by Gordon Kerr
Bonnot had almost been taken on 24 April when they had surprised him at an apartment belonging to a well-known fence. In the resulting gunfight he killed one gendarme and wounded another before escaping over the rooftops.
Four days later he was tracked to a garage in the Paris suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, owned by a Bonnot Gang sympathiser, Jean Dubois. Five hundred police officers, soldiers, firemen, military engineers and armed private individuals besieged the house and Dubois was shot dead when officers charged the garage. Then, after shots had been exchanged by Bonnot and the soldiers and police officers outside, Police Chief Lépines ordered three of his men to place an explosive charge beneath the house, the resulting explosion completely demolishing the front of the building. When police entered what remained they found Bonnot hiding in a rolled-up mattress. He opened fire on them, but was hit in the head by a bullet said to be from the police chief’s gun. The shot, however, did not kill him immediately.
Outside, the crowd that had gathered went mad and police again feared that a lynching might take place. They calmed the situation by declaring that Bonnot had already died and had been buried in a secret grave. He did die shortly afterwards on the way to the police station but had taken care to leave behind a note acquitting the others of responsibility, placing all of the blame on himself.
Garnier and Valet remained at large until 14 May when they were discovered in a house in Nogent-Sur-Marne, in Paris’s eastern suburbs. Once again, a huge force assembled – 300 policemen and 800 soldiers – with Sûreté Chief Guichard taking personal control of the operation. An intense gunfight raged for some time before Guichard decided enough was enough. At two in the morning he ordered that the building be blown up. Garnier died in the explosion, but Valet, seriously wounded, continued firing for some time until he, too, was silenced. Like Bonnot, Garnier left a confession, implicating himself and exonerating all the others.
At the trial of the surviving members of the Bonnot Gang which began on 3 February 1913, Victor Serge was sentenced to five years for robbery, Eugéne Dieudonné got life, and Carouy and Marius Metge were given life with hard labour. Raymond Callemin, Antoine Monnier and André Soudy refused to plead for clemency, preferring to be executed on the guillotine.
The West End Gang
The West End Gang has been active in the Canadian city of Montreal’s west side and beyond since the early years of the 20th century, consisting mostly, though not exclusively, of members of Irish descent. Originally known simply as the Irish Gang, it focused, during its formative years on truck hijacking, kidnapping and armed robbery.
Like numerous other criminal organisations, the West Enders branched out into the world of drugs in the 1970s, importing hashish and cocaine into Canada for sale in the United States and forging alliances with the Montreal Mafia, Cosa Nostra and the Hell’s Angels. The three groups together make up what is known as the ‘Consortium’ and work together to fix drug prices. Police estimates place a value of $80 billion on the ten tons of cocaine and 300 tons of hashish they smuggled into Canada from the 1970s to the 1990s.
Frank Peter ‘Dunie’ Ryan was perhaps the most successful leader the West End Gang ever had. He was known as ‘Mother’ to his employees because he really did seem to look after them, if they played the game.
Born in 1942, his father abandoned the family when Ryan was just three years old. By his mid-teens, he had dropped out of school and launched himself on a life of crime, forming a gang and leading them in acts of petty theft, truck hijacks and burglary. This continued until the mid-1960s when he was arrested in America for armed robbery after he, four other Montrealers and a Boston gangster carried out a Massachusetts bank robbery. Aged just 24, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison. After being paroled, he is reported to have returned to Montreal with $100,000 in cash, the spoils of a string of robberies in the States. He invested the cash in loan sharking, but claimed to have lost the lot. It was at this point that he moved into the racket that would bring him real riches – drugs.
Soon his drug-smuggling was being carried out on a grand scale and he had set up a network that covered Quebec, Ontario and the provinces on Canada’s east coast. By now he was the dominant criminal force in Montreal, more powerful than other criminal organisations, principal among which were the Hell’s Angels and the Cotroni family. He could ask them for favours such as when he felt he had been ripped off by one of his own men, Hughie McGurnaghan. All Ryan had to do was contact the Hell’s Angels North Chapter and they sent one of their members, Yves ‘Apache’ Trudeau, to sort out the problem. A bomb in McGurnahgan’s Mercedes took care of him and delivered an important message to anyone who thought he could get one over on Dunie Ryan.
He had a near-monopoly on all the hashish coming into Canada and reputedly carried $500,000 around with him in a briefcase to invest in the various schemes he came across in his day-to-day business.
Despite doing him favours, Ryan was disliked by Montreal’s other criminal elements such as the Hell’s Angels and the Mafia, because they wanted a share of his drugs business. Ryan, however, was unwilling to let them in, and resentment grew. He boasted of connections with the IRA that were more powerful than any to be found in Montreal. ‘Mafia, pafia,’ he would say. ‘If there’s a war, we’ve got the IRA..’
Ryan was not a believer in the banking system and refused to entrust any of his vast fortune to them. Once, when testifying before the Quebec Police Commission’s inquiry into organised crime, he was asked where he kept his money. Ryan replied that he buried it in the ground. The Crime Commission lawyer suggested that he was joking, but Ryan replied: ‘I don’t believe in the banks. I know that the police can go to banks and see the safety deposit boxes and check them.’
This led to a couple of maverick Hell’s Angels planning to kidnap his children and hold them hostage until he told them where these holes containing his money were located. Ryan was passed information about what was going to happen and once again called in his Angel of no mercy, Apache Trudeau. The two Angels died before they could put their plan into action.
Ryan’s reign as the king of Montreal finally came to an end on 13 November 1984. He was working in his office at the Nittolo’s Garden Motel when he was interrupted by a West End Gang member, Paul April. April told him that there was a woman waiting to have sex with him in one of the motel’s rooms. Ryan went to the room and discovered waiting for him April, a small-time Montreal crook by the name of Robert Lelièvre, and two other men. They all had guns and planned, like the two Hell’s Angels, to find out from him where he had stashed the $50–100 million he was believed to be worth. As they tried to restrain Ryan, he struggled and was felled by a blast in the chest from a shotgun. A slug from a .45 through his right cheek finished him off. At least his stash was safe. He was only 42 but would be remembered fondly for many years after his death by those who worked with him. One, William ‘Billy’ McAllister, had nothing but kind words to say about Ryan: ‘Mother [Ryan] was a criminal genius and a nice person. He wasn’t ruthless, but you couldn’t put your hand in his pocket to steal from him. But that’s the law on the street. He was very kind-hearted and generous. He was an honourable man.’
Allan ‘The Weasel’ Ross picked up where Ryan left off. He had been a loyal sidekick of Ryan’s since the early 1960s when the West End Gang was still known as ‘the Irish Gang’. By the early 1980s he was an enormously powerful and wealthy man, reputed to be the fifth biggest cocaine-trafficker in North America.
Paul April decided the time was right to make a leadership bid, but Ross, called in the ever-reliable Apache Trudeau, offering him $200,000 and the chance to have his sizeable drug debt wiped out if he took on a contract for April and the others who had been in the Nittolo’s Garden Motel room with Dunie Ryan.
Twelve days later an explosion destroyed the entire apartment block in which April and his associates were holed up. April, Lelièvre and two other gang members died and eight other people were injured.
Ross consolid
ated his position when Edward Philips, one of his associates, was murdered in a restaurant car park in March 1985. Ross found out that his murderer was a drug dealer called David Singer and decided to make an example of him. He sent his henchmen Raymond Desfossés and Allan Strong, a.k.a. Jean-Guy Trépanier, to Florida where Singer was hiding out.
On 10 May Singer got into a car with Ross’s men. While Desfossés drove the car, Strong covered a struggling Singer’s face with a pillow and fired several shots into it. They dumped the body at the side of the road and sped off. In their haste, however, Desfossés was seen jumping a red light by a Highway Patrolman. He was pulled over, but as the cop approached the car, Desfossés pulled out his gun and fired at him, hitting the officer in the leg. They took off once again, managing to escape.
They thought they were in the clear, but police officers discovered the phone number of Allan Ross’s wife in the dead Singer’s pocket. The trail led straight back to Desfossés, Strong and Ross. It took a while to build up the case, but finally, in October 1991, Ross was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on the evidence of an informer and attempt to bribe the federal agent arresting him with $200,000. The officer, however, was having none of it. He was charged with murder and cocaine-trafficking, the evidence against him was overwhelming. No fewer than 15 informants were willing to testify against Ross. One, however, a Montreal drug dealer named Gaétan Lafond, missed his day in court. He was murdered a month before while eating in a restaurant in Medillin, Colombia’s drug capital. His killers walked up to his table and calmly pumped eight bullets into him. No one has ever been arrested, but the killing proved that Ross’s power reached far beyond the bars of his prison cell.
In November 1997 Allan Ross was sentenced to life in prison, the judge telling him he would have to serve at least 45 years before being eligible for parole.
Defossés was arrested in 1992 and fought extradition to Florida from Canada. Eventually, however, in 1997, he was extradited for the murder of David Singer and the attempted murder of the policeman he shot.
Strong, meanwhile, had gone on the run, only being apprehended in February 1994, in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Extradited to Florida on the murder rap and charges of drug smuggling, his case was lost when a member of his crew, Jean-Francois Leboeuf, testified against him. He went to prison for 25 years.
While Ross had been under arrest, it came to light that Sidney Leithman, lawyer to Frank ‘Dunie’ Ryan and another leading Montreal underworld figure, Frank Cotroni, had been a police informer since 1985 when he had informed on a client who was involved in a drugs case. Once the news was out, it was obvious that he would not be doing too much more informing. He was shot dead at the wheel of his black Saab convertible at 6.48 a.m. on 13 May 1991. Leaving his home, he had been cut off by a car at a set of traffic lights. A man waiting in a nearby telephone kiosk walked over to his car and fired four bullets into him from a .45 pistol. A bag of smoked meat was then thrown on the body, to add insult to injury.
Leithman had traces of cocaine in his blood and was known to have had an escalating habit. When he was killed, he was under investigation as a co-conspirator in Ross’s case, Ross being another of his clients. He was being further investigated for obstructing the course of justice following reports that he had been bribing drug dealers not to talk to the police. However, there is little doubt that if he had been charged, he would have been in a position to get a lot of people into trouble.
One of them was senior police officer Claude Savoie, who was head of the drug squad. He shot himself in his office just before he was going to be interviewed by internal affairs officers about his dealings with Leithman. When Leithman was shot, he had Savoie’s telephone number in his pocket and Savoie had had several meetings with Leithman and Allan Ross, unaccompanied by any other police officer. These meetings had taken place while Ross was being investigated by the American Drug Enforcement Administration.
Following Ross’s arrest, Daniel Serero, known as ‘The Arab’ as he had been born in Casablanca, took care of business for a while. Serero described himself as a florist and had declared only $21,959 in salary since 1989. However, he seemed to be able to make his money go a long way because when the authorities investigated his finances, he was discovered to be spending more than $45,000 a month. He dressed in the finest designer clothes, dined in expensive restaurants, lived in a plush penthouse in the affluent city of Westmount, at one time the richest community in Canada, and drove a Rolls Royce. In September 1996 he went to jail for 11 years.
The only members of the leadership left on the streets were the Matticks brothers, Gerry and Richard. They maintained the gang’s hijacking and drug-trafficking activities and allegedly ran things at the Port of Montreal.
At present, the West End Gang consists of around 125 to 150 members according to Montreal police estimates. Serero is back on the streets again and can only be presumed to be carrying on with his previous activities, but the gang’s current leader is unknown since Gerry Matticks, too, was jailed in 2003.
Part Eight: British Killers
Jimmy Moody
He was known to the staff of the Royal Hotel in Hackney simply as Mick. He would come in now and then for a couple of drinks, speak to no one, finish his drink and leave. Always polite and always quiet.
On 1 June 1993 it was no different. He sat on a stool at the bar minding his own business, making his pint last and staring at the bottles hanging from the optics behind the bar. A man in his early forties, wearing a leather jacket, came through the door and went to the Gents, presumably caught short out in the street. Just moments later he emerged, a .38 revolver in his hand. He stopped, took aim and fired three bullets from his Saturday Night Special into the chest of the man known as Mick. Mick slumped to the floor and as he did so, the man in the leather jacket fired another round into his back, just to make absolutely certain. He then calmly turned and walked out the door, climbed into a waiting Ford Fiesta XR2 and was driven off, never to be seen again.
The dead man – Mick – turned out to be a gangster called Jimmy Moody who had once been a member of the gang run by Charlie and Eddie Richardson that terrorised South London in the 1960s. At the height of their power, the Richardsons had had a reputation for employing some of London’s most infamous and sadistic gangsters. They were also known as the ‘Torture Gang’, which tells you all you need to know – their ‘speciality’ was pinning victims to the floor with six-inch nails and/or removing their toes with bolt cutters. They had legitimate businesses – Charlie was into scrap metal and Eddie was into fruit machines – but these enterprises were merely fronts for their more lucrative criminal activities – fraud, theft and fencing stolen goods.
Their business methods were unorthodox. If Eddie wanted you to install one of his fruit machines in your pub, it was not wise to refuse, unless you wanted to have to pay for repairs to the damage his heavies would do. Their principal mode of operation was the use of ‘Long Firms’. These were companies that would be set up by someone they knew. The business would operate legally for a while, establishing a credit rating. This achieved, they would then place a large order for goods, often washing machines, fridges or televisions, and would sell them. Instead of using the proceeds to pay their supplier, however, they would simply pocket the money and the company would vanish into thin air. Nonetheless, the Richardsons managed to stay out of prison. It was amazing the difference a tidy donation to the Police Benevolent Fund could make to a case.
Jimmy Moody had been the number one enforcer for the Richardsons in a criminal career that spanned four decades and in which his associates included some of the most infamous British criminal names – Jack Spot, Billy Hill, Mad Frankie Fraser and the Krays, to name but a few. He was a powerfully built man, a devoted body-builder, extraordinarily fit and strong. However, 13 years before his leather-jacketed assassin had strode into the Royal Hotel, he had seemed to disappear off the face of the earth. He had been locked in his cell in Brixton Prison one night
while awaiting trial. Next morning, he, along with a couple of cellmates, was gone.
His short stay in Brixton followed an armed robbery that had gone awry. In the late 1970s he was working with an accomplished armed robber named Billy Tobin. Tobin had assembled a crew known as the Chainsaw Gang, or sometimes the Thursday Gang. They became the most successful armed robbers of the 1970s. Their game was hijacking security vans, often using extreme violence, cutting them open and making off with the contents – usually very large sums of money. They were nothing if not innovative in their methods and they planned their robberies in meticulous detail, carrying them out with military precision.
Moody is reported to have once dressed up as a policeman and forced a security van to stop in the Blackwall Tunnel, collecting the keys of the cars that had stopped behind the van to delay the raising of the alarm. It was when they rammed a security van in Dulwich with a mobile crane that Tobin was finally caught. But Moody got away and hid out in a lock-up garage that he kept ready for just such an eventuality. It contained books, food, body-building equipment and even a chemical toilet. He made the mistake of visiting his son, however, and was arrested and charged with robberies with estimated takings of £930,000. Awaiting trial in Brixton, he enjoyed what his brother Richard brought in for him – in those days a prisoner’s family could provide him with food and little luxuries. Unfortunately for the authorities, Richard’s steak and kidney pies also hid drill bits, hacksaws and other tools useful in a prison breakout.