Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (46 page)

Sunday, November 25, 1984 was a great day for a Montreal sports fan to stay inside. Not only was it unseasonably cold, but the new-look Canadiens were in Boston to take on the hated Bruins and the NFL season was heating up as teams jockeyed for playoff positions. It was a hard time for a betting man to be without a TV. At 3:30 p.m., Trudeau and veteran West End Gang hit man Michael Blass parked illegally in front of 1645 boulevard Maisonneuve Ouest, a 22-story luxury high-rise just a short walk from the southeast edge of Parc Mont-Royal. Trudeau didn't get out of the car. Instead, Blass carried the package up to number 917. He exchanged pleasantries with Lelièvre, April and two other thugs, Louis Charles and Gilles Paquette. They thanked him for the TV, but made it clear they had other things on their minds and weren't interested in socializing. April, in particular, seemed nervous and couldn't stop moving.

Blass said he understood and offered to set up the equipment. Desperate for a little normalcy, the gangsters thanked him and told him to go ahead. Blass unpacked it all and, with meticulous gentleness, assembled the equipment. His last task was to set the five-minute timer on the back of the VCR. He then feigned disappointment when the TV wouldn't turn on and mumbled something about getting a repairman. Lelièvre vetoed the idea. Charles half-jokingly suggested Blass take the TV back with him. Blass interrupted him and said he had a friendly repairman who knew how to keep his mouth shut. Lelièvre relented. Blass left. As soon as the door shut behind him, he ran for the stairs. Taking them two steps at a time, he tore through the lobby and into Trudeau's car. They laid rubber and were a block away before Blass's car door closed.

The blast could be heard throughout the city. At 4:10 p.m., Lelièvre's apartment (and everything in it) was obliterated. The walls of eight other units in the building crumpled. The elevators were destroyed. Windows all around the neighborhood shattered. “April found out exactly how the Hells Angels work,” said Trudeau.

His job done, Trudeau went back to Ross and asked for his money. Ross said he couldn't pay him any more than the $25,000 he'd already advanced him and that Trudeau could get the rest by collecting debts owed to Ryan by members of the Sorel Chapter and the 13th Tribe, a gang slated to become the Hells Angels Halifax Chapter on December 5.

First he went to Sorel. They told him to fuck off. Why pay a fellow Hells Angel a debt they owed a dead man? Realizing there wasn't much he could do, he went to Halifax. Desperate to be Hells Angels, the members of the 13th Tribe struggled to comply. They gave him $46,000. A few weeks later, Grub MacDonald, by then president of Hells Angels Halifax Chapter, brought another $52,000 to Sorel. It was for Trudeau, but he didn't want to visit Laval. The boys at Sorel took the money—and it eventually made its way to Trudeau—but they mocked MacDonald for his fealty and he returned to Nova Scotia wildly embittered.

Réjean “Zig Zag” Lessard, president of the Sorel Chapter, called a meeting with Halifax and Sherbrooke, another chapter patched over on the same day as the 13th Tribe. It wasn't just the extortion. Trudeau and his gang of idiots were a black mark on the organization. Excessive cocaine use and drinking had led the Laval Chapter to bizarre behavior. Their wanton, random violence and their blatant, small-time crimes endangered them all. More important, their mounting cocaine debts were crippling the whole organization. After a vote, Lessard got what he wanted. Laval was to be eliminated. Two of the Laval bikers were to be offered membership in the Sorel Chapter, two others were to be forcibly retired and the rest were given a death sentence.

Naturally, Trudeau was the primary target, but he had the survival skills of a cockroach. Sensing that the hatred the other chapters had for Laval was on the verge of turning into retribution, Trudeau, who had snorted $60,000 worth of coke up his nose in the previous three weeks, checked himself into a posh Oka detox center on March 17, 1985. “I saw what was coming,” he said. “I'd seen it myself in the past, what happened to members who drank or sniffed too much.”

Sorel enforcer Robert “Ti-Maigre” Richard called the Laval, Sherbrooke and Halifax clubhouses to announce a party in Sherbrooke—about 100 miles southeast of Montreal—on Saturday, March 23. After the call, Georges “Bo-Boy” Beaulieu, president of the Sherbrooke Chapter, went to a local sporting goods shop and bought six sleeping bags. Store owner Daniel Raby later recalled that Beaulieu was in such a hurry, he forgot to take his receipt.

Less than half of the Laval chapter showed up. Incensed, Lessard and his men were forced to holster their guns and throw a party. He announced to the crowd that the meeting had been postponed a day so that the others could arrive, and that their attendance was absolutely mandatory. He booked every available room at the La Marquise motel down the street and put up the overflow at the Lennoxville a few miles away.

Most of the bikers woke around noon or soon thereafter. The remaining members of Laval, except Trudeau, of course, arrived in Sherbrooke that afternoon. Church, as Hells Angels worldwide refer to their meetings, was called for 2:30. Everyone showed and the slaughter began. Sorel prospects, forced to wait outside as usual, heard shouts. Someone mentioned the Outlaws. Another yelled something about guns. After that, it was just the booming of guns and the screams of the victims. Laurent “L'Anglais” Viau was shot in the head. Jean-Pièrre “Matt le Crosseur” Mathieu was similarly dispatched. Michel “Willie” Mayrand died struggling. Jean-Guy “Brutus” Geoffrion took a bullet in the head and another in the spine. Guy-Louis “Chop” Adam was shot seven times by three different guns. He died on the front lawn after fleeing through the front door.

The surviving members of the Laval chapter, Gilles “Le Nez” Lachance, Yvon “Le Père” Bilodeau and Richard “Bert” Mayrand (whose brother had just been murdered before his eyes) huddled in a blood-soaked corner. As the other Sorel members dragged the bodies into the garage and hosed the blood and guts off the floor, Lachance told Richard he had some blood on his boots. Richard took a moment to wipe it off.

Finished cleaning, the bikers gathered around Lessard. He told them that the men had died because they snorted too much coke and because Trudeau had leaned on his brothers because an outsider would not pay a debt. Bilodeau and the surviving Mayrand were told to leave. The others, some still spattered with the blood and tissues of their victims, surrounded Lachance. Lessard told him that they held no grudge against him and that he was free to walk away or join the Sorel chapter. Lachance eventually joined. One of the original Popeyes, he was still officially a Hells Angels prospect because he was in prison for man-slaughter when the gang was patched over.

While a few prospects were forced to burn their dead brothers' possessions, Lachance and Sorel members Jacques “La Pelle” Pelletier and Robert “Snake” Tremblay drove back to Laval. When they get there, they found Michel “Jinx” Genest, the last surviving member other than Trudeau, all alone drinking beer. They told him what happened and that he was invited to join the Sorel chapter. He accepted and helped his new brothers pack some of his dead brothers' possessions into their trunk. Over the next few days the Laval clubhouse was looted and the apartments of the five dead bikers were emptied of anything of value, whether the murdered man lived alone or not. Lessard decreed the theft necessary to repay the Halifax Chapter and to provide a gift for Western Canada's sole chapter in Vancouver, a move he hoped would help soften the news of the slaughter. He sent a letter to the Hells Angels East Coast regional headquarters reporting that “the North Chapter has been closed down.”

It had been closed, but not eliminated. Normand “Biff ” Hamel, a former Laval prospect who joined Sorel, went to visit Trudeau in rehab. He told Trudeau what had happened and that he was dishonorably discharged and would have to get rid of his tattoo. Trudeau complied by blackening out the logo with an indelible marker. “I understood very quickly what it meant,” he said.

Upon his release, Trudeau went to the ransacked Laval clubhouse. His bike and the $46,000 he had hidden in a wall safe were gone. He called Hamel who told him that he could forget about the money but could get his bike back if he murdered two people who might turn informant—including Mathieu's girlfriend Ginette “La Jument” Henri, who served as accountant for the Laval chapter.

Henri was also considered valuable to Sorel because she was one of the two living people who knew where Laval's drugs were stashed. Lessard knew she'd never turn them over to her boyfriend's killers, but he also didn't want them to end up as evidence. The only other person who could find them was Claude “Coco” Roy, a Laval prospect who was outside the Sherbrooke clubhouse when most of his chapter was exterminated. Genest was allowed to prove his worth to his new chapter by recovering the cocaine. He called Roy and told him to meet him with the drugs at the $20-a-night Ideal Motel in the boonies. As soon as Roy walked into the room, Genest smashed him in the side of the head with a gun, killing him. He then searched Troy's blood-spattered body and found five bags of coke in his underwear. Emboldened by a job well done and a sample of his booty, Genest called the dead man's stripper girlfriend and asked her for a date. She turned him down.

A police wiretap that had been in place at the Sherbrooke clubhouse since October 1983 finally paid a dividend. Officers from the Sûreté du Québec determined that five Hells Angels were missing and that something big had happened at the clubhouse. Armed with this meager evidence, the cops descended on the building. The front door was torn down with a backhoe and cops with metal detectors swarmed the grounds. Helicopters equipped with heat sensors powerful enough to discover fresh graves were brought in. They found nothing but a shirt with what they claimed was a bullet hole, some legal weapons and an amount of drugs too small to get anyone in real trouble.

Trudeau earned his bike back by murdering former Popeye Jean-Marc “Le Grande Guele” Deniger. It took a while, though. The Hells Angels will only accept media coverage as confirmation of a hit and nobody found Deniger's body. Frustrated, Trudeau finally called
Le Journal de Montréal
five days later and gave them an anonymous tip that they would find something of great interest in the back seat of Deniger's car.

The police kept hammering away at the Hells Angels, but found very little. They happened upon a treasure, though, when they arrested Trudeau on a weapons charge.

As the St. Lawrence got warmer, decomposition did what the police couldn't and the bodies started floating. First came the fattest, Geoffrion, on June 1st. Sûreté du Quebec (SQ) divers were sent down. Although the water was nearly opaque, with visibility no more than a foot, they felt around and found the remains of Viau, Adam, Mayrand and Roy. So crowded was the Hells Angels graveyard that one diver also discovered the skeleton of Berthe Desjardins, who was murdered by Trudeau—along with her husband and mother-in-law—on February 11, 1980.

The Quebec media went crazy.
Allô Police
, a lurid Montreal tabloid that often knew more about the underworld than the police did, ran an article claiming the Hells Angels had $50,000 contracts on the lives of Trudeau and Regis “Lucky” Asselin, a former Laval prospect who narrowly escaped two attempts on his life, once by driving a bullet-riddled van through the front door of a hospital. Sergeant Marcel Lacoste, the commander of the SQ's investigation into the murders, took a copy of the story to Trudeau, who was in Montreal's Bordeaux jail on an unrelated weapons charge. Trudeau, who was scheduled to be back on the streets in August, sighed, shook his head and said: “I killed for them and now they want to kill me—that's gratitude, eh?”

By October 2, 1985, 17 Hells Angels were charged with first-degree murder and warrants were issued for 10 more, all on the basis of tips and testimony from Trudeau and Gerry “Le Chat” Coulombe, a Sorel prospect who was horrified by the slaughter and wanted out. But the police knew their case was weak unless they could get an eyewitness to talk (Coulombe was at the scene, but was outside the building for most of the shooting and was hiding when Robert “Snake” Tremblay shot a fleeing Adam on the front lawn).

It didn't take long. Gilles “Le Nez” Lachance, now a Sorel member, had seen everything. The SQ arrested him on a minor charge, but they knew exactly how valuable he was. They offered him immunity for a laundry list of crimes if he would tell them everything that had happened in the Sherbrooke clubhouse in March. Terrified that he might be next on the hit list and more than happy to avoid prison, he cooperated readily.

Superior Court Judge Jean-Guy Boilard brought down his gavel on the case on December 19, 1986. After two trials—a main one and a separate one for Genest—complete with a media circus, countless calls for mistrial, 12 people cited for contempt of court, a judge scolding the SQ for “incompetence” and one juror admitting he was bought by the Hells Angels for $25,000—Lessard, Pelletier, Michaud and Genest were found guilty of murder. Richard was acquitted. The rest plea bargained their way to lesser sentences.