Biker Trials, The (20 page)

On October 20,2004, Stéphane Plouffe, a longtime member of the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter, walked into the Montreal courthouse and surrendered himself to the Sûreté du Québec as had been arranged beforehand. Within hours, he was ushered into a courtroom where he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking. Plouffe had been in hiding for more than three years and his surrender put an end to one of the most successful criminal cases ever brought to a Quebec court.

Project Ocean was an unexpected bonus for the police investigators who had spent years gathering evidence for what would lead to Operation Springtime 2001. It virtually landed in their laps, yet netted more full-patch members of the Hells Angels than any other investigation had in many years (with the exception of Project Rush the parallel investigation that led to Operation Springtime 2001). Project Ocean also helped the Sûreté du Québec settle an old score with Gerald Matticks, a man whose influence in the Port of Montreal made him a key asset to Boucher and the Hells Angels.

On the same day Plouffe surrendered, he was sentenced to three years in prison. The police had little knowledge of how he had managed to avoid capture since 2001. Ironically, as he was preparing to do his time behind bars, some of the people who had almost immediately pleaded guilty to charges related to Project Ocean, and were serving much longer sentences than Plouffe's, were just being released on parole.

Of the 51 people charged in connection with Project Ocean, 50 were eventually sentenced, including 36 who received federal sentences averaging about four years. Only one person, a Hells Angel named Guy Dubé, would see his charges dropped because the evidence against him was very thin. Faced with the mounds of evidence the police had gathered in only six months, almost everyone charged in connection with Project Ocean pleaded guilty within months of being arrested. They were people from all walks of life, ranging from full-patch members of the Hells Angels to people who claimed they were only vaguely aware they were working for the gang.

The focus of investigation was a collection of apartments the Nomads chapter had used to conduct the accounting of what had become a vast drug empire that stretched across Canada. The system, with its vaults, counting machines and detailed accounting, would be referred to in court as the Nomads Bank since it handled more money in some weeks than some branches of Canada's chartered banks. The Hells Angels employed people they knew had no criminal records to run their bank with the hope they would never draw police attention to the place where the gang's millions flowed. According to one investigator, some in the organization were 60 years old, others upwards of 80.

“They have no criminal records. You don't use known criminals to transport sums like this because they are more investigated by the police,” the officer would later say in court.

But in September 2000, police tailing Jean-Richard (Race) Larivière, a member of the Rockers who was about to graduate to the level of prospect in the Nomads chapter, noticed that Larivière made frequent visits to an apartment building on Beaubien Street in Montreal. The surveillance opened a crack into the Hells Angels' finances that soon produced a flood of evidence against the 50 people who ended up convicted. They ranged from
a grandmother with expensive tastes who buzzed money couriers into her apartment building, to full-patch Hells Angels from across Quebec who were either making large cash deposits or, as was more often the case, withdrawals for their respective chapters. While making sentencing arguments before Judge Réjean Paul on September 23, 2003, prosecutor André Vincent made his assessment of what the Nomads Bank represented.

“When you talk of legal businesses in Quebec, these are figures that correspond to something much higher than a medium-sized business can hope to have. The sales for the 39-day period are in the order of $18,104,000. That amount corresponds to the sale of 452 kilos of cocaine and 115 kilos of hashish.” It was during the April 9, 2001, bail hearing of Jean Adam and Dominic Tremblay, both minor players in the Nomads Bank, that all the details began to spill out. Canada now had an open window on what the biker war was truly about: millions in drug money.

Richard Despaties, a Sûreté du Québec officer, testified during the hearing.

“How did this investigation get initiated. During what period?” prosecutor Valerie Tremblay asked him.

“First of all, it started around July 25 [2000], in another case, there was an informant named Dany Kane, who we called 1N3683,” Despaties said, referring to the member of the Rockers who had been feeding information to the police since the beginning of the war. “Dany Kane was a member of the Rockers and served as the chauffeur for Normand Robitaille who is a Nomad. And, from what I know, Normand Robitaille had asked Dany Kane to watch his leather briefcase and Dany Kane searched [it]. He found certain documents, photocopied them and turned them over to his controllers.”

During the summer of 2000, Robitaille had decided to try Kane out as a chauffeur and someone to run his errands. It was a position of trust. The fact Kane was still working for both the
police and the Hells Angels was incredible at that point. He had started working as an informant for the police in October 1994, after contacting
RCMP
Sgt. Jean-Pierre Lévesque through a call he placed to Interpol. Sgt. Lévesque set up a meeting. On October 18, 1994, he met at a Best Western in Dorval at 6 p.m. with Lévesque and Sgt. Pierre Verdon. To prove his worth, Kane told the officers several things about the Hells Angels and one of their puppet gangs, the Evil Ones.

“The source has remarkable potential,” Verdon would write in his notes of that meeting, which began a working relationship that ended in 1997 when Kane was arrested for a murder in Nova Scotia. Kane's trial for the homicide ended up being tossed out of court, and he slowly worked his way back into the Rockers. The fact that he was so close to key members of the Hells Angels was what kept the police interested in him, despite the fact that when he agreed to work as an informant the second time around he confessed to having murdered for the gang.

About two years after being arrested for the Nova Scotia murder, Kane was working for new police handlers in the Regional Integrated Squad in September 1999. He started out working like he had for the
RCMP
, providing information and being paid each time he did so. By March 2000, he had signed a contract that meant he was officially working for the police as a double agent and expected to eventually testify in court. Before signing the contract, Kane admitted to all of his crimes, including a murder he had committed while working as a tipster for the
RCMP
and had tried to pin on someone else through the information he was feeding the police.

The financial compensation called for in the contract was indicative of Kane's value as an informant. He was required to collaborate with the Sûreté du Québec and would be paid three installments of more than $500,000 each after Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out and as the Project Rush investigation
made its way through the courts where he was expected to testify. The contract also called on the Sûreté to cover several of Kane's expenses like his mortgage, $587 per month for his motorcycle and the rental of a Neon and two Plymouth Voyageur vans. The police gave Kane $600 for new clothing because Normand Robitaille once asked him to dress more stylishly; he was given $1,000 to buy a gift for René Charlebois' wedding; he was given money to cover his contribution to the Rockers' ten percent fund. All of this put the police in a strange position where they were financially supporting the gang.

But in the end Kane never spent a day on the witness stand. Instead, he took his own life for reasons that are not known. He was found dead inside the garage of his home in Saint-Luc on August 7, 2000. He had died of carbon monoxide poisoning after starting up a luxury car, opening the sunroof and the windows and letting the garage fill with the deadly fumes.

Knowing that he was under constant police surveillance, Robitaille once asked Kane to drop him off at a métro station and handed his underling the briefcase for safekeeping. Kane received the briefcase around 5 p.m. He raced to meet his controllers and they photocopied the documents inside. Within three hours, Kane had the briefcase back with all the originals and was ready to pick up Robitaille as planned at another métro station several kilometres from the one where he had dropped him off. The investigators instantly recognized the names of five men tied to the Rock Machine among the documents Robitaille was carrying. That Robitaille would be interested in personal information on his rivals came as no surprise. But the investigators struggled to make sense of coded accounting ledgers that were also inside the briefcase.

“They were on 8.5 by 14 pages with all kinds of names, names we
did not know, with money figures next to them,” Despaties said at the bail hearing, offering several copies of the documents to the lawyers involved. “At the office, we looked at these documents but we couldn't understand them because the names on the documents are not the surnames of bikers that we knew. Because we knew the bikers by very specific surnames, we looked at it and we said we didn't understand, except that we knew it was an accounting sheet for drugs.” Despaties explained that the figures next to the names appeared with dates as well. In one column, figures were accompanied by the initials
BL
, and in another,
BR
. Despaties said he immediately took them to be abbreviations of the French words
blanc
and
brun
. He said that in his six years of experience in narcotics, he came to know the word blanc,French for white, was commonly used as a code word for cocaine, and
brun
, French for brown, meant hashish.

Despaties said that at the moment of this finding the police were heavily involved in Project Rush, which was within months of coming to an end. Kane's discovery was set aside and initially not considered a high priority.

Jean-Richard (Race) Larivière, a prospect in the Nomads chapter

“The documents were placed into exhibit. There wasn't a prolonged investigation except that Dany Kane, the informant in the case, was doing drug deals with certain members,” Despaties said. “If he wanted to buy a kilo of cocaine, he had to go through Jean-Richard Larivière, who was a member of the Rockers as well. By the month of September 2000, we started to follow Jean-Richard Larivière. On the first days we were following
him,” Despaties elaborated, “Mr. Larivière went to a condo situated at 7415 Beaubien in Montreal. What we found curious about Mr. Larivière was that it was a building with an entrance on Beaubien and an underground parking lot on the east side of the building. Mr. Larivière entered the building by what I would call a panic door, but it required a key. According to the people following him, Mr. Larivière had the key. It caught our attention, but nothing more than that. We thought that maybe he was visiting a member of his family. We didn't know. However, shortly after, Mr. Larivière returned to this building twice. That's when we decided there must be something going on inside. We started to do surveillance for weeks at the building to see what was going on.”

Despaties said that during their surveillance, the police noticed that a known drug dealer named Paul Gaudreau visited apartment 504 inside the building several times. They checked with HydroQuébec, the provincial utility, and were told that there was very little electricity being consumed inside the apartment. They also noticed that during nighttime hours lights were rarely used inside the apartment. As the interest grew, investigators dug up a months' old intelligence report that made mention of the Beaubien Street building. The report detailed how, on August 31,2000, a police surveillance team had tailed Sylvain Laplante, a member of the Rockers as he left his hometown of Valleyfield, an eastern Quebec city near the Ontario border, in a red Ford Taurus. Hours later he showed up at the Beaubien Street apartment building in a Buick Century. He entered the building with a briefcase.

Despaties said the information was enough to get a search warrant. “We went inside the apartment. It was an apartment that did not have much furniture. What was peculiar was that there was very little clothing and the refrigerator was empty. It led us to believe that no one actually lived in the apartment.” What they did learn was that the apartment was being rented by a retired member of the Canadian military who was actually living
in Hull at the time. The police listened in on a conversation the man had had with Richard Gemme, the accountant behind the Nomads Bank. Gemme joked that it was a good thing the military man had retired because if the police ever found out he was lending his name to rent apartments for the Hells Angels it would likely ignite a large-scale investigation.

The police got a warrant to place a listening device and video camera in the apartment on October 16,2000. Despaties said that during surveillance they saw other people show up at the address. The first to catch their attention was Jacques Nepveu, a former member of the Rowdy Crew, a Hells Angels' underling gang based in Lavaltrie, a town east of Montreal. Despite having left the Rowdy Crew, Nepveu was still known to be close to the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter. The police watched as Nepveu arrived at 7415 Beaubien Street on October 3, 2000. He was carrying a bag. But when he left, he had no bag.