by Paul Cherry
12
The View From the Other Side
As things slowly sorted out in Operation Springtime 20OI and preparations were made to bring gang members to trial, the prosecution realized they had a unique situation on their hands. Through informants, they could not only provide a detailed image of what life in the Hells Angels’ drug network was like, but they could also show the flip side of the coin — what it was like to be hunted by the Hells Angels. For example, long before the Hells Angels in question were arrested, Peter Paradis, a full-patch member of the Rock Machine had turned on his own underlings and testified against them in a drug trafficking case. Just weeks before Operation Springtime 2OOI was carried out, four of Paradis’ former associates were dinged with some of the first sentences rendered under the antigang legislation the federal government had adopted in 1997. People who had helped move cocaine for Paradis were sentenced to 45 months, and saw an additional 45 tacked on because they did it to support the Rock Machine. During that trial, Paradis was asked to testify about life in the Rock Machine and how the gang profited from drug trafficking. Now he was being asked to focus on what life was like looking over his shoulder, knowing he was the Rock Machine’s principal man in Verdun, turf the Hells Angels wanted as theirs.
Technically, at 12 years, Paradis’ sentence was much stiffer than the people in the Rock Machine he had turned on. But by the time he sat in the witness box at the trial overseen by Jean-Guy Boilard, on July 10, 2002, he had already been out on parole for several weeks. He had benefited from a condition that stipulated he serve his time in a provincial prison, which meant he wasn’t subject to federal sentencing laws. He was out after serving roughly one-sixth of his sentence.
“I was a full-fledged member of the Rock Machine,” Paradis said when Crown prosecutor François Briere asked him about his role in the biker war. “During the period that I was a full-fledged member, the Rock Machine was in a transition. . . . Several people affiliated together were not in a bike club until the end of 1999. We become an official club of a biker gang, hang-arounds in the Bandidos. It’s an international club.” Paradis went on to detail how he had joined the Rock Machine in 1994.Before that, he had spent the better part of the previous decade dealing cocaine as an independent, concentrating mostly on Verdun.
“In practical terms, as an independent drug dealer, what does that mean?” Briere asked.
“It’s someone who is not obliged to anyone. He can work in an organization but . . . it’s difficult to explain. Independent means you don’t belong to anyone. You have the right to buy from where you want, you can take from where you want.” Paradis described his drug dealing in Verdun as being relatively uneventful up until 1994. He had grown up in Verdun and many of the independent drug dealers in the area respected each other’s turf.
“Can you tell us under what circumstances, Mr. Paradis, in 1994, you left your status as an independent and joined the organization, the Rock Machine?” Briere asked.
“I saw an occasion to get a business, near the end of 1993.I was concerned because my business had fallen. I had left Verdun because business had turned quiet. I no longer had interest in doing business seriously.” So, at a time when his future as a drug dealer was looking bleak, Paradis was invited to a meeting in a boutique. There he met Renaud Jomphe, a man who would play a significant role in the Rock Machine. Jomphe gave Paradis his phone number and told him he had a proposition for him. It would be an offer to let Paradis move large amounts of cocaine for Jomphe and the Rock Machine.
After years of struggling to make it in Verdun, Paradis saw Jomphe’s offer as a way to start making serious money. “It gave me a chance to put myself on the map. I was tired of living like I was. Evidently Renaud was a guy who made a lot of money, with the type of life he had, and Ti-Bum [Pierre Beauchamp] as well, evidently. I said, why not me?”
Paradis’ first assignment was to develop a network of clients or small-time dealers who would regularly buy cocaine from him. The issue of loyalty would become more important as the rival gang, the Rockers, made it apparent they were interested in moving into Verdun, even before the biker war started. Paradis said that in 1993 a client of his asked if he had heard that independents were becoming a thing of the past. He said the client suggested Paradis meet Patrick Lock, who was then the president of the Rockers. Paradis said he realized right away he didn’t want anything to do with Lock.
“Did you speak to this guy, Pat?”
“The only thing he said to me, after I told him I didn’t want to hear anything, was ’you’re no longer independent. You have 24 hours to answer me.’ I said I could do better than that, that I could answer him right away and I told him to leave. I closed the door and that was the end of that.”
Lock, the son of Mom Boucher’s friend Richard (Sugar) Lock, would end up spending most of the biker war sitting on the benches. In 1995, he was exposed by Jean Dubé, a man who turned informant after he was arrested in a plot to kill someone on Lock’s orders. Lock was enraged after the police had been tipped off to a stash of drugs, explosives and weapons on 25th Ave. Lock wasn’t arrested right away. He wanted a man named Marcel Picard dead because he figured he was the rat, when, in fact, it was Dubé who was operating as a tipster for the police.
Lock was arrested and sentenced to more than five years in prison. While behind bars, he dealt drugs and collected on debts for other dealers while remaining loyal to the Rockers. The National Parole had to release him in 2000 because he had reached the two-thirds mark of his sentence, his statutory release date. But Lock was arrested only months later for breaking the conditions of the release.
He had been spotted at a bar, giving instructions to other men. As he left the bar, he realized he was being followed by the police and pointed an object that appeared to be a gun at them. When the police searched his car, they didn’t find a gun but did find the business cards of several Rockers, an indication that Lock was back in business. His parole was officially revoked in March 2001, just as his fellow Rockers were being rounded up. However, the parole board was required to release him again the following October.
Lock’s confrontation with Paradis and the fact that he was storing weapons in Lasalle, a Montreal suburb near Verdun, suggested Boucher and the Hells Angels were very interested in expanding to areas west of the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district, even before the war started. By recruiting people like Paradis, the Rock Machine were attempting to stem that expansion.
“It was Renaud [Jomphe] who got us started,” said Paradis. “We started, I think, with a little ounce of coke. Slowly, within about a month it turned into a quarter pound. That is 112 grams of coke. But while the business grew, that meant that the word got out fast, too. Ear-to-mouth goes very, very fast especially on the streets. At the same time, I was doing propaganda for the Rock Machine, because I was doing work for them.”
Paradis said Jomphe was making $100 on every ounce the Rock Machine moved for him. Paradis soon started to see the benefits of working for a large organization. Within months of being in the Rock Machine he was trusted to handle larger quantities of cocaine.
“We had gotten to about a pound, and I didn’t want to drive around with a pound of coke in my car.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want to get arrested with it.”
Paradis said Rock Machine members would drive around almost exclusively in sport-utility vehicles because they had bigger consoles, which they would have customized so they could hide their drugs inside. These custom jobs were sophisticated to the point of being entirely electronic and requiring a code to open. For example, opening the console on Paradis’ vehicle required that it be in neutral and that one fiddle with buttons on the heater. The gang also hid large quantities of drugs in the houses of people they knew who did not have criminal records. Paradis started with a woman who worked in a local hospital. The gang also set about taking control of places like Verdun in the same way the Rockers were doing for the Hells Angels in Hochelag
a Maisonneuve.
“It progressed slowly. Sometimes, for example, the Rock Machine, we’d make the tour of bars to demonstrate that ’it’s us who now sell here.’ But the other side was doing the same thing,” Paradis said.
“And how do you go about going into bars and saying ’It’s us who are going to sell here?’” Briere asked.
“You collect five or six, eight guys. Sometimes a dozen, sometimes less. [We’d put] Rock Machine shirts on their backs and install ourselves in the club. But usually when you go in a club it’s because you know someone there, be it the manager or be it a dancer, a waiter. It could be anybody.”
Paradis was then asked about the origins of the war, and, like other informants before and after him, he said that for him, the starting point was when Sylvain Pelletier was killed in 1994.
“And it was a war that took what type of form? I’m not talking about incidents, but the war took what form on the ground?” Briere asked.
“That isn’t hard,” Paradis responded. “If you worked for one side, you didn’t work for the other. The war came about because of that. From my perspective, the Rock Machine wanted to keep what we had, and the Rockers, the Hells Angels, wanted to take it away.”
“And what you had was?”
“For me it was my territory. But it was the same for all the full-fledged members. Not just in Verdun, but everywhere.”
Briere then asked Paradis if he had ever had to replace people who worked for him.
“One thing that happened right away was Jean-Marc Caissy. He was a runner for me. A guy who delivered drugs and collected money. And he was killed.”
“And what did you do from that moment on? Did you replace him?”
“I was obliged to replace him so that my business would continue to roll.”
“Were there others like Jean-Marc Caissy who you were obliged to replace, in the same circumstances?”
“None come to my memory right now.”
“Besides a death, were there other reasons why you had to replace a runner or a dealer?”
“There were some who changed sides, or simply abandoned it. They didn’t want to be in the middle of it.”
Things changed quickly for Paradis after deciding to sell for the Rock Machine. He was advised to always carry a firearm and he recruited bodyguards to work for him. He told the jury that he always needed to have someone with him when he went outside his home. Two of the men he recruited, Simon (Chiki) Lambert and Éric (Beluga) Leclerc, would later end up being among the people Paradis turned on when he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking and gangsterism.
By May 1994, Paradis had proven himself as a drug dealer to the Rock Machine and was officially made a hangaround in the gang, a move that proved they had adopted the same hierarchy system as the Hells Angels. He was also given an Alliance ring — an A surrounded by diamonds. “The Alliance was formed just before I arrived, I think, or around the time I arrived. When they gave me the Alliance ring they said, ’Take this, you are a part of the Alliance.’ But they said at the same time that I was also a hangaround.”
Paradis said the ring was handed to him at a restaurant during a meeting with other gang members. He said it came as a surprise and that it was Jomphe who had given him the promotion. It meant Paradis had access to Rock Machine meetings where they made key decisions in their turf war.
“Now, Mr. Paradis, within the frame of what you call the war, were you personally the victim of an attack?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell the members of the jury, this is during what time, what date?”
“The month of August. August 10,1998.”
“On August 10, 1998, what was your status in the Rock Machine?”
“Full-fledged member.”
Paradis went on to say that at that point in the war he was aware that the Rockers had recruited well-known drug dealers like Bruno Lefebvre and Pierre Provencher to take control of Verdun. Paradis said he was accompanied by his bodyguard Daniel (Poutine) Leclerc that day and both were prepared for trouble. The pair had only made a trip to the butcher shop, but Paradis was wearing a bulletproof vest anyway. “Guys were falling from one side to the other. It was in my interest to have one on my back,” Paradis said, but quickly added that as he started to near his home he felt safer and removed the vest.
He then noticed a car was following them and he told Leclerc to get a gun ready. Paradis watched as the black Toyota Corolla he had been keeping an eye on pulled up next to his GMC Jimmy. They were both now stopped at a red light. The passenger side window began to open and someone opened fire on Paradis’ vehicle. His window shattered and he felt something strike his chest.
Paradis was struck four times in all but, he told the jury, he recalled keeping his foot on the brake of his Jimmy because before the shooting started he had noticed women and children crossing the intersection. The incident put Paradis in the hospital for eight days.
Paradis said he figured everyone in Verdun in the drug milieu knew what his vehicle looked like, so it was not hard for the Hells Angels to line him up as a target. By that point the Rock Machine had basically abandoned Verdun because of the war and had they left him on his own to defend it. Jomphe, his mentor and the Rock Machine’s key man in Verdun, was killed on October 18, 1996, along with another member of the Alliance. They had been shot while dining at a Chinese restaurant in Verdun.
“When Renaud was killed it really touched at the morale, it really messed up the Rock Machine, and this is not my personal opinion, this is how it was. There was no one left. The full-fledged members said, ’Look, Verdun, we’ll leave it to you.’ There was no one else to take it over. It is not up to a prospect to take over the job of a full-patch member, when there are 10 or 12 full-patch members who can do it. It was their job to do it. They didn’t do it. I think they had their reasons.”
The police would later learn, through Hells Angels’ informant Dany Kane, that the hit on Jomphe was likely carried out by three Hells Angels’ underlings in the Evil Ones biker gang, all of whom would eventually become full-patch members of the Montreal and South chapters. Kane’s claim was supported by another source who said one of the three men named by Kane had bought black jogging pants and a black T-shirt before Jomphe’s murder. The man who survived the hit in the Chinese restaurant, Raymond Lareau, told the police that the shooter was dressed in black.
Jomphe was apparently not afraid of the Hells Angels. When 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers was killed in the botched bombing in 1995, Jomphe went public and told the Journal de Montréal that the Rock Machine had nothing to do with it. He publicly blamed the Hells Angels, calling them “real hoods.”
During the trial, Paradis was asked by Crown prosecutor François Briere to describe how the Rock Machine approached the war, in Verdun particularly.
“We had teams,” Paradis said. “Some were made for killing, some were made for burning, another was for placing dynamite, others were to go into selling points that belonged, not necessarily to the Rockers, but everything that belonged to the Hells Angels.”
One of Paradis’ targets was the Champlain Bar in Ville-Émard. He admitted to blowing it up because he believed that a Rock Machine associate had double-crossed the gang and set up Jomphe for the hit in the Chinese restaurant.
“I had information from the street and I had information personally that [the turncoat] was holding meetings with Mom Boucher on the second floor of the Champlain Bar,” Paradis said.
“After getting that information what did you do?” Briere asked. Paradis said he felt he needed permission from the Dubois family to blow up the bar. He said another member of the Rock Machine got the blessing through Alain Dubois, who was not yet a member of the Rockers. Paradis said he also tried to blow up an Italian restaurant where, he had heard, the Rockers held regular meetings, but the dynamite didn’t go off. It was right across the street from a private club owned by Pierre Beauchamp, one of the Hells Angels’ early victims in the biker war.
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Paradis’ next assignment was to blow up another bar. “It was in Robert Leger’s neighborhood. He said the Italians there had connections, and that the Rockers wanted the club, and the Italians didn’t want to be associated with anyone. So Robert Leger asked me if I could do anything about it. So I blew it up, too.”
Paradis told the jury how he also blew up a bar on Saint-Laurent Blvd. because the Rock Machine believed it was controlled by Normand (Biff) Hamel and Denis Houle, both members of the Nomads chapter. Paradis said this was done on the orders of André (Frisé) Sauvageau, a Rock Machine member who had long been targeted by the Hells Angels. An informant once told the police that Maurice Boucher and Scott Steinert had once chased Sauvageau down a stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through Montreal. They had to give up the chase after spotting a Sûreté du Québec patrol car.
When Paradis discovered that a tanning salon in Verdun belonged to the man he believed had sold out Jomphe, he decided to not to blow it up but to burn it down.
“It was in a neighborhood that I knew well. There was a lady who lived above it. So I said it should be burned, not blown up. To use a Molotov cocktail,” he said at trial. Briere showed Paradis a photo album that had been seized at Richard (Dick) Mayrand’s house. The photo album contained the photos of practically anyone associated with the Alliance. While going over the photos, Paradis noted that some people who gravitated to the Rock Machine were basically flakes who appeared to only be interested in the violence of the war.
“What was the war to you? Why were you involved?” Briere asked.
“That’s a good question. But at the beginning . . .”
“What was the goal of being implicated in a war as a [member of the] Rock Machine?”
“What happened was . . . it was more or less like . . . well, how can I explain it? It started by selling to make money. And then we were obliged to protect ourselves. It took several steps. You’re protecting yourself, and then you involve yourself more.”
