Biker Trials, The (39 page)

Within months of the war starting, Boutin was approached by the Hells Angels and was offered a chance to join their side.

“When you are involved in drugs ...when you start to become a big fish, from the financial perspective in the drug world, there is always a bigger fish who wants to say, 'Hey you're on my turf,'” Boutin said of his reasons for choosing to join the gang. He said that in 1995, he started buying cocaine from the Rockers through members like Richard (Sugar) Lock and André Chouinard. “After a few months, I became partners with Paul Fontaine who was a guy from the same group,” Boutin said.

Giauque asked Boutin if he and Fontaine did the same job at the time.

“No, my qualities were more as a seller of drugs, we call it 'a business guy.' I was more of the decisional guy when it came to drugs, when it came to my team,” he said. Boutin then went on to explain how Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné had also been part of that team. He described Fontaine as handling the muscle end of it, and he said that if he couldn't reach agreements with other dealers, Fontaine was sent in to take care of it. He added that some people in the Rockers network were being paid $500 a week just to beat up people. “Let's say, if you had a problem with a guy who was from a big clique of Italians or someone else, it could degenerate into a big conflict. [Fontaine] would be sent in. Or if it was someone who played with guns. My qualities were more in dealing,” Boutin said. “There was a biker war and we were trying to expand in our neighborhood as much as we could.”

Boutin dealt primarily in the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district, keeping the Hells Angels very happy. He said that between 1995 and 1997, he never sold less than a kilo a week. Impressed with his abilities, the Hells Angels assigned him to be the business end of a team assigned to move the Rock Machine's drug dealers out of the Gay Village.

But as the expansion was taking hold, Boutin was arrested with several people and charged in the plot to kill Boucher that had taken place more than two years before. The charges against Boutin would not stand up in court, and by now the Hells Angels trusted him. Despite being charged with attempting to kill the Hells Angels' leader, he was able to conduct business from behind bars through people who visited him.

When Boutin was released four months later, in May 1997,he learned that Fontaine had replaced him with three other people. They were Steve Boies, Danny Decelles and the newcomer Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné. Fontaine proposed that they all
become partners. But Boutin said he found the others had left his business in a mess and he was not impressed. “Things were bad from A to Z. When I got out we owed money,” Boutin said. The team assigned to take over the Gay Village was in debt to the tune of $40,000. Boutin said that within a matter of months he was able to turn things around and put the partnership back in the black.

At that point, Boutin estimated he was making $5,000 a week selling cocaine for the Hells Angels. He told the jury that Fontaine was making the same amount as his muscle. Gagné was making about $3,000 while taking orders from Fontaine (Gagné would testify that he made only $1,000). Boutin noted that in 1997,he was merely an associate of the gang and had no status in the Rockers, while Fontaine had graduated from being a Rocker to being a prospect in the Hells Angels.

“The decisions on where the group could go in terms of territory, it was Paul Fontaine who made those decisions. Number one. The person who made money decisions and business decisions was me. I was number one.”

As the business grew, Boutin continued to be supplied with cocaine through Chouinard. The pair developed a series of hand signals to conduct business.

“We didn't speak. When we talked about drugs we knew we were being followed by the police all day long. If we wrote anything on paper we burned it right away. Like in my office, I had a business office, if it was in my office or in my truck I had one of those things where you can make a drawing and erase it right away. It doesn't leave a trace. When we talked about things more serious we talked into each other's ears.”

Boutin said in all the time they did business together, Chouinard never handed him cocaine in person.

“Mr. Chouinard had a system of runners and I had a system of runners. Runners are people who bring things from point A to point B. A guy like me who is tied to the bikers is generally
followed by the police all the time. The runner is a guy who is not followed. Often we take someone who has no file, who isn't known. It could be someone old, a woman, someone who does not have the look of being in a criminal business.”

“What do you call these people?” Giauque asked.

“A citizen”

“How did the transactions happen?”

“I'd give [Chouinard] a little address on paper. It could be a place I had rented somewhere. And his runner would take the kilo and would bring it to the address.” Boutin said that within months of his start in drug dealing he trained himself to never come in contact with the drugs because he worked on the assumption that he was always being followed by the cops, and he said he used his own runners to pay Chouinard the money.

Boutin said he became a striker in the Rockers in October 1998, after Fontaine had disappeared to dodge the murder and attempted murder charges against him in the death of prison guard Pierre Rondeau. He said that as a striker he was required to do “the watch” only on occasion. He revealed to the jury that, often, the person doing guard duty at the door of a bunker or gang clubhouse would not carry a firearm because the Rockers figured he was an easy target for the police to arrest on a weapons charge. To counter this, the Rockers often had someone sitting in a car nearby with guns on the floor of the vehicle. Fontaine had asked him to join the Rockers earlier but he resisted. He said he had decided to join after Normand Robitaille asked him to — René Charlebois had been pushing for it too. At that point, Robitaille was a prospect in the Hells Angels. Boutin said that in terms of business it changed nothing for him. Giauque asked how it changed his life, if at all.

“[When you join the Rockers] life is divided in three. It's an
expression we use often. You have the family side with kids and you have to put all your time into it like everyone else. You have the business side and you have to watch your business. And you have the club side. It is not necessarily . . . it is more of a . . . it is not business. The club is about power. It is about power,” Boutin said. “I can say that when we joined ...when we put a leather jacket on a guy's back, even if he isn't known, he can enter a restaurant and everyone is scared. That is power.”

Shortly after Fontaine disappeared in December 1997,Boutin said he was pulled aside by Robitaille and discreetly told to find a new business partner. But Robitaille also informed Boutin that he had to pay $1,000 a month to Fontaine's family.

Fontaine was like a ghost to almost everyone in the gang, and to the police who were looking for him. Some in the police assumed he was dead because Tousignant's charred body had been found on February 27, 1998, in Bromont, a town in the Eastern Townships. When Tousignant's body was discovered near the side of a road, it was still on fire. A Sûreté du Québec officer named Gilles Cimon put out the flames, but an autopsy later revealed Tousignant had already died of gunshots to the head and chest. To investigators probing the homicide, it appeared that Tousignant had been killed elsewhere and then brought to the area where he was set on fire. There were signs that two people had carried the corpse ten metres from the side of the road and then set it on fire.

But Boutin was part of the chosen few trusted enough to be let in on the gang's well-kept secret: Fontaine was alive. Two years after Fontaine disappeared, Boutin received a risky assignment right around the Christmas holidays in 1999.

“He wanted to see his kids, and he asked to see me too,” Boutin said of the trip he had to make with Fontaine's family. A big snowstorm that day only added to Boutin's woes. “We made a lot of detours because, at the time, Paul Fontaine was one of the
most sought-after men in North America. So we made detours, we used the métro [subway], we had parked a car at a location. But the windshield was broken so we didn't use it [because it would draw attention and increase the potential of being pulled over by the police]. So we took detours through the métro. I was with Fontaine's wife and his two children. There was also a prospect from the Hells Angels' Trois Rivières chapter. He was in contact by cellular with Paul Fontaine.”

After zigzagging through Montreal's extensive subway system, the small group arranged for a taxi to take them to Quebec City. As the group rode along toward the provincial capital, the snowstorm got worse and the taxi driver's wipers broke off. They pulled over at a repair garage. Someone in the group called for another taxi and asked the new driver to take them to the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec City, one of the ritziest hotels in Canada. The group had now told an outsider their destination, the precise location of one of the most wanted men in Canada. Boutin began to wonder if that was a great idea. “I was seated in front,” Boutin recalled. “Paul Fontaine's wife was seated in the back with the two children. We gave him the address. The guy who picked me up saw that I was a guy with a woman and two children and he thought we were a couple heading to the Chateau Frontenac. So he says, 'Where are you from?' and I say, 'From Montreal.' I didn't say I was from Rosemont. He said, 'Oh yeah? I was a cop for 25 years in Rosemont.'”

The fact that a retired cop was taking them to see Fontaine alarmed Boutin. He began acting like he and Fontaine's wife were married. But the driver seemed to pay them no special attention, and he left them off at the Chateau Frontenac without incident. Fontaine was able to dine with his family at the Chateau Frontenac and then they headed for a chalet in nearby Stoneham. Although he didn't mention it during the Beliveau trial, Boutin said that Fontaine did not look like the man he
knew before. He described him as a wreck and figured being on the run and away from his family had totally destroyed him.

Once Boutin lost Fontaine as a partner, he was paired up with Stéphane Faucher, who did not yet have status in the gang beyond working for longtime drug dealer Normand (Pluche) Bélanger. “At the start, [Bélanger] did not have a status either. He was an intimate friend of Mr. Boucher and Normand Robitaille,” Boutin said.

Boutin said he himself was made a striker at around the same time as other people who would go on to play significant roles in the Hells Angels' expansion in western Montreal, including Dany St-Pierre. Boutin also identified Eric (Pif) Fournier and Bruno Lefebvre, two of the nine accused in the Beliveau trial, as being made strikers around the same time as he was.

The independent-minded Boutin preferred doing his own thing. Instead of relying on people the Rockers imposed on him for protection or acting himself as the muscle, he chose to create his own gang of drug dealers with Stéphane Faucher and called them the Scorpions. Faucher had them dealing on Montreal streets like Sainte-Catherine and St-Hubert. One day, while the police were investigating the Scorpions, they noticed at least 20 of their dealers peddling in the Berri-uQAM métro station, one of the busiest in Montreal. (
UQAM
stands for Université du Québec à Montréal.)

While Normand Robitaille and Boucher had no problem with the Scorpions, they could not allow Boutin to wear two patches at once, a violation of the Hells Angels' own rules. He was told he'd have to quit the Rockers if he wanted to run the Scorpions with the Nomads chapter's blessing. Boutin had no problem with leaving the Rockers because he was more concerned with someone in the Scorpions stealing his trafficking network. It had to be
clear who was running the show, and Boutin believed that doing it from the fringes of the Rockers' network was the wrong way to go about it.

In terms of his drug business, nothing changed, Boutin said. His boss at the time was Robitaille, who was rising remarkably fast in the Nomads chapter. Robitaille gave Boutin instructions to start buying directly from Normand Bélanger. At the same time, Boutin was able to continue buying cocaine from Chouinard. He needed a steady supply of cocaine to feed his network of Scorpions who were now moving two or three kilos per week. The money coming in impressed the Hells Angels, and Boutin began to hear talk of the Scorpions being turned into a puppet gang much like the Rockers. He said Robitaille told him the Hells Angels were thinking of patching the gang over after a probationary period.

“But Normand [Robitaille] made it clear that there were certain guys in the Scorpions who were really not ready to wear a patch on their backs. They were not ready. They lacked discipline. It takes more discipline to be a full member of the Rockers than it does in the Scorpions because you have obligations, like a meeting in Vancouver. You can't say 'I'm not going.' You are obliged to go. It's more like obligations like that. The club comes before a lot of things. Sometimes you have to leave your business aside, your family aside and not everybody wants to do that. The higher you go in the hierarchy, the less you can make mistakes,” Boutin said. After taking a closer look at the Scorpions, the Hells Angels realized they were only interested in two members becoming Rockers. Giauque then asked Boutin about Masses, the meetings the Rockers held.

“There are not many big subjects or delicate things discussed at Mass. We had like a ...we wouldn't say things like 'we have to kill that guy.' We practically never talked about the Rock Machine during a Mass. We were not allowed. If anyone ever heard, it
could implicate the big guys who were there.” Mass was generally reserved to discuss club business, including paying into the ten percent fund. “The ten percent serves the guys in prison, paying lawyers to take care of their case,” Boutin said.