Lanthier officially joined the Rockers on April 15, 1994, and during that same spring was already reaping the benefits. Montreal Urban Community Police officers on routine patrol arrested him and two other men in a park in Montreal's east end. Lanthier and the others appeared to be surprised when they saw the uniformed officers riding through the park on bicycles, one officer recalled in court. The trio quickly headed for two white cars parked nearby. The patrol officers followed them. When they reached the cars, one noticed a firearm inside one of the
vehicles. Another officer noticed that the passenger in Lanthier's car was trying hard to close the glove compartment. The officer assumed that the man was trying to hide a gun. The situation grew tense as the patrol officers and colleagues who had arrived as backup drew their weapons and ordered Lanthier and his friends to get out of the cars.
Inside the two cars, the police found a 9-mm pistol with chrome plating and a black cross on the handle. They also found a smaller calibre handgun under a back seat. Both weapons were loaded. Three bulletproofvests were in one ofthe trunks. The passenger in Lanthier's car pleaded guilty to possessing all the weapons and received a four-month prison sentence. Lanthier was acquitted shortly after his friend was sentenced. The incident fit a pattern police would see in the coming years where Rockers underlings were expected to “take the fall” for full-patch members. The Hells Angels expected the same loyalty from the Rockers.
Gregory Wooley was another member of the Rockers who was targeted in Project Rush. Wooley had grown up in a tough section of northern Montreal and gravitated to a street gang composed of the children of Haitian immigrants who had developed a distinct community in Montreal North and the city's St. Michel district. Despite being black, Wooley rose quickly through the ranks of the lily-white Rockers. Though he knew he had little chance of ever becoming a Hells Angel because of the gang's racist exclusionary rule, he did not seem deterred.
Like Houle and Mathieu, Gregory Wooley was behind bars when Operation Springtime 2001 was carried out. When the charges were filed, he was still recovering from a serious head injury he had suffered while in a maximum-security penitentiary. On January 31, 2001, Wooley was pushed during a fight in the penitentiary's weight room, and when he fell, his head struck
the metal bar of a bench press. The man suspected of nearly killing Wooley was in prison for homicide but had no ties to the biker war. He was never charged with the assault, but Wooley's parole officer, aware of the biker's reputation, would later call the attack “a suicidal act” on the part of the other inmate.
Some police detectives in the Montreal police force wondered if Wooley had run out of luck on April 5, 2000. The full-patch member of the Rockers was preparing to board a flight to Haiti when security checking one of his suitcases found a .44 Smith & Wesson handgun inside. Wooley was arrested and quickly pleaded guilty to possession of the weapon, which earned him his first significant sentence.
Investigators in the Montreal police were puzzled by Wooley's apparent miscue, and some speculated that he might have believed he was untouchable at that point. They also couldn't help but notice that Wooley was leaving Canada just after two members of an underling gang he ran, called the Syndicate, had been murdered outside a Montreal strip club.
Mere months earlier, a judge had tossed out evidence in a trial against Wooley on a weapons charge; he had been acquitted. A gun had been recovered on a sidewalk near where Wooley had been stopped for what the police claimed was a routine traffic stop. That summer night in 1999, Wooley had been driving through downtown Montreal on a motorcycle. According to the official police version, he was pulled over because he was speeding and the muffler on his motorcycle was making a lot of noise. He was stopped at a downtown intersection by Constable Michel Bureau, a Montreal police constable who would later testify that he immediately recognized Wooley and noticed he was wearing his gang colors. The cop found out that Wooley only held an apprenticeship licence and was supposed to be accompanied by another motorcyclist. After Officer Bureau returned to his car and began processing the traffic violations, he said he noticed
Wooley make a sudden movement and seemed to be adjusting something under his jacket.
“I knew at that moment that Mr. Wooley had already been implicated in murders. He was a violent individual, and he was the only black to be admitted into a biker gang. There were certainly reasons to assume that he was violent,” Bureau later said in court. Bureau called for backup and, within minutes, five police officers were involved in what was supposed to be a traffic violation. Bureau would testify that he feared for his safety and even tried to compromise with Wooley.
“I can make you a deal, for my security. Show me what you have in your jacket and we can forget the towing,” Bureau said he told Wooley. The biker replied: “You have no business.” Bureau said he then increased the immunity offer by telling Wooley he would look the other way if he found drugs. Again, Wooley refused. Bureau asked a third time, ordering Wooley to “show me what you have” under the jacket. Wooley said no and reminded the officers that he wasn't under arrest. They informed Wooley he was indeed under arrest for the traffic violations, and they searched him while he sat on his motorcycle. They found no weapon on him, but a semiautomatic Springfield Armory .45-calibre pistol was spotted lying on the sidewalk nearby.
When the case went to court, a judge analyzing the evidence refused to believe the pull-over was routine and theorized that it was part of a police surveillance operation where the officers involved used the traffic violation as an excuse to check in on Wooley. The judge ruled that the biker's constitutional rights had been violated and the evidence the police had filed in the case was tossed out. The biker was acquitted of possession of an illegal firearm a month later.
By the time of that bungled arrest, Wooley had already developed a reputation with the Montreal police. They suspected him of several murders, and while he had been awaiting trials in previous
cases, he was involved in at least three fights with other inmates. The reports on the fights suggested he used “excessive and extremely violent force” in each case. As well, in the days leading up to the weight room fight, Wooley had been caught attempting to smuggle
PCP
into the penitentiary. The parole board learned the attempt to smuggle the drugs was part of a plan with other inmates who hoped the
PCP
would provoke violence, disorder and mutiny in the prison.
“The information also indicates that you were the head of the conspiracy,” the board noted when it refused Wooley parole â for several reasons. One was that a prison-security report filed to the board alleged that Wooley was also the head of a crack ring early on in his sentence and that he had successfully smuggled drugs into a penitentiary. It was also early in his sentence that a psychologist determined Wooley's central problem was his temper, a rage he could not control. The psychologist who filed an evaluation to the board also determined that Wooley had weak judgement, low self-esteem and, at the age of 16, had attempted suicide.
In April 2001, Wooley refused to undergo any more psychological evaluations. The nine murder charges he now faced through the evidence collected in Project Rush were not his first. Wooley was charged in the March 28,1997, slaying of a 25-year-old Rock Machine member named Jean-Marc Caissy who was about to play floor hockey with some friends when he was shot outside a recreation center in Montreal. Less than three weeks later, the Montreal police arrested the gunman, a Hells Angels' associate named Aimé Simard. The hit man decided to turn informant and fingered members of the Rockers, including Wooley, as taking part in the conspiracy to commit murder. Wooley was arrested and charged, along with the other members of the Rockers, but a jury ultimately acquitted all of them in a case that left police and other authorities in Quebec questioning the value of informants.
But informants and double agents would provide much of the evidence that led to the Operation Springtime 2001 arrests. Their information would be used by the Crown to paint a portrait of a drug trafficking network intent on having sole control over Montreal's drug market.
“We are talking about a war. We must not forget that,” Vincent said on October 21, 2002, at one of the so-called megatrials that were the result of Operation Springtime 2001. One year after catching five Nomads with guns, hit money and photos of their enemies and after looking the other way, the Crown attorney could now prosecute almost all of them for orchestrating a massive, murderous conflict.
“The ideology of expanding and totally controlling the traffic of drugs in Montreal came from Maurice Boucher”
â Stéphane Sirois, ex-member of the Rockers, who wore a wire for the police as they probed the Hells Angels.
At the center of the conflict that became the war between the Hells Angels and the Alliance, a collection of drug traffickers in gangs like the Pelletier Clan and the Rock Machine, was a man called Mom.
Maurice “Mom” Boucher could not tolerate competition, so he relentlessly plotted to eliminate it. He expected full loyalty from his drug dealers, and he asked them to adhere to the same structure and rules expected of him as a member of the Hells Angels when he created his own gang in 1992, calling them the Rockers. And when he felt other members of the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter were not bloodthirsty enough for his war, he created his own chapter in 1995.
But years before the biker war ever started, the police already knew Boucher was a major player in Canada's drug trafficking scene. During an
RCMP
operation dubbed Project Jaggy, an investigation that began in September 1992, Boucher was drawing attention that indicated to the police how closely the Hells Angels were associated to other forms of organized crime. Project Jaggy began as an investigation into a conspiracy to bring 3.2 tons of cocaine into Canada from Jamaica. The police were tipped off that
members of the Hells Angels' Quebec City chapter were meeting with people from eastern Canada to plot smuggling routes.
André Imbeault, a founding member of the Quebec City chapter, and Richard Hudon, convinced a man named Fennie Bungay to accept $1.5 million for his work in preparing a boat that would be used to smuggle drugs. The Hells Angels also gave Bungay $240,000 to buy them a boat. As they continued to monitor this partnership, the
RCMP
noticed other Hells Angels were coming on board as well, including Daniel Beaulieu and Marius Perron.
Bungay bought a boat called the
Arctic Trader
and spent $75,000 trying to make it seaworthy between April and May of 1993. But at the end of June, Perron had to give Hudon the bad news that the
Arctic Trader
couldn't be used. To offset their losses, the Hells Angels called in a specialist from Edmundston, New Brunswick, to strip their investment of anything worth money. Within a month, the Hells Angels apparently recovered from the setback because the new boat, called the
Fortune Endeavor,left
Marystown, Nova Scotia. As the police would learn, the illegal venture was crawling with Hells Angels. They would be charged eventually in connection with Project Jaggy, but Boucher was not one of them. However, his name kept popping up in surveillance reports as
RCMP
investigators followed the key players.
One of the first instances of police surveillance came on May 25, 1993, when Imbeault held a meeting with a man named Raynald Desjardins, who, the police would later learn, was financing the smuggling operation. Accompanying Desjardins that day was Boucher, sporting his Hells Angels' colors. That Boucher was with Desjardins was a noteworthy fact to investigators. Desjardins was well known to the police as being the right-hand man of Vito
Rizzuto, the reputed godfather of the Mafia in Montreal. What Desjardins brought to the Hells Angels was access to the Montreal Mafia's financial support and his personal experience in drug smuggling, which dated back at least to 1980. As early as 1986, Desjardins was already being referred to in police intelligence reports as “the supplier” of drugs for Montreal's Mafia.
Desjardins would get one of the stiffest sentences to come out of Project Jaggy, 15 years, but he used the time to either solidify his contacts or make new ones. While he served his sentence he was the subject of at least two major investigations by corrections officials for crimes including an attempted murder, a failed hit he allegedly ordered from prison. By the time of his statutory release date on June 2, 2004, having served two-thirds of his sentence, Desjardins was still considered an influential man despite spending more than a decade behind bars. While serving his sentence, he associated with both mob figures and Hells Angels. A February 2004 parole board report alleged that he frequently broke penitentiary rules.
“You have acquired over the years an important status at the head of structured, criminal organizations and maintained those associations inside the penitentiary,” the parole board wrote in a report. Nonetheless, they were required by law to release him. All the parole board could do was warn Desjardins that if he maintained those links while serving what remained of his sentence outside, he would be sent right back to a penitentiary. He was also required to supply a summary of his revenues and spending on a monthly basis.
But Correctional Service Canada was likely glad to see Desjardins go. During his time behind bars he had allegedly ordered two inmates to kill another, named William Fisher, in April 1995. According to a final report of a
CSC
investigation of the incident, the conflict was over Desjardins not wanting drugs to enter the wing of the penitentiary where he was staying. He
was also suspected of trying to poison another inmate while at the Leclerc Institution, and was thought to have been the mastermind behind several violent incidents that occurred while he was serving his sentence.