Author: mcross2024

Sherbrooke’s first biker war

The Night of the Long Knives saw gang rivalries played out in public, while authorities, witnesses looked the other way.

As a writer setting my crime novels in the Townships of the 1970’s, I’ve had no shortage of background material to sift through. It was an incredibly rough era for so many reasons, a time when a lot of folks lived life close to the bone. Playing a prominent role were the outlaw bikers, shooting up the streets of Sherbrooke and bringing the city firmly into the fold of organized crime. And the local memory of those times, including an all-out bloody turf war, has been overshadowed by the violence that came later.

In the 1950’s and 60’s lots of folks embraced the post war prosperity and got motorcycles. Little clubs started to pop up, groups of like-minded folks who enjoyed a beverage or two and a ride in the country on the weekend. These were the 99%, the law-abiding bikers who often get overlooked.

Then there was the other 1%. In Sherbrooke in the 1960’s there was a gang known as The Dirty Reich, a group of bad boys who saw the potential in organized crime, with revenue streams from things like drugs, prostitution, and human trafficking. They also did a lot of other violent, cruel, and nasty things, seemingly just to be assholes. If you were “visibly” gay, or not white, or different in any way they might pull over and give you a beating. Despite this, the Dirty Reich even had its own Catholic priest, Father Jean Salvail.

By the early 1970’s the priest had left the scene, and The Dirty Reich had become the Gitans (Gypsies), now locked in an uneasy coexistence with the Atomes (Atoms) for control of Sherbrooke’s illicit trades. In an era where the murder rate in Montreal was roughly three times what it is now, and in which that city was hailed as the bank robbery capital of North America, the Gitans and Atoms were getting rich by filling the void of vice in the Sherbrooke cityscape.

Why were things so rough in the 1970’s? There was a lot of political unrest, from the Front de Liberation du Quebec bombings to the rise of separatism. The economy was slowing, and Sherbrooke was in the midst of transforming from a predominantly English-speaking factory town to predominantly French-speaking one. Sherbrooke was rough, and life less easy than it had been. There’s even an unproven theory that the lead in gasoline car exhausts of the time made folks more aggressive.

The Townships countryside wasn’t immune to the uptick in violence. Members of both gangs would tour about on their motorcycles, striking fear into the locals and bringing the hard drug trade to the smaller towns. On top of their Montreal Street headquarters in Sherbrooke, the Gitans even had clubhouses in Cowansville and Frelighsburg.

For the Gitans and the Atomes things came to a head on the night of March 15, 1974. Three Gitans were having a few beers at the Brasserie La Boustifaille on King East when a half-dozen Atomes showed up. The trash talk began, and before long they collectively decided to take things outside. Next thing you know there are about 20 bikers from the two clubs, armed with firearms, knives, chains, and baseball bats, beating on each other in the parking lot.

In the ensuing rumble, Atome Robert Provencher was shot in the back and fled the scene on foot, while Gitan Jacques Filteau was knifed in the guts. His buddies rushed him to the nearby St. Vincent de Paul hospital emergency room. Provencher staggered as far as Cartier Street before collapsing outside an apartment, begging for an ambulance. The ambulance came and brought him… to the same hospital where Filteau was being treated.

Of course, fellow Gitans came to see Filteau, while Atome members came to see Provencher. Hostilities broke out in the emergency room, and the lone security guard was easily overwhelmed. In the midst of the melee the Sherbrooke Police were called in. They had no sooner restored order than word came that more bikers were on their way, and efforts refocused on keeping them out of the various hospital entrances. They called in the Sûreté du Québec to lend a hand.

Somewhere in all this five Gitans got into a car and left, pursued by six Atomes in another car. At the corner of 12th Avenue and King East the Gitans slammed on the brakes, and the two cars collided. The Gitans got out, surrounded the Atomes car and opened fire. Marc Distefano, 23, was shot in the head and killed. Michel Lamoreux, 19, was hit in the chest and killed, having been inducted into the gang six hours earlier.

Here comes what is perhaps the strangest twist in the entire affair: That summer, after months of seeming police inaction, four people were arrested for the murders of Distefano and Lamoreux. By that fall, all were acquitted. For all the violence in what became known locally as The Night of the Long Knives, not a single person was convicted of a crime. “Les Gitans “blancs comme neige,” declared the headline in La Tribune.

Indeed, despite continued outbreaks of sporadic violence and even a provincial police commission to study the province’s biker gangs, little was done. By 1979, Sherbrooke Record Editor James Duff declared “… we think the age of the gangs has passed.” Meanwhile the Gitans slowly picked off or patched over members of the Atomes, and by 1984 the Gitans themselves were patched over, founding the Sherbrooke chapter of the Hell’s Angels.

Apparently on this prediction, Jim Duff misread his tea leaves. Just over 11 years later, the Sherbrooke chapter of the Hell’s Angels invited in five members of the North Chapter to their Lennoxville clubhouse, and shot them. Setting the early stage for the province-wide biker war of the 1990’s.

The Georgeville plane crash that left observers scratching their heads.

Why would Satan’s Choice be involved the marine salvage business?

Ed note: This originally appeared earlier this year in The Record’s Townships Weekend section

By Maurice Crossfield

Every now and then you come across an oddball story, one that doesn’t make sense and raises more questions than it answers. Like why, when a Royal Canadian Air Force transport plane crashed on Lake Memphremagog in 1968, did it end up being salvaged by a group of outlaw bikers a decade later?

                  On January 7, 1968 (I wasn’t even a month old yet), Flight Lieutenant J. D. Evans and navigator Flight Lieutenant J. F. Morrow of 401 Auxiliary Squadron, based out of St. Hubert, were practicing landings on Lake Memphremagog near Georgeville with a De Havilland Otter. The single engine Otter was used in the RCAF for light transport and search and rescue operations until 1980, and many of them are still in service today, primarily as bush planes serving remote communities. They can be kitted out with conventional landing gear, floats for open water landings, or skis for winter touchdowns.

                  On one of the practice landings the ill-fated aircraft broke through the ice. Then the fuselage sank into the water. The two men managed to scramble out of the downed aircraft, giving their wedding tackle a good chilly soaking in the process.

                  Fortunately, the crash had a witness in the form of 18-year-old Réal Bernais, who had been hanging out on the Georgeville wharf. He was probably watching the plane. Bernais jumped on his snowmobile and raced out to get the two men, bringing them back to Henry McGowan’s boarding house to warm up and dry out. As they sipped hot coffee, they heard an explosion as the airplane caught fire. Within minutes the fire was out, the plane having sunk into 280 feet of water.

                  Over the next decade the wreckage of the ill-fated Otter was the subject of several salvage attempts. Marine Industries of Montreal apparently spent $30,000 to locate and raise the aircraft, but with no success.

                  Then in 1976 Montreal-based Lafitte Salvage purchased the salvage rights for $1,000. Using cutting edge technology such as closed-circuit cameras, they located the plane and managed to haul the tail and fuselage back to the surface, taking the wreckage to dry land in Georgeville, and later Magog. The salvagers refused to comment on rumours that a safe was found on the plane.

                  Here’s where things start to get interesting: It turns out that Lafitte Salvage was never a registered company. But the names of the five-man crew were known to the authorities: Brian Powers, Robert Chou, Michael French, Michel Veillette and Jean-Paul St. Michel. All members of the Satan’s Choice Motorcycle Club. If you start digging around in old newspapers looking for organized crime in the 1970’s, these names come up over and over. There was a gang war that saw Satan’s Choice and the Outlaws shooting it out with the Popeyes and Hell’s Angels. It was a bloody conflict in a particularly bloody era of Quebec history.

                  Powers ended up shot at his home in Montreal’s West Island in 1979. French was gunned down by West End Gang enforcer and hitman Jackie McLaughlin in 1982, his body found near Kahnawake. Chou died in 2018 of liver failure. I’m not sure what became of the others, but as you can see, these weren’t classically trained salvage experts living good, clean lives.

                  There are quite a few aspects of this that don’t add up: Firstly, why did Evans and Morrow try to land on Lake Memphremagog when the ice wasn’t thick enough to support an aircraft of that size? What caused a downed, nearly drowned airplane to explode well after the men were rescued? And then, why was security around the crash site so lax? If a military aircraft goes down, wouldn’t the RCAF have sent its own people to secure the site, and maybe send military divers in to examine the wreckage? I am unsure of the rules back then, but these days there would have been a full Canada Transportation Safety Board or a military investigation, with experts going over every inch of the plane and reporting on their findings. Instead, the armed forces sold off the salvage rights to whoever, with no regard for things like security, crash causes, or who they were giving military property to.

                  And why were a bunch of outlaw bikers doing underwater salvage work? News reports from the time said the skis from the plane were worth a few thousand dollars. The engine still turned freely and the three-bladed propellor was intact. But these guys were more accustomed to making bigger money in other domains, like dealing drugs and pimping out strippers and prostitutes. Stripping crashed planes for parts seems like more actual work than they were used to. How come they managed to raise the plane when the experts at Marine Industries failed?

                  Add to that the rumors of a safe on board. Was there something valuable on the Otter? I doubt it. The 401 Squadron was air reserve. These were part time guys, weekend warriors, who seem to have been practicing landings. Why would they have been carrying anything of value?

                  These are all questions that will remain unanswered. In fact, this story would likely have been forgotten by all but a few people if the late John Allore hadn’t come across it. While John Allore died in an accident nearly a year ago, his website https://theresaallore.com/ lives on. It’s a fascinating archive of true crime in the Eastern Townships and beyond, dedicated to finding who murdered his sister Theresa, when she was a student at Champlain College in November 1978.

                  Hopefully that’s a story we can still find answers to.

The Future, by Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou

On a rainy and snowy March night I took part in CBC Reads, And So Does Lennoxville, a fundraiser for that town’s library. While my arguments in defence of this fine novel didn’t carry the night, The Future did go on to win the CBC’s top prize. Here’s why:

The Future is Catherine Leroux’s alternate history of Detroit, in which the city was never surrendered to the Americans, and my choice for the Canada Reads theme of the one novel that carries us forward.

I have to say right away that The Future is a beautiful, poetic translation. As both a writer and a translator, I am impressed by both Leroux’s skill at creating a dystopian future, and the deft hand of translator Susan Ouriou. Translation has its own particular challenges at the best of times, but Ouriou handles her task with grace.

In The Future, Fort Détroit is a French-speaking Canadian city, but still has many of the problems that we have seen plague real-life Detroit recent years: Pollution, poverty, the legacies of racism and colonialism. However, in this alternate future, Fort Detroit society has broken down even further: There’s little to be had in terms of police or fire protection, and city services like water and sewage regularly break down. People must rely on themselves and those close to them.

Yet destroyed buildings, such as the city’s leaning Tour de Lys, or even neighbourhood houses, slowly, mysteriously, regenerate themselves. There are magical elements, never clearly explained, that tap into the reader’s imagination. To me this is where the most profound aspects of storytelling take place, in a sense prying our minds open to the possibilities of the universe.

         Gloria comes to Fort Detroit following the murder of her estranged daughter Judith, and the disappearance of her granddaughters. She wants to find her grandchildren, and the truth of what happened to her daughter. Nearly destroyed by grief, she slowly builds bonds with neighbours, and begins to learn of the resilience that keeps them going, despite the harsh realities of their existence. They grow food in abandoned lots, gather necessities from the devastated environment around them. Comfort each other in times of loss.

         Gloria also discovers a group of the city’s children who live in the nearby Parc Rouge ravine. Runaways, or perhaps abandoned or orphaned by their parents, these kids have established their own society, complete with its own rules and hierarchies, all based on the greater common good. In short when these children are abandoned by society, they create a society of their own. Kind of like Lord of the Flies, but far more humane, compassionate. They may grumble about their leaders, but when push comes to shove, the common good wins out.

And this to me is what makes The Future such a compelling book to move us forward. At its core it is a book about community. Society may have collapsed, but community endures. Community can mean many things, from neighbours helping neighbours to children supporting each other when adults can’t, or won’t. Much like the buildings regenerating themselves, if a community breaks down, another form of bonding between people moves in to take its place. And in these varied forms of community, we see reflections of ourselves.

In this age of anxiety and insecurity, The Future is a reminder than in grim times we don’t have to go it alone. Indeed, those darkest of times are when we need to reach out. To build bonds, to serve others, and to receive support in return. Plain and simple, we are social creatures.

We don’t control much in this life. The one thing we all have a measure of control over is HOPE. Hope for a kinder future in which people help each other, despite the challenges. Hope for better times, even when the world around us seems hopeless. Indeed, the absence of hope, like the absence of community, invariably leads to the end of humanity.

Despite its dystopian backdrop, The Future is ultimately a hopeful work, providing readers with plenty to think about, and a vision for a way forward. It may seem like the end of society, but in that ending are numerous small beginnings. We are all more resilient than we can imagine and more resilient collectively than alone. The Future is a reminder of those simple facts.

Seneca Paige: Justice of the Peace, MLA, counterfeiting king

Dunham’s first cottage industry was a real money maker

People often speak dismissively of our history, no doubt fuelled by that teacher who recited names and dates, making sure to never stray too far from the established curriculum. History is something that happened elsewhere, written by and for kings, leaders and generals who dictated the terms of victory, or rarely, accepted defeat.

            But history is so much more than that. It is the lived experiences of people just like you and me, who worked hard, often died young and struggled, not merely to be successful, but just to survive. While I love history, I hold no illusions about “the good old days.” Like many of you, I’m alive because of medical science and modern prosperity. I’ve never had scurvy, tuberculosis, or faced the threat of starvation. It might not seem like it, but we live in the best time to be alive.

            As a storyteller though, I love history. I love imagining myself not in the shoes of Napoleon or Churchill, but in the well-worn leather boots of more regular folks. And if there’s one man I’d love to do an interview with, and who refutes the Townships myth of “nothing interesting ever happened here,” it would be Dunham’s counterfeiting king, Seneca Paige.

            Before we dive into Paige’s life, a quick bit of background: In the early days of the United States there wasn’t a single US currency. Instead, banks issued notes that served as legal tender. These notes varied greatly in style and substance, and early settlers with an artistic flair often set out to recreate them, trading them for legitimate cash, gold, or using them to buy supplies. Counterfeiting was illegal in the US, but north of the border, making fake US bank notes wasn’t against the law. Having come from the States, some of the new settlers seized upon an opportunity, and a border that was, for the most part, still an imaginary construct.

            Born in Hardwick, Massachusetts in 1788, Paige was a slippery critter from the get-go. He got busted in Jersey City in 1809 for passing a fake dollar bank note, but got out of that one. Then after being arrested for counterfeiting in Baltimore in 1812 he escaped custody. He got caught again in 1816 and managed an escape yet again. That’s when he moved to Cogniac Street in Dunham.

            Not much of a street, barely even a road, stretching from near Selby Lake to North Sutton, Cogniac Street, now known as Hudon Road, became the counterfeiting capital of North America in the early 1800’s. And it’s here that our intrepid Mr. Paige really came into his own.

            Paige built up a counterfeiting network of printers, engravers, couriers, and various folks all looking to cash in on counterfeit craze. Known officially as a wood merchant and building contractor, his main focus was making money. Lots of money.

The counterfeiter’s tool kit.

            But there were others on Cogniac Street that he had to deal with. Ebenezer Gleason was an illiterate but clever man with a gang of funny money makers of his own. In a region and time where survival was a daily concern for most, Gleason prospered. Seemingly he saw the benefit of working for Paige and his people, contenting himself to playing second fiddle.

            Not so for Turner Wing and his gang. In 1824 Wing led his gang of thugs, armed with pistols and swords, down the road to Paige’s lair. They hauled away about $4 000 in bank notes, copper plates, printing equipment and even a few of Paige’s crew, including his dear old dad, who ran the presses. Nobody messes with dad and gets away with it, so Paige and Gleason locked and loaded and paid the Wing crew a visit. By the time the dust settled all was returned, including dad, and Wing was allowed to continue his business, on a reduced scale.

            Where were the cops, you might ask. This being early days, there wasn’t much for law enforcement. There was pretty much just Ephraim Knight, Bailiff for the District of Bedford. Knight tried his best, getting little more than the occasional beating and regular torment from the counterfeiters, known far and wide by now as Cogniackers.

            By 1833 however, the tide began to turn, and the laws began to catch up. That summer an assortment of law enforcement types from both sides of the border surrounded and raided the Wing and Gleason compounds, hauling away large sums of legal and illegal tender, printing equipment and chemicals, and arresting thirteen people, including Ebenezer Gleason and four of his sons. Hauled to Montreal, they were all convicted, but only spent two years behind bars.

            Walking between the raindrops once again was Paige, who was never convicted of a crime north of the border. But what does a criminal do when the counterfeiting business goes into decline? For Seneca Paige, politics, of course. He was given a large tract of land by the Crown, served a stint as a Justice of the Peace, and then in 1851 he became the Member of the Legislative Assembly for Missisquoi in the Province of Canada. He even has his own National Assembly web page, which makes no mention of his checkered past.

            Today the Cogniac Street counterfeiters are all buried in one of the several cemeteries along Hudon Road. Ebenezer Gleason is in the Harvey Cemetery, Turner Wing in the tiny cemetery that bears the family name. Various others, little known or entirely forgotten, sprinkled amongst the more faithful in the Dunham East or Farnam’s Corner cemeteries.

            But not Seneca Paige. He died in 1856 at the age of 68. Finally safe to return to the US, he was buried in Bakersfield, in Franklin County, Vermont. His tombstone states: “His Loss will be felt by many; particularly by the poor. He was truly the poor man’s friend.”