Befriend and Betray

by Alex Caine

  Pete had saved my ass in his time—in particular on one occasion in northern Ontario during my hitchhiking days. I was in a restaurant in the town of Dryden when a redneck about my age started riding me. It was only after I straightened the guy out in a physical way that I was told he happened to be the son of a local cop. That made me less than interested in standing on the side of the road with my thumb in the air, so I went to a gas station and called up Pete in Hull. Together with Rita, later to be the mother of his four sons, he drove more than a thousand miles—almost twenty-four hours—while I hid in the rocky woodland outside of town waiting for them. So, in a sense, helping Pete now was just paying him back.

  If I couldn’t ignore Pete and his problems, there were some things competing for my time and attention that I could take a pass on. After arriving back in Vancouver, I had got in touch with Scott Paterson and given him an update, as was my habit any time I went somewhere new. We got together once or twice for coffee. Then, a couple of months later, around the time Pete washed up in Vancouver, another Mountie called and said he wanted to meet.

  A day or two later I was in Confederation Park, meeting him and his partner. Within five minutes he had handed me a roll of bills. Seven hundred and fifty dollars.

  “What’s this for?” I asked.

  “Just to show we really appreciate you taking the time out to meet us.”

  I wasn’t going to say no to that. I did, however, say no to the job. It was a drugs-and-bikers thing, but the problem was the location—right there in Burnaby.

  “You don’t shit in your own backyard,” I said. “I never work where I live.” I went on to explain that we’d just settled in and got the club going and that I really wasn’t interested in uprooting the kids and Natalie all over again. The Mounties accepted that and weren’t too upset, even if it turned out to be a pretty expensive no.

  A few months after that, Scotty called me again, but this time it wasn’t work-related. His old RCMP partner, Larry Ricketts, had recently reunited with his wife and moved with her to Victoria to make a fresh start. They’d bought a puppy for their son and were intent on making things work. But tragically, the boy had been killed in a traffic accident not long after they’d moved.

  I phoned up Larry to offer my condolences, and he was appreciative. He also told me that his wife didn’t want the dog around anymore because of the memories and associations. Soon enough, Thumper had a girlfriend and we had a litter of little Rotties.

  More importantly, however, my renewed contact with Larry led to him phoning again a year later. And to me eventually, finally, getting back in the game.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Les Hells and the Para-Dice Riders

  ______

  The first Canadian Hells Angels chapter opened in Montreal in 1977, and the gang has dominated the province’s biker scene ever since. By the early 1990s, however, domination was no longer enough—they wanted to be the only game in town. At least in Montreal, the province’s biggest city and home to pretty much half its population. So, with several puppet gangs as their foot soldiers, les Hells, as they’re known, began a brutal campaign to monopolize the drugs business, especially the big money-maker: cocaine.

  Other organized crime groups, most of which were French-Canadian family mobs based in the various working-class neighborhoods around Montreal, first tried to accommodate the ambitions of les Hells and work with them. When that didn’t work, the families began resisting. To little effect. Finally, in 1993, they banded together and started to fight back, under the banner first of the Alliance and eventually of the Rock Machine, a biker gang created for the exclusive purpose of resisting the Hells Angels’ predations.

  Initially, police didn’t much mind criminals taking out criminals—it made for fewer bad guys to deal with. But as 1994 turned into 1995, bombs increasingly became les Hells’ weapon of choice. A successful explosion could accomplish three goals: kill their enemies, destroy a place of business (and point of sale) and send a very strong message.

  Then, in August 1995, a piece of shrapnel struck and killed an eleven-year-old boy when a booby-trapped Jeep exploded across the street from where he was playing. Police suddenly were forced to jump to it. So was born l’Escouade Carcajou— the Wolverine Squad—a special task force uniting the RCMP, the Quebec provincial police (known as the SQ after its name in French, the Sûreté du Québec) and various municipal police forces, principally Montreal’s. To accomplish its work, Carcajou was handed what amounted to a blank check from the Quebec government.

  I didn’t know any of this when I got a call from Larry Ricketts in October 1995 asking me to speak to Corporal Pierre Verdon, a Mountie colleague of his from Quebec. After a brief conversation, during which I said little more than that I was interested in going back to work, I was on a plane for Montreal. There, in a hotel room on the South Shore, Verdon and a colleague of his from Ottawa, Staff Sergeant Jean-Pierre (J.P.) Lévesque, gave me the details of the job.

  They wanted me to penetrate the Sherbrooke chapter of the Hells Angels. It wasn’t deeply involved in what Quebecers were already calling la guerre des motards— the Biker War; that was really in the hands of the Montreal chapter, the recently formed Nomads and the Montreal-area puppet clubs. Instead, the Sherbrooke chapter was considered to be the money chapter, and that’s what the Mounties wanted me to focus on. Rather than nail the members in drug buys or other front-end illegal activity, they hoped I would find out where their money was going and maybe get them to invest in a scheme I came up with.

  I liked that angle, and the job appealed to me on several other levels as well. Sherbrooke was not unlike Hull in many ways: neither small town nor big city; mostly French but with a solid English minority; blue-collar. I was also up for an adventure. I’d not done an infiltration job for a decade and had been totally immersed in my martial arts club for five years. Now, with the business effectively running itself thanks to our two talented and dependable instructors, taking time away was conceivable.

  Natalie and I had had a child of our own about six months earlier, so I didn’t expect her to much like the idea of me returning to my old job, which I’d told her about after we got together. Her reaction surprised me. If it meant we might have a chance of moving back east, she was all for it. The new baby had reminded her how much she missed her other children, whom she hadn’t seen—or been allowed to see—for five years now. Heading back east wouldn’t get her access—only lawyers could do that—but she’d at least be closer. So, with her blessing, I accepted the gig on the understanding that I’d initially commit to only a three-month probe, and then she and I would decide whether moving east made sense or not.

  I flew back to Montreal a week or two after that first visit, this time to get to work. There I had a day of meetings with Carcajou squad members and got outfitted with a credit card with a $25,000 limit.

  “Don’t use it!” said the SQ sergeant, Guy Ouellette, who gave it to me. He then lectured me as if I were a criminal who had just agreed to become an informant. “You do anything illegal—anything—we’ll find out about it and you can expect to be charged.”

  After that, he repeated the same message about five times, but using different words.

  “I know my fucking job,” I finally said aggressively, just to shut him up. Speaking French again—and swearing in it—was a pleasure.

  The next day, Pierre Verdon drove me the ninety miles or so from Montreal to Sherbrooke. We didn’t talk that much on the way and the silence gave me time to plan my entry into the world of Sherbrooke’s Hells. This time, I decided, I’d come in seriously crooked. I had with me an eight-by-ten glossy studio portrait of a girl called Rachel, who had been one of the Élite team, a short-lived escort agency I had set up way back when for the Thai pilots case. I made up a story in which she was a stripper-turned-snitch due to testify at an upcoming trial; I was the guy charged with taking care of her. Exactly what that meant, I’d leave up to the imaginations of the people I spoke to. If
they thought “hit man” or “contract killer,” I’d be doing my job. Of course, I wouldn’t be stopping people on the sidewalk to ask if they had seen the woman. Instead, I would concentrate on three bars and a motel, all of which I knew to be biker-owned.

  On my second visit to the main biker bar, a strip club called Barbie on Wellington Street, I confided in the doorman. He wasn’t being too discreet about his affiliations: he was wearing a Hells Angels T-shirt.

  “Listen, out of respect for you guys, I should tell you what I’m here for,” I said, before pulling out a shrunken-down copy of the photo and giving him the CliffNotes of my interest in her. “C’est un rat,” I said, adding, “She’s from here and word is she’s coming back here.”

  I counted on him not to ask too many questions, and he didn’t. Instead, he just took a long look at the photo, said she wasn’t working there and hadn’t been around, and promised he’d keep his eye out for her. “Check in occasionally,” he said.

  I went back a few nights later, only to find a different doorman out front. But things looked positive when I went to order a drink—the barman brought me a Pepsi without my having to ask, and when I went to pay he just waved me off. I guessed they had been talking about me and regarded me favorably.

  Like the doorman, the barman turned out to be a patched member of les Hells, and I spent a bit of time chatting with him that night. Again I flashed the photo, and he, of course, said he hadn’t seen her. It wasn’t much, but still, things were looking good. I had made contact.

  Then the jerk from the SQ, who was his force’s main expert on bikers and had never met a microphone he didn’t fall for, decided to mouth off at a press conference about Carcajou’s goal in the Sherbrooke area. He said the task force had a comprehensive plan to crack down on the illegal activities of the Hells Angels, their puppet clubs and associates and to go after them ruthlessly. Then he added, “And we’ve recently inserted an agent in place for that very purpose.”

  That was it—in one sentence the goofball had torpedoed the whole project. I called Verdon as soon as I saw the item on the evening news. “I’m out of here,” I said.

  He fully understood. If anything, he was angrier than I was. While I packed my bags and got the hell out of Sherbrooke, Verdon went on the warpath within Carcajou.

  I initially thought it had just been a combination of stupidity and motor mouth that had led the cop—who went on to become a successful provincial politician—to make his blunder. Later, though, I came to suspect otherwise. For years, the ill will between the RCMP and the SQ had been pretty much as bad as that between the Hells Angels and their criminal rivals. The creation of Carcajou didn’t make things any better, at least not initially. The police seemed to be investing as much effort in undermining their rivals within the task force as in going after the bad guys. And since I was brought in by the RCMP and was clearly their infiltrator, I’d been a target of the SQ.

  I headed home to Vancouver, the family and the club with one thing clear in my mind: the investigation may have ended as prematurely and as unsuccessfully as any I’d been involved in, but that was the work I wanted to be doing. Another thing became clear during the following weeks: it was back east that we should be living. Natalie would be closer to her kids; I would be near to Verdon, who seemed as likely a source of future employment as any of my police contacts. Scott Paterson had retired by then to set up his own security company, and Ricketts’s new job was in uniform and administrative; it didn’t put him in a position to require my services.

  We moved early in 1996. The car was just as overloaded on this trip as it had been coming the other direction five years earlier. The occupants, however, were different. My son, who had come back to live with us after the year with his mother, was thirteen now and was a passenger. But my daughter, who was fifteen, had decided she didn’t want to go through the pains of moving and making new friends all over again, and she opted to stay with her mom’s sister and her family. Then, of course, we had the baby. Of the animals, only the cat made the return trip. Thumper had had to be put down because of hip problems and Teela, the female Rottie that Larry had given me, turned out not to be very good with young children, so I’d passed her on to someone else. I’d also given the club to the two instructors who, by that time, had been effectively running it for several months anyway.

  Our plan was to spend a month or so in the Ottawa-Hull region and then move on to Saint John. The time in Hull didn’t have anything to do with nostalgia on my part—I was over that. Rather, I’d spend it building a bit of verifiable background for use in future infiltration assignments. In particular, in consultation with my new Mountie friends, I’d get involved in a business that had been known to attract organized crime in the past: I’d promote a concert or two. How hard could it be?

  My brother Pete, who had recovered enough to go back to Hull and back to playing music, provided an entree and the Mounties covered a few expenses—a car and a cellphone, for instance. Since I wasn’t an RCMP employee, I got to keep any profits I made from my ventures. (There weren’t many, but I didn’t lose my shirt either.)

  Of course, that sort of background-building ended up taking more than a month. I eventually stayed six months in the region, while Natalie and the kids went on to Saint John ahead of me. During my time in Ottawa, I quickly realized that Verdon wouldn’t replace Scott Paterson in my life. He was too wrapped up in Carcajou, the escalating biker war in Quebec and handling a Hells Angels informer in Montreal. Instead, my new conduit to infiltration jobs would be Verdon’s good friend J.P. Lévesque. He was based in Ottawa and was the national coordinator for what’s called the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada—a Mountie-run outfit that tries to get those most secretive of organizations, police forces, to share organized crime information with each other. He was as much diplomat as cop, and had endless contacts in Canada and internationally.

  Whereas Scott had done little more than give me phone numbers with the message, “This person wants to talk to you,” J.P. played a much larger role. He gave advice, sifted out those jobs that he felt weren’t appropriate, and seemed to be actually concerned with the impact of the work in general, and of specific assignments in particular, on me, my family and my career. That’s why I began to refer to him as my rabbi—law enforcement slang for a superior who watches out, formally and otherwise, for an underling. In return for the guidance and protection, rabbis tend to be rewarded with the most precious currency among police the world over: intelligence, some of which the undercover agent might not even share with his handlers, depending on his relationship with them.

  The first official job I did for J.P. was a joint RCMP–Interpol operation involving a dozen police forces from half as many countries. Because of national security considerations, the details fall under the Official Secrets Act, making it a criminal offense to discuss them. Suffice it to say, the assignment took me out of Canada barely a week or two after I got to Saint John and kept me out of the country for eighteen months. My absence would have gone over worse with Natalie had she not been back near her family (although she still didn’t have access to her kids; she wouldn’t get that until the summer of 1998) and had she not understood that this wasn’t a regular assignment. It went well beyond the scope of good guy/bad guy, catch-the-speed-dealing-biker.

  I found myself back in Saint John in early 1998, and very happy to be home. Despite the long time away, the reintegration to family life was easier than it had ever been before. One reason was that the job I was coming off hadn’t required me to be a completely different person; another was that I was older, more mature and more capable of keeping what I’d come to call church and state—the personal and the professional—apart.

  A period of relative serenity on the home front helped also. My son was a teenager at the time, but an easy one. He had a great relationship with Natalie and an even better one with his younger half-sister. She worshipped him, all the more so because I wasn’t around much in her early years, and he
loved her back just as much. Natalie was also in good spirits. Shortly after her return to Saint John we’d begun legal proceedings to obtain her access to her older children again, and even if it was slow going, and even if her ex’s family fought us every step of the way, by early 1998 we were clearly winning.

  Needless to say, the legal action was expensive. So when J.P. Lévesque called me in March with another job, I nibbled. It led to a meeting in Kingston, Ontario, with some special squad investigators from the Ontario Provincial Police; that encounter led to me moving to Toronto on May 5. The assignment involved infiltrating the Para-Dice Riders biker club—the main gang in Toronto but by no means the only one—and gathering intelligence on, among other things, its relationship with the Quebec Hells Angels.

  The biker war was still raging in that province and outlaw motorcycle gangs had come to be recognized as the most serious organized crime threat across the country as a whole. The buffer treaty I’d witnessed being negotiated in Sturgis more than a decade earlier had led to a global shakeout of the biker world during the 1980s and 1990s. There had been a huge expansion in the number of members and chapters of the Hells Angels and Bandidos; meanwhile, independents had gone extinct by the dozen. Toronto, however, resisted the trend, and remained misleadingly calm. Its biker scene was still diverse and dynamic, with a handful of independent gangs—the Para-Dice Riders (known as the PDR), the Loners, Satan’s Choice, the Vagabonds, the Last Chance—all coexisting more or less happily. It was a rich market, and the bikers seemed to recognize that the pie was big enough for all of them.

  The police knew that this could change very quickly. The HA were increasingly putting pressure—with both carrot and stick—on the PDR and the other gangs active in what’s known as the Golden Horseshoe, an economically thriving area that begins east of Toronto and wraps westward around the tip of Lake Ontario toward the U.S. border at Niagara Falls. In addition to developing an accurate picture of the interaction between the PDR, the other Ontario gangs and the expansion-minded Quebec Hells, I was to collect any evidence I could of drug, gun and explosives trafficking between the provinces and among members.