Still considering him a trusted confidant, Bourgoin invited Sirois out for a fancy sushi dinner in the West End. In fact, Bourgoin was considering recommending him for a promotion. Rather than the “baseball team” (the squad of Rockers who intimidated debtors and enemies with fists and bats), Bourgoin wanted Sirois to join the “football team” (the Rockers who eliminated enemies with guns and bombs). The work was less physically taxing, the pay was much higher and the chances for advancement were much greater. Sirois said he was interested, but that he needed more details, especially when it came to the cash. Bourgoin laughed and laid out the compensation package like any other prospective employer. The Hells Angels, Bourgoin said, would pay $100,000 for every full-patch Rock Machine member murdered, $50,000 for every prospect and $25,000 for every hangaround or known associate.
Ginette Martineau and Raymond Turgeon were exactly the kind of people Beauchamp was making fun of when he was talking to Sirois. She was 49, he was 52 and they lived together in a nondescript apartment in the suburbs. They worked together at Acces-Sport, a privately owned licensing office that handled automotive issues for the insurance bureau of Québec. Money was always tight and thrills were few and far between. So when a charming young man offered to pay Martineau for some information about some license plate numbers, she was eager to deal.
On January 17, 2000 Martineau handed her new friend a photocopy of the license and insurance information for a man named Marius Poulin. It included his home address and phone number. She got $200 in return. Ten days later, Poulin was found dead in the stairwell of his apartment building.
Before she was caught, Martineau gave her friend another important file in exchange for $200. It was for Michel Auger, who had never visited their Rue Ontario store. “For some reason, he gave the newspaper building as his home address,” said Randall Richmond, the prosecutor who tried Martineau. “And that’s where they got him.” It became increasingly clear that Martineau was passing information to the Hells Angels’ executioners. “A man’s life went for $200, that’s what it amounted to,” said Richmond, referring to Poulin. “It’s pretty horrifying.” Though they couldn’t pin conspiracy on Martineau or Turgeon, they did manage to convict them on 25 breach-of-trust charges and the 25 charges of fraudulent use of insurance-board files. They both received sentences of five years. And, although they could never find the triggerman for the Auger shooting, Richmond did put the man who supplied the weapon, a Hells Angel’s associate named Michel Vezina, behind bars. Vezina was sentenced to 59 months for trafficking the .22-caliber Ruger that Auger was shot with and a far more lethal Luigi Franchi submachine gun. It was his second conviction for trading illegal weapons in three years.
Significantly, an unnamed party requested four publication bans for the Martineau-Turgeon trial. Judge Maurice Galarneau granted them all. Under his orders, the media were not allowed to report what happened to the other people whose information was accessed; they could not report any speculation by lawyers or witnesses as to whom the information would have helped; they could not name the party who asked for the bans and, perhaps ridiculously, they could not reveal the subject Auger normally wrote about.
One person Auger wrote about frequently was Peter “Buddy” Paradis, one of the most powerful members of the Rock Machine. He didn’t start out big. In 1981, at the less-than-legal age of 16, he started working as a stripper in Montreal’s gay clubs. After two years on the stages and tables, Paradis learned a more lucrative trade—dealing drugs, mainly cocaine. He made a pretty good living as an independent until the war broke out and he was forced to pick sides. In June of 1994, he was one of many small-time dealers approached by Rock Machine founding member Renaud Jomphe to join their side. It was hard to say no.
Jomphe—known by some as the “King of Verdun”—was a well-known dealer long before the Rock Machine was an entity. Paradis agreed and his fortunes immediately improved. Jomphe sincerely liked Paradis, taught him the intricacies of the industry and gave him contacts that increased his reach. At the height of the war, on October 18, 1996, Jomphe went out for dinner at the Kim Hoa restaurant in Verdun with two of his henchmen, Christian Deschesnes and Raymond Laureau. It was his last supper. They were already drunk when a masked man approached their table and raked them with submachine-gun fire. Jomphe and Deschesnes died immediately and Laureau was injured severely enough to end his gangster career.
By that time, Paradis had shown he was smart, courageous and ready for the big time. They gave him Jomphe’s old fiefdom. Not only did his income almost quadruple, but he also became a Rock Machine prospect. With added rewards came added responsibilities. On April 11, 1997, Paradis was driving through the East End with two of his dealers, Mario “Marteau” Filion and Simon “Chiki” Lambert, when Lambert spotted one of the enemy. Hells Angels-associated dealer Raymond Vincent was standing on a street corner as they passed by. Filion, who was driving, turned the corner and went around the block. Lambert put on a ski mask, pulled out a gun and rolled down his window. As they passed by again, Lambert shot Vincent three times. He later died in an area hospital.
Life as the boss wasn’t always easy. When one of Paradis’s dealers, Yan Bastieri, complained that Hells Angels associate Eric Perfechino was muscling in on his business, Paradis gave him a gun and told him to “do what you know you have to do.” Perfechino was murdered a week later.
As the war intensified, Paradis never went anywhere without his bodyguard Daniel “Poutine” Leclerc. On the surprisingly cool summer night of August 10, 1998, Leclerc drove Paradis to his home in Lasalle. Neither driver nor passenger noticed the two men parked in the black Ford Taurus in front of the house. As Leclerc drove off, two masked men emerged from the Taurus and shot Paradis four times before escaping. After eight days in a downtown hospital and still weak, Paradis returned home.
As soon as he was healthy enough, Paradis went back to work. His contacts in the Rock Machine told him that the gang’s brass was pleased with his efforts, but would not be reluctant to give his position to someone they considered more courageous if his recovery lingered on much longer. Things weren’t going well for the Rock Machine and they needed money fast. The Hells Angels were winning the war and more and more street-level dealers were defecting from the faltering Alliance. But the “Hells” (as the Rock Machine called them) weren’t the only enemy.
On March 9, 1999, Paradis and eight of his dealers were arrested by Carcajou. He made bail and, desperate for cash, quickly started trying to collect on his debts. In January 2000, Paradis sent his younger brother Robert (who’d been both shot and arrested in the previous year) and tough guy Jimmy Larivée to collect from a particularly annoying customer. Gilles Nolet supported his rather large cocaine habit by stealing jewelry, and he was always hanging around Paradis, hoping the coke would come out and they’d party. On one night out before Paradis was shot, Nolet told him that a Colombian had sold him a kilo of excellent coke and that he could have it for just $15,000. Paradis bought it and Nolet faded away. When the coke turned out to be so impure as to be practically worthless, Paradis put out word that he was coming for his money. The shooting and the arrest deferred the debt, but when Paradis was finally able to do something about it, he did. But before his little brother and Larivée could get to Nolet, he was murdered in a bar in Côte-Saint-Paul.
Things just weren’t working out for Paradis in Montreal. His funds were drying up and his sources of income were being murdered, the Hells Angels had taken over his territory and his dealers, and the police had an excellent case against him. He was one of the first four people to be charged under C-95, Canada’s new anti-gangster law. Facing a bleak future outside of prison and thinking about his wife and son, Paradis told his lawyer to cut him a deal. In exchange for a lighter sentence (12 years with a chance at early parole), Paradis promised to tell everything he knew about the Rock Machine, the Hells Angels and the criminal underworld in Montreal.
Paradis wasn’t the only prominent member of the Rock Machi
ne who lost faith in their ability to compete with the Hells Angels, at least in Montreal. At about the same time Paradis and his men were arrested, founding Rock Machine member and former SS man Paul “Sasquatch” Porter packed up his operation (including a few trustworthy dealers) and moved to Ottawa. With Hells Angels turning dealers all the time, the 6-foot 6-inch, 420-pound Porter found it increasingly difficult to hold onto his territory at the foot of the notorious Boulevard St-Laurent. But maintaining a staff wasn’t the only problem Porter had in Montreal; he was also a conspicuous target. While driving his Chevy Dually pickup down Route 341 near the North Shore village of L’Épiphanie on May 31, 1997, Porter was passed by a Mustang. As the other car came even with his driver’s side window, Porter reflexively turned his head. He saw a young man lower his window, draw a gun and unload a magazine of automatic fire. When Porter collected himself on the side of the road, he was surprised that all he had suffered was a scratch on his arm; the door of his pickup was full of holes and his bullet-proof vest would need replacing. Less than a year later, it happened again. Porter was driving in the East End when seven men opened fire on his truck. He put it in reverse and escaped without a scratch.
A few weeks later, he decided to move to Ontario. He and his old friend André “Curly” Sauvageau (another former SS man) were just beginning to make inroads into Ottawa’s modest drug market and serve as godfathers for the Rock Machine’s fledgling Kingston chapter when fellow Rock Machine member Joe Halak invited them to his Canadian Thunder motorcycle show in Georgetown, a quiet little town just west of Toronto. Although the Hells Angels didn’t show up in person, they did send a gift. That morning, July 21, 2000, the Toronto Sun sent a technician to 341 Guelph St. in Georgetown to fix a newspaper box that had been malfunctioning for weeks; it had been giving away free newspapers. When the unsuspecting repairman arrived, he was surprised to find a box of 4,000 nails surrounding 2.2 kilos of C4 plastic explosive. Although police surmised that Porter was the intended target, there was little doubt that dozens of innocent motorcycle enthusiasts would have been killed or maimed if the bomb had exploded at the show.
On the outside, Porter was unaffected by the attempts on his life. When Boucher and Fred Faucher signed the truce that officially ended hostilities between the two gangs, Porter was front and center with his oversized leather jacket and its massive Rock Machine patch. Two months later, he crossed the lines. On December 27, 2000, just two days before Stadnick welcomed 150 new Ontario bikers to the Hells Angels, Porter switched sides, bringing Sauvageau and his dealer network with him. It was a tremendous loss for the Rock Machine and a huge victory for the Hells Angels. “It’s not like going from the Conservatives to the Liberals; it’s like going from the Hatfields to the McCoys,” one Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer said. “He could never get away with something like that in the United States or in Europe, but Canada’s a different place.”
Many in the media have speculated that Porter’s defection was due to his old friendship with Boucher from the SS days, but the reverse is probably true. Porter walked the Rock Machine walk during the war and was one of their most stalwart, if not overly aggressive, members. It was only once Boucher was back in Maison Tanguay for the prison guard murders that Porter would negotiate with the Hells Angels. “I think he blamed Boucher for the war,” said one Hull-based dealer who claims to know Porter and Sauvageau well. “But he had no problem with Wally.” And it must have been clear to him that with the rapid expansion of the Hells Angels nationwide, his chances for survival as one of the most prominent of their enemies were dwindling.
Stadnick was gracious in victory. Porter was not only accepted into the club, but he and his partners in Ottawa were reinforced with a few Québec Hells Angels and granted the title of Nomads Ottawa. It was not only an acknowledgment of Porter’s worth to the Hells Angels, but also an indication of how serious were Stadnick’s plan for Ontario. It was the third Nomads chapter in Canada, after one was set up in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby in September 1998 to control the rapidly expanding chapters on the West Coast. Just as the Hells Angels’ name, logo and concept had proven desirable enough to franchise a generation earlier, Stadnick’s Nomads idea had proven prosperous enough, and immune enough from prosecution, for it to be copied in other places with enough business to support an elite biker management team.
While the Hells Angels may have looked invincible from the inside, the police were gearing up for their own war with the gang. The RCMP, SQ, OPP and local police forces in Montreal, Québec City, Vancouver, Toronto and Hamilton came together for a project as large, far-reaching and unprecedented as Stadnick’s massive patch-over had been. Armed with over 264,000 wiretaps, miles of videotape, hundreds of photographs and documents and the testimony of Stéphane Gagné, Stéphane Sirois, Peter Paradis, Sandra Craig and others, the allied police forces launched Operation Printemps.
As soon as all the documentary evidence was scanned and loaded onto CDs by the RCMP, a network of ERMs (Esquoades Regional Mixte or Regional Integrated Squads) involving 23 different police forces were set up in areas where Hells Angels and puppet club activity was particularly heavy—Montreal, Québec City, Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke, Hull and Jonquière. “It was the first time that a long-term joint force operation had been put in place in Québec,” said RCMP Sergeant Tom O’Neill, head of the Montreal ERM. “We had several JFOs in the past, but they generally had short-term mandates with one file, or they involved one group or one event. If we needed resources that were not available at one police force, we would go to another police force.”
On the afternoon of March 26, 2001, two days before the huge operation was to launch, O’Neill hosted a meeting with hundreds of officers from various police forces. The crowded auditorium sat spell-bound as O’Neill went through a long PowerPoint presentation detailing the evidence, the suspects and the strategies involved. Although most of the cops had an inkling that they were being gathered to arrest some Hells Angels, almost all of them were shocked at the size of the operation. “We were stunned,” said one SQ officer. “It was like we were taking down the whole gang.” The cops in attendance were so impressed with their mission that few said anything before O’Neill opened the floor to questions. Even then, the officers needed to take a moment to compose themselves. The scale of the operation was simply overwhelming. There were warrants for a total of 142 bikers (although four were assumed dead), including the entire Nomads, Rockers and Evil Ones clubs. Charges would include conspiracy, drug trafficking, money laundering, gangsterism and, of course, murder. When O’Neill finally finished, he was given a standing ovation. O’Neill later joked that he should have charged admission and sold popcorn.
As successful as the meeting was, O’Neill and the other managers of Operation Printemps couldn’t help but worry. With as big an operation as they were planning it was critical that word not leak out. They weren’t so much worried that one of the 2,000 officers might tell a wife or girlfriend what was going on, but they couldn’t stop thinking about how Gagné and other informants had told them about how Boucher, Scott Steinert and others had bragged about contacts within the police. If even just one biker found out about the operation and spread word, it could be disastrous. Years of work and millions of tax dollars would be lost and hundreds of officers would be put into grave danger.
It started at 4:30 a.m. Paul, who manages a sporting goods shop, was walking his dog before heading downtown to open the store when he saw a convoy of police vehicles come speeding out of the Complex Sportif Claude Robillard. “I lost count after I saw 30 go by,” he said. “They were in a big hurry and they had all their stuff.” By midnight, police in Québec had conducted raids in more than 200 locations in 77 different municipalities, and 118 bikers and their associates were behind bars. Police also seized huge amounts of cash and biker property (including all three of Mom Boucher’s South Shore homes) under proceeds of crimes legislation. Cooperating police forces in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia arres
ted ten more bikers, including Stockford. “We’re talking about the most important operation of this kind that we’ve ever had,” said Montreal police Commander André Durocher.
“It’s unprecedented.” Most of the big names in the Hells Angels—Normand Robitaille, Michel Rose and even Boucher’s son Francis—were paraded past TV cameras on their way to jail. One news report showed a 77-year-old accountant, who had been laundering money for Hells Angels, uncovered by Project Ocean, pathetically asking the police not to put him in Bordeaux prison because he’d just had prostate surgery. Only one Nomad was not arrested: David “Wolf ” Carroll, who had been named in many of Kane’s reports. When his name was conspicuously absent from the list of those arrested, some in the media wondered in print if it was because he was an RCMP informant.
Operation Printemps was wildly successful, but it failed on one important count. The only Nomad the police failed to put behind bars that day was Stadnick. Some sources claim he was tipped off and making a run for it, while others counter that the giant take-down coincidentally fell on his anniversary with Kathi Anderson. Either way, Stadnick was in Jamaica when the arrests happened in Canada. When confronted, the Hamilton police claimed they knew he was gone, but they busted into his house anyway, just to be sure. “We knew where he was,” Hamilton-Wentworth Chief Ken Robertson said the day after the raids. “And we know where he is. And it’s only a matter of time before he faces the music like the rest of them.”
But they were taking no chances. With the likelihood of Stadnick willingly returning to Hamilton to face charges slim, Steve Pacey, the Hamilton biker specialist, called O’Neill and told him where Stadnick was. While the RCMP and the Jamaican Defense Force SWAT team were arresting Stadnick in Jamaica, it was Pacey’s responsibility to search Stadnick’s house. Much of what he found, he expected. There were closets full of fancy clothes—“he had racks and racks of Armani suits and Kathi had expensive shoes out the wazoo,” he said—and office equipment. He was struck by the cleanliness of the house and a decor far subtler that Stadnick’s often flamboyant appearance would suggest. But what really surprised him were the pictures. “The inside of the house was full of photographs,” he said. “Much of the wall space was devoted to framed pictures and there were piles and piles of photo albums everywhere.”
Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle Page 55