Biker Trials, The (44 page)

As she began to answer, some of the lawyers on the defense team who understood Spanish shouted and leaped out of their seats. Beliveau was forced to excuse the jury again and argued with the lawyers about the effect the blunder might have had. Antelo's answer had not been translated into French yet, but the defense lawyers argued that some members of the jury likely understood Spanish. Beliveau told Antelo again to not speak of her husband's murder. He then recalled the jury and instructed them to ignore any references to Craig's death.

“In 1993, my husband was outside of the country. After the attempted murder, he went to Colombia for two years. He stayed in Colombia until 1996. He returned in March or February, 1996,” Antelo continued. She said that when he returned the couple agreed to separate but did not get a divorce. “During this period, we did not work together. That is the reason I sought out Michel Rose,” Antelo said.

Antelo ended the day's testimony on that note. She was brought back the following morning and a new translator was brought in. A defense lawyer asked Antelo about her deal with the U.S. authorities. He asked her how she had managed to reach a deal that saw her do no time in jail. Antelo advised the judge that her answer might touch on what she was ordered not to say before the jury. Beliveau excused the jury and asked what she would say. “It was for my security,” Antelo said. She made it clear that Craig's murder convinced her to see the
DEA.

“They were saying that they wanted to end things with me. The reason why I brought myself to the North American authorities, is one that you didn't want to hear. So you should not ask the question,” Antelo told defense lawyer Roy. She mentioned that she had learned the Hells Angels were looking for her, and Guy Lepage's name was mentioned in particular.

The cross-examination continued with one defense lawyer making the mistake of trying to suggest the Colombians would have wanted her dead. He asked about the $2.5 million that had been seized during the summer of 1999 from Sylvain Roy in Miami. All the question accomplished was to reveal that the Hells Angels had other issues with Antelo. She said the money belonged to her, Rose and Chouinard. It was supposed to be used to pay the Colombians. She was asked who had to absorb such heavy losses.

“It was a discussion that went down to the last minute with André, Mom Boucher and Michel Rose. We were supposed to assume the losses together,” she said. “There was no agreement among the people who represented the Hells Angels. There was an agreement among the Colombians, that they would assume half the debt. . . .TheColombians whom I was dealing with were not debutantes in this business. The Colombians who work in large scales like them, they are not used to it, but they know that these losses arrive often.”

The defense was having little luck creating other potential enemies for Antelo, so they switched gears and attacked her credibility. They got her to discuss how she was renting a luxury home in Hampstead, a toney suburb of Montreal, while she and her husband were separated. The defence also got her to reveal that she and Craig had lived in a spacious house in Candiac, a South Shore suburb, during most of their marriage, bought on the proceeds of their drug dealing. When Craig was killed, Antelo owned the house and she was able to sell it for $280,000, which was expensive in Candiac.

Defense lawyer Guy Quirion then attacked Antelo on her qualities as a mother. He brought out a surveillance photo. It showed her coming out of a lunch meeting with a drug dealer, her young children at her side. Quirion asked if those were indeed her children. Antelo began to break up. She questioned Quirion's ethics and suggested he was putting her children's lives in danger by showing the photo to the courtroom. Quirion didn't even wait for the translation of what she said — he seemed to understand her Spanish.

“You don't think you put your children's lives in danger by getting them mixed up in your drug dealing?” he asked. Antelo didn't answer.

Pierre Panaccio was the next to ask questions. He queried Sandra Antelo on her legitimate import businesses. She said that, for the most part, she imported furniture into Canada from Korea. Panaccio asked if she ever filed income reports on these companies. She said she believed her husband did file tax returns. Panaccio then asked if Antelo had other kids from another father. Prosecutor Giauque quickly protested that the question was irrelevant. But Beliveau allowed it. Antelo responded that she had children who were between 20 and 30 years old. Panaccio touched a nerve when he asked Antelo how she explained her income to her adult children.

“For that reason, I had several companies to make a screen for my children. My children are now professionals who have graduated from McGill and Concordia. They are not out on the street. They are not criminals. They grew up in a family atmosphere with respect and education. Despite the fact that my husband and I took part in another business, my children were raised through a different system. My children grew up outside of what we were doing,” Antelo said. Panaccio asked if that meant she was living a lie when it came to her children.

“What I want to know, sir, is if you explain to your children
that you defend criminals. That is your work, no?” Antelo said in a cold tone.

Panaccio understood the question before it was translated into French and did not want the jury to hear it. He exploded. Beliveau allowed the jury to hear what Antelo had said, but did not seem pleased when he heard the translation. He reminded the jury that being a defense lawyer was honorable work.

As things slowly sorted out in Operation Springtime
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and preparations were made to bring gang members to trial, the prosecution realized they had a unique situation on their hands. Through informants, they could not only provide a detailed image of what life in the Hells Angels' drug network was like, but they could also show the flip side of the coin — what it was like to be hunted by the Hells Angels. For example, long before the Hells Angels in question were arrested, Peter Paradis, a full-patch member of the Rock Machine had turned on his own underlings and testified against them in a drug trafficking case. Just weeks before Operation Springtime
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was carried out, four of Paradis' former associates were dinged with some of the first sentences rendered under the antigang legislation the federal government had adopted in 1997. People who had helped move cocaine for Paradis were sentenced to 45 months, and saw an additional 45 tacked on because they did it to support the Rock Machine. During that trial, Paradis was asked to testify about life in the Rock Machine and how the gang profited from drug trafficking. Now he was being asked to focus on what life was like looking over his shoulder, knowing he was the Rock Machine's principal man in Verdun, turf the Hells Angels wanted as theirs.

Technically, at 12 years, Paradis' sentence was much stiffer
than the people in the Rock Machine he had turned on. But by the time he sat in the witness box at the trial overseen by Jean-Guy Boilard, on July 10, 2002, he had already been out on parole for several weeks. He had benefited from a condition that stipulated he serve his time in a provincial prison, which meant he wasn't subject to federal sentencing laws. He was out after serving roughly one-sixth of his sentence.

“I was a full-fledged member of the Rock Machine,” Paradis said when Crown prosecutor François Briere asked him about his role in the biker war. “During the period that I was a full-fledged member, the Rock Machine was in a transition. . . . Several people affiliated together were not in a bike club until the end of 1999. We become an official club of a biker gang, hang-arounds in the Bandidos. It's an international club.” Paradis went on to detail how he had joined the Rock Machine in 1994.Before that, he had spent the better part of the previous decade dealing cocaine as an independent, concentrating mostly on Verdun.

“In practical terms, as an independent drug dealer, what does that mean?” Briere asked.

“It's someone who is not obliged to anyone. He can work in an organization but . . . it's difficult to explain. Independent means you don't belong to anyone. You have the right to buy from where you want, you can take from where you want.” Paradis described his drug dealing in Verdun as being relatively uneventful up until 1994. He had grown up in Verdun and many of the independent drug dealers in the area respected each other's turf.

“Can you tell us under what circumstances, Mr. Paradis, in 1994, you left your status as an independent and joined the organization, the Rock Machine?” Briere asked.

“I saw an occasion to get a business, near the end of 1993.I was concerned because my business had fallen. I had left Verdun because business had turned quiet. I no longer had interest in doing business seriously.” So, at a time when his future as a drug
dealer was looking bleak, Paradis was invited to a meeting in a boutique. There he met Renaud Jomphe, a man who would play a significant role in the Rock Machine. Jomphe gave Paradis his phone number and told him he had a proposition for him. It would be an offer to let Paradis move large amounts of cocaine for Jomphe and the Rock Machine.

After years of struggling to make it in Verdun, Paradis saw Jomphe's offer as a way to start making serious money. “It gave me a chance to put myself on the map. I was tired of living like I was. Evidently Renaud was a guy who made a lot of money, with the type of life he had, and Ti-Bum [Pierre Beauchamp] as well, evidently. I said, why not me?”

Paradis' first assignment was to develop a network of clients or small-time dealers who would regularly buy cocaine from him. The issue of loyalty would become more important as the rival gang, the Rockers, made it apparent they were interested in moving into Verdun, even before the biker war started. Paradis said that in 1993 a client of his asked if he had heard that independents were becoming a thing of the past. He said the client suggested Paradis meet Patrick Lock, who was then the president of the Rockers. Paradis said he realized right away he didn't want anything to do with Lock.

“Did you speak to this guy, Pat?”

“The only thing he said to me, after I told him I didn't want to hear anything, was 'you're no longer independent. You have 24 hours to answer me.' I said I could do better than that, that I could answer him right away and I told him to leave. I closed the door and that was the end of that.”

Lock, the son of Mom Boucher's friend Richard (Sugar) Lock, would end up spending most of the biker war sitting on the benches. In 1995, he was exposed by Jean Dubé, a man who turned informant after he was arrested in a plot to kill someone on Lock's orders. Lock was enraged after the police had been
tipped off to a stash of drugs, explosives and weapons on 25th Ave. Lock wasn't arrested right away. He wanted a man named Marcel Picard dead because he figured he was the rat, when, in fact, it was Dubé who was operating as a tipster for the police.

Lock was arrested and sentenced to more than five years in prison. While behind bars, he dealt drugs and collected on debts for other dealers while remaining loyal to the Rockers. The National Parole had to release him in 2000 because he had reached the two-thirds mark of his sentence, his statutory release date. But Lock was arrested only months later for breaking the conditions of the release.

He had been spotted at a bar, giving instructions to other men. As he left the bar, he realized he was being followed by the police and pointed an object that appeared to be a gun at them. When the police searched his car, they didn't find a gun but did find the business cards of several Rockers, an indication that Lock was back in business. His parole was officially revoked in March 2001, just as his fellow Rockers were being rounded up. However, the parole board was required to release him again the following October.

Lock's confrontation with Paradis and the fact that he was storing weapons in Lasalle, a Montreal suburb near Verdun, suggested Boucher and the Hells Angels were very interested in expanding to areas west of the Hochelaga Maisonneuve district, even before the war started. By recruiting people like Paradis, the Rock Machine were attempting to stem that expansion.

“It was Renaud [Jomphe] who got us started,” said Paradis. “We started, I think, with a little ounce of coke. Slowly, within about a month it turned into a quarter pound. That is 112 grams of coke. But while the business grew, that meant that the word got out fast, too. Ear-to-mouth goes very, very fast especially on the streets. At the same time, I was doing propaganda for the Rock Machine, because I was doing work for them.”

Paradis said Jomphe was making $100 on every ounce the Rock Machine moved for him. Paradis soon started to see the benefits of working for a large organization. Within months of being in the Rock Machine he was trusted to handle larger quantities of cocaine.

“We had gotten to about a pound, and I didn't want to drive around with a pound of coke in my car.”

“Why?”

“I didn't want to get arrested with it.”

Paradis said Rock Machine members would drive around almost exclusively in sport-utility vehicles because they had bigger consoles, which they would have customized so they could hide their drugs inside. These custom jobs were sophisticated to the point of being entirely electronic and requiring a code to open. For example, opening the console on Paradis' vehicle required that it be in neutral and that one fiddle with buttons on the heater. The gang also hid large quantities of drugs in the houses of people they knew who did not have criminal records. Paradis started with a woman who worked in a local hospital. The gang also set about taking control of places like Verdun in the same way the Rockers were doing for the Hells Angels in Hochelaga Maisonneuve.

“It progressed slowly. Sometimes, for example, the Rock Machine, we'd make the tour of bars to demonstrate that 'it's us who now sell here.' But the other side was doing the same thing,” Paradis said.