Pubdate: Mon, 30 Mar 1998 Source: Montreal Gazette (Canada) Section: A1 / FRONT Contact: http://www.montrealgazette.com/ Author: James Mennie FIGHTING BIKERS A MATTER OF MONEY With an uneasy truce between warring criminal gangs and with provincial funding running out, the MUC police anti-biker squad will be disbanded Tuesday. ``Is it OK if we put our signs here?'' The man driving the pickup truck obviously isn't used to making this kind of request. The bed of his truck bristles with orange no-parking signs, the ones planted in snowbanks before the snow is cleared. The driver usually doesn't need anybody's permission to put up his warnings. But on this evening, on a windswept avenue in the north end of Anjou last week, the block is dominated by a column of marked and undercover police vehicles parked at the curb, engines idling. At the back end of the convoy are four vans from the Montreal Urban Community police tactical squad. HARM, the MUC police anti-biker squad used for street-level operations, is waiting to pounce. The police officers, milling about on the street trying to keep warm, wear pistols, dark blue fatigues, baseball caps, bullet-proof vests and combat boots. A constable tells the truck driver that, of course, he can go on doing his job, but the driver plants one more sign and then leaves. The police officers have been stuck here for an hour, waiting for the target to show up at a bar nearby. An undercover agent will buy some cocaine from him and then all those plainclothes and uniformed police will swoop in, in such numbers that everyone will listen when they yell: ``Nobody move.'' But finally, Andre Bouchard, the police commander in charge of the operation, emerges from an unmarked car at the head of the convoy and walks toward the vans, moving his arms back and forth in front of his waist like an umpire calling a runner safe. It's no use, Bouchard says quietly, the target is not moving from his house. This is costing money, there's no point sitting around any longer. The word travels down the column. Vests go back into trunks and undercover cops - as menacing in appearance as the people they are paid to arrest - disappear into the night, driving cars much nicer than Bouchard's. They are philosophical. After all, in the past year, the HARM squad has done this kind of thing 150 times before. - - - - Peace broke out between the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine somewhere between the November day when they lowered Maurice (Mom) Boucher into the back of an unmarked police car and the day last month when somebody put two bullets into Denis Belleau. Not peace in an identifiable, signed-treaty sense so much as in the quiet realization by both sides in a four-year gang war (with a body count of more than 60) that one could no longer deal with a business competitor by trying to blow him to bits. ``Carcajou (Wolverine) was formed to go after the kingpins,'' said Bouchard, using the nickname for the task force assembled three years ago by MUC police, the Surete du Quebec, and the RCMP to step in between the warring gangs. ``But now, there aren't any kingpins left.'' That's where HARM comes in. A former member of the Wolverine squad, Bouchard now runs HARM. The name comes from the initials of Hell's Angels and Rock Machine. It has been 15 hours since Bouchard called off the raid and now he sits in a police interview room downtown, his voice energetic but his eyes tired as he inventories the new uneasy quiet between the gangs. Provincial Funding The HARM section was formed with provincial government funding last April - and will be dissolved Tuesday, when that funding expires. HARM has been, in effect, a formalized version of Operation Respect, which was a crackdown on both gangs that began after a night when four uniformed officers, trying to investigate an assault, were physically tossed out of a Hell's Angels-Controlled Bar. Bouchard pointed out that the Cazetta brothers - the heads of the Rock Machine - are now in jail, that Maurice Boucher, alleged head of the Hell's Angels Nomads chapter, faces trial for the murder of two provincial jail guards, and that a wave of assassinations over the past six months has thinned out both gangs' war cabinets. The most recent execution took place in Quebec City last month when Denis Belleau, a founding member of the Rock Machine, was shot as he walked into a local diner. Large-scale police reaction to the gang war, which really began after the bomb killed an 11-year-old boy in August 1995, has diminished from the days when the Wolverine squad had 80 wire taps going at once. But business goes on. ``Since the HARM squad was formed, Bouchard said, ``we've carried out 150 raids, closed 24 licensed establishments ... carried out 600 arrests. As of March 13, we had seized drugs with a total street value of $15,387,000 and $510,000 in cash. We've seized 25 firearms, 10 vehicles and 28 sticks of dynamite.'' After a pause, he added, ``Everybody's nervous now, they don't ever know if they're selling to one of our guys.'' The personnel for the HARM squad are drawn from the investigations branches of each of MUC police force's four districts. Each provides about 25 detectives. Armed back up comes from the tactical section (better known as the riot squad). But despite Bouchard's enthusiasm, despite the apparent alarm and consternation among foot soldiers of the gangs, the fact remains that funding for HARM runs out Tuesday, the end of the provincial government's fiscal year. Bouchard's squad is not the only anti-biker squad being unplugged. Last week, the collection of Quebec City-area police forces that form the GRICO task force, a special unit that concentrated on gang-controlled bars, also announced it was shutting because the gang-war situation was less explosive than before. The replacement will be a much cheaper unit to oversee the exchange of gang-related intelligence. Simply put, in a province where emergency wards are crammed and schools can't get textbooks, there simply isn't enough tax money to keep the gangs from making money of their own. Jean-Paul Brodeur, a criminologist at the Universite de Montreal's International School of Comparative Criminology, said that the investigation of organized crime has never been cost effective. Cost Benefits ``In a context where the resources of police are getting scarcer and scarcer, we never ask how much it costs 12 cops to book 50 people. If we knew the cost benefit, it might make very little sense to use 12 investigators to spend two years putting 50 traffickers behind bars for an average of two to five years - it doesn't do much to the drug trade.'' Nor does Brodeur seem ready to accept police claims that the Hell's Angels were planning to destabilize the justice system by assassinating law-enforcement officials, a campaign police contend began last year with the killings of the two guards: ``What the police are saying reminds of what was said in the 1970s about Quebec terrorism. At that time, they were talking about selective assassination to destabilize the government. (The police say) the two prison guards were only the beginning and that crown attorneys would be targeted. ``I don't know what to think about that - generally, in North America, the accepted wisdom among organized criminals is that you don't go killing prison guards or police officers or judges because this would be your doom. The plausibility that the Hell's Angels would to try destabilize (the justice system) seems a bit far-fetched.'' Far More Lucrative According to MUC police, the heads of the U.S. branches of the Hell's Angels share Brodeur's incredulity if not his even-tempered manner of expressing it, and are furious that so much police attention has been focused on drug operations, which are far more lucrative when not regularly raided. However, Brodeur is quick to add that governments don't need killings of law-enforcement officials to see organized crime as a serious threat to their authority. ``The point is, as long you don't see (organized crime), the legitimacy of the state is not challenged. I've always referred to (bikers) as criminals in uniform and in a well-ordered society it is the police who wear the uniforms, not the criminals.'' Bouchard said that funding for organized-crime operations is hard to come by and wonders whether one way to maintain budgets would be to use seized funds. ``Right now my (undercover) guys have to carry a bag to hide their walkie-talkies because they're so big,'' he said. ``Meanwhile, the guys they're following have equipment that beeps whenever we get close to them.''