by Paul Cherry
The financial compensation called for in the contract was indicative of Kane’s value as an informant. He was required to collaborate with the Sûreté du Québec and would be paid three installments of more than $500,000 each after Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out and as the Project Rush investigation made its way through the courts where he was expected to testify. The contract also called on the Sûreté to cover several of Kane’s expenses like his mortgage, $587 per month for his motorcycle and the rental of a Neon and two Plymouth Voyageur vans. The police gave Kane $600 for new clothing because Normand Robitaille once asked him to dress more stylishly; he was given $1,000 to buy a gift for René Charlebois’ wedding; he was given money to cover his contribution to the Rockers’ ten percent fund. All of this put the police in a strange position where they were financially supporting the gang.
But in the end Kane never spent a day on the witness stand. Instead, he took his own life for reasons that are not known. He was found dead inside the garage of his home in Saint-Luc on August 7, 2000. He had died of carbon monoxide poisoning after starting up a luxury car, opening the sunroof and the windows and letting the garage fill with the deadly fumes.
Knowing that he was under constant police surveillance, Robitaille once asked Kane to drop him off at a métro station and handed his underling the briefcase for safekeeping. Kane received the briefcase around 5 p.m. He raced to meet his controllers and they photocopied the documents inside. Within three hours, Kane had the briefcase back with all the originals and was ready to pick up Robitaille as planned at another métro station several kilometres from the one where he had dropped him off. The investigators instantly recognized the names of five men tied to the Rock Machine among the documents Robitaille was carrying. That Robitaille would be interested in personal information on his rivals came as no surprise. But the investigators struggled to make sense of coded accounting ledgers that were also inside the briefcase.
The Vault Opens
“They were on 8.5 by 14 pages with all kinds of names, names we did not know, with money figures next to them,” Despaties said at the bail hearing, offering several copies of the documents to the lawyers involved. “At the office, we looked at these documents but we couldn’t understand them because the names on the documents are not the surnames of bikers that we knew. Because we knew the bikers by very specific surnames, we looked at it and we said we didn’t understand, except that we knew it was an accounting sheet for drugs.” Despaties explained that the figures next to the names appeared with dates as well. In one column, figures were accompanied by the initials BL, and in another, BR. Despaties said he immediately took them to be abbreviations of the French words blanc and brun. He said that in his six years of experience in narcotics, he came to know the word blanc,French for white, was commonly used as a code word for cocaine, and brun, French for brown, meant hashish.
Despaties said that at the moment of this finding the police were heavily involved in Project Rush, which was within months of coming to an end. Kane’s discovery was set aside and initially not considered a high priority.
Jean-Richard (Race) Larivière, a prospect in the Nomads chapter
“The documents were placed into exhibit. There wasn’t a prolonged investigation except that Dany Kane, the informant in the case, was doing drug deals with certain members,” Despaties said. “If he wanted to buy a kilo of cocaine, he had to go through Jean-Richard Larivière, who was a member of the Rockers as well. By the month of September 2000, we started to follow Jean-Richard Larivière. On the first days we were following him,” Despaties elaborated, “Mr. Larivière went to a condo situated at 7415 Beaubien in Montreal. What we found curious about Mr. Larivière was that it was a building with an entrance on Beaubien and an underground parking lot on the east side of the building. Mr. Larivière entered the building by what I would call a panic door, but it required a key. According to the people following him, Mr. Larivière had the key. It caught our attention, but nothing more than that. We thought that maybe he was visiting a member of his family. We didn’t know. However, shortly after, Mr. Larivière returned to this building twice. That’s when we decided there must be something going on inside. We started to do surveillance for weeks at the building to see what was going on.”
Despaties said that during their surveillance, the police noticed that a known drug dealer named Paul Gaudreau visited apartment 504 inside the building several times. They checked with HydroQuébec, the provincial utility, and were told that there was very little electricity being consumed inside the apartment. They also noticed that during nighttime hours lights were rarely used inside the apartment. As the interest grew, investigators dug up a months’ old intelligence report that made mention of the Beaubien Street building. The report detailed how, on August 31,2000, a police surveillance team had tailed Sylvain Laplante, a member of the Rockers as he left his hometown of Valleyfield, an eastern Quebec city near the Ontario border, in a red Ford Taurus. Hours later he showed up at the Beaubien Street apartment building in a Buick Century. He entered the building with a briefcase.
Despaties said the information was enough to get a search warrant. “We went inside the apartment. It was an apartment that did not have much furniture. What was peculiar was that there was very little clothing and the refrigerator was empty. It led us to believe that no one actually lived in the apartment.” What they did learn was that the apartment was being rented by a retired member of the Canadian military who was actually living in Hull at the time. The police listened in on a conversation the man had had with Richard Gemme, the accountant behind the Nomads Bank. Gemme joked that it was a good thing the military man had retired because if the police ever found out he was lending his name to rent apartments for the Hells Angels it would likely ignite a large-scale investigation.
The police got a warrant to place a listening device and video camera in the apartment on October 16,2000. Despaties said that during surveillance they saw other people show up at the address. The first to catch their attention was Jacques Nepveu, a former member of the Rowdy Crew, a Hells Angels’ underling gang based in Lavaltrie, a town east of Montreal. Despite having left the Rowdy Crew, Nepveu was still known to be close to the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter. The police watched as Nepveu arrived at 7415 Beaubien Street on October 3, 2000. He was carrying a bag. But when he left, he had no bag.
Six days after spotting Nepveu, Sgt. Pierre Boucher of the Sûreté du Québec managed to make his first surreptitious entry into the apartment. According to Despaties, “When we installed the camera and the audio in the apartment, we noticed that people would show up on Tuesdays, mostly on Tuesdays, but also on Thursdays, from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, and the person who took care of the apartment was a man named Robert Gauthier. He did not live at the address but somewhere else in Montreal.
“Most of the time it would happen like this: people would show up at [apartment] 504, enter inside the apartment and hand over a bag to Mr. Gauthier. After that the clients would leave. What was very particular to Mr. Gauthier in his methods of operation was that after the clients would leave he was very vigilant. He would look through the peephole, he would look out the patio doors. Once the clients had driven away, we would see him leave 504 for a minute or two and return to 504. We realized that there was certainly another apartment that Mr. Gauthier was going to because he would always leave with the bags.”
“And when he came back?” Tremblay asked.
“His hands were empty,” Despaties said, adding that as they continued their investigation, the police found that Gauthier was traveling down one floor to apartment 403. Inside apartment 504, meanwhile, the television would play all the time. Whenever someone showed up with a bag of money, a radio would be turned up loud. Despaties said they could hear almost no conversations on their wiretaps.
In order to more fully monitor Gauthier, the police got a warrant on October 24 that enabled them to do electronic surveillance inside apartment 403. It
turned out to be a sparsely furnished four-and-a-half rooms with a safe inside a bedroom cabinet. A bill for the safe was found in a kitchen cupboard. There were no clothes in the closets and no food in the fridge or cupboards.
“It was just like apartment 504 except that there were a lot of gym bags,” Despaties said. “There were all kinds of them, all kind of brands. They were empty and piled inside a closet.” Another investigator later remarked that the pile of gym bags was stacked about five feet high.
“We noticed that Gauthier was bringing the bags from 504 to 403 and returning to 504 to wait for clients. Except that when Mr. Gauthier would bring the bags to 403, we entered after he left. We had a key and we counted how much money was in the bags and looked at the notes that were inside the bags,” Despaties said. “The smallest amount we found was around $5,000. The biggest was $600,000” Inside the bags, investigators always found little notes with codes on them. Despaties said that as the investigation progressed investigators began to sort out who the drug dealers were behind the codes.
What the police would later learn was that couriers who were bringing the money to the apartment had very specific instructions. Carl Ouellette, a man who was making deliveries for the Quebec City chapter and one of the people arrested in Project Ocean, would later reveal an important detail the police had not learned during their investigation. Ouellette said that on the days he made deliveries he was instructed to send out a coded message on a pager when he was at least an hour from the apartment building. The message would include what time he wanted to make the delivery. Then he would wait for a coded reply on the pager giving him the green light to make the delivery. Investigators soon noticed that a man they later identified as Stéphane Chagnon would enter apartment 403 and take control of the bags, check the money and then record the amounts on a computer. On October 25, the police entered apartment 403 and made copies of a ledger, a diskette and the hard drive on a laptop computer. Cracking the passwords for the computer files proved absurdly easy as they were all “0000.”
“From the beginning of November 2000 we had a surveillance team outside the building. All of the clients who brought money were filmed. Most of the time, their licence plate and car were filmed at the same time,” Despaties said. Chagnon would transfer the money to another apartment building, 8101 Place Montoire, in Anjou and just a short trip west of the Beaubien Street address. Through their surveillance, police learned he would always head for apartment 309,rented by a 64-year-old woman named Lise Gelinas.
“What was curious in this part of the investigation was that Lise Gelinas was renting apartment 308 on Place Montoir and a Lise Germain Gelinas was renting apartment 309. We found that curious,” said Despaties, who also reported that the police had obtained a warrant and entered apartment 309. “At that location, what we found were money-counting machines, elastic bands, everything needed to count money. Three counting machines if I’m not mistaken and a large safe [with a digital combination]. No sign of life though, and no clothing.”
The police got a warrant to place an audio wire in the apartment. Despaties said that what the police learned next amazed them.
“They were counting [money] every morning. We thought it was a bank. It went from eight in the morning to between 10 or noon. There was counting all the time. We heard nothing but the counting machines.” The police also learned Gelinas was buzzing people in to the apartment building from her residence across the hall from the counting room. They also noticed that Gelinas and Monique Gauthier, a frequent visitor to apartment 309,were often engaged in conversation. It turned out that Monique Gauthier was the one counting the money. It also turned out that she was the ex-wife of Michel Rose, a member of the Nomads chapter. The police would also later learn she was sister of Robert Gauthier, the man running the Beaubien Street apartments for the Hells Angels. Of all the members of the Nomads chapter, it was Rose and André Chouinard who appeared to have clear ties to the banking system. Whenever Larivière would show up at the Beaubien Street apartment, it was often after meeting with Rose.
The apartment across from Gelinas’ was not only used to store money but to pay off large-scale suppliers to the Nomads chapter drug network. “For example,” Despaties explained, “Usine[French for “factory” and the code name for] a supplier of cocaine. So, Usine, when we did copies of their accounting we noticed there was a new client that was on the account sheet. Instead of being a client/buyer he was a client/supplier. We noticed that when people went to Place Montoir and left with boxes, the total of the accounts went down.”
Clients and Suppliers
Investigators also noticed that when a man they eventually realized was a courier for the “Usine” account would leave Place Montoir with a box, the account for Usine was always noted as having been paid around $1.5 million. The account was paid more than $8 million between November 23 and December 15, 2000. Despaties said the police figured the Hells Angels were using two apartment buildings to prevent burns.
“The goal of the investigation was to ...well it evolved from day to day. We noticed that it was always the same people who showed up, always the same clients, the same codes.”
The police soon realized that Chagnon was hiding something in apartment 403. They got a warrant again and found out it was a zip disk. A computer specialist copied the diskette for the police before anyone would notice it was missing. During their surveillance investigators noticed the man they would later realize was the accountant, Richard Gemme, was interacting with Chagnon. Both were childhood friends of André Chouinard.
“Chagnon appeared to be having trouble with his accounting and the diskette. We noticed that Gemme seemed to be more at ease in accounting.”
The police eventually seized two documents. One seemed to break down accounting by chapters. They also found a note that appeared to be orders to move to new apartments. They heard this order in their surveillance on bugged rooms as well. After doing what the police referred to as “sneak entries” into the apartments on Beaubien Street several times, the police had begun to pick up on the patterns of the accounting. Investigators were becoming so familiar with the system they weren’t caught off guard when the Nomads chapter ordered that their accounting lists be broken down by chapters, instead of by individual Hells Angels. The first column was the Quebec City chapter. The second, dubbed “Granche,” was the Montreal chapter and the one labeled “Top” was the Nomads. The accounting program also listed bad accounts and an inventory of what drugs they had in stock and in what amounts. The red column covered what they owed their suppliers.
Despaties said that, most of the time, the accounting was very accurate. There was only a small margin of error between what was brought in and what was accounted for. The police copied Chagnon’s zip disk about three times. The last time was on December 19, 2000. What they learned was that the accounting on the computer disc closely resembled the documents Kane had supplied them months earlier, except for the point in November when the Nomads chapter asked it be broken down by chapter. The investigators also realized that Kane had heard right when he was told by David (Wolf) Carroll, a founding member of the Nomads chapter, that each member of the chapter was being paid a fixed salary of about $5,000 a week from the Nomads Bank. While they monitored the apartments, the police noticed that Larivière appeared to deliver money to members of the Nomads chapter in shopping bags, always on Tuesdays and almost always $40,000 in hundred dollar bills.
The accounting software even included detailed breakdowns on large quantities of drugs the Hells Angels had purchased. For example, 50 kilos of cocaine would be broken down by the price they had paid and the profit the Nomads chapter had made off it. When the entire quantity was sold, the profit would be transferred over to the general accounting sheet. Other details included the fact that Stéphane Faucher, who was once a prospect in the Nomads chapter, was not allowed to buy drugs from the network. What the police would later find out was that Faucher had done something to embarrass the gang whi
ch had caused Denis Houle, a longtime member of the gang, to advise the others that he was not Hells Angels’ material. After his arrest, Faucher would become a Crown witness, supplying prosecutors with additional information to help bolster their case. But when it was his turn to testify in court, he backed out.
Another fact that caught the eyes of investigators examining the accounting system was that the Nomads chapter was charging independent drug dealers the same price for cocaine as they were members of other Hells Angels’ chapters. The Nomads were cutthroat business men who wouldn’t even give fellow Hells Angels a discount.
It was a cold, businesslike attitude the Nomads chapter took toward their drug empire. December 12, 2000, was the day the account in Louis (Melou) Roy’s name was terminated. The account was code-named “Jenny” and tens of thousands of dollars were still in it, even though Roy, a founding member of the Nomads chapter, had disappeared sometime in June. His body had yet to be found but investigators believed he had been purged from the gang. His disappearance coincided with negotiations the Hells Angels were having with the Mafia over what price a kilo of cocaine could be sold for in Montreal. Within days of Roy’s disappearance, the police found his luxury car parked on a downtown Montreal street covered in parking tickets. No one outside of the gang could say for sure whether Roy had been killed. But now the police noticed, through the copied accounting computer disk that his drug money was being distributed to members of the Trois Rivières chapter, the one where Roy had started his career as a Hells Angel.