Biker Trials, The (21 page)

Six days after spotting Nepveu, Sgt. Pierre Boucher of the Sûreté du Québec managed to make his first surreptitious entry into the apartment. According to Despaties, “When we installed the camera and the audio in the apartment, we noticed that people would show up on Tuesdays, mostly on Tuesdays, but also on Thursdays, from 8 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon, and the person who took care of the apartment was a man named Robert Gauthier. He did not live at the address but somewhere else in Montreal.

“Most of the time it would happen like this: people would show up at [apartment] 504, enter inside the apartment and hand over a bag to Mr. Gauthier. After that the clients would leave. What was very particular to Mr. Gauthier in his methods of operation was that after the clients would leave he was very vigilant. He would look through the peephole, he would look out the patio doors. Once the clients had driven away, we would see him leave 504 for a minute or two and return to 504. We realized that there was certainly another apartment that Mr. Gauthier
was going to because he would always leave with the bags.”

“And when he came back?” Tremblay asked.

“His hands were empty,” Despaties said, adding that as they continued their investigation, the police found that Gauthier was traveling down one floor to apartment 403. Inside apartment 504, meanwhile, the television would play all the time. Whenever someone showed up with a bag of money, a radio would be turned up loud. Despaties said they could hear almost no conversations on their wiretaps.

In order to more fully monitor Gauthier, the police got a warrant on October 24 that enabled them to do electronic surveillance inside apartment 403. It turned out to be a sparsely furnished four-and-a-half rooms with a safe inside a bedroom cabinet. A bill for the safe was found in a kitchen cupboard. There were no clothes in the closets and no food in the fridge or cupboards.

“It was just like apartment 504 except that there were a lot of gym bags,” Despaties said. “There were all kinds of them, all kind of brands. They were empty and piled inside a closet.” Another investigator later remarked that the pile of gym bags was stacked about five feet high.

“We noticed that Gauthier was bringing the bags from 504 to 403 and returning to 504 to wait for clients. Except that when Mr. Gauthier would bring the bags to 403, we entered after he left. We had a key and we counted how much money was in the bags and looked at the notes that were inside the bags,” Despaties said. “The smallest amount we found was around $5,000. The biggest was $600,000” Inside the bags, investigators always found little notes with codes on them. Despaties said that as the investigation progressed investigators began to sort out who the drug dealers were behind the codes.

What the police would later learn was that couriers who were bringing the money to the apartment had very specific instructions. Carl Ouellette, a man who was making deliveries for the
Quebec City chapter and one of the people arrested in Project Ocean, would later reveal an important detail the police had not learned during their investigation. Ouellette said that on the days he made deliveries he was instructed to send out a coded message on a pager when he was at least an hour from the apartment building. The message would include what time he wanted to make the delivery. Then he would wait for a coded reply on the pager giving him the green light to make the delivery. Investigators soon noticed that a man they later identified as Stéphane Chagnon would enter apartment 403 and take control of the bags, check the money and then record the amounts on a computer. On October 25, the police entered apartment 403 and made copies of a ledger, a diskette and the hard drive on a laptop computer. Cracking the passwords for the computer files proved absurdly easy as they were all “0000.”

“From the beginning of November 2000 we had a surveillance team outside the building. All of the clients who brought money were filmed. Most of the time, their licence plate and car were filmed at the same time,” Despaties said. Chagnon would transfer the money to another apartment building, 8101 Place Montoire, in Anjou and just a short trip west of the Beaubien Street address. Through their surveillance, police learned he would always head for apartment 309,rented by a 64-year-old woman named Lise Gelinas.

“What was curious in this part of the investigation was that Lise Gelinas was renting apartment 308 on Place Montoir and a Lise Germain Gelinas was renting apartment 309. We found that curious,” said Despaties, who also reported that the police had obtained a warrant and entered apartment 309. “At that location, what we found were money-counting machines, elastic bands, everything needed to count money. Three counting machines if I'm not mistaken and a large safe [with a digital combination]. No sign of life though, and no clothing.”

The police got a warrant to place an audio wire in the apartment. Despaties said that what the police learned next amazed them.

“They were counting [money] every morning. We thought it was a bank. It went from eight in the morning to between 10 or noon. There was counting all the time. We heard nothing but the counting machines.” The police also learned Gelinas was buzzing people in to the apartment building from her residence across the hall from the counting room. They also noticed that Gelinas and Monique Gauthier, a frequent visitor to apartment 309,were often engaged in conversation. It turned out that Monique Gauthier was the one counting the money. It also turned out that she was the ex-wife of Michel Rose, a member of the Nomads chapter. The police would also later learn she was sister of Robert Gauthier, the man running the Beaubien Street apartments for the Hells Angels. Of all the members of the Nomads chapter, it was Rose and André Chouinard who appeared to have clear ties to the banking system. Whenever Larivière would show up at the Beaubien Street apartment, it was often after meeting with Rose.

The apartment across from Gelinas' was not only used to store money but to pay off large-scale suppliers to the Nomads chapter drug network. “For example,” Despaties explained,
“Usine
[French for “factory” and the code name for] a supplier of cocaine. So,
Usine
, when we did copies of their accounting we noticed there was a new client that was on the account sheet. Instead of being a client/buyer he was a client/supplier. We noticed that when people went to Place Montoir and left with boxes, the total of the accounts went down.”

Investigators also noticed that when a man they eventually realized was a courier for the “Usine” account would leave Place Montoir with a box, the account for Usine was always noted as
having been paid around $1.5 million. The account was paid more than $8 million between November 23 and December 15, 2000. Despaties said the police figured the Hells Angels were using two apartment buildings to prevent burns.

“The goal of the investigation was to ...well it evolved from day to day. We noticed that it was always the same people who showed up, always the same clients, the same codes.”

The police soon realized that Chagnon was hiding something in apartment 403. They got a warrant again and found out it was a zip disk. A computer specialist copied the diskette for the police before anyone would notice it was missing. During their surveillance investigators noticed the man they would later realize was the accountant, Richard Gemme, was interacting with Chagnon. Both were childhood friends of André Chouinard.

“Chagnon appeared to be having trouble with his accounting and the diskette. We noticed that Gemme seemed to be more at ease in accounting.”

The police eventually seized two documents. One seemed to break down accounting by chapters. They also found a note that appeared to be orders to move to new apartments. They heard this order in their surveillance on bugged rooms as well. After doing what the police referred to as “sneak entries” into the apartments on Beaubien Street several times, the police had begun to pick up on the patterns of the accounting. Investigators were becoming so familiar with the system they weren't caught off guard when the Nomads chapter ordered that their accounting lists be broken down by chapters, instead of by individual Hells Angels. The first column was the Quebec City chapter. The second, dubbed “Granche,” was the Montreal chapter and the one labeled “Top” was the Nomads. The accounting program also listed bad accounts and an inventory of what drugs they had in stock and in what amounts. The red column covered what they owed their suppliers.

Despaties said that, most of the time, the accounting was very accurate. There was only a small margin of error between what was brought in and what was accounted for. The police copied Chagnon's zip disk about three times. The last time was on December 19, 2000. What they learned was that the accounting on the computer disc closely resembled the documents Kane had supplied them months earlier, except for the point in November when the Nomads chapter asked it be broken down by chapter. The investigators also realized that Kane had heard right when he was told by David (Wolf) Carroll, a founding member of the Nomads chapter, that each member of the chapter was being paid a fixed salary of about $5,000 a week from the Nomads Bank. While they monitored the apartments, the police noticed that Larivière appeared to deliver money to members of the Nomads chapter in shopping bags, always on Tuesdays and almost always $40,000 in hundred dollar bills.

The accounting software even included detailed breakdowns on large quantities of drugs the Hells Angels had purchased. For example, 50 kilos of cocaine would be broken down by the price they had paid and the profit the Nomads chapter had made off it. When the entire quantity was sold, the profit would be transferred over to the general accounting sheet. Other details included the fact that Stéphane Faucher, who was once a prospect in the Nomads chapter, was not allowed to buy drugs from the network. What the police would later find out was that Faucher had done something to embarrass the gang which had caused Denis Houle, a longtime member of the gang, to advise the others that he was not Hells Angels' material. After his arrest, Faucher would become a Crown witness, supplying prosecutors with additional information to help bolster their case. But when it was his turn to testify in court, he backed out.

Another fact that caught the eyes of investigators examining the accounting system was that the Nomads chapter was charging
independent drug dealers the same price for cocaine as they were members of other Hells Angels' chapters. The Nomads were cutthroat business men who wouldn't even give fellow Hells Angels a discount.

It was a cold, businesslike attitude the Nomads chapter took toward their drug empire. December 12, 2000, was the day the account in Louis (Melou) Roy's name was terminated. The account was code-named “Jenny” and tens of thousands of dollars were still in it, even though Roy, a founding member of the Nomads chapter, had disappeared sometime in June. His body had yet to be found but investigators believed he had been purged from the gang. His disappearance coincided with negotiations the Hells Angels were having with the Mafia over what price a kilo of cocaine could be sold for in Montreal. Within days of Roy's disappearance, the police found his luxury car parked on a downtown Montreal street covered in parking tickets. No one outside of the gang could say for sure whether Roy had been killed. But now the police noticed, through the copied accounting computer disk that his drug money was being distributed to members of the Trois Rivières chapter, the one where Roy had started his career as a Hells Angel.

The police monitoring the accounting also noticed the Trois Rivières chapter had purchased, in a six-month period between July 5, 2000, and December 19, 2000,164 kilos of cocaine along with 105 kilos of hashish from the Nomads chapter. The Nomads chapter's reach extended even to Quebec City.

“The goal of the case, among other things, was to identify the client accounts. There were many who we were able to identify,” officer Despaties said, adding investigators were able to identify about ten full-patch Hells Angels who showed up to deliver money. “I just want to say to the court that they did not show up wearing their Hells Angels' colors. During the years we've investigated them we've got to know some well,” he said.

But most of the couriers were people the police did not recognize. Dominic Tremblay, the man whose bail hearing Despaties was testifying in, was monitored as he made frequent trips to Montreal for the Trois Rivières chapter. The first time he was seen was on November 2, 2000, at the building on Beaubien Street. He brought $40,000 to the apartment building. Three weeks later, on November 23, 2000, he brought more than $200,000.On November 30, he brought $53,655;on December 5, he brought $125,545;on December 7, he brought $22,445. Then, on December 14, 2000, Tremblay was recorded bringing a bag to Gauthier that contained $253,335.

“Concerning the proof in your investigation, it ended on what date?” Tremblay, the prosecutor, asked.

“You could say the first phase ended on January 30, 2001.We executed three search warrants that night.”

On December 11, 2000, they overheard tenant Lise Gelinas telling her sister she could no longer deal with the stress of guarding millions of the Hells Angels' money. During one conversation, Gelinas indicated that the banking system had been in place for four years. Other wiretaps suggested the couriers and the people accepting the money had known each other for as many as six years. Soon after Gelinas talked of quitting, she got her wish — investigators noticed the banking system had changed. The counting machines were moved from the apartment across from Gelinas's to apartment 403 back on Beaubien Street. Robert Gauthier was there regularly now, so it became harder for the police to enter the room surreptitiously.

“We decided that January 30 was a good day to hit those apartments, because we saw money going in but it didn't go out,” Despaties said. In apartment 403, the police found $800,000 in a safe. In apartment 504, they didn't find money but they found documentation, the coded amounts each courier had left with the money. These papers were hidden everywhere,
in the fridge and in cupboards.