Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  These weren’t mere holiday snaps; they chronicled Stadnick’s entire career. “There were albums devoted to his recovery from the accident. You could see his progression; he might have wanted them for a lawsuit,” said Pacey. “And there were all kinds of pictures of him with other bikers and even some celebrities.” Pacey put the photos of Stadnick with the other Hells Angels and Nomads in chronological order and noticed that he edged ever closer to the front-row center position normally reserved for the president. In the office, he found a gallery of pictures he was sure gave Stadnick a huge amount of pride. In the photos, he was seen in friendly poses with a number of celebrities, including NHL players, NHL coach Pat Burns (a former cop), and a well-known African-American movie star. At this point, Pacey had to admit he was a bit impressed, but what he found in the night table drawer chilled him. There were a number of photos of rival bikers from the Rock Machine and other gangs. There was a picture of a man playing softball with the words “Tommy—RCMP informant” written on it. And, finally, there was a picture of Pacey himself. “You like to think you’re pretty sharp and you know they’re following you, but I still have no idea when and where they took that picture,” he said. “I used to like to tell people I found it on her side of the bed; I’ll bet Walter really appreciated that.”

  Chapter 13

  They all underestimated France Charbonneau. They shouldn’t have. The lawyer who reopened the prison guard murder case against Maurice “Mom” Boucher and would prosecute him was smart, creative and fearless. She brought a 79-1 record in murder cases into the courtroom and had no intention of letting Boucher get away again. She spent months of late nights and weekends studying the first trial trying to figure out what went wrong. She distilled it into three things—bikers in the courtroom intimidated the jury, Boucher’s defense lawyer used his ample charisma and professionalism to seduce the jury, and the judge did everything he could to discredit the testimony of informant Stéphane Gagné.

  When the second trial came around, it was far different from the first. Of course, there was a different judge. And as per Charbonneau’s instructions, nobody was allowed into the spectators’ area with any hint of insignia—no colors, no belt buckles, no labels, no nothing. You couldn’t even have a polo player on your shirt. Charbonneau also decreed that Boucher and the jury be out of sight of all spectators except media: there would be no contact between Mom and his gang or any intimidation of the jury this time.

  But there was little she could do about Jacques Larochelle, Boucher’s slick high-priced lawyer, until he made what Charbonneau believed was a huge mistake. When Larochelle found a slight discrepancy between Gagné’s testimony in the interrogation room and what he said in court, he turned on the witness. Larochelle accused Gagné of lying and asked him to explain. “I had been awake for 25 hours when I said that,” Gagné said, referring to his admission to Sergeant Robert Pigeon in the interrogation room years earlier. “I didn’t know what I was saying.” Larochelle sneered, “You didn’t look tired to me.” Charbonneau was stunned. Seizing the moment, she interrupted and shouted, “Let’s see the videotape!”

  The tape was played in court in glorious black and white. Gagné was babbling. His head was reeling and falling into his hands. Even through the grainy overexposed video, it was clear his eyes were unfocused and his skin was waxy. Gagné was exhausted to the point of collapse. And Larochelle’s credibility was shot. When the jury came back, the foreman announced that all but one of them had reached a decision and she wasn’t entirely sure what “reasonable doubt” meant. Once instructed by Judge Pierre Béliveau on the finer points of the law, they came back with a decision. On May 5, 2002, Maurice “Mom” Boucher was found guilty of two counts of murder for Diane Lavigne and Pierre Rondeau and one count of attempted murder for the shooting of Robert Corriveau. He betrayed almost no emotion as the bailiffs took him away.

  One down, 128 to go. Actually, the defendants were broken down into groups representing their level of involvement. The first 98—Hells Angels, members of puppet gangs and other associates—were to be tried individually for crimes they had committed or for evidence found at the site of their arrest. The next 17—all Rockers—were to be tried en masse for gangsterism, drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder. And the final 13—all of the Nomads and a few prominent Rockers—were charged with gangsterism, drug trafficking, conspiracy to commit murder and 13 charges of first-degree murder. From the testimony of Rocker Stéphane Gagné and former Rocker turned RCMP agent Stéphane Sirois, the prosecution had managed to trace a handful of the 160 or so murders from the war back to the Nomads and Rockers.

  The first of what the media would label mega-trials was an utter fiasco. For some reason, Jean-Guy Boilard, the man whose handling of the first Boucher case resulted in the need for another one, was selected to preside. In its opening argument, the prosecution entered 177 CDs as evidence. The defense immediately objected. Although the evidence on the disks amounted to no fewer than 693,000 pages of documents to go along with the 274,000 wiretapped conversations, 256,000 police logs and 211 videos, the defense wanted hard copies of everything on the CDs, claiming that documents on disk are much easier to forge or alter than those on paper. To support their claim, they brought in an expert witness from Vancouver. By happenstance, one of the prosecution team recognized him from another trial. The defense’s “computer expert” was actually a guy who owned a paving company on the West Coast and had served as an expert witness on the subject of asphalt about a year earlier. Boilard refused the request to print.

  The following day the entire seven-person defense team walked out of the courtroom, vowing not to return until their $500-a-day stipend from legal aid was doubled. Before an entire day was lost, Boilard raised their pay to an unprecedented $1,500 per day, on the condition they did no other work. Outraged, Quebec’s attorney general Paul Bégin protested, pointing out that the trial was likely to cost over $2.5 million in lawyers’ fees alone. Boilard held a press conference in which he threatened to suspend the trial if Bégin questioned his judgment again. Bégin backed down. The defense, looking at the biggest pay checks of their lives, started taking their time with their presentations and what had promised to be a long case started to appear endless.

  Boilard’s decision also affected the other mega-trial, where defense lawyers got a raise from $500 to $1,100 a day and worked just as slowly. With seven weeks of paid summer holidays, the trial dragged on. Justice Réjean Paul had a reputation as a tough, no-nonsense judge, but this case proved too much for him. The defense lawyers the bikers had collected were mostly boorish and unruly and did everything they could to delay and frustrate the proceedings. None was worse than Réal Charbonneau, who was representing a minor Rocker named Paul “Smurf” Brisebois. While Brisebois winked at his girlfriend in the audience, Charbonneau put on a show of rare insolence. He frequently ignored Paul’s commands and spoke right over him, often using a distasteful mockery of low Quebecois slang. According to one eyewitness, the defense lawyer even made what he believed was an obscene gesture toward the judge when he wasn’t looking. Five months after the trial began, just a little more than 10 percent of the witnesses had been heard from. Paul had had enough. He cited Charbonneau with contempt and removed him from the case. He had no choice but to offer Brisebois the choice of getting a new lawyer, defending himself or being removed from the mega-trial and tried alone. Brisebois wasn’t stupid; he took the third option and the trial became a bit less mega.

  Boilard ran into more trouble almost as soon as he got back in the courtroom. Gilles Doré, a lawyer he had publicly scolded in court in another case, sent him a letter complaining about his actions, which he called “abusive.” Boilard replied with an angrily worded letter of his own—a very bad idea. Doré leaked the response to the local media and they ran with it. A week after he wrote the letter, on July 22, 2002, Boilard stood up, told everyone gathered in the courtroom that because of a “reprimand,” he believed that he no longer h
ad “the moral authority, or even the necessary capacity,” to preside over the bikers’ trial. Despite the fact that 123 witnesses had testified, 1,114 exhibits had been shown and millions of taxpayers’ dollars had been spent, Boilard took off his robe, muttered something about “retirement” and went home. Pierre Béliveau, the judge who presided over Boucher’s conviction, was named to replace him but, as capable as he was, there was nothing he could do with the mess Boilard had left but declare a mistrial.

  It took seven months for the courts to get the pieces back together for a new trial. During that period, seven bikers had plea bargained to lesser crimes, some receiving sentences as short as three years. Another, Normand “Pluche” Bélanger (Sirois maintained he handled the gang’s ecstasy trade, mostly to high schoolers) called in sick. His doctor testified that Bélanger suffered from a veritable buffet of diseases, including diabetes, hypertension, cirrhosis of the liver and one other condition the judge wouldn’t allow to be published. When asked how long Bélanger had to live, the doctor said “no more than ten months.” Beliveau granted Bélanger a conditional release, so he could spend his final days with his eight-year-old daughter, on September 10. Fourteen months later, The Montreal Mirror reported that Bélanger was seen as he rented videos and took friends to “a downtown spaghetti restaurant” looking “chipper” and “youthful.” Two weeks after Bélanger’s release, fellow defendant René “Balloune” Charlebois asked to be excused for a toothache. He got one day off.

  Of course, things were different for Walter Stadnick and Donald Stockford. Neither they nor their high-priced Toronto lawyers spoke much French. Alan D. Gold, former president of the Canadian Criminal Lawyers Association and Edward Greenspan, who had defended such luminaries as former Nova Scotia premier Gerald Regan, theatre magnate Garth Drabinsky and millionaire wife-killer Helmuth Buxbaum, represented an enviable dream team. Neither came for free. They asked Judge Jerry Zigman for an English-language trial (the prosecution wanted them to undergo a bilingual trial with Boucher, André Chouinard and Brisebois) and, on September 18, 2003, it was granted. They were flexing their muscles early.

  But they didn’t frighten Randall Richmond, Quebec’s deputy chief prosecutor for organized crime, although he did later admit that he had studied and been influenced by Greenspan when he was in law school. Not only was Richmond fluent in English (like the defendants, he originally came from Hamilton), but he was the Crown’s most informed and effective prosecutor. But so impressive were the imported lawyers that Michel Rose, a francophone, decided to be tried in English. “I cross-examined him in English and he passed,” said Richmond. “The law says that you can be tried in either official language; it doesn’t have to be your first language or even your best language. You simply have to have an acceptable grasp of it.” Richmond described Rose’s English as “good enough” and said: “It was clear he chose an English trial because he wanted Greenspan to represent him.”

  Despite having lived for almost two decades in Quebec, neither Stadnick nor Stockford appeared to have learned much French. “The only times I ever heard their voices was on wiretapped phone conversations, and they always spoke in English,” said Richmond. “In fact, when other people, francophones, spoke with them, they always used English as well.”

  As with the previous trial, the defense team claimed ignorance of how to use the CD-mounted evidence and demanded that it all be printed and translated at government expense. The Crown agreed to translate and print all evidence it planned to bring into the trial. Unable to work out a deal, Gold and Greenspan then took the translation issue to the Supreme Court of Canada, which decided that the Crown need only translate and print what was necessary for its case. Although nothing was gained by either side, the translation issue delayed the case many weeks. “We consented to translating thousands of pages of evidence—we accepted it as part of doing a trial,” said Richmond. “We actually translated much, much more than we planned to use.”

  With the preliminary issues finally out of the way, the trial began in earnest on March 1, 2004. On the very first day, Greenspan surprised everyone in the courtroom by entering a guilty plea on Rose’s behalf. Eight other francophone bikers also pled guilty that day, including Nomad André Chouinard. Although they avoided a first-degree murder charge (which carries a mandatory 25-year sentence with no chance at parole), Rose and Chouinard did admit to the attempted murder of Sandra Craig and to importing more than four tons of Colombian cocaine into Quebec.

  With Rose gone, Stadnick and Stockford were led into the bullet-proof Plexiglas cage that served as a defendants’ box, their leg shackles rattling as they walked. Moments earlier, guards reported Stadnick sardonically chuckling with them and boasting that it wouldn’t be long before he was free again. Once in court, however, both looked impassive and serious. Neither made any gesture or revealed any emotion as Richmond read the 23 charges, including 13 of first-degree murder, against them. When the long list of crimes he was alleged to have committed was finally finished, Stadnick leaned into his microphone and in a low, quiet and steady voice said, “not guilty.”

  Gold and the defense team led in a number of witnesses and supporting evidence that portrayed both defendants as well liked and respected family men. He pointed out that Stockford had no criminal record and that Stadnick’s was slight, especially when compared to the other bikers on trial. The court heard about Stockford’s legitimate career as a movie stuntman and about how he’d landed a small role in the big-budget Jennifer Lopez film Angel Eyes. No mention was made of West End Talent, the stripper agency Stockford and his wife, Christine, ran back in Hamilton, or the fact that Stadnick had never held a legitimate job.

  The gangsterism and drug-trafficking cases against the bikers were very straightforward. The earlier trials had established the Nomads as fulfilling the requirements as a criminal organization as described by Bill C-95. Dozens of photographs and other documentary evidence were displayed before the court, establishing both Stadnick and Stockford as members of the Hells Angels and later, the Nomads. Although he did show that Stadnick was a particularly influential man within both groups, Richmond was never able to prove he was president, although the evidence supported it. In all of the posed group photos after the date in which Stadnick was alleged to have become president, he is sitting front-row center. And, after the same date, according to the testimony of police officers, Stadnick always rode on the front left of every biker procession they’d seen him in. Richmond brought in Guy Ouellette, the Sûreté du Québec’s (SQ) oft-quoted biker expert, to testify that, in his opinion, those bits of respect from the other bikers indicated that Stadnick was indeed president.

  Similarly, evidence and testimony that had already been introduced in the other mega-trials carried credibility against Stadnick and Stockford. The documents that Sandra Craig had provided were easily cross-referenced with those seized from the “Nomads National Bank” and from later arrests. Accounting records from March 30, 1999, to December 15, 2000, showed that $111,503,361 made its way through the Nomads with $10,158,110 coming from the Gertrude account for the purchase of 267 kilos of cocaine and 173 kg of hashish. Other documents revealed that the contact numbers for the Gertrude accounts led to phones and pagers used frequently and exclusively by Stadnick and Stockford.

  It would, of course, be harder to prove them murderers. There was not a shred of admissible evidence that either Stadnick or Stockford had ever killed anyone. But Richmond had established that they were both very influential men and that other bikers, particularly Rockers, were bound to carry out their commands. “In the cases where we had physical evidence of the murders—DNA, fingerprints—the murderers had already pled guilty,” said Richmond. “But just as a general is liable for any war crimes men under his command commit, we were convinced that Stadnick knew about the murders and did nothing to stop them.” The defendants were accused, therefore, of being responsible for the murders of Pierre Beauchamps, Marc Belhumeur, Yvon Roy, Johnny Plescio, Jean Rosa, P
ierre Bastien, Stéphane Morgan, Daniel Boulet, Richard Parent, Serge Hervieux, Tony Plescio, Patrick Turcotte, François Gagnon and Alain Brunette, as well as three counts of attempted murder in the cases of bombs that didn’t achieve their intended purpose. “We had no surprise evidence against them,” Richmond said afterward. “It was risky, a long-shot; I could have dropped the murder charges, but I felt that it was a theory that should be tested.”

  Because the defendants elected against a trial by jury, it was up to Justice Zigman alone to determine whether the state saw Stadnick and Stockford as gangsters, drug traffickers, murderers or all of the above. It didn’t take him long. On September 13, 2004, Zigman declared the two men in the defendants’ box guilty of gangsterism, drug trafficking and conspiracy to murder. There was not, he said, enough evidence to find them guilty of murder. Neither Stadnick nor Stockford showed any emotion as Zigman read his verdict or when he described them as “hardened criminals who show little or no hope of being able to straighten out their lives and cease participating in criminal activities. They are violent people who are a danger to society. They have expressed no remorse for their acts.”