Maurice Boucher
Maurice Boucher was a Canadian gangster, convicted murderer, reputed drug trafficker, and outlaw biker. He was once president of the Quebec Nomads chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Boucher led Montreal's Hells Angels against the rival Rock Machine biker gang during the Quebec Biker War of 1994 through 2002 in Quebec, Canada. In 2002, Boucher was convicted on two counts of first degree murder for ordering the murders of two Quebec prison officers in an effort to destabilize the Quebec Justice system.
He was sent to serve three life sentences at Canada's only supermax prison, in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines. While imprisoned there, Boucher survived several assassination attempts motivated by his infamy, and was placed in a special unit of the prison to isolate him. Authorities transferred him in June 2022 to the nearby Archambault Institution under conditions of secrecy so he could receive palliative care following the metastasis of his throat cancer. He died 10 July 2022.
Boucher had two children, Alexandra Mongeau and Francis Boucher, who have also been involved in organized crime.
Early life
Born in Causapscal, Quebec, Canada, Boucher was raised in poverty in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough of inner-city Montreal, where his family moved when he was two years old. Boucher had seven siblings; his father, Albert Boucher, was a construction worker while his mother, Claire Boily, stayed at home to raise their eight children. Boucher's father was an alcoholic who frequently beat his wife and children. His mother was described as the main source of love during his childhood. Albert Boucher was described as "a severe man who tolerated no lip from his children" and imposed an "iron discipline" on his eight children. In the 1960s and 1970s, the construction industry in Quebec was dominated by the Mafia-linked union boss André "Dédé" Desjardins, known as le roi de la construction, who ran the Conseil des métiers de la construction union quite brutally. The world that Boucher grew up in was a world where violence was commonplace and where corruption was accepted as normal. Boucher's school report cards describe him as an indifferent student and he dropped out of school in grade 9 to work odd jobs. In April 1973, the 19-year-old Boucher committed his first known crime, when he stole $200 from a dépanneur. In July 1974, Boucher got a certificate allowing him to work in the construction industry, but he only lasted a week before being fired due to problems caused by his heavy drinking and drug use.Unhappy with his income and desperate to support his drug habit, he turned to crime. He was arrested for three break and enters in the fall of 1974 and served nearly six months in detention. The first known crime committed by Boucher as an adult was on the night of 5 November 1974, when he broke into a grocery store in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district and attempted to steal 23 cartons of cigarettes but was caught by police upon exiting the store in possession of the cartons. It was during this time that Boucher's girlfriend, Diane Leblanc, was pregnant. By his own admission, Boucher was addicted to alcohol and marijuana and he often used cocaine, amphetamines, LSD, and heroin, though he stated to a police psychologist, Martin Pellerin, in February 1975 that he stopped using hard drugs in September 1974. In February 1975, Boucher was interviewed by Pellerin who described him as an ambitious man who wanted to get rich without working. Boucher told Pellerin that he would have liked to have followed his father into the construction trade, but the economic recession caused by the Arab oil shock of 1973–74 had made work very hard to find. Pellerin also described Boucher as lacking emotional empathy as a result of his abusive childhood, saying he was a very cold-hearted individual who regarded violence as acceptable behaviour.
On 5 November 1975, Boucher committed an armed robbery but was caught and sentenced to 40 months in prison. Boucher went into a butcher's shop armed with a rifle and stole $138.38, but because he used a gun with the robbery, the court imposed a stiff sentence. In December 1978, Boucher and his younger brother, Christian, were arrested for a series of home invasions, and for beating up the owner of one of the homes they had robbed. In July 1979, Boucher got a job working at a plastic factory in Montreal, which he held for four years, which was the longest period of legitimate employment in his entire life. In December 1981, Boucher was again charged with a home invasion, but the charges were dropped when the victim refused to testify against him in court.
Around 1982, Boucher was a member of a white supremacist motorcycle gang named the SS who were based in Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the eastern tip of the Island of Montreal. The SS were a group of men of working-class background who were strongly opposed to non-white immigration and initially their activities were limited to beating up non-white immigrants in order to make them go back to their countries of origin. A fellow member of the SS was Salvatore Cazzetta; the two became friends. As leaders of the gang, they became candidates to join the Hells Angels when the Angels decided to expand its operations into the rest of Canada. One of the members of the SS was one Normand "Biff" Hamel, who was to follow Boucher into the Hells Angels; it was Hamel, whose first conviction for drug dealing was in 1978, who introduced the SS gang to the drug trade. Hamel argued that this was a more profitable form of activity than beating up non-white immigrants. Hamel argued that however enjoyable it might be to beat up nonwhite immigrants, this did not make the SS biker gang any money. Right up until his murder in 2000, Hamel was described as Boucher's principal business partner.
It was during his time in the SS that Boucher, until then an undistinguished petty criminal, first showed the charisma and ability to lead that later marked his time in the Hells Angels. One of Boucher's most consistent enemies, Commander André Bouchard of the Montreal police, who first encountered Boucher in the 1970s, described Boucher during his time in the SS: "He was muscle. He was a crazy fucker. They'd send him out to beat up some guy. He was stoned half the time". Bouchard stated: "Mom at that time had aspirations. He was ambitious—and vicious". The journalist James Dubro stated about the distinctive outlaw biking sub-culture in Quebec: "There's always has been more violence in Quebec. In the biker world it's known as the Red Zone. I remember an Outlaws hit man telling me he was scared going to Montreal."
Commander Bouchard described Boucher as a man who loved publicity and who was always smiling for the cameras. Bouchard stated:
He'd do it on purpose, come out of the funeral parlor, stand with ten or twelve of his guys, look right into the cameras and smile and wave. But he never talked. Because I'll tell you honestly, he can't put two words together.
However, Bouchard also said:
He's very intelligent in the way he runs people. He's got a very high leadership quality. If he were straight he'd be a great manager for any business... He rules by fear. People respect him because they fear him. They don't respect him because he's respectable.
In March 1985, the Sorel chapter of the Hells Angels suspected the Laval chapter of wasting drug profits by using too much of the product themselves and ripping off the Nova Scotia chapter of $96,000. The Laval chapter was invited to a Sorel chapter party in Sherbrooke. When the five Laval members arrived, they were ambushed and murdered. Two months later, divers located the decomposing bodies of the victims wrapped in sleeping bags and tied to weightlifting plates at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River. What became known as the Lennoxville massacre was considered extreme even for the criminal underworld, and it gave Quebec's Hells Angels a notorious reputation. Boucher was impressed with the Lennoxville massacre, which proved to him that the Angels were sufficiently ruthless for his tastes, and only criticized Réjean "Zig Zag" Lessard, the man behind the massacre, for sparing three Angels from the Laval chapter instead of killing them. Bouchard stated that Boucher stopped his substance abuse after the Lennoxville massacre, which was prompted because of the heavy drug use of the Montreal North chapter, saying "He got the message and a lot of them got the message. It scared the shit out of them".
Cazzetta found the ambush—essentially, biker "brothers" killing their own—to be an unforgivable breach of the outlaw code. He refused Boucher's offer to join him at the top of the Quebec Hells Angels, and instead formed his own smaller gang—the Rock Machine—with his brother Giovanni Cazzetta in 1986. In the aftermath of the massacre, Yves "Apache" Trudeau, the Angels' leading killer, turned Crown's evidence and his testimony sent 39 Angels to prison. The late 1980s was a period of flux for the Angels in Quebec, and Boucher rose very rapidly through the ranks. Laurent Viau of the Laval chapter had been killed in the Lennoxville massacre, Réjean Lessard of the Sorel chapter had been convicted of first-degree murder for ordering the Lennoxville massacre, and Angels' national president Michel "Sky" Langois fled to Morocco to escape charges of first-degree murder relating to the massacre.
Hells Angels
In September 1984, Boucher held a gun to the head of a 16-year-old girl and threatened to kill her on the spot if she did not have sex with him, leading to his conviction for armed sexual assault. During his time in prison, Boucher managed to illegally collect unemployment insurance. It was not until shortly before he was to be released in January 1986 that a clerk finally noticed that the address the cheques were being mailed to was a prison. In 1986, soon after finishing his 40-month sentence for the armed sexual assault, Boucher joined the Hells Angels motorcycle club in Montreal, and quickly rose through its ranks. Normand "Biff" Hamel joined the Angels just a few months before Boucher did. Hamel served as Boucher's sponsor. On 1 May 1987, Boucher became a "full patch" member of the Hells Angels, just three days after the murder of Martin Huneault, a leader of a rival outlaw biker gang, the Death Riders. It is widely believed that Boucher killed Huneault to become a "full patch" member of the Angels' Montreal chapter, the oldest and most prestigious Angel chapter in Canada. Huneault had been watching a hockey game and drinking with his girlfriend in a Laval bar when somebody marched in and shot him three times; none of the people in the bar who witnessed the crime were willing to testify that the gunman was Boucher. Huneault had been opposed to the Death Riders working with the Hells Angels. With Huneault's murder, the Death Riders became a Hells Angels puppet club, giving the Angels control of the drug trade in Laval.The Canadian crime journalist Jerry Langton described Boucher as "big and strong and not afraid to fight anyone. And smart and charismatic, even charming and could get along with just about anyone". One Hells Angel who later turned Crown's evidence, Serge Boutin, testified at Boucher's trial in 2002: "Monsieur Boucher was considered like a god. When I'd see other Hells Angels around him, they were full of admiration". Boucher had the nickname "Mom" because of his attention to detail, as he pestered his men with questions to make certain that they thought of everything, just like a loving, but overbearing mother. Boucher's other nickname was Les Lunettes, because his glasses made him look like a graduate student. When Walter "the Nurget" Stadnick became the national president of the Canadian Hells Angels in April 1988, he appointed Boucher his Quebec lieutenant. Stadnick and Boucher went to Quebec City on 28 May 1988 to meet the leaders of an outlaw biker club called the Vikings, who agreed to "patch over" to become the Hells Angels Quebec City chapter the same night. Described as a "natural born leader", Boucher excelled as Stadnick's Quebec lieutenant.
In 1988, Boucher went to Mississauga, Ontario, where he hijacked a truck and attempted to drive it back to Montreal, being arrested by the Peel Regional Police before getting very far. In a highly unusual move, the Crown agreed to have the case tried in Montreal instead of Mississauga and Boucher's $10,000 bail was paid for by another Angel, Normand Hamel, who managed a company importing coffee from Costa Rica. Hamel's company, Irazu Inc, was owned by a senior citizen named Richard Muselle, who did not get out very much, and in whose home was later found millions of dollars. The Angels liked to hide the cash from their criminal activities at Muselle's house out of the belief that neither rival criminals nor the police would search the home of an elderly, frail and rarely seen man. On 15 September 1989, Boucher had the Hells Angels firebomb the clubhouse of the rival Outlaws gang in Danville. The next day, Darquis Leblanc, the president of the Outlaws' Danville chapter whose clubhouse had just been incinerated, met with Boucher at the Angels' clubhouse in Sorel and asked to defect. Boucher told him that as a "full patch" Outlaw, it was out of the question for him to join the Hells Angels as the Angels never accept "full patch" Outlaws, but stated that he could be an Angel associate, an offer Leblanc accepted. Leblanc served as an Angel agent within the Outlaws, supplying intelligence as the Hells Angels and their puppet club, the Evil Ones, started to take over territories controlled by the Outlaws in 1989 and 1990. In 1989, Boucher was charged with lying to a police officer, and given a choice between paying the $200 fine or going to prison for four months; for reasons that remain unclear, he chose the latter, being released in March 1990. Boucher's activities attracted little attention from the police who assumed that the Hells Angels were finished following the convictions of 21 Hells Angels in the late 1980s.
On 15 September 1990, Claude Meunier, the president of Outlaws' Montreal chapter, was assassinated in a drive-by shooting, taking four bullets to his chest. At Meunier's funeral, Leblanc was nearly lynched by other Outlaws who accused him of betraying Meunier to the Angels. Shortly afterwards, Tony Mentore, Meunier's right-hand man, was approached by a young man with a map who was apparently lost. The young man had a handgun hidden under the map and used it to shoot Mentore three times in the head. In November 1990, Boucher was discovered by the police to be carrying a 38-caliber handgun, paying the $900 fine rather than serve five months in prison. By December 1990, the Outlaws had been virtually driven out of Quebec by Boucher. By that time, the total Outlaws in Quebec numbered only ten as most of had quit following the murders of Meunier and Mentore. The Quebec Outlaws leader, Jean "Sonny" Lacombre, was living as a recluse, only leaving his house with his two bodyguards. With the Outlaws reduced down to powerlessness in Quebec, Boucher no longer needed Leblanc. On the night of 21 February 1991, the bullet-ridden corpses of Leblanc and his brother-in-law, Yvan Martel, were found lying in the snow less than 100 feet from the Angels' clubhouse in Sorel. The automobiles of both Leblanc and Martel were found in the parking lot of the Angels' clubhouse. When questioned by the police, Boucher denied knowing either Leblanc or Martel.
By the early 1990s, he was considered one of the most powerful bikers in the province, and was involved in numerous lucrative criminal activities such as cocaine trafficking and loan sharking. On 26 March 1992, Boucher founded the Rockers Motor Club, the Hells Angels' puppet club in Montreal that was to be responsible for most of the murders committed in the Quebec biker war, with hopes of being promoted up to Hells Angels. Francis Boucher, the oldest son of Maurice, followed his father into racist activism. Francis Boucher was the president of the Sorel chapter of the White Power Canada group as well being a member of the Quebec Ku Klux Klan youth wing. On 31 July 1992, Francis Boucher at the age of 17 organized a Nazi rally, the Aryan Festival '92, which attracted much negative publicity and was also one of the first times his father was mentioned in the Quebec media.
In September 1992, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police started an investigation, codenamed Project Jaggy, of a drug smuggling operation run jointly by the Mafia and the Hells Angels to bring in cocaine from Jamaica, which in turn originated in Venezuela. In March 1993, Boucher paid a $500 fine after he was pulled over by a traffic cop and found with martial arts weapons in his car, violating the court order forbidding him to have any weapons. On 25 May 1993, a surveillance team from the RCMP took photographs of Boucher, wearing his Hells Angels colors, meeting Raynald Desjardins, the right-hand man of Vito Rizzuto, the leader of the Rizzuto crime family, one of the most powerful Mafia families in Canada. Desjardins had lunch with Rizzuto every Sunday at the Buffet Roma restaurant; it was reported that Rizzuto had a strong distaste for associating with outlaw bikers. Jean-Pierre Boucher of the RCMP who ran Project Jaggy stated: "Raynald and Mom were really good friends. Every time Quebec City did something wrong, Raynald called Mom to solve the problem". A boat, the Fortune Endeavor, was making regular trips from Jamaica to Quebec City to smuggle cocaine, and as part of the investigation, police wiretaps showed that Boucher and Desjardins were speaking on the phone on an almost daily basis in the summer of 1993. On 17 August 1993, an RCMP surveillance team recorded Boucher arriving at the Montreal headquarters of Desjardins's company, Amusements Deluxe, and then stepping into a car that took him to an unknown location; on the previous day, the Fortune Endeavor was due to arrive in Halifax and to forestall an unexpected inspection by Customs Canada after the boat had suffered an engine failure at sea, the crew had dumped 750 kilograms of cocaine placed inside airtight plastic pipes off the coast of Nova Scotia. In the following days, a team of Hells Angels from Quebec arrived in Nova Scotia and wearing scuba gear tried to find the cocaine, which was finally located instead by the Canadian Navy. Desjardins was charged with conspiracy to smuggle the cocaine, but Boucher was not.