Biker Trials, The (29 page)

In the end, Judge Paul decided the government had a fair claim to $500,000 worth of Robitaille's assets. In a judgement he rendered on March 24,2005, the Superior Court judge said it was obvious Cogesma Inc. was used as a front to pay Robitaille a salary, so he could file his taxes, and as a way to launder his dirty money. Paul ordered the confiscation of $199,980 which police had found in a blue sports bag in one of Robitaille's residences, as well as money found in various bank accounts.

But Paul also ordered that the government could not touch a house in La Prairie where Robitaille had lived with his wife Annie-Sophie Bedard, who was also a defense lawyer. Paul said that while the intentions behind the 1995 transfer of the house from Robitaille's name to his wife's were dubious, there was not enough evidence to justify taking it from Bedard.

The government also could not confiscate some of the properties Robitaille was suspected of purchasing through underlings like De Serres. On top of what was confiscated, Robitaille was ordered to pay a $49,000 fine for the more than $200,000 in assets the government could not locate, including Robitaille's Harley-Davidson, estimated to be worth more than $26,000. Paul also tacked on an additional year to Robitaille's 20-year sentence. When Paul finished reading his decision, Robitaille had a
smile on his face that nearly stretched from ear to ear. Losing half a million while behind bars seemed to be no skin off his nose. From the prisoners' dock, he raised his handcuffed hands and congratulated his lawyers for their work.

“The war was always about expanding the drug network. That is why there were murders and settling of accounts. They had to show that they weren't going to let things be. A Hells Angel can never lose face.”

— Stéphane Sirois in a statement he gave to the police after turning informant.

On June 15,1998, Stéphane Sirois was approached by the police out of the blue. They had done their homework on Sirois and knew he had made a tough choice. He had been told by the Rockers he couldn't be a member if he stayed with his girlfriend — whose previous lover had been an informant. He chose the woman. The cops thought there was a chance Sirois would turn on the gang because his departure from the Rockers had not been a smooth one. If he did decide to turn, he would be a valuable part of the investigation because he knew intimate details regarding how the Rockers functioned overall as a gang. Sirois told the cops he wasn't interested in their offer. But for some reason, he kept the business card that had been handed to him by officer Robert Pigeon, an investigator with the elite Wolverine squad.

Sirois married the woman and they went on a honeymoon, but the relationship was doomed. Just minutes before he headed for the church to get married, the Rockers were hassling him for
$5,000 they felt he owed them. Within months of the marriage, Sirois and his wife were planning their divorce. Sirois fell into a depression and became hopeless. He wasn't sure what to do to rectify the situation when he remembered detective Pigeon's business card. Only months after their first meeting, on March 12,1999, Sirois called Pigeon and told him he was now interested in becoming an informant.

For starters, Sirois gave the police a series of statements about what he knew of the biker war. He confirmed what other informants had said about the starting point of the war being Maurice Lavoie's murder. Lavoie had decided to buy drugs from the Hells Angels instead of the Pelletier Clan. Soon after, he was dead, and the Hells Angels took the murder as a direct threat to their authority.

“Anyway, it seemed to me that the war was inevitable. The Rock Machine and the Alliance would have had to join the Hells Angels [to avoid a war],” Sirois told the police.

Nonetheless, it was the information Sirois had concerning the day-to-day operations of the Rockers, plus his relative good standing in the gang, that would be invaluable to the Project Rush investigation. The police were trying to build a gangsterism case against the Hells Angels and the Rockers. Now they had a former secretary of the Rockers on their side. The position Sirois had held in the gang meant he had recorded all the minutes of Rockers' meetings. Because of this, he knew what each member contributed to the ten percent fund, which, in turn, meant he could estimate how much each Rocker had made in drug sales.

Sirois said the ten percent was paid on good faith, but members were expected to pay a minimum of $300. He said part of the money was reinvested in the gang while, during the early years of the biker war, another chunk went directly to Maurice
(Mom) Boucher. At one point in Sirois' stint with the Rockers, Boucher was making $500 on every kilo of cocaine the Rockers sold. If Sirois' figures were right, Guillaume (Mimo) Serra was by far the Rockers' best drug dealer. On a monthly basis Serra led the pack by paying $3,000 to the ten percent fund. Longtime Rockers like Richard (Sugar) Lock, Paul (Fon Fon) Fontaine and Robert Johnson were paying $2,000, while Sirois' drug dealing allowed him to contribute $1,000.

Sirois also said the Hells Angels supplied the Rockers with the services of two accountants who provided the gang members with bogus income statements to create the illusion, on paper at least, that they held down steady jobs.

Sirois told his police handlers that in their earlier days the Rockers had to be unanimous on who could become a striker in the gang. But he also noted that Boucher eventually started imposing decisions on his underling gang. He said that was the case when Serra and Stephan (Sandman) Falls joined the gang.

“Every affiliated group has a godfather,” Sirois told the cops in describing how Hells Angels' puppet gangs like the Rockers, the Jokers and the Rowdy Crew worked.

“With the Rockers it is Maurice (Mom) Boucher. They were created so the Hells Angels would have a presence in Montreal. What's more, the Rockers are the
groupe de frappe
for the Nomads. The Rockers are different from affiliated groups. It is the Rockers that do most of the work and we are respected, even in western Canada. If you were to say what the Rockers represented, it would be the image that Maurice Mom Boucher projected. We are the pride of Mom.”

To display that pride, Boucher selected a patch for the Rockers that featured a logo just as menacing as the Hells Angels' winged skull. It was the front profile of a skull with the barrels of two guns pointing out from behind it.

“I don't know why the Rockers or the Hells Angels used that
symbol on their patches. But then a drawing or an acronym of death represents fear. It's more threatening for the public to see a symbol of a Death Head than to have two doves on a bikers patch. That is a bit why you've chosen to have a Wolverine for your squad,” Sirois told his police handlers, adding that both gangs had a rule that, if anyone outside their membership wore the patch on their backs, it had to be burned.

After taking several of his statements, the next step for the police was to get Sirois to infiltrate the Rockers by joining the group again. It would be no easy task.

While Sirois would be vague later on the details when testifying in the megatrials, his decision to marry was not supported at all by the Rockers. The woman in question had previously been with a man the Hells Angels believed to be an informant. The man was eventually murdered, but the Hells Angels still didn't
like the idea of someone in the Rockers marrying a woman who was once so close to a suspected snitch. Sirois said ultimately the choice of whether to marry her or stay with the Rockers was imposed on him by Boucher. Sirois quit and turned over his drug business to the Rockers.

The Rockers celebrate a key moment for them in the biker war in 1999. Normand Robitaille (top left) welcomes in the new underlings.

Now he had to get back in, but he had very little credibility among the gang's members. His contract with the police called on him to take notes and gather information on specific members of the Rockers and the Hells Angels. Sirois signed on with the police on June 23,1999. In exchange for his life-threatening work, he was promised police protection after he testified. Crown Prosecutor Madeleine Giauque at one point revealed that Sirois was paid about $100,000 for his work. That included a $50,000 payment when the arrests in Operation Springtime 2001 were carried out. Sirois' contract also called for him to be paid an additional $20,000 at the end of the preliminary inquiry and another $30,000 after he was done testifying in the trials.

To ensure his security, the Sûreté du Québec agreed to shell out $6,500 so he could pay off some debts with utility companies and a credit union. The police promised to change his identity and supply him with anything he needed after working for them. According to Sirois' contract, that included housing, moving expenses, psychological assistance and financial planning. To continue receiving this help after testifying, Sirois agreed to “change his lifestyle and live like a person who was prudent, reasonable and respectful of the law.” But first, he had to be bad enough to get back into the Hells Angels.

Initially, infiltrating the gang would appear to be easy because Sirois' former business partner Marc Sigman actually called on him, looking to see if they could start doing business together again. His police handlers told Sirois to ignore Sigman because he wasn't among the people targeted in the investigation at that point. The investigators in Project Rush wanted the heads of the
network — the members of the Nomads chapter were their priority. The lowest ranking gangsters targeted in Project Rush were full-patch members of the Rockers. Pursuing anyone below that mark threatened to widen the focus of the investigation too much. So Sirois started calling his closest connections in the Rockers.

He started with Stephen (Sandman) Falls, but Falls wouldn't return Sirois' calls. Sirois tried André Chouinard, who was, by then, a full-patch member of the Nomads chapter. Chouinard returned Sirois' calls and suddenly the new double agent found a crack in the door that might get him back in.

He began by inquiring about getting his patch back. Slowly, Sirois infiltrated the Rockers in a way only Dany Kane had done before. He began taking notes on his every interaction with the Rockers and agreed to wear a wire from time to time. Within weeks, he had already gathered some very damaging evidence. But he was pulled out of service when Claude De Serres, another informer, was found out and murdered. What Sirois had gathered on the Rockers did not become public information for more than two years. It came out during the trial of the 17 gang members.

In July
2002
, Sirois took the stand and faced his former fellow gangsters for the first time in years.

“Mr. Sirois, you were part of the Rockers at a certain part in your life,” prosecutor Roger Carrière asked.

“That's exactly right”

“At what moment were you associated with that club?”

“In 1994.”

“And before that period, before 1994, what where you doing?”

“I was selling drugs, but I was independent.”

“You trafficked in drugs, but you were independent?”

“Yes.”

“Did you have some associates at that time?”

“Not at that time. I had contacts but not associates.” Sirois then gave a little background on himself. He said he had started dealing drugs from the age of either 17 or 18, when he was already working in bars.

“At what moment did you become close to the Rockers?” Carrière asked.

“In 1994, I was close to the Rockers because there was a group of people who wanted to leave a gang known as the Chiefs. I knew those people.”

“Who were those people?”

Sirois rattled off the names of several members of the Chiefs, including Jean-Guy Bourgoin and André Chouinard. He said Boucher was involved in a decision that saw the Chiefs fold as a gang. Members were offered the opportunity to join the Rockers because Boucher could not tolerate the presence of another gang on the same turf as his.

“When did you decide to live this kind of life?”

“It was at what we called a bike show. It was proposed to me a bit more seriously. They told me they had striker patches for starters. I didn't know what a striker was, or a full-patch.”

“You didn't know what it meant?”

“I didn't know what it meant. They said, 'Look, after [being a striker], you'll become a member.' A member of what, I still wasn't sure. At the first show, I started to get interested. I liked it. It was more a temptation. They tempted me with what it would be like. But after that first show, they took back the patches. They decided they gave them out too fast. They didn't know the people they gave them to.”

“And this was during 1994?”

“Yes, this is still during 1994.”

“Had you been given a striker patch at that moment?”

“Yes.”

Shortly after the Rockers took back the striker patch from
Sirois, on December 5, 1994, a drug dealer named Bruno Bandiera was killed in an explosion as he drove along Taschereau Blvd. in Longueuil. The bomb had been detonated by remote control. Bandiera, who was 28 at the time, was ejected from his car and died instantly of severe head wounds. Sirois said it was Bandiera who had brought him into the Rockers fold and his death had some influence in Sirois wanting to join the Rockers. He joined them for his own protection, but Sirois might have thought twice about his choice had he known what Dany Kane had told the
RCMP
about Bandiera's death. Kane told his handlers it was the Rockers who had killed Bandiera because he owed them money and had started buying drugs from the Rock Machine to cover his debts. Jean-Guy Bourgoin welcomed Sirois into the gang and proposed to the other Rockers that he be accepted officially.