The single most important folder on Perrault’s desktop was simply called “Operation.” Inside were detailed plans for a joint RCMP-OPP-SQ operation to bring down Stadnick. Not only did the files contain everything the police knew about Stadnick from observation and informants, but it detailed police tactics and strategy. With all of their cards showing, the police got out of the game—at least temporarily. The operation to arrest Stadnick was called off. “We didn’t have a lot of choice,” said Pacey. When the information reached him, Stadnick knew where all the bugs were, whose phone was tapped and, sometimes, who the rats were.
None of the informants were identified by name in the files. But the Nomads worked long and hard to figure out who they were by putting together dates and places. One meeting in particular struck a note in the memory of Normand Robitaille. From the information in one informant’s file, he triangulated the date, the place and the discussion and came up with a name—Claude De Serres. A small-time dealer who worked for Serge “Pasha” Boutin in the gay village, De Serres had decided to go straight and serve as an informer for the SQ.
On February 21, 2000, Robitaille called Boutin, who was vacationing in the Dominican Republic, and told him what he thought. Boutin understood. He cut his trip short, returned to snowy Montreal and called De Serres. The two were old friends and De Serres was a top producer, so he readily accepted when Boutin invited him up to his chalet in the Laurentians for a weekend of skiing and partying. Both men had ulterior motives. Sure that Boutin would say something incriminating, De Serres arrived at the chalet with a recording device taped to his back. Police followed him up into the mountains but lost him in a snowstorm. When they finally arrived, they found his body by the side of a gravel road, partially obscured by a snow bank. It still had the recorder attached. When the police played the tape, they heard a man (not Boutin) ask De Serres, “Why do you work for the police?” De Serres didn’t get a chance to tell them why. The last sounds the police heard on the tape were the four shots that ended his life.
After De Serres’s death, Carcajou officers met with Kane and told him to quit the Rockers and get out of town. Information from Perrault’s laptop could easily pinpoint him as an informant and the De Serres incident showed exactly how the Hells Angels handled rats. Kane scoffed. Not only was he hanging around with his biker friends but he was actually recorded joking with some Nomads that De Serres was “one informant who wouldn’t be able to testify.” When he showed up on March 10, some officers reported they were sure Kane was ready to give up. Quite the opposite—he was there to deal. Up to this point, Kane had been an informant. He gave information that the police could use to uncover Hells Angels activities, but not use in court. Now he was willing to take the next step. He offered to testify against his brothers if his conditions were met.
When the negotiations were finished, Kane had hammered out quite a deal. Police offered to defend him under a system similar to the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, give him $1.75 million in three installments, another $63,000 up front as a signing bonus, $2,000 a week for living expenses, $3,000 in legal fees, $1,500 for a handgun he said he needed to serve as a bodyguard, $1,500 to take care of his suspended driver’s license, $1,000 for a wedding present for a Nomad and $600 for two new suits. In exchange, he wrote a confession detailing all of his crimes and promised to testify. It took ten pages for Kane to recount everything he’d done and when he was finished, he asked the police for more money.
He may have switched sides officially, but he didn’t stop working for the Hells Angels. Three weeks after he signed his confession, Kane, who was still trying to prove himself by acting as a gofer for the Nomads, was driving “Wolf ” Carroll to a license bureau in Montreal. Carroll was, as usual, complaining about how things were going for him in Halifax. In particular, he was talking about Kirk Mersereau. Kirk was the brother of Randy Mersereau, a former Hells Angel who had left the club to strike out on his own. Not only had Randy weakened and insulted the Hells Angels by leaving and becoming one of their competitors on the streets of Halifax, but rumor had it that he had been talking with the Bandidos about starting a local chapter. There was no way the Hells Angels, in particular the Nomads, could allow him to survive if they were to achieve their national agenda.
And Carroll admitted there was a great deal of pressure “from above” to solidify the Hells Angels’ standing on the East Coast. When they learned that Randy was attempting to contract out the murders of Carroll, Boucher and Mike McCrea, president of the Halifax Chapter while Carroll was in Montreal, he became their top priority. Kane told his RCMP handlers that Carroll called him with a plan to kill or intimidate their allies into submission, and then send the Jokers and Scorpions into Halifax to reclaim the city for the Hells Angels.
On the next day, September 23, 1999, a bomb blasted through Mersereau’s car dealership in Truro, Nova Scotia. Windows were shattered and seven employees were injured. Randy Mersereau stumbled out into the street with blood on his head and torn clothes, but he was not seriously hurt. Kane told the police that McCrea was behind the bombing, but no arrests were made. He also told them that Randy Mersereau didn’t have long to live. About a month later, Kane and Carroll got into Kane’s car and got on the road to Halifax. As Kane turned off Route 132 to Route 185 in Rivière-du-Loup, he saw police lights in his rearview mirror. Officially, the SQ officer stopped him for speeding, but he was actually a tipped-off Carcajou officer attempting to prevent a murder in Halifax. Carroll was surprised when Kane allowed the cop to search the car. When he found Kane’s .38 and Carroll’s Mac-10, the bikers were put under arrest, cuffed and put in jail until members of the Trois-Rivières chapter could post bail.
It didn’t matter. As soon as he got back to Montreal, Carroll got on the phone. Someone—maybe Carroll, maybe someone on his behalf—put together a local team in Halifax to take Randy Mersereau out. Although his body was never found, nobody ever saw Randy Mersereau again after October 31, 1999. His car was found, with the keys still inside, on the shoulder of Highway 102, just outside Truro. The police had no leads and the crime was never solved, although Kane later reported that Randy Mersereau had been killed by Hells Angels associates and had been buried in a forest near the highway. Kane didn’t give very many details, but he did point out that there were many people other than Carroll who wanted to see the Mersereaus dead.
Boucher didn’t care about the Mersereaus or the state of the club outside the Montreal urban community. With the Rock Machine subdued and the police and courts proven impotent against him, Boucher wanted to enjoy his spoils and rub it in their faces. In April 2000, Boucher and nine of his most intimidating Hells Angels and Rockers drove up to Anjou in the East End to have coffee. They took some seats at the Au Bon Pain in the Place Versailles shopping center. In full colors, Boucher and his men enjoyed their coffee and pastries in seats normally reserved for the homicide and anti-gang officers of the Montreal police, who had an office on the fourth floor of the mall.
At first, officers joked that having him downstairs just made it easier to watch him, but when he kept doing it every morning for a week, it became apparent to the police that Boucher was making a public show of his power. Commander Bouchard, the top officer at the station and the toughest cop in Montreal, was almost certainly the primary target of Boucher’s psychological assault. Bouchard had an idea: he’d bug the tables at Au Bon Pain. But Boucher had anticipated that move and frequently brought his lawyer along. It’s against the law in Canada to record lawyer-client conversations. Advised of this by his lawyers, Bouchard instead sent 20 cops to watch the bikers. His plan was to irritate them enough to utter a threat and then arrest them all. The charges wouldn’t stick, but it would piss Boucher off. Nothing happened. The next day, he sent down 30 cops. That was enough. Boucher and his men left, but they’d come back from time to time.
A week later, on April 17, Nomad Normand “Biff” Hamel drove his wife and son to their pediatrician’s office in Montreal. Formerly Bouch
er’s right-hand man, Hamel had been sent to Laval to act as godfather of the Death Riders puppet gang after Scott Steinert was killed. He wasn’t any luckier. As he got out of his Mercedes in the doctor’s parking lot, he saw two masked men approaching. That was all the warning he needed. He ran as fast as he could, while his wife and son retreated back into the car. He didn’t make it out of the lot; he was killed by two gunshot wounds to the head. The first Nomad and the third full-patch Hells Angel to be killed in the war, Hamel became front-page news throughout Montreal. Many commentators assumed that the Rock Machine had assassinated him and that the war was back on. But if they had taken the time to drive past any of the clubhouses in the area, they would have noticed that no flags were at half-staff. The Hells Angels were not grieving. With Hamel out of the way, the Death Riders were quickly reorganized as the Hells Angels Montreal North, under the supervision of full-patch Sorel members Stéphane “Fesses” Plouffe and Benoît Frenette.
Boucher had other tasks on his agenda besides irritating cops and restaffing Laval. A friend of his got into debt with the wrong guy. André “Dédé” Desjardins was a former construction union chief from the Olympic era who had a reputation as a man who would use any resources at his disposal to get his way. “He was a tough guy. But at the same time you have to remember labor relations back then were tough as well,” said Henri Masse, president of the Quebec Federation of Labour. “During strikes, employers would use thugs and dogs and other means.”
After leaving union politics, police say Desjardins turned very successfully to loan sharking. After quickly amassing a fortune reported to be more than $25 million, he moved to the Dominican Republic and was so entrenched there that police said that no construction happened in the country without Desjardins getting a cut. But he still did plenty of business in Montreal and when Boucher asked for a breakfast meeting, they agreed on Shawn’s in the East End on April 25. Boucher asked Desjardins to forgive his friend’s debt. Desjardins said “no way.” With interest, the friend was now in for $400,000 and that was just too much for him to get away with. Boucher didn’t offer money; he didn’t offer any reasons for Desjardins to relent other than the fact that Boucher and his men were running the show in Montreal now.
It didn’t impress Desjardins, who had been around a lot longer than Boucher and had some powerful friends of his own. Unable to reach any sort of agreement, Desjardins asked if they could continue their discussion later. Boucher suggested the same place, same time on the following day. On the morning of April 26, Desjardins and a burly friend were sitting at the best table in Shawn’s as waitresses in bikinis poured coffee. Just after 9:15 a.m., Desjardins’ cell phone rang. Rather than speak inside the restaurant, Desjardins walked out to the parking lot. As he opened the door to his Cadillac SUV, he was shot 11 times by a masked assailant, who left a silencer-equipped handgun at the scene and fled into a waiting van. Police consulted traffic cameras in the area, but found no leads.
Twenty minutes after the murder, the police recorded a call from a tapped Montreal phone to the Dominican. The only words spoken (in French) were “Okay, go ahead.” At 10:30 a.m., someone broke into Desjardins’ condo in Puerto Plata and stole the contents of his safe. With Desjardins out of the picture, Journal de Montreal reporter Michel Auger wrote that criminals would have to go to the Hells Angels for their loan-sharking and money-laundering needs.
The next day, Boucher had his morning coffee at Au Bon Pain. He was met there by Commander Bouchard, who asked him what he knew about Desjardins’ murder. Boucher told him to talk to his lawyer. He did. That afternoon, the Montreal police had a brief, polite meeting with Boucher and his lawyer, Gilbert Frigon. Boucher said that he’d met with Desjardins at Shawn’s to discuss the weather in the Dominican and that he knew nothing about the murder. “Sad thing,” he said. He also promised to call them back “if he heard anything.”
Chapter 11
Desjardins’ murder wasn’t about a debt. The friend wasn’t even a Hells Angel. He was an associate of Montreal’s Rizzuto crime family. Although Stéphane Gagné had told police that Boucher’s ultimate goal was to drive the mafia out of Montreal, Boucher knew it would be unwise to launch another war against a bigger, more entrenched enemy, so he chose to work with them instead. Their common interest was cocaine.
The Nomads had an enviable business model. Five of them—Boucher, Robitaille, Denis Houle, André Chouinard and Michel Rose—administered what the club called The Table. They imported cocaine and distributed it to every Hells Angels chapter (except Sherbrooke, which had cut an earlier deal), puppet club and associated dealer in Quebec. Members of The Table received $5,000 a week, plus 10 percent of the profits on sales of their drugs. The cocaine came to The Table primarily from the Mejia Twins cartel in Colombia, although a much smaller amount came from contacts in Bolivia, Amsterdam and New York. The Table’s man in Colombia was Guy Lepage.
A hulking ex-cop who’d been kicked off the Montreal force for corruption, Guy Lepage arrived at the Mejias’s distribution center in Barranquilla in the summer of 1997 and stayed at the palatial estate of José Miguel Carvajal—a senior executive in the cartel. After brief negotiations, Carvajal and Lepage worked out an ingenious and effective plan. The Colombians would get cocaine to a Hells Angels operative in Miami, who would then get mules to drive it up to Montreal for distribution.
The only problem with the system was that it couldn’t handle large volumes. Cocaine shipments through Lepage averaged less than 500 kilos a month, far less than the Hells Angels needed to corner the Montreal market, let alone all of Canada. With cost seemingly no object, Lepage (on orders from The Table) convinced the Colombians to ship 2,400 kilos of cocaine directly to Quebec. In October 1998, under cover of darkness, a medium-sized pleasure craft with Miami registry docked off the coast of Gaspé, Quebec. Seven SUVs were waiting on shore. When they loaded, the cars took off at regular intervals towards Montreal. They all took slightly different routes to confuse police. As the last SUV drove through the Gaspé Peninsula, a Sûreté du Québec officer in the tiny village of Ste-Anne-des-Monts thought there was something strange about a scruffy-looking young man of about 20 driving a brand-new Chevrolet Trailblazer at exactly the speed limit just after sunrise, so he pulled him over. A quick search revealed 480 kilos of cocaine and a pager with the telephone numbers of Lepage and fellow suspected cocaine importers Raymond and Sandra Craig. But the rest of the shipment got through. With some minor alterations in delivery methods, the Gaspé landing spot became the Hells Angels’ primary cocaine source.
No matter how effectively The Table could get cocaine into Quebec, there was no way they could get enough to run the mafia out of business. With years of experience and thousands of contacts and associates in every major city between Barranquilla and Montreal, the mafia could import drugs nearly at will. Rather than a war, the Nomads wanted an alliance.
On June 21, 2000, Robitaille, Chouinard and Rose went to a fancy Italian restaurant in Laval to meet with Vito Rizzuto, his right-hand man Tony Mucci and two other tough-looking Italians. Mom Boucher had promised he’d attend, but didn’t show up. That was fine with Rizzuto, who scrupulously avoided meeting with any well-known underworld figures, and none was better known than Boucher. After it was agreed that the Italians and the bikers would work together, dividing the bounty of the Montreal drug market between them and defending it against outside influences, they moved on to lesser items. First, they set the minimum price for a kilo of cocaine on the streets of Quebec at $50,000. Anyone selling for less faced the death penalty. Second, they decided to split the proceeds of a telemarketing scam, aimed at Americans to make detection and prosecution more difficult, equally between the bikers, the mafia and the independent operators. Although the total take from the scam was about $1 million per week, it was by far the least important item on the agenda.
The partnership hinged on the agreement that the Hells Angels were required to eliminate any competitors, even if they fell within their ow
n ranks. Considering the rampant slaughter of his former SS friends in the Rock Machine, Boucher showed no reluctance to murder even his closest associates if it meant the bottom line would improve.
Then, Louis “Mèlou” Roy, president of the Trois-Rivières Hells Angels, arrived in Montreal on June 21, with bad news for Boucher. A police raid on the Blatnois, a puppet gang based in nearby Grand-Mère, had been devastating and all of its important members plus several close associates were in jail. Robitaille told Roy not to worry, as that sort of thing happened from time to time and if he had been protecting himself properly, he had nothing to worry about from police.
He did, however, have a problem with the Nomads. Roy had been at the top of the underworld in Trois-Rivières for so long that he had built up an enviable fiefdom. He bought his cocaine from his own suppliers and set his price according to supply and demand. It was virtually always less, often quite a bit less, than $50,000 a kilo. Robitaille warned him that he should buy his cocaine from The Table. Roy refused. Robitaille told him that even if he didn’t deal with The Table, his friendship with Boucher and other Nomads could keep him alive if he got in line with their retail price demand. Again Roy refused. He attended the Nomads’ fifth anniversary party the following night and was never seen alive again.
Next on the Nomads’ list were Raymond and Sandra Craig, the largest remaining independent drug dealers in Montreal. The Craigs could operate without interference from the mafia, Hells Angels and even the Colombian cartels because Sandra was the daughter of a powerful Bolivian drug lord. Before the deal with the Italians, the Craigs had been consistent and reliable cocaine suppliers for the Nomads. Now they were competitors. On August 29, the Craigs were driving home after a quiet night of dinner and drinks at one of the chalets in Ste-Adèle. They were stopped at a red light when Sandra heard a crash. Four bullets came through the back window, three of them penetrating Raymond’s skull and killing him. The assassins, on a Suzuki Sidekick, assumed both people in the car were dead and sped away. It was the second attempt on Sandra’s life in two months and she was scared. She went home and shut down her business.
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 52