by Paul Cherry
“When you use the word risk, it’s about the transport of cocaine from the United States to Canada. The risk applicable to transport is evident,” Antelo said, adding she wanted to assume the least risk possible. The two sides were at a stalemate. Craig was playing hardball with the Hells Angels and now with a stalemate on their hands he demanded to see Maurice (Mom) Boucher.
“The first meeting with Mr. Mom Boucher was in the food court of [Montreal’s central train] station. There was André, my husband, myself and Mom Boucher,” Antelo said. “It was a meeting where my husband wanted Mom Boucher to participate because he was, in principle, the head of the group. We were not in agreement with the prices written down on paper. Mom Boucher discussed prices with my husband that they could agree on. It was understood by my husband that there was an agreement that had been accepted and we had completed the deal.
“Mr. Boucher was in agreement with everything my husband had proposed. The meeting ended with an agreement on the prices and that the prices would be respected. But the next day I had a meeting with André to see if everything was okay. André said, ’No.’ He said that everything would follow what we had agreed on before because Mr. Boucher would not respect anything he had agreed on with my husband.” Antelo said at that point Chouinard basically spelled it all out for her. The Hells Angels were going to pay whatever they wanted for the cocaine.
Business the Hells Angels’ Way
But it now appears the Hells Angels had decided they no longer needed Antelo or her husband Craig. They had a man spending significant time in Colombia to oversee their investments. Sometime in 1997, Guy Lepage, a former Montreal cop whom Boucher had befriended, was dispatched to Bogota, Colombia, to work for the Hells Angels from there. Lepage remained in Colombia for six weeks during one visit in 1997 and spent about two months in Colombia during the following summer.
Before spending all that time in Colombia, Lepage had helped them branch out in British Columbia in the mid-1990s. He did jail time in the western province for laundering the proceeds of crime. When he was president of the Rockers, Lepage would become the center of a small political scandal after it was revealed that Canada’s Federal Business Development Bank had mortgaged the Rockers’ bunker in Montreal. It was Lepage who took out the mortgage. He had quit the Montreal Urban Community Police during the 1970s while he was under investigation for fraud.
After being dispatched to Colombia, Lepage became heavily involved in the negotiations over the Hells Angels’ cocaine purchases and stayed at the home of a Colombian drug trafficker while he was there. In 1998, the American government seized $2.5 million U.S. in Florida that was bound for a Colombian cartel. A man named Sylvain Roy was arrested at a Holiday Inn in Miami with the $2.5 million that, in fact, belonged to Antelo and the Hells Angels. The Montrealer had been dispatched to Florida to oversee the shipment of money. The U.S. authorities would later learn that Roy had entered the States 15 times in 1998 and 1999.
Whenever the cocaine was successfully smuggled in to Florida, the Hells Angels had truck drivers pick it up at secret locations. The same truck drivers would often bring the money for the cocaine to Florida as well. When Lepage wasn’t living in Colombia making sure things went smoothly for the Hells Angels there, he was spotted several times in Quebec meeting with Boucher and other members of the Nomads chapter. In 1999, Lepage was frequently seen chauffeuring Boucher to the Pro Gym where the president liked to work out.
Lepage returned to Bogota in July 2000 and stayed until September of that same year, helping the Hells Angels ship more cocaine. But by then Antelo had decided to turn informant. She knew who Lepage was.
When he returned from an extensive trip to Mexico in December 2001, Lepage was forced to undergo a thorough search at customs. He brazenly told the customs agents he would be headed back to Mexico within days and would be back for another thorough search in April 2002. But within weeks, Lepage found his name on a piece of paper signed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. It was an extradition request from the U.S. government asking that he be tried on drug trafficking charges in Florida. When he was indicted in Florida, Lepage’s name would appear with that of Victor and Miguel Mejia Múnera, the twin brothers whom the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had already tagged in 1998 as up-and-coming cocaine traffickers with ties to the North Valle and Cali cartels. They were also Antelo’s contacts.
Lepage did little to challenge the extradition and by September had reached a plea bargain that saw him sentenced to ten years after pleading guilty to conspiracy. As part of his deal, Lepage was allowed to serve most of his time in Canada. Shortly after he was transferred to Canada, Lepage got a chance to tell his side of the story for the first time on public record. On October 26, 2005, Lepage appeared before the National Parole Board for an expedited review, a chance to be released after serving only two-thirds of his sentence.
During his nearly three-hour hearing, Lepage revealed much more about his relationship to Antelo than she did during her testimony in the Beliveau trial. He said Antelo had lived on the same street as his brother and that he knew her well before she was introduced to either Michel Rose or André Chouinard. Lepage said he would sometimes go jogging with Antelo.
He also said it was Antelo who asked him to go to Colombia the first time. “I wasn’t a dealer. I was an insurance policy,” he explained. Antelo asked him to stay with her Colombian contacts for six weeks while they awaited payment on one of the large shipments of cocaine. During the 1990s, it was common for Colombian drug cartels to insist that a member of a criminal organization they were dealing with stay with them while they awaited payment.
To act as such a guarantor meant putting his life at risk. “I did it for the money. It was the money that attracted me,” Lepage said when one of the commissioners asked him why he put his life on the line. Though something went wrong with that deal, he managed to return home safely but claimed he was never paid a cent for that trip.
He returned to Colombia when the relationship between Antelo, the Hells Angels and the Colombians was disintegrating over a loss of $1.8 million. One of the Columbians Lepage had met during his first stay called him and said that Antelo was claiming the Hells Angels were holding out on her. Lepage reported this problem to Maurice (Mom) Boucher, figuring the Hells Angel would want to maintain the contact in Colombia. Boucher said it was Michel Rose’s deal and he wanted nothing to do with it.
Lepage ended up going to Colombia merely to introduce Michel Rose, André Chouinard and Normand Robitaille to the Colombians. The bikers took over from there.
“You know how it is. When you’re a Hells Angel you are treated like a king by [other criminals],” Lepage said. “I never sat at the Hells Angels’ table [where they discussed their drug deals]. That was sacred.”
Lepage told the parole board that he got to know Maurice Boucher in 1988 when Lepage owned a discotheque in Sorel, the city where Boucher’s Montreal chapter was then based. Boucher soon asked Lepage to rent a building for him that was eventually used as a clubhouse for an underling gang.
The two became friends but Lepage insisted he never was Boucher’s “right hand man” as he had been described by the police and in media reports. He said he worked on Boucher’s estate in Contrécoeur in 1996, renovating his horse stables, garage and house. He admitted to being a member of the Rockers from November 1993 to April 1994 but denied ever being the president of the gang. Because he once wore a police badge, he could not join the Hells Angels. The gang has a rule that forbids former cops from joining them.
While Antelo did not explain how she knew Lepage, she did mention his name when she told the jury about when she started feeling the walls closing in.
It began after she traveled to Colombia and returned on June 10, 2000. Her intention was to discuss things again with Chouinard. While in Colombia, she had made arrangements for her deal with the Hells Angels but also made plans for another shipment that just she and her husband would be involved in. Antelo said t
hat after returning from Colombia, she had another meeting with Chouinard, but things did not go very well at all. Despite this, she and Chouinard agreed to meet the following Monday. Chouinard called her later and told her they had to push back the meeting to Tuesday. Antelo didn’t think twice about the reason for the change. As far as she knew, the Hells Angels were still interested.
“The meeting on Tuesday was supposed to be at ten in the morning. I called them to let them know I was on the way to the meeting.” At this point in her testimony, Antelo took a long pause and became very emotional. Her voice broke down.
“It was at that moment that they tried to kill me,” she said with difficulty. “At the entrance to the highway near my house. I was in my car and I was about to get on Highway 15. All of a sudden I saw a car, that was driving fast, pass me.” Antelo said she made a maneuver to avoid the car and, in doing so dropped her cell phone, which might have saved her life. As she leaned sideways to get her phone off the floor of her car, she heard shots.
“I didn’t want to stop out of fear that they would continue to shoot,” Antelo said.
Despite the fact this testimony obviously suggested that Chouinard and the Hells Angels were behind the attempt to murder her, the defense waited until this point to object and ask that the jury be excused. The lawyers then argued over whether Antelo could testify further about either the attempt to kill her or the subsequent murder of her husband. Judge Beliveau determined that it was okay for the jury to hear Antelo talk about what she knew of the attempt to kill her but ordered that she could not mention Craig’s murder. The jury was called back in and Madeleine Giauque asked her what she had done after the attack. Antelo said that immediately afterward, she called Chouinard. She said he merely listened to what she had to say and then hung up on her.
She told the jury that, “thanks to God,” she was not hurt but had to be treated for cuts to her face. She later moved to an apartment her husband kept in Montreal. After a while, she decided to collect her kids and leave Montreal. By September, she was meeting with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at an office in the American Embassy in Ottawa. In exchange for her statements and all the documentation she had on the Hells Angels and the Colombian brothers she was dealing with, Antelo was given a promise she would not be prosecuted in the U.S. The American authorities also agreed to protect her and her children. What Antelo was not able to tell the jury was that about two months after the attempt was made on her life, her husband, Raymond Craig, who was just weeks away from his 60th birthday, was gunned down outside the Chantadel bar in Sainte-Adele, a town in the Laurentians. He was killed on August 20, 2000.The defense was dead set against the jury hearing about this.
Their strategy in cross-examining Antelo was to suggest that she might well have had any number of enemies other than Chouinard and the Hells Angels. Letting the jury know about Craig’s death would only support the idea it was the Hells Angels who wanted to get rid of the couple.
The first defense lawyer to question Antelo was Lucie Joncas. She got Antelo to discuss her past as a drug smuggler, highlighting the fact that she had been doing it for decades. Antelo admitted that she had done business with cocaine traffickers in Bolivia from 1977 until the end of the 1980s. She had done jail time in California in 1983 for drugs. Remarkably, it was her only conviction in her long career as a drug trafficker.
It was during cross-examination by another defense lawyer that the jury almost learned of Craig’s murder. Another defense lawyer asked Antelo about a period in 1991 and 1992 when she and Craig lived in Spain. Defense lawyer Roland Roy asked if that was because Craig had been fleeing from the arrest warrant that charged him with the attempted murder near Montreal.
“Excuse me, but that is not pertinent!” Judge Beliveau interrupted.
After a brief discussion with the jury excused, the lawyer was allowed to proceed with the line of questioning. But Antelo was provided a poor translation of a question. Instead of asking Antelo about the attempted murder accusation against her husband, the translator asked about the murder of her husband.
As she began to answer, some of the lawyers on the defense team who understood Spanish shouted and leaped out of their seats. Beliveau was forced to excuse the jury again and argued with the lawyers about the effect the blunder might have had. Antelo’s answer had not been translated into French yet, but the defense lawyers argued that some members of the jury likely understood Spanish. Beliveau told Antelo again to not speak of her husband’s murder. He then recalled the jury and instructed them to ignore any references to Craig’s death.
“In 1993, my husband was outside of the country. After the attempted murder, he went to Colombia for two years. He stayed in Colombia until 1996. He returned in March or February, 1996,” Antelo continued. She said that when he returned the couple agreed to separate but did not get a divorce. “During this period, we did not work together. That is the reason I sought out Michel Rose,” Antelo said.
Antelo ended the day’s testimony on that note. She was brought back the following morning and a new translator was brought in. A defense lawyer asked Antelo about her deal with the U.S. authorities. He asked her how she had managed to reach a deal that saw her do no time in jail. Antelo advised the judge that her answer might touch on what she was ordered not to say before the jury. Beliveau excused the jury and asked what she would say. “It was for my security,” Antelo said. She made it clear that Craig’s murder convinced her to see the DEA.
“They were saying that they wanted to end things with me. The reason why I brought myself to the North American authorities, is one that you didn’t want to hear. So you should not ask the question,” Antelo told defense lawyer Roy. She mentioned that she had learned the Hells Angels were looking for her, and Guy Lepage’s name was mentioned in particular.
The cross-examination continued with one defense lawyer making the mistake of trying to suggest the Colombians would have wanted her dead. He asked about the $2.5 million that had been seized during the summer of 1999 from Sylvain Roy in Miami. All the question accomplished was to reveal that the Hells Angels had other issues with Antelo. She said the money belonged to her, Rose and Chouinard. It was supposed to be used to pay the Colombians. She was asked who had to absorb such heavy losses.
“It was a discussion that went down to the last minute with André, Mom Boucher and Michel Rose. We were supposed to assume the losses together,” she said. “There was no agreement among the people who represented the Hells Angels. There was an agreement among the Colombians, that they would assume half the debt. . . .TheColombians whom I was dealing with were not debutantes in this business. The Colombians who work in large scales like them, they are not used to it, but they know that these losses arrive often.”
The defense was having little luck creating other potential enemies for Antelo, so they switched gears and attacked her credibility. They got her to discuss how she was renting a luxury home in Hampstead, a toney suburb of Montreal, while she and her husband were separated. The defence also got her to reveal that she and Craig had lived in a spacious house in Candiac, a South Shore suburb, during most of their marriage, bought on the proceeds of their drug dealing. When Craig was killed, Antelo owned the house and she was able to sell it for $280,000, which was expensive in Candiac.
Defense lawyer Guy Quirion then attacked Antelo on her qualities as a mother. He brought out a surveillance photo. It showed her coming out of a lunch meeting with a drug dealer, her young children at her side. Quirion asked if those were indeed her children. Antelo began to break up. She questioned Quirion’s ethics and suggested he was putting her children’s lives in danger by showing the photo to the courtroom. Quirion didn’t even wait for the translation of what she said — he seemed to understand her Spanish.
“You don’t think you put your children’s lives in danger by getting them mixed up in your drug dealing?” he asked. Antelo didn’t answer.
Pierre Panaccio was the next to ask questions. He querie
d Sandra Antelo on her legitimate import businesses. She said that, for the most part, she imported furniture into Canada from Korea. Panaccio asked if she ever filed income reports on these companies. She said she believed her husband did file tax returns. Panaccio then asked if Antelo had other kids from another father. Prosecutor Giauque quickly protested that the question was irrelevant. But Beliveau allowed it. Antelo responded that she had children who were between 20 and 30 years old. Panaccio touched a nerve when he asked Antelo how she explained her income to her adult children.
“For that reason, I had several companies to make a screen for my children. My children are now professionals who have graduated from McGill and Concordia. They are not out on the street. They are not criminals. They grew up in a family atmosphere with respect and education. Despite the fact that my husband and I took part in another business, my children were raised through a different system. My children grew up outside of what we were doing,” Antelo said. Panaccio asked if that meant she was living a lie when it came to her children.
“What I want to know, sir, is if you explain to your children that you defend criminals. That is your work, no?” Antelo said in a cold tone.
Panaccio understood the question before it was translated into French and did not want the jury to hear it. He exploded. Beliveau allowed the jury to hear what Antelo had said, but did not seem pleased when he heard the translation. He reminded the jury that being a defense lawyer was honorable work.