Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle (78 page)

On March 9, 1999, Paradis and eight of his dealers were arrested by Carcajou. He made bail and, desperate for cash, quickly started trying to collect on his debts. In January 2000, Paradis sent his younger brother Robert (who'd been both shot and arrested in the previous year) and tough guy Jimmy Larivée to collect from a particularly annoying customer. Gilles Nolet supported his rather large cocaine habit by stealing jewelry, and he was always hanging around Paradis, hoping the coke would come out and they'd party. On one night out before Paradis was shot, Nolet told him that a Colombian had sold him a kilo of excellent coke and that he could have it for just $15,000. Paradis bought it and Nolet faded away. When the coke turned out to be so impure as to be practically worthless, Paradis put out word that he was coming for his money. The shooting and the arrest deferred the debt, but when Paradis was finally able to do something about it, he did. But before his little brother and Larivée could get to Nolet, he was murdered in a bar in Côte-Saint-Paul.

Things just weren't working out for Paradis in Montreal. His funds were drying up and his sources of income were being murdered, the Hells Angels had taken over his territory and his dealers, and the police had an excellent case against him. He was one of the first four people to be charged under C-95, Canada's new anti-gangster law. Facing a bleak future outside of prison and thinking about his wife and son, Paradis told his lawyer to cut him a deal. In exchange for a lighter sentence (12 years with a chance at early parole), Paradis promised to tell everything he knew about the Rock Machine, the Hells Angels and the criminal underworld in Montreal.

Paradis wasn't the only prominent member of the Rock Machine who lost faith in their ability to compete with the Hells Angels, at least in Montreal. At about the same time Paradis and his men were arrested, founding Rock Machine member and former SS man Paul “Sasquatch” Porter packed up his operation (including a few trustworthy dealers) and moved to Ottawa. With Hells Angels turning dealers all the time, the 6-foot 6-inch, 420-pound Porter found it increasingly difficult to hold onto his territory at the foot of the notorious Boulevard St-Laurent. But maintaining a staff wasn't the only problem Porter had in Montreal; he was also a conspicuous target. While driving his Chevy Dually pickup down Route 341 near the North Shore village of L'Épiphanie on May 31, 1997, Porter was passed by a Mustang. As the other car came even with his driver's side window, Porter reflexively turned his head. He saw a young man lower his window, draw a gun and unload a magazine of automatic fire. When Porter collected himself on the side of the road, he was surprised that all he had suffered was a scratch on his arm; the door of his pickup was full of holes and his bullet-proof vest would need replacing. Less than a year later, it happened again. Porter was driving in the East End when seven men opened fire on his truck. He put it in reverse and escaped without a scratch.

A few weeks later, he decided to move to Ontario. He and his old friend André “Curly” Sauvageau (another former SS man) were just beginning to make inroads into Ottawa's modest drug market and serve as godfathers for the Rock Machine's fledgling Kingston chapter when fellow Rock Machine member Joe Halak invited them to his Canadian Thunder motorcycle show in Georgetown, a quiet little town just west of Toronto. Although the Hells Angels didn't show up in person, they did send a gift. That morning, July 21, 2000, the
Toronto Sun
sent a technician to 341 Guelph St. in Georgetown to fix a newspaper box that had been malfunctioning for weeks; it had been giving away free newspapers. When the unsuspecting repairman arrived, he was surprised to find a box of 4,000 nails surrounding 2.2 kilos of C4 plastic explosive. Although police surmised that Porter was the intended target, there was little doubt that dozens of innocent motorcycle enthusiasts would have been killed or maimed if the bomb had exploded at the show.

On the outside, Porter was unaffected by the attempts on his life. When Boucher and Fred Faucher signed the truce that officially ended hostilities between the two gangs, Porter was front and center with his oversized leather jacket and its massive Rock Machine patch. Two months later, he crossed the lines. On December 27, 2000, just two days before Stadnick welcomed 150 new Ontario bikers to the Hells Angels, Porter switched sides, bringing Sauvageau and his dealer network with him. It was a tremendous loss for the Rock Machine and a huge victory for the Hells Angels. “It's not like going from the Conservatives to the Liberals; it's like going from the Hatfields to the McCoys,” one Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) officer said. “He could never get away with something like that in the United States or in Europe, but Canada's a different place.”

Many in the media have speculated that Porter's defection was due to his old friendship with Boucher from the SS days, but the reverse is probably true. Porter walked the Rock Machine walk during the war and was one of their most stalwart, if not overly aggressive, members. It was only once Boucher was back in Maison Tanguay for the prison guard murders that Porter would negotiate with the Hells Angels. “I think he blamed Boucher for the war,” said one Hull-based dealer who claims to know Porter and Sauvageau well. “But he had no problem with Wally.” And it must have been clear to him that with the rapid expansion of the Hells Angels nationwide, his chances for survival as one of the most prominent of their enemies were dwindling.

Stadnick was gracious in victory. Porter was not only accepted into the club, but he and his partners in Ottawa were reinforced with a few Québec Hells Angels and granted the title of Nomads Ottawa. It was not only an acknowledgment of Porter's worth to the Hells Angels, but also an indication of how serious were Stadnick's plan for Ontario. It was the third Nomads chapter in Canada, after one was set up in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby in September 1998 to control the rapidly expanding chapters on the West Coast. Just as the Hells Angels' name, logo and concept had proven desirable enough to franchise a generation earlier, Stadnick's Nomads idea had proven prosperous enough, and immune enough from prosecution, for it to be copied in other places with enough business to support an elite biker management team.

While the Hells Angels may have looked invincible from the inside, the police were gearing up for their own war with the gang. The RCMP, SQ, OPP and local police forces in Montreal, Québec City, Vancouver, Toronto and Hamilton came together for a project as large, far-reaching and unprecedented as Stadnick's massive patch-over had been. Armed with over 264,000 wiretaps, miles of videotape, hundreds of photographs and documents and the testimony of Stéphane Gagné, Stéphane Sirois, Peter Paradis, Sandra Craig and others, the allied police forces launched Operation Printemps.

As soon as all the documentary evidence was scanned and loaded onto CDs by the RCMP, a network of ERMs (Esquoades Regional Mixte or Regional Integrated Squads) involving 23 different police forces were set up in areas where Hells Angels and puppet club activity was particularly heavy—Montreal, Québec City, Trois-Rivières, Sherbrooke, Hull and Jonquière. “It was the first time that a long-term joint force operation had been put in place in Québec,” said RCMP Sergeant Tom O'Neill, head of the Montreal ERM. “We had several JFOs in the past, but they generally had short-term mandates with one file, or they involved one group or one event. If we needed resources that were not available at one police force, we would go to another police force.”

On the afternoon of March 26, 2001, two days before the huge operation was to launch, O'Neill hosted a meeting with hundreds of officers from various police forces. The crowded auditorium sat spell-bound as O'Neill went through a long PowerPoint presentation detailing the evidence, the suspects and the strategies involved. Although most of the cops had an inkling that they were being gathered to arrest some Hells Angels, almost all of them were shocked at the size of the operation. “We were stunned,” said one SQ officer. “It was like we were taking down the whole gang.” The cops in attendance were so impressed with their mission that few said anything before O'Neill opened the floor to questions. Even then, the officers needed to take a moment to compose themselves. The scale of the operation was simply overwhelming. There were warrants for a total of 142 bikers (although four were assumed dead), including the entire Nomads, Rockers and Evil Ones clubs. Charges would include conspiracy, drug trafficking, money laundering, gangsterism and, of course, murder. When O'Neill finally finished, he was given a standing ovation. O'Neill later joked that he should have charged admission and sold popcorn.

As successful as the meeting was, O'Neill and the other managers of Operation Printemps couldn't help but worry. With as big an operation as they were planning it was critical that word not leak out. They weren't so much worried that one of the 2,000 officers might tell a wife or girlfriend what was going on, but they couldn't stop thinking about how Gagné and other informants had told them about how Boucher, Scott Steinert and others had bragged about contacts within the police. If even just one biker found out about the operation and spread word, it could be disastrous. Years of work and millions of tax dollars would be lost and hundreds of officers would be put into grave danger.

It started at 4:30 a.m. Paul, who manages a sporting goods shop, was walking his dog before heading downtown to open the store when he saw a convoy of police vehicles come speeding out of the Complex Sportif Claude Robillard. “I lost count after I saw 30 go by,” he said. “They were in a big hurry and they had all their stuff.” By midnight, police in Québec had conducted raids in more than 200 locations in 77 different municipalities, and 118 bikers and their associates were behind bars. Police also seized huge amounts of cash and biker property (including all three of Mom Boucher's South Shore homes) under proceeds of crimes legislation. Cooperating police forces in Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia arrested ten more bikers, including Stockford. “We're talking about the most important operation of this kind that we've ever had,” said Montreal police Commander André Durocher.

“It's unprecedented.” Most of the big names in the Hells Angels—Normand Robitaille, Michel Rose and even Boucher's son Francis—were paraded past TV cameras on their way to jail. One news report showed a 77-year-old accountant, who had been laundering money for Hells Angels, uncovered by Project Ocean, pathetically asking the police not to put him in Bordeaux prison because he'd just had prostate surgery. Only one Nomad was not arrested: David “Wolf ” Carroll, who had been named in many of Kane's reports. When his name was conspicuously absent from the list of those arrested, some in the media wondered in print if it was because he was an RCMP informant.

Operation Printemps was wildly successful, but it failed on one important count. The only Nomad the police failed to put behind bars that day was Stadnick. Some sources claim he was tipped off and making a run for it, while others counter that the giant take-down coincidentally fell on his anniversary with Kathi Anderson. Either way, Stadnick was in Jamaica when the arrests happened in Canada. When confronted, the Hamilton police claimed they knew he was gone, but they busted into his house anyway, just to be sure. “We knew where he was,” Hamilton-Wentworth Chief Ken Robertson said the day after the raids. “And we know where he is. And it's only a matter of time before he faces the music like the rest of them.”

But they were taking no chances. With the likelihood of Stadnick willingly returning to Hamilton to face charges slim, Steve Pacey, the Hamilton biker specialist, called O'Neill and told him where Stadnick was. While the RCMP and the Jamaican Defense Force SWAT team were arresting Stadnick in Jamaica, it was Pacey's responsibility to search Stadnick's house. Much of what he found, he expected. There were closets full of fancy clothes—“he had racks and racks of Armani suits and Kathi had expensive shoes out the wazoo,” he said—and office equipment. He was struck by the cleanliness of the house and a decor far subtler that Stadnick's often flamboyant appearance would suggest. But what really surprised him were the pictures. “The inside of the house was full of photographs,” he said. “Much of the wall space was devoted to framed pictures and there were piles and piles of photo albums everywhere.”