Biker Trials, The

by Paul Cherry

  “What did you think then?” Marcoux asked.

  “I heard [the first] shot and a window break and I hid under the desk. I knew it was gunfire and I hid.” Bruneau’s testimony confirmed how badly the Hells Angels had botched the hit on him. Some of the photos that were found inside the getaway car were surveillance shots taken at a funeral he had attended but the photos were not of him. Whoever had supplied them to the shooters had written in pen “Serge Bruno” with an arrow pointing toward an unknown man.

  “Did you think you were the target?” Eric Marcoux asked. Bruneau paused for a long moment and his face gave away his anxiety. He rubbed his hand across his face. “Yes,” he replied, while admitting to the jury that he had a criminal record that included drug trafficking. “I was sure it was that. I thought it was because I was involved in drug trafficking.”

  “Who did you deal with?” Marcoux asked. Bruneau fidgeted and appeared deeply miserable. The defense lawyers objected strenuously to Marcoux’s questions. But Bruneau was eventually able to say that he was associated with Jean Rosa and Pierre Bastien.

  Despite a botched hit and the killing of an innocent man, the Hells Angels killed again only a little over a month later.

  Tony Plescio

  It would seem that the Hells Angels’ hits on rival gang members were becoming increasingly sloppy. On October 1, 1999, Johnny Plescio’s brother Tony was murdered in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant in Montreal North. Plescio had just taken his family to a children’s party at the restaurant. While Johnny Plescio’s murder appeared to be well planned — he was drawn to his window after the killer sliced his cable — Tony’s was reckless.

  Plescio was shot six times in the head and neck at point blank range in the parking lot. But a stray bullet struck Plescio’s wife, who was getting some diapers from the trunk of their car. The bullet wounded her foot, but she managed to make sure the couple’s child was safe in the car once she realized Plescio had fallen to the ground fatally wounded. Other people in the parking lot scattered; some were young mothers, terrified that their children were about to be killed. The shooter escaped in a car that sped away from the restaurant. As the shooter and a getaway driver crossed a bridge heading for Laval, the shooter apparently tried to toss the firearm into the Rivière-des-Prairies. Instead, the .357 Magnum fell to the pavement of an underpass below where it was later recovered by the police.

  Like his brother Johnny, Tony Plescio was a member of the Rock Machine. In 1990, he had been caught selling quarter-grams of cocaine for $30 out of the same bar on Bélanger Street owned by Johnny that someone had tried to torch twice during the biker war. At the time of his death, Plescio was waiting to be sentenced in a drug and weapons case.

  But Plescio had already made headlines years before the biker war ever started. He was arrested in 1985 in a strange incident that also involved Alex Hilton, one of several boxing brothers who came to prominence during the 1980s. By 1984 Alex and his brother Davey were both Canadian champions in their respective weight categories, and younger brother Matthew had a promising career ahead of him. But the Hilton name soon became as synonymous with crime as much as it was with boxing. The family was tied to Mafia leader Frank Cotroni, but the brothers’ crimes were, for the most part, tied to drinking. Alex Hilton in particular had been arrested several times for alcohol-induced mischief.

  On February 11, 1985, Plescio and Alex Hilton left the Action Disco Club, a bar on a service road of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through eastern Montreal, after a heavy night of drinking. While in the parking lot, Hilton reached into the trunk of his car and pulled out a .22 calibre rifle. A witness, fellow boxer Serge Cusson, later said that Hilton merely fired into the air and then Plescio grabbed the rifle and did the same. No one was injured in the shooting, but one of the shots did go through a window of a nearby building. The police were also told there had been an altercation inside the bar just before the shots were fired. Plescio was only fined and handed a probationary sentence for the offence.

  Patrick Turcotte

  On May 1, 2000, Patrick Turcotte was shot dead just after leaving a video rental store. Turcotte was a drug dealer who worked with the Rock Machine. Turcotte was crossing the street late in the afternoon when someone got out of a blue van and shot him in the back several times. The shooter then got into the van on the passenger side and it sped away. The gun used to kill Turcotte, a Beretta automatic pistol equipped with a custom-made silencer, was found lying under a white car, near where the van had been waiting. Two bystanders tried to help Turcotte and attempted to resuscitate him. When they loosened his belt, a gun fell to the ground. It had been stuck inside the back of his pants. His pager was left lying a few feet away.

  Ten minutes after the shooting, the blue van used in the murder exploded a few blocks away. It had been stolen earlier that day in Brossard. Witnesses saw two men run from it just before the loud blast. Police recovered two pairs of gloves on the ground nearby, and they were able to find DNA samples in both pairs. The DNA was later matched to Pierre (Peanut) Laurin and Paul (Schtroumpf) Brisebois. Both were Rockers at the time of Turcotte’s murder, but, on December 11, 2000, each was promoted to the status of prospect in the Hells Angels.

  In February 2003, while evidence in Turcotte’s murder was being heard in the trial before Justice Réjean Paul, Brisebois’ lawyer Real Charbonneau was rude to the judge after he cut off his cross-examination of a police witness. Paul ordered Charbonneau out of the courtroom and suspended the trial for the day. Charbonneau was charged with contempt, but was later acquitted. In the interim, Brisebois had his trial severed from the 12 other gang members. Months afterward, the entire trial came to an end when some of the accused reached plea bargain agreements.

  Brisebois and Laurin were not offered plea bargains, however, because of the solid evidence against them. But they did later agree to plead guilty to second-degree murder in the Turcotte case. In exchange, they were sentenced to life with a chance to apply for parole after serving ten years. The three years they spent behind bars awaiting the outcome of their case was not counted as double, as it usually is, so they would have to wait at least seven years before applying for parole. The pair also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking and gangsterism.

  François Gagnon

  François Gagnon’s murder would be just as sloppy as the Turcotte and Hervieux murders. But the homicide also indicated that either the Hells Angels were running out of targets or the Rock Machine were running out of capable people to deal their drugs: Gagnon was a drug dealer, but he was also mentally unstable.

  The early part of his criminal record indicates that Gagnon made a career out of drug dealing. On June 4, 1977, he was arrested with 27 grams of hashish and 7 grams of marijuana. Two years later he was charged with trafficking in cocaine. During the summer of 1980, he was caught selling small quantities of cocaine. In 1986, he was caught with 25 grams of hashish.

  Then in 1987, he was caught trying to smuggle 42 grams of hashish into the Bordeaux detention center. Gagnon had been out on a weekend pass and the guards suspected that he was smuggling drugs into the prison. They placed him in a special 72-hour cell, equipped with a modified toilet that didn’t flush, because they suspected Gagnon was smuggling hashish in through his stomach. They didn’t have to wait 72 hours. After one night, the guards came to check on Gagnon and found him sitting at the edge of the bed, balloons full of hashish near him. When he saw the guards he grabbed the balloons and threw them in the toilet.

  During the early 1990s, there were still signs that Gagnon was a very active drug dealer. But sometime after 1995, the criminal cases brought against him were of a very different nature. In 1997, he was charged with threatening the life of a Montreal police officer and his family. He was also charged with making threats against then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. A judge asked for a psychiatric evaluation, and the case was eventually dropped after Gagnon promised to take medication. But the following
year, he was charged with a series of strange crimes, including damaging a woman’s lawn furniture. On July 22,1998, he sent a package to Journal de Montréal reporter Michel Auger that spooked security guards at the newspaper. Again, a judge asked that Gagnon undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

  On September 22, 1998, Gagnon was arrested for making threats to Montreal Urban Community Police officers. Again, a judge asked for him to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. But Gagnon resisted. The psychiatrist ended up sending a letter to the judge in the case citing reasons for his inability to examine the accused. He wrote that Gagnon “would only come to an external clinic to have his welfare certificate renewed and to get benzodiazepine.” The psychiatrist also noted that the 350-pound Gagnon showed up for examinations intoxicated and that when he didn’t get benzodiazapine, a tranquilizer, he became aggressive and threatened the staff.

  So, after years of eliminating rival gang members, some of whom were millionaires, the Hells Angels decided to go after Gagnon, a man dependent on psychiatric medication to function.

  Gagnon was sitting in the kitchen of his Montreal North apartment while either one or two men quietly walked up the outside stairs at the back of his building. Gagnon was shot through the patio door that led to his kitchen. Three shots were fired from a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver, and three were fired from a .38 calibre revolver. Four of the shots struck Gagnon and he died quickly. The shooter or shooters left the scene in a blue Dodge Caravan. It was later spotted making an abrupt stop in the middle of the street a few blocks away. Three men were seen jumping out of the van. They all then jumped a nearby fence and disappeared into an alley.

  Four members of the Rockers during better days. From left to right: Gregory Wooley, Jean-Guy Bourgoin, Stéphane (Archie) Hilareguy and Daniel Lanthier.

  Back at the murder scene, the police recovered the gun used to shoot Gagnon. Inside the van they found the other firearm used in the murder, as well as a .357 Ruger revolver. They also found a fuel can with gasoline still in it and a box of flares. It appeared Gagnon’s assailants had tried to destroy the evidence but failed miserably. Police also recovered two pairs of running shoes. In a garbage can near where the van was abandoned, the police found two pairs of gloves. The fingerprints found on the flare box matched those of Stéphane (Archie) Hilareguy, a Rocker implicated in the murder of Yvon (Mon Mon) Roy, and his DNA was found in one of the pairs of running shoes. Inside the other pair the police found a DNA sample that would later be matched to Rocker Éric (Pif) Fournier. Inside one of the gloves found in the garbage can was a DNA sample that matched the unidentified sample recovered after the Hervieux murder.

  The fingerprints on the flare indicated that Hilareguy was in charge of destroying the evidence in the Gagnon hit, but he had apparently failed. His name was now tied to at least two Hells Angels’ hits and it appeared the Hells Angels could no longer tolerate the attention he had attracted. On June 16, 2000, less than two weeks after the Gagnon murder, Hileraguy’s young child was found standing outside his home in St-Roch while it burned. After the flames were extinguished the police found a body inside. It turned out to be Hileraguy’s 30-year-old girlfriend Natacha Desbiens. She had been shot to death before the house was set on fire. Several months later, Hilareguy’s remains were discovered in Potton, a small municipality in the Eastern Townships.

  5

  An Ocean of Cash

  On October 20,2004, Stéphane Plouffe, a longtime member of the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter, walked into the Montreal courthouse and surrendered himself to the Sûreté du Québec as had been arranged beforehand. Within hours, he was ushered into a courtroom where he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking. Plouffe had been in hiding for more than three years and his surrender put an end to one of the most successful criminal cases ever brought to a Quebec court.

  Project Ocean was an unexpected bonus for the police investigators who had spent years gathering evidence for what would lead to Operation Springtime 2001. It virtually landed in their laps, yet netted more full-patch members of the Hells Angels than any other investigation had in many years (with the exception of Project Rush the parallel investigation that led to Operation Springtime 2001). Project Ocean also helped the Sûreté du Québec settle an old score with Gerald Matticks, a man whose influence in the Port of Montreal made him a key asset to Boucher and the Hells Angels.

  On the same day Plouffe surrendered, he was sentenced to three years in prison. The police had little knowledge of how he had managed to avoid capture since 2001. Ironically, as he was preparing to do his time behind bars, some of the people who had almost immediately pleaded guilty to charges related to Project Ocean, and were serving much longer sentences than Plouffe’s, were just being released on parole.

  The Nomads Bank

  Of the 51 people charged in connection with Project Ocean, 50 were eventually sentenced, including 36 who received federal sentences averaging about four years. Only one person, a Hells Angel named Guy Dubé, would see his charges dropped because the evidence against him was very thin. Faced with the mounds of evidence the police had gathered in only six months, almost everyone charged in connection with Project Ocean pleaded guilty within months of being arrested. They were people from all walks of life, ranging from full-patch members of the Hells Angels to people who claimed they were only vaguely aware they were working for the gang.

  The focus of investigation was a collection of apartments the Nomads chapter had used to conduct the accounting of what had become a vast drug empire that stretched across Canada. The system, with its vaults, counting machines and detailed accounting, would be referred to in court as the Nomads Bank since it handled more money in some weeks than some branches of Canada’s chartered banks. The Hells Angels employed people they knew had no criminal records to run their bank with the hope they would never draw police attention to the place where the gang’s millions flowed. According to one investigator, some in the organization were 60 years old, others upwards of 80.

  “They have no criminal records. You don’t use known criminals to transport sums like this because they are more investigated by the police,” the officer would later say in court.

  But in September 2000, police tailing Jean-Richard (Race) Larivière, a member of the Rockers who was about to graduate to the level of prospect in the Nomads chapter, noticed that Larivière made frequent visits to an apartment building on Beaubien Street in Montreal. The surveillance opened a crack into the Hells Angels’ finances that soon produced a flood of evidence against the 50 people who ended up convicted. They ranged from a grandmother with expensive tastes who buzzed money couriers into her apartment building, to full-patch Hells Angels from across Quebec who were either making large cash deposits or, as was more often the case, withdrawals for their respective chapters. While making sentencing arguments before Judge Réjean Paul on September 23, 2003, prosecutor André Vincent made his assessment of what the Nomads Bank represented.

  “When you talk of legal businesses in Quebec, these are figures that correspond to something much higher than a medium-sized business can hope to have. The sales for the 39-day period are in the order of $18,104,000. That amount corresponds to the sale of 452 kilos of cocaine and 115 kilos of hashish.” It was during the April 9, 2001, bail hearing of Jean Adam and Dominic Tremblay, both minor players in the Nomads Bank, that all the details began to spill out. Canada now had an open window on what the biker war was truly about: millions in drug money.

  Richard Despaties, a Sûreté du Québec officer, testified during the hearing.

  “How did this investigation get initiated. During what period?” prosecutor Valerie Tremblay asked him.

  “First of all, it started around July 25 [2000], in another case, there was an informant named Dany Kane, who we called 1N3683,” Despaties said, referring to the member of the Rockers who had been feeding information to the police since the beginning of the war. “Dany Kane was a member of the Rockers and served as the chauffeur for Normand Robita
ille who is a Nomad. And, from what I know, Normand Robitaille had asked Dany Kane to watch his leather briefcase and Dany Kane searched [it]. He found certain documents, photocopied them and turned them over to his controllers.”

  During the summer of 2000, Robitaille had decided to try Kane out as a chauffeur and someone to run his errands. It was a position of trust. The fact Kane was still working for both the police and the Hells Angels was incredible at that point. He had started working as an informant for the police in October 1994, after contacting RCMP Sgt. Jean-Pierre Lévesque through a call he placed to Interpol. Sgt. Lévesque set up a meeting. On October 18, 1994, he met at a Best Western in Dorval at 6 p.m. with Lévesque and Sgt. Pierre Verdon. To prove his worth, Kane told the officers several things about the Hells Angels and one of their puppet gangs, the Evil Ones.

  “The source has remarkable potential,” Verdon would write in his notes of that meeting, which began a working relationship that ended in 1997 when Kane was arrested for a murder in Nova Scotia. Kane’s trial for the homicide ended up being tossed out of court, and he slowly worked his way back into the Rockers. The fact that he was so close to key members of the Hells Angels was what kept the police interested in him, despite the fact that when he agreed to work as an informant the second time around he confessed to having murdered for the gang.

  About two years after being arrested for the Nova Scotia murder, Kane was working for new police handlers in the Regional Integrated Squad in September 1999. He started out working like he had for the RCMP, providing information and being paid each time he did so. By March 2000, he had signed a contract that meant he was officially working for the police as a double agent and expected to eventually testify in court. Before signing the contract, Kane admitted to all of his crimes, including a murder he had committed while working as a tipster for the RCMP and had tried to pin on someone else through the information he was feeding the police.