“And how do you go about going into bars and saying 'It's us who are going to sell here?'” Briere asked.
“You collect five or six, eight guys. Sometimes a dozen, sometimes less. [We'd put] Rock Machine shirts on their backs and install ourselves in the club. But usually when you go in a club it's because you know someone there, be it the manager or be it a dancer, a waiter. It could be anybody.”
Paradis was then asked about the origins of the war, and, like other informants before and after him, he said that for him, the starting point was when Sylvain Pelletier was killed in 1994.
“And it was a war that took what type of form? I'm not talking about incidents, but the war took what form on the ground?” Briere asked.
“That isn't hard,” Paradis responded. “If you worked for one side, you didn't work for the other. The war came about because of that. From my perspective, the Rock Machine wanted to keep what we had, and the Rockers, the Hells Angels, wanted to take it away.”
“And what you had was?”
“For me it was my territory. But it was the same for all the full-fledged members. Not just in Verdun, but everywhere.”
Briere then asked Paradis if he had ever had to replace people who worked for him.
“One thing that happened right away was Jean-Marc Caissy. He was a runner for me. A guy who delivered drugs and collected money. And he was killed.”
“And what did you do from that moment on? Did you replace him?”
“I was obliged to replace him so that my business would continue to roll.”
“Were there others like Jean-Marc Caissy who you were obliged to replace, in the same circumstances?”
“None come to my memory right now.”
“Besides a death, were there other reasons why you had to replace a runner or a dealer?”
“There were some who changed sides, or simply abandoned it. They didn't want to be in the middle of it.”
Things changed quickly for Paradis after deciding to sell for the Rock Machine. He was advised to always carry a firearm and he recruited bodyguards to work for him. He told the jury that
he always needed to have someone with him when he went outside his home. Two of the men he recruited, Simon (Chiki) Lambert and Ãric (Beluga) Leclerc, would later end up being among the people Paradis turned on when he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking and gangsterism.
By May 1994, Paradis had proven himself as a drug dealer to the Rock Machine and was officially made a hangaround in the gang, a move that proved they had adopted the same hierarchy system as the Hells Angels. He was also given an Alliance ring â an A surrounded by diamonds. “The Alliance was formed just before I arrived, I think, or around the time I arrived. When they gave me the Alliance ring they said, 'Take this, you are a part of the Alliance.' But they said at the same time that I was also a hangaround.”
Paradis said the ring was handed to him at a restaurant during a meeting with other gang members. He said it came as a surprise and that it was Jomphe who had given him the promotion. It meant Paradis had access to Rock Machine meetings where they made key decisions in their turf war.
“Now, Mr. Paradis, within the frame of what you call the war, were you personally the victim of an attack?”
“Yes.”
“Can you tell the members of the jury, this is during what time, what date?”
“The month of August. August 10,1998.”
“On August 10, 1998, what was your status in the Rock Machine?”
“Full-fledged member.”
Paradis went on to say that at that point in the war he was aware that the Rockers had recruited well-known drug dealers like Bruno Lefebvre and Pierre Provencher to take control of Verdun. Paradis said he was accompanied by his bodyguard Daniel (Poutine) Leclerc that day and both were prepared for
trouble. The pair had only made a trip to the butcher shop, but Paradis was wearing a bulletproof vest anyway. “Guys were falling from one side to the other. It was in my interest to have one on my back,” Paradis said, but quickly added that as he started to near his home he felt safer and removed the vest.
He then noticed a car was following them and he told Leclerc to get a gun ready. Paradis watched as the black Toyota Corolla he had been keeping an eye on pulled up next to his
GMC
Jimmy. They were both now stopped at a red light. The passenger side window began to open and someone opened fire on Paradis' vehicle. His window shattered and he felt something strike his chest.
Paradis was struck four times in all but, he told the jury, he recalled keeping his foot on the brake of his Jimmy because before the shooting started he had noticed women and children crossing the intersection. The incident put Paradis in the hospital for eight days.
Paradis said he figured everyone in Verdun in the drug milieu knew what his vehicle looked like, so it was not hard for the Hells Angels to line him up as a target. By that point the Rock Machine had basically abandoned Verdun because of the war and had they left him on his own to defend it. Jomphe, his mentor and the Rock Machine's key man in Verdun, was killed on October 18, 1996, along with another member of the Alliance. They had been shot while dining at a Chinese restaurant in Verdun.
“When Renaud was killed it really touched at the morale, it really messed up the Rock Machine, and this is not my personal opinion, this is how it was. There was no one left. The full-fledged members said, 'Look, Verdun, we'll leave it to you.' There was no one else to take it over. It is not up to a prospect to take over the job of a full-patch member, when there are 10 or 12 full-patch members who can do it. It was their job to do it. They didn't do it. I think they had their reasons.”
The police would later learn, through Hells Angels' informant
Dany Kane, that the hit on Jomphe was likely carried out by three Hells Angels' underlings in the Evil Ones biker gang, all of whom would eventually become full-patch members of the Montreal and South chapters. Kane's claim was supported by another source who said one of the three men named by Kane had bought black jogging pants and a black T-shirt before Jomphe's murder. The man who survived the hit in the Chinese restaurant, Raymond Lareau, told the police that the shooter was dressed in black.
Jomphe was apparently not afraid of the Hells Angels. When 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers was killed in the botched bombing in 1995, Jomphe went public and told the
Journal de Montréal
that the Rock Machine had nothing to do with it. He publicly blamed the Hells Angels, calling them “real hoods.”
During the trial, Paradis was asked by Crown prosecutor François Briere to describe how the Rock Machine approached the war, in Verdun particularly.
“We had teams,” Paradis said. “Some were made for killing, some were made for burning, another was for placing dynamite, others were to go into selling points that belonged, not necessarily to the Rockers, but everything that belonged to the Hells Angels.”
One of Paradis' targets was the Champlain Bar in Ville-Ãmard. He admitted to blowing it up because he believed that a Rock Machine associate had double-crossed the gang and set up Jomphe for the hit in the Chinese restaurant.
“I had information from the street and I had information personally that [the turncoat] was holding meetings with Mom Boucher on the second floor of the Champlain Bar,” Paradis said.
“After getting that information what did you do?” Briere asked. Paradis said he felt he needed permission from the Dubois family to blow up the bar. He said another member of the Rock Machine got the blessing through Alain Dubois, who was not yet a member of the Rockers. Paradis said he also tried to blow up an Italian restaurant where, he had heard, the Rockers held regular
meetings, but the dynamite didn't go off. It was right across the street from a private club owned by Pierre Beauchamp, one of the Hells Angels' early victims in the biker war.
Paradis' next assignment was to blow up another bar. “It was in Robert Leger's neighborhood. He said the Italians there had connections, and that the Rockers wanted the club, and the Italians didn't want to be associated with anyone. So Robert Leger asked me if I could do anything about it. So I blew it up, too.”
Paradis told the jury how he also blew up a bar on Saint-Laurent Blvd. because the Rock Machine believed it was controlled by Normand (Biff) Hamel and Denis Houle, both members of the Nomads chapter. Paradis said this was done on the orders of André (Frisé) Sauvageau, a Rock Machine member who had long been targeted by the Hells Angels. An informant once told the police that Maurice Boucher and Scott Steinert had once chased Sauvageau down a stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway that runs through Montreal. They had to give up the chase after spotting a Sûreté du Québec patrol car.
When Paradis discovered that a tanning salon in Verdun belonged to the man he believed had sold out Jomphe, he decided to not to blow it up but to burn it down.
“It was in a neighborhood that I knew well. There was a lady who lived above it. So I said it should be burned, not blown up. To use a Molotov cocktail,” he said at trial. Briere showed Paradis a photo album that had been seized at Richard (Dick) Mayrand's house. The photo album contained the photos of practically anyone associated with the Alliance. While going over the photos, Paradis noted that some people who gravitated to the Rock Machine were basically flakes who appeared to only be interested in the violence of the war.
“What was the war to you? Why were you involved?” Briere asked.
“That's a good question. But at the beginning . . .”
“What was the goal of being implicated in a war as a [member of the] Rock Machine?”
“What happened was . . . it was more or less like . . . well, how can I explain it? It started by selling to make money. And then we were obliged to protect ourselves. It took several steps. You're protecting yourself, and then you involve yourself more.”
“At the beginning of what you call the war, Mr. Paradis, what territory were you defending?”
“Verdun,” Paradis said, adding that by the time of the arrest that led to him becoming an informant the Rock Machine no longer controlled the turf.
“Who owned it, then?”
“It wasn't us, so it had to be the other side.”
Peter Paradis' younger brother Robert was also a target in the biker war. The two had been close growing up, and Robert followed Peter into the Rock Machine. Someone had made an attempt on Robert's life in 1999 but failed. Remarkably, despite having a brother who turned informant, Robert Paradis was made a full-patch member of the Bandidos biker gang in 2001.
In
2OO2,
he was rounded up, along with several other Bandidos. But he ended up with one of the lighter sentences of the investigation, two years and fours months for conspiracy to traffick and illegal possession of a .45-calibre firearm. He was denied both day and full parole during the spring of 2004 because he remained loyal to the biker gang.
Another witness to give a view from the other side of the war was Patrick Henault. Like Paradis, Henault had become disillusioned with the Bandidos and the people who he'd known previously through the Alliance. In 1998, at the age of 20, Henault was already a member of the Palmers and serving a two-year sentence for drug trafficking and possession of an unregistered
firearm. Once, while he was preparing for a parole hearing, he told a corrections official, “I'll be killed if I'm placed in a halfway house here [in Montreal].” As they continued to deny him parole during his sentence, the National Parole Board commissioners who heard his case noted they were getting reports that Henault seemed very intelligent and was a crafty manipulator.
A drug-sniffing dog became excited when a woman showed up to visit Henault in December 1998. She refused to be searched, which added to the guards' suspicions that Henault was dealing drugs behind bars. A search of his cell turned up contraband tobacco which Henault claimed to have collected for a hockey pool he'd started. He also appeared to be very familiar with firearms, something Henault attributed to being an Air Cadet when he was an adolescent.
Like Paradis, his decision to turn informant came after being arrested. In Henault's case the decision was made in June 2002 after the police arrested practically anyone tied to the Bandidos' Montreal chapter who wasn't already behind bars. The investigation was dubbed “Operation Amigo.”
While awaiting trial, Henault became increasingly worried about how his case was going to play out in the courts. He wanted to get his case over with quickly because the police had videotape evidence of him preparing for a hit on Steven (Bull) Bertrand, Boucher's close friend and a high-volume drug dealer tied to the Hells Angels. Henault decided to turn on the Bandidos. He eventually pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, attempted murder and conspiring to burn down several bars where dealers friendly with the Hells Angels were selling.
Henault signed his informant deal on October 8, 2003, and only a few months later, on January 12, 2004, found himself testifying in the Beliveau trial.
“The fact that I decided to become an informant was because I was fed up with the life I was living. There was pressure from
the co-accused who . . . for me, I wanted to settle things. I was fed up. I wanted to transfer to another prison, do my time and not know anything more of bikers. It wasn't part of my image, and I had the pressure from other co-accused to not plead guilty so it would cause delays in the eventual trial of the Bandidos,” Henault told the jury. He also said he was not impressed with his lawyer, with while other Bandidos were taking on well-known attorneys. Also, seeing other Bandidos defect and join the Hells Angels had left Henault questioning the gang's worthiness. He had had enough of the life of a gangster.
As the Crown had done with other informant witnesses, Briere asked Henault early on in his testimony about how he got involved in drug trafficking.