Tag: Eastern Townships

A look back at the brutality of the Hells Angels Lennoxville Purge

It was the party that laid the groundwork for a gang war that would shake Quebec for more than 15 years

By Maurice Crossfield

I missed an anniversary earlier this year. No, it’s not really one that should be celebrated. March 2025 marked the 40th anniversary of the Lennoxville Purge, in which five Hells Angels were gunned down at a party at the gang’s clubhouse and ultimately set the stage for the second Quebec Biker War.

A little background first: Back in the 1970’s Sherbrooke was the home of rival gangs the Gitans (formerly the Dirty Reich), and the Atomes. They were basically hooligans who rode motorcycles, did a lot of drugs and dabbled in a few organized crime activities. And when they crossed paths, things often got ugly, leading up to the so-called Night of the Long Knives in March 1974, in which the two gangs got into a rumble, which spilled over into various parts of the city, including in the emergency room of the St. Vincent de Paul hospital. By the end of the night two Atomes were dead, and several bikers were injured. Policing being what it was, no one went to jail for any of it.

In the years afterwards the violence became more sporadic, and it seemed the gangs were fading. Slowly the Gitans picked off or patched over the remaining Atomes.

Provincially, there was a Montreal gang called the Popeyes, who were itching to get into the big leagues, so in 1977 they tossed out their gang colours and became the very first Hells Angels chapter in Canada. They then went to war with the Outlaws in what became known as Quebec’s First Biker War, and by 1984 they had chased the Outlaws out of Quebec. Not long afterwards the Gitans, now the only motorcycle club in Sherbrooke, became Hells Angels as well.

By this point the Hells were getting serious about business, building up their network of drug dealers and establishing ties with the big boys of organized crime, like Montreal’s West End Gang and the mafia’s Rizutto family. Their credo was simple: less partying and general hooliganism and more business.

But the Laval chapter, also known as the North Chapter, apparently didn’t get the memo. They still liked having fun and causing trouble. But when they started using drugs that they were supposed to sell, and then started skimming the profits, the Montreal chapter saw a problem. Something needed to be done. How about a party in Lennoxville?

When eight members of the Laval chapter showed up at the Sherbrooke clubhouse (located just on the Lennoxville side of the line on Queen St.), they were welcomed inside. Then, with members of the Montreal, Sherbrooke and Halifax chapters present, five of them were gunned down. The remaining three Laval bikers were then made to clean up the mess and dispose of the bodies.

Years later, when I was working as a newspaper reporter, I got to see the inside of the bunker following a raid by the Sherbrooke Police. It was a rather unsettling feeling standing in the room where the massacre took place.

After the shooting, the five bodies were then put in sleeping bags and weighed down with cinder blocks and dumped into the St. Lawrence River near Sorel. Two of the Laval cleanup crew were forced into retirement, and the third was reassigned to the South, or Montreal chapter. Two weeks later another man, Claude (Coco) Roy, was shot by fellow gang member Michel (Jinx) Genest.

That was that. Until a fisherman in Sorel snagged a body in three months later. Sûreté du Québec divers found the rest, and the Lennoxville Massacre came to the public’s attention.

“At that moment (in 1985), the Hells Angels were doing a real cleanup to become a real criminal organization,” said André Cédilot, a reporter with the La Presse newspaper who covered organized crime at the time.

Eventually, out of the 41 people present at the Lennoxville Purge, five men were given life sentences for the murders. They were all were released on parole between 2004 and 2013.

But all was not well in the biker world. Most notably brothers Salvatore and Giovanni Cazetta decided to form the Rock Machine in 1986, rather than join the Hells Angels. Initially the two gangs opted to coexist. Until one of the Cazetta brothers got nabbed in the US while trying to smuggle 200 kilos of cocaine and went to prison. The Hells decided the time had come to take over all street-level cocaine sales in Quebec.

The resulting bloodbath between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine would last more than 15 years. Through the many twists and turns, the final body count was 162 dead, including several innocent bystanders. There were 84 bombings and over 130 cases of arson. Though the Rock Machine joined forces with the Bandidos, most of them ended up dead or arrested. The Bandidos imploded in 2006 following an internal massacre of their own in Shedden, Ontario.

The Hells Angels were targeted by police many times during the biker war, with raids, arrests, jail sentences, releases, bikers informing on bikers, you name it. In a 2009 operation 156 Angels were arrested in Quebec, New Brunswick and France. But in 2015 the charges against most of them were dropped, the judge deciding that things had dragged on too long.

From the mid 1990’s to the early 200’s, I got to cover a few biker-related cases. Like the raid I mentioned earlier, where I also got to see one of Sherbrooke’s SWAT team members easing his way towards the house, rifle at the ready, when one of the Hells guard dogs came up and licked his face.

And there was the humour of seeing the Evil Ones, a Hells Angels puppet gang, being dragged into court. Being primarily francophones, they called themselves the “Heevils Ones.” I got a kick out of seeing a group of guys who belonged to a gang that they couldn’t even pronounce the name of properly.

There were literally dozens of twists and turns in the biker war saga, of bikers turning informant, settling of accounts, and so on. Two provincial prison guards, Diane Lavigne and Pierre Rondeau, were murdered on orders from Hells Angels Nomad leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher. There were even plans to kill police officers, Crown Prosecutors and judges, but those fortunately didn’t pan out. Boucher was convicted 2002 of ordering the prison guard murders, and sentenced to life behind bars. He died of throat cancer in 2022.

The dust may have settled, but the Hells Angels are still out there. The clubhouse was torn down in 2021, and the organization is a little quieter these days, but they’re still out there, doing their thing. Taking care of business.

Freedom 1.0: Welcome to Jerico, Sutton

A look at one of the lesser known destinations of the Underground Railroad

We all like to think of history, especially more recent history, as something that has been recorded, documented, indexed, and put on a shelf at the local historical society. But sometimes you come across tidbits that point to something more. Like the settlement of escaped slaves known as Jerico in Sutton.

It’s on my route as one of the town garbage truck drivers. Wednesdays are my Glen Sutton run, which puts me in close contact with the US border in several spots. And there, off Scenic and onto Judd Road, you find Jerico Road. It’s a pretty area, with elegant homes separated by acres of forest and rolling hills. The road got its name in 2001, in tribute to the long-vanished settlement that is believed to have existed there.

Image from Hertiage Sutton Historical Society

Practically nothing is known about the settlement or its people. In fact, if it wasn’t a mention of it on a map from 1865, the late local historian Mark Clerk would likely never have even known to look for it. But there it is, spelled Jerico, and not Jericho. The original Jericho is one of the oldest cities in the Middle East, and as the Old Testament says, the Israelite Joshua had his army march around the walled city for six days. On the seventh day they marched around it and, at a precise moment, blew their trumpets and yelled and shouted, and the walls of the city collapsed.

Much raping, pillaging and murdering ensued, but since it was the good guys doing the defiling, it is seen biblically as a good thing. History is written by the victors, I guess.

From this Israelite victory came the hymn Joshua, Fit the Battle of Jericho, an African American spiritual that was popular amongst enslaved Americans in the 1850’s. This was around the time that slaves began trying to escape their bonds and head north, following the series of roads, waterways and safe houses that became known as the Underground Railroad. In all some 30,000 to 40,000 enslaved Americans are believed to have ventured north, most of them to Canada West, today known as Ontario, or to Nova Scotia.

But a few of them came to Canada East. While the existence of a black community in St. Armand is better known, apparently a few came to the border near Richford, Vermont, and then crossed over into Sutton Township.

Beyond that, the information is practically non-existent. His curiosity piqued by the name on the map, Clerk did some digging around and all he could come up with was an article in a Richford newspaper dating from 1980 that referred to Jerico as a black settlement just across the border. Clerk acknowledges that the writer didn’t provide any source material, but he figured they must have had some kind of source for their story.

It’s understandable, I guess. These folks probably weren’t interested in anything other than keeping a low profile. This was an era when escaped slaves were commonly hunted down in the northern US, to be returned to their owners in the south. Slaves were expensive, and rewards for their return generous. And the northern border was little more than a line on a map. And as black slaves were expressly forbidden from learning how to read and write, we don’t have any diaries or letters or documents. Even over in St. Armand, where we know quite a bit more, we don’t really know much about how they lived.

And life in Jerico would have been tough. Cold winters, hilly terrain covered in rocks and virgin forest, not exactly great farming country. Travel was a slow, difficult process. And probably when they did venture south to Richford or north to Sutton Flats (as the village of Sutton was then known), they weren’t treated very well. Racism was a fact of life. If you lived then, you were almost certainly racist.

Clerk said he thought many Jerico residents returned to the US to fight in the Civil War in the 1860’s or returned once the war was over and slavery was abolished. I tend to agree, the natural human tendency being to return to familiar surroundings. Go home, reconnect with family and close friends that had been left behind on the plantations, farms and factories that had previously depended on slave labour.

Back here in Sutton, at a time when tensions between Canada and the US are higher than they have been in many decades, we are left with little to show of long-lost Jerico. No written accounts, no ruins of settler cabins in the hills of Glen Sutton. No graves or markers. Maybe Jerico never existed at all. How much of our history has been lost to the forces of time?

But when I turn off Judd Road onto Jerico every Wednesday morning, it’s nice to think that this remote corner of Sutton was once a place where a few folks experienced freedom for the first time.

The Marion Affair: Not all injuries are physical

Charles Marion spent 82 days chained up in a hole in the ground in Gould

I have long had an interest in the way violence impacts everyone. Not just the victim, but their family, friends, even their community. And the violence of what became known as the Marion Affair, the longest kidnapping in Canadian history, is no exception.

“For many people, the Marion Affair was a simple news item,” Pierre Marion, son of the kidnap victim, told Radio Canada recently. “But for those of us who lived through it, it upended our lives.”

                  In 1977 Charles Marion was a loan manager at the Caisse Populaire de Sherbrooke Est on King Street East. A longtime employee of the credit union, the 57-year-old lived a fairly typical, quiet life with his wife and kids. And sometimes for a break he would go to his cottage in Stoke, which he named “Mon Repos.”

                  On August 6, 1977, he was taking it easy at Mon Repos when several masked men broke in and grabbed him. They tied up his companion, a female coworker from the Caisse Pop, and locked her in a shed. Then they bundled Charles Marion into his van and left the scene.

                  At first no one knew anything was wrong. But Marion’s wife became suspicious when she couldn’t reach him, so she headed out to Stoke. She found his companion, who by this point had been tied up for 18 hours. The awkward conversation would have to wait. The police were called, and the manhunt began.

                  As for Charles Marion, he was blindfolded and taken to Gould. There his kidnappers had dug a hole in the ground, poured a thin pad of concrete, built some rough wooden walls and a ceiling, and then covered it all with dirt and branches. This would be his home for the next 82 days.

                  To say the man suffered is an understatement. He was chained to a steel rod set in the concrete, with the chains holding him by his arms, legs and neck. The kidnappers rarely fed him, other than gin and tranquilizers to keep him quiet. Most of the time he sat in the dark, fetid hole, with no idea of what lay ahead. Twice he tried to take his own life rather than continue his living hell.

                  Meanwhile the family received a ransom note from a group calling themselves “Les Sept Serpents,” demanding a $1 million ransom (the equivalent of about $5 million today). The local media, including Sherbrooke Record reporters Janet Cotton, Robert MacPherson and photographer Perry Beaton, covered the mayhem.

After the initial search involving some 200 Sûreté du Québec officers turned up nothing, the SQ changed tactics. They agreed to pay the ransom but tried to pass off pieced of cardboard for the cash. When two men tried to pick up the ransom at Belvidere Heights in Lennoxville, they were ambushed by game wardens out looking for poachers. Then the police started shooting. In the resulting confusion and gunfire, the men managed to escape. Meanwhile the game wardens went home to change their underwear.

                  With the Caisse Populaire refusing to pay the $1 million ransom, the family continued to plead with the kidnappers, often through the media. They even got radio station CHLT to broadcast coded messages as a part of the negotiations. Photos of Marion, holding a current issue of the La Tribune newspaper, were released as proof of life.

In the end the family managed to raise $50,000. Far short of the original objective, the kidnappers finally agreed to accept it.        On October 26, Pierre Marion, Charles’ son, accompanied by a police officer took the cash to Sand Hill in Cookshire. There, guided by CB radio, they dropped it off. The following evening Charles Marion, emaciated, bearded but alive, was found near the Sherbrooke Airport in East Angus. He had been delivered there on the back of a motorcycle wearing blacked out goggles.

If this was a movie, everything would wind up very neatly from this point. But real life is messy and doesn’t adhere to convenient timelines. In fact, it was eight months before Michel de Varennes, Claude Valence and his wife Jeanne were arrested. The ransom money had been marked with invisible ink, and the men were, naturally, trying to spend it.

Traumatized by the experience, Charles Marion tried to move on. But in the process the SQ had raised the possibility that Marion had been in on the kidnapping all along. Rumours can spread like wildfire, and soon the Marion family felt they could no longer trust their friends and neighbours.

In the end, Varennes was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Claude Valence to 6 years. Charges against Jeanne Valence were seemingly dropped, and the other people Marion said took part were never caught. Though the trial revealed Charles Marion was truly the victim, the SQ have never apologized. In 2022 Pierre Marion released a book, 82 jours: l’affaire Charles Marion.

“He wanted to turn the page, but deep down he never managed to turn it,” Pierre Marion said. “He lived with public opinion, which always thought that he was partly responsible for this.”

Charles Marion was never able to return to his old job, and struggled to pick up the pieces. Traumatized by his treatment during and after the kidnapping, alienated from his community, 22 years later he took his own life in 1999 at the cottage where it all began.

And a family continues to try to make sense of it all.

The Stacey Letters: A look back at life in the wilds of Ascot Corner

Think your life is tough? Life on the frontier was far from glamorous, and even farther from easy.

            In 1836, young George Stacey was a philandering, irresponsible young man who was running around London and racking up debts he could never repay. His father, an Ordnance Clerk at the Tower of London, and George’s father in-law, decided that the best course of action was to send George to Canada, with his young wife Eliza in tow. The two children, Fred and Louisa, would stay behind.

            The couple settled on a vacant piece of land in what is now Ascot Corner. Being city folk in an alien environment, it would have been a bit like going to Mars. George and Eliza would never see their parents again yet maintained in regular and affectionate contact for the remainder of their lives. And amazingly enough, their correspondence survived until it was found by author and editor Jane Vansittart, who sifted through them and created Lifelines: The Stacey Letters 1836-1858.

            Before we go further, let’s stop for a second to think of Eliza: She marries this carefree young man who promptly gets in trouble. She then sticks dutifully by him while her own father seems good with sending her to the other end of the world with a man who is, by all appearances, a n’er do well. She’s going to spend the rest of her life giving birth to another six children, and have as many miscarriages, struggling, literally, to survive. Yet in her letters she rarely complains about her lot in life, even when her son Albert, born with severe disabilities, dies at the age of seven.

            With little money and surrounded by the boreal forest, city slickers George and Eliza must figure out how to survive, and fast. Pioneer life is hard, and the necessities of life are both hard to come by and expensive. And no one, not even in the nearby settlement of Sherbrooke, has cold hard cash to buy them.

            In the following months and years, the couple faces the near constant threat of starvation, winters colder than anything they’ve ever experienced, and summers hotter than the tropics. Their potato crops mirror that of Ireland, where the great famine results in thousands of deaths and thousands more emigrating to Canada. George writes of the sorry state of these Irish refugees, also sent to the colonies because they were seen, as were the Stacey’s, as a problem to be disposed of.

            And yet, despite his initial lack of knowledge, greenhorn George gets down to work, and even dams up a brook on his property to build a sawmill. Cutting trees, sawing lumber, farming, and trying to prosper. But the lack of cash is a constant problem, and on occasion George spends time in jail in Sherbrooke due to unpaid debts. Eliza, seemingly always with a child on her hip or in her belly (or both), manages to keep the home fires burning.

            In fact, the Stacey’s probably wouldn’t have survived had it not been for dear old dad, who periodically sends what little money he can spare. That and some bits and pieces of inheritances, makes the difference. Bundles of clothes, usually castoffs from family in London, are hydraulically compressed into bales and sent by ship, for a new life in Lower Canada.

            Dad’s letters give insight to events of the time, such as the fire in the Tower of London, in which the Crown Jewels are nearly lost. Or the Great London Exhibition of 1851. And at a time when it took weeks or months for letters to arrive, there’s a commentary on the new trans-Atlantic cable, a revolution that accelerated communications on a scale never seen before. Dad is suspicious of this new-fangled technology.

            Eventually the children, Fred and Louisa, come to live with their parents at Drighlington, the Stacey property across the St. Francis River from modern day Ascot Corner. There are good years and quite a few bad years, all told in typically stoic fashion: Alfred slices the ends of his fingers off on a circular saw but can work again in a few weeks. George has a gigantic boil that is very painful. Or spent days in bed in agony over his sciatica. Eliza is unable to walk because of lumbago, or the aftereffects of the latest miscarriage. Fred got poison ivy, again, and can’t even put his boots on from the pain. Then George tumbled into the basement, dislocating a shoulder and an elbow, but got back to work after a few weeks. Louisa makes observation that the children were shorter, likely due to a diet that consisted mainly of buckwheat, corn and what few potatoes they managed to harvest.

            Eventually, and only after the passing of Eliza, the family begins to do more than survive. George buys more land and builds a grist mill. Louisa takes over as head of the household, raising a few animals and looking after the children. She only marries later, after her father dies in 1862.

            Theirs is a far from unique story, preserved only because someone kept those letters and they finally landed in Vansittart’s capable hands. That and community volunteers like Milt Loomis, a family descendent, who with other volunteers erected a monument to the Stacey’s at the Ascot Corner Pioneer Cemetery. There was even a musical play, Louisa, written by former Record staffer Sunil Mahtani and musician Donald Patriquin in 2005.

            The Stacey’s: Folks who endured extraordinary hardships but kept going. They were tougher, more resilient, than we can ever imagine. When faced with a situation they put their trust in God and carried on. And from people like the Stacey’s, came people like us.

            A reminder that we are tougher than we imagine.