Biker Trials, The (41 page)

In the hours before De Serres was killed, Boutin and Barriault met at a McDonald's. They had told De Serres to meet them there. As they waited for him to show up Boutin noticed something out of the ordinary.

“I saw two suspect cars that I was persuaded were police cars. At that point I turned to Barriault and I said, 'We're going to arrive at this meeting and there is all this surveillance.' He said, 'No, no, no. Maybe you're not used to these murder jobs. Maybe you're nervous. There's no problem. All is well.' So I thought, 'Okay, maybe I'm paranoid.' Maybe it was the adrenaline. I had
felt the adrenaline before but in drug deals it is different.”

Boutin should not have been so dismissive about the cars. In fact, there was a surveillance team following De Serres that day. De Serres met up with Boutin and Barriault at the restaurant. To make sure he wouldn't worry, De Serres was told he could follow the pair in his car for the trip up north. The surveillance team followed the cars but soon lost track of their informant as he headed up north with Boutin and Barriault. When they got to a point where it would be difficult for De Serres to turn back, Barriault motioned for him to pull over.

“Mr. Barriault said, 'Leave your car there,' in Lanoraie. When De Serres got out, I told him to leave his pager and cellular in his car,” Boutin said. With De Serres in the car, Barriault made sure they weren't being followed by driving the wrong way down oneway streets and using other maneuvers. Boutin said that when they arrived at the chalet, there was snow everywhere. He noticed two trucks parked nearby and knew someone was lying in wait inside the chalet. The trio trudged through the snow toward the chalet with Barriault in front of De Serres and Boutin in back.

Boutin testified that as far as he knew De Serres had no idea what was about to happen to him. Barriault and De Serres opened the door. It led to the chalet's basement. Boutin said that as he walked down the stairs he realized De Serres was already on the ground and that someone had a revolver pointed at him. “Our job was to bring him there. So we left,” Boutin said.

As the pair drove back south, Barriault seemed agitated and complained about how slow Boutin was driving. After leaving Barriault off, Boutin headed for his home in a small rural village near Montreal. By now, the cops had realized their informant had disappeared and their only reference point was that he had had a meeting with Boutin earlier that day.

Boutin said that by the time he got home he realized that he was being followed by the police. It looked like one of the cops
tailing him was very nervous. He said he realized at that point that something was seriously wrong. When he stepped inside his house, he started to consider the huge mistake he had made. When he looked out a window, he could see what he believed were police cars parked on a road a short distance from his house. The morning after De Serres was killed, Boutin noticed an Intrepid was following him wherever he went. If it was the police, they didn't seem to care that Boutin knew they were there. At one point, Boutin slowed his car to well below the speed limit and the Intrepid did the same. That was enough to convince Boutin he was in serious trouble and the message he was getting was that the police were going to pick him up eventually.

Despite knowing that De Serres had been working for the police, the Hells Angels who shot him execution style did not search his body afterward. A truck driver spotted the body on February 4, 2000, lying on top of a snowbank on the side of Highway 125 in Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci, a town well north of Montreal. A bag had been placed over his head and his feet were bound. But most important the police found that De Serres' body-pack, a tape recorder and transmitter, were still taped to his back.

A little over a week later, the television network
TQS
broke the story about how De Serres had been an informant for the Wolverine squad. A news team had spotted the body-pack on De Serres' body when the police were examining him on the snowbank. Boutin was at a restaurant when Faucher told him the news.

“Robitaille whispered into my ear that it was all a pack of lies, that if it was the truth everyone would have been arrested by now,” Boutin said.

When the story aired, the anti-biker gang squad was sent scrambling and had to make arrests sooner than they had planned. Stéphane Sirois, a valued informant who had infiltrated the
Rockers, had to be pulled out of service. Boutin and Barriault were rounded up quickly — at that point, they were the only leads the police had. In his testimony in court, Crown prosecutor Madeleine Giauque wanted Boutin to touch on how he had become an informant. “Why did you make this decision?” she asked.

“I had been in prison for about 15 months. I never thought I would be an informant. That was the last place I wanted to go. But within the space of two days, it all exploded. First my wife ... I have ten children and she was totally depressed knowing I would spend up to 25 years in prison. The best friend I ever had in my life was Mr. Robitaille and he was the same. I don't know if he saw me as a danger, that I'd one day end up here, but he was paranoid.”

Meanwhile, the people handling the prosecution of the bikers rounded up in Operation Springtime 2001 were disclosing their evidence to the defense. Boutin learned that Faucher had turned informant. The drug dealer who had helped Boutin form the Scorpions was now providing incriminating evidence against him. Boutin said he asked to have his murder trial dealt with right away, before more people decided to turn informant, including people who might have been involved in De Serres' death.

Boutin said he had been waiting 15 months for his preliminary hearing in the murder case and now his defense lawyer was telling him the Hells Angels were thinking of holding it off another 15 to see what the police were going to do with Charlebois regarding his role in the informant's murder.

“It all exploded,” Boutin said. “I was risking 25 years for a murder that, in my book . . . it was not me who had decided to kill that person. Yes, in the sense of the law, I am as guilty as anyone.” At this point, Justice Pierre Beliveau confirmed to the jury that, if his story was true, Boutin could have been found guilty of first-degree murder even though he only brought De Serres to the chalet.

Boutin said he wasn't sure who was paying for his lawyer's bills but Robitaille had been taking care of him in prison before he himself was arrested. Charlebois had been doing the same for Barriault.

To Boutin, the situation seemed to solve itself. He was pushed into a corner and the only logical way out was to turn informant and let the police know everything he had done in the biker war.

Prosecutor Giauque asked Boutin if the biker war was an ongoing thing, whether the Hells Angels were consistently fighting for territory. Boutin said he was made aware of the truce the Hells Angels had negotiated during the fall of 2000 while he was in jail. But he soon realized that it did not last long. Maurice (Mom) Boucher held two meetings during that autumn with leaders of the Rock Machine. The truce was negotiated, but the Rock Machine would later learn this was done primarily so the Hells Angels could put an offer on the table for their members to join them. The offer was a full-patch member of the Rock Machine could defect and have the same status in the Hells Angels. Even prospects were made similar offers.

Giauque then asked if the biker war had carried into Quebec's prisons.

“In no matter what prison in Quebec, even if you don't have anything to do with the bikers ...Take for example at Rivière-des-Prairies. It doesn't matter who you are, they [correction officers] take you to a counter and ask you what side you are on, Hells Angels or Rock Machine. Even if you stole a bicycle. For your security, they ask you to choose a Hells Angels' wing or a Rock Machine wing,” he said.

Regarding the truce, Giauque asked how it changed things in prison. Boutin said it was Faucher and Robitaille who informed him that a truce was coming. “I was the person with the highest
rank in the Hells Angels in prison, or in Rivière-des-Prairies,” Boutin said in reference to the detention center where he was held at the time.

“So I asked for the thoughts of my superiors, Mr. Charlebois and Normand Robitaille, what I should do if I met one. They sent me the message.”

“By who?”

“By the defense lawyers. [They said] there are individuals, there were six, but there were four that they were sure would be on our side. They said I should take the steps with the authorities in prison so that they be transferred to [the Hells Angels] sector. I took the steps,” Boutin said, adding he went to the vice-warden to tell him about the defections. “I said, 'Listen there are four guys known on the Rock Machine side who should come to my wing.' He laughed and said that I was crazy and that he wouldn't do it.”

Boutin insisted, so the vice-warden called meetings with other prison staff at Rivière-des-Prairies. Boutin said the Montreal Regional Integrated Squad was called to verify if this could be true. The vice-warden told Boutin that he had a hard time believing what he was hearing and that he was concerned that even if it were true, there would be dire consequences if the truce suddenly ended. Boutin said he told the vice-warden to consider what would happen if he didn't make the transfers and the four men ended up killed in the Rock Machine wing.

“He was stuck in the middle,” Boutin said.

Within hours a decision was made to transfer the four to the Hells Angels' sector but not the same wing as Boutin. The four men were Éric (Beluga) Leclerc, Jimmy Larivée, Gaetan Coe and Stéphane Veilleux. Because they were not yet full-patch members of the Rock Machine, they were made prospects in the Hells Angels. Meanwhile, outside prison, Salvatore Brunnetti and Nelson Fernandez, two influential members of the Alliance, were made
instant members of the Hells Angels' Nomads chapter.

Another former member of the Rock Machine to cross over was Stéphane Trudel, a man suspected of being behind several of the biker war's murders in Montreal and Laval early on in the conflict. He was considered an expert in explosives. But he had spent most of the biker war behind bars serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for an attempted murder, passing his time in incarceration serving as vice-president of the inmates committee. He was also suspected of selling drugs in his penitentiary in 1998, and, at around the same time, Trudel lost his status as a full-fledged member of the Rock Machine. Because of this, when he crossed over to the Hells Angels it was only as a prospect. He later moved on to an Ontario chapter and in 2004 was wanted on an arrest warrant alleging he was part of a stolen car ring along with Paul Porter.

Following Trudel to the Ontario-based gang was Daniel Leclerc, the former right-hand man of a full-patch Rock Machine member named Peter Paradis. Leclerc joined the Hells Angels while still awaiting the outcome of the first gangsterism trial in Quebec. While trying for parole on his two years and nine months sentence, Leclerc denied joining the Hells Angels, but police intelligence said otherwise, as did the group photos found in his cell of Leclerc with 13 other Hells Angels.

The police had listened in when Boutin was informed that he was expected to handle the transfer of people who had chosen to defect. They had wiretapped Stéphane Faucher's home in Longueuil. It sounded like any ordinary conversation at first. A baby could be heard crying in the background. Boutin was calling from his detention center and Faucher asked him if he had some paper to write the names down. Boutin asked if that was really necessary and Faucher insisted.

The gang members who had defected were still on trial in a Rock Machine-related case at that point and Faucher and Boutin
saw little hope of their being acquitted. Faucher said the transfer had to be done before they were convicted because after that then things might get very confusing. Boutin's huge ego was evident during the conversation. He said had he already spoken to a prison official and was initially told there was a “1 in 10,000” chance of the transfers taking place. “Me, here, I have the power to talk to the assistant-director of the prison,” Boutin said in the recorded conversation.

“Okay,” Faucher replied.

“When trouble happens here, it's me that they come see.”

The police also learned that Boutin in particular did not think much of the guys he was being asked to help transfer. He described Jimmy Larivée as being a
“tête folle”
meaning crazy, and that some of the defectors were “not the cream” of the Rock Machine. “The Rock Machine [guys] were a lot more weak than us in prison,” Boutin said during his testimony.

Before Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out, Boutin's business was being maintained by Stéphane Faucher and Paul Cossette, a former member of the Scorpions and by then a striker in the Rockers. Boutin said he was receiving money from Faucher and Cossette. Part of that money, he said, was being paid back to the Rockers, whose members were all paying money into a fund for a new bunker. This was on top of their usual ten percent.

During the trial, Giauque asked that excerpts from a videotape the police secretly made of a meeting the Rockers held on December 16,1999, be played for the jury. The video captured the Rockers discussing a problem in very vague terms. After watching the tape Boutin explained it was in reference to a meeting he had been summoned to in the South Shore. They were discussing a hit ordered on Michel Bertrand, a founding member of the Palmers, one of the gangs that was part of the Alliance. Bertrand
had a big axe to grind, considering the Hells Angels had murdered his twin brother Daniel early on in the biker war. Stéphane Faucher had ordered the hit on Michel Bertrand, Boutin said, but it didn't go very well.