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."