As the level of violence escalated on the streets of Montreal, more and more bikers found themselves behind bars, where they continued the war. One such soldier was Stéphane “Godasse” Gagné, a constantly stoned thug with a seventh-grade education, who had somehow managed to mastermind a drug-trafficking network in the East End that netted him about $250,000 a year. At least it did until he got a phone call in the summer of 1994 from Paul “Fonfon” Fontaine, a full-patch Hells Angel. Fontaine told Gagné to shut down his operation and Gagné complied without argument. He did, however, set up a meeting with Boucher through a common friend who owned a Hells Angels- associated cell phone store. Impressed by Gagné’s ambition and the fact that he’d named his son Harley-David, Boucher told him that he could go back to selling drugs in the East End, but he would have to get them from Fontaine and give him a portion of the proceeds. That arrangement worked out well until Gagné sold 1.5 kg of cocaine to an undercover member of the SQ. Knowing better than to rat out the Hells Angels, Gagné took his punishment in hopes it would gain him prospect status when he got out.
Like many Montrealers convicted of drug offenses, he was sent to Bordeaux prison in the city’s north end. By early 1995, the notorious prison had become the most intensely fought-over chunk of real estate in Quebec. With an interior drug trade that police estimated as worth more than $7 million a year and supplied in part by paper bags and even tennis balls full of narcotics thrown over the prison walls during recreation time, Bordeaux was deteriorating into an uncontrollable war zone. Inside, members of the Hells Angels and Rock Machine recruited other prisoners with drugs, cash or threats of violence. By February, all but 20 inmates had chosen up sides. When, by mutual consent, the two sides severely beat the 20 nonaligned prisoners, the guards finally stepped in. From that point forward, half the prison would be reserved for the Hells Angels and their associates and the other half would house the Rock Machine and their allies. The two groups would never meet without intense supervision and nonaligned inmates would be forced to fend for themselves against whichever group controlled their wing.
On his way into Bordeaux, Gagné told the guards that he had some friends in the Hells Angels. They pulled his arrest record and, finding no connection to either gang, tossed him into C Block, the heart of Rock Machine territory. On his first day in his new cell, he was surrounded by six inmates. They didn’t know who he was, so they put him through the standard test. One of the men, Jean Duquaire, pulled out a photo of Mom Boucher and told Gagné to spit on it. When he refused, the other men pummeled him, breaking three of his ribs and knocking out two of his teeth. While recovering in the prison hospital, he met up with some Hells Angels associates who provided him with a metal rod (which he smuggled out in his pant leg) and a sharpened spoon that could be used as a knife. On his first day back in CBlock, he found Duquaire alone and bludgeoned him with the metal rod. After two whacks, Gagné noticed someone behind him. The witness, a nonaligned inmate about half Gagné’s size, was then forced to stab Duquaire’s unconscious body. That involuntary involvement would, Gagné hoped, prevent him from ratting. His job done, Gagné retreated to his cell and pretended to sleep. Less than an hour later, he was taken into protective custody without explanation and eventually transferred to a Hells Angels-dominated prison in Sorel.
When he arrived, he was surprised and delighted to see Boucher. Just a few days earlier, March 24, 1995, Boucher and his right-hand man André “Toots” Tousignant had been on their way to a Sherbrooke motorcycle show when they were stopped by police for failing to signal a lane change. Aware of who they’d stopped, the officers asked both men to get out of the car. A quick frisk revealed an unlicensed, unregistered 9-mm handgun tucked into Boucher’s belt. The serial numbers had been filed off. Boucher pleaded guilty to possession of a restricted weapon and was sentenced to six months in prison. But things were very different in Sorel than they were in Bordeaux. The Hells Angels ran the facility and lived in a relaxed atmosphere rich in drugs and free from the threat of the Rock Machine, or even the guards. They were so bold in Sorel prison that when the warden refused to grant day passes to Boucher and two friends, her house was fire bombed the same night. Boucher had heard about what happened in Bordeaux and assured Gagné that his loyalty and courage would be rewarded.
Outside the prison walls, the war had been growing more dangerous. On February 12, Rock Machine associates stole 2,500 sticks of dynamite that were mysteriously left unguarded from a construction site in Joliette. A week later, police acting on an anonymous tip found something even more chilling. In an East End garage frequently used by Hells Angels and their associates, they discovered two vans full of explosives and detonators. One of them contained a bomb in which four sticks of dynamite were surrounded by hundreds of nails. This was the first time police had found evidence of a shrapnel bomb. While dynamite may cause absolute devastation in a contained area, a nail bomb sends a shower of sharp, white-hot metal over a much larger, less defined area. Anyone in the vicinity of the explosion is likely to be killed or severely wounded by the shrapnel. Its discovery led the police to the frightening conclusion that the bikers were now using public terror as a weapon in their war. “Many people would have been killed or maimed if this bomb had exploded in a public area,” said Detective Michel Gagné of Montreal’s anti-gang squad. “It is no longer a war just between gangs.”
The next day, February 21, Montreal police transfered 15 more officers to its anti-gang squad. They had been on duty just a few hours when the next bomb went off. Bar L’Energie was a nightclub frequently visited by Hells Angels and their associates, and it had already survived one small explosion in 1993. This time, though, a bomb containing 5 kg of high explosive and surrounded by 9-mm bullets, which ignited simultaneously and shot off in wild directions, took the club’s facade off. Since it was a Tuesday night, L’Energie was empty. The explosion didn’t kill anyone, but it served its purpose. The Rock Machine had shown that they had large-scale, anti-personnel weapons too, and they were not afraid to use them. The Hells Angels responded by firing three bullets into the head of Claude Cossette, one of the oldest and most influential Alliance drug dealers, as he left his house in Chateauguay. A week later, two Rockers found a cardboard box on the doorstep of their clubhouse and opened it gently. Not surprisingly, there was a bomb inside. Frightened and confused, they called Boucher. He sent over Tousignant, who calmly ripped the detonator off the dynamite and threw it down an alley. It exploded with a loud pop. That night, police found another bomb in a bar owned by a man alleged to be a member of the Dark Circle.
While Boucher was on vacation in Ixtapa, the violence diminished and the Hells Angels went back to business. Although he was still just a prospect, the ever-ambitious Steinert started flexing his muscles. In open defiance of club rules, Steinert started a puppet club called the Group of Five, which approached bars in trendy, more wealthy parts of Montreal and Ottawa—places that had previously received little attention from either the Hells Angels or the Rock Machine—to supply cocaine and ecstasy. Steinert was already getting rich with his stripper/ escort agency Sensations, when he made a separate deal with a New York City mafia lieutenant to supply strippers to a resort in the Dominican Republic. After that, he openly bragged about how he intended to control every other agency in the province—by force if necessary. It was an astute plan; the sex industry may not be as lucrative as the drug industry, but the money is easier to make and harder to trace. And Montreal, which a recent study by the Quebec Conseil du Statut de la Femme declared the “Bangkok of the West,” is the place to make it. But it was a direct threat to Carroll, who had taken over Aventure, Lambert’s company that supplied girls from the East Coast and Quebec for jobs in Ontario.
Even worse, the boastful Steinert told anyone who would listen about his plan to start a new and better gang in the Kingston/ Belleville region. Making an enemy of the alcoholic, often penniless Carroll was one thing, but stepping on Stadnick’s toes was quite another. It was b
ad enough that Steinert was openly planning to start a gang in Ontario, an area the club had reserved for Stadnick alone, but to constantly point out how and why Stadnick’s Demon Keepers had failed was particularly annoying. For the moment, Stadnick would let Steinert mouth off.
On March 14, Rock Machine associate Denis Marcoux was driving to his job at a Quebec City bar when a remote-controlled bomb exploded in his pickup. Unlike previous bombs, which had been placed in the vehicle’s dashboard or console in an effort to kill the driver or passenger, this one was embedded in the driver’s side door. When it exploded, Marcoux’s left leg was severed, while the truck’s running board detached and flew threw the window of an apartment across the street. It came to rest on the floor of a room beside an 18-month-old baby. Although he and his ten-year-old brother were covered in their own blood and shattered glass, neither was seriously hurt.
Innocent bystanders had been caught in the crossfire before, but this was the first time children had been harmed. Public fear turned to outrage. The following day, Quebec public security minister Serge Ménard met with the cabinet in an effort to form a plan. When he eventually emerged from the meeting and was mobbed by the press, Ménard finally admitted what the people of Quebec had known for a long time: “It’s a war between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine for the control of drug sales.”
Sensing an opportunity, the Hells Angels began an aggressive PR campaign. Some sources say the orders came down from Stadnick himself. The Hells Angels were allegedly behind a campaign that distributed hundreds of thousands of leaflets throughout Quebec disclaiming any responsibility for the violence and placing the blame on the SQ. The most popular of them stirred up old hatreds by telling readers that the SQ had blown up bars during the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) crisis and they were not above doing it now to discredit the bikers. In response, the SQ issued an unsigned press release claiming to have negotiated a peace treaty between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine.
In all likelihood the truce never actually existed, but the violence did subside in April 1995, while Boucher was in prison and Stadnick was on the road. A couple of uniformed cops in downtown Hamilton saw Stadnick’s Jaguar and decided to stop him. They followed him until he failed to signal a lane change, then pulled him over. As usual, he was polite and cooperative, if not exactly friendly. As he stepped out of the car, one of the officers (now retired) noticed his monstrous gold belt buckle. After a few questions, the police confiscated it as a potentially dangerous weapon, gave Stadnick a ticket and let him go. After a night at home and a morning in church with his parents, he went to Hamilton airport and boarded a plane for Winnipeg.
The prairie city had become something of a third home for Stadnick. According to police who were familiar with him, he bought a condo there and gave it to his local girlfriend Tiffani and their son Damon (Nomad spelled backwards). He stayed with them when he was in town. And in April 1995, he was there on business. Meeting with a number of Spartans who were growing dismayed by Darwin Sylvester’s bizarrely violent leadership, Stadnick formed them into a new club. Typical of his operations, the plan was large in scope and meticulous in its execution. Called the Redliners, Winnipeg’s newest gang was a puppet of the Rockers, which was itself a puppet of the Nomads, which was an elite subset of the Hells Angels. Although Stadnick had created the Redliners, the police said the connection to him was too complicated to be proven in court. And unlike the Spartans and Los Brovos, who operated out of members’ homes or storefronts, the Redliners clubhouse was the first fortified biker bunker in the Canadian prairies. Situated between the airport and massive rail-yards and equipped with armor plating, automatically locking doors, an emergency generator and the latest in audio and video surveillance equipment, the Redliners’ clubhouse impressed Winnipeg police as a harbinger of a war to come.
Stadnick spent much of the spring and summer of 1995 in Winnipeg overseeing the Redliners, although he was never seen at or even near the clubhouse. He met with them frequently at bars and restaurants, inspected their appearance and listened to their progress reports. The discipline he enforced surprised police. Unlike the other bikers in Winnipeg (or the original Hells Angels for that matter), Stadnick forced the Redliners to have short, well-groomed hair and to dress neatly and appropriately at all times. Rick Lobban, biker cop for the Winnipeg police, later told reporters that “the Redliners were his attempt to create a group and give it a pedigree that could become a Hells Angels chapter.”
According to Kane, Stadnick had even more to do in Winnipeg. His reports to the RCMP allege that Stadnick, who was still dealing with Los Brovos and the Spartans, arranged for a series of drug couriers to get on a Via Rail train in Montreal with up to 7 kilos of cocaine in two suitcases. The plan was to stop at Toronto’s Union Station, rendezvous with an anonymous contact and exchange one suitcase with drugs hidden inside for one full of cash. When the courier arrived in Winnipeg, he was to call a pager number and leave a code indicating his hotel and room number. Before long, another man unknown to the courier traded another suitcase full of cash for the remaining drugs. The courier then gave the suitcases full of money to a third contact in Montreal. It was a system that worked perfectly and repeatedly.
With Stadnick back in town and Boucher out of prison, the war resumed in Montreal. On July 3, tipped-off SQ officers recovered a white cargo van in Lachine that had been stolen from the McGill University maintenance department in January. What they found inside—an arsenal worthy of a large-scale military assault—sent a shockwave through the province. Welded to the van’s floor was a tripod mount and a 7.62 mm FN machine gun (the kind used by many NATO armies as an anti-personnel weapon) with a two-meter-long belt of ammunition. Beside it were four Mac-10 submachine guns, two sawed-off shotguns and a U.S. military issue .30-caliber M-1 semiautomatic carbine. Farther back were 122 sticks of dynamite, 50 detonators and a seven-pound nail bomb. Although the munitions were terrifying enough, the police found something that could have had an even more profound impact on the already critical situation—stolen SQ insignia. If the stick-on labels had been affixed to the outside of the van, any attack it was involved in would have been blamed on police. Although they never took credit for the van, some Hells Angels later claimed that the SQ had planted the decals there to further discredit bikers.
The origin of the insignia notwithstanding, the SQ managed to turn a huge victory into a PR disaster bigger than the Hells Angels could have imagined. It was the middle of the night when the Montreal police delivered their bomb-disarming robot. Rather than evacuate the area, the police hid behind a blast shield and sent the robot in by remote control. Normally a flood of water from its high-pressure hose is enough to neutralize any bomb, but something went wrong in the parking lot in Lachine that night. For some reason, the spray ignited the explosives and turned the van into millions of pieces of flying metal. Debris was scattered over a half mile of apartment buildings and stores, with some of it coming agonizingly close to an old chlorine storage tank at a water treatment plant. Although the residents of the area didn’t wake up to a cloud of poisonous gas, they did find their windows shattered and their floors covered in pieces of glass, metal, brick and asphalt. Miraculously, nobody was hurt. But the SQ was widely accused of knowingly and unnecessarily putting a huge number of innocent people into mortal danger. And they owed the Montreal police a new bomb-disarming robot.
The SQ thought they had caught a break when they arrested a small-time Quebec City hood and former Mercenaire named Michel “Pit” Caron. It became clear under questioning that Caron was more deeply involved in the war than police had originally thought and, when talk turned to murders, they were willing to deal. In exchange for some dropped charges, Caron told the SQ about his old friend and sometime partner, Serge Quesnel.
A high-school dropout from suburban Trois-Rivières, Quesnel had only once held a legitimate job—as a fast-food cook for two weeks. Instead, he used his muscles to make a very successful living as an enf
orcer and debt collector for area drug dealers. He moved up in the eyes of the underworld in 1988 when he bludgeoned a small-time dealer named Richard Jobin to death. It was an effort to impress potential employers, and it paid off—Quesnel started getting more work than ever and getting paid more for his services. When another dealer, Martin Naud, let it slip that he knew enough details of the Jobin murder to endanger him, Quesnel stabbed him in the eye with a pair of scissors, then cut his throat before burning his body.
Quesnel spent a short stint in Donnacona prison on an unrelated offense, during which he made money and connections by beating and stabbing fellow prisoners. He later claimed that his lawyer offered to introduce him to Louis “Mèlou” Roy, president of the Hells Angels Trois-Rivières Chapter and one of the original Nomads. Impressed by Quesnel’s résumé, Roy offered him a job as professional murderer. In case he wasn’t sold by the offer of $500 a week and anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 for each murder (depending on the risk), Roy told him “there’ll be a lot of work.” Quesnel quickly agreed. To start him off, Roy gave him a handgun and $2,000 in cash, got him a haircut and bought him $800-worth of clothes.
On December 14, 1994, Quesnel received a call from Sylvain “Baptiste” Thiffault, the second most powerful and influential member of the Trois-Rivières chapter. He gave Quesnel his first assignment. Jacques Ferland was a PCP cook and sometime dealer from Grondines, a suburb of Quebec City, who occasionally sold to members and associates of the Rock Machine. Thiffault told Quesnel as much as he could about Ferland, including his home address, favorite restaurants and other habits. Since it was an easy hit—Ferland was a small-timer with no heavyweight friends or security plan—the fee was $10,000. Excited and a little nervous about his first contract, Quesnel called his old friend Caron and offered him $4,500 if he’d help. On the evening of January 29, 1995, Caron drove Quesnel to Ferland’s house and waited in the car. Quesnel ran into a friend of Ferland’s, André Bédard, on the sidewalk and the two men walked into the house together. Bédard shouted that Ferland had a visitor and left. When Ferland walked down the stairs, Quesnel shot him twice in the head. Ferland’s wife, still upstairs, heard the gunfire and hid. She needn’t have worried; Quesnel was under strict orders to spare her life. As they’d planned, Caron and Quesnel dumped the stolen car and snowmobiled back home.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 43