Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  Réjean “Zig Zag” Lessard, president of the Sorel Chapter, called a meeting with Halifax and Sherbrooke, another chapter patched over on the same day as the 13th Tribe. It wasn’t just the extortion. Trudeau and his gang of idiots were a black mark on the organization. Excessive cocaine use and drinking had led the Laval Chapter to bizarre behavior. Their wanton, random violence and their blatant, small-time crimes endangered them all. More important, their mounting cocaine debts were crippling the whole organization. After a vote, Lessard got what he wanted. Laval was to be eliminated. Two of the Laval bikers were to be offered membership in the Sorel Chapter, two others were to be forcibly retired and the rest were given a death sentence.

  Naturally, Trudeau was the primary target, but he had the survival skills of a cockroach. Sensing that the hatred the other chapters had for Laval was on the verge of turning into retribution, Trudeau, who had snorted $60,000 worth of coke up his nose in the previous three weeks, checked himself into a posh Oka detox center on March 17, 1985. “I saw what was coming,” he said. “I’d seen it myself in the past, what happened to members who drank or sniffed too much.”

  Sorel enforcer Robert “Ti-Maigre” Richard called the Laval, Sherbrooke and Halifax clubhouses to announce a party in Sherbrooke—about 100 miles southeast of Montreal—on Saturday, March 23. After the call, Georges “Bo-Boy” Beaulieu, president of the Sherbrooke Chapter, went to a local sporting goods shop and bought six sleeping bags. Store owner Daniel Raby later recalled that Beaulieu was in such a hurry, he forgot to take his receipt.

  Less than half of the Laval chapter showed up. Incensed, Lessard and his men were forced to holster their guns and throw a party. He announced to the crowd that the meeting had been postponed a day so that the others could arrive, and that their attendance was absolutely mandatory. He booked every available room at the La Marquise motel down the street and put up the overflow at the Lennoxville a few miles away.

  Most of the bikers woke around noon or soon thereafter. The remaining members of Laval, except Trudeau, of course, arrived in Sherbrooke that afternoon. Church, as Hells Angels worldwide refer to their meetings, was called for 2:30. Everyone showed and the slaughter began. Sorel prospects, forced to wait outside as usual, heard shouts. Someone mentioned the Outlaws. Another yelled something about guns. After that, it was just the booming of guns and the screams of the victims. Laurent “L’Anglais” Viau was shot in the head. Jean-Pièrre “Matt le Crosseur” Mathieu was similarly dispatched. Michel “Willie” Mayrand died struggling. Jean-Guy “Brutus” Geoffrion took a bullet in the head and another in the spine. Guy-Louis “Chop” Adam was shot seven times by three different guns. He died on the front lawn after fleeing through the front door.

  The surviving members of the Laval chapter, Gilles “Le Nez” Lachance, Yvon “Le Père” Bilodeau and Richard “Bert” Mayrand (whose brother had just been murdered before his eyes) huddled in a blood-soaked corner. As the other Sorel members dragged the bodies into the garage and hosed the blood and guts off the floor, Lachance told Richard he had some blood on his boots. Richard took a moment to wipe it off.

  Finished cleaning, the bikers gathered around Lessard. He told them that the men had died because they snorted too much coke and because Trudeau had leaned on his brothers because an outsider would not pay a debt. Bilodeau and the surviving Mayrand were told to leave. The others, some still spattered with the blood and tissues of their victims, surrounded Lachance. Lessard told him that they held no grudge against him and that he was free to walk away or join the Sorel chapter. Lachance eventually joined. One of the original Popeyes, he was still officially a Hells Angels prospect because he was in prison for man-slaughter when the gang was patched over.

  While a few prospects were forced to burn their dead brothers’ possessions, Lachance and Sorel members Jacques “La Pelle” Pelletier and Robert “Snake” Tremblay drove back to Laval. When they get there, they found Michel “Jinx” Genest, the last surviving member other than Trudeau, all alone drinking beer. They told him what happened and that he was invited to join the Sorel chapter. He accepted and helped his new brothers pack some of his dead brothers’ possessions into their trunk. Over the next few days the Laval clubhouse was looted and the apartments of the five dead bikers were emptied of anything of value, whether the murdered man lived alone or not. Lessard decreed the theft necessary to repay the Halifax Chapter and to provide a gift for Western Canada’s sole chapter in Vancouver, a move he hoped would help soften the news of the slaughter. He sent a letter to the Hells Angels East Coast regional headquarters reporting that “the North Chapter has been closed down.”

  It had been closed, but not eliminated. Normand “Biff ” Hamel, a former Laval prospect who joined Sorel, went to visit Trudeau in rehab. He told Trudeau what had happened and that he was dishonorably discharged and would have to get rid of his tattoo. Trudeau complied by blackening out the logo with an indelible marker. “I understood very quickly what it meant,” he said.

  Upon his release, Trudeau went to the ransacked Laval clubhouse. His bike and the $46,000 he had hidden in a wall safe were gone. He called Hamel who told him that he could forget about the money but could get his bike back if he murdered two people who might turn informant—including Mathieu’s girlfriend Ginette “La Jument” Henri, who served as accountant for the Laval chapter.

  Henri was also considered valuable to Sorel because she was one of the two living people who knew where Laval’s drugs were stashed. Lessard knew she’d never turn them over to her boyfriend’s killers, but he also didn’t want them to end up as evidence. The only other person who could find them was Claude “Coco” Roy, a Laval prospect who was outside the Sherbrooke clubhouse when most of his chapter was exterminated. Genest was allowed to prove his worth to his new chapter by recovering the cocaine. He called Roy and told him to meet him with the drugs at the $20-a-night Ideal Motel in the boonies. As soon as Roy walked into the room, Genest smashed him in the side of the head with a gun, killing him. He then searched Troy’s blood-spattered body and found five bags of coke in his underwear. Emboldened by a job well done and a sample of his booty, Genest called the dead man’s stripper girlfriend and asked her for a date. She turned him down.

  A police wiretap that had been in place at the Sherbrooke clubhouse since October 1983 finally paid a dividend. Officers from the Sûreté du Québec determined that five Hells Angels were missing and that something big had happened at the clubhouse. Armed with this meager evidence, the cops descended on the building. The front door was torn down with a backhoe and cops with metal detectors swarmed the grounds. Helicopters equipped with heat sensors powerful enough to discover fresh graves were brought in. They found nothing but a shirt with what they claimed was a bullet hole, some legal weapons and an amount of drugs too small to get anyone in real trouble.

  Trudeau earned his bike back by murdering former Popeye Jean-Marc “Le Grande Guele” Deniger. It took a while, though. The Hells Angels will only accept media coverage as confirmation of a hit and nobody found Deniger’s body. Frustrated, Trudeau finally called Le Journal de Montréal five days later and gave them an anonymous tip that they would find something of great interest in the back seat of Deniger’s car.

  The police kept hammering away at the Hells Angels, but found very little. They happened upon a treasure, though, when they arrested Trudeau on a weapons charge.

  As the St. Lawrence got warmer, decomposition did what the police couldn’t and the bodies started floating. First came the fattest, Geoffrion, on June 1st. Sûreté du Quebec (SQ) divers were sent down. Although the water was nearly opaque, with visibility no more than a foot, they felt around and found the remains of Viau, Adam, Mayrand and Roy. So crowded was the Hells Angels graveyard that one diver also discovered the skeleton of Berthe Desjardins, who was murdered by Trudeau—along with her husband and mother-in-law—on February 11, 1980.

  The Quebec media went crazy. Allô Police, a lurid Montreal tabloid that often knew
more about the underworld than the police did, ran an article claiming the Hells Angels had $50,000 contracts on the lives of Trudeau and Regis “Lucky” Asselin, a former Laval prospect who narrowly escaped two attempts on his life, once by driving a bullet-riddled van through the front door of a hospital. Sergeant Marcel Lacoste, the commander of the SQ’s investigation into the murders, took a copy of the story to Trudeau, who was in Montreal’s Bordeaux jail on an unrelated weapons charge. Trudeau, who was scheduled to be back on the streets in August, sighed, shook his head and said: “I killed for them and now they want to kill me—that’s gratitude, eh?”

  By October 2, 1985, 17 Hells Angels were charged with first-degree murder and warrants were issued for 10 more, all on the basis of tips and testimony from Trudeau and Gerry “Le Chat” Coulombe, a Sorel prospect who was horrified by the slaughter and wanted out. But the police knew their case was weak unless they could get an eyewitness to talk (Coulombe was at the scene, but was outside the building for most of the shooting and was hiding when Robert “Snake” Tremblay shot a fleeing Adam on the front lawn).

  It didn’t take long. Gilles “Le Nez” Lachance, now a Sorel member, had seen everything. The SQ arrested him on a minor charge, but they knew exactly how valuable he was. They offered him immunity for a laundry list of crimes if he would tell them everything that had happened in the Sherbrooke clubhouse in March. Terrified that he might be next on the hit list and more than happy to avoid prison, he cooperated readily.

  Superior Court Judge Jean-Guy Boilard brought down his gavel on the case on December 19, 1986. After two trials—a main one and a separate one for Genest—complete with a media circus, countless calls for mistrial, 12 people cited for contempt of court, a judge scolding the SQ for “incompetence” and one juror admitting he was bought by the Hells Angels for $25,000—Lessard, Pelletier, Michaud and Genest were found guilty of murder. Richard was acquitted. The rest plea bargained their way to lesser sentences.

  With six bikers dead, Lessard, Pelletier, Michaud and Genest in prison and Trudeau, Coulombe and Lachance in protective custody, the people of Quebec thought the Hells Angels were a spent force. They were dead wrong. After an aggressive recruiting drive and the patching over of a number of small, rural clubs, the Hells Angels were replenished with eager young men ready to make money from drugs and show off their death’s heads. In fact, one Hells Angels veteran told a Montreal paper that he was grateful to the cops for cleaning out the club’s deadwood.

  Sonny Barger and his Bay Area buddies defined the Hells Angels through rules, rites and uniformity. They put together a self-sustaining entity that attracted new members who were willing to die for their brothers simply because of what they believed in. Years later, men like Lessard, Trudeau and Lachance set a precedent for Canadian Hells Angels that would be repeated again and again. Brotherhood has its place, but not if it gets in the way of money or the drug trade. The penalty for going against the club is a bullet in the head and a trip to the bottom of the St. Lawrence. The life of a Canadian Hells Angel isn’t about the thrill of the open road or the company of a club of freedom-loving brothers. Instead, it’s a sleazy, low-rent existence in which members must sell drugs, plant bombs, hire themselves out as muscle and commit other crimes without knowing if, when or why they could end up facing the small end of a shotgun.

  Chapter 3

  Kelly has driven over the Skyway Bridge twice a day for 12 years but she still looks every time. And she always looks on the same side. Lake Ontario is just another big lake, but Hamilton Harbour has some real character. Even from a quarter mile away, the water looks greasy. On the south side of the harbour, the Hamilton side, there are sinister-looking steel factories from one end to the other. On most days, it’s hard to see much of them through the smoke and fog. But the fires are always visible. Sometimes red, purple or even bright blue, the tongues of flame reach three or four storeys into the air. They are there to burn off poisonous gases, but their smell remains. Almost as tall and just as imposing stands another by-product of steelmaking, slag, which shows up as hundred-foot high piles of gray stones. Much of what you see of Hamilton from the Skyway is actually built on slag dumped into the harbour to make more room for even more factories. If you look closely enough, Kelly pointed out, you can see a junk-yard with a fence made of old buses turned on their sides, their windows now shattered and their tops and sides covered with threatening graffiti. It’s not a pretty sight.

  “It’s like a bad car wreck, isn’t it?” she said as her silver Toyota Echo swayed in the high winds over the bridge. “Just can’t take your eyes off it, eh?” Like most people from Hamilton with any ambition, she got out of town as soon as she could. “To tell you the truth, I don’t even know many people back there any more,” she said. “I was one of the last of my friends to move out.” She now lives in Oakville and commutes to her job with an insurance company in the city. Even though she’s abandoned her home town and freely speaks derisively of it, Kelly still considers herself a Hamiltonian at heart. After all, there is no Oakville in Oakville. As she says: “It’s really just a few thousand nearly identical houses, a gas station and a 7-Eleven.” Hamilton may be smelly and ugly, but at least it’s a city with a culture and an identity. She’s proud to be from Hamilton and finds herself defending it at dinner parties. “Besides, it’s way better than it used to be,” she said. “Back when I was in high school, Hamilton was a very different place—dirtier, smellier, nastier and more violent.”

  Kelly grew up in Birdland. Tucked away on the mountain in the southwest corner of Hamilton, as far away from the factories of the northeast as possible, Birdland is more like the suburbs than part of a major city. Originally called Cardinal Heights, the planned community of look-alike houses and identical cul-de-sacs got its more popular name from the fact that all the streets are named after species of birds. The neighborhood joke is that the residents of Titmouse Court wanted to change their street’s name because property values might be affected by the mention of mice. Away from busy streets, Birdland was a quiet, well-treed neighborhood where most people knew each other and generally got along. Barbecues and pool parties were commonplace and there were always kids playing some sort of sport in the round part of the cul-de-sacs, while watchful parents worked, relaxed or socialized. Growing up on Bobolink Road, Kelly went to Hill Park High School.

  She was even prettier then. It was 1970 and she was a long-legged blonde who got good marks and kept mainly to herself and a few good friends. Since she spent a lot of time with Rodney, her boyfriend, who was already in college at Mohawk, she didn’t socialize much with other students after class. But after three years at Hill Park, she basically knew who everybody was.

  Even if she had been more outgoing, she probably wouldn’t have spent much time with Walter Stadnik. He wasn’t really her kind of guy. Born 18 years earlier, on August 3, 1952, at St. Joseph’s Hospital at the base of the mountain, Wolodumyr Stadnik was the third son of Andrew and Valentina Stadnik. Living at 98 East 16th Street, a few blocks north of Birdland, he grew up around a different set of kids. Consisting of smaller, less attractive houses filled with scores of immigrant and transplanted farmer families—most of whom had found work in the city’s factories, although Andrew Stadnik was a tree surgeon employed by the city—Stadnik’s neighborhood was entirely less friendly than Kelly’s. It was a place where people generally kept to themselves, preferring to socialize with extended families instead of neighbors. It was nothing like inner-city Hamilton for violence and squalor, but it bred a more rough and tumble kind of kid than Birdland.

  But Stadnik—soon called Walter or Wally by everyone but his parents and beginning to spell his last name “Stadnick”—hardly fit the mold of a juvenile delinquent. People who remember him as a child uniformly report that he was intelligent, quiet, polite and generally well behaved. He went to church every Sunday with his parents and seemed to be a pretty good kid. As happens with so many other boys, though, Stadnick changed when he hit pub
erty. Although he was one of the first kids in his class to clear 5 feet, he soon grew to 5-feet 4-inches and never got much taller. As the shortest boy in class by grade 11, he had to try harder and would often act out in school—and not in ways that educators would approve of in the late 1960s. “He clearly had a great deal of natural intelligence, but he was impossible to motivate,” said a former teacher who didn’t want to be named but couldn’t hide his frustration. “It was almost like he didn’t want to succeed.” Stadnick’s marks were good enough to get by, but no better. His best marks came from auto shop, where he showed a great deal of mechanical inclination and an organized mind well-suited to solving complex problems.

  While no academic, Stadnick did find some success in the school’s social circles. He had an undeniable charm and was very popular with a small segment of the school population and was well known by the rest of it. “Of course I knew Wally, everyone did,” Kelly recalled. “It’s not like we were best friends or anything like that; but I knew him well enough to say ‘hi’—although I don’t think I would have unless he did first.” But they traveled in different circles. Kelly, quiet, studious and ambitious, spent all her time in class or the library. Walter, on the other hand, could almost always be found in the smoking area if he wasn’t in class and often when he was supposed to be. “He was what we used to call an ‘occie’—someone who only took courses that prepare you for a specific occupation, like auto mechanics, electrical or metal shop,” she said. “But he was better than the rest of them; he never called me names or tried to grab my rear end or anything; he seemed nice enough.”