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And by the end of , it all seemed to be working well. The Hells Angels in Quebec had reached the peak of criminal arrogance by the freezing cold afternoon of December 29, The building had served for years as a hangout and secure bunker for the first chapter of the already notorious gang, chartered in Canada on December 5, Inside the building, members of the Hells Angels from all over Quebec were enjoying one of the biggest parties they had ever thrown. The gang that had developed a remarkable ability to dodge the police while it conducted million-dollar drug deals was doing nothing to camouflage this gathering.
Anyone looking at the building from the street could tell it was no ordinary clubhouse. Surveillance cameras were visible on several parts of the building and on the land surrounding it. The one thing about the party that resembled any other that might have been going during that holiday week in Canada was that someone had taken advantage of the cold weather and stacked several cases of beer outdoors on a balcony to keep them cool.
But this was no ordinary party. The gang was using their fortified bunker in Sorel for a mass, overnight conversion of new members. For years, the Hells Angels had toyed with the idea of setting up a chapter in Ontario but had held back for various reasons, including an inability to find members they felt stacked up to the level of criminal organization and discipline the Hells Angels had achieved in Quebec. It was apparent to police that influential Hells Angels from Quebec had long been calling the shots on possible expansion into Ontario.
As it grew in influence and notoriety, its members spearheaded expansion in parts of British Colombia, Nova Scotia and Manitoba. The members of the Nomads chapter in particular appeared keen on expansion. It was put together in the mids, near the start of the biker war, by Maurice Mom Boucher, who by then, at the age of 41, had been a Hells Angel for seven years. Through informants, the police learned that Boucher had grown frustrated with the passive attitude many of his fellow members in the Montreal chapter were taking during his violent conflict with other drug dealers in the east end of Montreal.
Dispatches from informant Dany Kane made it clear to police that Boucher only wanted gang members for his Nomads chapter who were willing to participate in the war. The Patchover In an extremely rare move, the Hells Angels allowed members of the long-established Ontario outlaw gangs to join them without having to go through the traditional initiation process.
Normally, those eager to join would go through distinct and often lengthy stages before earning the coveted status of the full-patch member. In some cases, it could take years to earn the right to wear a Death Head patch.
But now, in a move showcasing their arrogance and criminal influence, the Hells Angels in Quebec obtained the blessing from other chapters around the world to allow more than people to join the gang in one day. Before the sun set that day, a truck carrying two industrial-sized sewing machines pulled up to the Sorel bunker.
It contained dozens of patches ordered from Austria, where they are made exclusively for the gang. The police had also listened in on wiretaps as longtime Hells Angels like Donald Pup Stockford and Richard Dick Mayrand prepared for the expansion throughout most of December. The young men who stood at the gate that afternoon were likely unaware that what they were doing could be used against them later in court. Six years of war had taken a huge toll on the members of the Rock Machine, and on the Alliance, a collection of gangs and influential drug dealers who battled with the Hells Angels.
But now they had the Bandidos as allies in Quebec and the new chapters they had created over the previous summer in Ontario. The Hells Angels in Quebec were forced to react, especially to the fact the Bandidos would be in Ontario, and react in a way that would reflect their modus operandi — unambiguous intimidation backed by huge numbers. At a small Sorel hotel a few kilometres from the bunker, full-fledged or full-patch members of the Hells Angels from chapters all over Canada were being escorted to the party in minivans under heavy guard.
Despite the party atmosphere, 26 The Biker Trials the war with the Rock Machine and the Alliance was still on, a drug-turf war that had, to that point, seen people killed over claims to lucrative areas in cities like Montreal and Quebec City, where street-level drug dealers peddled drugs like cocaine and hashish. The Quebec Hells Angels knew their rivals might be looking for targets.
A squat, chubby man who slightly resembled his nickname Schtroumpf is French for Smurf , Brisebois appeared nervous as he arranged for the guarded transport of his superiors. The aggressive underling, who had quickly climbed the ladder to prospect, had only seven months earlier taken part in the murder of a drug dealer who was selling for the Rock Machine.
On May 1, , year-old Patrick Turcotte was shot dead after leaving a video store in Verdun, a working-class suburb of Montreal. It was yet another sign to the police that the quickest way to graduate in the network was through murder. Seven months later, Brisebois took yet another step by graduating from the Rockers and was made a prospect in the Nomads chapter. Being a Hells Angel was a far cry from how Brisebois had started his career as a drug dealer.
At the age of 18, he had sold tiny bags of cocaine and marijuana out of rented apartments. Now, at 29, he appeared headed for full membership in the Nomads, making him a partner in a multimillion dollar drug network. Brisebois was not supposed to be at this party. Marcos Townsend, The Montreal Gazette chauffeured to the party.
The local police grabbed Brisebois, spread him out on a car, searched him for weapons and handcuffed him. It was perhaps the only hitch for the Hells Angels that day. All the while, a seamstress busily sewed the winged-skull patches onto the jackets of the new members. As day became night, the members of the Nomads chapter likely felt they were unstoppable. Even with Boucher in prison, the gang was clearly dominating the war. It was a conflict like no other in Quebec, with one side so fixated on supremacy over a major metropolitan city that murder was epidemic.
By that point, 28 The Biker Trials the Hells Angels had more than members spread across Quebec in six chapters, including the elite Nomads chapter based in Montreal. What would soon become public knowledge was that the Nomads very nearly achieved their desired monopoly on the cocaine market in Montreal.
Everything seemed to be going as the Hells Angels willed it. Mayrand said he had had a long day. Sergeant Ouellette replied that his was going to be longer — he had to record how many new members the gang had. Mayrand shrugged his shoulders and informed Ouellette there were new Hells Angels for the police to deal with.
The day after the party, Maurice Mom Boucher searched for news on what had transpired in Sorel. As the police listened in, Provencher gushed about the party. He told Boucher about being amazed by the enormity of it all. Then their thoughts turned westward, toward Ontario and the possibilities that came with creating new brothers. Their recorded conversation was going to be one small part of the evidence. Transcripts of hours of wiretaps were already being carefully read and reread. Secretly recorded videotapes of meetings the Rockers had held were being scrutinized carefully.
It was all in preparation for a well-kept secret; the network Boucher and the rest of the Nomads had built over the years was about to crumble. Only three months later, before the sun emerged on March 28, , more than 2, cops from all over Quebec began pounding on doors and arresting dozens of people, including any members of the Nomads chapter who could be found. Of those charged, 42 were singled out for an indictment accusing them of 23 of the most serious crimes, including a failed plot to level an entire building in Verdun with a bomb, and 13 specific counts of first-degree murder.
Those charges stemmed from the Project Rush investigation. Another 49 were named in another warrant, generated by the Project Ocean investigation, accusing them of either supplying or dealing the drugs that fueled the network. Paul Schtroumpf Brisebois Brisebois, the short man who had worked security at the Sorel party only weeks before, was among the 42 gang members included in the Project Rush indictment, including the Turcotte murder in Verdun.
By now Brisebois knew the drill. During the spring of , when he was 18, the rcmp had received a complaint 30 The Biker Trials from someone living on the same street where Brisebois was selling. Too many people were coming and going to the apartment. The officer knocked on a door and was greeted by Brisebois.
He only asked who had referred him to his illicit pharmacy. Then he walked through the apartment to a living room table where the officer watched as he pulled out a little bag of cocaine from a margarine container that had been shoved inside an empty beer pitcher. With the purchase made, the rcmp got a warrant to search the apartment. Inside, they found several more of the little bags along with a small quantity of hashish. Brisebois was arrested, charged and released on bail to await a possible trial. But while his case was still at the preliminary stage, Brisebois was caught again, selling quarter-gram bags of cocaine, just a few doors down from where the rcmp had nabbed him a year earlier.
He eventually served a combined 13 months in prison for the two busts. But to the investigators who had spent years targeting the biker gangs, the real coup that day were the arrests of almost all the full-patch members of the Nomads, including some who had been Hells Angels for more than a decade. Years before the March roundup, Houle made it clear to authorities he was committed to the gang.
After the bloodbath, the bodies were stuffed into sleeping bags, weighed down with barbells and dumped in a river. The Hells Angels had purged their own members in part for consuming cocaine the gang intended to sell for profit. Houle had a small role in this purge, an event that awoke Canada to the violent potential of the Hells Angels. During the early part of his sentence, Houle was caught selling drugs in a federal penitentiary and intimidating other inmates, so he was transferred from a minimum-security institution to Donnacona, a maximum-security penitentiary near Quebec City.
The parole board held back on granting Houle full parole during the early s because he refused to discuss the details of his role in the Lennoxville murders. In , he told the board he would not discuss the slayings because other Hells Angels found guilty of taking part were still appealing their sentences.
In that loyalty would be paid off as he was picked to be one of the founding members of the Nomads chapter despite having spent the past several years in prison. Houle had been arrested for drunk driving, possession of drugs and uttering threats to the police officers who had arrested him. Inside his car, the police had found the brand-new Nomads patches.
Now they knew what those patches were for. One parole report revealed that even though Houle had dropped out of school by the age of 15, while he was in grade 8, tests he agreed to undergo in prison indicated he had a superior intellect. Behind bars, he worked to complete high school and took accounting courses. Houle made it clear that when his sentence ended and he was no longer subject to parole conditions he would rejoin the Hells Angels.
Near the end of his sentence, Houle returned to the minimumsecurity penitentiary closer to Montreal, where members of the Alliance tried to eliminate him. The assassination attempt failed. One month later, four men tied to the Alliance were arrested and charged with attempted murder. All four eventually pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison terms of less than three years. Testimony the informants gave in court opened a very public door on the biker war. They were charged with conspiring to commit murder. At least 6 of the 17 men charged in a series of conspiracies and attempted murders would later be targets themselves.
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, 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, 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 34 The Biker Trials entry and exit wounds, the fatal ones to his head. Less than a month later, on October 22, , 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. All the while his eight-year-old daughter crouched in the back seat, fearing for her life. Only a few months earlier he had completed his 30month prison sentence for the conspiracy to kill a Hells Angel. Houle was not arrested at home during Operation Springtime 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, , 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. 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 high- Alain Brunette, president of a Bandidos chapter way 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.
Vincent remained tightlipped 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 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. Gilles Trooper Mathieu While Boucher was under constant police surveillance during the late s, Mathieu always seemed to have the ear of the president of the Nomads chapter.
During the investigations that led to the Operation Springtime 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.
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 36 The Biker Trials 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 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, 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. 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. 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 Normand Robitaille 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 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, , 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. After getting out of prison, Robitaille obviously decided the risk of being a Hells Angel was still worth taking. On June 9, , his own prediction to the parole board almost came true.
As Robitaille dined at a 38 The Biker Trials 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. A member of the 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: On a base of aggression towards an absent father, he made certain compromises with his proper image of the good father of a family. 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 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. 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. He was wearing a hidden recorder as the pair dined on sushi at a Montreal restaurant on February 2, 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.
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. Sirois chose the woman, setting off a chain of events that the Hells Angels would regret.
Before he was arrested, he was routinely seen driving around in luxury cars. 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, , when 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.
Lanthier officially joined the Rockers on April 15, , and during that same spring was already reaping the benefits. Lanthier and the others appeared to be surprised when they saw the uniformed officers riding through the park on bicycles, one officer recalled in court. The trio quickly headed for two white cars parked nearby. The patrol officers followed them. The officer assumed that the man was trying to hide a gun. The situation grew tense as the patrol officers and colleagues who had arrived as backup drew their weapons and ordered Lanthier and his friends to get out of the cars.
Inside the two cars, the police found a 9-mm pistol with chrome plating and a black cross on the handle. They also found a smaller calibre handgun under a back seat. Both weapons were loaded. Three bulletproof vests were in one of the trunks. Lanthier was acquitted shortly after his friend was sentenced. The Hells Angels expected the same loyalty from the Rockers. Despite being black, Wooley rose quickly through the ranks of the lily-white Rockers.
When the charges were filed, he was still recovering from a serious head injury he had suffered while in a maximum-security penitentiary. The man suspected of nearly killing Wooley was in prison for homicide but had no ties to the biker war. Some police detectives in the Montreal police force wondered if Wooley had run out of luck on April 5, The full-patch member of the Rockers was preparing to board a flight to Haiti when security checking one of his suitcases found a. Wooley was arrested and quickly pleaded guilty to possession of the weapon, which earned him his first significant sentence.
Mere months earlier, a judge had tossed out evidence in a trial against Wooley on a weapons charge; he had been acquitted. A gun had been recovered on a sidewalk near where Wooley had been stopped for what the police claimed was a routine traffic stop. That summer night in , Wooley had been driving through downtown Montreal on a motorcycle.
According to the official police version, he was pulled over because he was speeding and the muffler on his motorcycle was making a lot of noise. He was stopped at a downtown intersection by Constable Michel Bureau, a Montreal police constable who would later testify that he immediately recognized Wooley and noticed he was wearing his gang colors.
The cop found out that Wooley only held an apprenticeship licence and was supposed to be accompanied by another motorcyclist. Wooley had already been implicated in murders. He was a violent individual, and he was the only black to be admitted into a biker gang. Bureau called for backup and, within minutes, five police officers were involved in what was supposed to be a traffic violation.
Bureau would testify that he feared for his safety and even tried to compromise with Wooley. They informed Wooley he was indeed under arrest for the traffic violations, and they searched him while he sat on his motorcycle. They found no weapon on him, but a semiautomatic Springfield Armory. When the case went to court, a judge analyzing the evidence refused to believe the pull-over was routine and theorized that it was part of a police surveillance operation where the officers involved used the traffic violation as an excuse to check in on Wooley.
The biker was acquitted of possession of an illegal firearm a month later. By the time of that bungled arrest, Wooley had already developed a reputation with the Montreal police. They suspected him of several murders, and while he had been awaiting trials in pre- 44 The Biker Trials vious cases, he was involved in at least three fights with other inmates. As well, in the days leading up to the weight room fight, Wooley had been caught attempting to smuggle pcp into the penitentiary.
The parole board learned the attempt to smuggle the drugs was part of a plan with other inmates who hoped the pcp would provoke violence, disorder and mutiny in the prison. One was that a prison-security report filed to the board alleged that Wooley was also the head of a crack ring early on in his sentence and that he had successfully smuggled drugs into a penitentiary. The psychologist who filed an evaluation to the board also determined that Wooley had weak judgement, low self-esteem and, at the age of 16, had attempted suicide.
In April , Wooley refused to undergo any more psychological evaluations. The nine murder charges he now faced through the evidence collected in Project Rush were not his first. Wooley was charged in the March 28, , slaying of a yearold Rock Machine member named Jean-Marc Caissy who was about to play floor hockey with some friends when he was shot outside a recreation center in Montreal. The hit man decided to turn informant and fingered members of the Rockers, including Wooley, as taking part in the conspiracy to commit murder.
Wooley was arrested and charged, along with the other members of the Rockers, but a jury ultimately acquitted all of them in a case that left police and other authorities in Quebec questioning the value of informants. One year after catching five Nomads with guns, hit money and photos of their enemies and after looking the other way, the Crown attorney could now prosecute almost all of them for orchestrating a massive, murderous conflict.
Mom At the center of the conflict that became the war between the Hells Angels and the Alliance, a collection of drug traffickers in gangs like the Pelletier Clan and the Rock Machine, was a man called Mom. He expected full loyalty from his drug dealers, and he asked them to adhere to the same structure and rules expected of him as a member of the Hells Angels when he created his own gang in , calling them the Rockers. During an rcmp operation dubbed Project Jaggy, an investigation that began in September , Boucher was drawing attention that indicated to the police how closely the Hells Angels were associated to other forms of organized crime.
Project Jaggy began as an investigation into a conspiracy to bring 3. As they continued to monitor this partnership, the rcmp noticed other Hells Angels were coming on board as well, including Daniel Beaulieu and Marius Perron. To offset their losses, the Hells Angels called in a specialist from Edmundston, New Brunswick, to strip their investment of anything worth money.
Within a month, the Hells Angels apparently recovered from the setback because the new boat, called the Fortune Endeavor, left Marystown, Nova Scotia.
As the police would learn, the illegal venture was crawling with Hells Angels. They would be charged eventually in connection with Project Jaggy, but Boucher was not one of them. However, his name kept popping up in surveillance reports as rcmp investigators followed the key players. Raynald Desjardins and the Montreal Mafia One of the first instances of police surveillance came on May 25, , when Imbeault held a meeting with a man named Raynald Desjardins, who, the police would later learn, was financing the smuggling operation.
That Boucher was with Desjardins was a noteworthy fact to investigators. Desjardins was well known to the police as being the right-hand man of Vito 48 The Biker Trials Rizzuto, the reputed godfather of the Mafia in Montreal. Desjardins would get one of the stiffest sentences to come out of Project Jaggy, 15 years, but he used the time to either solidify his contacts or make new ones. While he served his sentence he was the subject of at least two major investigations by corrections officials for crimes including an attempted murder, a failed hit he allegedly ordered from prison.
By the time of his statutory release date on June 2, , having served two-thirds of his sentence, Desjardins was still considered an influential man despite spending more than a decade behind bars. While serving his sentence, he associated with both mob figures and Hells Angels. A February parole board report alleged that he frequently broke penitentiary rules.
Nonetheless, they were required by law to release him. All the parole board could do was warn Desjardins that if he maintained those links while serving what remained of his sentence outside, he would be sent right back to a penitentiary. He was also required to supply a summary of his revenues and spending on a monthly basis. But Correctional Service Canada was likely glad to see Desjardins go.
During his time behind bars he had allegedly ordered two inmates to kill another, named William Fisher, in April According to a final report of a csc investigation of the incident, the conflict was over Desjardins not wanting drugs to enter the wing of the penitentiary where he was staying. He 49 PA U L C H E R R Y was also suspected of trying to poison another inmate while at the Leclerc Institution, and was thought to have been the mastermind behind several violent incidents that occurred while he was serving his sentence.
Frank Cotroni died of brain cancer during the summer of But it landed both men in hot water with the parole board. Maurice Mom Boucher and the Fortune Endeavor Back in , Desjardins had risen to such prominence in the underworld that some police began referring to a RizzutoDesjardins organization. Desjardins drove around in an expensive Mercedes-Benz, spent his leisure time on a foot pleasure boat and had amassed an impressive collection of rare and antique cars.
It was around this time that Imbeault had told an rcmp informant that Desjardins was financing the Fortune Endeavor smuggling operation. The police also noticed that Desjardins and Rizzuto were talking to each other on a regular basis.
It was among other papers Bordeleau had gathered on rival gangsters. As the war was beginning to heat up in , Kane told the rcmp that the Hells Angels were aware that the Alliance was a serious group of well-financed drug traffickers. In , during his time as a Rocker, he had taken part in an ill-planned extortion attempt that landed him in a federal penitentiary for a couple of years. But when the war started, the Rock Machine was just a part of a group of criminal organizations called the Alliance whose members refused to back down before the Hells Angels. He said he had been dealing hashish in various Sorel parks and in a bar called Le Petit Bourg, the place where he shot Buteau and another biker named Guy Gilbert on September 8, The first of the two successful hits would take place the night of September 25, Verdon noted the concern at the end of 20 pages of notes generated from that November meeting.
The Hells Angel was obviously concerned about being monitored by the police because he had shown up for the meeting driving a car registered in the name of the mother of Luc Bordel Bordeleau, who was a member of the Rockers at the time. Just days prior to this meeting, the Fortune Endeavor had penetrated Canadian waters on its return from Jamaica but had run into trouble.
It reported problems to the authorities at the Halifax port. Worried that they would go through an official inspection, those on board dumped kilograms of cocaine packed into plastic pipes weighed down with lead and chains. He planned to locate the cocaine using sonar. On board with him was Bordeleau, who besides being a founding member of the Rockers and a close friend of Boucher, was also a professionally trained scuba diver.
Whenever Bordeleau and the others would came back to shore without their sunken illicit treasure they were closely followed by the rcmp. Surveillance teams noticed that Bordeleau did little to hide the fact that he was always armed. To the police, it appeared Boucher had personally recruited Bordeleau for the cocaine recovery operation. Despite having apparently little to do with the larger smuggling plan, Bordeleau was charged, shortly after giving up the search for the cocaine, along with the other major players, like Imbeault and Desjardins.
The cocaine was located about a year later by the Canadian Armed Forces. His telephone conversations with Desjardins provided little of actual interest to investigators. It had been a long and messy road. His mother stayed home to look after Boucher and his seven siblings, three brothers and four sisters.
The details of his early life are contained in a presentencing report filed when Boucher was 21 and, by then, a petty criminal with a serious drug problem, by his own admission. The report was filed to a judge in February by criminologist Guy Pellerin who interviewed 52 The Biker Trials Boucher, his mother, a friend and an investigator with the Montreal police. He had been nabbed in connection with three different break-ins during the fall of The first arrest came on November 5, just after midnight.
Boucher smashed the front door window of a neighborhood grocery store in Hochelaga Maisonneuve, the low-income Montreal district where he had grown up. He grabbed 23 cartons of cigarettes and headed out. But his actions had set off an alarm heard by two cops in a nearby patrol car. When they pulled up to the front of the store, the officers saw Boucher standing in front of it.
A green plastic bag filled with cigarette cartons lay at his feet. Boucher claimed to have been high on drugs at the time of the break-ins and barely aware of what he was doing. He said that while he enjoyed getting high he was also fully aware what damage the drugs could do to him. His girlfriend Diane Leblanc was eight months pregnant and Boucher said he realized that a huge responsibility was about to be placed on his shoulders. At that point in his young life, Boucher had tried lsd, cocaine and heroin. He told Pellerin that he had created a habit and needed the softer drugs to compensate.
He claimed he had stopped taking amphetamines because they were making him paranoid — he had become fearful of everything and often slept with a firearm. Boucher and his siblings distanced themselves from their father and Boucher, in particular, developed an attitude of indifference. If his father started yelling, he would simply leave the room, Pellerin was told.
Boucher dropped out of school while in grade 9 at the age of either 17 or His performance in school was mediocre and he never developed an interest in his studies. He left home shortly thereafter. Boucher took up a series of jobs, but for very short periods of time. He found them to be poor paying jobs that offered little in terms of a future.
He also admitted that his drug use affected his focus. Just before his arrest in , Boucher had earned a competence card in construction. He told the criminologist he was eager to work in the same industry as his father because he had heard it paid well. But at the time, the construction industry in Montreal was dead. There were strikes and work stoppages.
Boucher had found work on a construction site, but only for a week which discouraged him. He suffered from insomnia and was going through withdrawal. Boucher told the criminologist that the only drugs he could get in prison were from a doctor who was giving him something for the insomnia. Pellerin wrote that he believed the three months had been a lesson for Boucher, but he had doubts the lesson would stick. But fatherhood would not be the turning point the criminologist had hoped it would be. Five months after becoming a father, Boucher was incarcerated again.
And when he got out, Boucher continued his life of crime. On November 5, , only months after Pellerin filed his report, Boucher graduated to the big time. They each received a month prison sentence, giving Boucher his first federal prison term. University of Queensland Library. Open to the public ; HV This single location in Australian Capital Territory: This single location in Queensland: None of your libraries hold this item.
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Open Preview See a Problem? Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Little did the Nomads know that at the height of achieving their goals, they would also be months away from a lengthy police investigation to shut them down. One criminal trial in particular turned out to be one of the longest in Canadian history. It meant convincing a jury to accept the notion that a biker gang works on the same principle as a pirate ship — even the cook knows what their common goal is.
Now, Cherry reveals the inside story of the biker culture and the biker trials. Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The Biker Trials , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Aug 19, Tari rated it it was ok Shelves: I would have enjoyed this book more if it had been organized a bit differently. There were so many players that I felt it would have been less confusing had the book introduced the people and the situations in a different order.