Wrong Side of the Law (23 page)

On March 8, Rivard forfeited any legal right to fight extradition to the United States when he failed to appear in court. One day later, another political bombshell landed, this time in Quebec City. Opposition leader Daniel Johnson of the Union Nationale made charges in the Quebec National Assembly that Premier Jean Lesage’s Liberal government may have been guilty of “complicity and connivance” in Rivard’s escape. He said that Claude Wagner had hand-picked raids on suspected Rivard associates, and that some planned raids had been called off when police received orders from “higher-ups.” One aborted raid, said Johnson, was to have been made on the home of a Liberal member of the Assembly.

Johnson said Rivard’s escape had made Quebec “a laughingstock in all of Canada, in all America, and even in the whole universe.” He called for an immediate debate. The motion was defeated by a vote of 51 to 17, but the Lesage government now had to quell new rumblings about the “tentacles” of organized crime reaching into high places.

On March 11, Jean-Noël Lavoie of the Quebec Liberals told the Assembly that it was his home that had allegedly been spared an RCMP raid. Lavoie was also mayor of the Île Jésus community of Chomedey. He was involved in a major libel suit concerning some suspect real-estate deals on Île Jésus, and Lucien Rivard’s name had come up during inquiries into the case.

Lavoie claimed he hadn’t been aware he’d been targeted for a police raid and had no knowledge of a “secret telephone call” that cancelled the raid. He accused Daniel Johnson of “trying to link me in one way or another with Mr. Rivard.” He called on Johnson to “stop peddling malicious statements … and stop spreading this venom.”

Johnson responded that the federal Liberal party was being devoured by a “gangrene” that had spread to its “Siamese Twin,” the Quebec Liberal party. Wagner answered, “I state on my honour and with all my sincerity that, according to the information in my possession at the moment, there was no plot on the part of politicians or anyone else to facilitate the escape of Lucien Rivard.”

While politicians at every level were denying accusations of corruption, Marie quietly sold the press a four-page letter she said her husband had mailed to her from Vancouver. It was dated March 6. Marie said she’d torn up the envelope and flushed it down the toilet in case the postmark could give the police a clue as to which part of Vancouver it had been mailed from.

Asked why she had sold the letter, Marie explained, “At the beginning, I gave interviews to anyone who wanted one. Now I mustn’t forget I have to live. I have to eat and pay my taxes and I have no more income. I don’t get the impression people will go down on their knees to offer me work once this is all over.” (Before marrying Rivard four years earlier, Marie had been a telephone operator.)

The police immediately scoffed at the letter as a ruse to throw them off the trail. “Why should Rivard go to Vancouver?” asked Inspector Jean Gagnon of the Quebec Provincial Police. “Montreal is a big town. There are a million places he can hide out here where he has a lot of friends in the underworld.”

In spite of their doubts about the letter’s authenticity, the police grilled one of the detainees they’d picked up in a raid about the possibility that Rivard could actually be in Vancouver. Eddy Lechasseure was an ex-convict and Rivard’s close friend and former business partner. He lived in Montreal’s Rosemount suburb in an apartment he rented under the alias Eddy Hunter, the English translation of his name. When the police came calling on March 12, they allegedly found a blackjack on the premises and arrested Lechasseur for possession of an illegal weapon. Detectives interrogated him for several hours, but didn’t disclose to the press whether or not he’d given them any useful information.

The heady allure of gold was added to the growing Rivard saga on March 18, with the report from an unnamed woman who’d been arrested by the Ontario Provincial Police in a case involving fraudulent bankruptcy charges. The woman, whose husband belonged to a Toronto gang, said that she and other gang members’ wives would take trips to France and Italy and return to Toronto with “souvenir” packages. The packages, she said, were then forwarded by courier to Lucien Rivard in Montreal. She believed the packages contained gold bullion. Curiously enough, two days after Rivard’s breakout, a United States senate sub-committee report had implicated him as a drug-smuggler and a dealer in illicit gold.

Throughout the political storms and police raids, creative minds with a flair for satire continued to find inspiration in the Rivard Affair. Impressionist Rich Little parodied Prime Minister Lester Pearson singing, “Old Man Rivard, he just keeps running away.” The comedy singing group The Brothers-in-Law included a song about Rivard titled “A Government Inquiry” on their album
Oh, Oh Canada
. A young housewife in St. Laurent, Quebec, named Anne-Marie Fauteux (later Namaro, died February 14, 2000) wrote “The Ballad of Bordeaux Jail,” a humorous poem in the style of the nineteenth-century Canadian poet William Henry Drummond. The ballad describes how the clever “big wheel, Lou Rivard” confronts the cigar-smoking warden, and tells him:

Pardonnez-moi, mon capitaine

I did not stop to think

But with your kind permission

I would like to hose the rink

In the final stanza, the author refers to Rivard as “That Gallic pimpernel.”

The satirical poem was published in Canadian newspapers in the first week of April. The public laughed, but government officials and police were not at all amused. On April 9, in Montreal, a judge rejected habeas corpus petitions submitted on behalf of Rivard’s associates: Groleau, Gagnon, and Jones. They could all now be sent to the United States.

Within a week, Marie claimed she’d had another letter from her husband. This one, she said, had been posted in Barcelona, Spain. She showed reporters the envelope, which did indeed have a Barcelona postmark, but the date and time were illegible. Marie wouldn’t share the contents of the letter with the press because, “it could make trouble for him.” She would only say, “He is waiting for something. He expects it in a few days … When that happens, he will write me again and let me know where he is.”

Once again, the police dismissed Marie’s letter as a hoax. C.W. Harvison, retired head of the RCMP, said he believed Marie was using the newspapers to send messages to Rivard. He suggested it was a “decided possibility” that the Rivards had a pre-arranged code and communicated by means of press stories based on interviews with Marie.

Surprisingly, at that time Lucien Rivard wasn’t at the top of the RCMP’s “Most Wanted” list. That dubious honour went to Georges LeMay, who had vanished after pulling a $4 million bank robbery in Montreal in 1961. He was also a suspect in the mysterious disappearance of his wife, although police had no hard evidence that he was guilty of foul play. LeMay was arrested in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on May 6. He was the first criminal to be caught through what was then called “satellite TV police power.” The pioneering Early Bird satellite program sent images of suspects most wanted by the RCMP, the FBI, and Scotland Yard to TV viewers on both side of the Atlantic. A marina worker recognized LeMay’s face and the bank robber was in the Dade County jail within hours.

As soon as the news of LeMay’s arrest broke, the police in Fort Lauderdale were swamped with phone calls from Canadian newspapers. In addition to details about LeMay’s arrest, they wanted to know if the Florida police had any leads on Rivard, who was known to be an underworld associate of LeMay’s in Montreal. Robert Smith, captain of detectives in the Fort Lauderdale police department, said they didn’t know anything about Lucien Rivard.

The local police had received circulars on LeMay, said Smith, but nothing on Rivard. They hadn’t heard of this international criminal for whom even Interpol was searching. Smith said the detectives in his department were angry about having no information on Rivard, because they might have actually seen him without realizing who he was. LeMay was arrested aboard his yacht. As he was being taken in handcuffs to a police car, an unidentified man said to him, “Now George, you take care of yourself. You know what I mean?” The same man had been seen driving around Fort Lauderdale with LeMay. His description was similar to Rivard’s.

Besides the possibility that a major drug smuggler might have slipped through their fingers, the thought that had the Fort Lauderdale detectives fuming concerned the potential loss of money. Unlike Canadian law-enforcement officers, American police officers were eligible to claim rewards. Rivard was worth $15,000! One of Captain Smith’s detectives complained, “With that kind of a reward for Rivard, how come we haven’t got circulars? He must be more important than LeMay, whose reward was only half as much.”

Although Montreal police still said they were sure Rivard had never left the city, the press shifted its focus to Florida. A waitress in a Fort Lauderdale waterfront restaurant looked at prison mug shots of Rivard Canadian reporters showed her, and said, “Sure, I recognize him.” She said he’d first shown up in the restaurant about a month earlier and had become a regular customer. Whenever he left, he always headed straight for the dock where LeMay’s boat was tied up. He spoke with an accent she couldn’t identify, and had “cold, dark eyes.” The waitress said she hadn’t seen the man since LeMay’s arrest.

On May 10, the FBI announced it was searching for Rivard in Florida. If Canadian officials had been embarrassed over Rivard’s escape, it was now the Americans’ turn to blush after learning that Georges LeMay had been living in luxury on a yacht right under their noses and Rivard might have been his guest. “If Rivard is in the Fort Lauderdale area,” quipped the Toronto
Star
, “he would be wise to hole up next to the police station.”

Captain Smith argued, “We can’t search for Rivard until we’ve been officially asked to do it.” He went on to explain that it was only through a lucky tip brought about by the Early Bird program that they’d nailed LeMay. Prior to that, besides the circulars, the only information they’d had on him was a clipping from a Kenora, Ontario, newspaper. “If we had reason to believe a man we wanted was up in Canada,” Smith said, “we would have plastered the place with information.”

American authorities learned that LeMay had been in the United States for almost all of the four years since the bank robbery, but had gone to Montreal for Easter of 1965. He had re-entered the United States at Rouses Point, New York, on April 20, using false identification. The question was; could LeMay have helped smuggle Rivard across the border?

Reporters found LeMay’s common-law wife, Lise Lemieux, a former Montreal nightclub singer, in a Miami hotel they said was “awash with French Canadian visitors.” She agreed to talk to them in the hotel’s bar, under the watchful eyes of two bodyguards. She told the reporters there was no need to worry about them, “as long as I’m smiling.”

Lise said she had never heard LeMay mention Lucien Rivard. She denied that anyone named Rivard had ever been on their yacht. But she also insisted that LeMay was innocent of bank robbery. “I don’t know where my husband got the money,” Lise said. “But he did well in the real estate business in Montreal. My husband never told me anything he felt I shouldn’t know.”

The American government issued an “all states” warrant, signed by President Lyndon Johnson, for the arrest of Lucien Rivard. This document empowered any law-enforcement officer anywhere in the country to arrest the suspect in question on sight. It superseded all other warrants. The FBI refused to divulge whether it had any new information on Rivard.

In Canada, the press reported on May 10 that in December 1964 — while in jail — Rivard had arranged the sale of his share of Plage Ideal for $268,000. Marie claimed to know nothing about the sale. Where the proceeds were deposited was a mystery.

A tip on an illegal lottery-ticket racket led Montreal police to Andre Durocher on June 4. Four detectives went to an east-end address where they’d been told Durocher had a basement apartment. As they approached the building, Durocher’s wife came out. She spotted the detectives and cried, “Andre! Get out! It’s the swine from the police!”

Two policemen broke down the door and overpowered Durocher before he could get his hands on a weapon. A search of the apartment turned up four revolvers, several sticks of dynamite, and three Molotov cocktails. As Durocher was being taken away, he snarled, “You pigs! You took me by surprise, or they would have had to wipe you up with blotting paper.” That, at least, was the account the police gave to the newspapers.

Durocher had died his hair red in a feeble attempt at disguise. The police were sure Rivard had dumped him right after the escape and that he probably had no idea where Canada’s most wanted man was hiding. Marie, still willing to talk to any reporter, said, “I am sure he can’t know anything. My husband must have got to know him in Bordeaux. I never heard anyone mention his name before that.”

The police hoped Durocher would enlighten them on whether or not he and Rivard had inside help when they escaped. Instead, he told them a garbled tale of being in Spain with Rivard up until three weeks earlier. He even threw in a few Spanish words for effect. Durocher said Rivard had advised him not to return to Montreal, but then gave him $25,000.

Durocher had $1,100 on him, and had bought a brand-new car under a false name. Detective Sergeant Robert LeBlanc of the Montreal police department said it was “within the realm of possibility” that Durocher and Rivard had been in Spain, but not very likely. He didn’t believe Rivard would have kept a small-time hoodlum like Durocher with him. There had been no passport among Durocher’s belongings in the apartment. LeBlanc doubted he had even left Montreal. Durocher had most likely seen the newspaper articles about Marie’s supposed letter from Spain, and had concocted a story. “I don’t think we’ll ever get much out of him,” LeBlanc said. On June 4, 1966, Durocher would be found hanging in a prison lavatory, an apparent suicide.

An unnamed senior police official expressed the view that “Rivard is lucky if he is still alive today. He knows too much and is too well-known to be left lying around for too long.” The notion that Rivard had enemies in the underworld soon became evident.