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Fourteen Hells Angels, or associates of the gang, have avoided a trial set to begin next week by pleading guilty to taking part in a general conspiracy to murder rival members of criminal organizations over an eight-year period.
With jury selection set to begin Monday, the 14 men — thirteen of which were tied to the gang’s Trois-Rivières chapter — pleaded guilty on Thursday to a murder conspiracy charge while any first-degree murder charges they also faced were placed under a stay of proceedings. The guilty pleas recorded on Thursday brought the number of men who have pleaded guilty in Operation SharQc to 101. Operation SharQc was a lengthy investigation led by the Sûreté du Québec that saw almost every member of the Hells Angels based in Quebec arrested in April 2009.
No one arrested in Operation SharQc has had an actual trial yet, but almost all of the men who pleaded guilty Thursday were supposed to be part of a larger group whose trials are set to begin Monday with jury selection. The large group has now been reduced to 10. Another two men are expected to have a trial in English at a later date, which means only 12 of the 156 people originally charged in 2009 still have cases pending. According to the SQ’s website, another nine men have yet to be arrested in Operation SharQc.
Besides the guilty pleas, the prosecution obtained the court’s permission on Thursday to destroy two of the gang’s bunkers — one in Trois-Rivières and another near Quebec City — which were significant symbols of the biker gang’s defiance, especially between 1994 to 2002, the time frame referred to in the murder conspiracy charge. The men who pleaded guilty on Thursday admitted they were part of a plot the Hells Angels hatched to go after other organized crime figures who opposed their goal to monopolize drug trafficking across the province. Besides being allowed to level the buildings, the provincial government will take ownership of the land the Trois-Rivières chapter once considered its headquarters. Discussions are still underway to determine which level of government will take control of the land near Quebec City.
Included among the group of men who entered guilty pleas on Thursday were at least two who served as presidents of the Trois-Rivières chapter at some point in the past 15 years.
Before announcing the guilty pleas to Superior Court Justice André Vincent, prosecutor Robert Rouleau informed the court that a first-degree murder charge and a conspiracy charge filed against Daniel Beaulieu, 56, a man alleged to be tied to the biker gang’s Quebec City chapter, would be stayed. Beaulieu was arrested in Operation SharQc in April 2009 and was detained for nearly six years until he was granted bail in March this year. On Thursday, Beaulieu walked out of the courtroom knowing the case brought against him was finished.
Jean-Pascal Boucher, a spokesperson for the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales, said the reasons why Beaulieu’s case was dropped can’t be made public yet because of a publication ban placed on the evidence in the upcoming trial.
“We have our opinion and the Crown has its opinion but what’s important now is that Mr. Beaulieu is a free man now,” said Nellie Benoît, Beaulieu’s defence lawyer. “It’s time for him to celebrate. It’s all over.”
When asked for his reaction, Beaulieu smiled and motioned toward Benoît.
“I think my lawyer said it all. I am a happy man,” Beaulieu told the Montreal Gazette.
Only four of the men who pleaded guilty on Thursday were sentenced. As part of a joint sentencing recommendation, Alain Biron, 59, a former president of the Trois-Rivières chapter, received an overall sentence of 11 years and four months. With time served factored in, Biron has only one day left to serve, a required formality.
Jean-Damien Perron, 57, received an overall sentence of 12 years and seven months. He was credited 116 months in terms of time already served and was left with a 35-month prison term on Thursday. Daniel Royer, 58, received the same overall sentence as Perron, but has only 24 months left to serve.
All three men were out on bail before they entered their guilty pleas. They had to be frisked in the courtroom by a special constable before the were returned to custody. The frisking prompted some of the nine Hells Angels who were already detained to tease their friends, jokingly suggesting they enjoyed the experience.
Marc-André Hinse, 44, a Hells Angel who was already serving a 10-year prison term he received in 2009, received an overall sentence of 12 years and seven months.
The 10 other men will be sentenced on three separate dates later this year.
pcherry@montrealgazette.com
Here are profiles of nine of the men who pleaded guilty:
Alain (Timote) Biron, 59
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter since 2004. In 2000, Biron was a member of the Blatnois, a Hells Angels puppet gang, when several of its members were charged in a case that became one of the first tests of Canada’s anti-gang laws.
Biron was arrested in a roundup of Blatnois members, but was only charged with marijuana possession, avoiding the gangsterism charges that many of his fellow gang members would be convicted of.
In June 2004, Biron proudly showed off how he had been promoted to the Hells Angels during a party to celebrate the chapter’s 13th anniversary in Trois-Rivières. Biron stunned police investigators by parading in the street, outside the gang’s bunker, showing off his leather jacket with the Hells Angels infamous death head logo, which only a full-patch member is allowed to wear.
According to a court decision made in a drug trafficking trial held in Newfoundland, Biron was again promoted, by July 2006, to president of the Trois-Rivières chapter.
Clermont (Narf) Carrier, 53
Member of the Hells Angels network since Nov. 19, 1994, when he became a Blatnois member. Carrier has served time for taking part in a murder conspiracy.
On Oct. 17, 1997, he pleaded guilty to his role in a plot to kill a hotel owner and was sentenced to four years in prison. The plot was revealed to police after a hit man for the Hells Angels, Serge Quesnel, provided police with evidence of how the gang planned to kill rivals.
Jean-Damien (Ti-Blanc) Perron, 57
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter since at least 2002. Perron appeared to be made of Teflon early in his Hells Angels career because very little of the charges filed against him in the 1990s would stick.
In 1996, Perron and eight other men saw a major drug trafficking case, being heard in Montreal, tossed out of court as a side effect of something that happened in a completely different case involving members of the West End Gang. The other case came to be known as the Matticks Affair and involved allegations the Sûreté du Québec had filed falsified evidence in a major drug bust. Four SQ investigators implicated in the Matticks Affair, including one who admitted to perjury, were the main investigators in the case against Perron and the eight others.
On June 12, 1996, with the credibility of the investigators in doubt, the prosecutor in the Perron case asked for a stay of proceedings on the drug trafficking and conspiracy charges all nine men faced and Perron walked.
His luck ran out in June 2002 when he was charged, along with a couple of other Hells Angels, following an SQ investigation into drug trafficking in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region. He managed to avoid being arrested for five months but the police found Perron hiding in an apartment on de Maisonneuve Blvd. in Montreal. He pleading guilty to drug trafficking, conspiracy and gangsterism charges the following year and was sentenced to a five-year prison term.
Daniel (Johnny) Royer, 57
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter since at least 2001. As part of an investigation into the Hells Angels’ now-defunct Nomads chapter in 2000, police uncovered a series of Montreal apartments that were used to store millions in cash the gang made from the sale of drugs. The apartments were also used to keep an accounting system the Nomads chapter used to record their drug deals with other organized crime figures and other Hells Angels chapters.
Police had no trouble linking account No. 116 on the ledger to Royer (the Hells Angels used his nickname as an attempt at a coded reference) and it revealed he had purchased 78 kilograms of cocaine from the Nomads, probably for the Trois-Rivières chapter, during a five-month period in 2000.
On Oct, 17, 2001, just seven months after his arrest, Royer pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and a gangsterism charge. He was sentenced to an eight-year prison term.
Royer would later tell the Parole Board of Canada that he gravitated to the biker gang gradually after he began working in motorcycle repair in 1989.
He was able to leave a penitentiary in February 2007 after reaching his statutory release date. It was clear to authorities that he was still a Hells Angel, but he had not posed a problem while behind bars and even learned a trade, welding. He was returned to a penitentiary 22 months later when he was arrested in Project SharQc and still had roughly six months left on his eight-year sentence.
Jean-Francois (Frank) Bergeron, 53
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter since at least 1995. Bergeron once sued the Montreal police for nearly $15,000 for making a mistake when they arrested him in 1992 outside the Chez Parée strip bar on Stanley St. The arresting officers had noticed Bergeron and another Hells Angel — both were wearing their gang’s colours — as they stepped outside the bar at closing time.
The other Hells Angel was out on bail and was subject to a curfew while, at that point, Bergeron did not have a criminal record. Confusion set in as Bergeron resisted arrest and the officers assumed he was the one who was violating a court-ordered curfew. The police only realized the error after Bergeron had been detained for nearly three hours. In 1995, Bergeron was awarded $500 for the mistake because a judge determined the police acted in good faith and it appeared Bergeron didn’t correct them when they claimed he was the other Hells Angel.
Bergeron’s claim to having a pristine record came to an end in 1998 when he pleaded guilty to a series of charges related to an RCMP investigation into drug trafficking in Chicoutimi, dubbed Project Carnassier, during which Bergeron sold drugs to an undercover agent a few times. Bergeron served a 16-month prison term in the RCMP case.
He was arrested again, in 2002, as part of a large-scale investigation, led by the Sûreté du Québec, into the Hells Angels’ activities in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region. The following year, Bergeron pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, conspiracy and gangsterism charges and was sentenced to a 48-month prison term.
Yves (Flag) Gagné, 63
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter. Gagné’s only significant arrest before Project SharQc came in 1995 after he and two other men were charged with plotting to kill three men who were influential members of the Alliance, a grouping of criminal organizations that opposed the Hells Angels and their monopolistic goals.
The complicated case, which was based partly on evidence from an informant, ended in a stay of proceedings at the Laval courthouse in 1999.
Gagné’s son, Daniel, later joined his father by becoming a member of the biker gang’s chapter in Trois-Rivières. The younger Gagné was also arrested in SharQc, but was released in 2011 after a Superior Court judge placed a stay of proceedings on his case and those of 28 other people who only faced drug trafficking charges.
Marc-André (T-Co) Hinse, 44
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter. Hinse is the only member of the gang who has been serving a prison sentence almost since the time arrests were first made in Project SharQc in April 2009.
On June 26, 2009, Hinse, the head of the Trois-Rivières chapter at one point, was sentenced to an overall 10-year prison term after he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and gangsterism. With time served factored in, Hinse was left with 81 months left to serve, leaving him lots of time to figure out what to do with the charges he faced in SharQc.
Hinse, who had no criminal record before 2009, had pleaded guilty to charges filed against him in 2004 — part of a Sûreté du Québec investigation dubbed Project Corona — but he had avoided arrest for three years until the police found him hiding in a chalet in La Tuque on Oct. 11, 2007. The police who found Hinse in the chalet were acting on a tip that a different man, sought on drug trafficking charges in a case in Newfoundland, might be hiding there. Hinse had controlled a network that was able to sell 17 kilograms of cocaine in less than a year and was estimated to have raked in more than $1.7 million in profits.
When he finally entered his guilty pleas in 2009, 47 other people arrested in Project Corona had already been convicted.
Steve Rainville, 41
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter. Rainville was reportedly one of three Hells Angels from Quebec instrumental in setting up a chapter for the gang in Dominican Republic in February 2009, about two months before arrests were made.
He served a 20-month prison sentence for an assault in 1994. He was also arrested in 1997, while he was a member of a Hells Angels puppet gang called the Rowdy Crew, after the Sûreté du Québec pulled over a speeding car on Highway 40, near L’Assomption. Three other men tied to the Hells Angels were in the car with Rainville and a search by police turned up two loaded firearms and 60 grams of hashish. Rainville faced a series of charges following the arrest, but they were stayed a month later after one of the other men confessed the guns and hashish belonged to him.
Gilles Robidoux, 61
Member of the Trois-Rivières chapter since 1995. In 2006, Robidoux pleaded guilty to being part of a large drug trafficking network based in the Saguenay region and insisted that his sentence be served in a federal penitentiary.
The network was run by Richard Roy, the brother of Louis (Melou) Roy, one of the most powerful members of the Hells Angels until he disappeared without a trace in 2000.
When Robidoux entered his guilty pleas — to drug trafficking conspiracy and gangsterism — he was concerned about the notoriously bad conditions often found in overcrowded provincial detention centres and wanted to be sure his sentence would be at least two years, the minimum required for a criminal to be sent to a federal institution. His lawyer at the time told the judge, who ultimately agreed with the sentencing recommendation, that Robidoux would have a better chance at seeing his family if he were inside a federal penitentiary.
http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/several-hells-angels-arrested-in-project-sharqc-to-plead-guilty
