POLICE AGENT REVEALS HIS CLIMB UP ANGELS RANKS

Informer Says Being an Enforcer Put Him in Jail, Where Police Recruited Him

Michael Plante, the 36-year-old Vancouver man who infiltrated the
Hells Angels, was approached by police after he was arrested in July
2003 for assault and extortion.

The Mounties visited him while he was still in jail and asked him if
he wanted to become an informant against the Hells Angels.

At the time, Plante knew a number of members of the East End chapter
of the Hells Angels, including Lloyd (Louie) Robinson, a senior member
of the motorcycle gang, with whom Plante had worked out, lifting weights.

He had also worked as a Hells Angels enforcer, doing various assaults
and debt collections, and as a middleman in drug deals, so he was
trusted by members of the motorcycle gang.

Plante said the extortion and assault charges that landed him in jail
stemmed from his working as an enforcer for the Hells Angels --
basically hired "muscle" to intimidate people and, if necessary, use
force to get them to pay money owed to Angels.

These details involving the secret underworld of the Hells Angels
emerged at a drug trial Friday in which Plante was testifying against
Hells Angels member Ronaldo Lising and an alleged associate, Nima Ghavami.

Plante recalled his long-time buddy, Randy Potts, who had applied to
become a Hells Angel and had reached hang-around status, meaning he
could wear a leather vest with an insignia on the front indicating he
was in the Hells Angels "program" -- the four-step progression that
usually took two years.

He said the steps go from official friend to hang-around and then to
prospect, when the person is given the bottom rocker for the back of
their vest that says British Columbia and an insignia that says
Prospect on the front.

The next step is a full-patch member, when the member is given the
Hells Angels Death's Head to complete the colours worn by full members.

But back in 2003, he recalled, Potts had been beaten up and somebody
had taken his vest.

Plante recalled going to the East End chapter clubhouse and hearing
Potts being slapped by a senior Hells Angel member, Robinson, and
Potts falling to the ground. He saw Potts had a black eye from the
previous fight he had lost.

He recalled Potts being told to "get rid of" the guy who beat him, so
Potts and Plante went out to the Surrey home of the man, Audey Hanson,
to stake out his home for about two months.

He said Potts eventually gave Plante two guns -- an Uzi submachine gun
and a .38 handgun -- and dropped him off at Hanson's house to kill
him.

Plante recalled he purposefully jammed the Uzi outside Hanson's home
and pointed at him to scare him. Wearing a balaclava at the time,
Plante took the .38 and fired it three times into the air to scare off
the man, who ran inside his house.

The witness recalled he later told Potts the Uzi had jammed. "He
didn't believe me."

He said Potts later gave the guns to another friend who shot Hanson,
who survived.

But the job that got Plante arrested, he said, involved a Mission
Hells Angels member, David Patrick O'Hara, who asked Plante to pick up
a guy at his office and bring him to O'Hara's Surrey home, where the
man was beaten and bloodied for about 15 minutes.

Then O'Hara told Plante and another man: "Take him back to Vancouver
and get $20,000 from him."

Plante said the man never handed over a dime but police arrested and
charged him.

Asked by prosecutor Martha Devlin why he decided to work as a police
informant, Plante said: "Moral and ethical reasons. There was no
grudge for doing what I did."

He added: "The things [the Hells Angels] were getting away with, I
didn't think it was right."

Nine months after he agreed to work as an informer, for which he was
paid about $3,000 a month, police presented him with a first agreement
in April 2004 to become a police agent, which would mean he would be
working more closely with police and have more police protection if
anything went wrong.

It would also mean he would be required to testify in court to collect
the reward money, which at that time was $30,000. At no time did
Plante try to negotiate more money, he said.

Two months later, police presented a second agreement offering $1
million in reward money.

Plante said he read the agreement carefully but didn't sign it for six
days.

"I was signing my life away. The life I previously knew," he explained
Friday during his court testimony.

"It was a big step. Really big," he recalled of signing the
document.

Then he realized there was no turning back.

He also realized he would be killed if anyone discovered he was a
"rat" who infiltrated the Hells Angels and was in the clubhouse daily
by the fall of 2004, when he applied to become a member.

He said new members have to know someone in the Hells Angels for five
years. He recalled he knew Robinson for three years, and was even
entrusted with driving Robinson's son to school and work, and he knew
Potts for five years.

He said he had met many Hells Angels over the years, mainly because he
had worked as a bouncer in bars such as Coconuts in Burnaby and the
Dell Hotel in Surrey, where he was entrusted to sit in a hotel room at
the Dell, a hotel frequented by bikers and where Angels would stash
cocaine in the ceiling.

He said he would sit in a hotel room and watch to make sure nothing
happened to the drugs until someone came to pick it up.

He said he would do this a couple of times a month for a
year.

Plante said he had attended high school at Cariboo Hill, then Douglas
College, but became a bouncer because he did competitive weightlifting
and body building.

At one time, he was about 250 pounds and could bench-press 400 pounds,
earning him the nickname Big Mike because of his extremely muscular
build.

He also worked as a bouncer at the North Burnaby Inn, where a Hells
Angel got him the job, then moved to Alberta for a year, working as a
bouncer in a bar in Medicine Hat.

On his return to B.C., Plante got a job at Costco for five years,
loading trucks.

During that time he didn't associate with Hells Angels and didn't get
into fights because he didn't work in a bar, Plante said.

Eventually, an aspiring Hells Angel got him a job at another biker
bar, the Marble Arch strip club. When it closed, Robinson got him a
job as a bouncer at the Cecil Hotel strip club, where he worked
weekends, making about $9 an hour.

During his two years at the Vancouver club, he met another Cecil
bouncer, Nima Ghavami, who is also on trial for trafficking
methamphetamine.

Plante said the deeper he got into the police investigation, with more
Hells Angels added as targets, the more stressful it became. Partly it
was knowing that one wrong move could cost him his life.

But another thing stressing him out was leading a double life, living
a lie on a daily basis, with hardly any time for a private life.

He said Hells Angels would call him at 2 a.m. and he would have to
respond immediately to prove to them he wanted to become a member.

As well, he said he was forced to lie to Hells Angels members about
their own activities, recalling that one member ripped off another for
three kilograms of crystal meth and cocaine in order to fund his own
methamphetamine lab.

To cover it up and keep the peace between the Hells Angels, he said,
he got the RCMP to pay one of the Hells Angels for the missing drug.

Finally, in January 2005, Plante pulled the plug and said he couldn't
do it any more.

One of his final acts was buying five kilograms of cocaine from
Jonathan Sal Bryce, the 25-year-old son of John Bryce, the president
of the East End chapter of the Hells Angels.

Two of the drug deals were done in the Hells Angels clubhouse in east
Vancouver.

The son pleaded guilty Thursday to cocaine trafficking and possessing
the proceeds of crime and extortion, saving Plante from having to
testify and avoiding having the Crown play the tape recordings Plante
secretly made of conversations inside the inner sanctum of the Hells
Angels.

At one point during a recorded phone conversation with police played
in court this week, Plante tells his handlers that he's so stressed,
he's almost having a heart attack. He ends the call by swearing and
hanging up.

The Crown said Friday that more calls will be played Monday when the
six-week trial continues at the Vancouver Law Courts.

Plante is now living under a new name at an undisclosed location.