Moreau had served a three-year sentence in the late 1990s for drug trafficking and possession of a weapon. He admitted only to agreeing to store drugs for a dealer at his house for $500 a month. He said he had agreed to do so to support his three children and because he had serious drug debts to pay.
Moreau did not have the record of a hardened criminal. He had spent most of his adult life trying to pull off ill-fated schemes like passing off bogus cheques at grocery stores. He got caught frequently. In 1993 alone, he pleaded guilty to one count of breaking and entering, 21 counts of fraud, 3 counts of conspiracy, 2 counts of being in possession of the proceeds of crime and 21 counts of forgery. During the autumn months of 1987, Moreau went on an equally remarkable crime spree, breaking into 27 houses in small towns near Joliette within the space of roughly two months. He would sometimes do five houses in one night, stealing things like jewelry, firearms, microwaves, radios and any cash he could get his hands on, including $10 in rolled up quarters. He pleaded guilty to most of the break-ins and was sentenced to an 18-month prison term and two years probation.
He spent all of 1997 behind bars working as a debt collector for Hells Angels who were selling drugs inside his penitentiary. The parole board was not impressed with his association with the gang and decided not to grant Moreau day parole during the
summer of 1997 though he had to be let go on statutory release by November 1998. The main condition of his release was that he not associate with known criminals, but Moreau obviously ignored this. He was seen doing guard duty outside a Rockers meeting, and was made a full-patch member of the gang on August 24, 1999. Still he was never arrested for the parole violation.
But Moreau was often at odds with his fellow Rockers. He seemed to have a temper that let his tongue fly. Normand Robitaille, a member of the Nomads chapter, once had to tell Moreau to shut his mouth at a meeting where the Rockers were discussing a botched hit. Moreau was one of the very few Rockers ever recorded talking openly about criminal activity while the police secretly videotaped the gang's meetings. One moment in particular revealed his thoughts on the Rockers and what the patch meant to him. During a discussion concerning plans to split up the gang into two territories in Montreal, maintaining their presence in the city's east end but also making them visible in the west end, he said, “It is then that [the police] will realize the Rockers are really imposing. Because actually they know about the Rockers but they don't know how many and where.”
In Ancaster, Ontario, police arrested Donald Stockford, a longtime member of the Hells Angels and a founding member of the Nomads chapter. Inside his home they found tons of clothing bearing the Hells Angels' Death Head logo. Included among that was a T-shirt printed with a photo of the
CN
tower with the name Hells Angels Ontario, the gang's logo and the words “the first wave.” The police also seized more than $32,000 in American and Canadian bills, and found Stockford's will, which stated that in the event of his death the Hells Angels would take care of his funeral services.
The police had always suspected Stockford played an important
role for the Hells Angels in Ontario, and on December 12, 2000, those suspicions were confirmed. Through a wiretap, the police listened in on a conversation between Dick Mayrand and Stockford. It would become apparent that what they had been talking about that day was the patchover of the smaller gangs in Ontario at the Sorel bunker due to occur a few weeks later. The conversation indicated it was Stockford who had the kind of clout in Ontario the Hells Angels needed to sell their idea to members of gangs like the Satan's Choice. Mayrand had just finished taking a boxing lesson when Stockford called him up.
“And?” Mayrand asked.
“Very, very, very positive,” Stockford replied.
“Nah,” said Mayrand, apparently unable to believe that the patchover he was partly in charge of was going so smoothly. Setting up a chapter in a new province required a vote involving all the other Canadian chapters.
“Yeah.”
“Nah.”
“Everyone.”
“Nah.”
“Very, very, very positive. Yeah.”
Mayrand couldn't believe what he was hearing. Stockford then told him that the people he had met with were in meetings that very day, discussing the Hells Angels' proposal. The conversation switched to how many new Hells Angels' patches they would need to welcome in their new associates.
“You might need to up the order,” Stockford said.
“It's, it's done,” Mayrand replied.
“Okay.”
“I ordered a hundred sets.”
“You might need another hundred,” said Stockford, laughing.
A longtime member of the Hells Angels and also a founding member of the Nomads chapter, Stadnick was in Jamaica at the time the police operation was carried out. He was arrested at a resort hotel more than a week later and was eventually brought back to Montreal, where he would insist on being tried in English along with Stockford. Except for Maurice (Mom) Boucher, no one in the Nomads chapter was considered by police to have more influence than Stadnick. By all appearances, he was in charge of expanding the Hells Angels into provinces like Manitoba. In 1995, informer Dany Kane told the
RCMP
that Stadnick was working to establish a drug pipeline that ran between Thunder Bay and Winnipeg. Stadnick had been seen traveling to Winnipeg pretty frequently during the biker war, and, as Stéphane Sirois, a former Rocker turned undercover agent would later testify, Stadnick was sent to the city in 1996 to attempt to set up a Rockers chapter there.
Stadnick already had drug dealers working for him in Winnipeg and the thinking was that the Rockers should set up shop there officially. Four years later, in 1999, the Hells Angels chose instead to patchover an established gang called Los Bravos. On July 21,2000, the police watched as Stadnick arrived at the Los Bravos hangout in Winnipeg with a big, white bag. Several biker members also headed inside. When they came out, the Los Bravos members were sporting leather jackets with patches on their backs that made it clear they were now prospects in the Hells Angels. The next day, Stadnick was seen partying at a Winnipeg strip bar with members of the Satan's Choice from Ontario.
Inside his house, the police found something they figured could be used as evidence of gangsterism against Stadnick. Ironically, it came in the form of a Valentine from his ten-year-old niece who wrote to her Uncle Wally, “Are you still the leader of the Hells Angels?” and suggested Stadnick was spending way
too much time in Quebec. She added, “I hope you can move the club to Canada and out of Quebec.” Above a phone in his house was a sticker that read, “Be careful what you say over this phone”.
Despite being part of the Nomads chapter based in Montreal, Ontario was home to Stadnick. He initially was a member of a Hamilton-based gang called the Red Devils until he became a prospect in the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter in 1985. Roughly a decade later, he was a founding member of the Nomads chapter.
By comparison to other members of the gang, Alain Dubois' role in the Hells Angels' drug network appeared insignificant. But he faced many of the same charges Stadnick did in Operation Springtime 2001.
Very few people had ever been granted the status of full-patch Rocker in the way Dubois had. It was a testament to his abilities as a drug dealer in the western sections of Montreal which the Hells Angels were intent on conquering. The Nomads chapter imposed Dubois' instant membership on the Rockers on August 24,1999. He, along with Pierre Laurin, Stéphane Jarry and Gaetan Matte, were welcomed into the gang at a Verdun pizza restaurant that day. But Dubois did not take well to being a Rocker. On top of running his business he was expected to be at the beck and call of his superiors in the Nomads chapter. Dubois had come to the gang with pedigree in Montreal's drug trafficking world. He was the son of Jean-Guy Dubois, a man who was part of a gang of brothers who once controlled several rackets like loan-sharking and prostitution in Montreal's west end.
When the police came knocking at Alain Dubois' home in Chateauguay, he was home. He was handcuffed and taken away while his wife prepared their children for school. Learning that he was being charged along with the Hells Angels must have come as somewhat of a surprise to Dubois since he had quit the
Rockers several months before. But he still had some of their paraphernalia lying around. There were T-shirts with phrases like “Support 81,” the Hells Angels' code for
HA
, using numbers that match the letters' alphabetical order. Hidden in a bag in Dubois' garage was a Ceska pistol and a revolver. The police also seized a bulletproof vest and a canister of pepper spray.
Dubois had managed to quit the gang “in good standing” after only eight months in April 2000, but now he was charged with being a participant in their war. Dubois' father's gang was already known for being involved in smuggling large quantities of hashish. Ironically, Jean-Guy Dubois and his brothers had already fought a similar war for control of Montreal's west end in the 1970s. Jean-Guy Dubois would spend many years behind bars while his son Alain grew up and followed in his footsteps. That Alain would end up doing things like guard duty while members of the Nomads chapter worked out in a gym, appeared to be insulting.
During one particular Rockers
“messe”
or Mass, as the Rockers and Hells Angels in Quebec referred to their monthly meetings, Dubois let his frustrations show. The police were secretly videotaping the meeting on October 12,1999. After the meeting ended, Dubois stayed behind to discuss a marijuana deal. As the videotape recorded everything, Pierre Provencher, a leader in the Rockers, informed Dubois and Matte that they would have to start taking over new territory for the gang while one of its members was in prison. During the conversation Dubois lost his cool and said that in the future he wanted everything laid out more clearly. He then stated that when he joined the gang he was promised Chateauguay, the city where he lived, as his private turf. Now, he said, Provencher was telling him someone from the Jokers, a Hells Angels' puppet gang, was thinking of moving in.
“I have all of that, Chateauguay,” Dubois said in his deep
voice. It was one of the few times the Rockers were recorded discussing business in such an obvious way.
He was displaying the same temper that had sometimes compromised him during his earlier years as a criminal. On December 28,1984, he and a cousin robbed a Canadian Tire store in Lasalle, a Montreal suburb. The crime was a relatively minor one and Dubois ended up only receiving a sentence of two years' probation. But, because of his temper, he also managed to get some prison time out of it. While his cousin was on trial for the robbery, Dubois had shown up for a pretrial hearing and listened to a police officer testify. During a break in the hearing, on March 27, 1985, he walked up to the investigator in the courthouse corridor and made a veiled threat, saying, “You're doing okay with the police, be careful of that.” He later made a more overt threat to the same investigator, saying, “inside [the courthouse] everything is okay. Outside it is not the same.”
Later that same year, on June 12, he approached the same investigator at the courthouse, again during a break in the court case. The investigator was using a public phone when Dubois grabbed it out of his hand and said: “You're a liar. You swore on the bible. It's not even true. You're too often with the police. Watch yourself. The world is small and we might meet one day on a sidewalk.” So, while he only received a probationary sentence in the robbery, Dubois was also ordered to serve 90 days in a provincial detention center because of his inability to control himself at the courthouse.
Dubois' father Jean-Guy, the third-eldest of nine brothers, was himself behind bars when his son was jailed for threatening a cop. On June 2,1977, Jean-Guy Dubois had been sentenced to life in prison for beating up a man and then tossing him into the Lachine canal. The man drowned in the canal, and the beating was found to have contributed to the drowning. Two Montreal police constables investigating a stolen car parked near the canal had seen
Dubois and an accomplice dump the body in the canal. When he was arrested, Dubois claimed he had been urinating in the canal and did not know the man who was in the canal near him.
By July 1991, Jean-Guy Dubois had been paroled for the Lachine canal homicide, but within a matter of months he was back behind bars for conspiring to traffic 100 kilograms of hashish. While preparing for parole the second time, in 1993, Jean-Guy Dubois told a psychologist that he had grown up amid misery in the St-Henri district. “Only his close family seems to bring him stability and a source of pride,” the psychologist wrote in a report to the board.
During that second federal prison term, Dubois appeared to be a changed man. He was polite to the personnel and had become the penitentiary ombudsman, busy helping other inmates get parole. He would later tell the parole board in 1994 that, at the age of 60, he was finding prison life very tough. A psychiatrist concurred and informed the board that it seemed to have a devastating effect on the man. Little did Dubois know that in a matter of years he would sit in a courtroom and watch as his son was sent to a penitentiary.
It was December 20, 1996, four shop-
She Hits
ping days before Christmas, and Pierre (Ti-Bum) Beauchamp had to find a parking space in one of the busiest sections of downtown Montreal. Despite the busy shopping period, he managed to find a spot near the corner of Sainte-Catherine Street West and Metcalfe Street. There he sat and waited, watching the many shoppers walk by, and apparently growing impatient as he tried to page someone three times. Inside his Ford Explorer, he had with him $60,000.