HASHISH SHIPMENTS BUILD PORT LEGEND

For 25 per cent off the top, Gerald Matticks could get ship containers full
of drugs safe and sound out of Montreal's port.

Anyone willing to pay would bypass high-tech security, video cameras and
paperwork.

"It was systematic," prosecutor Robert Rouleau told a judge yesterday. "He
was paid either in money or in product."

With those words, what police have known for decades became unrefuted
public knowledge - Matticks ran criminal activity in the port of Montreal.

"With his consent and help," Quebec Court Judge Jean-Pierre Bonin added,
"the containers would be delivered by different manoeuvres without danger
to whom they belonged."

Matticks's notoriety in the port even reached the ears of a Senate
committee on security in airports and harbors. Their February report said a
crime family had eyes everywhere in the port and could make containers
disappear.

The report didn't name him, but police knew who it was talking about.

The report said the way the unions controlled who was hired led to the
problem. Incidentally, both Matticks and his son Donald are members of the
checkers' union.

Checkers are the ones who ensure ship containers go to the proper place.

One of the ways police say drugs get through is by a corrupt worker in
another port putting an extra container on a ship, which is then unloaded
in Montreal.

No paperwork exists for the container so it can easily disappear once here.

Evidence in court shows he brokered seven shipments of hashish totaling
33,363 kilograms, and one of 260 kilograms of cocaine. All in a little more
than a year.

Despite Matticks's contacts, a number were seized by police.

If Matticks got his 25-per-cent share in drugs, he would then sell it to
the Hells Angels, Rouleau added.

At times, the biker gang owed him as much as $7 million.

Rouleau said Matticks's sentence of 12 years, which started yesterday, was
agreed to beforehand by the prosecution and defence. It avoids at least two
trials of four months each. Since Matticks has already spent 18 months in
jail awaiting trial, which counts as double, the total works out to 15 years.

Police learned the intricacies of Matticks's port operation when his
right-hand man became an informant last year to get a shorter sentence.

They were able to charge Matticks with more crimes, as well as arrest much
of his gang three weeks ago.