Biker Trials, The Read Online Free PDF Page B

bunker. Some of the gang’s underlings hoisted them up a stairway into the bunker, away from prying eyes.
    Outside, members of the Sûreté du Québec and the Ontario Provincial Police ( OPP ) watched, many cursing the cold and the fact they had had to cut their holidays short to monitor the party. Confirmation that the massive “patchover” was going to take place had come days earlier in a box searched at the Canadian border. It contained dozens of patches ordered from Austria, where they are made exclusively for the gang. The police had also listened in on wiretaps as longtime Hells Angels like Donald (Pup) Stockford and Richard (Dick) Mayrand prepared for the expansion throughout most of December. Now, police videotaped as gang members drove up to the bunker’s gates in flashy sport-utility vehicles and minivans. The police took careful noteof every biker member who showed up for the party, but they were also keen to record who among the Hells Angels’ underlings were working guard duty. The young men who stood at the gate that afternoon were likely unaware that what they were doing could be used against them later in court. Because of changes to Canada’s anti-gang legislation, prosecutors could now argue that by doing guard duty the underlings were facilitating the loftier objectives of a criminal gang.
    To those police investigators who had probed the Hells Angels in Quebec for years, the “patchover” of Ontario gangs was not a surprise, although the scale and the rapidity of the event was. Only weeks earlier, the gang’s main rival in the bloody biker war, the Rock Machine, had been informed that it had been accepted into the fold of the Bandidos, the only outlaw motorcycle gang with an international membership comparable to that of the Hells Angels. Six years of war had taken a huge toll on the members of the Rock Machine, and on the Alliance, a collection of gangs and influential drug dealers who battled with the Hells Angels. But now they had the Bandidos as allies in Quebec and the new chapters they had created over the previous summer in Ontario. The Hells Angels in Quebec were forced to react, especially to the fact the Bandidos would be in Ontario, and react in a way that would reflect their
modus operandi
— unambiguous intimidation backed by huge numbers.
    In a typical show of the gang’s force, dozens of men who were part of the Hells Angels’ now vast underling network worked security outside the Sorel bunker. Boxes of brand-new walkie-talkies were distributed to those working guard duty, or “the watch,” while one prospect lectured his colleagues on how to operate them. At a small Sorel hotel a few kilometres from the bunker, full-fledged (or full-patch) members of the Hells Angels from chapters all over Canada were being escorted to the party in minivans under heavy guard. Despite the party atmosphere,the war with the Rock Machine and the Alliance was still on, a drug-turf war that had, to that point, seen 150 people killed over claims to lucrative areas in cities like Montreal and Quebec City, where street-level drug dealers peddled drugs like cocaine and hashish. The Quebec Hells Angels knew their rivals might be looking for targets.
    Standing outside the Sorel hotel was 29-year-old Paul (Schtroumpf) Brisebois, a prospective member of Boucher’s Montreal-based Nomads chapter. A squat, chubby man who slightly resembled his nickname (Schtroumpf is French for Smurf), Brisebois appeared nervous as he arranged for the guarded transport of his superiors. The aggressive underling, who had quickly climbed the ladder to prospect, had only seven months earlier taken part in the murder of a drug dealer who was selling for the Rock Machine. On May 1, 2000, 25-year-old Patrick Turcotte was shot dead after leaving a video store in Verdun, a working-class suburb of Montreal. Weeks after the murder, Brisebois graduated from the level of