Biker Trials, The (9 page)

Patrick Boucher, three years younger than Maurice, would also end up spending most of his adult life in and out of prison. During the early 1990s, he was turned down for day parole while serving a sentence for breaking and entering into a home on Saint-Catherine Street East. He was later released after serving two-thirds of his two-year sentence. But even his statutory release was revoked because the Montreal Urban Community Police picked him up for breaking into his own home after a night of heavy drinking. In 1988, Patrick Boucher was sentenced to two years for the armed robbery of a woman. Three years later he would get another 18 months for breaking and entering on Leclaire Street. He ended the 1990s serving a sentence of two
years probation after being caught in another break-in where he assaulted the arresting officer.

During the early 1980s, Maurice Boucher appeared to be headed down the same petty criminal path as his brothers. He was arrested late in December 1981 for breaking into a home in Montreal's east end, but in order to get bail, Boucher told the authorities that he was holding down a job at a manufacturing plant on Notre Dame Street East and living with Diane Leblanc. He had been hired at the appliance factory on July 9, 1979.He worked with plastics, earning a little over $10 an hour. According to letters filed in court, it was a job he would keep for at least four years. Boucher and an accomplice were accused of breaking into the home by smashing a window. They stole a radio, cassette player and some tools. But the charges against him were thrown out several months later after the victim somehow decided not to show up in court to testify against Boucher.

It was after a 1982 arrest that Boucher's criminal record began to indicate he was more than just a thief capable of smash-and-grab jobs. He was arrested for trying to extort money from a man working in a café. The victim accused Boucher of trying to force him to commit a robbery so he could pay back a debt. The charge was eventually dismissed, but by now the police appeared to have taken serious notice of Boucher. There was a note in the police report indicating the police had an intelligence file on Boucher. It noted that he appeared to operate out of a brasserie in Montreal's Hochelaga Maisonneuve district. The next time Boucher would be picked up was about a year later, in June 1983, for a stolen Visa credit card. He was fined $250. A few months later, he would be arrested again, this time for a minor theft, and fined $300 with a sentence of two years' probation.

It was around this time that Boucher joined the
SS
, a motorcycle
gang based in Pointe aux Trembles, on the eastern tip of the Montreal Island. Normand (Biff) Hamel, a man Boucher would later choose to become a founding member of the Nomads, had been part of the
SS
since 1981. Another member in the gang at the time was Salvatore Cazzetta, a man who would play a significant role in Boucher's life in the years to come. Cazzetta and his brother Giovanni later formed the Rock Machine, a gang that would eventually stand in opposition to the monopolistic attitude the Hells Angels and in particular, Maurice (Mom) Boucher took toward eastern Montreal in the early 1990s.

Like Boucher, Salvatore Cazzetta started out as a petty criminal who put little thought into what he was doing. He was arrested in 1975 for stealing a Ford Mustang over the Thanksgiving weekend and then scrapping the car for parts. Cazzetta made solving the crime a snap by leaving the skeleton of the stripped vehicle behind his home. Two years later, Cazzetta earned himself his first federal sentence when he broke into a bar with his brother Giovanni to steal a measly $300 in coins from cigarette machines. One reason he got two years for the minor crime was that Cazzetta rushed a cop who found him hiding in the basement.

By 1980, he was apparently interested in becoming a biker. He was caught prowling around the back of a woman's house at night, preparing to steal her Harley-Davidson. Years later, while recording information from another arrest, police would notice Cazzetta had the image of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle tattooed onto his arm along with the word “Brothers.”

In 1981, Cazzetta was involved in what appeared to be ganglike activity at the Bordeaux detention center. An inmate, Wayne Story, was playing cards when other inmates stormed into the room and beat him with metal bars, killing him. But the case against Cazzetta and the four other inmates accused of killing
Story was weak. A jury acquitted them all on December 17,1981.

By 1982, Cazzetta had developed a cavalier attitude toward the law. Just before dawn on November 26, he simply smashed in the window of a clothing store on Centre Street and grabbed whatever he could. A tenant in the building saw Cazzetta — who sported the same ponytail and beard he would keep for years — step out of the broken window with 26 leather coats draped on his shoulder. Cazzetta's dog followed behind him, making him even more recognizable. Another witness, a woman who was coming home from work, would later tell the police she saw Cazzetta standing outside the clothing store just minutes before the break-in. She couldn't help but notice him because he was urinating on a wall nearby while his dog faithfully waited beside him. She told the cops Cazzetta appeared to be drunk. Hours later, when the tenant told the store's owner what had happened, he jumped into a car and drove around looking for the mysterious bandit with the telltale ponytail. Within minutes, he located Cazzetta just a few streets away, walking the same dog he had been seen with during the break-in. Cazzetta served two years less a day for stealing the leather jackets. Shortly after completing that sentence, Cazzetta was involved in moving drugs. He served two months for possession of 56 grams of
PCP.

A decade later, the police had intelligence that the Cazzetta brothers, Salvatore and Giovanni, were the heads of the Rock Machine and that the gang had its hands in drugs, prostitution and loan-sharking. Although Salvatore was one of the leaders in the biker war, he was actually behind bars for practically all of it. Arrested in 1994 for attempting to smuggle 200 kilos of cocaine into Canada through the U.S., Cazzetta was extradited to Florida and convicted. He spent three years in the U.S. penal system, earning a high school degree, and then was transferred back to Canada to serve out the remainder of his sentence. After serving two-thirds of his sentence, he was paroled and released from a
medium-security penitentiary in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines in June 2004. Salvatore Cazzetta smiled broadly when he learned the National Parole Board would not require him to live in a halfway house for the rest of his sentence. He told the panel of three commissioners that he ultimately planned to move to Ontario. “I am less known there,” he said adding that the violence of the biker war was “not my style.” He blamed the biker war on other members of the Rock Machine who took over after his arrest in 1994. He described his vision of the Rock Machine as “an association of businessmen” who merely planned to sell clothing through boutiques.

Like his brother, Giovanni Cazzetta denied involvement in the biker gang war. When he was up for parole in May 2005, Giovanni said the Rock Machine was formed years before the war started, and he pointed out that he too was behind bars when it began. He added that when the Rock Machine was formed, its members already had a sizeable share of Montreal's drug turf, at least enough to keep them satisfied, he said. Appearing before the parole board, Giovanni Cazzetta said the Hells Angels started the war and that if he hadn't been behind bars at the time, things might have turned out differently.

The 48-year-old Giovanni Cazzetta, who was greying at the temples but had managed to stay trim while serving a lengthy sentence for drug trafficking and possession of the proceeds of crime, said he planned to move to Calgary and start his life over in the construction industry.

“It was my choice. It was mine,” Cazzetta said when asked about how he had become an influential drug dealer after spending his younger years “basically raising myself.” Now he wanted to disassociate himself from members of the Rock Machine who by then had joined the Bandidos. He told Correctional Service Canada the same thing in 2004 when he was transferred from a maximum-security penitentiary to a medium-security one in Laval.

In 1997, while he was out on statutory release for a drug trafficking sentence, Cazzetta was arrested for the same offence again. He told the parole board in May 2005 that his original plan was to leave Montreal because he wanted no part of the war. He claimed his arrest in 1997 was the result of him feeling obligated to help out his old friends who needed his influence to score large quantities of cocaine. “I had the contacts. I had the good contacts,” he said, adding he also stayed close to the Rock Machine for his own protection.

Giovanni Cazzetta argued that he had had little to do with the violence of the war, but he was asked, by parole board commissioner Paul Mercier, whether he had ever considered the other victims of the war, like all the junkies both gangs had helped to create. “There must have been many,” Giovanni Cazzetta acknowledged, but added later, “I made a decision. Crime is finished for me.” The parole board turned him down.

Despite the fact that it would produce some of the major players in what would eventually become the biker gang war, the
SS
amounted to little and disbanded sometime during the mid 1980s.

Maurice Boucher's criminal career was about to take a violent turn. During the summer of 1984, he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl while threatening her with a gun. He was arrested shortly after and pleaded guilty within days. He was sentenced to 23 months in prison. After spending only a few days in a Joliette, Quebec, detention center, he was transferred to Montreal where he served most of his sentence behind bars and was released sometime in January 1986. But being behind bars didn't prevent Boucher from committing crime. While incarcerated, Boucher managed to receive unemployment payments on a biweekly basis. His little scheme was discovered around the time he was released.

On May 1,1987, Boucher's days of petty schemes, like cheating
the unemployment office, were over. He received his full-patch as a member of the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter. The Montreal chapter was the first one ever established in Canada, and by the time Boucher joined it was a decade old. In the aftermath of the Lennoxville Purge, several members from the Montreal chapter were either fugitives or behind bars. A heavy recruitment process was on in Quebec. Boucher's buddy from the
SS
, Normand (Biff) Hamel had joined the Montreal chapter only months earlier. The police would later find it curious that Boucher received his patch just three days before 23-year-old Martin Huneault, the young leader of a biker gang called the Death Riders, was gunned down in a Laval brasserie on Cartier Blvd. At that point, the Death Riders were considered rivals of the Hells Angels.

In the minutes before he was gunned down, Huneault had been drinking a beer with his girlfriend and watching a hockey game on television. There were about six people in the brasserie at the time and a waitress was at the cash register. Someone walked in through the front door, strolled about twelve feet, stood facing Huneault from no more than three feet and opened fire. Three bullets struck Huneault — one square in the face, another went through his right arm and ricocheted through his upper body. Huneault fell to the floor and bled to death. What caught the within days of Huneault's death, members of the Death Riders were suddenly seen hanging out with Boucher and Hamel.

Normand (Biff) Hamel and Gilles Mathieu, members of the Nomads chapter.

By then Boucher and Hamel were close friends. Hamel would ultimately be described by at least one of their associates as being more of a businessman than Boucher. But Hamel also had a
violent streak. In 1986, as he was just about to become a Hells Angel, Hamel was detained at the Parthenais holding center, which used to be part of the Sûreté du Québec headquarters. Hamel was in the holding cell with about a dozen other inmates when one started to shout that he wanted to undergo a lie detector test. The inmate was soundly beaten by Hamel, who didn't appreciate the shouting.

If their criminal records are any indication, Hamel was involved in high-volume drug dealing long before Boucher was. During the summer of 1978, the Montreal Urban Community Police were investigating a major drug network operating in the city. It had taken them a long time to penetrate the network and their investigation took them to a Montreal bar called El Cid, where an informant had told an undercover officer he could buy some
PCP
. The undercover cop was able to buy 46 capsules from Hamel for $115. All the officer had to do was walk into El Cid where he was told he could find Hamel, who was easy to spot, thanks to the thick beard he would keep throughout most of his adult life. Hamel was seated under a television hung on the brasserie wall when the informant made the introduction. Hamel and the undercover cop went outside and made the deal in the investigator's rented car.