Biker Trials, The (19 page)

Despite the obvious screw up, witnesses testified that the two masked men appeared to know exactly where they were going, as if they had studied the layout of the rental agency. They walked in through an open garage door and strode right past a mechanic.

Bruneau, who had known Hervieux for seven years, would later be called to testify in one of the trials to come out of Project Rush, heard before Justice Réjean Paul. He appeared uneasy and never looked toward the 13 men sitting in the specially designed, bulletproof prisoners' dock. The courthouse had been specifically built to try the Hells Angels' Nomads chapter. Construction began shortly after Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out. It was built on land near the Bordeaux detention center to facilitate the transfer of the many gang members. The new courthouse, which cost taxpayers $16.5 million, featured state-of-the-art equipment. Testimony could be recorded digitally, and lawyers sitting at each table could watch video evidence on computer screens. The dock could seat several of the accused for one trial. Bruneau stood several feet away from the accused as he described himself as a car dealer. Prosecutor Éric Marcoux asked him about what he remembered from Hervieux's murder.

“I heard shots and I hid,” Bruneau told the jury. “I waited for
things to calm down. I saw Serge Hervieux and I called the police.”

“What did you think then?” Marcoux asked.

“I heard [the first] shot and a window break and I hid under the desk. I knew it was gunfire and I hid.” Bruneau's testimony confirmed how badly the Hells Angels had botched the hit on him. Some of the photos that were found inside the getaway car were surveillance shots taken at a funeral he had attended but the photos were not of him. Whoever had supplied them to the shooters had written in pen “Serge Bruno” with an arrow pointing toward an unknown man.

“Did you think you were the target?” Eric Marcoux asked. Bruneau paused for a long moment and his face gave away his anxiety. He rubbed his hand across his face. “Yes,” he replied, while admitting to the jury that he had a criminal record that included drug trafficking. “I was sure it was that. I thought it was because I was involved in drug trafficking.”

“Who did you deal with?” Marcoux asked. Bruneau fidgeted and appeared deeply miserable. The defense lawyers objected strenuously to Marcoux's questions. But Bruneau was eventually able to say that he was associated with Jean Rosa and Pierre Bastien.

Despite a botched hit and the killing of an innocent man, the Hells Angels killed again only a little over a month later.

It would seem that the Hells Angels' hits on rival gang members were becoming increasingly sloppy. On October 1, 1999, Johnny Plescio's brother Tony was murdered in the parking lot of a McDonald's restaurant in Montreal North. Plescio had just taken his family to a children's party at the restaurant. While Johnny Plescio's murder appeared to be well planned — he was drawn to his window after the killer sliced his cable — Tony's was reckless.

Plescio was shot six times in the head and neck at point blank
range in the parking lot. But a stray bullet struck Plescio's wife, who was getting some diapers from the trunk of their car. The bullet wounded her foot, but she managed to make sure the couple's child was safe in the car once she realized Plescio had fallen to the ground fatally wounded. Other people in the parking lot scattered; some were young mothers, terrified that their children were about to be killed. The shooter escaped in a car that sped away from the restaurant. As the shooter and a getaway driver crossed a bridge heading for Laval, the shooter apparently tried to toss the firearm into the Rivière-des-Prairies. Instead, the .357 Magnum fell to the pavement of an underpass below where it was later recovered by the police.

Like his brother Johnny, Tony Plescio was a member of the Rock Machine. In 1990, he had been caught selling quarter-grams of cocaine for $30 out of the same bar on Bélanger Street owned by Johnny that someone had tried to torch twice during the biker war. At the time of his death, Plescio was waiting to be sentenced in a drug and weapons case.

But Plescio had already made headlines years before the biker war ever started. He was arrested in 1985 in a strange incident that also involved Alex Hilton, one of several boxing brothers who came to prominence during the 1980s. By 1984 Alex and his brother Davey were both Canadian champions in their respective weight categories, and younger brother Matthew had a promising career ahead of him. But the Hilton name soon became as synonymous with crime as much as it was with boxing. The family was tied to Mafia leader Frank Cotroni, but the brothers' crimes were, for the most part, tied to drinking. Alex Hilton in particular had been arrested several times for alcohol-induced mischief.

On February 11, 1985, Plescio and Alex Hilton left the Action Disco Club, a bar on a service road of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through eastern Montreal, after a heavy night of drinking.
While in the parking lot, Hilton reached into the trunk of his car and pulled out a .22 calibre rifle. A witness, fellow boxer Serge Cusson, later said that Hilton merely fired into the air and then Plescio grabbed the rifle and did the same. No one was injured in the shooting, but one of the shots did go through a window of a nearby building. The police were also told there had been an altercation inside the bar just before the shots were fired. Plescio was only fined and handed a probationary sentence for the offence.

On May 1, 2000, Patrick Turcotte was shot dead just after leaving a video rental store. Turcotte was a drug dealer who worked with the Rock Machine. Turcotte was crossing the street late in the afternoon when someone got out of a blue van and shot him in the back several times. The shooter then got into the van on the passenger side and it sped away. The gun used to kill Turcotte, a Beretta automatic pistol equipped with a custom-made silencer, was found lying under a white car, near where the van had been waiting. Two bystanders tried to help Turcotte and attempted to resuscitate him. When they loosened his belt, a gun fell to the ground. It had been stuck inside the back of his pants. His pager was left lying a few feet away.

Ten minutes after the shooting, the blue van used in the murder exploded a few blocks away. It had been stolen earlier that day in Brossard. Witnesses saw two men run from it just before the loud blast. Police recovered two pairs of gloves on the ground nearby, and they were able to find
DNA
samples in both pairs. The
DNA
was later matched to Pierre (Peanut) Laurin and Paul (Schtroumpf) Brisebois. Both were Rockers at the time of Turcotte's murder, but, on December 11, 2000, each was promoted to the status of prospect in the Hells Angels.

In February 2003, while evidence in Turcotte's murder was being heard in the trial before Justice Réjean Paul, Brisebois'
lawyer Real Charbonneau was rude to the judge after he cut off his cross-examination of a police witness. Paul ordered Charbonneau out of the courtroom and suspended the trial for the day. Charbonneau was charged with contempt, but was later acquitted. In the interim, Brisebois had his trial severed from the 12 other gang members. Months afterward, the entire trial came to an end when some of the accused reached plea bargain agreements.

Brisebois and Laurin were not offered plea bargains, however, because of the solid evidence against them. But they did later agree to plead guilty to second-degree murder in the Turcotte case. In exchange, they were sentenced to life with a chance to apply for parole after serving ten years. The three years they spent behind bars awaiting the outcome of their case was not counted as double, as it usually is, so they would have to wait at least seven years before applying for parole. The pair also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking and gangsterism.

François Gagnon's murder would be just as sloppy as the Turcotte and Hervieux murders. But the homicide also indicated that either the Hells Angels were running out of targets or the Rock Machine were running out of capable people to deal their drugs: Gagnon was a drug dealer, but he was also mentally unstable.

The early part of his criminal record indicates that Gagnon made a career out of drug dealing. On June 4, 1977, he was arrested with 27 grams of hashish and 7 grams of marijuana. Two years later he was charged with trafficking in cocaine. During the summer of 1980, he was caught selling small quantities of cocaine. In 1986, he was caught with 25 grams of hashish.

Then in 1987, he was caught trying to smuggle 42 grams of hashish into the Bordeaux detention center. Gagnon had been out on a weekend pass and the guards suspected that he was smuggling drugs into the prison. They placed him in a special 72-hour
cell, equipped with a modified toilet that didn't flush, because they suspected Gagnon was smuggling hashish in through his stomach. They didn't have to wait 72 hours. After one night, the guards came to check on Gagnon and found him sitting at the edge of the bed, balloons full of hashish near him. When he saw the guards he grabbed the balloons and threw them in the toilet.

During the early 1990s, there were still signs that Gagnon was a very active drug dealer. But sometime after 1995, the criminal cases brought against him were of a very different nature. In 1997, he was charged with threatening the life of a Montreal police officer and his family. He was also charged with making threats against then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. A judge asked for a psychiatric evaluation, and the case was eventually dropped after Gagnon promised to take medication. But the following year, he was charged with a series of strange crimes, including damaging a woman's lawn furniture. On July 22,1998, he sent a package to
Journal de Montréal
reporter Michel Auger that spooked security guards at the newspaper. Again, a judge asked that Gagnon undergo a psychiatric evaluation.

On September 22, 1998, Gagnon was arrested for making threats to Montreal Urban Community Police officers. Again, a judge asked for him to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. But Gagnon resisted. The psychiatrist ended up sending a letter to the judge in the case citing reasons for his inability to examine the accused. He wrote that Gagnon “would only come to an external clinic to have his welfare certificate renewed and to get benzodiazepine.” The psychiatrist also noted that the 350-pound Gagnon showed up for examinations intoxicated and that when he didn't get benzodiazapine, a tranquilizer, he became aggressive and threatened the staff.

So, after years of eliminating rival gang members, some of whom were millionaires, the Hells Angels decided to go after Gagnon, a man dependent on psychiatric medication to function.

Gagnon was sitting in the kitchen of his Montreal North apartment while either one or two men quietly walked up the outside stairs at the back of his building. Gagnon was shot through the patio door that led to his kitchen. Three shots were fired from a .357 Magnum Smith & Wesson revolver, and three were fired from a .38 calibre revolver. Four of the shots struck Gagnon and he died quickly. The shooter or shooters left the scene in a blue Dodge Caravan. It was later spotted making an abrupt stop in the middle of the street a few blocks away. Three men were seen jumping out of the van. They all then jumped a nearby fence and disappeared into an alley.

Four members of the Rockers during better days. From left to right: Gregory Wooley, Jean-Guy Bourgoin, Stéphane (Archie) Hilareguy and Daniel Lanthier.

Back at the murder scene, the police recovered the gun used to shoot Gagnon. Inside the van they found the other firearm used in the murder, as well as a .357 Ruger revolver. They also found a fuel can with gasoline still in it and a box of flares. It appeared Gagnon's assailants had tried to destroy the evidence but failed miserably. Police also recovered two pairs of running shoes. In a garbage can near where the van was abandoned, the police found two pairs of gloves. The fingerprints found on the flare box matched those of Stéphane (Archie) Hilareguy, a Rocker implicated in the murder of Yvon (Mon Mon) Roy, and his
DNA
was found in one of the pairs of running
shoes. Inside the other pair the police found a
DNA
sample that would later be matched to Rocker Éric (Pif) Fournier. Inside one of the gloves found in the garbage can was a
DNA
sample that matched the unidentified sample recovered after the Hervieux murder.

The fingerprints on the flare indicated that Hilareguy was in charge of destroying the evidence in the Gagnon hit, but he had apparently failed. His name was now tied to at least two Hells Angels' hits and it appeared the Hells Angels could no longer tolerate the attention he had attracted. On June 16, 2000, less than two weeks after the Gagnon murder, Hileraguy's young child was found standing outside his home in St-Roch while it burned. After the flames were extinguished the police found a body inside. It turned out to be Hileraguy's 30-year-old girlfriend Natacha Desbiens. She had been shot to death before the house was set on fire. Several months later, Hilareguy's remains were discovered in Potton, a small municipality in the Eastern Townships.