would be sent in. Or if it was someone who played with guns. My qualities were more in dealing,” Boutin said. “There was a biker war and we were trying to expand in our neighborhood as much as we could.”
Boutin dealt primarily in the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district, keeping the Hells Angels very happy. He said that between 1995 and 1997, he never sold less than a kilo a week. Impressed with his abilities, the Hells Angels assigned him to be the business end of a team assigned to move the Rock Machine’s drug dealers out of the Gay Village.
But as the expansion was taking hold, Boutin was arrested with several people and charged in the plot to kill Boucher that had taken place more than two years before. The charges against Boutin would not stand up in court, and by now the Hells Angels trusted him. Despite being charged with attempting to kill the Hells Angels’ leader, he was able to conduct business from behind bars through people who visited him.
When Boutin was released four months later, in May 1997,he learned that Fontaine had replaced him with three other people. They were Steve Boies, Danny Decelles and the newcomer Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné. Fontaine proposed that they all become partners. But Boutin said he found the others had left his business in a mess and he was not impressed. “Things were bad from A to Z. When I got out we owed money,” Boutin said. The team assigned to take over the Gay Village was in debt to the tune of $40,000. Boutin said that within a matter of months he was able to turn things around and put the partnership back in the black.
