Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (61 page)

In all likelihood the truce never actually existed, but the violence did subside in April 1995, while Boucher was in prison and Stadnick was on the road. A couple of uniformed cops in downtown Hamilton saw Stadnick's Jaguar and decided to stop him. They followed him until he failed to signal a lane change, then pulled him over. As usual, he was polite and cooperative, if not exactly friendly. As he stepped out of the car, one of the officers (now retired) noticed his monstrous gold belt buckle. After a few questions, the police confiscated it as a potentially dangerous weapon, gave Stadnick a ticket and let him go. After a night at home and a morning in church with his parents, he went to Hamilton airport and boarded a plane for Winnipeg.

The prairie city had become something of a third home for Stadnick. According to police who were familiar with him, he bought a condo there and gave it to his local girlfriend Tiffani and their son Damon (Nomad spelled backwards). He stayed with them when he was in town. And in April 1995, he was there on business. Meeting with a number of Spartans who were growing dismayed by Darwin Sylvester's bizarrely violent leadership, Stadnick formed them into a new club. Typical of his operations, the plan was large in scope and meticulous in its execution. Called the Redliners, Winnipeg's newest gang was a puppet of the Rockers, which was itself a puppet of the Nomads, which was an elite subset of the Hells Angels. Although Stadnick had created the Redliners, the police said the connection to him was too complicated to be proven in court. And unlike the Spartans and Los Brovos, who operated out of members' homes or storefronts, the Redliners clubhouse was the first fortified biker bunker in the Canadian prairies. Situated between the airport and massive rail-yards and equipped with armor plating, automatically locking doors, an emergency generator and the latest in audio and video surveillance equipment, the Redliners' clubhouse impressed Winnipeg police as a harbinger of a war to come.

Stadnick spent much of the spring and summer of 1995 in Winnipeg overseeing the Redliners, although he was never seen at or even near the clubhouse. He met with them frequently at bars and restaurants, inspected their appearance and listened to their progress reports. The discipline he enforced surprised police. Unlike the other bikers in Winnipeg (or the original Hells Angels for that matter), Stadnick forced the Redliners to have short, well-groomed hair and to dress neatly and appropriately at all times. Rick Lobban, biker cop for the Winnipeg police, later told reporters that “the Redliners were his attempt to create a group and give it a pedigree that could become a Hells Angels chapter.”

According to Kane, Stadnick had even more to do in Winnipeg. His reports to the RCMP allege that Stadnick, who was still dealing with Los Brovos and the Spartans, arranged for a series of drug couriers to get on a Via Rail train in Montreal with up to 7 kilos of cocaine in two suitcases. The plan was to stop at Toronto's Union Station, rendezvous with an anonymous contact and exchange one suitcase with drugs hidden inside for one full of cash. When the courier arrived in Winnipeg, he was to call a pager number and leave a code indicating his hotel and room number. Before long, another man unknown to the courier traded another suitcase full of cash for the remaining drugs. The courier then gave the suitcases full of money to a third contact in Montreal. It was a system that worked perfectly and repeatedly.

With Stadnick back in town and Boucher out of prison, the war resumed in Montreal. On July 3, tipped-off SQ officers recovered a white cargo van in Lachine that had been stolen from the McGill University maintenance department in January. What they found inside—an arsenal worthy of a large-scale military assault—sent a shockwave through the province. Welded to the van's floor was a tripod mount and a 7.62 mm FN machine gun (the kind used by many NATO armies as an anti-personnel weapon) with a two-meter-long belt of ammunition. Beside it were four Mac-10 submachine guns, two sawed-off shotguns and a U.S. military issue .30-caliber M-1 semiautomatic carbine. Farther back were 122 sticks of dynamite, 50 detonators and a seven-pound nail bomb. Although the munitions were terrifying enough, the police found something that could have had an even more profound impact on the already critical situation—stolen SQ insignia. If the stick-on labels had been affixed to the outside of the van, any attack it was involved in would have been blamed on police. Although they never took credit for the van, some Hells Angels later claimed that the SQ had planted the decals there to further discredit bikers.

The origin of the insignia notwithstanding, the SQ managed to turn a huge victory into a PR disaster bigger than the Hells Angels could have imagined. It was the middle of the night when the Montreal police delivered their bomb-disarming robot. Rather than evacuate the area, the police hid behind a blast shield and sent the robot in by remote control. Normally a flood of water from its high-pressure hose is enough to neutralize any bomb, but something went wrong in the parking lot in Lachine that night. For some reason, the spray ignited the explosives and turned the van into millions of pieces of flying metal. Debris was scattered over a half mile of apartment buildings and stores, with some of it coming agonizingly close to an old chlorine storage tank at a water treatment plant. Although the residents of the area didn't wake up to a cloud of poisonous gas, they did find their windows shattered and their floors covered in pieces of glass, metal, brick and asphalt. Miraculously, nobody was hurt. But the SQ was widely accused of knowingly and unnecessarily putting a huge number of innocent people into mortal danger. And they owed the Montreal police a new bomb-disarming robot.

The SQ thought they had caught a break when they arrested a small-time Quebec City hood and former Mercenaire named Michel “Pit” Caron. It became clear under questioning that Caron was more deeply involved in the war than police had originally thought and, when talk turned to murders, they were willing to deal. In exchange for some dropped charges, Caron told the SQ about his old friend and sometime partner, Serge Quesnel.

A high-school dropout from suburban Trois-Rivières, Quesnel had only once held a legitimate job—as a fast-food cook for two weeks. Instead, he used his muscles to make a very successful living as an enforcer and debt collector for area drug dealers. He moved up in the eyes of the underworld in 1988 when he bludgeoned a small-time dealer named Richard Jobin to death. It was an effort to impress potential employers, and it paid off—Quesnel started getting more work than ever and getting paid more for his services. When another dealer, Martin Naud, let it slip that he knew enough details of the Jobin murder to endanger him, Quesnel stabbed him in the eye with a pair of scissors, then cut his throat before burning his body.

Quesnel spent a short stint in Donnacona prison on an unrelated offense, during which he made money and connections by beating and stabbing fellow prisoners. He later claimed that his lawyer offered to introduce him to Louis “Mèlou” Roy, president of the Hells Angels Trois-Rivières Chapter and one of the original Nomads. Impressed by Quesnel's résumé, Roy offered him a job as professional murderer. In case he wasn't sold by the offer of $500 a week and anywhere from $10,000 to $25,000 for each murder (depending on the risk), Roy told him “there'll be a lot of work.” Quesnel quickly agreed. To start him off, Roy gave him a handgun and $2,000 in cash, got him a haircut and bought him $800-worth of clothes.

On December 14, 1994, Quesnel received a call from Sylvain “Baptiste” Thiffault, the second most powerful and influential member of the Trois-Rivières chapter. He gave Quesnel his first assignment. Jacques Ferland was a PCP cook and sometime dealer from Grondines, a suburb of Quebec City, who occasionally sold to members and associates of the Rock Machine. Thiffault told Quesnel as much as he could about Ferland, including his home address, favorite restaurants and other habits. Since it was an easy hit—Ferland was a small-timer with no heavyweight friends or security plan—the fee was $10,000. Excited and a little nervous about his first contract, Quesnel called his old friend Caron and offered him $4,500 if he'd help. On the evening of January 29, 1995, Caron drove Quesnel to Ferland's house and waited in the car. Quesnel ran into a friend of Ferland's, André Bédard, on the sidewalk and the two men walked into the house together. Bédard shouted that Ferland had a visitor and left. When Ferland walked down the stairs, Quesnel shot him twice in the head. Ferland's wife, still upstairs, heard the gunfire and hid. She needn't have worried; Quesnel was under strict orders to spare her life. As they'd planned, Caron and Quesnel dumped the stolen car and snowmobiled back home.

Satisfied with the Ferland job, the Hells Angels, again through Thiffault, offered Quesnel another opportunity. They even supplied him with a driver, Mario Lussier—a member of the Rowdy Crew, a puppet gang who sold Hells Angels drugs in nearby Lanaudière. The murder of Claude “Le Pic” Rivard almost went bad as a cop happened to see the killing, but the Hells Angels were impressed by the fact that both Quesnel and Lussier managed to get away and the police didn't have anything but a wrecked stolen pickup truck. The Hells Angels gave Quesnel $15,000 and the promise of more work.

Richard “Chico” Delcourt thought he was pretty smart. He'd successfully managed to sell drugs without dealing with the Hells Angels or the Alliance and was getting away with it. When word of his independent operation made it to the Hells Angels, they offered Quesnel $10,000 to murder him. Quesnel assumed that, like many drug dealers in Quebec at the time, Delcourt dreamed of someday joining the Hells Angels. On the pretext of taking him to a Quebec City Hells Angels party at which, he hinted, they would be auditioning new members, Quesnel offered Delcourt a ride. Delcourt was understandably cautious, but Quesnel laughed and said, “If we wanted to kill you, we would have done it long ago.” Delcourt agreed to go with him.

Quesnel originally planned to have his old partner drive, but Caron was avoiding his former partner because he was afraid he might become his next victim. When another driver also failed to show, Quesnel stole a car and picked up Delcourt alone. After explaining that he always took back roads to avoid the police, Quesnel parked the car on a snow-covered gravel road and told Delcourt he had a confession to make: “I don't have a driver's license.” Not wanting his new friend to get in trouble, Delcourt offered to drive. As they got out of the car to exchange seats, Quesnel shot him three times, then sped away.

Things were going well for Quesnel until Caron fingered him. On April 1, 1995, the SQ stopped his car, charged him with the murders of Ferland and Delcourt and took him to jail. Much to Quesnel's relief, the police were willing, even anxious, to deal. In exchange for his testimony against Roy and other Hells Angels and confessing to five murders and 13 other crimes, the SQ offered Quesnel a 20-year sentence with a chance at parole after 12. Quesnel was ready to take the deal, but when he paused before answering, the SQ sweetened it to a ridiculous degree. Realizing that Quesnel's primary concern was his own protection, they offered him a new identity and even promised to pay to remove his tattoos, including the blue teardrops etched under his eyes. Sensing their desperation, Quesnel held out and indicated he'd appreciate some financial reward for his efforts. Without even faking reluctance, they put the money on the table. For his cooperation, they'd pay him $500 a week for 15 years. Quesnel did the math in his head—that was a total of $390,000. Even if the money was just dumped into a savings account, he'd come out of prison a millionaire. Not bad for a guy who just admitted to killing five people. Stifling his laughter, Quesnel agreed to testify.

Within days, the police rounded up a dozen Hells Angels and associates, including Roy and Thiffault. But the SQ let another potential victory slip through their fingers. Considering Quesnel far too valuable to expose in any prison, the SQ kept him in a cell in their Quebec City headquarters. While there, he was frequently visited by his girlfriend, a 21-year-old stripper named Sandra Beaulieu. Officers began to look forward to her visits and two of them even convinced her to pose for some risqué photographs, as long as she was allowed to retain copies.

As the Crown was preparing for a preliminary hearing against Lussier, the first of the men Quesnel was to testify against, Martin Tremblay, a lawyer who defended many Hells Angels, put a bold plan into action. He sent copies of the photographs the police had taken of Beaulieu, along with another of her sitting in Quesnel's lap in an SQ office, to local newspapers. He also sent along an affidavit in which Beaulieu swore that she'd had sex, alcohol and PCP with Quesnel in SQ offices. He then released some details of the deal SQ had made in exchange for Quesnel's testimony. And he noted that since Quesnel had convinced Beaulieu to smuggle PCP into the police station, he had committed conspiracy to distribute illegal drugs, a crime that should have voided his deal with the SQ. Public reaction was predictably negative. Quesnel fired back by accusing Tremblay of plotting to kill Roger Aubin, a former client. When investigators found no evidence to support his claim, Quesnel's credibility sank even lower.