by Paul Cherry
The hotel seemed to be crawling with gangsters. In the lobby was Stéphane Faucher wearing his colors. Boutin was there as well and so was Paul Brisebois, Daniel Jarry, Pierre Laurin and Normand Bélanger. Ouellette said he and Perrault went to their rooms. But they decided to check out the bar to see if they could spot more bikers. By then it had closed. The two cops called it a night.
The next morning, Ouellette said, he was standing in front of the door to Perrault’s room waiting for his Ontario colleague to join him for breakfast. As he knocked on Perrault’s door, Ouellette noticed Pierre Laurin, a Rocker, coming out of the elevator. He said Laurin headed straight for his own room, 209, but took a good look at rooms 202 and 204, where the two cops were staying.
Ouellette got into the elevator with Perrault and inside were Normand Bélanger and Maurice (Mom) Boucher. Ouellette said he made small talk with Boucher, asking him how he had enjoyed a production of the popular musical Notre Dame de Paris. Ouellette said he and Perrault went to the hotel restaurant where they spotted Gilles (Trooper) Mathieu, a longtime Hells Angel and a founding member of the Nomads chapter. He was seated at a table alone. Ouellette said he knew Mathieu had gone to South Africa a week earlier for an international Hells Angels’ event, so he discussed that with him.
“We ate breakfast. We were there for a total of 20 minutes in the dining room. The service was very fast. What was unusual was that there were a lot of individuals showing up while we ate. The first was Pierre Provencher who showed up for a glass of water to take his pills. The second to enter the room was André Chouinard. At the time, Mr. Chouinard was a member of the Nomads chapter and had his colors on. He greeted us, said, ’Salut, salut, bonjour, bonjour’ and then he went and whispered into the ear of Mr. Mathieu and left again,” Ouellette told the jury.
With his incredible ability to remember detail, Ouellette described the breakfast as if it were going on right before his eyes. He also tried to make it clear that it became evident to him afterwards that the gang members were checking to make sure Ouellette and Perrault were still in the restaurant while someone was stealing the computer. Ouellette said Laurin showed up as well and started reading a newspaper. “And then I was a little surprised because Mr. Laurin [a unilingual francophone] took the comics page from The Gazette. There was the Journal de Montréal, La Presse and all sorts of other newspapers but he took the comics page in English of The Gazette. I did not find that normal,” he said suggesting Laurin wasn’t reading the newspaper at all but making sure the cops didn’t head back to their rooms before the job could be done. Sylvain Demers, a member of the Scorpions, walked in and asked for a pitcher of water and left. Mathieu got up from his table and made small talk with Ouellette and Perrault again, joking that the cops would make good overtime that weekend.
When Ouellette and Perrault left they noticed Boucher and Faucher in the lobby. Ouellette said what he found curious was that Boucher changed his position to watch the cops walk by. Ouellette said Perrault had forgotten the key to his room and went down to the reception to get a copy. Minutes later, Perrault came knocking on Ouellete’s door. He seemed disturbed. He told Ouellette that several personal items had been stolen from his room, including his personal computer and diskettes. Ouellette said he and Perrault asked a cleaning lady if she had seen anything. He said the cleaning lady was very nervous and said she did not know anything.
Ouellette went back down to the lobby and spotted Maurice Boucher who was now conversing with Gilles Mathieu. “I mentioned to Mr. Boucher that one of his guys, from 209,had entered Mr. Perrault’s room and had taken something from Mr. Perrault and that he should bring it back. Mr. Boucher turned towards me and said it was not one of his guys, and he looked me in the eyes and said, ’I’m not the police.’” Ouellette said he and Perrault headed to the Sûreté du Québec station and called their bosses to report what had been stolen and the circumstances behind it. The computer was long gone and the Sûreté had to sort out what might come of it.
In his testimony, Boutin said that even though the two Scorpions who stole the laptop worked for him they had done it at the request of André Chouinard. (One of the Scorpions suspected of taking part in stealing the laptop was shot to death in Montreal on November 26, 2004. He was still dealing drugs for an organized street gang that had originally been created through the Nomads chapter.) Boutin was curious to find out what was on the laptop computer but the Scorpions had orders from higher up in the network, namely a member of the Nomads chapter, to turn it over to the Hells Angels. Boutin said that several days later Charlebois paged him and asked that they meet at a Dunkin’ Donuts. The plot to kill De Serres was about to unfold.
When the pair met at the doughnut shop, Charlebois suggested that they go for a walk, without their pagers or cell phones. They headed for a métro station where Charlebois whispered into Boutin’s ear what his assignment would be.
Days after the theft of the laptop, the Hells Angels managed to open the documents contained on it. The police believe that Richard Gemme, the computer whiz who helped the Hells Angels with their accounting software, helped the gang sort through Perrault’s computer and software. When Gemme was arrested, they found police documents on his computer. They found Perrault’s laptop at one of the Beaubien Street apartments used for the Nomads’ bank system. De Serres’ full name was not mentioned in the documents. He was identified by his first name and as a numbered source. But the documents contained summaries of the information he was feeding to the police. The documents also contained information that identified him as someone who handled marijuana for Boutin, which made it very easy to identify De Serres through a process of elimination. Boutin said that when Charlebois asked him about this, he realized right away who the snitch in his network was.
While the Hells Angels set up the hit on De Serres, Boutin was instructed on how to lure him up north. Boutin told De Serres that he wanted to introduce him to someone who was growing pot and asked him to check out the quality. Boutin testified that he was only told part of the plan, but that Mario Barriault, a Hells Angels’ underling who had already done time for things like loan-sharking, assault and drug trafficking, was brought in to help out. Earlier on, Boutin had asked Charlebois about what might happen if things got heavy. He said he told Charlebois he considered himself a businessman and was unprepared to deal with what might happen. Charlebois told him it was fine if he didn’t want to get his hands dirty, he could use Guillaume Serra if necessary.
In the hours before De Serres was killed, Boutin and Barriault met at a McDonald’s. They had told De Serres to meet them there. As they waited for him to show up Boutin noticed something out of the ordinary.
“I saw two suspect cars that I was persuaded were police cars. At that point I turned to Barriault and I said, ’We’re going to arrive at this meeting and there is all this surveillance.’ He said, ’No, no, no. Maybe you’re not used to these murder jobs. Maybe you’re nervous. There’s no problem. All is well.’ So I thought, ’Okay, maybe I’m paranoid.’ Maybe it was the adrenaline. I had felt the adrenaline before but in drug deals it is different.”
Boutin should not have been so dismissive about the cars. In fact, there was a surveillance team following De Serres that day. De Serres met up with Boutin and Barriault at the restaurant. To make sure he wouldn’t worry, De Serres was told he could follow the pair in his car for the trip up north. The surveillance team followed the cars but soon lost track of their informant as he headed up north with Boutin and Barriault. When they got to a point where it would be difficult for De Serres to turn back, Barriault motioned for him to pull over.
“Mr. Barriault said, ’Leave your car there,’ in Lanoraie. When De Serres got out, I told him to leave his pager and cellular in his car,” Boutin said. With De Serres in the car, Barriault made sure they weren’t being followed by driving the wrong way down oneway streets and using other maneuvers. Boutin said that when they arrived at the chalet, there was snow everywhere. He noticed two truck
s parked nearby and knew someone was lying in wait inside the chalet. The trio trudged through the snow toward the chalet with Barriault in front of De Serres and Boutin in back.
Boutin testified that as far as he knew De Serres had no idea what was about to happen to him. Barriault and De Serres opened the door. It led to the chalet’s basement. Boutin said that as he walked down the stairs he realized De Serres was already on the ground and that someone had a revolver pointed at him. “Our job was to bring him there. So we left,” Boutin said.
As the pair drove back south, Barriault seemed agitated and complained about how slow Boutin was driving. After leaving Barriault off, Boutin headed for his home in a small rural village near Montreal. By now, the cops had realized their informant had disappeared and their only reference point was that he had had a meeting with Boutin earlier that day.
Boutin said that by the time he got home he realized that he was being followed by the police. It looked like one of the cops tailing him was very nervous. He said he realized at that point that something was seriously wrong. When he stepped inside his house, he started to consider the huge mistake he had made. When he looked out a window, he could see what he believed were police cars parked on a road a short distance from his house. The morning after De Serres was killed, Boutin noticed an Intrepid was following him wherever he went. If it was the police, they didn’t seem to care that Boutin knew they were there. At one point, Boutin slowed his car to well below the speed limit and the Intrepid did the same. That was enough to convince Boutin he was in serious trouble and the message he was getting was that the police were going to pick him up eventually.
Despite knowing that De Serres had been working for the police, the Hells Angels who shot him execution style did not search his body afterward. A truck driver spotted the body on February 4, 2000, lying on top of a snowbank on the side of Highway 125 in Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci, a town well north of Montreal. A bag had been placed over his head and his feet were bound. But most important the police found that De Serres’ body-pack, a tape recorder and transmitter, were still taped to his back.
A little over a week later, the television network TQS broke the story about how De Serres had been an informant for the Wolverine squad. A news team had spotted the body-pack on De Serres’ body when the police were examining him on the snowbank. Boutin was at a restaurant when Faucher told him the news.
“Robitaille whispered into my ear that it was all a pack of lies, that if it was the truth everyone would have been arrested by now,” Boutin said.
The Business Man Behind Bars
When the story aired, the anti-biker gang squad was sent scrambling and had to make arrests sooner than they had planned. Stéphane Sirois, a valued informant who had infiltrated the Rockers, had to be pulled out of service. Boutin and Barriault were rounded up quickly — at that point, they were the only leads the police had. In his testimony in court, Crown prosecutor Madeleine Giauque wanted Boutin to touch on how he had become an informant. “Why did you make this decision?” she asked.
“I had been in prison for about 15 months. I never thought I would be an informant. That was the last place I wanted to go. But within the space of two days, it all exploded. First my wife ... I have ten children and she was totally depressed knowing I would spend up to 25 years in prison. The best friend I ever had in my life was Mr. Robitaille and he was the same. I don’t know if he saw me as a danger, that I’d one day end up here, but he was paranoid.”
Meanwhile, the people handling the prosecution of the bikers rounded up in Operation Springtime 2001 were disclosing their evidence to the defense. Boutin learned that Faucher had turned informant. The drug dealer who had helped Boutin form the Scorpions was now providing incriminating evidence against him. Boutin said he asked to have his murder trial dealt with right away, before more people decided to turn informant, including people who might have been involved in De Serres’ death.
Boutin said he had been waiting 15 months for his preliminary hearing in the murder case and now his defense lawyer was telling him the Hells Angels were thinking of holding it off another 15 to see what the police were going to do with Charlebois regarding his role in the informant’s murder.
“It all exploded,” Boutin said. “I was risking 25 years for a murder that, in my book . . . it was not me who had decided to kill that person. Yes, in the sense of the law, I am as guilty as anyone.” At this point, Justice Pierre Beliveau confirmed to the jury that, if his story was true, Boutin could have been found guilty of first-degree murder even though he only brought De Serres to the chalet.
Boutin said he wasn’t sure who was paying for his lawyer’s bills but Robitaille had been taking care of him in prison before he himself was arrested. Charlebois had been doing the same for Barriault.
A Kind of Truce
To Boutin, the situation seemed to solve itself. He was pushed into a corner and the only logical way out was to turn informant and let the police know everything he had done in the biker war.
Prosecutor Giauque asked Boutin if the biker war was an ongoing thing, whether the Hells Angels were consistently fighting for territory. Boutin said he was made aware of the truce the Hells Angels had negotiated during the fall of 2000 while he was in jail. But he soon realized that it did not last long. Maurice (Mom) Boucher held two meetings during that autumn with leaders of the Rock Machine. The truce was negotiated, but the Rock Machine would later learn this was done primarily so the Hells Angels could put an offer on the table for their members to join them. The offer was a full-patch member of the Rock Machine could defect and have the same status in the Hells Angels. Even prospects were made similar offers.
Giauque then asked if the biker war had carried into Quebec’s prisons.
“In no matter what prison in Quebec, even if you don’t have anything to do with the bikers ...Take for example at Rivière-des-Prairies. It doesn’t matter who you are, they [correction officers] take you to a counter and ask you what side you are on, Hells Angels or Rock Machine. Even if you stole a bicycle. For your security, they ask you to choose a Hells Angels’ wing or a Rock Machine wing,” he said.
Regarding the truce, Giauque asked how it changed things in prison. Boutin said it was Faucher and Robitaille who informed him that a truce was coming. “I was the person with the highest rank in the Hells Angels in prison, or in Rivière-des-Prairies,” Boutin said in reference to the detention center where he was held at the time.
“So I asked for the thoughts of my superiors, Mr. Charlebois and Normand Robitaille, what I should do if I met one. They sent me the message.”
“By who?”
“By the defense lawyers. [They said] there are individuals, there were six, but there were four that they were sure would be on our side. They said I should take the steps with the authorities in prison so that they be transferred to [the Hells Angels] sector. I took the steps,” Boutin said, adding he went to the vice-warden to tell him about the defections. “I said, ’Listen there are four guys known on the Rock Machine side who should come to my wing.’ He laughed and said that I was crazy and that he wouldn’t do it.”
Boutin insisted, so the vice-warden called meetings with other prison staff at Rivière-des-Prairies. Boutin said the Montreal Regional Integrated Squad was called to verify if this could be true. The vice-warden told Boutin that he had a hard time believing what he was hearing and that he was concerned that even if it were true, there would be dire consequences if the truce suddenly ended. Boutin said he told the vice-warden to consider what would happen if he didn’t make the transfers and the four men ended up killed in the Rock Machine wing.
“He was stuck in the middle,” Boutin said.
Within hours a decision was made to transfer the four to the Hells Angels’ sector but not the same wing as Boutin. The four men were Éric (Beluga) Leclerc, Jimmy Larivée, Gaetan Coe and Stéphane Veilleux. Because they were not yet full-patch members of the Rock Machine, they were made prospects in the Hells Angels. Me
anwhile, outside prison, Salvatore Brunnetti and Nelson Fernandez, two influential members of the Alliance, were made instant members of the Hells Angels’ Nomads chapter.
Another former member of the Rock Machine to cross over was Stéphane Trudel, a man suspected of being behind several of the biker war’s murders in Montreal and Laval early on in the conflict. He was considered an expert in explosives. But he had spent most of the biker war behind bars serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for an attempted murder, passing his time in incarceration serving as vice-president of the inmates committee. He was also suspected of selling drugs in his penitentiary in 1998, and, at around the same time, Trudel lost his status as a full-fledged member of the Rock Machine. Because of this, when he crossed over to the Hells Angels it was only as a prospect. He later moved on to an Ontario chapter and in 2004 was wanted on an arrest warrant alleging he was part of a stolen car ring along with Paul Porter.
Following Trudel to the Ontario-based gang was Daniel Leclerc, the former right-hand man of a full-patch Rock Machine member named Peter Paradis. Leclerc joined the Hells Angels while still awaiting the outcome of the first gangsterism trial in Quebec. While trying for parole on his two years and nine months sentence, Leclerc denied joining the Hells Angels, but police intelligence said otherwise, as did the group photos found in his cell of Leclerc with 13 other Hells Angels.