Stéphane Gagné (born 12 December 1969) is a Canadian former gangster, outlaw biker and contract killer who was a hitman for the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club during the Quebec Biker War. Charged with two counts of first-degree murder, Gagné turned Crown witness against the Hells Angels in 1997 in exchange for one murder charge against him being dismissed. He was sentenced to 25 years' imprisonment. Gagné's testimony resulted in Hells Angels leader Maurice "Mom" Boucher being imprisoned for murder in 2002.
Early life Gagné was born into a working-class French-Canadian family in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district of Montreal. His father worked as a professional wrestler, and his mother was a housewife. His uncle was a hitman for the Dubois brothers and was murdered in 1974. Paul Cherry, the crime correspondent of The Montreal Gazette, wrote that Gagné speaks his joual (nonstandard Quebec French) with a strong working-class accent with a distinctive nasal tone. Cherry noted that Gagné usually has a "goofy grin" on his face, which gives the impression that his intelligence is very low.
As a child, Gagné suffered from learning disabilities, especially from attention-deficit disorder, and was much bullied by the other children. Gagné dropped out of school in grade 7 to work as a drug dealer and as a thief. A self-confessed drug addict, Gagné was as a teenager "quasiment gelé" ("almost frozen"), as he phrased it, by usually being high on hashish and PCPs. Besides selling drugs, Gagné stole automobiles and robbed homes and businesses. He amassed a criminal record, being convicted nine times over 12 years for automobile theft, home invasions, drug trafficking, and probation violations. Gagné told the National Parole Board in 2016 that he wanted to become a gangster to bring "beautiful women and money." By the age of 24, Gagné had made enough money to purchase a house with his wife, Marie-Claude Nantais, who was also involved in his drug-dealing business. He fathered a son, whom he named Harley-David, after his motorcycle. Alongside his partner, Tony Jalbert, Gagné operated a string of crack houses and shooting galleries for cocaine and heroin addicts.
Gagné's nickname of Godasse (Old Shoe) came from his reputation for brutality, as he would beat up people and kick them in the head, usually while he wore his old shoes. He testified in court that he had once savagely beat a prostitute because she had stolen from a drug dealer working for him. Gagné stated he felt no shame in beating up a woman because, as he put it, "if you let that kind of thing go, all of the druggie girls are going to steal from you." He was successful in his business and made $6,000 in cash per week and about $250,000 per year. Gagné also engaged in welfare fraud. as he claimed to be unemployed, which allowed him to collect welfare. He often used the "stupidity defence" at his trials by claiming that his IQ is so low that he could not be held legally responsible for his crimes, which that the courts have consistently rejected. Gagné has admitted that he is not as asinine as he claimed to be and says that he acted like a mentally-challenged person in the hope of avoiding prison time.
Hells Angels In July 1994, Gagné was ordered by the Hells Angel, Paul "Fonfon" Fontaine, to close his shooting galleries for heroin addicts, which were competing with the shooting galleries owned by the Hells Angels. Desperate to stay in business, Gagné met with Maurice "Mom" Boucher on Sherbrooke Street. Using a type of sign language used in the Montreal undeworld, Gagné pointed to his nose (meaning that he wanted to buy cocaine) and then touched Boucher's arm (meaning that he wanted to buy cocaine from the Hells Angels). Boucher pointed to Fontaine, which indicated that he was buy the cocaine from him. Gagné was very attracted to joining the Hells Angels, which he believed would make him into a powerful man. By contrast, Gagné's business partner, Jalbert, broke with him and joined the Rock Machine. Gagné sold an average of three kilograms of cocaine per month for the Hells Angels. Gagné usually paid about $34,000 in cash while the rest of the cocaine he took on was sur la bras (on credit). At Boucher's trial in 1998, Gagné testified, "I'm not stupid. I knew that the Hells would win the war. They're rich, better organized and certainly more disciplined."
In the fall of 1994, Gagné was sent to prison after selling cocaine to an undercover Sûreté du Québec officer, Robert Pigeon. In December 1994, while serving his sentence at Bordeaux Prison, Gagné was confronted by a member of the Rock Machine, Jean Duquaire, who demanded him to stomp on a photograph of Boucher and declare his allegiance to the Rock Machine. When he refused, he was beaten by Duquaire. After recovering, Gagné attacked Duquaire with a metal bar and beat him until he bled. Gagné testified about life in the underworld: "In this environment, there's only rule: win." Gagné was sent to another prison in Sorel, where he met up with Boucher, who was serving six months for violating a weapons ban after the police discovered a gun on him. Boucher was so pleased by the beating that he ordered his son Francis to make weekly cash payments to Gagné's wife to support her while Gagné was in prison. Boucher and Gagné became close and were often seen talking in the prison courtyard. As a prisoner, Gagné invented what he called the pen-merde ("shit-pen"), a mixture of his own excrement and urine that he would keep in an empty shampoo bottle for ten days and then use to soak the guards with.
In July 1995, Boucher was released, followed by Gagné in April 1996. On his first day of freedom, Gagné contacted Francis Boucher to ask for a meeting with his father. On the second day, Gagné had lunch with Maurice Boucher. Gagné was told, "I've got important work for you. I want you to stick around." He later testified, "It was there that Maurice Boucher said that he had big things for me. And he didn't say much more than that." Gagné discovered that Boucher had a disconcerting habit of suddenly appearing and expecting Gagné to drop everything to carry out his latest project. Gagné took Boucher on a trip through Verdun, where Boucher ordered him to drive and park a car packed with a powerful bomb to explode outside of a Rock Machine clubhouse. After setting off the bomb, the Hells Angels planned to storm the clubhouse and gun down everyone inside. Gagné was trained in how to set off a remote-controlled bomb.
The police informer Dany Kane alerted the police to the planned attack. which never happened as there was always a police car near the clubhouse. One evening in the summer of 1996, Gagné was supposed to drive a stolen automobile packed with a bomb to the clubhouse, but the attack was cancelled when the Hells Angels noted there was a police cruiser waiting for them. In another attempt to bomb the clubhouse, Gagné stole a van that was painted the same shade of grey as Hydro-Québec vans. On 23 August 1996, the police seized the van that Gagné had parked outside the clubhouse; it had 200 pounds of dynamite fashioned into a remote-controlled bomb. Gagné joined the Rockers, the Hells Angels puppet club that Boucher had founded in March 1992. The Rockers were divided into a "baseball team," which beat people up and destroyed property, and a "football team," which functioned as a death squad. Gagné joined the latter. Gagné testified, "The football team is a team of killers." Gagné remembered how Pierre Provencher, a Rocker, told one drug dealer that he was to pay 10% of his profits to Gagné because "Godasse is going to open some doors." When the drug dealer expressed some confusion about that statement, Provencher stated that Gagné would kill any drug dealer not working for the Hells Angels. Gagné described the atmosphere in the Rockers as one of relentless paranoia, and members communicated via sign language or by writing on an erasable magnetic board of the fear of police wiretaps.
In February and March 1997, instead of working on the "football team," Gagné was assigned to the Gay Village project under Serge Boutin, an attempt to take over all drug dealing in Montreal's Gay Village. Gagné reported that the majority of his clients in the Gay Village were male prostitutes who turned to prostitution only to support their drug addictions. In March 1997, Gagné, together with a Peruvian immigrant, Steve Boies, kidnapped a rival drug dealer, Christian Bellemare, and took him out to a chalet in the Laurentians. As Bellemare begged for his life, Boies shot him while Gagné's gun jammed. Together, Boies and Gagné shot Bellemare three times. Gagné strangled Bellemare and then buried him in the snow. However, Bellemare was not dead and climbed out of the snow, which caused Gagné to go into hiding for the next month. Despite botching his first murder attempt, Gagné became a "hang-around" member of the Rockers in May 1997.
Gagné served as a drug dealer and bodyguard for the Hells Angels. At restaurants, he always monitored people coming out of washrooms, where weapons might be hidden. That made Gagné state, "If the guy returned and put his fingerprints everywhere, that's not a killer, that guy because a killer would not put his fingerprints everywhere." Gagné found that the Hells Angels had their own intelligence unit with three vehicles, which were equipped with hidden cameras powered by batteries that lasted for 72 hours. To create a cover, Gagné testified that the Hells Angels printed their surveillance vehicles with the lettering of a fake construction contractor and even created a cell phone number for the fake company to give the impression that the vehicles were parked in the same spot for so long because a construction contractor was at work. Gagné would park one of the three vehicles and pick it up the next day. When the mother of the gangster Frank Cotroni died, Boucher had Gagné park the automobiles with hidden cameras in the parking lot of the church in which the service was held since Boucher wanted footage of everyone who attended the funeral and the license plates of their cars as he was planning to liquidate the Cotroni family. One policeman stated, "When the Hells went on a biker rally and stopped for a rest, Gagné would jump off his Harley and starting polishing the Hells' machine. He'd make sure the refrigerator was stocked with beer at biker parties and brought them drinks." Gagné was also involved in the escape of Richard Vallée in June 1997.
Murders Boucher knew from corrupt policemen that there was an informer in the ranks of the Hells Angels but did not know his name. To flush out the "mole," Boucher wanted the Hells Angels to start murdering people associated with the justice system. Boucher ordered two Hells Angels, André "Toots" Tousignant and Paul "Fonfon" Fontaine, to kill some random prison guards, and the two men recruited Gagné in turn. Together with Tousignant, Gagné waited outside Rivière-des-Prairies Prison in the eastern end of Montreal, waiting for an auspicious moment to strike. However, it was decided to murder prison guards from Bordeaux Prison instead, as it was closer to the major highways, which made escaping easier.
On 26 June 1997, Gagné and Tousigant armed themselves with handguns and got on two stolen '81 Suzuki Katana motorcycles. As the prison guard Diane Lavigne was leaving work in her minivan at Bordeaux Prison shortly after 9:48 pm, Gagné and Tousigant followed her. The two men rode up next to her minivan and opened fire, putting one bullet through Lavigne's arm and another into her lung, the latter of which proved to be fatal. Both men abandoned their guns at the crime scene. After the killing, Lavinge, Tousigant and Gagné returned to the garage, changed their clothes, and went out to the woods to burn the clothing and biker helmets that they had worn when they killed Lavigne.