Dany Kane
Dany "Dany Boy" Kane was a Canadian criminal who was a compliant police informant at the same time. Kane worked for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as an informant inside the Hells Angels for many years, and provided information to the police on the Hells Angels. Kane was found dead of an apparent suicide in the garage of his suburban Montreal home in the summer of 2000.
Early life
Born in L'Acadie, Quebec, as a child Kane was brought up by caring relatives, attended private school and Boy Scouts, and went on many expensive vacations. Kane's father, Jean-Paul Kane, was a bricklayer, while mother Gemma Brideau was a housewife. Kane's family was poor, but respectable. To save money, Kane's parents sent him away to live with an uncle, which damaged Kane's self-esteem. Kane was a loner who disliked revealing his feelings and always felt out of place. Germain Godin, the owner of a local grocery store who employed Kane as a teenager, recalled: "He was always very polite, a good employee. He was easy to deal with. It was a good family". In 1983, Kane met and started to date a 13-year-old girl, known under the pseudonym of Josée as she does not want her real to be known, who later became his wife.He grew up discontented with his life and wanted recognition in a bike gang in Quebec. Kane was a restless student who was incapable of sitting still in class. When he was 16 he left school and took whatever work he could get. Robert Guimard, the neighbor of his parents, introduced him to motorcycles and not long after he fell into the biker fraternity life of strip clubs run by the bikers in the small towns around Montreal. Ever since the 1960s, there has been an outlaw biker subculture in Quebec, and Kane embraced it as a way of rejecting the values of his working-class family. Josée reported from his teenage years onward Kane had wanted to join an outlaw biker club, with the Hells Angels being his first choice. In June 1990, Josée gave birth to the first of Kane's children, a son named Benjamin.
Criminal life
Kane's first crime was a break-and-enter when he was seventeen. By the age of eighteen, Kane joined a small biker gang based in St-Hubert named the Condors led by Patrick Lambert. While working for the Condors he earned around $700 a week making sure dealers had the product they needed. The Condors merged with a Hells Angels puppet group known as the Evil Ones, but Kane resented having to prove himself again to a new set of bikers and decided to branch out and sell drugs, guns, and cigarettes on his own. From 1990 to 1992 he was making $3000 a week from drug trafficking and sold between thirty and fifty guns and accessories.Kane was very active as a gun-runner, buying illegal guns smuggled in from the United States via the Kahnawake Mohawk reserve, which straddles the border between Quebec and New York state, and is one of the main smuggling routes between Montreal and New York City. Kane sold guns to anyone who asked and had enough money. Between 1990 and 1992, Kane sold at least 50 guns, which were mostly handguns or machine guns, with an average profit of $300-$400 per gun sold. Kane's wife, Josée, grew increasingly unhappy over the summer of 1992 with the criminals that her husband kept bringing home as she told him that his friends were disreputable, dishonest and dangerous. Two of Kane's friends, Martin Giroux and Eric Baker, validated his wife's concerns by stealing 20 of his illegal guns with the intention of selling the stolen arms themselves.
In September 1992, Kane and two other men nearly beat two men to death. Kane shot Baker in the legs, saying this was punishment for stealing his guns. During the beating he accidentally shot Baker in the head. Baker was left for dead in a sandpit, but was able to crawl his way to a farmhouse despite his wounds. Kane was convicted of conspiracy to murder, kidnapping, assault, illegal use of a firearm and possession of a gun with the serial number filed off. He was given a 25-month sentence of which he only served ten months in prison and another five in a transition home.
MC membership
Puppet Clubs
Kane was a member of the outlaw motorcycle groups known as the Condors, the Rockers, and the Demon Keepers, all of which were the puppet clubs of the Hells Angels. He had ties to Maurice Boucher, the biggest name in the Canadian Hells Angels. When his business began to suffer because he did not belong to a group, Kane approached two members of the Hells Angels, Walter Stadnick and David "Wolf" Carroll, with hope that they could get him into the Hells Angels. After a year passed, with Kane doing what he thought was slave labour without being invited to the MC, he became annoyed with Stadnick and Carroll for not getting him into the MC. The Hells Angels is a hierarchical organization that requires recruits start in a puppet club. If they do well, they graduate to the title of hang around, where they can't wear the patch but are considered an associate. Next, they become a prospect, where they get a half patch that shows the chapter's title. If they continue to perform well, they become a full patch member and get the Winged Death Head emblem. Kane had to work as a bodyguard and a chauffeur to Carroll and Stadnick; as a "mule" delivering drugs, prostitutes and guns; and paying for all their meals and drinks at restaurants and bars, in hope that he would be promoted up the ranks as a reward. Kane was considered to be a likeable and intelligent character whose only major weakness was sex as he bragged incessantly to anyone who would listen about the size of his penis and his sexual prowess with the opposite sex. Kane kept his bisexuality a closely guarded secret as homophobia is rampant within the outlaw biker subculture.Demon Keepers
Kane was upset because he had worked with the gang for several years and was not even considered a hang around. Kane's luck then changed. Kane was "recruited by David Carroll and Walter Stadnick to preside over three chapters of an Ontario puppet club called the Demon Keepers. Stadnick was unhappy about the way that the Ontario biker gangs such as Satan's Choice, the Loners, and the Para-Dice Riders all refused his offers to join the Hells Angels, and in the fall of 1993 decided to several members of the Rockers and other puppet gangs move to Ontario to set up a new puppet gang.Stadnick wanted chapters to be set up in Toronto, Cornwall, Ottawa, and Niagara Falls to flood the Ontario market with cheap cocaine that would force the other Ontario gangs to join the Hells Angels. The fact that Johnny Papalia, the long time boss of the Papalia family who hated outlaw bikers was ailing from health problems, left Toronto open to the Hells Angels by 1994. Toronto had a number of 'Ndrangheta clans such as the Coluccio, DeMaria, Tavernese, Figliomeni, Ruso, Racco and Commisso clans, but the way that the Toronto 'Ndrangeta was divided into seven clans limited their ability to oppose the Hells Angels.
Stadnick chose Kane to the president of the Demon Keepers puppet gang. The Demon Keepers were founded in a party at the Hells Angels Montreal chapter's clubhouse on 29 January 1994 and later the same day Kane and his gang rode out to Toronto. Kane also unveiled the Demon Keepers patch, which he had designed himself. The journalist Jerry Langton described the patch as a chain made up of assault rifles circling what appeared to be a badly drawn portrait of "Bela Lugosi as Dracula". The majority of the members of the Demon Keepers were in Langton's view "an array of South Shore tough guys, some of whom had already been discarded by the Evil Ones". Kane together with the other members chosen for the Demon Keepers could barely speak English, which presented major problems in Ontario as most Ontarians could not understand what they were trying to say. Kane chose as the Demon Keepers' clubhouse an expensive apartment on Eglinton Avenue in Toronto. Kane's choice of a clubhouse made it impossible to set up surveillance cameras and the problems with limited parking in Toronto made it difficult for people to visit the clubhouse.
The plan did not work out because Carroll was a serious alcoholic and never had money to support the gang which meant they could not intimidate drug dealers in cities such as Ottawa, Cornwall, and Toronto. Kane had the Demon Keepers ride through small towns like Belleville in attempts to pressure local drug dealers to buy from the Demon Keepers. Kane planned to take on the Outlaws, later writing in a confession to his police handlers: "While we were there, we put together several murder plots to eliminate the Outlaws. We slapped surveillance on them and the bars they frequented". The Demon Keepers during their short existence from January to April 1994 failed to make a single drug sale in Ontario.
Kane called the Demon Keepers a gang of "no-talent imbeciles" while Carroll was often too drunk to lend him support and Stadnick was attempting to persuade the Satan's Choice and Para-Dice Riders gangs to "patch over" to become Hells Angels. Kane came to suspect that the Demon Keepers were just a ploy by Stadnick to apply pressure on Satan's Choice and the Para-Dice Riders to "patch over" to the Hells Angels, making him feel rather used.
Arrest
On April 1, 1994, Kane was arrested in Belleville, Ontario for having two handguns in his car, and spent the next four months in prison. Once Kane was arrested Stadnick shut down the Demon Keepers. During his time in the Quinte Detention Centre in Belleville, Kane realized that he was bisexual after he had sex with another prisoner, which left him with the intense desire to have more homosexual experiences after he discovered that he enjoyed having sex with men. Kane also felt that Stadnick had set him up to fail with the Demon Keepers, and he wanted revenge by becoming a police informer.After Kane was released from prison for his April 1994 weapons charges, he began to hate the Hells Angels. In July 1994, Kane started to associate with Scott Steinert, an American living in Montreal who was a "prospect" with the Hells Angels. Steinert planned to set up a Hells Angels chapter in Kingston once he was promoted up to a "full patch" Hells Angel and planned to have Kane move to Kingston with him. However, Carroll ordered Kane to rejoin the Evil Ones puppet gang, which Kane considered to be a major humiliation. Kane believed that the Hells Angels had used them and told one of his police handlers that he wanted revenge. Kane had become frustrated that he was still a member of the Rockers, the Hells Angels' puppet club in Montreal, and had not been promoted to become an Angel despite all of his work for the club.