Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (38 page)

Early in 2008, they returned to national consciousness in a big way because a high-ranking member of the federal government's cabinet irresponsibly left some classified documents at his girlfriend's house. The story would have appeared on page B16 of your local newspaper if the girlfriend in question hadn't been married to a prominent biker, and to have had a common-law relationship with another. That guaranteed the front page.

Maxime Bernier was a career politician and the son of a career politician. He was elected to federal parliament in 2006 as a Conservative for the riding of Beauce, a semi-rural but very industrious district just south of Quebec City, even though he lived in Montreal. His father, Gilles, had represented the same riding from 1984 to 1997.

The Conservatives were a bit surprised by their minority victory in the federal election and scrambled to find suitable ministers for their cabinet. Despite being new to Parliament, Bernier was appointed Minister of Industry and Registrar General. No more than 18 months later, he was anointed Foreign Affairs Minister, one of the most important and powerful posts in the Canadian government.

It did not always go well. On a trip to Afghanistan, he told a group of reporters that Kandahar Provincial Governor Asadullah Khalid should be replaced, even though Khalid had been democratically elected, had a long and distinguished career fighting the Taliban and had survived a number of suicide attacks. Immediately, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the rest of the Canadian government rushed to criticize Bernier, and claim that Canada did not actively interfere in Afghan politics.

Less than a month later, when Cyclone Nargis devastated Burma (also known as Myanmar), Bernier promised that a Canadian Forces CC-177 transport aircraft (usually referred to in the media by its American designation, C-17 Globemaster) would be dedicated to the relief effort. But he didn't realize that all four of Canada's CC-177s were busy in Afghanistan at the time. In order to fulfill his hasty promise, the Forces were obliged to rent an identical C-17 from the American Army for just over $1.1 million for the weekend.

As bad as the start of his parliamentary career was, it got far, far worse. Even at the start of his political career, questions had been raised in the media about Bernier's girlfriend. Julie Couillard was younger than him and pretty; and the media focused primarily on her habit of wearing revealing, even risqué clothing.

They should have dug a little deeper. After a failed common-law relationship with a real estate developer when they were both teenagers, Couillard became a waitress at a Montreal strip bar. There she met and later lived with a man she called Norman, one of the bar's bouncers, but left him after he grabbed her by the throat in what she described as a “'roid rage.”

On her own, but very active in the bar scene, she became close friends with Tony Volpato. Born in Italy, Volpato was a cocaine importer, high-ranking member of the Cotroni Mafia family and close friend of Frank Cotroni's. She told him she was worried about Norman, who she believed was stalking her. Volpato said he'd take care of it. Couillard didn't ask him how he would, but felt confident he would be successful and stopped worrying about Norman.

She soon met another man (she called him Steve) who was an American playing for the Montreal Machine, a short-lived franchise with the World League of American Football, the National Football League's unsuccessful attempt to export its product outside the United States. She was quite taken with Steve, and went to California with him, but returned to Montreal when she found him too aggressive.

And then, while eating a hot dog in a crowded restaurant, she met the man she would befriend and then eventually move in with, Gilles Giguère. She said it was his eyes that caught her attention. “All I could focus on was those eyes, brimming with gentleness and goodness and wielding a strange power over me,” she wrote. He introduced himself as a construction worker, but she soon found out that he was actually, in her words, a “moneylender.” In fact, he was a notorious loan shark with a close association with the Montreal Hells Angels and had spent time in prison for robbery.

Their relationship helped in her new ambition to become an actress. She appeared in small roles in a variety of movies and TV shows including
Highlander III: the Sorcerer
and even appeared topless in a TVA miniseries documenting the life and times of former Quebec premier René Lévesque. She was so taken with Giguère, in fact, that she claimed to have turned down repeated romantic advances by Quebecois pop star and heartthrob Roch Voisine to stay with him.

Couillard later acknowledged that she knew what Giguère did for a living, but she never saw the violent side of it. They would dine at a restaurant and someone would hand Giguère an envelope full of cash. In her own telling of the story, she admitted to not allowing herself to think about what would happen to debtors should they fall behind on a payment.

They had been together for years when Giguère told Couillard that a friend of his was getting out of prison and needed some help getting back on his feet, perhaps with some construction work. The guy who was looking for a few bucks hammering nails just happened to be the notorious Maurice “Mom” Boucher. Couillard later said that she was scared of Boucher the moment she saw his eyes, that she felt they revealed he had no conscience. She warned Giguère that she wanted to see as little of Boucher as possible, and that she considered all of his biker friends to be too vulgar for them to see often.

Couillard particularly disliked one of her boyfriend's biker pals. She described Léo Lemieux as a “motormouth” and admitted she warned Giguère that he was probably a police informant and that he shouldn't say anything in front of him. He didn't follow her advice, and Lemieux informed on him.

At 6 a.m. on December 5, 1996, a SWAT team from the multi-force Carcajou (Wolverine) unit broke into their condo. Couillard claimed they beat Giguère brutally and unnecessarily, and accused them of trying to see her naked. She sold the story to
Allô Police
, Montreal's lurid tabloid that focused on the city's crime. They ran it under a headline with bold, inch-tall, all-capital type that read: “Arrested In the Bedroom! The Spouse of the Mobster Gilles Giguère, the Actress Julie Couillard Condemns the Wolverine!” In her autobiography,
My Story
, she made it very clear she has a low opinion of police, and frequently referred to them as “animals.” Both Giguère and Couillard were soon released, but she said that their relationship started to turn sour. He admitted that he had made some statements to police — who, he said, threatened to “get” her if he didn't — but did not make clear what he'd said. Giguère was later charged with conspiracy to commit murder because of his association with the Hells Angels management team, but police withdrew the charge due to lack of evidence two months later.

Although they were both very shaken from their experiences, the couple decided to get married, but put off setting a date because Giguère was still facing charges related to drugs and weapons found in his possession. He assured her they belonged to Lemieux, and she believed him.

On the morning of April 26, 1996, Couillard recalled that she went downstairs to say good-bye to Giguère on his way to work only to see his truck leaving. She never saw him alive again.

After two days of looking for him, Couillard received a call from police telling her that Giguère's body had been found, that he had been shot six times and left in a rain-filled ditch by the side of a rural highway. She didn't believe it, but later that day saw his body on a TV news report while visiting with family members at her brother Patrick's house.

Couillard later said that she was shocked and even sickened by the fact that Boucher attended Giguère's funeral. Desperate to make sure Giguère's name was clear and to help secure her own safety, she assured Boucher that Giguère would never have turned informant. “Don't worry about it,” Boucher told her, smiling. “There's people who think
I'm
a snitch.”

Fearing not only that the Hells Angels had killed her boyfriend, but were planning to kill her, Couillard tried to distance herself from them. She took what money they had saved up and, with some of Giguère's non-biker contacts, set up a contracting company.

Her tenure away from the bikers did not last long. At a bar, she met up-and-coming Rockers full-patch Stéphane Sirois, a good friend of Boucher's who had also worked with Stadnick. It didn't take long before she found out he was a biker, but instead of running away, she rationalized her attraction to him:

And to her credit, she saw some success in her plan to “save” Sirois. At the height of the Hells Angels-Rock Machine war (in which the Rockers were primary combatants), Sirois was asked to turn in his patch because the Rockers found out that he was living with Couillard. As the ex-girlfriend of a man they considered to be an informant, she was certainly too dangerous to have around. Faced with choosing between his girlfriend and his gang, Sirois chose Couillard. Surprisingly, the Rockers accepted his resignation and stayed on generally positive terms with him.

He asked her to marry him and she accepted. But Sirois had a hard time finding legitimate work, and the couple began to get encumbered with massive debts from wild spending. He started borrowing money from her and convinced her to pay $12,000 for her own wedding ring. Their wedding was a massive, lavish — and by most accounts garish — affair that saw the couple leave in the same Rolls-Royce limo Celine Dion had rented for her wedding. On his way to the ceremony, Sirois was stopped by a Rocker who asked him for the $5,000 he owed him. Sirois begged off, citing the fact it was his wedding day.

Their honeymoon was a disaster as their credit cards were declined in the Bahamas and they had to pay cash for a flight home. Sirois then revealed that he was in much more financial trouble than he had let on, and he pushed her to lend him more money, intimating that his old biker friends might kill him if she didn't.

Couillard decided to divorce him. Knowing he would refuse, she took matters into her own hands and had an affair with one of her contracting clients, a real estate developer she identified as Bruno. Before she could tell Sirois that she had cheated on him, he left her. But not for another woman. In fact, he turned informant and entered the witness protection program. Since he had been the Rockers' de facto bookkeeper, he had a great deal of information to pass along. The day after Couillard found out about Sirois, she discovered she was pregnant. Since she decided Bruno was almost certainly the father, she had an abortion. Sirois later testified that it was Boucher who ordered the hit on Giguère, and described Couillard as being “close to getting it” as well.

While starting her life over again as a bartender, she ran into another old real estate contact — she identified him as Sylvain — and began to work for him. They started an affair, but she broke it off because he was married and refused to leave his wife.

She then rebounded into another relationship with a man named Robert Pépin. Within days, he offered her a managing partnership in his security firm. Pépin was good friends with Jacques Duchesneau, president of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), and the two of them were putting together a deal that would have put Pépin's systems into airports all around the country. Pépin eventually lost the contract, and then lost Couillard when she found out that the shares in his firm that he promised her were instead given to a man to whom he owed money. They parted, she said, on pleasant terms, but Pépin later committed suicide.

At that point, she entered into yet another relationship with a married man; this one was Phillippe Morin, who owned a Quebec City-based construction company named Kevlar. Couillard and her friend, Bernard Coté, were anxious to sell some real estate in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Luckily for her, Coté worked for Michael Fortier, the federal Minister of Public Works, who happened to be looking for property in Quebec City for federal government projects. Coté and Morin convinced Couillard to represent both of them to the federal government.

Morin took Couillard to a meeting at Montreal's upscale Ristorante Cavalli. Along with his business partner René Bellerive, political fundraiser Eric Boyko and five attractive young ladies, Morin's guest of honor was Bernier, who was then Minister of Industry and Boyko's boss at the federal government's Business Development Bank. Bernier, Couillard later said, had had a few drinks, sat next to her and even kissed her on the cheek.

Although somewhat offended at the time, Couillard started to communicate with Bernier and, after realizing that they were likely to hook up soon, she decided to reveal the details of her past in case it would jeopardize his career. “It was obvious to me if I became his partner, I would surely be subjected to background checks,” she wrote. “ ... if I'm wrong, then Canada's national security is truly in jeopardy.”

They started dating and took trips together. Couillard said that Bernier made staying together at least a year a condition of their relationship, in part, she maintained, to silence persistent rumors that he was gay. He designated her as his personal companion on official trips and referred to her conversationally as “my spouse.” And it was at that time she attended his swearing-in ceremony as Foreign Minister in a dress that sent tongues wagging and camera flashes popping.

Bernier's staff quickly grew tired of the demanding and sharp-edged Couillard and tried to keep them apart. One particularly persistent staffer stood up to her and Couillard admitted that she first considered slapping “the little bitch” but changed her mind and ordered Bernier to choose between the two of them. The staffer, who was still recuperating from a major car accident, was fired.