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It is for Eve Trudeau. The blood was all business. An assassin for the Hell's Angels in the seventies and eighties, Trudeau was known as Apache, the Mad Bumper, and the Mad Bomber. As a contract killer, he did his job so well that the biker sometimes lent him out to other organized crime empires in Montreal, including the East End French gangs led by the deadly Dubois Brothers and the upstart Irish mafia in the West End. Eve Trudeau remains
one of Canada's most prolific serial killers. When he narrowly missed being assassinated because he was in drug rehab, he turned government informant and confessed to his crimes, which included killing forty three people. But as a witness, Trudeau was a disaster, and the sweetheart deal he got with little jail time for his murders caused public outrage. Award winning writers Julian Cheer and Lisa Fierman tell the incredible story of how this assassin escaped the police and the justice
system for over a decade. A compelling and revealing account of corruption, in competence and murder. Hit Man is based on extensive research and exclusive new interviews with police, lawyers and bikers who knew Eve Apache Trudeau. The book that we were featuring this evening is Hitman, The Untold Story of Canada's Deadliest Assassin. With my special guests, journalists and authors Julian Cher and Lisa Fiterman. Welcome to the program,
and thank you very much for this interview. Julian Cher and Lisa Fiterman.
Great to be here.
Thank you. Yes, it's nice to be here.
Thank you so much, and congratulations on this newest book between you both co authored, hit Man.
Thanks. It's been a national bestseller here in Canada and it's obviously available in the States. We've been journalists for many, many years, but this was a fun and exciting book to write.
Tell us about the origins of this book. What brought you to this story. You say that you have a background in organized crime and writing about organized crime. But tell us about just the origins of this book project itself.
Sure. Yeah, I've been an investigative journalist for thirty forty years, written many books, including at least two books on the Hell's Angels. I went to California to interview the Hell's Angels leaders there for books that I wrote called Angels of Death, and I've done documentaries. You know, as an investigative journalist, I think we're both interested in kind of the dark mirror, you know, the rocks, what's hiding under
the rocks in our society. And the Hell's Angels always fascinated me because unlike the Mafia or MS thirteen, they have a very elaborate pr machine, right, they have web pages and their trademarked and they have this whole mythology. So that's why I've covered them for so long. And this book that I co wrote with my wife Lisa, was a chance to go back to the origin story. How did the Hell's Angels set up here in Canada, which became an important base for the Hell's Angels. Why
did they come here and what were the consequences. So that's why we decided to do a hit man together.
It was it was strange. Julian's agent called him to ask if he would do another biker book and he said no straight out, and then he began to think it would be fun to do a book with me. And I had covered all the biker trials in Quebec and including the big Mega trials and the first trial of Maurice mon Bouche, who was a biker leader who was convicted of killing two prison guards. So it just
seemed to be an intro testing thing to do. Our agents both told us that this isn't a good idea, you know, because they'd seen partnerships break up because of working together. And we said we'll take the chance, and we had a lot of fun doing it.
Yeah, let's get to the Eve Trudeau and you say he had been the founder of the first Hell's Angels chapter in Quebec and then became a hit man for the outlaw bikers and for fifteen years he had killed in the shadows, unknown and undetected by police. Let's talk about Eve Trudeau and Popeye's motorcycle gang and his early development in organized crime.
Yeah, he's a fascinating character. Young boy grows up in Quebec in the fifties and sixties. Unlike many biker leaders that I've profiled, he doesn't fit the stereotype, right, He's not there's no evidence of an abused family, poverty, early drugs, or criminal records that you often see with a lot of bikers. Seems to be a you know, perfectly normal kid. But he gets attracted to one of the many biker groups circulating in Quebec as in the States in the
sixties and seventies. They were called the Popeyes, kind of after you know Popeye, the Sailor Man. Very violent, not very structured or organized. They had gray jackets, but they were among the most violent biker gangs. And he was I think a bit of an outsider, right, He.
Was a bit of an outsider. He was, you know, small and quiet. But I'd also like to point out that in Quebec, you know, we were just coming out of what was called the Great Darkness. The Catholic Church held huge sway here and the government of the day
was aligned with them. So when that fell, you had this kind of counterculture movement rise out of that, and part of that was this proliferation of biker gangs throughout the province with no rhyme or reason except to be counterculture and druggies and everything that your parents really hated for you to be.
So yeah, and Trudeau didn't. You don't see those early signs of a psychopathic killer.
He was known.
He didn't even have a bike at the beginning of motorbike. He loved doing wheeli's on his motorcycle. The one thing that was interesting, if you're going to eventually develop into one of the world's most prolific serial killers for organized crime, it's a good thing as a young man to land the job at an explosive factory. And that's what he did. He worked at a company called CIL that made explosives for the army and the police, so that would serve
him well in the future. Now, what happens in nineteen seventy seven, Trudeau has already committed his first kill. Nineteen seventy he's working for the Popeyes and a loser steals one of their bikes. Not a good thing to do
with a motorcycle gang. So they send this young wiry guy, Eve Trudeau out to kind of meet out some punishment and return the bike, and to some degree, possibly by accident, he lands up killing the guy, right, This wasn't his intention, but he begins to realize he's pretty good at this and this is his ticket to success. You know, you're in a biker gang. It's a business, right, you either have to be good at extortion or drug smuggling. And
Trudeau discovered he was pretty good at killing. So he began to knock off some of the enemies of the Popeyes. And in nineteen seventy seven, Sonny Barger and the Hell's Angels based in California. They've been active in California in the fifties and sixties. They start expanding throughout the States
and they decide to plant a flag in Canada. And of all the places to come, they come to Montreal, and of all the clubs to patch over, you know, to take over, absorb and make them the Hell's Angels, they choose the Popeyes.
And so in.
Nineteen seventy seven, Eve Trudeau, this young killer, becomes one of the founding members of the Hell's Angels in Quebec.
Now tell us about Quebec's unique geographical position in North America and its relation to the top crime family Organized crime families in America. Tell us about the importance of Quebec in terms of the drug business and organized crime in North America.
Sure, you know, Americans who know Canada that's the largest undefended border, and that means for now anyways, that's right, until we become the fifty first state, as some people might want, but it means that, you know, travel is pretty easy between the two countries for tourists, for business, but also for drugs and guns. Montreal is only an hour and a half drive to the border. It's an hour flight to New York and so it's very close
to the American border. It's also a huge port city, and that port brings in ships from Europe and of course from Latin and Central America. The port for many years was controlled by organized crime, particularly the Irish mafia. They were called the West End Gang, and so Montreal also had a long history as kind of sinn city.
Some American students of history, right, remember in the twenties and thirties, I mean Irving Berlin, right that the Broadway songwriter had a song about Hello, party, Let's go to Montreal. Because there was prohibition in the in the United States, and so people came to Montreal to Party. In the fifties it was gangsters and mafias, and then we had the Italian mafia set up in Montreal. They became known as the Sixth Family, you know, the Five Families in
New York. Well, the Montreal Mafia became so powerful they were seen as both allies and competitors to the New York Mafia. So Montreal has always been an important crime center, and it's where the Hell's Angels became the most powerful and influential. Just to give you some perspective, there are about maybe a thousand and members of the Hell's Angels
in America, tens of thousands around the world. Canada, which has like one tenth the population, has five hundred Hells Angels, you know, percentage wise, it's one of the biggest centers of the Hell's Angels in the world. And more importantly, in America, the Hell's Angels have to compete with the Bandidos, the Outlaws, the Pagans. They're not necessarily even the largest outlaw motorcycle gang. Well, in Canada, the Hell's Angels are
not just the largest, they're the only one. They have a complete monopoly here, which they don't have in Europe. Or Australia. So it just shows how powerful Montreal is as a crime capital.
And they're very strong in all the port cities in Vancouver, in Halifax, and you're in Montreal.
So how does Ive Trudeau become a hit man for the Hell's Angels? You write that he was so good at killing that other gangs like the Dubois Gang Dubois Brothers in Montreal hired him out for assignments. Tell us about the methods of his killing and also some of the hires that led to him becoming an assassin for the Hell's Angels.
So that's a good question. So look, nineteen seventy seven, he's already been killing for seven years for the Popeyes. But what's important for people to understand is is groups like the Popeyes and listeners might know of small motorcycle gangs. I'm not talking about legal groups. You know, I used to ride a motorcycle. There are many weekend clubs of people out motorcycling, but outlaw gangs. People probably know of
small gangs in their downs or neighborhoods. But the Popeyes were just in Quebec, right, They were a small group. They had no international connections. The Hill's Angels come in in ninety seventy seven, watch over the Popeyes. Suddenly Ef Trudeau.
That's like running a little corner store. And then suddenly you've got a McDonald's franchise, right, and you have this international connection, this international stature, but you also have international enemies, and so the Hell's Angels would systematically want to take over or wipe out their competition, notably a group called the Outlaws, but other motorcycle gangs. So suddenly Ef Trudeau, who's done the occasional hit for the Popeyes, becomes the
go to man as the Hell's Angels. Keep in mind, too, we're in the late seventies early eighties. What comes into place suddenly cocaine. Right before we were talking about marijuana and other drugs, but cocaine hugely profitable, hugely popular, and so to maintain this monopoly of cocaine, the Hall's Angels need Trudeau to systematically wipe out rivals and other gangs and even their own members, people who have gone astray.
And so he begins to do systematic killings. But a lot of what will happen will also be innocents who get caught in the crossfire.
And we're talking girlfriends, we're talking mothers, we're talking a guy who he thought was his target and who he sawt multiple times in the back. It was the wrong person. So it was just one killing after another. And well, he began as the accidental assassin in a way when he killed his first victim. It became his bread and butter, his way to acceptance, his way to being one of the guys, and in the end, to supporting his drug habit.
When you talk of this drug habit, tell us about how extensive this drug habit is and what is the growing attitude among some of the bikers and Hell's Angels in Montreal regarding Trudeau's drug habit or any of the other biker's drug habit.
Yeah, it's interesting. So you know, it's important to realize that first and foremost, the Hell's Angels became a business, became an organized crime organization. You know, in the fifties and sixties, it was fun in games, a lot of
drug sex and rock and roll. What, of course happens is you know, Sunny Barger, the international leader of the Hell's Angels, says openly in his book in the seventies, it was the gangster era, right, and he talks about the importance of cocaine, and for the Hell's Angels it was a business making money. What they didn't want were their own members becoming what was called sniffers. Right. You were bringing in this cocaine from the cartels, from the
mafia internationally, you were distributing in the streets. You wanted to make money selling it. You didn't want to lose money putting it up your nose. So there was tension when members like Ef Trudeau, who developed quite a cocaine habit, there was tension with the other bikers who wanted to
become more and more businessmen involved in cocaine trafficking. Now to step back a bit, as Trudeau is developing his cocaine habit more and more, he needs contracts for killing to get the money so that he could sustain his cocaine habit. But he's so prolific. What the Hell's Angels start doing, as we talk mentioned before, is they start farming him out, you know, almost like in the classified
ads to other gangs. There's a French gang called the Dubois Brothers that he does some killings for, but the biggest group he starts working for is a group called the Irish West End Gang. They controlled the western part of Montreal, Irish gangsters, bank robbers. They controlled the port, so the Hell's Angels and the mafia in Montreal had to do business with them, and their leader hires Trudeau
to kill a wayward drug dealer. Trudeau blows up his car, puts a remote bomb underneath his car and blows up the car right in a park. He could have killed kids and passers by. Luckily only the car gets blown up. And then when one of the leaders of the Irish gang get killed, they want and so they ask Trudeau to kill the man the assassin. Trudeau scouts out where
the man is living. He's hanging out with three other bikers in a huge skyrise in downtown Montreal, right next to the Big Hockey Arena, and as tens of thousands of hockey fans are streaming out on a weekend in November nineteen eighty five, four am that morning, Trudeau sends somebody to deliver a TV and a VCR at four am in the morning to these guys, saying, hey, you guys don't have a TV. Here's a present from Eve
Trudeau with a video about the Hell's Angels. Now, I don't know about you, Dan, but at four am in the morning, if I did a gift you know from Eve Apatchri Trudeau, Ih, well not, I wouldn't accept it, you know, you know, and he was known as both the mad bumper and the mad bomber. But they take the gift. They plug in this video and within seconds. Wow, it's such a powerful bomb. And Trudeau later will testify how he calculated, you know, the width of the walls and everything.
He figured there would be no other victims other than the people in that apartment.
And remarkably he was right. The four people die, their bodies, you know, spread all over the street, the windows of the entire skyrides crashed down, remarkably, only a few injuries. And Trudeau accomplished his goal. And he was supposed to get two hundred thousand dollars, which he needed for his drug habit. Well, the Irish Western gang who hired him said, well, you know, for the rest of your money, go to your fellow bikers because they owe us for a lot
of drugs we've been selling them. So Trudeau goes cap in hand to different chapter leaders, and they grudgingly agree to fork over the money. But then they discover that Trudeau and a lot of his chapter members, in what's called the North Chapter, there are several chapters in Quebec. The North Chapter have been sniffing cocaine and not selling it.
Not only that, been they have developed their own drug making operation and they're keeping all the profits to themselves.
So they decide to do something that I think says a lot about what the Hell's Angels are all about. They decide they will massacre their own members. They want to massacre the entire North Chapter. On a fateful weekend in March nineteen eighty five, they bring in, they invite the North Chapter to another clubhouse and they take out the machine guns and they kill five members. Luckily or ironically, you'll never guess where Eve Trudeau is.
He was in drug rehab in the middle of a forest in Oka, which is west of Montreal, and he heard about this, and he knew his days were numbered, especially when a representative of the leader of the chapter who had initiated the killings came to visit him and say his motorcycle had been seized. You know, his days as a biker were ended, except if he killed two more people, he might be spared.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.
Yeah, he's faced with I mean, this is you know, a guy who's been it's now nineteen. You know, he's been killing for the Popeyes and then the Hills Angels for fifteen years. Suddenly the tables are turned and he realizes that he's on the hit list, and so he makes a faithful decision. The police after this these massacres are searching desperately for clues, and you know, there's there's
a code of silence among the bikers. So even though five bikers have been killed and their girlfriends are worried.
First we're getting a bit of ahead of ourselves here. Police had no idea that this had happened. And for years, I mean, every time a victims surfaced, they always just figured, oh, it's a settling of accounts between criminal groups. So they had no idea that they were looking for single assassin. So then when bodies start to float, it's only when bodies start to float to the surface of the Saint Lawrence.
River where they five massacred bodies had been dumped.
Did they realize that there was something bigger going on?
So they started an investigation and they do a bit of a sweep of the bikers and Trudeau gets arrested on a minor gun possession charge, and you know, usually a gun possession charge, it's not hard to beat. You're not going to do a lot of time. But he pleads guilty and he goes to jail, possibly, we think, because he realized that might be the safest place for him given that he was on this hit list from
his former brethren. Well, the police visit him, show him evidence indications that there's a fifty thousand dollars contract on his head, and so he makes a faithful decision which will change forever his life but also in many ways the history of the Hells Angels in Canada and in America. He decides to turn informant. He tells a police officer, it's so delicious given how much blood he had on his hands. He tells the police officer, I've been killing
for them and now they want to kill me. That's gratitude. A huge amount of events will then unfold.
What kind of numbers does he tell this Johnny Dalzell, this person that he had a relationship back from nineteen sixty nine. He was a liaison with the Montreal Police and the bikers. But tell us about the the numbers that he confesses to, the kinds of YEP numbers that he talks about committing.
By this point, John Delzel is a high is a highly a high ranking police officer in charge of the night, entire night shift of the Montreal Police Department, and he gets a call.
By coincidence, he hung out with a very young EF Trudeau back in the nineteen seventies. I wouldn't say they were friends. One was a cop, the other was a biker if he.
Gave him rights home on his motorbike because Trudeau didn't have a motorbike. Dalzell gets a call from the Quebec Provincial Police Central Station stating that that E. Trudeau wants to see him. Dalzell's says, what's going on and has his driver, you know. By this point, Dalzell has his own driver take him to what's called Patana. It's it's the QPP headquarters, and he goes to see Trudeau who's sitting in a in a cell and he says, hi John, and John says, hi, hi, Eva, what's what's up. He
tells him that he wants to become an informant. But are these guys the qube Provincial police good guys to uh to work with? And Dalzel says, well, I don't know. You've got to have something to trade. That's the whole point of becoming an informant. And Trudeau says to him, well, how does forty three murders sound? And Dalzell's response is holly, ecuse my language. I think he said, excuse my language. He was shocked and he said, I think these guys
are good, so yeah, do it. And that's how he became an informant.
And what he confesses to is, you know, orchestrating or personally carrying out at least forty three murders for the outlaw bikers, including the bombings we talked about, car bombings, building bombings.
Kicking people.
There is boots, strangling people. Yeah, you know, bullets, fatal bullets to the body, stabbing to the head, stabbing. So he would do whatever was necessary. So suddenly the police and again you know, again it's nineteen eighty five, Sunny Barger and the hell's Angels have expanded around the world. Barger does some time in prison, but the police in America, in both the United States and Canada, don't have a deep understanding of the bikers, how powerful the Hell's Angels are,
and it's quite secretive. Well, suddenly you have an elite member, Eve Apache Trudeau, who is carried out contract killings, willing to fess up and testify against his former brothers, and this is quite a gold mine. So initially there's a coroner's inquest into the massacre of those five bikers, and Eve Trudeau's testimony is quite riveting. It's just a coroner's inquest,
it's not a legal trial into murder. But for the first time really in the world, he begins to explain the inner workings of the Hell's Angels, how the chapters are organized, the discipline, he talks their codes, the their their you know, very strict discipline, the importance of murders
and getting rid of enemies. It's quite a shocking first look at the inner workings of the Hell's Angels, and so it starts off well, but then things go off the rails because the police in Quebec, as in the rest of North America really didn't have a lot of experience, one with the Hell's Angels and two in dealing with high level informants, particularly the police in Quebec. You know, in New York they had already dealt with the mafia and they were mafia trials, same in other states. But
the Quebec police were not used to this. So what they do is they quickly rush and they say, Wow, you're a great informant. You're going to be our star witness, and we're going to go after a bunch of Hell's Angels. And so they arrest a lot of the Hell's Angels leaders and members in Quebec and a bunch of trials start and they want to trot Eve Trudeau out to testify. But things don't go as planned.
How did defense lawyers go to discredit Ive Trudeau? What is their attempt? How do they try to discredit Eve Trudeau on the stand.
I'm not sure that trias is the proper word, because they discredited on every one of them discredited him on the stand. The first trial was with the defense learned named Daniel Rock and he just had the list of forty three killings that Trudeau admitted he had participated in
and he had him Trudeau go through each one. Well, the jury listened, and you know, the jury's looking at this killer, admitted killer, sitting in the witness box before them, and of course they aren't going to believe this guy. And that's what happened in every trial.
And it means that in the next I think there are like five trials over the next couple of years, and in every trial in which he testifies as a key witness, used bikers get acquitted. Now, you know, it's important to step back here, Dad, because if you look at other trials that have taken place all through the States and in Canada and in Europe. Look, it is normal if you're going to get an insider, a snitch, an informant, whatever you want to call him, to testify
in any organized crime case. It's not going to be a local priest or a nun, right, it's going to be a fellow criminal by definition, right, an informant, an insider is part of the gang and they have often committed horrible, ugly crimes and they're clearly testifying in their own self interest. Anybody who's seen, you know, episodes of Law and Order know this but prosecutors and the police have to play a careful game. They know they're not dealing with a saint, so they have to do a
few things. First of all, you have to hope that the person at least will show some humanity or remorse. Right, we'll say, yes, I did those bad things, but now I see it differently, and I'm willing to pay the price for my crimes. So the jurors will feel some kind of understanding of them.
And the second thing that police have since learned to do is make sure that they confirm what this terrible, horrible witness who's done terrible things is telling them. You know that you need to have independent corroboration. It's key to winning a case.
So it's interesting to see the mistakes that they made. They gave Trudeau a very controversial sweetheart deal before he even testified, and it shocked people here in Canada when the deal becomes public before he starts testifying for forty three murders, he sentenced to life, but with the chance, which means in Canada, the almost certainty of parole after
seven years. Just seven years, which means, you know, yeah, we're talking like two months for every murder, right, he'll get a whack of money, you know, go under witness protection and for the rest of his life. While in jail, you know, he gets Color TV and steak dinners and conjugal visits, and so there's outrage. But there have been other contracts where where snitches or informants got you know, a million dollars or three million dollars, but it was
predicated on performing well. In other words, the deal is only going to come through if your testimony holds up in court, and that's not what they did. Let me just contrast based on what we were saying, because it's really important listeners understand nothing wrong with using a killer, a criminal to go after other criminals. The question is how much preparation and how do you back this up? We were talking dan about Montreal as a crime center,
a mafia crime center. Well, the biggest alleged mafia crime family in Canada is the Risutos. In fact, Vito Rizzuto, who police and prosecutors named as the Godfather of Canada, was arrested not by Canadians, but was charged by Americans for a New York mafia killing that was featured in some Hollywood movies. He gets extradited and serves time in an American prison. From two thousand and seven to twenty twelve, the mafia, like Vito, have been cooperating with the Hells
Angels in drug trafficking. When he dies, his son Leonardo takes over, and Leonardo, according to police, hires a man like Eve Trudeau, a man named Francisco Silva, a hitman, a mafia hitman who will conduct multiple murders just like Trudeau. Silva gets arrested, just like Trudeau just a few years ago, and shortly after he gets arrested, a helicopter arrives at the prison where he's being held outside of Montreal and escorts him out of the prison yard. Everybody knows he's
turned government snitch. And what do the police do. Unlike with Trudeau a couple of decades earlier, where they arrested him, gave him a great deal and then shuffled him off quickly to court with no preparation and no confirmation, the police in Quebec, having learned their lesson, spent three years, three years after he turned snitch, interviewing him getting his evidence. Then, as we've since found out, they got wired taps and
search warrants, surveillance to back up what he was saying. Oh, and they literally told the court this is so important, they said, given his heavy criminal past, we need to do extensive verification. And only three years later, really just a couple of months ago, we saw one of the biggest mafia arrests. Several leaders of the Italian mafia and
Montreal were arrested based on this hitman's testimony. So that's the lesson of our book is that not only did Trudeau get away for fifteen years of killing at least forty three people, and people ask us, you know, how did he do it? How did he hide?
He didn't have to hide. The cops didn't know that they were looking for him in the first place. And he really set the scene for the biker wars in Quebec that came afterwards, because the Hell's Angels saw that they could really kill with impunity and not have to worry about being arrested for it.
Yeah, the police saw the killings, you know, as they would call it another dangland slaying or resettling of accounts, and police officers would later tell us that at the time they kind of there was the wrong impression. Well, you know, they're just cleaning up our garbage for us, right, of course, innocence were getting caught in the crossfire.
Including an eleven year old.
Boy in one of the bombings. So what happens is the Hell's Angels if Trudeau gets the sweetheart deal, gets whisked away to jail and then witness protection. And the new Hell's Angels leaders realized that there was this guy who got away with more than forty murders and the
police weren't even looking for him. They didn't care. So when the Hell's Angels in the nineties go to war against their rivals known as the Rock Machine, to some degree tied with the American gang called the Bandidos, we see in Quebec in the nineties a more than one hundred and sixty deaths, bombings, burnings, massacres, much more than you ever saw an al Capone Chicago. Because Eve Trudeau
had set the bar. He had showed the Hell's Angels not only how to do it, but how you could get away with it.
Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages you talk about, these drug wars that were set off these wars between gangs and aj the Hell's Angels. But we haven't talked about the media response. You talked about the young boy that was caught in the crossfire, and you talk about the in your book about Alo Police,
early tabloid from the fifties. What is the media's response to all of this, Eve Trudeau and the sweetheart deal and his failed testimony, but also what is the public response.
The public was outraged, plain and simple. They thought this was the most terrible thing to have happened for Alo Police, which covered the trials extensively, and if Trudeau especially, it was all down to Eve Trudeau. So the headlines weren't government loses a case or so, and so when's the case. It was Trudeau loses loses another one. It was all down to Trudeau being a loser, being a killer, being terrible. I mean one of the headlines said the worst serial killer in Canada.
But it gets more complicated because initially, for many years, much like still happens in so many newspapers and TV reports that listeners are reading and watching in the States, much of the media buys into the myth of the Hells Angels as kind of of lovable rascals, right, you know, the Clint Eastwards bikes. You know, sure, you know they can be a little rough at the edges and maybe a little mean. Yeah, you know they yeah Christmas toys
for tots and things like that. And so they have this image, you know, like Sons of Anarchy and the images that are portrayed by Hollywood. And they have a PR machine as we mentioned, you know, the Mafia doesn't have web pages. You know, the Asian Triads aren't a registered trademark like the Hill's Angels. The Hills Angels have Sue Disney and toys, r Us and Sacks Fifth Avenue, right that that's the kind of PR power they have. So initially what you saw is is this almost hero worship.
You know, people might remember how al Capone was first treated, you know in the battles against elliot Ness, and the hero worship of people like a Sunny Barger, Willie Nelson saying at the tribute when he died there was a big party at the coliseum. There's this whole hero worship of leaders of the Hells Angels. So initially in Quebec where we had crime tabloids, but also the main newspaper tabloids. When there was like a Hell's Angel's wedding, it was
covered like a Hollywood affair. One of Quebec's most famous singers, Jeanette Renaud, sings at one of the weddings and there's pages and pages of coverage in the media. Only when investigative journalists start looking into the real connections between the
Hell's Angels and organized crime. Only when innocence like that eleven year old boy named Danielle Derosche dies because a piece of shrapnel goes into his head as he's playing outside on a summer morning in East ten Trial, as the bikers blow up a jeep to get rid of one of their enemies. The public outreach begins to build and the investigative journalists start pointing out the truth of
the Hell's Angels. And that's when the mood begins to change in Quebec, and I think in the rest of Canada, where, unlike the United States, I think big sectors of public opinion now see and recognize Hell's Angels as the organized crime group that they are. That's what's changed.
I can't tell you enough the terror of sitting in a courtroom during mom Bouchet's trial for the killing of two prison guards.
Maurris Mambouche was probably the most influential and powerful leader of the Quebec Hell's Angels and in many ways one of the most famous Hell's Angels in Canada and around the world world.
But you know, having the jury in full view of the courtroom and of the of the audience, and sitting next to bikers with knuckle dusters on their fingers, staring you know, at their elbows, on their on their laps and staring intently at the jerors this case was being tried, and just I would try to put myself in their position as because they were easy to find it. It was terrifying. And he was acquitted. Mombouchet was acquitted and allowed to walk out the courtroom that very that very moment.
I have to tell you that in that moment he storms out. They use a hitman to testify against him, because the Hells Angels had put out contracts to kill prison guards randomly in order to basically take on the state and state power. Like Eve Trudeau. That first testimony from the hitman as a disaster. Maris mom Bouche is acquitted.
He storms out of the courthouse, opens the courthouse doors, and one of the first people he knocks down is my wife, Lisa, who's a court reporter for the Montreal Gazette. And when I was doing one of my first documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on the Hell's Angels, I would have this videotape where you'd see Lisa getting knocked
down by the Hell's Angels. Now what happens, and it goes back to the theme we've been talking about throughout this then, is a very smart prosecuted sides to appeal and uses the same hit man who was a failure in the first trial. But they learned the lesson, and as we talked about, she got back up evidence. She was able to show the jury that everything this hit man was saying, even though he was a killer, was
true because of other evidence and Maur's mom. Bouche was convicted and spent the rest of his life in jail where he died. Now, during all this time, during the huge biker war, Eve Trudeau, who almost certainly would have been killed in that bike a war because there was so much violence going on, is first sitting very comfortably in jail, is then sent to a prison nobody knows where because he's obviously been protected from other prisoners. And
then he gets bail and he's underwitness protection. Nobody knows where he is, nobody hears from him until a shocking development in two thousand and four.
This crown prosecutor, a young crown prosecutor, she's only been working for the last two years, is prosecuting sexual abuse cases in a town called Saint Jaan. And there's a pile of cases on her desk, including one for a Dinny Cote, and the investigating police officer knocks on her door and says, hey, you should know that this Deny Kote is not Denny Kote. He's Eve Trudeau. And she has to think of it. You know who is Eve Trudeau.
She's that young, and she realizes that this is the same Eve Trudeau who they you know, her family argued about the cases that he was involved in, you know, around the dinner table when she was in Greade school, and she knew she had something bigger on her plate than anything she ever had before, and it was the sexual abuse of a boy.
So Trudeau, well known serial killer, protected by taxpayers, protected by police lands up sexually assaulting a young boy. He's arrested, cannot find a lawyer, lands up pleading guilty. The judge at the time says, you have evil in you, and he says you have killed more people than the entire Canadian army did in the Gulf War.
Incredible.
Sends him back to prison, and after a few years he develops cancer and he goes before the parole board, and because he's dying anyways, he asks to be released. You know, he's never given interviews, but he makes a couple of interesting statements to the parole.
Board, including that he wants to show his mother that he is a good person despite all that he's done.
And the parole board decides to free him because he's going to die anyways. One of the sister, a woman who starts our book, Darlene Weihold, who was the sister of her brother, gets killed as an innocent bystander mistaken identity. If Trudeau's first kills was to get rid of an outlaw leader of the outlaw gang, and he has the right address but the wrong man. He shoots Darlene's brother to death. When he finds out the next day in the newspapers, that he's killed the wrong guy. He laughs
at it and still wants to collect his money. He still no, no, no, you have to go kill the right guy, which he does. Meanwhile, Darlene, you know, has lost her brother, never knew until Trudeau's history comes to light what had happened. And she goes to the parole hearing to see this evil man, to see this devil, but she's quite surprised by what she sees.
Sees this ghost in a wheelchair who seems like he couldn't that he's a wisp himself. She could swat him over if she wanted. She also feels that, I mean, why is this guy asking for parole after all this time, you know, he should be rotting in jail. Her family has been destroyed. It never was able to recover. She you know, the relationship with her other brothers was broken, her mother died, it was it's just been a broken life.
But she seasoned get parole, and she just figures, well, I guess that cancer is the ultimate ultimate sentence.
Yep, she feels there's some kind of justice. He gets parole, and typically of this ghost of a man, this cipher of a man, we never know where he's paroled, he dies. We don't have an exact date, but within weeks or of being paroled, nobody knows where he's buried, and that's
the end of the hitman. But of course, I think the point is is that if you look at some of these targeted assassinations that are still going on, you know, you could read about bikers that are shot off their motorcycle in various states in the South, as as the biker wars continue. Here in Quebec, we've seen a well known biker leader early one morning at a shopping center, stepping out of his car with his little infant child and his wife, and a high powered rifle explodes from
a distance and he is failed and killed. Clearly another hit man at work. So you know, yes, Eve Trudeau was one of Canada's and indeed one of the world's most prolific serial killers, an organized crime hit man, But there are other hitmen out there, and unless police and prosecutors take organized crime seriously, they're going to continue their work.
As you write the lesson, you mentioned it already, but the lesson was to probably use Eve Trudeau as a source of information, and very much like the American model, when they had a hitman, they use the information to further their investigation rather than assuming that he would be a good witness on the stand. In the prosecution of the Hell's Angels.
Yeah, there's a small example around the same time. And you know, look, we're in twenty twenty five. The police have now had forty fifty years of experience with the Hell's Angels. There are now special biker squads. I have talked to police officers all through the United States. You know, part of the problem is the police, you know, they move on somebody who's on an organized crime beat, moves on to homicide or or fraud or a different department.
The bikers stay the same, right, They've been the bikers for twenty thirty forty years, the same leaders, So they have that same experience that the police do not have. But now there are organized viker squads in many police departments and federal police agencies in both the United States and Canada, and so they have learned a lot about how to do this work and how to be more careful.
But even back at the time when Trudeau was turning out to be such a disaster in the trials, there was another serial killer called Donald Lavois, and he was much more successful. And we talked to one police officer about how they were able to use him in a different way than Ive Trudeau was used.
Levoi, for example, told the investigator that he had killed a man and buried his body in this spot in that he surrounded the body with candles, and so the investigators went out to that spot, dug up the body and saw the candles, so that they were able to you provide independent corroboration of what Donald Levoix was saying, and that has been terribly important in the cases since.
Yeah, it shows the precedent. As we mentioned, Montreal is gearing up, possibly in the fall, for one of the biggest mafia trials we've ever seen, about a dozen mafia leaders. As I said, we're arrested based on the evidence given by a mafia hitman. But the police have spent three years getting wire taps and surveillance, and so when that trial starts, it might not still work. We don't know.
We don't know the strength of the evidence. And for sure, this hit man will testify, this man who has blood on his hands, much like Eve Apache Trudeau, but there'll be much more corroborative evidence, and that's the difference. And so we'll see what will happen. So there are many lessons. You know, when Lisa and I set out to write this book, we want it to be very careful not
to write what I like to call biker porn. You know, these biker books that either paint the bikers you know, in a kind of very heroic way, or show their evil deeds, but it still amounts to being a form of biker pornography. We wanted to make it a story not only of course, about a serial killer and especially his innocent victims, but to show what's wrong with our justice system, with our police system across North America when
it comes to organized crime. What are the lessons we could learn from the story of Ivapatchi Trudeau and I hope that's the power of the book.
Absolutely. I want to thank you both, Lisa Fiterman and Julian Sheriff for coming on and talking about your latest hit Man, The Untold Story of Canada's Dead Assassin. For those people that might want to find out more about this book and your other work, could you tell us about a website or any social media that you both do.
Yeah, are just google our name wwwjulianshare dot com.
And www dot Lisa Fiterman dot com.
And there's lots about Hitman, documents, interviews, articles that have been written, and my other books that we mentioned, Angels of Death, Road to Hell, quite a few books about organized crime in America, and you can contact us through those websites and we answer all our emails.
And if I may just add one thing for Julian's previous biker books, he always, you know, he would always be asked by someone in the audience, aren't you scared? And he would always answer, my wife starts the car in the morning, and he can't.
Do that anyway, can't use that joke anymore. Nope.
Well, thank you so much, Lisa Fiterman and Julian Cheer for hit Man, the untold story of Canada's deadliest assassin. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.
Take care, stay safe everyone.
Bye.
Thank you,