Biker Trials, The

by Paul Cherry

  Beliveau also let his opinion be known about how some of the defense lawyers behaved during the trial. When it came to factoring in the time eight of the nine accused had already spent behind bars awaiting the outcome of their case, Beliveau could not look past the irritating delays caused by some of the defense lawyers, calling their refusal to admit certain evidence nothing but a stall tactic. He estimated that without the useless delays, the trial would have lasted about six months, half as long as it actually did. He also pointed out that during the English-language trial of Donald Stockford and Walter Stadnick, which had just begun at that point, the lawyers involved had agreed to submit 213 admissions which took prosecutor Randall Richmond just four days, and several sips of water, to read before Justice Jerry Zigman.

  In Sebastien Beauchamp’s case, Beliveau sentenced the Rocker to eight years for his conviction on the drug trafficking charge, and another five to be served consecutively for participating in the activities of a gang.

  In Luc Bordeleau’s case, Beliveau noted his lengthy criminal record and association with the Hells Angels, right up to the point where he became a prospect in the Nomads chapter. The judge sentenced him to 10 years for conspiracy to murder, 10 years to be served concurrently for drug trafficking and another 10 to be served consecutively for participating in the activities of a gang.

  Alain Dubois received only a two-year sentence for conspiring to murder rival gang members but also an eight-year sentence to be served concurrently for drug trafficking. He was also sentenced to two years to be served consecutively for participating in gang activities. Beliveau did not require that Dubois serve at least half of his sentence.

  In Richard Mayrand’s case, Beliveau took note of the fact he had been a member of the Hells Angels for years. He was sentenced to 10 years for conspiracy to murder, another 10 to be served concurrently for drug trafficking and 12 years to be served consecutively for participating in gang activities. With time served factored in, he would be required to serve 16 years and 9 months, and do at least half of it behind bars.

  Beliveau felt that if anyone in the bunch had a chance at rehabilitation it was Paulin. He was sentenced to seven years for conspiracy to commit murder, seven to be served concurrently for drug trafficking and five years to be served consecutively for participating in the activities of a gang. With time served factored in, he had to serve six years and nine months, with the obligation of having to serve two and a half years before being eligible for parole.

  While Beliveau’s tough stance towards the defense was applauded by some, the Quebec Court of Appeal did not agree with him. In June 2005, more than a year after the sentences were rendered, the appeal court reduced Beauchamp’s and Dubois’ sentences by nine months each.

  In the summary of the judgement Justice Francois Doyon wrote that Beliveau “went too far” in lumping together the eight lawyers as a whole. Beauchamp’s lawyer Lucie Joncas in particular had not taken part in the aggressive tactics the others employed. Joncas has fought a clean fight and therefore her client did not deserve to be punished.

  The appeal court also determined there was no proof that the bikers knew their lawyers were going to act in an unacceptable manner.

  Conclusion

  Patrick Turcotte was by no means an important player in the biker gang war. He was a street-level drug dealer trying to do business for the Rock Machine in Verdun, a part of the Montreal Island the gang had for the most part given up on by the time Turcotte was gunned down by Pierre (Peanut) Laurin and Paul Brisebois, two members of the Rockers eager to prove themselves to the Nomads chapter. Turcotte did not have the criminal influence of a Renaud Jomphe or even Peter Paradis, two men who paid dearly for trying to prevent the Hells Angels from taking over Verdun. But details of Turcotte’s death will remain with me for a long while for a few reasons.

  On May 1, 2000, I went out to cover the murder for The Gazette late in the afternoon, grumbling to myself about how inconveniently the assignment came late in my shift, coupled with the dark clouds in the sky threatening rain. By then, things had become so predictable in the biker war that I had suggested to the assigned photographer that he drive around the blocks of Verdun that surrounded the murder scene to look out for any flaming vehicles.

  Within minutes, the photographer found the smoldering minivan used in the slaying. It had been doused with an accelerant and torched. A flaming minivan had essentially become a signature for the Hells Angels’ hits, like marking a Z for Zorro.

  Claiming to know the motive behind a murder before even knowing the identity of the victim might sound like a boast, but it isn’t. I refer to Turcotte’s murder sometimes when attempting to describe the overall mood in Quebec towards the biker war on the day he was killed. The war had been dragging on for six years at that point. Drug dealers were being murdered in broad daylight on residential streets.

  Within an hour of arriving at the scene, a police source was able to confirm that Turcotte was dealing drugs for the Rock Machine and tell me who he was friendly with in the gang. The police who were investigating the biker clearly had good intelligence information.

  But what struck me most was how the residents of that Verdun neighborhood reacted to the brutally violent slaying that had just played itself out on their streets. As I stayed on the scene and the afternoon turned to early evening, I walked into a nearby restaurant just outside the investigation’s yellow police-tape perimeter. I tried to chat up some people as they munched away on poutine and hot dogs, but they had little to say. Despite the fact a murder had just taken place a few hours earlier on their street, the greasy spoon was packed with diners, some of whom made jokes, saying things like, “No one is going to miss him.”

  Those closest to the restaurant’s window could, for their dining pleasure, watch Turcotte’s blood trickle into a nearby sewer as the rain began to fall and wash it away. Lying next to the red puddle was Turcotte’s pager, the standard tool of the drug trafficking trade. The blood and the pager sitting next to each other on the Verdun pavement while blocks away a minivan smoldered told the story of what had just happened. The average Montrealer could have seen the images on television that night with the sound off and correctly concluded the news item was about a Hells Angels’ hit.

  As I rode away from the murder scene in a taxi, the blasé mood in that restaurant disturbed me the more I thought about it. Parts of Verdun have always been rough, but people bringing their children into a restaurant to munch on fries within view of homicide detectives looking for things like discarded firearms was unsettling. Montrealers had become so used to the biker war they were numb to it.

  Perhaps that is because Montreal’s underworld history is so steeped in violence. To some, the biker gang war likely seemed to be a mere continuation of decades worth of murderous violence in the city.

  When Alain Dubois decided to join the Rockers, his father Jean-Guy must have thought back to the 1970 s when his gang was engaged in a war that featured remarkable similarities to the current biker war. In that conflict, the leaders, who were fighting over southwest parts of Montreal, had also known each other for years before greed took over and hell broke loose. And just like in the biker war, the conflict between the Dubois brothers and a rival gang was, according to some who were involved, touched off when the Dubois brothers killed a drug dealer who refused to buy from them. Also, at least three of the Hells Angels who were founding members of the Nomads chapter joined the gang during the early 1980s, during or just after the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter had forced the Outlaws, a rival gang that arrived in Quebec in 1977, out of the province entirely in a war that featured the same extreme violence, bombings and murders as the Nomads chapter’s war with the Alliance did.

  One of the clearest signs the war was over came when inmates from both the Bandidos and the Hells Angels requested in 2003 that they no longer be segregated from each other at the Donnacona penitentiary near Quebec City. In the years since Operation Springtime 2OO1, only a handful of homic
ides in Montreal appeared to be tied to biker gang activity. With all of the convictions produced by the Project Rush investigation, the Nomads chapter was “frozen,” a term used when a chapter cannot meet the minimum requirements of having six full-patch members who are not behind bars. Most of the members of the Quebec-based Nomads chapter are now part of what the Hells Angels call the Big House Crew, a reference to incarcerated members. All Hells Angels who are behind bars receive a newsletter, informing them of where they can correspond with other jailed gang members.

  But the Hells Angels, in Canada especially, have a history of not tolerating competition for long. It is something worth considering as the chapters set up in Ontario by the Quebec-based Hells Angels continue to grow.

  After refusing to open a chapter in Ontario for decades, the Hells Angels in Quebec suddenly opened the floodgates in 2000 and set up shop all over the province. According to a 2002 estimate, there were 178 members of the Hells Angels in Ontario, with another 66 waiting in the wings at either the prospect or hang-around level. The members are required to communicate with each other through encrypted email. The Angels’ influence is apparently spreading, as the gang set up a new chapter in Hamilton in 2005 and were rumored to be creating more. Evidence has also been presented in court indicating that Hells Angels’ members based in Ontario were considering setting up a chapter in New Brunswick.

  Quebec’s influence over the Ontario chapters is very evident. Several of the members of the Nomads chapter in Ontario were participants on either side of Quebec’s biker war. Brett Simmons, the same person who was injured as a getaway driver when the Rock Machine tried to blow up the bunker of a Hells Angels’ affiliate club in 1995, was arrested ten years later, in June 2005,on charges that, as a member of Hells Angels in Ontario, he was part of a large-scale drug trafficking ring.

  An accidental shooting in North York in April 2004 that left a mother of three paralyzed is a further sign the Hells Angels in Ontario are following the model of the men who brought them into the fold, a collection of some of the worst criminals Canada has ever seen. The charges laid in the shooting indicate two things that bear a striking resemblance to how the Nomads chapter operated in Quebec. One is that they have close ties to other powerful organized crime groups, like the Mafia, and the other is that they are just as reckless as they were in Quebec.

  But there is also evidence the Ontario chapters have developed a policy of pursuing other means before settling their problems with violence. The presidents of the Ontario chapters are believed to have gone over this policy at a meeting held in 2002.

  Cracks are even beginning to show in the quiet-on-the-surface Sherbrooke chapter, considered one of the biggest (in terms of membership) and richest chapters in all of Canada. The mega-trials in Quebec provided evidence that the Sherbrooke chapter tried its best to stay autonomous from Maurice (Mom) Boucher and his monopolistic plans. For the most part, the Sherbrooke chapter kept a low profile during Quebec’s biker war. But at least two of its members are under investigation for allegedly laundering millions of dollars and cheating provinces of even more money through the sale of cars.

  During the spring of 2005, RCMP investigators spread out in various parts of the Eastern Townships and elsewhere in Quebec searching businesses the chapter’s members had acquired over the years. The RCMP investigation started in London, Ontario, where one of the two Sherbrooke members who were being investigated set up a prospect chapter in 2001.

  There are also signs that people won’t forget that the Hells Angels in Ontario grew out of Quebec’s violent biker war. In March 2005, a prosecutor in Barrie, Ontario, played a police videotape of the December 2000 patch-over ceremony in Sorel as he made his closing arguments in an extortion trial involving two Ontario Hells Angels based in Woodbridge. The prosecutor said he did it to prove the pair were part of a large criminal organization, and not just a couple of “motorcycle-riding enthusiasts,” as the Ontario chapters would like the general public to believe.

  The trial produced a precedent-setting judgement when, on June 30, 2005, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michele Fuerst determined the Hells Angels to be a criminal organization in Canada. Steven (Tiger) Lindsay, a man who had the words “Hells Angels” tattooed on his chest, and Ray Bonner were found guilty of extortion and committing a crime “in association with” a criminal organization, part of federal anti-gang legislation that allows gang members to be sentenced to an additional 14 years for their crimes. In that case, an expert on organized crime testified that the key test of a criminal organization is its ability to exist beyond the control of one leader.

  The Hells Angels have grown worldwide from three chapters in California in 1957 to 227 chapters, with more than 2,500 members, in 29 countries. That includes 118 members in Quebec.

  Guy Ouellette, the retired Sûreté du Québec sergeant, testified during the Barrie trial as well, revealing that members of the South, Trois Rivières and Sherbrooke chapters picked up the pieces in Montreal’s lucrative drug trade after the Nomads chapter in Montreal was shut down in 2001. Fuerst wrote in her judgement: “It simply defies common sense that a group so deeply involved in crime in Quebec would have any interest in establishing benign counterparts in a neighboring province. It makes little sense that its primary ambassadors would be prolific drug traffickers, if the purpose of expansion was benign. It makes even less sense that if it were expanding for benign reasons, it would choose to do so by assimilating long-established outlaw motorcycle clubs, contrary to its usual cautious approach to acquiring new members. It does make every sense that, at a time when it was under pressure because of events in Quebec, it would expand to strengthen its drug trafficking networks and attempt to shut out its competitor.”

  Hopefully, no one in Ontario is buying the argument the Hells Angels are simply riding enthusiasts.

  Cast of Characters

  Sebastien (Bass) Beauchamp—Joined the Rockers as a striker on March 26,1999, and became a full-patch member on October 16, 2OOO. He was convicted of drug trafficking and gangsterism but dodged a bullet when a jury also acquitted him of conspiring to murder rival gang members. He was sentenced to serve seven years and nine months beginning from the day he was sentenced, April 8, 2004.The Quebec Court of Appeal later reduced the sentence to seven years.

  Normand (Pluch) Bélanger—A close friend of Maurice (Mom) Boucher. He was considered an important player in the Hells Angels’ expansion into the ecstasy market. He joined the Rockers on March 26, i998.He became a prospect in the Nomads chapter on October 5, 2000. He was excused from one of the Hells Angels’ megatrials because he suffered from cirrhosis caused by hepatitis B, diabetes, hypertension and the after-effects of two heart attacks and was too ill to assist his lawyer. When he was arrested a second time in a loansharking case brought against him and other Hells Angels in February 2004, he had to appear in court in a wheelchair. He died in May 2004.

  Luc (Bordel) Bordeleau — A founding member of the Rockers when the gang was created by Boucher on March 26, 1992. Served a five-year term for the Hells Angels after he was caught scuba diving while looking for a large quantity of cocaine gang members had to toss overboard during the early 1990s. He had close ties to Boucher and lived near his compound. He was made a prospect in the Nomads chapter on its fifth anniversary. When the police searched his house in 2001 they found a grenade launcher among a collection of other weapons. He was convicted in the only Project Rush-related trial to go before a jury. With the time he served awaiting the outcome of his case counting as double, he was sentenced to serve more than 14 years starting from April 8, 2004, his sentencing date. He has to serve at least half that behind bars before he can apply for parole.

  Françis (Le Fils) Boucher — The son of Hells Angels’ leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher. He was made a member of the Rockers on March 26,1999. On November 18,2002, he pleaded guilty to his role in the biker war and was sentenced to serve a 10-year sentence from that date. He is required to serve at least half his sentence be
fore he can apply for parole.

  Maurice (Mom) Boucher — Became a Hells Angel on May 1,1987. Created a gang of thugs and drug dealers called the Rockers in 1992. Split off from the Montreal chapter and formed his own elite Nomads chapter which was chartered on June 24, 1995. Many informants describe him as the leader behind the Nomads during the biker war and the person who started the conflict. Sentenced to life in prison on two first-degree murder convictions and an attempted murder conviction after he ordered the Rockers to kill prison guards in an effort to destabilize the justice system. He has appealed the verdicts.

  Jean-Guy Bourgoin — A founding member of the Rockers. He remained with the underling gang throughout the biker war and was still a member when he was arrested in 2001. On September 23, 2003,he and a group of fellow Rockers and Hells Angels ended their megatrial by agreeing to a plea bargain that saw first-degree murder charges dropped. Bourgoin was sentenced to 15 years. With time served factored in, he had only 10 years left on the sentence from the day he pleaded guilty.

  Serge (Pacha) Boutin — Started out the biker war as a drug dealer for a group called the Alliance which opposed the Hells Angels. Joined the Rockers on October 12, 1999, and decided to turn informant after being charged with helping to kill an informant and several other criminal accusations. He was sentenced to life for the murder of the informant but he managed to plead guilty to manslaughter which meant he would have quicker access to parole.