Montreal — In a major breakthrough in the war against organized crime, nine defendants pleaded guilty Thursday at the high-profile megatrial of 12 top-ranking Hells Angels and associates accused of murdering rivals during Quebec's bloody biker war.
Each of the accused had been charged with up to 13 counts of first-degree murder. But the nine men pleaded guilty to the lesser charges of conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking, and membership in a criminal gang.The remaining three will have new trials against whom the Crown has direct evidence, such as DNA or fingerprints. Each is charged with first degree murder.
At least four of those who pleaded guilty — René Charlebois, Denis Houle, Gilles Mathieu and Normand Robitaille — were not mere foot soldiers but had obtained either full-fledged membership in the Nomads, the elite Hells Angels chapter.
The bikers were accused of killing 13 men, shot dead in the Montreal area over a span of 3˝ years in strikingly similar circumstances.
The Crown depicted them as cold-blooded serial killers who murdered people with impunity, gunning down their victims in broad daylight, whether in public places or in their homes, whether their targets were alone or in the company of their children.
One victim, Serge Hervieux, a garage employee, had been killed by mistake after the gunmen confused him with his boss, their intended target.
The murders were part of a merciless methodical campaign to remove all competition and gain a monopoly over Montreal's lucrative illegal drug market. Each day, the Hells Angels sold in Montreal an average of 44,000 doses of cocaine and their drug trafficking brought the gang $100-million in annual revenue, the jury heard.
To prosecute them, the provincial government built a special high-security courthouse next door to the prison holding the accused. The defendants were led into the building through an underground tunnel and sat in a bullet-proof glass enclosure.
The slayings illustrate how well-organized the Hells Angels waged their turf war, the Crown argued.
The Hells Angels had a fee structure for their killers, paying from $25,000 to $100,000, depending on how high their victims ranked.
Each slaying required previous surveillance of the victims. The Hells Angels operated their own intelligence network. They had moles who accessed government automobile-insurance records to pinpoint the home addresses of their enemies.
The gunmen used getaway vehicles stolen up to three months before the crime and hidden in rented garages, along with firearms and gasoline cans — to torch the vehicles and destroy evidence afterward.
The stolen vehicles were vans of common models, making it easier to steal licence plates from similar vehicles to disguise them. The jury heard that it would take only 10 seconds for someone with a screwdriver to break into a van and hotwire the vehicle.
Also, the prosecution said the gang had electronics experts who set up devices to intercept the phone numbers of those who called their enemy's pagers.
The trial began with 13 accused but one will be tried separately after his lawyer was expelled from the case after being charged with contempt of court.
