by Paul Cherry
“At the beginning of what you call the war, Mr. Paradis, what territory were you defending?”
“Verdun,” Paradis said, adding that by the time of the arrest that led to him becoming an informant the Rock Machine no longer controlled the turf.
“Who owned it, then?”
“It wasn’t us, so it had to be the other side.”
Peter Paradis’ younger brother Robert was also a target in the biker war. The two had been close growing up, and Robert followed Peter into the Rock Machine. Someone had made an attempt on Robert’s life in 1999 but failed. Remarkably, despite having a brother who turned informant, Robert Paradis was made a full-patch member of the Bandidos biker gang in 2001.
In 2OO2, he was rounded up, along with several other Bandidos. But he ended up with one of the lighter sentences of the investigation, two years and fours months for conspiracy to traffick and illegal possession of a .45-calibre firearm. He was denied both day and full parole during the spring of 2004 because he remained loyal to the biker gang.
Patrick Henault
Another witness to give a view from the other side of the war was Patrick Henault. Like Paradis, Henault had become disillusioned with the Bandidos and the people who he’d known previously through the Alliance. In 1998, at the age of 20, Henault was already a member of the Palmers and serving a two-year sentence for drug trafficking and possession of an unregistered firearm. Once, while he was preparing for a parole hearing, he told a corrections official, “I’ll be killed if I’m placed in a halfway house here [in Montreal].” As they continued to deny him parole during his sentence, the National Parole Board commissioners who heard his case noted they were getting reports that Henault seemed very intelligent and was a crafty manipulator.
A drug-sniffing dog became excited when a woman showed up to visit Henault in December 1998. She refused to be searched, which added to the guards’ suspicions that Henault was dealing drugs behind bars. A search of his cell turned up contraband tobacco which Henault claimed to have collected for a hockey pool he’d started. He also appeared to be very familiar with firearms, something Henault attributed to being an Air Cadet when he was an adolescent.
Like Paradis, his decision to turn informant came after being arrested. In Henault’s case the decision was made in June 2002 after the police arrested practically anyone tied to the Bandidos’ Montreal chapter who wasn’t already behind bars. The investigation was dubbed “Operation Amigo.”
While awaiting trial, Henault became increasingly worried about how his case was going to play out in the courts. He wanted to get his case over with quickly because the police had videotape evidence of him preparing for a hit on Steven (Bull) Bertrand, Boucher’s close friend and a high-volume drug dealer tied to the Hells Angels. Henault decided to turn on the Bandidos. He eventually pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, attempted murder and conspiring to burn down several bars where dealers friendly with the Hells Angels were selling.
Henault signed his informant deal on October 8, 2003, and only a few months later, on January 12, 2004, found himself testifying in the Beliveau trial.
“The fact that I decided to become an informant was because I was fed up with the life I was living. There was pressure from the co-accused who . . . for me, I wanted to settle things. I was fed up. I wanted to transfer to another prison, do my time and not know anything more of bikers. It wasn’t part of my image, and I had the pressure from other co-accused to not plead guilty so it would cause delays in the eventual trial of the Bandidos,” Henault told the jury. He also said he was not impressed with his lawyer, with while other Bandidos were taking on well-known attorneys. Also, seeing other Bandidos defect and join the Hells Angels had left Henault questioning the gang’s worthiness. He had had enough of the life of a gangster.
As the Crown had done with other informant witnesses, Briere asked Henault early on in his testimony about how he got involved in drug trafficking.
“The first time was in 1992. I was 18 years old. It was inside a little bar. I was arrested immediately. I’d say within eight days. It was my first experience. After that, in 1993, I was approached by an independent named Stéphane Deslauriers to sell for him in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, to sell on the streets with a pager. It was from there that I starting selling drugs, around the beginning of 1993.” Briere asked Henault what he meant by the term “independent.”
“A person who is independent is a person who is not obliged to buy their drugs from someone, be it a biker gang or another criminal organization. So the person buys where they want and sells where they want.”
“So at that point you were working for this person Deslauriers?”
“Yes. I worked from 1993 until the start of 1995,” Henault said, adding he sold drugs all over the east end of Montreal, including in Rosemont and Hochelaga Maisonneuve. The prosecutor asked him when he had started to make contacts with organized criminals.
“My first contact was during the summer of 1994. I’m not sure when exactly but I’m certain it was the summer. I got a call from someone who wanted to meet in a little club, the White Elephant, on Ontario [Street] at the corner of Amherst. I went there during the afternoon. I asked the barman, who paged me. He said to go downstairs. I went downstairs and there was a group of people there. To my memory there were at least five. Two of those people, who I got to know later, were Paul Fontaine and a guy named D. J. Labonte, asked me to step outside. I went outside with them and they gave me the message that they wanted to talk to my boss, who was Stéphane Deslauriers. They wanted to meet him.” Henault said he passed on the message but he didn’t know if Deslauriers actually called Fontaine.
Henault said he cashed out of Deslauriers’ operation in 1995 and started selling drugs out of a bar for a few months. He said he was selling “indirectly for André Desormeaux and Franco Fondacaro.” He also said he knew at the time that they belonged to the Palmers, a gang that was part of the Alliance. Desormeaux had served time for plotting to kill members of the Hells Angels during the mid-1990s. Henault said he’d worked out of the bar until September 1995, when two Molotov cocktails were tossed into the bar. No one was injured but the message had been sent.
“Around September, when I started working directly for Franco Fondacaro and André Desormeaux, I met, at the Brasserie St. Michel, I met . . . it was a guy named Fritz [the nickname of Dark Circle member Jean Jacques Roy]. I forget his first name. And I met Louis Jacques Deschenes, they were members of the Dark Circle.”
Then one of the more bizarre events in the biker war led to Henault meeting several more people tied to the Alliance.
At around 1 a.m. on September 21,1995, four men with ties to the Rock Machine rode in a van to a fortified clubhouse in Saint Luc, a small town several kilometres south of Montreal. The clubhouse belonged to the Jokers, a Hells Angels’ puppet gang. Three of them got out of the van and headed for the clubhouse on foot, carrying a very powerful bomb. A 24-year-old man named Stéphane Doucet was guarding the bunker when he noticed the trio. Doucet would later tell the police he fired a single shot from a shotgun towards them, figuring they were Rock Machine members on their way to kill him. The shotgun blast set off the bomb that the three men were planning to plant next to the bunker. Benoit Grignon, 28, Daniel Paul, 26, and Pierre Patry, 27, were killed instantly by the huge blast. The driver of the van, Brett Simmons, was severely injured. Doucet managed to escape prosecution when a prosecutor determined he was acting in self defence.
Simmons was not so lucky. He ended up being charged while still in his hospital bed. The resident of Kingston, Ontario, spent weeks recovering in a hospital, then had to undergo six months of physiotherapy. At that point, he had been a prospect in the Rock Machine, having been introduced to the gang while working as a bouncer at a bar. He was sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in the botched bomb plot. Simmons was eventually released after serving two-thirds of his sentence but was soon hauled back to a penitentiary in Ontario during the spring of 2002, after h
e was spotted hanging out with biker gang members while out on parole. He wound up defecting to the Hells Angels, joining a chapter in Ontario.
Henault attended the funeral for the three men who died in the blast. It was there, he said, that he started to make several connections with people in the Alliance. Shortly afterward he was fronted some money, which to him meant he was considered a prospect in the Palmers.
Briere was asked what his functions were.
“At the base, my functions were to do errands and be a bodyguard.”
“For who?”
“For Fondacaro and André Desormeaux.”
Henault did this for about 30 days, until Fondacaro was arrested late in 1995 as a suspect in the failed attempt to kill members of the Hells Angels while they were in a federal penitentiary in Laval. Desormeaux went into hiding and asked Henault to look after his pregnant wife. Fondacaro was arrested at a Montreal restaurant. Desormeaux’s wife had the baby in December while the Dark Circle member was hiding out in a chalet the Alliance was renting up north. Desormeaux was eventually arrested, and quickly pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill members of the Hells Angels.
By January 29,1998, he had served two-thirds of his sentence and was released to live at a halfway house. But he never showed up and was arrested six months later in possession of a firearm. He later told the parole board that he didn’t think a halfway house was safe enough for him because he knew he was a walking target. Desormeaux was returned to a federal penitentiary where he was suspected of dealing drugs to other inmates.
Desormeaux was Henault’s boss, and as a result, Henault frequently had to work as his bodyguard. When Henault pulled off armed robberies, he was also required to give Desormeaux a percentage of the take.
During that same period in the war, Henault was asked to carry out a variety of tasks for the Alliance. He said he and a man named Jean-François Cyr set up a phony bomb scare at a workout club that belonged to Steven (Bull) Bertrand. Cyr had placed a fake plate on a car in the parking lot and Henault placed the phony call. At another point late in the war, Henault was asked to torch a bar in Montreal’s east end. For this, Henault hired out two people, including François Barbeau, who was arrested shortly afterwards. Barbeau was sentenced to six years for tossing a Molotov cocktail into the bar while there were still about fifteen people inside. These six years were tacked on to the federal sentence Barbeau had earned before he tried to torch the bar. Barbeau’s previous sentence began in the mid-1990s, 40 months for armed robbery. While out on parole for that sentence, he’d tried to help the Rock Machine spring their explosives expert, Roger Hardy, from the Donnacona maximum-security penitentiary near Quebec City.
Hardy was serving a 32-year sentence that began in 1977 and grew every time he was released on parole. For example, he’d had 14 years added to his existing sentence in 1990 for a series of armed robberies committed shortly after being released. Besides being considered an expert on explosives, Hardy was known to be a master locksmith, and had tried to use his expertise to break out of penitentiaries several times. He is one of a small percentage of inmates who remain behind bars despite having served two-thirds of their sentence.
On March 10, 2005, the National Parole Board decided to make Hardy ineligible for parole. The panel of three commissioners had a hard time looking past several incidents, including the fact Hardy had threatened to kill two prison guards. Just a year earlier, Hardy had told the parole board that his plan, if released, was to either sell drugs or guns. The Rock Machine planned to use the Donnacona’s sewer system to free Hardy and at least two other men. The plan was foiled when the Sûreté du Québec, investigating a report that drugs were being smuggled into Donnacona, discovered a manhole cover had been loosened in preparation for the escape attempt. Barbeau had an additional 23 months tacked on to his sentence for that offence.
In February 2005, after turning down his previous attempts at parole, the board had no choice but to release Barbeau for having served two-thirds of what by then amounted to an 11-year sentence. Barbeau was granted the statutory release because he had not been out on parole since the Molotov cocktail arson attempt had been tacked on to his existing sentence. For a variety of reasons, including the fact he appeared to be addicted to heroin, Barbeau was required to stay at a halfway house for the remainder of his sentence, and to take part in a program to deal with his drug problem. By then, Barbeau had severed his ties with his gang, which had become the Bandidos.
“I’m not in nothing and I don’t want to be in nothing,” Barbeau told corrections officials as they were trying to determine where to place him. He told corrections officials at the time that the gang had treated him like a puppet, something he could not tolerate, so he’d quit. But, according to a parole board report, Barbeau continued to sell drugs while behind bars. His drug dealing started a chain reaction in a federal penitentiary that, by 2003, saw the end of segregation between inmates loyal to either the Hells Angels and Bandidos in Quebec’s federal institutions, a clear sign that the war was over.
Henault said that in 1997, he’d carried out a contract given to him by Michel Bertrand, a member of the Palmers. The order was to burn down a tanning salon they believed belonged to the Hells Angels. Henault said Bertrand also gave him the contract to burn down a greasy spoon on Pie IX Blvd. that was tied to the Hells Angels. The jobs gained Henault more respect in the gang and he was soon welcomed into places like the Rock Machine hangout on Lesage Street and the gang’s bunker on Huron Street where he started hanging out with Rock Machine members like Yves Murray. This turned Henault into an instant target for the Hells Angels.
“At one point, myself, Yves Murray and Michel Bertrand, who was at the time my boss, we left to go, I can’t remember why, to the west [section of Montreal]. We took Ontario Street heading west, and we got to Fullum when Michel Bertrand noticed a car parked in a parking lot and there was someone inside it.” Henault said they pulled up to the car and Murray and Bertrand easily recognized the people inside, but he didn’t. The vehicle started to follow them. He said he looked back and noticed the windows were open and that the person in the passenger side appeared to be armed.
Henault said Bertrand pressed a button and a hiding place below the dashboard of his vehicle opened up. Inside was a firearm. They drove around, making several turns until they were sure the car was following them. There were three people inside the other vehicle. Bertrand then noticed he was running out of gas and Henault said he was ordered to shoot at the car behind them.
“I lowered the window. I was seated in the back. I took out the gun and fired four times in the direction of the vehicle. I noticed that two hit the ground. I don’t know where the other two went. The vehicle stopped. I got down, and then I looked and I saw the passenger take out a revolver and fire towards us once.”
Bertrand managed to hide his vehicle in a lane between a Canadian Tire and a rotisserie restaurant, and the chase was over. Henault told a jury he later learned the guys who tried to kill him were Pierre Toupin and Kenny Bedard. But it was not the only time Henault would see gunplay during the biker war. Henault said that he and Yves Murray were once driving around in Montreal’s Point St. Charles district when Murray noticed a red pickup truck. Murray turned to Henault, said he had spotted Jean-Marie Fontaine, a relative of Paul Fontaine, inside the truck, and then pulled out his gun.
“He lowered his window and called out to Jean-Marie Fontaine. Jean-Marie Fontaine opened his vehicle and placed his hands on the side of the window and said he wanted to talk to Yves Murray. But Murray didn’t want to hear it. Murray said, ’How’s it going you gros chien[a slang term in French, roughly meaning fat lazy dog]?’”
Henault said he then told Murray to shoot Fontaine. Murray fired one bullet, but by then Fontaine had ducked inside the pickup. He then sped off.
Confrontations weren’t limited to Montreal’s rougher areas either, Henault said. He recalled how he, Luc Beaupré and Michel Bertrand went to the Montreal courthouse
to watch court proceedings in the case involving Yvon (Mon Mon) Roy and Gilles Lambert, charged in a plot to have Maurice (Mom) Boucher killed. Henault said that when he and his fellow gangsters walked into the courtroom, they noticed that members of the Rockers were already there.
“To my memory, Paul Fontaine was seated in the first chair from the aisle. Next to him was Stéphane Gagné and the third person. Michel Bertrand was sitting directly behind [Fontaine]. I was directly behind Stéphane Gagné, and we saw Paul Fontaine shake his head. He sensed that we were looking at him so he turned. Michel Bertrand said, ’Hi, how’s it going?’ Just to be specific, Michel Bertrand was accused of conspiring to murder Paul Fontaine in 1995. Fontaine smiled and said, ’Yeah, it’s going all right.’”
Henault said Fontaine suddenly got up to leave, and he and Bertrand followed him. Fontaine headed for a pay phone. Bertrand assumed Fontaine was calling for reinforcements in case things got out of hand, and told Henault to call the Rock Machine’s bunker to do the same. A few other Rock Machine members, including Stéphane Morgan, showed up quickly, but by then the court hearing the case had adjourned and they found Fontaine in a courthouse corridor talking to lawyer Gilles Daudelin.
“So the game plan had changed. Luc Beaupré looked at me as if to say, ’What do I do?’ I said, ’Go ahead,’” Henault told the jury. Beaupré approached Fontaine and threw a punch, but missed and struck the lawyer instead. That’s when an all-out brawl broke out. Henault said he jumped on Gagné’s back. A huge guy who was with Fontaine and Gagné at the time picked up a granite ashtray and threw it at Beaupré and the others, effectively putting an end to the fight.
Henault revealed that he was also asked to do a lot more than use his fists. He talked about how, during the summer of 1998, he and André Desormeaux were driving in Old Montreal when the latter spotted André Chouinard’s Jeep Cherokee. They followed him to a parking lot. Desormeaux then put together a plan in which they would go to an apartment and get prepared for a hit on Chouinard. They also called a man named Yvan Nadeau, someone the gang counted on to supply getaway cars.
