by Paul Cherry
At that point, Boutin estimated he was making $5,000 a week selling cocaine for the Hells Angels. He told the jury that Fontaine was making the same amount as his muscle. Gagné was making about $3,000 while taking orders from Fontaine (Gagné would testify that he made only $1,000). Boutin noted that in 1997,he was merely an associate of the gang and had no status in the Rockers, while Fontaine had graduated from being a Rocker to being a prospect in the Hells Angels.
“The decisions on where the group could go in terms of territory, it was Paul Fontaine who made those decisions. Number one. The person who made money decisions and business decisions was me. I was number one.”
As the business grew, Boutin continued to be supplied with cocaine through Chouinard. The pair developed a series of hand signals to conduct business.
“We didn’t speak. When we talked about drugs we knew we were being followed by the police all day long. If we wrote anything on paper we burned it right away. Like in my office, I had a business office, if it was in my office or in my truck I had one of those things where you can make a drawing and erase it right away. It doesn’t leave a trace. When we talked about things more serious we talked into each other’s ears.”
Boutin said in all the time they did business together, Chouinard never handed him cocaine in person.
“Mr. Chouinard had a system of runners and I had a system of runners. Runners are people who bring things from point A to point B. A guy like me who is tied to the bikers is generally followed by the police all the time. The runner is a guy who is not followed. Often we take someone who has no file, who isn’t known. It could be someone old, a woman, someone who does not have the look of being in a criminal business.”
“What do you call these people?” Giauque asked.
“A citizen”
“How did the transactions happen?”
“I’d give [Chouinard] a little address on paper. It could be a place I had rented somewhere. And his runner would take the kilo and would bring it to the address.” Boutin said that within months of his start in drug dealing he trained himself to never come in contact with the drugs because he worked on the assumption that he was always being followed by the cops, and he said he used his own runners to pay Chouinard the money.
Life Divided in Three
Boutin said he became a striker in the Rockers in October 1998, after Fontaine had disappeared to dodge the murder and attempted murder charges against him in the death of prison guard Pierre Rondeau. He said that as a striker he was required to do “the watch” only on occasion. He revealed to the jury that, often, the person doing guard duty at the door of a bunker or gang clubhouse would not carry a firearm because the Rockers figured he was an easy target for the police to arrest on a weapons charge. To counter this, the Rockers often had someone sitting in a car nearby with guns on the floor of the vehicle. Fontaine had asked him to join the Rockers earlier but he resisted. He said he had decided to join after Normand Robitaille asked him to — René Charlebois had been pushing for it too. At that point, Robitaille was a prospect in the Hells Angels. Boutin said that in terms of business it changed nothing for him. Giauque asked how it changed his life, if at all.
“[When you join the Rockers] life is divided in three. It’s an expression we use often. You have the family side with kids and you have to put all your time into it like everyone else. You have the business side and you have to watch your business. And you have the club side. It is not necessarily . . . it is more of a . . . it is not business. The club is about power. It is about power,” Boutin said. “I can say that when we joined ...when we put a leather jacket on a guy’s back, even if he isn’t known, he can enter a restaurant and everyone is scared. That is power.”
Shortly after Fontaine disappeared in December 1997,Boutin said he was pulled aside by Robitaille and discreetly told to find a new business partner. But Robitaille also informed Boutin that he had to pay $1,000 a month to Fontaine’s family.
Fontaine was like a ghost to almost everyone in the gang, and to the police who were looking for him. Some in the police assumed he was dead because Tousignant’s charred body had been found on February 27, 1998, in Bromont, a town in the Eastern Townships. When Tousignant’s body was discovered near the side of a road, it was still on fire. A Sûreté du Québec officer named Gilles Cimon put out the flames, but an autopsy later revealed Tousignant had already died of gunshots to the head and chest. To investigators probing the homicide, it appeared that Tousignant had been killed elsewhere and then brought to the area where he was set on fire. There were signs that two people had carried the corpse ten metres from the side of the road and then set it on fire.
But Boutin was part of the chosen few trusted enough to be let in on the gang’s well-kept secret: Fontaine was alive. Two years after Fontaine disappeared, Boutin received a risky assignment right around the Christmas holidays in 1999.
“He wanted to see his kids, and he asked to see me too,” Boutin said of the trip he had to make with Fontaine’s family. A big snowstorm that day only added to Boutin’s woes. “We made a lot of detours because, at the time, Paul Fontaine was one of the most sought-after men in North America. So we made detours, we used the métro [subway], we had parked a car at a location. But the windshield was broken so we didn’t use it [because it would draw attention and increase the potential of being pulled over by the police]. So we took detours through the métro. I was with Fontaine’s wife and his two children. There was also a prospect from the Hells Angels’ Trois Rivières chapter. He was in contact by cellular with Paul Fontaine.”
After zigzagging through Montreal’s extensive subway system, the small group arranged for a taxi to take them to Quebec City. As the group rode along toward the provincial capital, the snowstorm got worse and the taxi driver’s wipers broke off. They pulled over at a repair garage. Someone in the group called for another taxi and asked the new driver to take them to the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, one of the ritziest hotels in Canada. The group had now told an outsider their destination, the precise location of one of the most wanted men in Canada. Boutin began to wonder if that was a great idea. “I was seated in front,” Boutin recalled. “Paul Fontaine’s wife was seated in the back with the two children. We gave him the address. The guy who picked me up saw that I was a guy with a woman and two children and he thought we were a couple heading to the Chateau Frontenac. So he says, ’Where are you from?’ and I say, ’From Montreal.’ I didn’t say I was from Rosemont. He said, ’Oh yeah? I was a cop for 25 years in Rosemont.’”
The fact that a retired cop was taking them to see Fontaine alarmed Boutin. He began acting like he and Fontaine’s wife were married. But the driver seemed to pay them no special attention, and he left them off at the Chateau Frontenac without incident. Fontaine was able to dine with his family at the Chateau Frontenac and then they headed for a chalet in nearby Stoneham. Although he didn’t mention it during the Beliveau trial, Boutin said that Fontaine did not look like the man he knew before. He described him as a wreck and figured being on the run and away from his family had totally destroyed him.
Once Boutin lost Fontaine as a partner, he was paired up with Stéphane Faucher, who did not yet have status in the gang beyond working for longtime drug dealer Normand (Pluche) Bélanger. “At the start, [Bélanger] did not have a status either. He was an intimate friend of Mr. Boucher and Normand Robitaille,” Boutin said.
Boutin said he himself was made a striker at around the same time as other people who would go on to play significant roles in the Hells Angels’ expansion in western Montreal, including Dany St-Pierre. Boutin also identified Eric (Pif) Fournier and Bruno Lefebvre, two of the nine accused in the Beliveau trial, as being made strikers around the same time as he was.
The Scorpions
The independent-minded Boutin preferred doing his own thing. Instead of relying on people the Rockers imposed on him for protection or acting himself as the muscle, he chose to create his own gang of drug dealers wit
h Stéphane Faucher and called them the Scorpions. Faucher had them dealing on Montreal streets like Sainte-Catherine and St-Hubert. One day, while the police were investigating the Scorpions, they noticed at least 20 of their dealers peddling in the Berri-uQAM métro station, one of the busiest in Montreal. ( UQAM stands for Université du Québec à Montréal.)
While Normand Robitaille and Boucher had no problem with the Scorpions, they could not allow Boutin to wear two patches at once, a violation of the Hells Angels’ own rules. He was told he’d have to quit the Rockers if he wanted to run the Scorpions with the Nomads chapter’s blessing. Boutin had no problem with leaving the Rockers because he was more concerned with someone in the Scorpions stealing his trafficking network. It had to be clear who was running the show, and Boutin believed that doing it from the fringes of the Rockers’ network was the wrong way to go about it.
In terms of his drug business, nothing changed, Boutin said. His boss at the time was Robitaille, who was rising remarkably fast in the Nomads chapter. Robitaille gave Boutin instructions to start buying directly from Normand Bélanger. At the same time, Boutin was able to continue buying cocaine from Chouinard. He needed a steady supply of cocaine to feed his network of Scorpions who were now moving two or three kilos per week. The money coming in impressed the Hells Angels, and Boutin began to hear talk of the Scorpions being turned into a puppet gang much like the Rockers. He said Robitaille told him the Hells Angels were thinking of patching the gang over after a probationary period.
“But Normand [Robitaille] made it clear that there were certain guys in the Scorpions who were really not ready to wear a patch on their backs. They were not ready. They lacked discipline. It takes more discipline to be a full member of the Rockers than it does in the Scorpions because you have obligations, like a meeting in Vancouver. You can’t say ’I’m not going.’ You are obliged to go. It’s more like obligations like that. The club comes before a lot of things. Sometimes you have to leave your business aside, your family aside and not everybody wants to do that. The higher you go in the hierarchy, the less you can make mistakes,” Boutin said. After taking a closer look at the Scorpions, the Hells Angels realized they were only interested in two members becoming Rockers. Giauque then asked Boutin about Masses, the meetings the Rockers held.
“There are not many big subjects or delicate things discussed at Mass. We had like a ...we wouldn’t say things like ’we have to kill that guy.’ We practically never talked about the Rock Machine during a Mass. We were not allowed. If anyone ever heard, it could implicate the big guys who were there.” Mass was generally reserved to discuss club business, including paying into the ten percent fund. “The ten percent serves the guys in prison, paying lawyers to take care of their case,” Boutin said.
He said that if they had a surplus they would sometimes use the money to buy dinner. Often it was used to cover hotels when they went on a ride, as the Hells Angels are required to do as a motorcycle club. Boutin also said it was used to buy weapons, a touchy issue for the defense lawyers because that aspect of the fund solidly supported the prosecution’s gangsterism case. References to the ten percent fund being used to purchase weapons were rare and the defense would contend that informants had been coached to bring the subject up.
Boutin said Mass was not optional. You had to show up and sometimes a member of the Nomads chapter would sit in. Boutin said he knew the Hells Angels in the Nomads held Mass, too, but he never was allowed to attend one. When Robitaille went to one, Boutin was not allowed to call him for two or three hours. He also was never told what happened during Nomads’ Masses. But he knew from some of the other Rockers that stuff did leak out of the meetings, like news about who had become a member.
Boutin eventually decided to rejoin the Rockers and was made a full-patch member on October 12,1999. After that, Boutin said, he had no free time. He was ordered to do menial tasks like buy tickets to a boxing match or go to Trois Rivières to pick up something that needed to be brought back to Montreal. He found the situation occasionally ridiculous. He once had to cancel a $10,000 drug transaction so he could attend a Rockers’ Mass where they talked about nothing.
One thing that was made clear to him, Boutin said, was that the Hells Angels in the Nomads chapter were his bosses and his job in the gang was to expand their drug dealing territory.
“If there were dealers who were not with us, we would go to see them. We would ask them if they wanted to be supplied by us. If they were on our territory, they would have to get off. We always tried to get an amicable agreement from our side. We tried to cover as much territory as possible.”
He said that if he considered a rival drug dealer to be smalltime, the Rockers would simply send in someone to beat him up. If Boutin felt the dealer was backed by the Mafia or the Rock Machine, they would call in Paul Fontaine. After Fontaine disappeared, Robitaille made the decisions about how to handle the muscle end of the business partnership. Sometimes Stéphane Faucher would be sent in to settle things. Boutin said he had to ask Robitaille for permission if he wanted to buy drugs from someone other than the Nomads. But the benefit to him as a dealer was that he could tell Fontaine or Robitaille whenever there was a Rock Machine drug dealer on his turf. He said the problem was always taken care of.
Giauque asked if the Rockers had a specific territory.
“I could say that Hochelaga Maisonneuve and the Gay Village had been conquered,” he said. “When I say conquered I mean all of the streets, from A to Z, every little dealer was selling for a Rocker in Montreal. That’s what I mean by conquered. For us, the Rockers of Montreal, it is on our backs. On our patches there was a Montreal. So, we worked on the island of Montreal.”
Boutin said he worked Saint-Laurent Blvd. as well and rattled off a list of Rockers who participated in selling on the street for the Hells Angels, including Pierre Provencher, Gregory Wooley, Paul Brisebois and Bruno Lefebvre. He said he knew of several Rockers who were involved in the gang’s expansion in Montreal’s southwest, including Provencher, Alain Dubois, Stéphane Jarry, Pierre Laurin and Gaetan Matte.
Maurice (Mom) Boucher’s old chapter, the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter, were dealing drugs in Montreal’s Plateau district as well as Rockers like Jean-Guy Bourgoin, Boutin said. Rosemont was also being handled by the Hells Angels’ Montreal chapter and Jean-Guy Bourgoin controlled part of it. In Montreal North, Boutin said, there were only a few drug dealers working for them, and as far as he knew, the West Island, traditionally an anglophone area of the Montreal island, was not monopolized by the Hells Angels. Boutin said the Ruff Ryders, a gang that emerged out of a low-income neighborhood in the West Island, had just started selling drugs for the Rockers through Gregory Wooley in 1999.
Giauque asked what membership in the Rockers had meant to Boutin’s way of life. He said it made him feel obligated to the gang. Meanwhile, the territory he had worked so hard to establish in Hochelaga Maisonneuve took a hard financial hit while he had to focus his attentions elsewhere. He said several Rockers took it over. Charlebois was one. Robert Johnson, Dany St-Pierre and Pierre Toupin were also called in to help.
Boutin then began to think back to how his nickname in the gang had changed. He had been called Pacha, a name he didn’t seem to mind. But he had a serious weight problem and the Rockers took to referring to him as “Le Gros.” While awaiting what he assumed was going to be his first-degree murder trial in the De Serres case, Boutin dropped a lot of the weight. Months after his arrest, he appeared at a bail hearing in Montreal and could actually be described as thin. It was obvious the anxiety of the pending murder trial had gotten to him. It was the mention of his time behind bars that brought Giauque back to questioning Boutin about the De Serres murder.
The Murder of Claude De Serres
Boutin said that months before double agent De Serres was killed René Charlebois had told him that he would soon be asked to bring the man to a specific location. Boutin then elaborated on how the Hells Angels had discovered De
Serres was working for the police.
Hells Angels from across Canada had gathered in Sherbrooke on Saturday, December 4,1999, to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the chapter there. More than 120 bikers from places like Vancouver and Winnipeg were packed into a reception hall located on a hillside in Sherbrooke.
While staying in Sherbrooke, some of the Hells Angels from Montreal had noticed that Sgt. Guy Ouellette, from the Sûreté du Québec, was staying at the same hotel. Seeing him there was not unusual, Boutin said. Ouellette would often end up taking the same flights and staying at the same hotels as the Hells Angels. He was often assigned to monitor their parties and funerals and did so openly and with a level of professionalism that many of the Hells Angels respected.
Boutin said gang members noticed that Ouellette and an Ontario Provincial Police officer named Rick Perrault were carrying briefcases. Some among the gang members staying at the hotel said they’d always wondered what information Ouellette had on them. When the two police officers left their rooms to have breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant, two Scorpions were ordered to break in and steal a briefcase. “The Nomads were happy about [the laptop being stolen]. So were the Rockers. Everybody was happy.”
Well, not everybody.
Ouellette testified in the Beliveau trial on December 15, 2003, and he made it clear the police weren’t happy. He recalled that after working all night identifying the gang members who had attended the party he headed back to the hotel and noticed that members of the Rockers and the Nomads chapter were staying there. He spotted Boutin first, along with Patrick Pepin, who was a hangaround at the time and was not wearing his colors. Ouellette said he put his bags in his hotel room and then he and Officer Perrault left to park their cars at the Sûreté du Québec’s Sherbrooke headquarters, just a short distance across the street from the hotel. “After parking the cars, we returned to the hotel and when we returned to the hotel there were more bikers there than when we made our first visit,” Ouellette said, adding that he had then noticed René Charlebois, who was a prospect in the Nomads at that point, near the hotel’s reception desk.