Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (74 page)

The next day, Boucher had his morning coffee at Au Bon Pain. He was met there by Commander Bouchard, who asked him what he knew about Desjardins' murder. Boucher told him to talk to his lawyer. He did. That afternoon, the Montreal police had a brief, polite meeting with Boucher and his lawyer, Gilbert Frigon. Boucher said that he'd met with Desjardins at Shawn's to discuss the weather in the Dominican and that he knew nothing about the murder. “Sad thing,” he said. He also promised to call them back “if he heard anything.”

Desjardins' murder wasn't about a debt. The friend wasn't even a Hells Angel. He was an associate of Montreal's Rizzuto crime family. Although Stéphane Gagné had told police that Boucher's ultimate goal was to drive the mafia out of Montreal, Boucher knew it would be unwise to launch another war against a bigger, more entrenched enemy, so he chose to work with them instead. Their common interest was cocaine.

The Nomads had an enviable business model. Five of them—Boucher, Robitaille, Denis Houle, André Chouinard and Michel Rose—administered what the club called The Table. They imported cocaine and distributed it to every Hells Angels chapter (except Sherbrooke, which had cut an earlier deal), puppet club and associated dealer in Quebec. Members of The Table received $5,000 a week, plus 10 percent of the profits on sales of their drugs. The cocaine came to The Table primarily from the Mejia Twins cartel in Colombia, although a much smaller amount came from contacts in Bolivia, Amsterdam and New York. The Table's man in Colombia was Guy Lepage.

A hulking ex-cop who'd been kicked off the Montreal force for corruption, Guy Lepage arrived at the Mejias's distribution center in Barranquilla in the summer of 1997 and stayed at the palatial estate of José Miguel Carvajal—a senior executive in the cartel. After brief negotiations, Carvajal and Lepage worked out an ingenious and effective plan. The Colombians would get cocaine to a Hells Angels operative in Miami, who would then get mules to drive it up to Montreal for distribution.

The only problem with the system was that it couldn't handle large volumes. Cocaine shipments through Lepage averaged less than 500 kilos a month, far less than the Hells Angels needed to corner the Montreal market, let alone all of Canada. With cost seemingly no object, Lepage (on orders from The Table) convinced the Colombians to ship 2,400 kilos of cocaine directly to Quebec. In October 1998, under cover of darkness, a medium-sized pleasure craft with Miami registry docked off the coast of Gaspé, Quebec. Seven SUVs were waiting on shore. When they loaded, the cars took off at regular intervals towards Montreal. They all took slightly different routes to confuse police. As the last SUV drove through the Gaspé Peninsula, a Sûreté du Québec officer in the tiny village of Ste-Anne-des-Monts thought there was something strange about a scruffy-looking young man of about 20 driving a brand-new Chevrolet Trailblazer at exactly the speed limit just after sunrise, so he pulled him over. A quick search revealed 480 kilos of cocaine and a pager with the telephone numbers of Lepage and fellow suspected cocaine importers Raymond and Sandra Craig. But the rest of the shipment got through. With some minor alterations in delivery methods, the Gaspé landing spot became the Hells Angels' primary cocaine source.

No matter how effectively The Table could get cocaine into Quebec, there was no way they could get enough to run the mafia out of business. With years of experience and thousands of contacts and associates in every major city between Barranquilla and Montreal, the mafia could import drugs nearly at will. Rather than a war, the Nomads wanted an alliance.

On June 21, 2000, Robitaille, Chouinard and Rose went to a fancy Italian restaurant in Laval to meet with Vito Rizzuto, his right-hand man Tony Mucci and two other tough-looking Italians. Mom Boucher had promised he'd attend, but didn't show up. That was fine with Rizzuto, who scrupulously avoided meeting with any well-known underworld figures, and none was better known than Boucher. After it was agreed that the Italians and the bikers would work together, dividing the bounty of the Montreal drug market between them and defending it against outside influences, they moved on to lesser items. First, they set the minimum price for a kilo of cocaine on the streets of Quebec at $50,000. Anyone selling for less faced the death penalty. Second, they decided to split the proceeds of a telemarketing scam, aimed at Americans to make detection and prosecution more difficult, equally between the bikers, the mafia and the independent operators. Although the total take from the scam was about $1 million per week, it was by far the least important item on the agenda.

The partnership hinged on the agreement that the Hells Angels were required to eliminate any competitors, even if they fell within their own ranks. Considering the rampant slaughter of his former SS friends in the Rock Machine, Boucher showed no reluctance to murder even his closest associates if it meant the bottom line would improve.

Then, Louis “Mèlou” Roy, president of the Trois-Rivières Hells Angels, arrived in Montreal on June 21, with bad news for Boucher. A police raid on the Blatnois, a puppet gang based in nearby Grand-Mère, had been devastating and all of its important members plus several close associates were in jail. Robitaille told Roy not to worry, as that sort of thing happened from time to time and if he had been protecting himself properly, he had nothing to worry about from police.

He did, however, have a problem with the Nomads. Roy had been at the top of the underworld in Trois-Rivières for so long that he had built up an enviable fiefdom. He bought his cocaine from his own suppliers and set his price according to supply and demand. It was virtually always less, often quite a bit less, than $50,000 a kilo. Robitaille warned him that he should buy his cocaine from The Table. Roy refused. Robitaille told him that even if he didn't deal with The Table, his friendship with Boucher and other Nomads could keep him alive if he got in line with their retail price demand. Again Roy refused. He attended the Nomads' fifth anniversary party the following night and was never seen alive again.

Next on the Nomads' list were Raymond and Sandra Craig, the largest remaining independent drug dealers in Montreal. The Craigs could operate without interference from the mafia, Hells Angels and even the Colombian cartels because Sandra was the daughter of a powerful Bolivian drug lord. Before the deal with the Italians, the Craigs had been consistent and reliable cocaine suppliers for the Nomads. Now they were competitors. On August 29, the Craigs were driving home after a quiet night of dinner and drinks at one of the chalets in Ste-Adèle. They were stopped at a red light when Sandra heard a crash. Four bullets came through the back window, three of them penetrating Raymond's skull and killing him. The assassins, on a Suzuki Sidekick, assumed both people in the car were dead and sped away. It was the second attempt on Sandra's life in two months and she was scared. She went home and shut down her business.

Kirk Mersereau hadn't been very careful since his brother's death. He'd sworn revenge many times in Halifax and word eventually leaked to Paul Wilson and then to Carroll. Carroll flew to Nova Scotia and met with Mersereau. At first he tried to turn his enemy, indicating how rich he could become if he became a Hells Angel. Mersereau wouldn't budge. There was no way he'd do business with the people who'd killed his brother. Since he'd made it personal, Carroll finished the meeting by asking Mersereau if he'd put out a contract on his life. Mersereau didn't say that he had, but he didn't deny it, either. With no more to talk about, Carroll left. Three days later, on September 10, a neighbor drove up to Mersereau's isolated farmhouse because she hadn't heard from him in a while. She was about to knock on the front door when she noticed it was open. Inside, she heard what she thought was a baby softly crying. When she came in, she saw Mersereau's 18-month-old daughter exhaustedly trying to cry. She picked her up and carried her into the bedroom, where she found the bloodied bodies of Mersereau and his wife.

With his enemies either dead or made into friends, Boucher was not just a gangster—he was a celebrity. When Nomads prospect René “Balloune” Charlebois was married on August 5, Boucher held the reception at his Contrecoeur farm, invited the tabloid press and hired Quebecoise pop star Ginette Reno to perform. When photos of Reno hugging and kissing Boucher appeared in
Allô Police
, she was soundly criticized in the mainstream media. Her response was a bizarrely pompous demi-apology in which she compared herself to Christ. “Jesus hung out with bad people,” she told the
Journal de Montréal
, inferring that she was aware that the Hells Angels weren't solid citizens. “Are they killers and criminals 24 hours a day?” She couldn't use ignorance as an excuse. She'd also sung and partied at Paul “Fonfon” Fontaine's wedding the previous summer.

And she wasn't the only big-time celebrity who'd been linked with Boucher and the Hells Angels. José Théodore, star goaltender for the Montreal Canadiens, showed up in police photos drinking beer with some bikers in the Sorel clubhouse. When the SQ took the photos to the NHL head office in New York, their security department told Théodore to avoid the bikers, at least in public. He ignored them. When he and his father, Ted, were stopped on a golf course after playing 18 holes with some Hells Angels, he used a similar defense to Reno's—they might be bad guys, but hanging out with them doesn't make me bad. “My father taught me respect and good manners; he also showed me that honesty to one's self pays off,” Théodore said. “If you are honest in your work, you're not afraid of looking at yourself in a mirror.” Later that year, Théodore's father and half-brother were arrested for running a loan-sharking business out of the Montreal Casino.

While Boucher's star was rising, Kane's was sinking into self-doubt, blunted ambition, resentment and despair. He'd allowed the police to put video cameras, transmitting and recording devices in his home, his car and on his person. The police could tell he was beginning to feel exposed and vulnerable. His biker career was depressing him, too. While he had spent ten years of his life with the Hells Angels, killed for them, started clubs for them and gone to prison for them, he was still nothing more than a gofer. While he was still chauffering Robitaille around and waiting patiently while the Nomad did his business, Kane could see newer members of the gang surpassing him. Michel Rose had not only become a Nomad, but was riding around in his many luxury cars or custom Harleys or piloting one of his three racing boats. Even Gregory “Picasso” Wooley, who'd done way less than Kane had, had become Rockers president—and he was black, normally a hindrance to promotion in biker gangs.

Meanwhile, Kane was having big-time money problems. He'd foolishly guaranteed a loan that Denis Houle, one of the wealthiest Nomads and a member of The Table, had taken from the Sherbrooke chapter. When Houle didn't repay it, Robitaille pressed Kane to come up with the $80,000. Even more galling was the fact that The Table had just forgiven a $400,000 loan that the always unreliable Carroll had forgotten to repay.

By August, those close to Kane began to notice that he was emotional and depressed even by his own standards. On the morning of August 7, his common-law wife Patricia was extremely worried. So were the police. Benoît Roberge, the Montreal police officer attached to Carcajou who became Kane's contact after his falling out with the RCMP, had a 7 a.m. meeting with the informant and, when he didn't show up after 15 minutes, the cop paged him. But it was too late. At 8:30 a Rockers-supplied driver took Patricia and her son Steve home to Kane's house. She'd been at her mother's house the night before and had warned Kane not to deadbolt the front door. He had a habit of sleeping late and heavily the mornings after he'd been partying and, considering the mood he'd been in, she wouldn't put it past him to be snoring away inside.