Maurice ‘Mom’ Boucher, former Quebec Hells Angels leader, dies at 69 from cancer

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He was once Canada’s most notorious criminal, the public face of a savage turf war over drug trafficking that left more than 160 people dead, forced a massive deployment of police resources and amendments to the Criminal Code.

Maurice (Mom) Boucher, who was the most prominent Quebec Hells Angels kingpin in the late 1990s, has died.

Mathieu Lavoie, president of the Quebec prison guards’ union, confirmed the news first reported by La Presse that Mr. Boucher died on Sunday of throat cancer at the age of 69.

In a statement, Correctional Service Canada said Mr. Boucher was under medical care at the Archambault penitentiary but died “of apparent natural causes.”

Mr. Boucher had been behind bars for more than two decades for ordering the assassination of two of the prison guards’ union members, who were ambushed at random in 1997.

The two murders were part of a plot to destabilize society and clinch the loyalty of Mr. Boucher’s henchmen, court later heard.

Instead, it precipitated Mr. Boucher’s downfall after one of the gunmen turned informant.

His criminal empire collapsed shortly after, in a major crackdown in 2001.

Long unchecked, the gang’s homicidal rampage prompted an overhaul of law-enforcement tactics in Canada, encouraging the use of joint police task forces and specialized prosecutors’ offices, and leading to the creation of the new criminal offence of gangsterism.

The man other outlaw bikers idolized was born on June 21, 1953, in Causapscal, a sawmill town in the Gaspé Peninsula, the eldest of the eight children of a construction worker.

According to a 1975 presentence report, Mr. Boucher dropped out of school in Grade 9 and shoplifted, robbed and burglarized to feed his drug use.

“He has come … to the hour of choice,” the report said, stating that Mr. Boucher could go clean and follow in his father’s footsteps. He chose to dive deeper into the criminal life.

He joined the Quebec Hells Angels in 1987, after the gang had been weakened by an internal purge where members had been murdered and their bodies dumped into the St. Lawrence River.

Within a few years, he emerged as an important leader, drawing the attention of police and media, who noticed his swagger and the authority he carried over other bikers.

“For us, Mr. Boucher was like a god,” former gang member Serge Boutin testified in court.

The biker war started in 1994 when the Hells Angels angled for a drug monopoly at the expense of traffickers aligned with the upstart Rock Machine gang.

“This is a company, except that it doesn’t sell bananas or cars but drugs,” prosecutor Yves Paradis would tell the courts. “Their competition isn’t Chrysler but the Rock Machine, and they don’t compete by buying ads but by killing people.”

In 1995, Mr. Boucher and other senior bikers founded the Nomads, an elite Hells Angels chapter that would direct the war.

Also, he was sentenced to six months for illegal firearms possession. While in jail, he befriended the man who would seal his fate one day: Stéphane (Godasse) Gagné.

A young, ambitious drug pusher who sided with the Hells Angels, Mr. Gagné had endured a beating from Rock Machine supporters rather than stomp on a picture of Mr. Boucher.

Impressed with such loyalty, Mr. Boucher took Mr. Gagné under his wing after they were released.

By then, a full-blown war was being waged in the streets of Montreal. The Hells Angels deployed large resources, conducting surveillance in disguised vans, compiling photo albums of their enemies, assembling murder kits of firearms, balaclava and gloves.

“The Hells didn’t just wait until they happened to run into their enemies on the street. They hunted them down like animals,” Crown attorney Randall Richmond told a subsequent biker trial.

More than 160 people died, several of them bystanders, including Daniel Desrochers, an 11-year-old fatally injured by a car bomb.

Meanwhile, Mr. Boucher, enjoyed the spoils of power. The Hells Angels were collecting tens of millions of dollars from the drug trade, enabling him to live in a spacious estate outside Montreal.

He summoned a photographer for a crime tabloid to his home to publicize the lavish wedding of one of his Hells Angels, an event where famous crooners Ginette Reno and Jean-Pierre Ferland performed.

He enjoyed the publicity, mugging for the cameras, flashing victory signs and smiling broadly.

But he was annoyed that some of the men had become police informants. The Crown would later allege that Mr. Boucher devised a scheme to destabilize the justice system and secure the loyalty of his men by forcing them to assassinate law-enforcement officials.

Picked at random among guards leaving work at the Bordeaux jail in Montreal, Diane Lavigne was shot dead in June, 1997, by Mr. Gagné.

Two months later, a second guard, Pierre Rondeau, was killed when Mr. Gagné and another biker fired on a prison bus.

By the end of the year, however, Mr. Gagné had been arrested and he decided to co-operate with the police.

Mr. Boucher was acquitted at his first trial after the defence hammered at Mr. Gagné's credibility. The biker boss and his men barged out of the courtroom and, that evening, he went to a boxing gala.

But after an appeal, a new trial was ordered, he was rearrested and convicted in 2002.

He still made the news while behind bars. He was the target of failed assassination attempts. In 2015, at age 62, he was simultaneously charged with conspiring to murder another imprisoned mobster, and investigated for shanking another convict in a separate incident.

With reports from Emerald Bensadoun in Montreal

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