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.''