by Paul Cherry
“I got dressed. I had a pistol with a silencer. I put that in a back pack and put on glasses,” Henault said, explaining his plan to blend in with the tourists in Old Montreal. Henault was assigned to kill Chouinard, but the plan was foiled when a groundskeeper told him to move off the property where he was lying in wait. He said that he and Desormeaux moved into new hiding places but by then Chouinard had left.
“At that time, in the event that we saw someone who was affiliated with the rival clan, if we had the opportunity, we’d kill him. If not, we would call someone who could,” he said. Henault said he was also involved in another plot to kill a member of the Hells Angels’ network during the summer of 1998. This time the target was Paul Cossette, a member of the Scorpions the Alliance suspected of trying to kill Michel Bertrand, whose twin brother Daniel had already been murdered early on in the biker war. Daniel Bertrand was shot to death at the age of 29 about a week after Sylvain Pelletier was killed, gunned down inside a Montreal bar on Ste. Catherine Street East. One of the bullets that struck him traveled through his left lung, a major vein, and his liver before exiting his body. Henault said the Alliance definitely wanted revenge for the attempt on Michel Bertrand.
The Hells Angels had an associate of the Rockers named Ryan Wolfson try to kill Bertrand. Wolfson used a stolen .357 Magnum to shoot Bertrand, but he did it in a busy park and one of his shots wounded an innocent bystander in the leg. With Bertrand wounded and lying on the ground, Wolfson walked up to him and prepared to shoot him in the head, but he had run out of bullets.
Wolfson had a history of extreme violence. In 1996, he had led police on a high-speed chase where he ended up speeding against the flow of traffic, ramming into a police car when he realized he was trapped. While serving his six-year sentence for attempted murder, Wolfson was found to be addicted to cocaine. He was released on November 10, 2004, having served two-thirds of his sentence, but left his halfway house illegally the same day he arrived. He was arrested just two days later after stealing a car. When his parole was revoked, Wolfson told the board he had been partying and had gotten high after meeting a woman.
Henault had done guard duty while Michel Bertrand recovered from the wounds he suffered at Wolfson’s hands. Henault said Franco Fondacaro asked him to kill Paul Cossette, but he initially didn’t say why. André Desormeaux and Fondacaro took Henault to the convenience store where Cossette worked to show him what his target looked like. Henault later learned the Alliance suspected Cossette of ordering the hit on Bertrand. The trio then went to a wooded area to try out a .22-calibre gun to see if it would do the job, but the hit was never carried out.
In fact, Henault’s testimony revealed that the Alliance’s attempts to murder the Hells Angels or the people who worked for them were not very well thought out and, for the most part, consisted of them scraping a plan together whenever they happened to see a potential target.
“During the summer of 2000, I was living downtown on Durocher [Street]. We got a call, André Desormeaux and I, from Jean Duquaire, who was at that moment a [member of the] Rock Machine. Jean Duquaire called us to say he had seen Mom Boucher in the sector of St-Laurent and Sherbrooke. He was at the gas station on the corner. So, me and Desormeaux left from Durocher, which was only a few streets away, and headed to meet Jean Duquaire. Jean Duquaire told us he had seen Mom Boucher in a green Volkswagen Beetle, one street north of Sherbrooke. Without waiting, me and André Desormeaux headed for the area where Mom Boucher was supposed to be ...with the goal of killing him. We never saw the vehicle,” Henault said.
Bleu Marin
Henault was then shown a series of photos of his former fellow gang members. As he identified them, he made a few mentions of the dinner held at a downtown Montreal restaurant called the Bleu Marin, a meeting between leaders of both the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine where they discussed a truce. Weeks earlier, Mom Boucher and other gang members from both sides had met in a room at the courthouse in Quebec City to discuss the same topic.
While the conversation was supposed to be about peace, both sides were careful to bring a large contingent of bodyguards. Henault said he was on guard duty outside the restaurant. His orders were to eat dinner at a nearby restaurant and wait to be paged to go to the Bleu Marin.
When the truce dinner was over, Henault got a call from his boss André Desormeaux, who invited him to a party at a downtown strip club. Henault said it was there that Desormeaux introduced him to Normand Robitaille and Richard Mayrand, two men Henault would have attempted to kill on the spot before the dinner. Henault said the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine members partied together that night at the strip club. After the celebrations were over, Henault said he was made aware of something that would start him on the road to discarding his loyalty towards the gang.
It came shortly after the truce was announced. He and Desormeaux set up a meeting with Salvatore Brunnetti and Nelson Fernandez at an Italian restaurant owned by a relative of Brunnetti. “We met with them, and it was Brunnetti and Nelson Fernandez who confessed to us that it was not the Hells Angels who had called to ask for a truce, but that in actuality it was the Rock Machine who had called the Hells Angels,” Henault said.
“What kind of reaction did that provoke out of you?” Briere asked.
“Let’s say we were surprised, disappointed.”
The police later learned the supposed truce had actually developed into an ultimatum from the Hells Angels, who were aware the Bandidos were prepared to patch over the Rock Machine. With both sides agreeing to what amounted to a ceasefire, the Hells Angels made their true intentions more evident. They made an offer whereby certain members of the Alliance could jump ship and enjoy the same status in the Hells Angels. For example, Salvatore Brunnetti, a longtime member of the Dark Circle, became a new member of the Hells Angels. A prospect in the Rock Machine who switched sides would become a prospect in the Hells Angels. But there was a time limit on the offer, and when it ended, hostilities would resume, even months after Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out.
Henault said that after learning Brunnetti and Fernandez were going over to the Hells Angels, he tried to stir up the pot and make sure no one else left. Henault said Guy Langlois, one of the Alliance members who was also quick to join the Hells Angels, tried to convince him to do the same.
“Guy Langlois told me, ’Come over with us. You’ll make money. I’ve never made money like this in my life.’ From there, I decided I wasn’t a Hells Angel and I wasn’t in the Rock Machine. It was the last time that I spoke to him,” Henault said.
“What happened that you made the decision, personally, to not join the Hells Angels?” Briere asked.
“I was not interested. I had no confidence in the Hells Angels. They had killed a lot of people I had known. I had no confidence. They are people who purge their own.”
The Arrival of the Bandidos
If the Hells Angels had made the truce offer to try to prevent the Bandidos from coming to Quebec, it failed. Henault said Jean Duquaire showed up one day shortly after the truce dinner with the new Bandidos patches. The war was back on. Joining the Bandidos, an international gang much like the Hells Angels with chapters all over the world, was seen as a new level of provocation.
Henault said he watched as his boss, Desormeaux, accepted the new patch. Some time shortly afterward, Henault was given one as well. The Alliance members who’d crossed over to the Hells Angels obviously gave their new partners in crime details about where their old friends could be found and targeted for hits. Brunnetti had been spotted by the police showing up early at the February 15, 2001, meeting where members of the Nomads chapter like Mayrand mulled over who their new targets would be. Also, when police raided the homes of the Hells Angels and Rockers targeted in Operation Springtime 2001, they found updated lists of places where the Bandidos regularly held meetings. Henault was shown the documents and confirmed that he had attended meetings at some of the places mentioned, including the Guy métro station and s
everal shopping mall food courts.
The fact that the entire Nomads chapter was either behind bars or on the lam as a result of Operation Springtime 2001 represented a world of possibilities, Henault said.
“My principal activities [after the arrests] was the sale of drugs, cocaine, pot. In the moments after I received my patch in the Bandidos, it was a question of recovering territory, attempting to recover territory,” he said.
When Henault was cross-examined, he was grilled about the most controversial parts of Operation Amigo, the investigation that resulted in a similar roundup of members of the Bandidos, several months after Operation Springtime 2001. The Montreal police had Éric Nadeau, a man tied to the Bandidos, working for them as an informant. The police were monitoring Nadeau, Henault and Desormeaux one day while they prepared for a hit on Steven (Bull) Bertrand, Boucher’s close friend. A surveillance videotape leaked to the media shortly after Operation Amigo was carried out showed Henault and the others preparing for the Bertrand hit. It appeared from the video that the Montreal police did little to prevent the hit from happening. Despite watching Henault arm himself inside the apartment on a closed circuit television, a surveillance team showed up only after Bertrand was shot. Henault was arrested only after he’d shot Bertrand several times while the drug trafficker dined at a sushi restaurant in Montreal’s trendy Plateau district. It would later be revealed that Bertrand ate there almost routinely, so it had been easy for the Bandidos to find him. Bertrand survived the attempt on his life.
Defense lawyer Guy Quirion began the cross-examination, and asked Henault about what happened that day. Henault had been arrested in the shooting, but was not charged immediately because he had been out illegally at the time and the authorities were able to hold him on that basis without having to disclose evidence in the ongoing Operation Amigo investigation — including the fact that Nadeau was a double agent. Henault had been technically at large for 28 months when he shot Bertrand, and he could be held for a variety of reasons, including the fact he had become a member of the Bandidos. When the arrests in Amigo were carried out months later, the attempted murder charges became public.
“It was after the charges came out in Project Amigo, in June 2OO2, that I learned that Éric Nadeau was an agent source? Henault said.
“What was your reaction, and Mr. Desormeaux’s, after you learned he was an agent source. What did you do?” Quirion said.
Henault admitted that he and Desormeaux tried to implicate Nadeau in the attempted murder. They had tried to make it look like Nadeau had first seen Bertrand and had directed Henault to him. Henault said that shortly after the arrests were made, the police showed him the cassette that captured images of him preparing to kill Bertrand. In the video, Nadeau is standing nearby. Henault said he was later told that Nadeau was also wearing a body pack, which could both record and transmit sound. In May 2OO3, Henault gave the police a statement claiming he had been a victim of police entrapment, and that it had been Nadeau who had actually planned the hit on Bertrand.
But months later, when Henault became an informant himself, he reversed his position and said that it was he and Desormeaux who had planned the hit on Bertrand. Éric Nadeau just happened to be with them at the time, Henault said.
“André Desormeaux and I made the decision to kill Steven Bertrand but Éric Nadeau was not next to us. He was about 12,15 feet away,” Henault said, adding the decision to kill Bertrand was only discussed once. Henault said they had spotted Steven Bertrand by chance.
He and Desormeaux had gone to a restaurant and spotted him seated in the neighboring sushi place.
Within months of his guilty plea, Henault was able to enjoy temporary leaves. Like almost all gangsters who turn informant, he arranged to serve his federal sentence in a provincial detention center, which meant he could get out quicker. By 2004, despite admitting he’d tried to carry out a cold-blooded murder only two years earlier, Henault was out on parole.
13
A Jury Decides
Madeleine Giauque appeared calm for someone waiting to see what a jury would think of the evidence she and a team of prosecutors had worked on for more than three years. After the jury was finally sequestered in February 2004, Justice Pierre Beliveau decided he wanted to meet with lawyers from both sides every morning in the courtroom while the jury members deliberated on the fate of Hells Angel Richard (Dick) Mayrand and the eight other bikers underneath him in the gang’s hierarchy. The morning meetings in the large courtroom were informal and friendly. The tension between the defense and the prosecution that had built up over the duration of the trial was subsiding.
The Morning News
Beliveau allowed a number of Montreal newspapers to be made available to the jury as long as all references to the trial and the Hells Angels were removed. Someone from the defense team was always present to verify that any potentially influential articles did not make their way into the jury. One morning there was even a debate over whether an article about the jury hearing the trial of Martha Stewart, the home-decorating mogul on trial for stock fraud in New York, should be cut out.
A courthouse clerk was assigned the duty of removing all the potentially influential articles. Her scissors were very busy on one day in particular when Operation South was carried out. A police operation much smaller in scale and of less significance than Operation Springtime 2001, it still resulted in the roundup of several members of the Hells Angels’ South chapter and many more underlings.
Eric Bouffard, a member of the Hells Angels arrested in Project Ocean.
Among those arrested on February 26, 2004, was Éric Bouffard, one of the Hells Angels who had been caught delivering money to the Nomads chapter’s bank. He had quickly pleaded guilty to the charges brought against him in Project Ocean, and was already out on parole when he was arrested again. The investigation centered on the South chapter, based in Saint-Basile-le-Grand. At the time, the police said the South chapter Ocean. appeared to have been filling the drug trafficking void created by the roundup of the Nomads chapter. But the investigation was also heavily focused on loan-sharking. When it was carried out, it made the front pages of all the Montreal newspapers and several pages inside. Some lawyers joked that the jury members were going to be intrigued by the amount of vetting done to their papers that morning.
While waiting for the verdict, Giauque managed to keep her sense of humor as well. While talking to reporters after one of the morning meetings in front of Beliveau, Giauque said that she and other members of the prosecution team killed time waiting for a verdict by watching DVDS.“But there is no way I’m going to watch Runaway Jury” Giauque said in reference to a film that had just been released on DVD starring Gene Hackman and John Cusack, portraying two sides engaged in a heated and very illegal battle to sway a jury.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury
It seemed to have taken forever to get to the point where a jury could actually deliberate on the charges filed in Project Rush. The question on many minds was whether the average person could accept that doing things like contributing to a fund, or performing guard duty, or acting as a personal bodyguard facilitated a criminal act and therefore was also a crime. It had taken a long time to get to that point. Jury selection had begun on January 13, 2003. The jury sat for 118 days over a period of a little more than one year. Much more court time was spent without the jury present, as lawyers argued various motions.
The evidence was broken down into 10 stages. The first involved informing the jury of what had been seized at the bikers’ homes during Operation Springtime 2001. Rather than allow much of that evidence in without challenge, the defense decided that it had to be scrutinized before the jury. That meant police officers who had seized the items had to be called in to testify. The process created delays that Beliveau would later criticize as being very unnecessary.
The second stage involved showing the jury hours of videotape police surveillance teams had taken of gang members doing things like attending me
etings or doing guard duty — “the watch” as the gang called it. Things did not get interesting for the jury until stage three, when they were shown the videotapes police had secretly made of meetings the Rockers held in hotel conference rooms. It was Dany Kane who had tipped off the police as to where the meetings were going to be held. Stage five involved the informant testimony, and stage seven involved much of the evidence gathered on the Nomads Bank.
Giauque was able to begin her final arguments on February 3, 2004. The task before her was to attempt to make sense of all the evidence the jury had heard and seen. In a very thorough multimedia presentation which took four days to complete, Giauque explained the reasons why the jury had watched hours of videotape and listened to countless wiretapped conversations. She went over the highlights of the Masses, bringing out the importance of some of the comments recorded as they applied to a gangsterism case. For example, in one of the Masses, the gang had discussed where Éric (Pif) Fournier was going to go when the Rockers divided the gang into two chapters, one to remain in the east end of Montreal and the other to give them a presence in the west end.
What became apparent during this Mass was that Fournier was a heavily prized bodyguard to Louis (Melou) Roy. Michel Rose and Roy had discussed the issue, and the possibility of Fournier losing his patch was mentioned. The gang also discussed how difficult it was to protect Roy and that there simply weren’t enough guys to act as his bodyguards. Fournier was believed to have committed several murders for the Hells Angels since his introduction to the Hells Angels in 1996.