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!”