Biker Trials, The (6 page)

Within a two-year period, two would be killed, three would be wounded by gunfire and another would escape death only because the hit men shot the wrong person (Serge Hervieux, 38-year-old father of two and one of several innocent victims of the biker war). One Dark Circle member ended up asking the National Parole Board if he could fully serve his seven-year sentence because he feared for his life if he got out while the biker war was still being waged.

The first of the two successful hits would take place the night of September 25, 1998. Jean Rosa, 32, was gunned down in front of his home in Laval, a Montreal suburb. He was found lying near his Pontiac Grand Prix covered in blood and barely alive, but was declared dead at a nearby hospital where a doctor found seven
entry and exit wounds, the fatal ones to his head. Less than a month later, on October 22,1998, Pierre Bastien, a hot-tempered bar owner and member of the Dark Circle, was shot, also outside his home in Laval. Just after 8 p.m., he parked his car and was still behind the wheel when someone shot him several times. All the while his eight-year-old daughter crouched in the back seat, fearing for her life. One bullet lacerated Bastien's heart and he died quickly. Only a few months earlier he had completed his 30-month prison sentence for the conspiracy to kill a Hells Angel.

Houle was not arrested at home during Operation Springtime 2001. He learned of the charges he faced while behind bars, just like Gilles (Trooper) Mathieu, who at 50, was also a longtime member of the Hells Angels. Mathieu had gone more than a decade without being charged with a crime. Until February 15, 2001, just weeks after the Sorel party, Mathieu and Houle, along with six other men who were members of the Nomads or the Rockers, were arrested as they held a meeting in a downtown Montreal hotel suite. They had been looking over photos of their enemies in the Bandidos.

Alain Brunette, president of a Bandidos chapter

“We can assume they were not exchanging hockey cards,” Commander André Durocher of the Montreal Urban Community Police said at a press conference after the arrests. One photo found on a table in the hotel suite was that of Alain Brunette, president of a Bandidos chapter, who just days earlier, had been wounded by gunfire while riding in a car along a highway north of Montreal.

While members of the Nomads chapter held their meeting, underlings in the Rockers stood guard at various strategic points in the hotel. When the police arrested the eight, they found that each was carrying a loaded handgun and about $10,000 cash.
Mathieu and the others quickly pleaded guilty to the weapons charge and were sentenced to a year in prison. In exchange for their plea, Crown prosecutor André Vincent agreed not to charge the eight with new federal anti-gang laws created specifically to target Quebec's violent biker gangs. Vincent remained tight-lipped about why he had accepted the guilty pleas. But at the time, Vincent was one of a handful of people who knew that Operation Springtime 2001 was about to be launched. Pursuing potential three-year prison terms for gang members like Houle and Mathieu would have been a waste of time for a prosecutor who knew what was going to happen to the Nomads in a matter of weeks.

While Boucher was under constant police surveillance during the late 1990s, Mathieu always seemed to have the ear of the president of the Nomads chapter. To some, he appeared to be one of Boucher's most trusted advisors.

During the investigations that led to the Operation Springtime 2001 arrests, the police used double agents to infiltrate the lower ranks of the gang. Betrayal by double agents was nothing new to Mathieu. More than twenty years earlier, the
RCMP
had used one such agent to catch Mathieu and a few other people who were part of an
LSD
trafficking ring. The double agent arranged to buy 5,000 blotters of the drug at $1.45 per unit from a Montreal drug dealer. Mathieu appeared to be working as protection for a man who delivered the
LSD
to Montreal from a town about an hour's drive west of the city. The double agent was told to go the drug dealer's house. Once there, he was told by the dealer's wife he would have to wait because the drugs were in transit. Eventually, a gray Pontiac pulled up to the house and a man got out. He carried the
LSD
blotters with him. A small group of
RCMP
officers moved in and arrested him. Mathieu and another man were waiting in the
grey Pontiac when they saw the
RCMP
apprehend the delivery man. But before they could flee, they too were arrested.

When the case went to court, Mathieu pleaded ignorance. Backed by testimony from the delivery man and the driver of the Pontiac, he told the judge he was merely a 31-year-old maritime inspector, from a small town in western Quebec, who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In reality, Mathieu had joined the Hells Angels on December 5, 1980. While testifying in his own defense, Mathieu told Judge Patrick Falardeau that, in the hours before the drug deal, he and his wife traveled to a friend's house for a visit, where he happened to find one of the men he would end up getting arrested with. Mathieu claimed he piled into the Pontiac with the others because they were heading to Montreal where he wanted to visit a friend about having car parts painted. While inside the car, the delivery man never mentioned anything about a drug deal, Mathieu told the judge.

“He denies any participation in this affair. Plus he has no criminal record,” Falardeau wrote in his June 26, 1981, judgement of the
LSD
case, but he made it clear he was not impressed with Mathieu's testimony.

“The explanations he supplied lack logic and plausibility,” Falardeau wrote, noting there were several holes in Mathieu's story, namely that before making the long trip to Montreal, Mathieu never called the man who was supposed to paint his car parts to make sure he would be home. Mathieu would claim he ended up with a one-year prison sentence and two years probation for bumming a ride into Montreal.

Mathieu is likely to have stashed away millions while he was a Hells Angel. During the preliminary hearing in Operation Springtime, evidence presented indicated that he owned a company worth $2.3 million based out of the West Edmonton Mall. A source had also told the police that Mathieu had hidden $1 million in a tax haven.

In the years that followed his drug conviction, Mathieu managed to avoid prison. He was among the few Hells Angels who got off on the Lennoxville Purge murder charges — he was able to prove he had shown up at the bunker sometime after the slaughter.

But Mathieu and other Nomads members like Houle and Boucher were accused of having a role in all 13 of the murders the Hells Angels were charged with in Operation Springtime 2001.The Crown's theory was that the gang members were like pirates on a ship, all sharing the same goal and aware of what was happening to achieve those goals.

Another pirate on the Nomads ship was Normand Robitaille, who was at that point only 32 years old but already a full-patch Hells Angel in the Nomads chapter. Robitaille had risen to the top ranks of the gang at a rate that raised some eyebrows. When he was 27, while out on bail in a 1995 drug trafficking case, Robitaille was arrested for extortion, forcible confinement and possession of a weapon. By the time Robitaille appeared before a parole board he had been a member of the Rockers for only a year. He was placed in a minimum-security penitentiary on May 23, 1995, and by November was alleged to have been running a small drug network inside it.

While in prison, Robitaille told the parole board that his decision to join a biker gang was influenced by his desire to expand his clientele and make more money. He told a prison psychologist that he realized if he didn't quit the Rockers, he would end up dead. After getting out of prison, Robitaille obviously decided the risk of being a Hells Angel was still worth taking. He quickly ascended the ranks of the Hells Angels' network and was a Nomad by October 5, 1998. On June 9, 1999, his own prediction to the parole board almost came true. As Robitaille dined at a
Montreal restaurant that night someone fired two shots at him, striking him in the right shoulder and the lower back. He was taken to a hospital where he was treated, but he refused to tell the police anything.

Jean-Guy Bourgoin was an accomplice in the same extortion case Robitaille had served time for. A member ofthe Rockers, Bourgoin was involved in the biker war from the very start, according to informants.

Like Robitaille, Bourgoin would tell the National Parole Board he blamed his criminal life on heavy drug consumption. A psychologist who met with Bourgoin during his sentence filed an assessment to the parole board and wrote the following: “He behaves like an immature individual whose masculine identity has not been assured. On a base of aggression towards an absent father, he made certain compromises with his proper image of the good father of a family.” The psychologist recommended Bourgoin reinforce his family life if he wanted to avoid the criminal life. But almost as soon as his two-year sentence had ended, it became obvious that Bourgoin, a high school dropout, considered the Rockers his family. To him, the other members of the gang were brothers while he and other members of the underling gang referred to their superiors as
mon oncles
, my uncles.

It was a 1998 incident involving Bourgoin that brought the Rockers considerable public attention. On September 15 of that year, Bourgoin and other members of the gang were partying at a trendy bar on Saint-Laurent Blvd. when an argument broke out on the dance floor. Stephen Reid, a six-foot-two linebacker for the Montreal Alouettes, was exchanging words with the bikers when Anthony Calvillo, the team's quarterback, and another Alouettes teammate joined in. Everyone involved was tossed out of the bar, but the dispute continued on the street and became
violent. Bourgoin struck Reid with a metal post used to line up customers outside the bar, and Reid suffered cuts to the back of his head, neck and elbows.

“Take a good look at my face my man,” Bourgoin said. “You file a complaint and I'll never forget your face.” But Reid did file a complaint and Bourgoin pleaded guilty to assault causing injury and was fined $2,000 for the incident.

Two years after the scuffle with the Alouettes, Bourgoin, who controlled much of the distribution of large quantities of drugs in Montreal's trendy Plateau district, would be secretly recorded by a man he considered his brother. Stéphane Sirois had quit the Rockers, but he rejoined them after being convinced to work as a police double agent. He was wearing a hidden recorder as the pair dined on sushi at a Montreal restaurant on February 2,2000. Sirois was pretending to want back into the Rockers. He asked Bourgoin what it took to rise through the organization quickly.

During the dinner, Bourgoin began listing what the Hells Angels would pay for successful hits on their enemies. He rattled off the prices in a matter-of-fact way, but in doing so, he revealed how far the Hells Angels were now willing to go in their efforts to eliminate their rivals. A full-fledged member of the Rock Machine could net the killer $100,000. Lower-level members had price tags of $50,000 and $25,000, depending on their rank. While working as a double agent, Sirois would inform the police that Bourgoin was making what he estimated to be $7,000 a month for his role in the Nomads' drug network.

During the first case to go to trial based on information from Project Rush, Sirois would tell a jury of his reasons for leaving the Rockers. He said he had orders from Boucher himself to choose between a woman he was seeing and the gang. The woman's previous boyfriend had been murdered and was rumored to have been a police informant. Sirois chose the woman, setting off a chain of events that the Hells Angels would regret.

Bourgoin ran the Rockers by committee, and one of the other two on the committee was Daniel (Boteau) Lanthier, a man who had no visible means of employment though he lived in a $150,000 home in a suburb across from the south shore of the Montreal Island. Before he was arrested, he was routinely seen driving around in luxury cars. As a Crown witness, Stéphane Sirois would tell investigators Lanthier made about $12,000 a month dealing drugs for the network. Sirois' estimates were based on what the Rockers members were able to contribute to the gang's ten percent fund, a collection of criminal profits used to cover things like lawyers' fees and, witnesses like Sirois would allege, to purchase weapons.

A convicted drug dealer named Ronnie Harbour, also a police informant, told investigators that, like Bourgoin, Lanthier was involved in the biker war from the beginning. The dealer told the police both men were involved with the Hells Angels as early as October 28,1994, when 32-year-old Sylvain Pelletier, part of the Pelletier Clan, a gang of brothers who chose to join the Alliance and oppose the Hells Angels early in the biker war, was killed when his Jeep was blown up. Pelletier's murder, allegedly on orders from Boucher, served as an announcement that the Hells Angels considered it open season on anyone not willing to sell their drugs, at their prices.