Biker Trials, The (43 page)

According to Antelo, Rose and Chouinard were not happy Craig was in the picture either.

“But there was no option. Either they accept to do it with us or not. There was a moment when they accepted my husband as being part of this transaction,” she said. “My husband did not want to work with the Hells Angels. He had never worked with them before and he never wanted to. He was very much against the idea of working with this group. But I had no other alternative because I had already started with them. From the start my husband thought it was a bad idea, for both him and I to work with them. He knew. I was not a francophone or a Quebecer. But my husband knew how these people worked. He said from the beginning that it was not the kind of group he wanted to work with. At the same time he knew that if he didn't join in, if I didn't
do the deal, I'd have a problem with this group. On several occasions he told me this and was very clear.”

Antelo began to cry at this point, recalling the moment when she made a choice in her life that would end up costing her dearly.

Antelo's next deal with the Hells Angels was plagued with problems.

“We couldn't come to an agreement because my husband was part of the discussions,” Antelo said. She then paused for a while as emotion overcame her. When she pulled herself together, she said that she had an agreement with Rose and Chouinard to split 50/50 the costs involved in bring their next shipment of cocaine into Canada. But the two sides began squabbling over things like the costs involved for the smuggling operation. She recalled one meeting at a golf course in Boucherville where Rose and Chouinard could not agree with Craig on the price the Hells Angels were going to end up paying for the cocaine they brought in. Giauque asked Antelo how risk affected price.

“When you use the word risk, it's about the transport of cocaine from the United States to Canada. The risk applicable to transport is evident,” Antelo said, adding she wanted to assume the least risk possible. The two sides were at a stalemate. Craig was playing hardball with the Hells Angels and now with a stalemate on their hands he demanded to see Maurice (Mom) Boucher.

“The first meeting with Mr. Mom Boucher was in the food court of [Montreal's central train] station. There was André, my husband, myself and Mom Boucher,” Antelo said. “It was a meeting where my husband wanted Mom Boucher to participate because he was, in principle, the head of the group. We were not in agreement
with the prices written down on paper. Mom Boucher discussed prices with my husband that they could agree on. It was understood by my husband that there was an agreement that had been accepted and we had completed the deal.

“Mr. Boucher was in agreement with everything my husband had proposed. The meeting ended with an agreement on the prices and that the prices would be respected. But the next day I had a meeting with André to see if everything was okay. André said, 'No.' He said that everything would follow what we had agreed on before because Mr. Boucher would not respect anything he had agreed on with my husband.” Antelo said at that point Chouinard basically spelled it all out for her. The Hells Angels were going to pay whatever they wanted for the cocaine.

But it now appears the Hells Angels had decided they no longer needed Antelo or her husband Craig. They had a man spending significant time in Colombia to oversee their investments. Sometime in 1997, Guy Lepage, a former Montreal cop whom Boucher had befriended, was dispatched to Bogota, Colombia, to work for the Hells Angels from there. Lepage remained in Colombia for six weeks during one visit in 1997 and spent about two months in Colombia during the following summer.

Before spending all that time in Colombia, Lepage had helped them branch out in British Columbia in the mid-1990s. He did jail time in the western province for laundering the proceeds of crime. When he was president of the Rockers, Lepage would become the center of a small political scandal after it was revealed that Canada's Federal Business Development Bank had mortgaged the Rockers' bunker in Montreal. It was Lepage who took out the mortgage. He had quit the Montreal Urban Community Police during the 1970s while he was under investigation for fraud.

After being dispatched to Colombia, Lepage became heavily involved in the negotiations over the Hells Angels' cocaine purchases and stayed at the home of a Colombian drug trafficker
while he was there. In 1998, the American government seized $2.5 million U.S. in Florida that was bound for a Colombian cartel. A man named Sylvain Roy was arrested at a Holiday Inn in Miami with the $2.5 million that, in fact, belonged to Antelo and the Hells Angels. The Montrealer had been dispatched to Florida to oversee the shipment of money. The U.S. authorities would later learn that Roy had entered the States 15 times in 1998 and 1999.

Whenever the cocaine was successfully smuggled in to Florida, the Hells Angels had truck drivers pick it up at secret locations. The same truck drivers would often bring the money for the cocaine to Florida as well. When Lepage wasn't living in Colombia making sure things went smoothly for the Hells Angels there, he was spotted several times in Quebec meeting with Boucher and other members of the Nomads chapter. In 1999, Lepage was frequently seen chauffeuring Boucher to the Pro Gym where the president liked to work out.

Lepage returned to Bogota in July 2000 and stayed until September of that same year, helping the Hells Angels ship more cocaine. But by then Antelo had decided to turn informant. She knew who Lepage was.

When he returned from an extensive trip to Mexico in December 2001, Lepage was forced to undergo a thorough search at customs. He brazenly told the customs agents he would be headed back to Mexico within days and would be back for another thorough search in April 2002. But within weeks, Lepage found his name on a piece of paper signed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell. It was an extradition request from the U.S. government asking that he be tried on drug trafficking charges in Florida. When he was indicted in Florida, Lepage's name would appear with that of Victor and Miguel Mejia Múnera, the twin brothers whom the Drug Enforcement Administration (
DEA
) had already tagged in 1998 as up-and-coming cocaine traffickers with ties to the North Valle and Cali cartels. They were also Antelo's contacts.

Lepage did little to challenge the extradition and by September had reached a plea bargain that saw him sentenced to ten years after pleading guilty to conspiracy. As part of his deal, Lepage was allowed to serve most of his time in Canada. Shortly after he was transferred to Canada, Lepage got a chance to tell his side of the story for the first time on public record. On October 26, 2005, Lepage appeared before the National Parole Board for an expedited review, a chance to be released after serving only two-thirds of his sentence.

During his nearly three-hour hearing, Lepage revealed much more about his relationship to Antelo than she did during her testimony in the Beliveau trial. He said Antelo had lived on the same street as his brother and that he knew her well before she was introduced to either Michel Rose or André Chouinard. Lepage said he would sometimes go jogging with Antelo.

He also said it was Antelo who asked him to go to Colombia the first time. “I wasn't a dealer. I was an insurance policy,” he explained. Antelo asked him to stay with her Colombian contacts for six weeks while they awaited payment on one of the large shipments of cocaine. During the 1990s, it was common for Colombian drug cartels to insist that a member of a criminal organization they were dealing with stay with them while they awaited payment.

To act as such a guarantor meant putting his life at risk. “I did it for the money. It was the money that attracted me,” Lepage said when one of the commissioners asked him why he put his life on the line. Though something went wrong with that deal, he managed to return home safely but claimed he was never paid a cent for that trip.

He returned to Colombia when the relationship between Antelo, the Hells Angels and the Colombians was disintegrating over a loss of $1.8 million. One of the Columbians Lepage had met during his first stay called him and said that Antelo was claiming
the Hells Angels were holding out on her. Lepage reported this problem to Maurice (Mom) Boucher, figuring the Hells Angel would want to maintain the contact in Colombia. Boucher said it was Michel Rose's deal and he wanted nothing to do with it.

Lepage ended up going to Colombia merely to introduce Michel Rose, André Chouinard and Normand Robitaille to the Colombians. The bikers took over from there.

“You know how it is. When you're a Hells Angel you are treated like a king by [other criminals],” Lepage said. “I never sat at the Hells Angels' table [where they discussed their drug deals]. That was sacred.”

Lepage told the parole board that he got to know Maurice Boucher in 1988 when Lepage owned a discotheque in Sorel, the city where Boucher's Montreal chapter was then based. Boucher soon asked Lepage to rent a building for him that was eventually used as a clubhouse for an underling gang.

The two became friends but Lepage insisted he never was Boucher's “right hand man” as he had been described by the police and in media reports. He said he worked on Boucher's estate in Contrécoeur in 1996, renovating his horse stables, garage and house. He admitted to being a member of the Rockers from November 1993 to April 1994 but denied ever being the president of the gang. Because he once wore a police badge, he could not join the Hells Angels. The gang has a rule that forbids former cops from joining them.

While Antelo did not explain how she knew Lepage, she did mention his name when she told the jury about when she started feeling the walls closing in.

It began after she traveled to Colombia and returned on June 10, 2000. Her intention was to discuss things again with Chouinard. While in Colombia, she had made arrangements for her deal with the Hells Angels but also made plans for another shipment that just she and her husband would be involved in.
Antelo said that after returning from Colombia, she had another meeting with Chouinard, but things did not go very well at all. Despite this, she and Chouinard agreed to meet the following Monday. Chouinard called her later and told her they had to push back the meeting to Tuesday. Antelo didn't think twice about the reason for the change. As far as she knew, the Hells Angels were still interested.

“The meeting on Tuesday was supposed to be at ten in the morning. I called them to let them know I was on the way to the meeting.” At this point in her testimony, Antelo took a long pause and became very emotional. Her voice broke down.

“It was at that moment that they tried to kill me,” she said with difficulty. “At the entrance to the highway near my house. I was in my car and I was about to get on Highway 15. All of a sudden I saw a car, that was driving fast, pass me.” Antelo said she made a maneuver to avoid the car and, in doing so dropped her cell phone, which might have saved her life. As she leaned sideways to get her phone off the floor of her car, she heard shots.

“I didn't want to stop out of fear that they would continue to shoot,” Antelo said.

Despite the fact this testimony obviously suggested that Chouinard and the Hells Angels were behind the attempt to murder her, the defense waited until this point to object and ask that the jury be excused. The lawyers then argued over whether Antelo could testify further about either the attempt to kill her or the subsequent murder of her husband. Judge Beliveau determined that it was okay for the jury to hear Antelo talk about what she knew of the attempt to kill her but ordered that she could not mention Craig's murder. The jury was called back in and Madeleine Giauque asked her what she had done after the attack. Antelo said that immediately afterward, she called Chouinard. She said he merely listened to what she had to say and then hung up on her.

She told the jury that, “thanks to God,” she was not hurt but had to be treated for cuts to her face. She later moved to an apartment her husband kept in Montreal. After a while, she decided to collect her kids and leave Montreal. By September, she was meeting with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at an office in the American Embassy in Ottawa. In exchange for her statements and all the documentation she had on the Hells Angels and the Colombian brothers she was dealing with, Antelo was given a promise she would not be prosecuted in the U.S. The American authorities also agreed to protect her and her children. What Antelo was not able to tell the jury was that about two months after the attempt was made on her life, her husband, Raymond Craig, who was just weeks away from his 60th birthday, was gunned down outside the Chantadel bar in Sainte-Adele, a town in the Laurentians. He was killed on August 20, 2000.The defense was dead set against the jury hearing about this.

Their strategy in cross-examining Antelo was to suggest that she might well have had any number of enemies other than Chouinard and the Hells Angels. Letting the jury know about Craig's death would only support the idea it was the Hells Angels who wanted to get rid of the couple.

The first defense lawyer to question Antelo was Lucie Joncas. She got Antelo to discuss her past as a drug smuggler, highlighting the fact that she had been doing it for decades. Antelo admitted that she had done business with cocaine traffickers in Bolivia from 1977 until the end of the 1980s. She had done jail time in California in 1983 for drugs. Remarkably, it was her only conviction in her long career as a drug trafficker.

It was during cross-examination by another defense lawyer that the jury almost learned of Craig's murder. Another defense lawyer asked Antelo about a period in 1991 and 1992 when she and Craig lived in Spain. Defense lawyer Roland Roy asked if that was because Craig had been fleeing from the arrest warrant that
charged him with the attempted murder near Montreal.

“Excuse me, but that is not pertinent!” Judge Beliveau interrupted.

After a brief discussion with the jury excused, the lawyer was allowed to proceed with the line of questioning. But Antelo was provided a poor translation of a question. Instead of asking Antelo about the attempted murder accusation against her husband, the translator asked about the murder of her husband.