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from the Montreal Gazette online
Tuesday 10 October 2000
AMANDA JELOWICKI and NELSON WYATT
The Gazette; CP
Faucher is interim leader of the Rock Machine.
Boucher heads the Nomads, an elite chapter of the Hells Angels.
For the second time in two weeks, the kingpins of Quebec's most notorious biker gangs gathered for a meeting, again prompting speculation the two sides are attempting to reach a truce in their bloody five-year turf war over the province's illegal-drug trade.
At the end of September, the outlaw bikers sat down in a conference room at the Quebec City courthouse for unknown reasons, infuriating politicians, police and the public. The latest summit took the shape of a dinner party Sunday night at the Bleu Marin, a trendy restaurant on Crescent St.
Like the Quebec City meeting, the hosts of the Montreal soiree were Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher and Frederic (Fred) Faucher, interim head of the rival Rock Machine. Sunday's guest list included about 20 of their lieutenants, radio reporter Claude Poirier and a photographer from the crime tabloid Allo Police.
The bikers turned up without a reservation and mingled at the bar while waiting for a table, Bleu Marin manager Matteo Scanzano said.
They wore street clothes until after dinner, when it was time for the photograph. "When they walked in, they were dressed like anyone else. When they made a picture together, that's when they put on their famous jackets," Scanzano said.
The group occupied a long table in the middle of a dining room crowded with other patrons.
Boucher and Faucher sat facing each other in the centre, flanked by their respective lieutenants.
"The restaurant was very crowded. They sat and ate and drank like normal people," Scanzano said. "The majority had seafood and fish and some pasta (to eat), and some had meat."
While provincial police said they were aware of Sunday's meeting, they said it would not affect their efforts to crack down on outlaw biker gangs.
"Yes, we learned about it," Surete du Quebec spokesman Isabelle Gendron said, "but it doesn't change anything at all. I don't know if this means (there's a truce). You should ask them. We don't have a comment on this right now."
The two journalists, invited to capture the moment, were called to the restaurant by the bikers shortly after 7 p.m., Poirier said in interviews yesterday.
"To my great surprise, when I arrived with Allo Police photographer Michel Tremblay, there were 20 or 25 people sitting around the table," he said. "On one side was Nomads leader Mom Boucher, and on the other side was interim Rock Machine leader Fred Faucher. (The Nomads are an elite chapter of the Hells Angels.)
"They were in the middle of eating and were accompanied by several of their lieutenants. There were handshakes and accolades all around after the meeting.
"These people weren't very talkative, though. I asked if they would do an interview," said Poirier, who did not sit with the bikers. "They said they didn't want to do an interview and that the photo would be worth 1,000 words.
"After the photo was taken, they asked us to leave, and we left."
The photo is to be published in Allo Police on Friday.
The gang leaders and their lieutenants drank champagne after the meal.
A police cruiser pulled up in front of the restaurant toward the end of dessert, attracted there by several bikers who had gone outside for some fresh air. Several of the gang members were briefly detained by the police, Poirier said, while Boucher and Faucher slipped out. There were no arrests.
There are unconfirmed reports that the bikers have reached a truce in the war over control of Quebec's lucrative illicit-drug trade. Since the fighting started in 1995, more than 150 people have been killed, including an 11-year-old boy who was a bystander when a car bomb exploded.
Also last month, crime reporter Michel Auger, who has covered the biker war extensively for the tabloid Journal de Montreal, was wounded by gunfire in the newspaper's parking lot.
Biker experts speculated yesterday that the two attention-grabbing gatherings were designed to ease public pressure on the criminal gangs.
"What's important is that it was once again done in public," said Yves Lavigne, author of three books on the Hells. "These bikers could easily meet in private and no one would know there is a peace deal going on, but they want the public to know because this gets the public off their back."
Lavigne suggested the Hells, who he said were winning the turf war, had started laying the groundwork for a peace treaty at the beginning of the year, taking a lower profile except for when they attend gang funerals.
He noted the Hells signed peace treaties with rival gangs in the Scandinavian countries in 1997 and in the United States in 1998 and 1999.
"They all want to make money and they realize that war hurts the bottom line," Lavigne said from Toronto. "The last treaty to be signed, if it is signed, will be with the Rock Machine."
Staff-Sgt. Jean-Pierre Levesque, a biker expert with the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, likened Sunday's dinner to the September 1997 love-in between the Hells and Bandidos in Denmark.
"The Hells and Bandidos decided to meet and make a big show of it," he said. At that meeting, the gangs bought TV time and were shown smiling and shaking hands.
"They said there was no war and now it was a truce, no need for special laws or to kick them out of the city."
The Hells love the publicity, Levesque said.
"They play a game. They like rubbing it in the face of the police."
Constable Ian Lafreniere, a Montreal Urban Community police spokesman, said he was not impressed by the biker meeting.
"It won't change anything in the way we deal with criminal biker gangs," he said.
Allison Hanes of The Gazette contributed to this report
Saturday 7 October 2000
SEAN GORDON, DAVID JOHNSTON of The Gazette contributed to this report
The Gazette
Renewed hostilities between Montreal's biker gangs have prompted the Quebec government to pour resources into more investigators and a special organized-crime bureau, which will dedicate 13 prosecutors to going after underworld figures.
Justice Minister Linda Goupil announced yesterday that her ministry will spend an extra $1.6 million annually on new prosecutors, whose sole job will be to bring organized-crime bosses and their henchmen before the courts.
"By uniting our efforts, we feel we can bring better support to police operations and fight criminal gangs more effectively," Goupil said.
The new prosecutors, plus three full-time office staff, are to be on the job this year.
Less is known about the government's plans to bolster the investigative corps.
Public Security Minister Serge Menard confirmed the cabinet has earmarked more money for anti-gang operatives, although he refused to go into detail.
"I've obtained assurances from the premier that we will receive the amounts that the police asked for to step up the fight against organized crime," Menard said.
"I will not give specific details, because we would then give an idea to those who we are fighting of the resources at our disposition."
Despite the added resources, Liberal public-security critic Jacques Dupuis warned that effective prosecution of organized crime figures is more than just a question of money.
"The money is a good thing. But we shouldn't forget it's only one tool, which isn't enough to fill a toolbox," Dupuis said.
The other tools, Dupuis said, should include an integrated database so police forces across Quebec can track gang members, better training for police officers in anti-gang techniques and changes to the Criminal Code that would ease the burden of proof.
The influx of new resources is reminiscent of 1995, when Menard created Wolverine, a crack anti-gang squad of detectives from the RCMP, the Surete du Quebec and the MUC police.
That task force has mutated into a loose arrangement of anti-gang units across Quebec.
Provincial bureaucrats recently met with their federal counterparts to discuss an anti-gang law proposal that would skirt the constitutional problems arising from simply banning membership to criminal groups.
In Montreal, the chief of the Montreal Urban Community police said there are economic as well as legal reasons Canada needs a stronger anti-gang law.
Michel Sarrazin said the existing anti-gang law requires Canadian police forces to devote enormous sums of money and labour they can't afford to prepare anti-gang cases that go to trial.
In an interview, Sarrazin said MUC investigators had to listen to 33,000 wiretapped conversations as part of their case against the Rock Machine biker gang. The trial of eight Rock Machine associates, now before the courts, is the first big prosecution in Quebec under the anti-gang law passed by the federal government in 1997.
Sarrazin said MUC police are completing a cost summary of their Rock Machine investigation, and the results will be used to help make representations to the federal government for more cost-effective measures.
The existing law requires police to put together evidence showing an individual committed a crime, that he did so as part of an organized criminal group that conspired, and that the crime was for the benefit of the group, and that the group was aware of the potential benefit.
In practice, Sarrazin said, meeting those requirements places prohibitive costs on the police, already working under tight budgets.
Lt. Norman Couillard, a special adviser to Sarrazin, said Winnipeg police recently gave up trying to put together a legal case against an aboriginal gang because of the expensive logistics.
Sarrazin said police need a tougher anti-gang law that would do four things:
- Make it illegal to be a member of a known criminal organization.
- Reverse the burden of proof on people accused of profiting from the
proceeds of crime by making them account for the source of their money.
- Make it quicker for police to get search warrants.
- Allow prosecutors to give defence lawyers summaries of the evidence they
have in a CD-ROM form.
"The defence lawyers like to say they're not equipped for that, which requires us to do a ton of needless paperwork, which takes a lot of time and money," Sarrazin said.
In Quebec City, Menard said: "We've put half the Hells Angels inside just using the Criminal Code.
"We will continue to do it, but it's certain that to reach the leaders of these organizations É we need an anti-gang law that somehow makes membership a crime."
Thursday 28 September 2000
ELIZABETH THOMPSON
The Gazette
Red-faced government ministers vowed to continue the fight against criminal gangs yesterday, in the wake of the revelation that the heads of the Rock Machine and the Hells Angels held a meeting at Quebec City's courthouse under the noses of guards.
But Public Security Minister Serge Menard said there may be little that can be done to stop a similar meeting from taking place again. "Their actions didn't pose a threat," he said.
Meanwhile, the Quebec Bar Association yesterday ordered an investigation into the conduct of Denis Bernier, the Quebec City lawyer for members of the Rock Machine who played a key role in arranging for the room at the courthouse.
If found to have violated the bar's code of ethics, Bernier could face sanctions ranging from a reprimand to disbarment, association spokesman Leon Bedard said.
The controversy surrounds the revelation that two kingpins of the gang world, Hells Angels head Maurice (Mom) Boucher and Rock Machine leader Frederic (Fred) Faucher, held a summit Tuesday morning in a most unlikely location: a small meeting room on the fourth floor of Quebec City's courthouse.
Each leader was accompanied by three bodyguards; two of the bodyguards openly sported their Rock Machine colours. A number of the men were smoking, despite signs around the courthouse prohibiting it, while their vehicles sat parked outside, unticketed, in a fire lane in front of the courthouse.
While the men met, courthouse security staff, concerned about provoking an incident, surrounded the room, then waited about 40 minutes for them to finish their meeting and leave.
Yesterday the first courthouse constable on the scene, who spoke to The Gazette on condition he not be named, said he knew something important was up and got a strange sensation in his chest the minute he recognized Boucher and Faucher. "Nothing ever happens here," he explained. "That's probably why they chose it."
The guard said he saw no visible sign of weapons on the bodyguards. If he had, he said, "I would have searched them."
The meeting between the two leaders whose troops have waged a bloody turf war for years has fueled speculation that they met to negotiate a truce. But yesterday morning, as he faced a wall of television cameras and dozens of questions, Menard said he will not let a "publicity stunt" by the bikers or speculation about a truce deter the government from continuing its fight against criminal gangs.
"I don't want to fall into the trap of a publicity stunt on the part of criminal bikers. We have to remember these people are ready to kill for profit," the minister said. "Whether these people are united or divided, they remain dangerous, and we will maintain our pressure and our actions against them."
Police have the gangs under surveillance but generally intervene only if they are about to commit a crime, Menard said. Moreover, police have to have reasonable grounds that someone has committed an infraction to search or arrest that person - something he said doesn't appear to be the case in this incident: "I don't think they committed an infraction."
That wouldn't be the case, however, if the federal government would heed Quebec's call for a new law making it illegal to belong to crime gangs, he said. "The fact those people show their colours in public facilitates their means of intimidation, facilitates their recruiting, and that facilitates their organization. If the sole fact of being part of a gang like that constituted an infraction, we could act."
Quebec Justice Minister Linda Goupil said she knew nothing about the meeting until her office began getting phone calls from reporters late in the day.
"It is surprising," she said, adding that she does not see how officials could have prevented the meeting.
Goupil said she has asked for a report from Justice Department officials to determine exactly what happened. Once she has the report she will decide whether any changes in courthouse procedures should be made.
While courthouses are public buildings, Goupil said the meeting should not have been held there.
"It is obvious that we have to find a way of doing things so that such things will never happen again."
Liberal public-security critic Jacques Dupuis said it is clear the bikers "aren't feeling any heat" and are thumbing their noses at the Quebec government. "It is a way for them to laugh at the authorities."
Saturday 16 September 2000
NORMAN WEBSTER
The Gazette
A few years ago, a friend and newspaper editor in Sweden told an international gathering about the growing menace of biker gangs in her country. They had taken violent control of the drug trade and were now threatening to kill journalists who investigated them. She herself, and her daughter, were under police protection.
After her speech, I asked Christina how many killings there had been to date. The answer was something like three or four. What, I asked, would she think of a bikers' battle in Quebec in which, up to that time, 30 or more had been slain?
She was genuinely shocked. "That's not a battle," she said. "That's a war."
I wonder what she would think today, when the toll of dead and disappeared here has risen to about 160 since 1994, in a gang war worthy of Al Capone's Chicago. Certainly, she would not be surprised by this week's attempt to murder Michel Auger of Le Journal de Montreal.
In retrospect, the hit was absolutely inevitable. The only mystery is why organized crime waited so long before targeting reporters, taking its cue from countries such as Colombia, where the drug lords reign and 10 journalists have been murdered already this year (89 in the last 11 years).
It is interesting, in the chorus of outraged reaction, how little we been inclined to blame ourselves for being such complacent, even complaisant witnesses to this foul war. For years we have watched from the sidelines while the bikers became swaggering stars in Quebec's celebrity culture.
We noted their anniversary parties and "conventions." We saw their leaders appear, with entourages, at public events. We made little jokes about calling in the Hells Angels to take care of business.
Why be surprised when entertainers sing at mobster weddings and get their pictures taken, smiling, with today's Big Al, our own Mom Boucher? (That one, mercifully, did make the public gorge rise; thank you, Ginette Reno.) For too long, too many Quebecers have seen these guys as roguish roustabouts on their Harleys, rather than the brutes they really are.
The result? Bombs, automatic rifles, even grenades - in Montreal, not Belfast. Police cars torched. Hits, which sometimes got the wrong victim, in broad daylight. Farmers afraid to go into their fields, because the mob is growing marijuana in the middle of the corn.
Quebec's ombudsman, Daniel Jacoby, reported last year that the biker gangs controlled a $60-million drug business within the prison system. Guards said that criminals deliberately got themselves sent to jail so they could manage the trafficking inside.
Those who try to crack down may pay with their lives. Two guards were snuffed in 1997 to send a message.
Small wonder that law-enforcement people feel vulnerable. Police in rural areas tell of being told "we know where you live" when they pull over Hells Angels. And you'd have to be pretty naive to think none of the huge drug profits have gone to police, prosecutors, prison guards, judges or politicians. The rot is spreading.
New laws? Perhaps we could start by enforcing existing ones - on noise, for example. This occurred to me the other day when a motorcycle pulled out of a donut shop parking lot with a BRA-A-A-ACKK! blast of sound that curdled the cream in my coffee and deafened everyone within 100 metres.
If your car's muffler goes, you have to get it fixed right quick, but just about any motorcyclist in Quebec seems allowed to disturb the peace at will. It's a small thing, but not, I think, insignificant.
It would be nice, too, to get at those offensive bikers' bunkers, perhaps with municipal bylaws. The Hell's Angels' redoubt above the road between Sherbrooke and Lennoxville has long been an obscenity of steel, concrete, fencing and floodlights, an aggressive, in-your-face statement by the boys to the passing citizenry. It's as if, in the old West, the James Gang set up its clubhouse right in the middle of town.
This, of course, was the scene of one of Canada's truly infamous crimes. In 1985, five rogue bikers were murdered there before being put in cement overshoes and dumped in the river.
Perhaps this is something a major commission into organized crime in Quebec could examine. It certainly would be more useful than an estates-general on language.
- Norman Webster is a former editor of The Gazette.
Saturday 26 August 2000
The Gazette
(photo) ALLO POLICE / Bourassa and Boucher on the cover of Allo Police.
Former premier Robert Bourassa looks oddly out of place on the cover of the crime-and-sex tabloid Allo Police published yesterday. Then there's the mustached man posing beside the late Liberal politician: biker kingpin Maurice "Mom" Boucher.
In the latest salvo of underworld publicity, Allo Police printed an interview with Boucher and a picture he provided showing the biker boss posing with a smiling Bourassa, who died in 1997.
It's a run-of-the-mill photograph of the kind politicians are routinely subjected to when citizens want a souvenir of fame. There's no indication of when or where it was taken, and Bourassa's former top aides expressed anger that his legacy has been toyed with in such meaningless, tabloid fashion.
"Mom Boucher responds to those offended," blares the headline of Allo Police. The reference is to the recent scandal in which megastar singer Ginetto Reno was photographed performing at the wedding of a Hells Angel member. Reno struck some touchy-feely poses with Boucher, leader of the elite Nomads chapter of the Quebec Hells Angels and the most notorious biker in the country. Some fans were offended.
In the Allo Police interview, Boucher says that "we find it unfortunate that some people criticized Mme. Reno and (Quebec singer) Jean-Pierre Ferland for having sung for us. We never wanted to harm them."
Boucher added that getting pictures taken with famous people is nothing new for he and his associates, and he pulled out the laminated picture of Bourassa to make his point.
"I nearly fell off my chair when I heard about it," said Ronald Poupart, a former Bourassa key aide who this week started serving as chief of staff for Liberal leader Jean Charest. "I was very angry. I thought it was a joke. Why would anyone want to do this? The poor man is dead. We have to respect Mr. Bourassa for all he did."
Poupart said that in the normal course of politics, Bourassa often found himself being asked to pose with any number of people for photographs, and he happily complied.
Yet Bourassa never had any dealings with Boucher, Poupart said, adding that the biker leader was not even known during the period when the picture must have been taken.
John Parisella, a former chief of staff for Bourassa, agreed that the former premier "had no fondness for bikers, no fondness for Hells Angels. He was premier for close to 16 years and in his whole professional career there has never been any doubts about his integrity and obviously nothing remotely sympathetic to those groups."
Parisella said that judging by the glasses Bourassa was wearing, large ones, it was probably taken sometime between 1983 and 1985. For his part, Boucher looks significantly younger, with a moustache that makes him barely recognizable.
At any rate, Parisella noted, the picture was taken at a time when few people had even heard of Boucher, who is today the highest profile biker boss in a drug turf war that has claimed about 150 lives.
In 1997, Boucher was charged with ordering the murder of two prison guards as part of an intimidation offensive against law-enforcement officials. He was acquitted the following year.
Bernard Tetrault, editor of Allo Police, said that the newspaper received a call from Boucher "at the last minute" on Monday, two days before its weekly deadline. He said that the newspaper was chronicling the biker war in a "neutral" way and was not serving as a propaganda tool of the Hells.
Reprinted under the Fair Use doctrine of international copyright law.
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