Biker Trials, The (5 page)

Standing outside the Sorel hotel was 29-year-old Paul (Schtroumpf) Brisebois, a prospective member of Boucher's Montreal-based Nomads chapter. 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, 2000, 25-year-old Patrick Turcotte was shot dead after leaving a video store in Verdun, a working-class suburb of Montreal. Weeks after the murder, Brisebois graduated from the level of “striker” in the Rockers to full-fledged membership. 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. By comparison, some former Rockers had been members of the Hells Angels' underling gang for more than five years without yet being promoted. 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 multi-million dollar drug network.

Brisebois was not supposed to be at this party. There was a court order forbidding him from associating with known criminals, and yet here he was, arranging for several of them to be
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. Even though their leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher, the architect of the Nomads chapter, was behind bars awaiting his second trial on charges that he had ordered the murders of two prison guards, other members of the Nomads like Denis Houle, Walter Stadnick and René Charlebois partied inside with their new Ontario brothers. They had even invited a photographer from the crime tabloid
Allô Police
, to take pictures and get the word out that the Hells Angels had once again expanded. All the while, a seamstress busily sewed the winged-skull patches onto the jackets of the new members.

Paul Brisebois is arrested on December 29, 2000.

(Marcos Townsend, The Montreal Gazette)

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,
the Hells Angels had more than 100 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. Now, through the contacts they had established over several years and the eight new Ontario chapters they had created overnight, the members of the aggressive Hells Angels' chapter were planning to increase their share of markets in cities like Toronto, Hamilton and Oshawa. Everything seemed to be going as the Hells Angels willed it.

Scott Robertson, a member of one of the now-defunct Ontario gangs, walked out of the Sorel bunker sporting his new Hells Angels' patch, and when police asked him to pose for a picture with his leather jacket, he obliged. Mayrand, who only months earlier had moved from the relative peace and quiet of the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter apparently to replace Boucher and assist the Nomads when it came to diplomatic issues, walked out of the bunker looking bushed. Guy Ouellette, a Sûreté du Québec sergeant who had probed the Hells Angels for more than a decade, managed to talk to him. 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 168 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. From his cell in a special wing of a women's provincial detention center, where he had been placed for security reasons, Boucher called Pierre Provencher, a trusted member of the Rockers. 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 168 new brothers.

“Hey that's some province,” Provencher said of the Hells Angels' newly acquired territory.

“Oh yeah, it's a big province,” Boucher replied.

What Boucher and Provencher didn't know was that the final preparation of years of work was underway in a special office for prosecutors at the Montreal courthouse. 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, 2001, more than 2,000 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. The roundup was dubbed
“Opération Printemps
(or Springtime)
2001”

All of those arrested were named in warrants on charges that ranged from drug trafficking to first-degree murder. 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.

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 1990, when he was 18, the
RCMP
had received a complaint
from someone living on the same street where Brisebois was selling. Too many people were coming and going to the apartment. The Mounties asked an undercover officer from the Montreal Urban Community Police to buy drugs from Brisebois. 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.

Ten years later, Brisebois was rising quickly through the Hells Angels' ranks. 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.

At 47 years old, Denis Houle, whose nickname was once Pas Fiable (Not Reliable), had 20 years as a Hells Angel under his belt and had already done serious jail time while wearing the gang's patch. Years before the March 2001 roundup, Houle made it clear to authorities he was committed to the gang.

“With the Hells, I have found a family,” Houle once told a prison psychologist while serving a nine-year sentence for being an accomplice after the fact in the 1985 murders of five fellow Hells Angels' members. The sordid event became known as the
“Lennoxville Purge” or the “Lennoxville Slaughter,” as the five members were invited to the Hells Angels' Sherbrooke chapter bunker on March 24, 1985, where they were gunned down. 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. The same psychologist told the National Parole Board that Houle, while serving his sentence, found a source of personal value in the gang, and described him as a well-structured individual “in his delinquency.” Life in his adopted family would permit Houle to live a lifestyle that, by 2001, according to court documents, was clearly incompatible with his declared revenue. He allegedly managed to hide $4.5 million in the Antilles and was believed to own $800,000 in real estate in Nova Scotia. 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 1990s because he refused to discuss the details of his role in the Lennoxville murders. In 1993, he told the board he would not discuss the slayings because other Hells Angels found guilty of taking part were still appealing their sentences. The parole board reports filed during Houle's sentence revealed a fierce gang loyalty that belied his nickname. In 1994 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.

The police half-jokingly referred to the Nomads chapter members as the “elite” of the five other Hells Angels' chapters chartered by the gang in Quebec by 2001. The newly created
Nomads represented some of the gang's most influential members in eastern Canada. At the helm was Boucher, a man who had become so influential as a drug dealer in Montreal's east end that a short stint behind bars during the mid-1990s caused panic, uncertainty and shortages among his many drug dealers in the Rockers. Like some of the other founding members of the Nomads, Boucher had held prominent positions within the gang including president of the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter. Because of details Dany Kane, a Hells Angels' underling who turned informant in 1994, was feeding them, the police were already aware of the existence of the Nomads well before it was chartered on June 24,1995. Also, just months before it was chartered, Houle's parole had been revoked because it was clear he had been involved in setting it up.

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. While on parole, he told the board that he was working as a sales representative for a company with a salary of $30,000. He also was involved in a small recycling company, owned by other Hells Angels' members, that the police believed was actually selling recycled products to small municipalities in Quebec's Eastern Townships. 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 minimum-security penitentiary closer to Montreal, where members of the Alliance tried to eliminate him. He and a fellow Hells Angel were
hanging out in the prison yard while men positioned outside the prison fence fired 11 shots from a semi-automatic rifle in their direction. 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. Two of the men arrested turned informant and alleged that members of the Dark Circle, leaders in the Alliance, had given the green light on Houle's murder and had provided support.

Testimony the informants gave in court opened a very public door on the biker war. If the Hells Angels didn't already know who was pulling the strings in the Alliance, they did now. Those members of the Dark Circle, a collection of the province's more influential drug traffickers who opposed the Hells Angels and their monopolistic attitudes, were arrested a month after the botched attempt on Houle. They were charged with conspiring to commit murder. The names of the Dark Circle members charged in the conspiracies would become a Hells Angels' hit list. At least 6 of the 17 men charged in a series of conspiracies and attempted murders would later be targets themselves.