The Quebec Biker War (French: Guerre des motards au Québec) was a gang war in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, lasting from 1994 to 2002, between the Quebec branch of the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine. The war left 162 people dead, including civilians. There were also 84 bombings and 130 cases of arson.
The conflict began when the Hells' Angels issued an ultimatum to monopolize the Montreal drug market. Rock Machine rejected the ultimatum, leading to escalating violence and retaliation. The Hells' Angels consistently maintained the upper-hand during the conflict, being vastly wealthier and more organized. Rock Machine sought international help from The Bandidos and local drug dealers.
The Quebec government, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and the federal government struggled to build a case to convict the lead figures of the war. The war came to end as the police managed to arrest gang members with new evidence in 2001, and with the murder conviction of Quebec Hells' Angel leader Maurice Boucher.
In March 2002, American journalist Julian Rubinstein wrote about the biker war: "Considering how little attention the story has attracted outside Canada, the toll is staggering: 162 dead, scores wounded. The victims include an 11-year-old boy killed by shrapnel from one of the more than 80 bombs bikers planted around the province. Even the New York Mafia in its heyday never produced such carnage, or so terrorized civilians."
Background
The Hells Angels first entered Canada via a "patch over" of the Popeyes of Montreal on 5 December 1977, and subsequently established dominance in Quebec during the First Biker War, in which they vanquished the Outlaws from the province. However, the club was severely weakened by the Lennoxville massacre on 24 March 1985, when five members of the Angels' chapter in Laval were shot by their clubmates. As the Laval chapter of the Angels had been liquidated, the leaders of the Sorel chapter fled Canada upon learning that they were also targeted. In the aftermath of the massacre, Michel "Sky" Langois, the national president of the Canadian Hells Angels, fled to Morocco after a warrant was issued for his arrest on charges of first-degree murder. Afterward, the vacuum left by the Hells Angels was filled by a number of Montreal-based organized crime groups such as the Rock Machine, and it was not until the early 1990s that the Angels became a major force in Montreal organized crime again.
In the early 1980s, Maurice "Mom" Boucher and Salvatore Cazzetta were leaders of the white supremacist SS motorcycle gang, dominating organized crime in the Pointe-aux-Trembles district of Montreal. In 1986, following a prison sentence for sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl, Boucher joined the Quebec branch of the Hells Angels, quickly rising to become the club's leader. Boucher, who became a fully patched Hells Angel on 1 May 1987, became president of the Sorel chapter later that year. One of Boucher's friends was Guy Lepage, a former Montreal police officer dismissed from the force for associating with Mafiosi, who became his main contact with the Mafia. Boucher's defection to the Hells Angels resulted in a rift with Cazzetta, who had sworn against working with the Angels over their involvement in the Lennoxville massacre the previous year. Cazzetta instead formed his own motorcycle club, the Rock Machine, with his brother Giovanni. Around this time, Quebec had earned a reputation as a hotbed of violence, and had become known within the biker world as the "Red Zone". The Italo-Canadian Cazzetta was not a member of the Mafia, but he did have a close relationship with the Montreal Mafia, and as a result of his Mafia ties, the Hells Angels were unwilling to challenge the Rock Machine as long as he was leader. Cazzetta has often been described as controlling all of the organized crime in Montreal that was not controlled by the Mafia in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
On 26 March 1992, as part of a push to recruit more members, the Hells Angels created a puppet club, the Rockers Motor Club. This was a common tactic on the part of the Angels to provide more manpower and a wider pool of followers willing to commit crimes in order to become Hells Angels. It is standard for members of a puppet club to commit most of the crimes in the hope that they will be promoted to the rank of "prospect" within the Hells Angels proper. A British policeman told journalist Patrick Lejtenyi about the use of puppet clubs by the Hells Angels: "However, the paranoia that new recruits might be infiltrators from law enforcement or even journalists causes much angst around their selection. To try and avoid this, potential members are treated like shit and asked to perform various tasks to prove their worth. These are often degrading or illegal, the rationale being that a UC [undercover] cop or similar wouldn't have the stomach for this or have the necessary authority to actually commit crimes. The downside of this is that the attrition rate is high ... However, those determined to wear the patch will ... do as they are ordered and that's what makes these gangs so dangerous."
The war began as the Hells Angels in Quebec began to make a push to establish a monopoly on street-level drug sales in the province in 1993. In Quebec, most of the illegal drugs were imported by the Mafia and distributed by the biker gangs to various street-level drug dealers. The journalist André Cédillot, an expert on biker gangs in Quebec, stated in an interview: "The Mafia were in charge of importation and the Hells Angels were the distributors. Internationally, the Mafia has a better reputation than Hells Angels because the Colombians don't trust the Hells Angels, but they do trust the Mafia." In Quebec, the power of the Mafia was limited by the fact it was only open to those who were Sicilians or of Sicilian descent. In contrast, the Quebec bikers were, and remain, mostly French-Canadian. When Cazzetta was arrested on charges on importing cocaine from the United States in 1994, the Angels saw an opportunity to challenge the Rock Machine. He spent 10 years in a U.S. prison for attempting to smuggle 200 kilograms of cocaine into Canada. Claude Vézina, who was president of the Rock Machine's Quebec City chapter at the time, became the club's new national president. Renaud Jomphe was made president of the Montreal chapter, while Marcel Demers became the president of the Quebec City chapter until eventually opening the Beauport chapter in late 1996. In the early 1990s, various independent gangs controlled drug sales territories in eastern and northern Montreal, including Saint Denis Street, as well as in Laval, Mascouche, Terrebonne, Saint-Sauveur, and Sainte-Adèle. A number of drug dealers and crime families, such as the Dark Circle, the Pelletier clan, the Rock Machine, the Palmers, and former members of the Devils Disciples, resisted the Hells Angels' attempts at monopolisation and established a coalition known as the "Alliance to fight the Angels". The subsequent guerre des motards resulted in the bombings of many establishments and murders on both sides. It claimed more than 160 lives, including Daniel Desrochers, an 11-year-old boy who was fatally injured by shrapnel as he was playing near a jeep that was blown up. Peter Edwards, the crime correspondent of The Toronto Star, wrote the Rock Machine "wasn't really a motorcycle club at all: members didn't have to own a bike to bike. What brothers Giovannia (Johnny) and Salvatore Cazzetta sought to create was a cohesive confederation of drug-dealing groups".
1994: The ultimatum and the beginning of conflict
The Hells Angels attempted to dislodge the Rock Machine and their allies from the Montreal drug market, and issued an ultimatum that anyone dealing drugs in the city would have to buy from them. Maurice Boucher organized puppet clubs to persuade Rock Machine-controlled bars and their resident drug dealers to surrender their illegal drug business. In response, the Rock Machine created the Palmers MC, a Rock Machine puppet club created to counter the Hells Angels and their Rockers and Death Riders puppet clubs. The Palmers had chapters in both Montreal and Quebec City, and were led and organized by Rock Machine members Jean "Le Francais" Duquaire and André "Dédé" Désormeaux. Désormeaux was a member of the Dark Circle and later joined the Rock Machine.
Rejecting the Angels' ultimatum, the Alliance launched a series of attacks against the Hells Angels beginning on 13 July 1994, when Death Riders member Pierre Daoust was shot dead by three Rock Machine associates while working in his motorcycle shop in Rivière-des-Prairies. The following day, Rockers member Normand "Norm" Robitaille survived a shooting in Montreal.
On 14 July, the Sûreté du Québec arrested five Rock Machine members, including Normand Baker, who were found in possession of firearms, explosives and detonators while en route to attack the South Shore clubhouse of the Evil Ones, a Hells Angels puppet club.
On 15 July 1994, senior Hells Angels from across Quebec were summoned by Boucher to an emergency meeting at a hotel in Longueuil to take a vote on whether or not they wanted to take part in biker war against the Alliance. According to Sherbrooke Hells Angel-turned-Crown witness Sylvain Boulanger, the Montreal, Trois-Rivières and Quebec City chapters – Michel Langlois and Maurice Boucher of the Montreal faction, and Quebec City chapter vice-president Marc "Tom" Pelletier in particular – were strongly in favour, while only the Sherbrooke chapter leaders were against retaliation against their rivals. Despite Sherbrooke's initial holdout, the chapter eventually relented in August 1994, providing the Hells Angels' leadership the unanimous vote required to go to war against the Alliance.
Assassination of Pelletier
On 19 October 1994, a local drug dealer, Maurice Lavoie, was gunned down in his car while his girlfriend was wounded. Lavoie had previously been buying his wares from the Pelletier Clan associated with the Rock Machine, but had recently switched to the Hells Angels, and as a result the Pelletier Clan hired a hitman named Patrick Call to kill Lavoie.
On 28 October 1994, Sylvain Pelletier, the leader of the Pelletier Clan, was killed by the Hells Angels.
The Alliance to Fight The Angels
After Pelletier was killed, the independent drug dealers of Montreal formed the "Alliance to Fight The Angels", headed by Sylvain's younger brother, Harold Pelletier.
The Pelletier Clan and the Rock Machine were the most visible parts of the Alliance to Fight The Angels, but its most influential part was the secretive Dark Circle, a group of Montreal businessmen who were secretly engaging in the drug trade. What the Dark Circle all had in common was that all of them owned bars and/or restaurants from which drugs were sold, and drug money laundered. It was agreed that the Pelletier Clan and the Rock Machine would provide the "muscle" while the Dark Circle would provide the financial backing. The Dark Circle's leadership was provided by a committee of five. The chairman was Michel Duclos, a Montreal schoolteacher who also owned a bar that was a front for laundering profits from the drug trade.
Harold Pelletier attempted to assassinate Boucher in November 1994. Martin Simard, a Pelletier Clan member, purchased stolen dynamite to fill a truck which was left near Boucher's favorite restaurant by the Alliance member Martin Pellerin. The plan was to set off the explosives by remote control when Boucher arrived, killing him and everybody else in the restaurant. A Montreal parking officer noticed the truck was parked illegally and had it towed, thus unknowingly foiling the plot.
On 4 November 1994, Rock Machine member Daniel Bertrand, was shot dead while drinking in a Montreal bar. On 4 December 1994, another Rock Machine member, Bruno Bandiera, was killed when his bomb he was transporting in his car exploded prematurely.
In November 1994, a disgruntled member of the Rockers, Dany Kane, a protégé of senior Angels' leader David "Wolf" Carroll, contacted the Interpol office in Ottawa, saying he wanted to sell information to the police.
Carroll had founded the Angels' chapter in Halifax in 1984, and moved to Montreal in 1990 to assist the president of the Montreal chapter, Maurice Boucher, although his French was very limited. It is generally believed that Carroll was in Montreal to assist the planned expansion of the Angels into Ontario, since he, together with national president Wolodumir "Walter the Nurget" Stadnick and Donald "Pup" Stockford were the only Anglos in the Quebec Angels' leadership. Neither Stadnick nor Stockford spoke French, and police wiretaps showed that when the leaders of the Angels met, interpreters were needed for them to participate. Carroll had spent two years in a Quebec prison between 1985 and 1987 awaiting first-degree murder charges for his role in the Lennoxville massacre, during which he learned some French.
At the request of Carroll and Stadnick, Kane had founded a puppet club for the Angels in Toronto called the Demon Keepers Motorcycle Club. However, the Demon Keepers ended in fiasco, with the entire group being put behind bars by authorities without making a single drug sale and Kane sought revenge by working with the police.