Chapter 7
It didn’t start with a bang. Or a boom. Instead, the Hells Angels’ war against the Rock Machine began with a politely worded letter. On a pretty, almost cloudless August afternoon in 1994, Hells Angels national president Robert “Ti-Maigre” Richard walked over to the Rock Machine clubhouse in Montreal and dropped an envelope on the steps. It was a typically bold move by the one-eyed, 300-pound Richard, who wore his colors into enemy territory for the event.
In the note, the Hells Angels simply asked the Rock Machine to stop calling themselves a motorcycle club. They had a point, since almost none of the Rock Machine members, especially after the Cazzettas were incarcerated, owned or even rode motorcycles. But it was not a mere lesson in semantics. The members of the Rock Machine understood what the note really meant—Quebec is Hells Angels turf; your presence is not welcome here.
But it was too late for mere intimidation. As the Hells Angels and their puppet gangs swallowed up more and more of the Montreal drug market, many street-level dealers became disenchanted with their tactics. If a dealer wanted to sell drugs in a Hells Angels neighborhood, he had to sell Hells Angels’ drugs at Hells Angels’ prices. If that dealer went to a different source, he would have to pay a Hells Angels’ penalty—perhaps his life. Since no single group had the manpower or will to stand up to the Hells Angels, many turned to the No. 2 gang, the Rock Machine. Since they had also seen their bottom line suffer, the Rock Machine gladly accepted them and moved to establish a new force to fight the Hells Angels.
Simply called the Alliance, the new group consisted of the Rock Machine, Montreal’s few remaining Outlaws, some independent dealers and a number of bar owners who sold drugs in their establishments and referred to themselves as the Dark Circle. Identified by a ring with an engraved eagle’s claw, the Dark Circle was very effective in recruiting young soldiers, even those with no criminal record, to fight for their right to sell cocaine. Their presence swelled the ranks of the otherwise small Rock Machine to a size and confidence that allowed them to take on the Hells Angels in Quebec in a way the Outlaws couldn’t.
Of course, even before Richard declared war in earnest, there had been some skirmishes. Pierre Daoust was one of those guys Stadnick found very useful. He wasn’t a member or prospect, but he was a close friend of the gang and was a particularly valuable asset to the club because he owned and operated the biggest Harley-Davidson repair shop in Montreal’s East End. The Hells Angels prize Harley shops, not only because they can have their bikes repaired and customized, but because they can also conduct club business away from their clubhouses, which run the risk of being bugged.
Although Daoust had never been in trouble for anything that had happened at his shop, he was well known to be a close associate of the Montreal Hells Angels and had often been seen riding with them. On the afternoon of June 13, 1994, two young men walked into his shop. It wasn’t uncommon for wannabes to approach him looking for a job or a deal on a bike, and these two looked like the kind he’d get rid of with a few brief words. As Daoust stood up and started to walk towards them, one of the men pulled a revolver from under his denim jacket and shot him. Although nobody was ever charged with Daoust’s murder, many within the Hells Angels suspected that the Rock Machine was involved.
The very next day saw more violence. As part of the master plan to insulate the important decision makers within the Hells Angels, Stadnick and his men had established or taken a number of smaller clubs—like the Evil Ones and the Condors—and provided them with drugs and protection in exchange for various illegal services. The reasoning is simple: if a member of a puppet club is caught carrying out a task given to him by a Hells Angel, he keeps quiet, takes his punishment and is handsomely rewarded with cash, drugs or even a Hells Angels prospective membership when he gets out of jail. And it worked very well. The puppet club in Montreal, the Rockers, specialized in intimidating street-level dealers into working only with Hells Angels. One of their leaders, a tough guy named Normand Robitaille who was already a good friend of Maurice “Mom” Boucher, was on his way home on June 14 when he was shot by two masked men who ran away. He was seriously hurt, and the statement was clear.
Later that same day, the Montreal police, acting on an anonymous tip that the Rock Machine was planning to blow up the headquarters of the Evil Ones, searched the hotel rooms of five members of the Rock Machine. They found three remote-controlled bombs, 12 sticks of dynamite and two handguns. Of the five men arrested, two—Fred Faucher and Martin “Blue” Blouin—belonged to the gang’s Quebec City chapter.
Three days later, two men known to be friendly to the Rock Machine were arrested in East End Montreal. They were wearing masks and body armor and had dynamite and detonators with them. Word quickly spread that they were a team sent out to assassinate Boucher. According to Vincent, the informant who claimed to be close to Stadnick and Boucher, the Hells Angels considered the attacks more of a nuisance than a war. “It’s true that Robitaille got hurt, but they went to a lot of effort for very little results and a bunch of them got arrested,” he said. “It was obvious they were trying to cause some damage, but it was also clear that they had a rat in there—the cops always seemed to catch them just before they could get anything done.”
But the Hells Angels couldn’t stand to let even a minor insurrection go unpunished, and they decided to hit the Alliance hard. The first target was a natural. Sylvain Pelletier, along with his two brothers, ran Montreal’s biggest drug ring not affiliated with the Hells Angels. In fact, they ran much of the cocaine trade in Maisonneuve-Hochelaga, Boucher’s home neighborhood. A few miles down river, on the tree-lined streets of Repentigny, on the morning of October 26, 1994, Pelletier got into his brand new Jeep Grand Cherokee and turned the key. Before he could shift from park to reverse, he was engulfed in flame and molten metal and plastic. His body was later positively identified by dental records.
Two weeks later, Daniel Bertrand, a well-known Rock Machine associate and drug dealer, was relaxing with some friends in Sainte-4, a popular bar in Montreal’s gay village, a district the Hells Angels’ Scott Steinert hoped to control. Bertrand had just sent a young friend to go get another round of drinks when two men walked up to his table and pulled out a pair of submachine guns. In what looked like a scene out of Scarface, the men showered the club with gunfire, then fled. Bertrand died and three of his friends were seriously injured. The gunmen were never tracked down.
But to the men in the Sorel clubhouse, the unpleasantness with the upstart Rock Machine was a sideshow to the real news. On December 4, the Hells Angels threw a party at the Sherbrooke clubhouse—site of the Lennoxville Massacre—to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Sherbrooke and Halifax chapters and to honor Stadnick for his work as national president. Every Hells Angel in Canada was invited and nearly all of them showed. But it wasn’t just a massive drunk; there was business to attend to. Topping the agenda was a tribute to Stadnick. After a series of speeches from members, prospects and invited guests from all over Canada, the former president was presented with a gift perfectly tailored to his unique sense of style. It was a gold-plated belt buckle, as big as a bread plate and as heavy as a brick, emblazoned with the familiar winged skull of the club.
When Stadnick got up to make his speech, he announced something that would change the course of biker culture and organized crime forever. The reason he gave up the presidency, he said, was that he was joining a new club. The partiers, who had been pretty relaxed up to that point, fell absolutely silent. Stadnick laughed and then announced his brilliant plan. This new club, something more than a chapter, would be made up of veteran Hells Angels who had proven their value over years of service. They’d be part of no chapter, but would work with Hells Angels and puppet clubs throughout the country.
He didn’t announce it that night, but the Nomads existed to insulate Stadnick and his allies from prosecution. It was too dangerous to do business at any of the existing clubhouses. Instead, the Nomads would get mem
bers of the Hells Angels or puppet clubs like the Rockers to do their bidding and, if necessary, take the fall. As the Hells Angels sought to control the Canadian drug market, the Nomads were formed to control the Hells Angels—and it soon became apparent that Hells Angels and puppet clubs could buy drugs from nobody else.
Dany “Danny Boy” Kane was by this time a trusted confidante of many of the most prominent Hells Angels (he was also an informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police). The day after the party he told the police what had transpired, letting them know the details of the Nomads more than two months before their patches arrived from the Austrian factory that makes all Hells Angels colors. After a look at the members of the new club, the RCMP labeled the Nomads as a Hells Angels “dream team.” Indeed, it did feature a roster of all-stars. Besides Stadnick and his trusted friend Don “Pup” Stockford, the original incarnation of the Nomads featured Boucher, Halifax president David “Wolf ” Carroll, former Trois-Rivières president Louis “Mèlou” Roy and his best friend Richard “Rick” Vallée, Gilles “Trooper” Matthieu, Denis “Pas Fiable” Houle and Normand “Biff” Hamel, leader of a North Shore puppet club called the Death Riders. According to police, all were well known to be heavyweights in the drug trade, and none of them would hesitate to use violence. Kane told them that, although Boucher was nominally president, the roles of the three biggest players wouldn’t change. Boucher would control Quebec, Carroll the East Coast and Stadnick the rest of Canada, with an eye on taking over Ontario.
Although the plan was to eventually have no clubhouse—they were magnets for police and media surveillance and, consequently, dangerous places to do business—Boucher set up a temporary headquarters on Rue Bennett, in the center of the Maisonneuve-Hochelaga neighborhood where he grew up.
While the top of the Canadian Hells Angels was busy morphing into a new club, the task of dealing with the Rock Machine fell to lowerlevel members. One man, in particular, jumped at the chance. Scott Steinert was in many ways unlike the other Montreal Hells Angels. Born in Beloit, Wisconsin, Steinert moved to Sorel as an eight-year-old in 1970 when the Beloit Corporation—the world’s largest manufacturer of paper-making machinery—transferred his father there. His family was well off, and he attended an exclusive English-language school. Although he was intelligent and sociable, Steinert got poor marks, was frequently in trouble with teachers (sometimes coming to blows) and was a regular in juvenile court. By the time he was 18, he’d dropped out of high school and moved to Vancouver, where he worked as an amusement park ride operator and small-time drug dealer. While there, he got involved with a bunch of would-be bikers and bought a Harley.
When his high school girlfriend, Louise, called to tell him his parents had moved back to Wisconsin, Steinert came back to Sorel. He returned a different man. Always big, Steinert had been working out religiously and had grown huge and muscular. He rode a Harley and was an experienced drug dealer and enforcer. Fluently bilingual, he used connections with old friends to set himself up with jobs ranging from beating up recalcitrant debtors to trafficking stolen goods and drugs. He was making a name for himself, until October 1985, when he sold two pounds of PCP to an undercover RCMP officer. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years in prison. But Corrections Canada was not prepared for his intellect and charm. Claiming that he never sold drugs to minors and had no connections to any organized crime figures, Steinert managed to get a parole hearing. Prison officials referred to him as having “interesting qualities” and “higher than average potential.” After Louise testified that his parents had loaned him money to set up an insulation business and that they had a circle of non-criminal friends, Steinert was released after just over two years in prison.
Less than a year later, Steinert was brought before a judge again. He’d been caught beating up a man who’d borrowed $300 from a loan shark. The man, who was on welfare, couldn’t come up with the $2,000 the loan shark demanded, so Steinert was sent to make an example of him. Though caught in the act and clearly working on behalf of organized crime, Steinert was sentenced to a single month in prison. While behind bars, Steinert made many friends and valuable connections. In fact, he was aggressively courted by a number of groups and decided to join the Hells Angels. And, before long, he became a favorite of Richard, the new national president.
Steinert’s bomb-making crew, which included Pat Lambert, had set bombs in two East End bars at the start of December 1994 in an effort to intimidate the Rock Machine. Kane told the RCMP. The police found the explosives, which had been triggered but—thanks to poor build quality—had failed to ignite. The first of Steinert’s successful bombs went off on December 5, when Rock Machine prospect Bruno Bandiera started his Plymouth minivan and was blown to pieces. Steinert planned another remote-controlled explosion, this time at a Rock Machine clubhouse, but had to call it off because children were playing in what could become the blast area. According to Kane, Hells Angels would never endanger children, even those of their worst enemies.
On December 16, a pickup truck was parked in front of a restaurant Mom Boucher liked to visit for lunch. Luckily for him and the other patrons, he came late that day. The pickup, which had been parked on the busy street since 8 a.m., was towed away before Boucher arrived. The guys at the pound were surprised when they found sticks of dynamite and a remote detonator under the tonneau cover. Realizing he was the target, Boucher put bullet-proof windows in his home and started wearing body armor when he was away from safe areas. More important, though, he realized that the Rock Machine was a big enough threat that the Nomads had to become involved.
Normand Baker, a prominent member of the Rock Machine who had once been arrested for possession of explosives, decided to escape the snow and violence of Montreal with a vacation in Acapulco. Whether he knew it or not, he had actually flown into Hells Angels territory. The Pacific side of Mexico had become very popular with Montreal Hells Angels after Boucher, who was barred from entering the United States, started vacationing there and eventually bought half-ownership of a hotel in nearby Ixtapa. The day after Baker left for Acapulco, so did six members and two prospects from the Hells Angels Trois-Rivières Chapter.
On January 4, 1995, Baker was eating lunch with his girlfriend at the Hard Rock Café in Acapulco. He was approached by a nervous-looking man wearing a bathing suit and sneakers. Baker, annoyed, asked him in English “what the fuck” he wanted. The man said “Happy New Year” in French, then pulled a gun out of a bag and shot him in the face. At first, the other patrons thought it was a joke, but they stopped laughing when blood started spurting everywhere. The gunman tried to flee, but bouncers barred the door. Desperate, he crashed through the plate-glass window and started running down Avenida Casiera Miguel Aleman. He didn’t get far. A combination of bouncers, patrons and passers-by managed to tackle, subdue and detain him until police arrived. He was identified as François Hinse, a Hells Angels prospect from Trois Rivières. A day earlier, Kane had told his RCMP handlers that Baker was Steinert’s No. 1 target.
Hinse attended an initial hearing on January 14 and prosecutor José Vélez Zapata asked for a 40-year sentence. Despite detailed descriptions by dozens of eyewitnesses, many of whom extended their Mexican vacations just to testify, and gunpowder burns on Hinse’s hands, judge Edmundo Román Pinzón decided there was insufficient evidence to charge him and released him to immigration officials, who sent him back to Canada. The RCMP were convinced it was “a flagrant case of corruption,” with the equivalent of $270,000 being paid by the Hells Angels. Kane later told the RCMP that a Mexican police officer told Boucher that he’d have taken care of Baker for $5,000 and saved him all the trouble with the courts.
In fact, Boucher had also formed alliances with police at home. Through corrupt officers in suburban police forces, the Hells Angels had managed to obtain photographs and home addresses of a number of Rock Machine members and associates. Kane also recalled how Boucher once met with a man in a black Mustang and returned saying “that’s
my pig.”
Back home, the war raged on. The day Hinse was released, Rock Machine member Daniel “Dada” Senesac carefully put a home-made bomb into the trunk of his Corsica and surrounded it with towels and blankets to cushion the bumpy ride. On his way to a Sorel bar known to be a Hells Angels hangout, Senesac hit a fatal pothole. Although he had been smart enough to invest in body armor, his head and arms were never found and his body was identified by tattoos on his back.
With bombs going off regularly in the streets of Montreal, the public was anxious for government intervention. It was one thing for a biker to shoot another biker in a biker bar, but the war had become entirely different.
The use of bombs, especially poorly made ones that exploded haphazardly, put everyone in danger. Serge Ménard, Quebec’s minister of public security, denied on January 19 that the bombs were part of a biker war. Through a spokesman, he said that they were “isolated incidents” and that he didn’t think it was necessary to set up a task force, choosing instead to let the Sûreté du Quebec (SQ) and local police forces handle the problem.
Less than two weeks later, three “isolated incidents” involving bombs and bikers occurred on the same day. On the snowy morning of January 31, members of Montreal police anti-gang squad found 200 sticks of dynamite (the same kind used in Steinert’s unsuccessful bombs two months earlier) in a car and 50 remote-controlled detonators in a nearby house. That night, Simon Bedard, a member of the Hells Angels Quebec City puppet club, the Mercenaires, hopped into his Chevy S-10 pickup and lost a leg when it exploded. Three days later, Claude “Le Pic” Rivard, a member of the Pelletier gang and a noted drug salesman for the Alliance, was stopped at a red light when another S-10 pulled up beside him. The man in the passenger seat, Serge Quesnel, rolled down his window and shot Rivard in the face. A uniformed officer on routine patrol happened to witness the murder and gave chase. After six blocks, the stolen S-10 wound up in a ditch and its two occupants took off on foot in different directions. Quesnel left the gun behind. Both men got away.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 42