Wrong Side of the Law Read online

  The Encyclopedia of Canadian Organized Crime.

  Bourgeois reached for the keys in the ignition, but was too late. Two men jumped in and forced him to the centre of the seat between them. A moment later, the car was racing down the street.

  The stockily built, middle-aged man with the crew-cut hair who had seized the steering wheel seemed to be out of breath as he gasped, “Keep quiet! Don’t get excited! We’re armed, but we won’t touch you.” The next day, sitting in his home just two blocks from Bordeaux Jail, Bourgeois told reporters about his encounter with the jail breakers.

  The car-jacker at the wheel asked him, “Do you know me?”

  “I said I didn’t know him and I didn’t want to know him,” said Bourgeois. “Then he said he was Lucien Rivard and he had just jumped the wall and escaped from Bordeaux. I looked at him again and then I remembered the pictures in the papers.”

  Bourgeois said that Rivard slowed down after putting some distance between himself and the jail. He actually seemed relaxed as he navigated the streets of Montreal, smoking a cigarette and offering one to Bourgeois. The frightened accountant, on the other hand, was anything but relaxed.

  “I asked them several times to let me off,” Bourgeois said, “but they replied each time not to worry. They would let me off in good time. I was more worried about the other fellow than about Rivard. He’s the one who shouted, ‘Grab him!’ … He looked like a pretty rough customer.”

  Bourgeois reported that Rivard told him why he had escaped. “He said he was fifty years old and that he was expecting a pretty long sentence. He said he preferred to take a chance at breaking out rather than face the prospect of staying in jail until the age of sixty-five or seventy.”

  Bourgeois still feared for his life, even though Rivard had told him he wouldn’t be harmed. He told the jail-breakers they could have the fifty dollars in his wallet. Rivard quietly replied, “We don’t need your money.”

  Then, to Bourgeois’s astonishment, Rivard gave him two dollars for taxi fare so he could get to his office. He even had a pencil and paper in his pocket so he could write down Bourgeois’s office phone number. Rivard promised to call Bourgeois and let him know where he could find his car. Twenty minutes after jumping into his car, Rivard and Durocher dropped Bourgeois on Crémazie Boulevard at Montée St. Michel, and then drove away.

  Bourgeois took a cab to his office. He arrived just in time to receive Rivard’s phone call — fifteen minutes after the escapees had released him. Rivard told him his car was in the parking lot of a shopping centre at Montée St. Michel and Fleury Street. Bourgeois phoned the police and told them about his encounter with criminals. Officers found the car just where Rivard had said it would be. Inside were two pairs of jail-issue trousers. Rivard and Durocher had brought along a change of clothes. They had planned the escape down to the last detail. The fact that Bourgeois’s car had been abandoned only a mile from the Pie IX Bridge suggested to police that the fugitives might already have escaped from Montreal Island. Considering Rivard’s underworld connections, they could be almost anywhere and might even be out of the country within hours. Because of the “Great Escape,” Rivard quickly became a household name, even to Canadians who might have paid only passing attention to the political controversy in which he was embroiled.

  Lucien Rivard was born in Montreal on June 16, 1914. He was a high-school dropout, and spent some time working in Quebec’s bush camps. Rivard’s name first appeared in police records in 1933 when, at the age of nineteen, he received a suspended sentence for breaking into a storage shed. Two years later he was fined for loitering. In 1938, Rivard did his first stint in jail when he was sentenced to a year for attempting to break into a store and receiving stolen goods. He was back in prison again in 1943, starting a three-year stretch for burglary.

  After that, Rivard managed to stay out of jail, but it wasn’t because he had decided to go straight. He had been learning the ropes of living on the wrong side of the law and had made friends with influential people in the Montreal underworld. He’d found that there was more money to be made dealing drugs than in petty burglaries, and less chance of going to jail.

  Rivard, known to his friends as “Moose,” became associated with organized-crime figures like Giuseppi “Pep” Cotroni and “Monseigneur” Paul Mandolini. He started off in the illicit narcotics trade pushing “goof balls” (made from a variety of drugs including heroin, cocaine, amphetamines, and barbituates) in bars and pool halls. Over time he rose in the ranks to become a major figure in an international drug ring dealing mainly in heroin. Rivard was suspected of being an important player in dealings involving Montreal gangsters and the Corsican drug-smuggling organization known as the “French Connection.”

  In 1956, Rivard went to Cuba to manage a casino for Mondolini. He allegedly ran guns to the rebel forces of Fidel Castro, who was fighting to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Rivard was arrested in 1958, imprisoned, and then expelled from Cuba.

  Rivard returned to Montreal, none the worse for his Cuban adventure. He opened up a luxurious beach resort called Plage Ideal (Ideal Beach) on Île Jésus, north of Montreal. According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, it was a place much favoured by men “with strong appetites for wenching and drinking.” Among the resort’s patrons were Rivard’s associates in the drug- and gun-trafficking business.

  For a few years, Rivard lived the high life. He had a townhouse in a working-class neighbourhood in Montreal’s north end, as well as a cottage on Île Jésus. He sported expensive suits and shoes and mixed with celebrities and high-profile gangsters, just like a figure from the Roaring Twenties. He always had a thick wad of cash from which he could peel off fifty- and hundred -dollar notes to impress his friends.

  Rivard and his beautiful wife, Marie, thirty-two, were devoted to each other. They had no children, but Rivard was nonetheless a man to whom family ties were important. He supported a sister and gave her husband a part-time job as a gatekeeper at the resort.

  Ties of a different nature were not only making Rivard wealthy, but also keeping him out of the clutches of the law. Not long after Rivard returned to Montreal from Cuba, he was arrested for possession of an unregistered handgun. A few words were spoken to the right people and the charge was quietly dropped. Sometime later, Rivard was charged with robbing a contractor of $5,000. When the case went to trial, Rivard’s three accusers were suddenly stricken with loss of memory. Among law-enforcement agencies, Rivard became known as “The Brains.”

  However, Rivard’s impunity was about to take a major blow. On October 10, 1963, a Montreal hoodlum named Michel Caron and his wife were crossing the border from Mexico into Laredo, Texas. An American customs agent thought Caron was acting in a suspicious manner and had the car searched. Hidden in the door panels were thirty-five kilograms of pure heroin. With the dope having an estimated value of more than $12 million once it had been cut and sold on the streets, the bust was one of the biggest in American history up to that time.

  Mrs. Caron claimed to know nothing about the heroin. Her husband refused to talk to police. “I don’t say nothing,” he told them. “If I do, I’m dead.” But the Texas police found a note in Caron’s pocket in handwriting that was eventually identified as that of Lucien Rivard. They had also arrested another drug courier named Roger Beauchemin who admitted he’d been working for Rivard and who said Rivard ran a multi-million-dollar narcotics operation out of the resort.

  Under police interrogation, Caron finally agreed to a deal. He would “sing” in return for a relatively light sentence of ten years and the promise of protection for his family in Montreal. Caron came to this decision even though a Montreal lawyer had flown to Texas to warn him of dire consequences if he “blabbed” to the police.

  Caron said he earned his living as a “salesman and gambler.” The address he gave as his place of residence was a house with which Montreal police were familiar. Officers had been called there for a variety of reasons and had sometimes been assaulte
d. Caron said that periodically he and other couriers working for Rivard went to Mexico on “holiday trips.” They picked up shipments of heroin that had been transported from the Middle East via France and South America and smuggled it into the United States. Caron said that Rivard paid $3,000 for each trip a courier like him made.

  Sometimes the couriers went to Paris, taking their cars with them. On the return voyage, the panels of the cars would be stuffed with heroin. On one occasion, according to Caron, a car that had just been unloaded from a transatlantic liner had caught fire on a downtown Montreal street. Rivard had coolly stood by and watched firemen put out the blaze, then called for a tow truck to haul the car away.

  Caron’s information led the RCMP to four of Rivard’s criminal associates in Montreal. They were also looking for Mandolino, who was believed to have made a sudden trip to Italy. In the months to come, a joint investigation by the FBI and the RCMP would result in the cracking of a major international drug ring in which Rivard was connected to Carlo Gambino, head of one of the powerful Mafia crime families in the United States. A police raid on a Montreal bus terminal would turn up sixty-one kilograms of pure heroin hidden in a locker. Among those caught in the police net were a man who claimed to be an employee of the Uruguayan foreign ministry in Montreal, a French citizen who had previously been deported from the United States on drug charges and had then re-entered the country illegally, and the Mexican ambassador to Bolivia.

  When Caron began to talk, information about the Canadian connection eventually reached the office of United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy. He personally called his counterpart in Ottawa to ensure that Caron’s family would be protected. Kennedy also told Canadian officials that the Americans wanted Lucien Rivard.

  RCMP officers arrested Rivard on June 19, 1964. As they led him to the car that would take him to Bordeaux Jail, Rivard called to Marie, “Don’t worry. I won’t be gone long.”

  Pierre Lamontagne, a Montreal lawyer and prosecutor who specialized in narcotics cases, was retained by the United States Department of Justice as its representative in the extradition process. Above all, the Americans wanted Lamontagne to make sure Rivard was not granted bail. They had no doubt that if Rivard got out of jail, he’d disappear. Rivard hired as his representative Raymond Daoust, who was considered to be one of the best criminal lawyers in Quebec.

  While Daoust worked on getting him a bail hearing, Rivard had to put up with the inconvenience of being lodged in Bordeaux. He spent hours reading legal texts, concentrating on points of law concerning bail. Later investigations would reveal that Rivard bribed guards to allow him the use of a telephone. For twenty-five dollars he could make two calls a day. Rivard phoned Marie daily. He didn’t say who else he called, but even though regulations allowed visits from family members only, Rivard had two visits from a known Montreal gangster. For one hundred dollars a week, Rivard’s cell door would be left open until 11:00 p.m. The regulatory lockup time was 4:30 p.m.

  In fact, Rivard was one of about forty inmates with the status of “VIP.” He could roam the corridors freely and watch hockey games on the television in the psychiatric wing. He gambled for high stakes in dice games. Rivard had an electric hot plate in his cell so he could fry eggs and boil water for instant coffee if he got hungry between scheduled mealtimes. His hard cot was cushioned with two mattresses. Months later, when Bordeaux came under severe criticism for being a “Queen Elizabeth Hotel” for criminals, guards explained to the press, under the promise of anonymity, that the VIP system had been in place for a long time and wasn’t their fault. They said that “big shots” like Rivard who had money and power could stir up a “bingo” (riot) if their privileges were hindered. They could even arrange for the transfer of any guard who threatened to upset the system. For those reasons, the guards said, they tolerated an arrangement that they didn’t necessarily condone. Nonetheless, they admitted that some of the guards, who were notoriously underpaid, supplemented their meagre incomes by selling goof balls and liquor to inmates.

  As a Bordeaux VIP, Rivard wasn’t exactly suffering behind bars in a tiny cell. But he was certainly afraid of being extradited to the United States and he might have decided to explore alternative options in case Daoust wasn’t successful. There would be evidence that Marie, who insisted that her husband was being framed by Roger Beauchemin because Rivard had fired him from a job at the resort, was also trying to help arrange bail. She allegedly approached influential people and borrowed large sums of money that could go toward a bail bond — or a bribe.

  The Rivard case exploded into a national scandal on Monday, November 23, when Erik Nielsen, the Progessive Conservative MP for the Yukon, dropped a bombshell in Parliament. Nielsen, a former Crown prosecutor in Whitehorse, stood up in the House of Commons and charged that Raymond Denis, a former aide to René Tremblay, the immigration minister in Lester Pearson’s Liberal government, had offered Pierre Lamontagne $20,000 to “go easy” in his opposition to bail for Rivard. Nielsen further charged that Guy Lord, recently a special assistant to Justice Minister Guy Favreau, had tried to “coerce” Lamontagne into throwing the fight against Rivard’s bail by threatening to blacklist him from future government work. Nielsen told a stunned Parliament that the case involved people known to belong to “the international crime society known as the Mafia or Cosa Nostra.”

  “The fact remains,” said Nielsen, “I can find no other way of putting it, that these tentacles of this international cartel dealing in narcotics extended into the very offices of two ministers of the federal government.”

  Nielsen’s accusations resulted in a seven-month-long inquest headed by Quebec Supreme Court Chief Justice Frédéric Dorion. RCMP officers testified that Lamontagne had been in fear of his life when he reported the bribery attempt. He’d had threatening phone calls and said, “I may find myself at the bottom of the river.”

  Raymond Daoust told the inquest that his client was “outraged” when he learned that illegal means had been used to clear the way for his bail. There was speculation that the bribe had not originated with Rivard, but with American gangsters who were worried about what he might say if he were extradited to the United States. Whether or not Rivard was behind the bribe, a Jekyll and Hyde image of him took shape during the inquest. In his appearances before Dorion, Rivard was joking and affable. He was allowed to kiss Marie, and, according to a Toronto Star reporter, “her eyes shone.”

  But there was testimony from police officers that seemed to justify Lamontagne’s fear that Rivard’s “gang” would try to get rid of him. The police said at least two potential witnesses — men who were associates of Rivard — feared for their lives because of “Rivard and his boys.”

  The “Rivard Affair” shook the Pearson government, but in the end didn’t topple it. Judge Dorion’s report had scathing words for the conduct of several members of the Liberal party. Raymond Denis was convicted of attempting to obstruct justice and sentenced to two years in prison. Guy Favreau, who had failed to take appropriate action following the bribe attempt, was obliged to resign in disgrace. He died a broken man two years later. For all its in-depth probing, the Dorion inquest left many mysteries unsolved. The man who might have been able to answer some disturbing questions about government officials and the “tentacles” of organized crime wasn’t talking. Lucien Rivard’s number-one concern was getting out of jail before the Americans could get their hands on him. South of the border, he faced a possible forty-year sentence.

  While the political storm raged, legal counsel for Rivard and three other men — Charles Emil Groleau, Julien Gagnon, and Joseph Jones — served a writ of habeas corpus. On December 4, 1964, the men were taken to court for the hearing. Reporters and photographers were waiting in the courthouse corridor. The prisoners didn’t want their pictures taken. They snarled threats, lunged at reporters, punched and kicked photographers, and knocked cameras to the floor. Police got between the prisoners and the newsmen and ordered the latter out. Veterans of the
press said they had not seen such a disturbance in the courthouse in many years.

  The hearing was remanded to December 18. This time strict security measures were in place. Doors leading to the courtroom that were usually open were locked. Police officers shielded the prisoners from the press. The case was remanded again, but even though nothing dramatic happened, the name of the principal figure was still headline material. “Rivard Well Guarded at Montreal Hearing” reported the Globe and Mail.

  Just how “well guarded” Rivard actually was would become the next big question in the Rivard Affair, and the focal point of yet another national scandal. The Dorion Inquest was still in progress when Rivard and Durocher made their sensational escape from Bordeaux Jail. Canadians woke up on the morning of March 3, 1965, to news that was more than stunning; it was an international embarrassment.

  Rivard’s escape infuriated a lot of people, including American authorities who were already growing impatient with the time the Canadians were taking to get through the extradition process. “We’ll have to regroup now, and consider our position again,” said one exasperated American official. “Ricard [sic] was the key to breaking this ring. I hate to think of him on the loose and in a position to operate again … This is a heck of a way to guard an important prisoner. The whole case is becoming ludicrous.”

  One of the Dorion inquiry lawyers, upon first hearing the news of the escape, said, “It’s got to be a joke organized by the press.” An editorial that appeared in the Toronto Star on March 3 lamented, “We hate to think what the escape of Lucien Rivard from Bordeaux Jail is going to do to Canada’s image in the United States … the affair must leave Washington wondering what sort of banana republic is sprouting to the north.”

  People at all levels scurried to cover themselves and dodge any blame. Guards who were immediately suspended without pay pending an investigation complained they were being made scapegoats. “How am I going to feed my family?” asked guard Roland Larue, who spoke to the press in defiance of an order to keep quiet. “There was no payoff here, I’m sure of it. These two slugged a guard and made it over the fence. It doesn’t look like a set-up to me.”