Pubdate: Thu, 13 Nov 2003
Source: Hour Magazine (CN QU)
Copyright: 2003, Communications Voir Inc.
Contact:  http://www.hour.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/971
Author: Alex Roslin

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

The Bikers, The Mafia, The Drugs, The Deaths - The Untold Story Of 
Organized Crime And The Gay Village

Normand Trudel didn't have enemies and trusted everyone, a friend once told 
a reporter. His nickname was L'Italienne because he had a thing for young 
Italian men. He was the co-owner of a gay pub called La Relaxe and a 
well-known personality in Montreal's Gay Village. When Trudel was found 
murdered in his condo on Amherst just before Christmas 1996, the Village 
was shocked. Police were stumped.

A few months later, another high-flying bar owner, Francois Tousignant, was 
found stabbed in the stomach and shot multiple times in his well-guarded 
house in Riviere-des-Prairies. Tousignant owned several of the Gay 
Village's hippest nightspots, including the Sky Club, and was notoriously 
discreet. He appeared to have disabled his sophisticated alarm system and 
let his assailant in.

In the tight-knit Village, the rumours flew. Fellow bar owners whispered 
about Trudel and Tousignant's underworld ties and figured the murders were 
connected to organized crime. Montreal police say they investigated the 
possibility of a gangland connection but still have no leads or suspects.

One bar owner says Trudel and Tousignant were involved in drug sales and 
that they were killed because they "crossed" the wrong person. "You do your 
business clean, you don't have problems," says another bar owner. "My 
mother says, 'Tell me who you hang around I'll tell you who you are.'"

The Angels Find A Paradise

The people Trudel and Tousignant might have hung around are still a burning 
concern for many in the Village.

The murders happened in the middle of Quebec's biker war. One of the 
biggest prizes of the eight-year bloodbath was the Gay Village. "The 
Village is the biggest drug market in Canada. I see it with my own eyes," 
says Peter Sergakis, the new owner of Sky and one of Montreal's biggest bar 
owners. "Where there is a big market everyone wants a piece of it."

Hells Angels boss Maurice "Mom" Boucher was as homophobic as they come, but 
he wasn't going to pass on a goldmine. The war started as the Hells took 
over Hochelaga-Maisonneuve and Pointe-aux-Trembles then battled their way 
west toward the biggest bars downtown, where the Italian Mafia was in 
control. The Village, dominated by the hated Rock Machine biker gang, the 
Mafia and independent dealers, stood in between.

Few of the 163 killings and 180 attempted murders of the war actually took 
place inside the Village, but the violence swirled all around. One of the 
first big Hells Angels hits took place on the edge of the Village in 
November 1994. Two gunmen walked into bar Sainte-4, a Rock 
Machine-controlled hangout on Ste-Catherine, and started shooting John 
Woo-style. They killed Daniel Bertrand, head of the notorious Bertrand 
crime clan, and wounded his three companions.

Bertrand's twin brother Michel was plotting his revenge a few months later 
with seven associates when they were arrested in a hotel room with a 
12-guage shotgun, four 9mm handguns and two Cobray machine pistols. Their 
target was Paul "Fonfon" Fontaine, the head of the Hells Angels' 
enforcement squad in the Gay Village. The plan was for four Haitian 
street-gang members to murder Fontaine at the entrance of a bar in the 
Village. (Fontaine later went missing after police alleged he was one of 
the hitmen who killed a prison guard on Mom Boucher's orders.)

Fontaine's partner in running the Village was a short, chubby man named 
Serge Boutin, an entrepreneurial whiz who masterminded the business side of 
Hells Angels operations in the gay community. Boutin, a father of 10, 
eventually became a government informant, and his testimony helped convict 
Mom Boucher of ordering the prison guard murders.

Boutin testified that his "company" sold 200 kilos of coke a year in the 
Village, had 100 employees and up to eight afterhours bars. He cleared as 
much as $500,000 a year.

Queer Alliance With The Mob

The presence of the Hells Angels in the Village was nothing new. Gangsters 
have been a big part of the gay nightlife scene going back to the 1950s. It 
was a time when cops made a sport of raiding gay bars with nightsticks 
swinging. "It was pretty repressive. We were afraid of the cops," says 
Suzanne Girard, the co-founder of the Divers/Cite Gay Pride Parade.

Mafia-run bars were one of the few places where gays and lesbians could 
meet and socialize, she says. "It had to be secretive and operate in the 
dark because of intolerance. The whole gay and lesbian bar scene was 
steeped in the Mafia, with the police mixed in and people being paid off. 
It used to be part of going out. Every night there was a police raid, but 
15 minutes before we would get a call that the police were coming, so all 
the underage people would leave out back," says Girard.

In fact, the Mafia played a big role in nourishing the gay culture of those 
years, says Frank Remiggi, a UQAM geography professor who has studied the 
evolution of Montreal's gay bars. "In the 1950s and '60s, gay bars were 
instrumental in creating gay culture. This is how networks were built and a 
culture developed," he says.

"Many older bars were Mafia-owned in '50s, '60s and '70s. The gay clientele 
were aware of this and willing to play the game. It was the only place to 
meet. The flip side is I'm not sure it is all that good for the gay 
community of Montreal," Remiggi says.

The dependence on Mafia bars started to lessen in the 1980s when gays and 
lesbians carved out their own space in a thriving Gay Village and protests 
forced the police vice squad to rein in its cowboys. Inside a decade, gays 
and lesbians went from black-and-blue social pariahs to cultural and 
economic darlings of the city as the Village drew hundreds of thousands of 
tourists all years.

But the underworld was evolving, too, as the monopolizing Hells Angels 
drooled over the Village's booming drug market. The cops had stopped 
bashing gays, but another kind of police repression never went away - the 
war on drugs. Illegal drugs meant expensive drugs, which meant big profits 
for mobsters. And that meant mobsters fighting over the new bar scene in 
the Village. Gays and the mob were once again pushed together.

As the Village flourished, gangsters beat up and killed rival dealers and 
stepped up pressure on bar owners to let their own people come in and 
retail coke and ecstasy. Owners who agreed got a commission. And it wasn't 
easy to refuse.

One high-profile bar owner seems shell-shocked as he talks about his 
headaches with the underworld. He says gangsters beat him up for kicking 
out a dealer. Meanwhile, a rival bar owner threatened to kill him because 
he was angry over the competition. A loan shark once came by and offered an 
attache case full of money for some renovations, but he refused. "That's 
how they take control," he says. "If I had known how bad it was I would 
have never opened this bar."

Another prominent bar owner says loan sharks are taking over more and more 
Village bars because the owners can't get financing anywhere else and a 
drop in tourism has choked off their cash flow. "If I want to expand my 
bar, and I go to the bank, they will refuse me," he says. "I can go to a 
loan shark and I will have the money in an hour."

One well-known Village merchant is relieved he never went through with a 
dream of opening a gay bar in the area. "I wanted to do it, but in 
retrospect I'm glad I didn't, thank God," he says. "I will never own a bar 
because of the Mafia. We were afraid of that. All they want is a point of 
sale."

Like almost everyone else interviewed for this story, the merchant asks 
that his name and identifying details be left out. "It's very touchy."
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman