From the publisher
In this definitive, up-to-the-minute account of the Hells Angels in Canada, two veteran journalists investigate why the recent imprisonment of feared biker leader, Maurice "Mom" Boucher, is too little, too late. By the spring of 2002, Boucher was safely in prison but the Hells Angels had grown to 37 chapters with close to 600 members across the country. They had taken over the drug trade and continued their rapid expansion into Ontario with a recent, high-profile enlistment -- or patchover -- of 168 members from other gangs. In Winnipeg, gang warfare turned ugly as the Hells muscled out the competition and firebombed a policeman's home. In Vancouver, they secured a stranglehold on smuggling in the all-important West Coast port. The Road to Hell is the story of how the Hells have taken over the Canadian crime scene: how politicians dithered while overburdened prosecutors burned out and lost major cases; how police brass squabbled while a handful of dedicated cops worked years to amass their evidence; how a few citizens stood up the bikers and paid for that bravery with their lives. Murder plots, drug deals, money laundering and assassinations are brought to life through never-before-revealed police files, wiretaps and surveillance tapes. In gripping prose, the authors tell all about Boucher's war on the justice system; how he finally lost in Quebec, thanks in part to Danny Kane, a reluctant biker turned informer; but how across Canada the Hells have succeeded in building a national crime empire. The RCMP and then the police in Montreal would run Danny Kane as one of the most successful -- and most secretive -- agents ever to infiltrate organized crime. Kane would climb all the way to the top: from a lowly hangaround to a trusted confidante of the Quebec Nomads, the elite chapter led by the top Hells Angels lieutenants of Maurice "Mom" Boucher. And through his entire six-year-career as a spy, few people -- even inside the police -- would ever know about his dangerous double life. -- from The Road to Hell
Details
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Title
The Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs Are Conquering Canada
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Author
Julian Sher; William Marsden
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Binding
Paperback
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Edition
First Thus
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Pages
416
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Volumes
1
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Language
ENG
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Publisher
Vintage Books Canada, Toronto, ON, Canada
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Date
June 2004
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ISBN
9780676975994 / 0676975992
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Weight
1 lbs (0.45 kg)
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Dimensions
8.96 x 6 x 1.05 in (22.76 x 15.24 x 2.67 cm)
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Dewey Decimal Code
364.106
Excerpt
Prologue: Source C-2994
“The source is very close to the bikers and has a very good knowledge of the milieu. His potential is unlimited.” -- RCMP confidential report, October 19, 1994
The killers left the eighteen-month-old baby alive, crying in his crib. His parents were not so lucky.
It was a peaceful rural Sunday, September 10, 2000. The house was quiet. Too quiet, in fact. So a neighbour came up the dirt driveway to check on the family home, which sat off an isolated stretch of Cogmagun Road in Hants County, Nova Scotia, about seventy-five miles southwest of Halifax. She found the sobbing infant inside. In the living room lay the bodies of Kirk Mersereau, forty-eight, and his wife, Nancy, forty-seven. Both had been slain execution-style. They had a four-year-old daughter, who was at her grandmother’s for the night. Had she been home she likely would have been executed too; hitmen don’t leave witnesses around. Only his tender age saved her younger sibling.
Kirk’s brother, Randy, a former Hells Angel who broke with the gang and dared to set up his own drug network, had vanished about a year earlier and was presumed dead. A small-time drug dealer in his own right, Kirk had put out a bounty of $50,000 on the head of anyone connected to his brother’s murder. “He made it known that he believed the Hells Angels were behind Randy’s disappearance and he was going to do something about it,” says Bruce Macdonald of the RCMP. Instead, he ended up paying the ultimate price for crossing the Hells.
To this date, police have not laid any charges in the case, and have no suspects. Only now, in this book, are details of a plot by the Hells Angels to execute Kirk Mersereau revealed for the first time, including vows by a top leader from Montreal that Mersereau “must be killed”; discussions at the Halifax clubhouse with the local chapter president about the need to eliminate Kirk; decisions that a biker hangaround -- and eventually the newest member of the Halifax Angel club -- should get the “mandate to kill” Mersereau.
When the bikers were calmly planning Mersereau’s elimination, they didn’t know that among them was a police informant.
His name was Dany Kane, and for years he had been walking a deadly tightrope between police and the Hells Angels, filing daily intelligence briefings. His reports reveal the Hells Angels’ most intimate secrets and follow the brutal, cold-blooded expansion of an outlaw biker gang that has grown into the most powerful criminal force in Canada. They show the degree to which police had a detailed knowledge of what was happening inside the Hells Angels as they blasted their way to power.
Rarely has the curtain been pulled back on police intelligence. Rarer still are the opportunities to tell the story of a deep-cover RCMP informant. The RCMP encases its informants in such a high level of secrecy that not even the bosses know their true identities.
The rise to power of leading Hells Angels such as Maurice “Mom” Boucher, David “Wolf” Carroll and Walter “Nurget” Stadnick -- and their ties to their brethren in Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia -- unfolds in thousands of pages of these intelligence reports entered into court records. This book tells the real story behind a small group of bikers who grew so powerful they shook the foundations of our justice system.
And it all revolves around one man who six years before the Mersereau murder made a telephone call to Mountie headquarters.
Sgt. Jean-Pierre Lévesque had been in his third-floor office at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, riffling through the accordion file folder he had jammed full of photographs of bikers. He had dozens of them. Some were individual shots taken at biker rallies. Lévesque thought that if only one of these bikers would talk, it would break the seal on a world that police -- so far -- had totally failed to penetrate.
Lévesque was the chief analyst for the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada (CISC), an RCMP-led coordinating group of more than a hundred national, regional and local police intelligence officers. It was October 17, 1994, and for several years, CISC had warned of the rising strength of biker gangs, especially the most powerful: the Hells Angels. Across the country, they were eclipsing Asian gangs, the Russian mob and even the traditional Italian Mafia as the top organized crime group.
Lévesque knew the police were losing the war. For years, they had neglected the bikers. Now that they were scrambling to catch up, they had no idea who the real power brokers were, how the organizations worked, how they moved their drugs and how they laundered their profits. Half the time, they didn’t even know for certain who among the growing number of leather-jacketed Harley riders was an outlaw biker and who was not.
To make matters worse, in Quebec, where the bikers were fighting an all-out war, the police were embroiled in scandal, corruption and embarrassing infighting. What’s more, nobody in authority seemed to care. Bombs were going off across the city almost weekly and yet police simply shrugged them off as a “settling of accounts.”
“I’ll tell you honestly, the department didn’t give two shits,” Montreal police Comdr. André Bouchard admitted. “They’re killing each other. I give a hell if some guy pops somebody who just got out of jail? No. We didn’t give a shit.”
Lévesque had recently started Project Spotlight. The idea was to gather as much pure intelligence as possible on the bikers. Maybe then police could better focus their investigations, shake things up a bit and see if they couldn’t scare up a few informers. But other than clipping newspapers and filing police reports, he wasn’t really getting anywhere.
And now here he was again flipping through colour pictures. Oddly, one particular photo always seemed to catch his eye. It was of a ragtag group of bikers, a short-lived Hells Angels puppet club from Belleville, Ontario, who called themselves the Demon Keepers. In the centre, crouching with one knee on the ground, was Dany Kane. His hair was cropped short and neat, his wire-rimmed glasses gave a schoolboyish look to his round face. It was as though the young man from a small village in Quebec couldn’t quite manage the tough, dead-eye biker look.
“He looked so like a librarian with his little glasses,” Lévesque recalled. “For some reason I just kept looking at the guy -- and then suddenly, who phones!”
From the Hardcover edition.
Media reviews
"(A) tremendous work on the Hells' Angels .... that will raise needed public awareness and denunciation of this threat to our communities."
—Honourable Gord Mackintosh, Minister of Justice/Attorney General, Manitoba
“The Road to Hell … brings into sharp focus why sophisticated outlaw motorcycle gangs must be a concern for everyone, from the suburban soccer mom to the Bay Street broker.”
—National Post
“Julian Sher and William Marsden present a thorough, colourful, enlightening account of how various missteps by the justice system helped the Hells [Angels] become the first organized crime organization to operate coast to coast... . With a cast of characters that includes blunt-talking police investigators and dozens of bikers, the book offers a multi-faceted perspective of what was going on behind the scenes among the bikers and those working to bring them to justice during the past decade.”
—Canadian Press
“Surprisingly detailed…. Chilling.”
—The Daily News (Halifax)
“Pulling no punches…[a]uthors Julian Sher and William Marsden detail Nova Scotia murder plots, contract killings and twisted revenge-filled biker politics, fuelled by the gang’s insatiable desire to control turf.”
—The Chronicle-Herald (Halifax)
“The Road to Hell: How Biker Gangs Conquered Canada by Montreal journalists Julian Sher and William Marsden…is clearly a case of…truth being stranger than fiction, and Sher and Marsden tell [the] story very well. … Road to Hell is a triumph on several levels. The authors are clearly comfortable with their topic and there’s a sense of indignation and zeal that fuels their story. … Sher and Marsden have managed to write an “important” book that moves with the power and style of a Harley Electra Glide.”
—Toronto Star
About the author
Julian Sher is the author of the award-winning, national bestseller, "Until You Are Dead" Steven Truscott's Long Ride into History. For 10 years he was investigative producer with CBC's the fifth estate, where his work garnered a Gemini and the Michener Award for Meritorious Public Service. He lives in Montreal. William Marsden is the senior investigative reporter for The Gazette in Montreal. He has won two National Newspaper Awards and three Judith Jasmin Awards -- Quebec's highest award for journalism. He recently co-produced an hour-long documentary on the Hells Angels for CBC's the fifth estate. He lives in Montreal.
