Julian Sher

Chapter 8
Trapped

By Friday evening, a tumultuous week was coming to an end in Clinton. As much as they could, the children and adults in the PMQs around the air force station tried to follow life’s normal pursuits. Steve was looking forward to some fun and adventure over the weekend. Some fishing, some baseball, maybe another trip into the woods to work on the tree house. As the sun dipped in the horizon, Steve headed over to one of his favourite places around the base, Lawson’s farm — unaware that he was about to spend his last hour of liberty for the next ten years.

***

It looked like rain, Bob Lawson thought as he rushed to finish the evening chores — a godsend after the crop-scorching heat all week. Lawson was eager to get a little haying done. “If you start the lawn mower, I can cut the grass,” suggested his mother, Alice Lawson.

Bob was in the barn with the cows when he heard a loud, clanging racket. A fifteen-foot metal chain attached to the farm dog had somehow got tangled up in the mower and was slowly dragging the terrified mutt toward the sharp, spinning rotors. Lawson knew he was too far away to get to the mower in time. He caught sight of Steve rushing up the driveway to the farm. Fortunately, the mower stalled, and the chain stopped only a few feet before the dog would have had an unappetizing encounter with the rotors.

Laughing, the boy began to untangle the chain from the lawn mower. Still, the Lawsons felt that Steve was more reserved than usual. “Steve seems a little quiet this evening,” Alice Lawson told her son. Perhaps Lynne’s death had shaken the boy, Bob thought. The day before, Steve had dropped by the barn and appeared to be bewildered by events: “I heard they found Lynne in the bush,” Lawson remembers Steve telling him. “How did she get there?”

With the Lawsons’ dog safe from the marauding mower, Steve hopped on Lawson’s new Ferguson 35 tractor. “He loved being on that tractor,” Lawson recalls. “I would often let him ride on it. Steve was good with machines.” The lanky boy stood on the tractor’s floorboard, leaning against the fender, while the farmer rode across his land. When they got to the edge of the crops, Steve jumped off and perched himself on a large rock. For safety reasons, Lawson never let Steve stay on the tractor when he hooked it up to the harvester. As Lawson began haying, Steve rested on the rock, gazing out at the paths and trails where the children played hide-and-seek and picked berries. He saw the thick expanse of Lawson’s bush where only a few weeks earlier he and his friend Leslie had built a tree house.

“He was sitting on that stone, but next time, when I turned the tractor around and came back, he was gone,” Lawson recalls. “I guessed he had walked back to the barn.”

Bored, or perhaps anxious to get home for a bite to eat, Steve headed back down to the county road.

He never made it home.

***

At the Goderich OPP station, Inspector Harold Graham had made up his mind. Jocelyne’s story about a date and the phone call with the results from the laboratory analysis of Lynne’s stomach contents pointed the finger at the Truscott boy. “At ten minutes to seven, I had him picked up,” Graham said. He sent out Const. Donald Trumbley to bring in the boy — preferably without his parents’ knowledge. “I asked the constable to try and get him away from home.” The OPP cruiser pulled up to the gateway at the Lawson farm.

“Would you get into the car and come with me? We want you to read over your statement,” Trumbley explained, referring to Steve’s interview with Graham that morning.

“Yes,” said the teenager, without a moment’s hesitation. Looking back forty years later at that fateful moment, Steven explains that in 1959 young people had an abiding respect and trust in authority. “Back then when you’re fourteen years old, you looked up to the police. When they told you to get in the car, you got in the car,” he says. Steve never thought to question where Trumbley was taking him, much less to ask about his legal rights.

Trumbley pulled into the Goderich police post with his teenage passenger and took the boy into a small room at the back of the station. Steve had no reason to believe he was doing anything but signing a witness statement. The police did not tell him he was no longer simply a witness, that he had instead become their chief suspect. They did not tell him this trip to the station was, to all intents and purposes, an arrest. Certainly, they wanted his signature–but not just on a statement. What the OPP wanted from Steven was a confession and they were going to do everything they could to get one, even if that meant bending a few rules to the breaking point.

When Steven walked into that police station Friday, he was walking into what, in hindsight, can only be described as a trap, carefully planned and well executed by Harold Graham. Twenty minutes before dispatching Trumbley to pick up Steve, Graham had another officer, Sgt. Charles Anderson, obtain a search warrant for the Truscott home. Anderson then contacted Dr. David Hall Brooks, the chief medical officer on the base “and advised him of what we had planned to do.”

Graham had a very specific objective in mind — get Steven alone, without any interference from his parents. Years later, at a police convention, he boasted about his well-planned strategy: “I was well aware of the judge’s guidelines that it is preferable to have a parent or social worker present when you are questioning a juvenile,” he explained to his appreciative audience. “I was also well aware that it would be an exercise in futility, so I chose to disregard those guides.”

Graham’s was a bold admission of how far the police were willing to go to get their man, even if their man happened to be a fourteen-year-old boy. “Judges can always set their own guides for prisoners, they are not laws,” Graham said defiantly. And he was right. The Juvenile Delinquents Act in 1959 did not require the police to ensure a youth’s parent or guardian was present; today it is the law. Still, while Graham had not strictly violated any laws, he seemed to forget that the police had not told Steven he was a “prisoner” or even officially a suspect. At the boy’s murder trial three months later, the judge was unsparing in his criticism of the police’s tactics that night: “The ordinary safeguard should have been taken and he should have been warned. He was undoubtedly under arrest. It was clear he would never have been allowed to go.”

“Will you read this aloud,” the inspector told the boy as he handed him a typed statement based on Steve’s interview earlier that day. Steve read the text out loud and, according to Graham’s account, asked for only one minor change. He said his return to the school was not at 8:00 p.m., but closer to 7:50 or 7:55 p.m. “That was crossed out . . . and changed, and he said then it was correct, and I asked him to sign it and he did,” Graham said. Steven signed the statement at eight o’clock, ten minutes after their meeting began.

The inspector from the Criminal Investigations Bureau, a veteran of a decade’s worth of homicide cases, now had the boy exactly where he wanted him: alone in a room in a police station. Every police officer hopes they can crack a murder case with a confession, thereby saving the courts time and trouble. For the next hour and a half, Graham, assisted by Constable Trumbley, probed and prodded Steven.

Graham began by questioning his story of seeing a car at the highway. “I told him it was difficult to understand that because the distance was so great and I asked him if he was sure,” the inspector later recounted.

Yes, Steve said, he was sure.

Was he sure that he had seen Lynne with her thumb out at the highway?

Well, the boy said, he had not actually seen her thumb; he had seen her arm out.

Graham noticed a crescent-shaped scratch on Steven’s left arm. How did he injure himself, the police officer asked.

On a tractor in Lawson’s barn, came the reply.

Then Graham moved to the guts of the interrogation: “Have you ever taken a girl into Lawson’s bush?” he asked.

“No,” Steve said.

“Have you ever made a date to take a girl into Lawson’s bush?”

“No.”

“Have you ever spoken to Jocelyne Gaudet about going into Lawson’s bush?”

“No.”

“Were you at Jocelyne Gaudet’s house on Tuesday night?”

“No, I haven’t been to Jocelyne Gaudet’s home since last winter,” Steve answered, according to Graham’s account.

“Have you ever phoned Jocelyne Gaudet?”

“No, I have never telephoned Jocelyne Gaudet.” Steve said. “The only conversation I have had with her is in school.” It was a strange question. Had Jocelyne told the police about a phone call to arrange the alleged secret date? If so, the police apparently considered it an unreliable claim, for the police would never again mention a phone call to Jocelyne.

There is no official record of what went on for the duration of the ninety-minute interrogation. The two police officers were the only witnesses. Graham took only a single sheet of notes. Today, Steven Truscott remembers the first hours of his slow, steady slide into the abyss of incarceration: “They would take turns questioning me and calling me a liar,” he says of Graham and Trumbley. “One would come in and question you. He would leave the room. The other one would come in and he would say: ‘You lied. You did this, you did that.’ They keep questioning you and calling you a liar, and you just can’t believe what’s going on. In your mind, you can’t understand what’s happening. And all through the whole thing I stuck to what I had said.”

If the OPP inspector was hoping the boy would crack, he was sadly disappointed. “He steadfastly maintained that his statement was true in every detail,” Graham later reported.

Throughout his ordeal that night — and indeed, throughout all his forthcoming days in court — Steve never cried, at least not in public. Much like his mother, the fourteen-year-old held his emotions in close check. “I just wasn’t brought up that way — it’s kind of not the air force way,” he says today in reflection. “I knew I hadn’t done anything. I had nothing to be afraid of.”

That did not mean the boy was not scared out of his wits as he sat in a police interrogation room. Why hadn’t the police contacted his parents?

***

Doris Truscott was in a panic. It was 9:30 p.m. and there was still no sign of her son.

“Where is he?” she wondered. “He should have been home — it’s very seldom he’s late.”

Bob Lawson was baling his final load of hay for the day in his barn when a pair of headlights lit up the driveway to his farmhouse. As he walked over to the car, he saw Doris Truscott roll down her window. The farm was the only place she could think her boy might be this late at night.

“Have you seen Steve?” she asked. “It’s getting dark and it’s not like Steve to stay out late.”

“I saw Steve earlier, but not for a couple of hours,” the farmer informed her.

Doris was filled with a sense of dread. One schoolchild had already gone missing and turned up dead in the bush. Where in heaven’s name was her boy?

***

At the OPP station in Goderich, Graham had decided to take Steven to the RCAF guardhouse in Clinton. He ordered one of his men to find Steve’s father, Warrant Officer Dan Truscott. The police got Steven to the guardhouse on the base around 9:25 p.m. Ten minutes later, his father arrived “in a hostile attitude,” according to Graham. The inspector had kept Steven in custody — getting him to sign a statement and then questioning him about a murder — for two and a half hours without even informing his parents. But the OPP man could not grasp why a parent would be upset at the officers who had swept away his son without notifying anyone.

“The father asked me in a belligerent manner how and where Steven had been picked up,” Graham said. Dr. Brooks painted a slightly more sympathetic picture, reporting that Steve’s father “naturally was the anxious parent who wanted to know what had happened to his son and why he was there.”

For his part, the frightened boy felt relieved at least one of his parents was on hand. “My dad was there, so I figured, you know, he’s not going to let anything happen,” Steve says.

Dan Truscott immediately wanted to know if his son had been taken into police custody with his own consent.

“I asked him to get into the car to accompany me to read the statement and he got in willingly,” Trumbley reported.

Dan turned to his son: “Is that right, Steven?”

“Yes,” the boy answered.

Graham attempted to allay the father’s fears. “I told them that Steven had been brought in on my instructions and as a result of our investigation thus far certain suspicions had been directed toward Steven.” The OPP inspector explained he wanted doctors to examine the boy.

Steve’s father asked to speak with the boy alone and took him into an adjoining room. “I told him they were accusing me and calling me a liar,” Steve recounts. “It was quite clear they were trying to pin this on me.” Dan emerged from the chat with his son a few moments later.

“I refuse to allow Steven to be examined by a doctor,” he said. “Steven says you accused him of murdering Lynne and called him a liar.”

“I didn’t accuse him of murdering Lynne at all,” Graham replied. “I pointed out certain features from his statement that indicated he was lying. My only duty is to try to determine the truth.”

“Steven never goes out with girls,” his father reportedly said.

“We have information that he had a date with a girl that night,” Graham replied, referring to Jocelyne’s story of her rendezvous with Steven in the bush. “Will you consent to a medical examination of Steven?”

It was a pivotal moment. Ever the military man eager to do the right thing, Warrant Officer Dan Truscott was not one to question rules and regulations. He turned to his friend, Sgt. Charles Anderson of the OPP. “What do you think about it, Charlie?”

“I think you should consent to the examination,” Anderson suggested. “It looks bad if you don’t consent to the doctor examining Steve.” (Truscott could not know that Anderson was hardly a neutral advisor. Under Graham’s orders, he had already taken steps to secure a search warrant for the Truscott home, even before Steven was picked up. Lawyers would later convince a judge that Anderson’s comments were an unfair police inducement.)
In any event, it is doubtful that Dan Truscott could have wrested his son away from the police, even if he wanted to. “It was apparent to me it was unlikely he would get the boy home,” Dr. Brooks reported. In the end, Steve’s father bowed to authority; he turned to the OPP officers surrounding his son and agreed to the medical exam. Nobody asked Steve what he thought.

Initially, there was some question about whether Brooks should conduct the exam, but after consulting with the commanding officer, it was determined it would be better if an outside, civilian doctor performed the task.
The police asked Dan Truscott for the name of his family doctor. He mentioned that in the past, they had consulted a Clinton general practitioner, Dr. John Addison. Addison had briefly seen Steven twice in October 1957 for a urinary infection, and had treated Steven’s brother Bill for a threatened appendix.

Dr. Addison arrived at the guardhouse around 10:35 p.m. A graduate of the University of Western Ontario, he had been practising medicine in Clinton since 1943. A stern-looking man with dark hair, a trim moustache and black glasses, Addison was well liked by the local citizenry. Presumably, the family doctor was supposed to be more dispassionate than Dr. Brooks, the military doctor working closely with the police. But Addison’s first move was to consult with the air force medical man. “I met Dr. Brooks first, who outlined a bit of the story that had transpired before as to why they wanted me to examine the prisoner,” Addison said later. “I had known . . . that this boy was the possible suspect of the rape.” Hardly a good start for a neutral observer.

“He accompanied me into the adjoining office,” Brooks said. “An examination of Steven then took place.”

Prologue
“American ­Legend”

Hells Angels will continue to ride to the ends of the earth.
The sun never sets on a Hells Angel ­patch.
–Hells Angel Sonny ­Barger

They had not planned on beheading ­her.

But Cynthia Garcia needed to be taught a lesson. The ­forty-­four-­year-­old single mother of six had committed a fatal error. Nobody disrespects the Hells Angels, especially in their own clubhouse. In their minds, “the stupid bitch” deserved to ­die.

It was a cool fall Thursday night in Mesa, Arizona, in October 2001. Ten bikers had just returned to the Hells Angels clubhouse after one of their favourite drinking holes shut down at 1:30 a.m. But the boys were still hungry for some ­action.

The clubhouse was in a rundown part of town just east of Phoenix, on a small street lined with ­busted-­up pickups, faded brown palm trees and ­broken-­down white fences. The Mesa headquarters was prettier than most biker hangouts, which often look more like bunkers than clubhouses. The local Angels had taken care to keep up appearances. The Spanish shingles on the slanted roof were not cracked; the white stucco wall was immaculate, except for a striking logo – two big yellow Death Heads bracketing the name “Mesa” in blood red. A Death Head also adorned the black mailbox on the ­sidewalk.

The winged Death Head is the Hells Angels’ proud emblem: an angry-looking skull with a helmet and feathers streaming behind him. It’s frightening – as it’s meant to be: don’t fuck with the Angels. We’ll eat you ­alive.

Inside the clubhouse, the Angels sent out one of their eager recruits to hunt down some women. He came back with Cynthia Garcia, five foot five and weighing 120 pounds – tiny compared to most of the beefy boozers in biker leather. She started drinking with the boys and having a good time, but then things turned ­nasty.

According to a gang officer who investigated her murder, “They brought her back for some recreation, and she didn’t want to recreate. So they beat her down. She still got mouthy with them. So they threw her in the trunk of a car and finished her off out in the desert.” She was barely alive, beaten and bloody, when the three bikers who’d taken it on themselves to deal with her dragged her out of the car and threw her on her back in the sand. They stabbed her repeatedly, according to a later confession from one of the ­killers.

“I want to cut the bitch’s head off,” the confessed killer claimed one of his bikers said. But his knife was too dull to finish the decapitation, according to the same ­testimony.

A bad knife was the least of the bikers’ problems. They could not know that for one of the killers, the slaying of an innocent woman had pushed him over the edge: he would turn traitor, rat on his biker brothers and start working undercover for the police. In the end, he would help bring down not only his two fellow killers but more than forty Hells Angels from five states on murder and drug charges in the biggest federal sweep against the bikers in American ­history.

Half a world away, Don Hancock, the retired chief of the Criminal Investigations Branch in Western Australia, drove through a quiet suburban neighbourhood in Perth with his friend Lou Lewis. The two men had passed the day at the racetrack, won a bit of money and were now enjoying the serene pleasure of time well spent. As they pulled into Hancock’s driveway, a powerful bomb positioned under his seat blew Hancock out of the car, shredding his body like a rag doll and killing him instantly. His friend died soon afterwards. A cellphone had triggered the bomb, and the outlaw biker who had dialled the number assured his mate that they wouldn’t be charged for the ­call.

A year earlier, outlaw bikers had literally blown to bits a small town in Australia’s outback where Hancock had retired. The former police officer had fled but was relentlessly tracked ­down.

Australians call outlaw bikers “bikies,” but there’s nothing friendly about the apparent diminutive. The murder of Hancock would launch a massive police investigation and inspire tighter laws designed to bring the bikies under control. But it was too late. Aussie bikies, bold imitators of their American brethren, had already become the country’s first nationwide crime syndicate, dominating Australia’s ­underbelly.

Three years later and another continent away, three bodies were discovered in a stream near the town of Eicht, in the southern Netherlands. This time, all three victims were elite bikers, members of the Dutch Hells Angels Nomads chapter, and one was the chapter ­president. Nomads are often the most powerful among fully patched bikers, not restricted to operations in a specific geographic turf. But not even Nomads are always immune to insider treachery.

It was late in February 2004. All had been shot several times ­point-­blank, ­execution-­style, their assassination sparked by the theft of 293 kilograms of cocaine with an estimated street value of $11 million. But this was much more than your usual burned drug deal. The murders revealed a hitherto undisclosed story in the outlaw biker chronicles: their international ties to Colombian drug dealers and narco-­terrorists.

Police later arrested a member of the Hells Angels chapter in Curaçao, an island in the southern part of the Caribbean that is part of the Dutch Antilles. The biker flipped and informed on thirteen Hells Angels Nomads back in Holland, who were then arrested and charged with the murders of their ­leaders.

The cocaine was reportedly shipped to Amsterdam, via the Angels’ new chapter in Curaçao, from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), an insurgency group labelled ­narco-­terrorists by the U.S. State Department. Police frequently compare the bikers to terrorist organizations because of their explosive violence and ­cell-­like structure, and the killings in the Netherlands revealed direct connections between the ­two.

For the first time, Dutch authorities, who had been notoriously reluctant to take on the country’s Hells Angels, the most powerful bikers in Europe, decided to act. Justice officials investigating the murders eventually charged almost the entire Nomads chapter, not just with murder and cocaine smuggling but also with being part of a criminal conspiracy. Their trial would send shock waves through the European biker ­underworld.

From the Hardcover edition.

Prologue

“HEAR THE CHILDREN CRY”

The cage was not big, even if it had been for a dog. For a small six-year-old, it was cramped. The little girl, though, was used to it. Shivering–more from fear than from cold–she crouched in her pen.

She was naked, except for a small orange wristband on her right arm. Her soft brown hair fell over her shoulders. On her face, no tears ran down her cheeks.

The man did unspeakable things to her, hurting her, touching her, penetrating her private parts. And then took digital pictures, movies. All the time.

Click. The camera catches her peering through the bars.
Click. Another shot shows her sprawled on a bed, naked.
Click. She grasps a hunting knife far too large for her tiny hand, its blade touching her skin. Scrawled across her chest, the words scream out: “Cut me. Hurt me.”

There are tens of thousands of children around the world trapped like the girl right now, but we know the names of only a handful. In 2002, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) outside Washington, D.C.–the central clearing house in the United States for victims of online abuse–had “identified” about two hundred children, meaning that their full identities were known and they had been rescued. By the end of 2005, the number was five hundred; by 2006, it had climbed to more than eight hundred children from around the world.

Still, those numbers represent only the proverbial drop of water in the online ocean. No one knows precisely how many children are victims of Internet porn–the crime is amorphous, often anonymous and always hard to pin down. The National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre in Ottawa, run by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), cited one study that estimates there are fourteen million websites displaying child abuse images, and more than twenty thousand new or recycled images posted on the Web each week. Five years ago, the CyberTipline run by NCMEC was receiving reports of child pornography at the rate of more than 24,000 a year; by 2006, that number had increased more than fourteen times to over 340,000.

Behind each of those pictures is a child’s solitary nightmare. Children like Shy Keenan, who was abused for years in England and saw her abuse pictures widely circulated on the Web before she became one of the country’s leading children’s rights advocates as an adult. “When I was a kid, I used to try to send ‘Help me’ messages with my eyes,”she says. “It didn’t take too long to figure out that no one good was looking at these pictures. And no one was looking at my eyes.”

Even as a child, Keenan realized that, ultimately, it was not about the pictures. The visual images are, in effect, crime scene photos: crimes of humiliation and torture of the most vulnerable members of society. Crimes committed not just by those who took the pictures. “It made no difference to me whether the abuser was under the covers or behind the lens or behind the computer,” says Keenan. “I was there because they wanted to be amused by the corruption and degradation of me.”

In fact, those who are downloading, viewing and trading the pictures are all too often much more than just voyeurs–they are active hands-on abusers themselves. Far from being down-and-out loners and isolated computer geeks, the creators and consumers of such images are teachers, priests, doctors, politicians, police and Boy Scout leaders. They are your relatives, your neighbors and your civic leaders. In just the first six months of 2006, the roster of Americans arrested on child porn charges included the former publisher of the New York newspaper Newsday, who also served on the city’s education policy board; the mayor of Green Oaks, Illinois, who had been in office for more than a decade and served for two years as chairman of the local Republican Party; a police chief in North Carolina; and the deputy press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, who pleaded guilty to using the Internet to seduce someone he thought was a teenage girl.

Mark Foley, the Republican congressman who was forced to resign in the fall of 2006 after revelations of sexually explicit e-mail messages he’d sent to teenage male Congressional pages, was co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus. He had been fond of telling cable TV talk shows that sex offenders were “animals” who would persist “unless stopped.”

“They come from all walks of life,” says Emily Vacher, an agent with the FBI’s Innocent Images program. “From all socio-economic backgrounds, educational backgrounds, sexual orientation–it doesn’t matter. And that’s what makes it even more difficult for law enforcement to catch them and for people to protect their kids.”

It’s not hard to find images of abuse on that computer sitting on your desk or in your child’s bedroom. One in seven young Web surfers has encountered unwanted sexual material or online harassment, according to the latest “Online Victimization of Youth” study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice. Only one in three American families protect their children’s Internet surfing with filters or blocking software. Even among those parents who do monitor their youngsters’ Web activities, 71 percent stop after the children turn fourteen.

Few people will ever witness a cocaine deal or a murder. But online child abuse is a crime that can reach out and touch anyone.

This book tracks the efforts of police and prosecutors around the world to find and save children being exploited by sexual predators–often at tremendous personal cost to themselves. It tells the harrowing tales of children rescued–and those still being abused online; it reveals the courage of some who have spoken out and the crippling trauma for some who will never recover. It follows the money trail of the shrewd entrepreneurs who have made millions by peddling child pornography and it looks at how the banks and credit card companies for too long have neglected how their financial institutions are entangled in this Web of exploitation.

Because the crime is global, so is this book. Instead of focusing on a single country, I concentrate on the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada–where the predators and their pursuers are the most active–along with recounting forays into Europe, Australia and Asia.

From the Hardcover edition.

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.