Maurice Boucher

Maurice Boucher (21 June 1953 – 10 July 2022) was a Canadian gangster, convicted murderer, reputed drug trafficker, and outlaw biker. He was once president of the Quebec Nomads chapter of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. Boucher led Montreal's Hells Angels against the rival Rock Machine biker gang during the Quebec Biker War of 1994 through 2002 in Quebec, Canada. In 2002, Boucher was convicted on two counts of first degree murder for ordering the murders of two Quebec prison officers in an effort to destabilize the Quebec Justice system.

He was sent to serve three life sentences at Canada's only supermax prison, in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines. While imprisoned there, Boucher survived several assassination attempts motivated by his infamy, and was placed in a special unit of the prison to isolate him. Authorities transferred him in June 2022 to the nearby Archambault Institution under conditions of secrecy so he could receive palliative care following the metastasis of his throat cancer. He died 10 July 2022.

Boucher had three sons and one daughter. Among them, Alexandra Mongeau (who uses her mother's surname) and Francis Boucher have also been involved in organized crime.

Early life Born in Causapscal, Quebec, Canada, Boucher was raised in poverty in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve borough of inner-city Montreal, where his family moved when he was two years old. Boucher was the oldest of eight children: three sons and five daughters; his father, Albert Boucher (1926–2006), was a construction worker while his mother, Claire Boily (1935–2009), stayed at home to raise their eight children. Boucher's father was an alcoholic who frequently beat his wife and children. His mother was described as the main source of love during his childhood. Albert Boucher was described as "a severe man who tolerated no lip from his children" and imposed an "iron discipline" on his eight children. In the 1960s and 1970s, the construction industry in Quebec was dominated by the Mafia-linked union boss André "Dédé" Desjardins, known as le roi de la construction ("the king of construction"), who ran the Conseil des métiers de la construction union quite brutally. The world that Boucher grew up in was a world where violence was commonplace and where corruption was accepted as normal. Boucher's school report cards describe him as an indifferent student and he dropped out of school in grade 9 to work odd jobs. In her memoir, Boucher's daughter, Alexandra Mongeau, recounted that Boucher confided in her that he was a victim of bullying at school and that he was sexually abused by Catholic priests as a child.

In April 1973, the 19-year-old Boucher committed his first known crime, when he stole $200 from a dépanneur. In July 1974, Boucher got a certificate allowing him to work in the construction industry, but he only lasted a week before being fired due to problems caused by his heavy drinking and drug use.

Unhappy with his income and desperate to support his drug habit, he turned to crime. He was arrested for three break and enters in the fall of 1974 and served nearly six months in detention. The first known crime committed by Boucher as an adult was on the night of 5 November 1974, when he broke into a grocery store in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district and attempted to steal 23 cartons of cigarettes but was caught by police upon exiting the store in possession of the cartons. It was during this time that Boucher's girlfriend, Diane Leblanc, was pregnant. By his own admission, Boucher was addicted to alcohol and marijuana and he often used cocaine, amphetamines, LSD, and heroin, though he stated to a police psychologist, Martin Pellerin, in February 1975 that he stopped using hard drugs in September 1974. In February 1975, Boucher was interviewed by Pellerin who described him as an ambitious man who wanted to get rich without working. Boucher told Pellerin that he would have liked to have followed his father into the construction trade, but the economic recession caused by the Arab oil shock of 1973–74 had made work very hard to find. Pellerin also described Boucher as lacking emotional empathy as a result of his abusive childhood, saying he was a very cold-hearted individual who regarded violence as acceptable behaviour.

On 5 November 1975, Boucher committed an armed robbery but was caught and sentenced to 40 months in prison. Boucher went into a butcher's shop armed with a rifle and stole $138.38, but because he used a gun with the robbery, the court imposed a stiff sentence. In December 1978, Boucher and his younger brother, Christian, were arrested for a series of home invasions, and for beating up the owner of one of the homes they had robbed. In July 1979, Boucher got a job working at a plastic factory in Montreal, which he held for four years, which was the longest period of legitimate employment in his entire life. In December 1981, Boucher was again charged with a home invasion, but the charges were dropped when the victim refused to testify against him in court.

Around 1982, Boucher was a member of a white supremacist motorcycle gang named the SS who were based in Pointe-aux-Trembles, on the eastern tip of the Island of Montreal. The SS were a group of men of working-class background who were strongly opposed to non-white immigration and initially their activities were limited to beating up non-white immigrants in order to make them go back to their countries of origin. A fellow member of the SS was Salvatore Cazzetta; the two became friends. As leaders of the gang, they became candidates to join the Hells Angels when the Angels decided to expand its operations into the rest of Canada. One of the members of the SS was one Normand "Biff" Hamel, who was to follow Boucher into the Hells Angels; it was Hamel, whose first conviction for drug dealing was in 1978, who introduced the SS gang to the drug trade. Hamel argued that this was a more profitable form of activity than beating up non-white immigrants. Hamel argued that however enjoyable it might be to beat up nonwhite immigrants, this did not make the SS biker gang any money. Right up until his murder in 2000, Hamel was described as Boucher's principal business partner.

It was during his time in the SS that Boucher, until then an undistinguished petty criminal, first showed the charisma and ability to lead that later marked his time in the Hells Angels. One of Boucher's most consistent enemies, Commander André Bouchard of the Montreal police, who first encountered Boucher in the 1970s, described Boucher during his time in the SS: "He was muscle. He was a crazy fucker. They'd send him out to beat up some guy. He was stoned half the time". Bouchard stated: "Mom [Boucher] at that time had aspirations. He was ambitious—and vicious". The journalist James Dubro stated about the distinctive outlaw biking sub-culture in Quebec: "There's always has been more violence in Quebec. In the biker world it's known as the Red Zone. I remember an Outlaws hit man telling me he was scared going to Montreal."

Commander Bouchard described Boucher as a man who loved publicity and who was always smiling for the cameras. Bouchard stated:

He'd do it on purpose, come out of the funeral parlor, stand with ten or twelve of his guys, look right into the cameras and smile and wave. But he never talked. Because I'll tell you honestly, he can't put two words together.

However, Bouchard also said:

He's very intelligent in the way he runs people. He's got a very high leadership quality. If he were straight [legitimate] he'd be a great manager for any business... He rules by fear. People respect him because they fear him. They don't respect him because he's respectable.

In March 1985, the Sorel (Montreal South) chapter of the Hells Angels suspected the Laval (Montreal North) chapter of wasting drug profits by using too much of the product themselves and ripping off the Nova Scotia chapter of $96,000. The Laval chapter was invited to a Sorel chapter party in Sherbrooke. When the five Laval members arrived, they were ambushed and murdered. Two months later, divers located the decomposing bodies of the victims wrapped in sleeping bags and tied to weightlifting plates at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River. On 26 March 1992, Boucher founded the Rockers Motor Club, the Hells Angels' puppet club in Montreal that was to be responsible for most of the murders committed in the Quebec biker war, with hopes of being promoted up to Hells Angels. Francis Boucher, the oldest son of Maurice, followed his father into racist activism. Francis Boucher was the president of the Sorel chapter of the White Power Canada group as well being a member of the Quebec Ku Klux Klan youth wing. On 31 July 1992, Francis Boucher at the age of 17 organized a Nazi rally, the Aryan Festival '92, which attracted much negative publicity and was also one of the first times his father was mentioned in the Quebec media.

In September 1992, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) started an investigation, codenamed Project Jaggy, of a drug smuggling operation run jointly by the Mafia and the Hells Angels to bring in cocaine from Jamaica, which in turn originated in Venezuela. In March 1993, Boucher paid a $500 fine after he was pulled over by a traffic cop and found with martial arts weapons in his car, violating the court order forbidding him to have any weapons. On 25 May 1993, a surveillance team from the RCMP took photographs of Boucher, wearing his Hells Angels colors, meeting Raynald Desjardins, the right-hand man of Vito Rizzuto, the leader of the Rizzuto crime family, one of the most powerful Mafia families in Canada. Desjardins had lunch with Rizzuto every Sunday at the Buffet Roma restaurant; it was reported that Rizzuto had a strong distaste for associating with outlaw bikers. Jean-Pierre Boucher (no relation to Maurice) of the RCMP who ran Project Jaggy stated: "Raynald and Mom were really good friends. Every time Quebec City did something wrong, Raynald called Mom to solve the problem". A boat, the Fortune Endeavor, was making regular trips from Jamaica to Quebec City to smuggle cocaine, and as part of the investigation, police wiretaps showed that Boucher and Desjardins were speaking on the phone on an almost daily basis in the summer of 1993. On 17 August 1993, an RCMP surveillance team recorded Boucher arriving at the Montreal headquarters of Desjardins's company, Amusements Deluxe, and then stepping into a car that took him to an unknown location; on the previous day, the Fortune Endeavor was due to arrive in Halifax and to forestall an unexpected inspection by Customs Canada after the boat had suffered an engine failure at sea, the crew had dumped 750 kilograms (1650 lb) of cocaine placed inside airtight plastic pipes off the coast of Nova Scotia. In the following days, a team of Hells Angels from Quebec arrived in Nova Scotia and wearing scuba gear tried to find the cocaine, which was finally located instead by the Canadian Navy. Desjardins was charged with conspiracy to smuggle the cocaine, but Boucher was not.

Quebec Biker War Starting the war In 1994, following the arrest of Salvatore Cazzetta on charges of conspiring to import 200 kg (440 lbs) of cocaine, the Rock Machine was rendered temporarily leaderless. Boucher, by now president of the Montreal chapter of the Hells Angels, decided to make his move against the Rock Machine and other independent dealers. His ultimate aim was to establish a Hells Angels monopoly over street-level, biker gang drug-dealing in the Montreal area—and eventually, all of Quebec. Boucher had the two Hells Angel puppet clubs, the Evil Ones and the Rockers, to start moving into markets controlled by the Rock Machine.

Boucher persuaded Rock Machine controlled bars and their resident drug dealers to surrender their illegal drug business or their resistance would lead to bloodshed. On 14 July 1994, two members of the Hells Angels' top puppet club, the Rockers, entered a downtown motorcycle shop and shot down a Rock Machine associate. This would be the spark that would set off the Quebec Biker war.

According to Kane's reports, Boucher was the man behind the "Thor affair" that did so much to discredit the Sûreté du Québec in the 1990s. In April 1994, a Norwegian container ship, the Thor1, arrived in Montreal. Acting on an anonymous tip, the Sûreté du Québec raided the Thor1 and found 26.5tons of hashish hidden just where the anonymous caller said it would be found. On the basis of what was found on the Thor1, Gerry Matticks, the boss of the Irish-Canadian West End Gang that controlled the Port of Montreal was charged with conspiracy to import drugs in May 1994. The case collapsed in court when Matticks's lawyers established that the Sûreté du Québec had planted evidence, most notably documents written in French that were found in Matticks' home. Matticks was born into a poor family of Irish immigrants in 1940 in one of Montreal's worst slums, had never attended school, spoke English as his first language, was illiterate, and was quite incapable of writing anything in either French or English. The fall-out from the Thor affair was a royal commission headed by Justice Lawrence Poitras which criticized the Sûreté du Québec for routinely engaging in unprofessional practices such as planting evidence, threatening witnesses, and perjury in court. Kane's notes state that Boucher had placed the anonymous call and bribed the Sûreté du Québec detectives to plant the evidence, as this would be a "win-win" for him. If Matticks was convicted, he would eliminate a potential rival or if Matticks' lawyers exposed the planted evidence, the resulting backlash would discredit the Sûreté du Québec. Kane wrote to his handlers: "He [Boucher] told me he was the person behind the Poitras inquiry and not even the Matticks brothers know that and that he paid the lawyers for getting the shit out for the Poitras inquiry".

The Nomads In January 1995, Boucher decided to start a new Hells Angels chapter which he would lead. The Hells Angels Nomads chapter was a group made up of the most powerful Hells Angels in Quebec and not bound by geographical locations like other Hells Angels chapters. Boucher was the sole president of the Nomad chapter in name, but in practice the Nomads were led by the triumvirate of David "Wolf" Carroll (responsible for Atlantic Canada), Boucher (responsible for Quebec), and Stadnick (responsible for the rest of Canada). According to Kane, Boucher had told him that the Nomads were going to be "plus rock n' roll" (more daring, exciting, and harder-more at liberty to act at will rather than according to club rules). The journalists Julian Sher and William Marsden translated plus rock n'roll as "...meaning they would be dangerous even by biker standards". Kane reported that the members selected for the Nomad chapter were Boucher, Walter Stadnick, David "Wolf" Carroll, Scott Steinert, Normand "Biff" Hamel, Gilles "Trooper" Mathieu, Louis "Mélou" Roy, and Donald "Pup" Stockford". The clubhouse for the Nomad chapter was located on Bennett Street in the shadow of the Olympic Stadium and was very near to Boucher's favorite gym, the Pro-Gym. The Nomad chapter purchased cocaine in large quantities such as 1,000 kilograms (2000 lb) at a time from the Rizzuto family and the West End Gang. With the exception of the Sherbrooke chapter, all other Hells Angels chapters in Canada were required to buy their cocaine from the Nomad chapter.

Kane described Boucher as a much more self-disciplined man than he had been in the 1970s, saying that he only consumed alcohol and otherwise avoided all drugs and that he always got up early in the morning to meet other Angels at about 9:30 am. Cleverly, Boucher usually paid his lawyer to be present at his meetings with other Angels, thus technically making these meetings between a client and his lawyer, meaning the police could not record these meetings as that would violate solicitor-client confidentiality. Boucher purchased a mansion in the south end of Montreal, complete with gardens and stables for his horses. Boucher was also active as a real estate developer in Mexico, owning several properties in Acapulco and often hosted parties attended by senior officers of the extremely corrupt Acapulco police department. Kane reported that Boucher spent much time in Mexico as he was unable to enter the United States owing to his criminal record. When filing his income taxes, Boucher variously gave his occupation as a chef, construction worker, used car salesman, and real estate developer. A great fan of Luciano Pavarotti and Phil Collins, Boucher always purchased front-row seats whenever those artists played in Montreal. Boucher's mistress, Louise Mongeau, took a familiar tone with him, calling him minou ("kitty") and mon p'tit chaton ("my little kitten").

Despite his background in the white supremacist gang, the SS, Boucher's bodyguard was the Haitian immigrant Gregory "Picasso" Woolley, who was also reputed to be the best assassin working for the Angels. Woolley is known as "Picasso" in the Montreal underworld because it is said that he is such an artist when it comes to killing, having first killed at the age of 17 when he knifed another Haitian immigrant and gang member to death. Woolley was said to have done such an "exquisite" job at carving up his rival that he earned the nickname "Picasso", and he was ultimately made the president of the Rockers by Boucher, becoming the first black man to ever head an outlaw biker club in Canada. Boucher's principal contact with the Rizzuto family was Guy Lepage, who had served with the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal from 1966 to 1974, and was dismissed for associating with Mafiosi. As a former policeman, Lepage could not join the Hells Angels as the Angels do not accept current or former law enforcement personnel into their ranks, but he did join the Rockers. Lepage also enlisted the help of the Craigs, a couple consisting of Raymond Craig and his Bolivian wife Sandra, to assist with importing drugs from South America.

The killings of Desrochers, Lavigne and Rondeau In March 1995, Boucher was found to be carrying a handgun after he was pulled over by the police, doing a few months in prison. After his arrest, a Sûreté du Québec detective told Boucher that the RCMP had a "coded informer" numbered C-2994 within his gang. During his time in prison, Boucher quarrelled with the warden, Nicole Quesnel, after she refused his request to give him day passes and on 9 June 1995, her house was burned down after being firebombed by masked men riding Harley-Davidson motorcycles. It was also during his time in Sorel prison in 1995 that Boucher became well acquainted with a career criminal named Stéphane Gagné whose nickname was Godasse (Old Shoe). In December 1994, Gagné was sentenced to two years in prison for selling cocaine and went to Bordeaux Prison, where he attacked an imprisoned Rock Machine member Jean Duquaire with a homemade knife after Duquaire had asked him to stomp on a photograph of Boucher. After the attack, Gagné was sent to the same prison as Boucher in 1995, where he boasted about his loyalty to the Hells Angels, and told Boucher he would do anything to get into the Angels. Boucher was released in July 1995, and remembered Gagné, telling him to get in touch after he got out of prison, saying he had "important work" for him. Gagné found that Boucher had a disconcerting habit of appearing suddenly and without warning, and expecting him to perform some task instantly; for an example, Boucher showed up unannounced at Gagné's mother's house to tell him that he had an important assignment that needed to be performed immediately. In this case, the assignment was to drive through Verdun to scout a Rock Machine clubhouse that Boucher wanted to see blown up.

After Gagné was released in 1996, he joined the Rockers. Boucher had the Hells Angels run their surveillance unit, consisting of three vehicles, namely a pick-up truck, a van and an automobile with tinted windows and secret cameras with batteries that lasted for 72 hours, which he used to collect intelligence on other criminal groups and the police. The cameras were usually hidden in a Kleenex box on the dashboards. Gagné would park one of the vehicles, set the camera running and come back the next day to collect the video footage. When the mother of the Mafioso Frank Cotroni died, Boucher had Gagné secretly record video footage of everyone who attended the funeral of Cotroni's mother together with the licence plates of their automobiles. Boucher told Gagné that he wanted the names of everyone in the Cotroni family as it was his intention to liquidate the Cotroni family once he was finished with the Rock Machine.

On 9 August 1995, a Jeep wired with a remote-controlled bomb exploded, killing an 11-year-old boy, Daniel Desrochers, who was playing in a nearby schoolyard. According to Kane, Boucher and Steinert had devised a plan to kill one of their own in a brutal manner in order to turn public opinion against the Rock Machine and selected a low-level drug dealer working for the Angels named Marc Dube as the one to be sacrificed. It was Dube who was killed in the bombing that also killed Desrochers. An RCMP report described Steinert as a "very violent and cruel psychopath who can't control himself", concluding he was the man most likely to have exploded the bomb that killed Dube despite the fact that there were children playing across the street from where Dube's jeep was parked. A month later, the first Hells Angels member was shot to death entering his car at a shopping mall. Nine bombs went off around the province during his funeral." Instead of meeting Desjardins at Shawn's as he had promised, Boucher went for a coffee at his favourite coffee shop, the Au Bon Pain. While Boucher was enjoying his coffee, Commander Bouchard arrived at the Au Bon Pain to ask Boucher what he knew about the murder of Desjardins and why he did not have breakfast at Shawn's as he had promised. Boucher refused to answer any questions and told Bouchard he would only speak with his lawyer present. On the afternoon of 27 April, Boucher together with his lawyer, Gilbert Frigon, met Bouchard at a police station to talk about the murder of Desjardins. Boucher claimed he and Desjardins had been talking about the weather in the Dominican Republic the previous day, which had bored him so much that he decided to skip breakfast with Desjardins that day. Boucher told Bouchard that it was a "sad thing" that his friend Desjardins had been murdered and would call him at once "if he heard anything". Bouchard later recalled that Boucher did not seem at all upset about the murder of his "friend" Desjardins.

Gagné testified at Boucher's trial in 2002 that Boucher greatly resented the power of the Mafia and was planning to drive them out of Montreal altogether, but was waiting until he won the Quebec biker war with the Rock Machine before taking on the Mafia, who were a far more powerful organization. However, Gagné testified that Boucher wanted to eliminate people like Desjardins, French-Canadian criminals willing to work with the Mafia, as an interim measure as a way of weakening the power of the Mafia before taking them on outright. Boucher's friend who was struggling with the loan was a man who had associations with the Rizzuto family and was not a Hells Angel. Langton argued that Boucher had chosen to use a case of an Italo-Canadian struggling with an unpayable loan as an excuse to eliminate Desjardins without arousing the suspicions of his nominal ally, Vito Rizzuto. Sher and Marsden wrote that Desjardins's murder was not "an isolated killing over a simple debt", but rather "the beginning of a new era of consolidation of the Hells' now massive drug empire, which extended throughout Quebec and the Maritimes and was fast spreading into Ontario and western Canada". Desjardins's business partner Robert Savard was killed on 7 July 2000 after having breakfast with Boucher on the previous day and by October 2000, there had been 11 murders of "independent" gangsters not with the Rizzuto family who had previously been allies of the Hells Angels.

In June 2000, Sandra Craig, a Bolivian immigrant who was the daughter of one of Bolivia's most powerful drug lords was almost killed by the Hells Angels on the streets of Montreal and on 29 August 2000, her Canadian husband Raymond Craig was killed by the Angels in the resort town of Ste-Adèle; the Craigs had previously been the main link between the Colombian gangsters and the Rizzuto family and the Hells Angels in Montreal. On 21 June 2000, the Nomads Normand Robitaille, André Chouinard and Michel Rose met Rizzuto to agree on the price of a kilo of cocaine in Quebec: $50,000, and with a penalty of death for anyone who sold below that amount. Kane stated that Boucher wanted to attend the meeting with Rizzuto but did not, so as not to attract police attention. According to Kane, a group called La Table consisting of Boucher, Denis Houle, Michel Rose, Normand Robitaille and André Chouinard set the prices for drugs in Quebec in consultation with the Mafia. Due to the agreement with Rizzuto, Boucher no longer needed the Craigs, and decided to dispense with their services. On 23 June 2000, to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the founding of the Nomads, Boucher held a party, which was the last time that Louis "Mélou" Roy, a Nomad and the Hells Angels chapter president for Trois-Rivières was seen alive. Roy had objected to the deal Boucher had reached with the Rizzuto family to sell cocaine for $50,000 per kilo. Roy had preferred to sell cocaine for considerably less and had told Boucher he would not abide by La Table'''s prices, believing that as a founding member of the Nomads that he was immune from being punished by Boucher. At the preliminary hearing for the West End Gang boss Gerry Matticks in 2001, a witness for the Crown testified that Roy was taken from Boucher's party to a meat-processing plant owned by Matticks, had his mouth stuffed so he could not scream, and was put through a meat-grinder while still alive. Regardless of his actual fate, Roy was last seen alive going to the Nomads' party on 25 June 2000 and has not been seen since. In the summer of 2000, Michel Auger, the crime correspondent of Le Journal de Montréal wrote a series of articles stating that Boucher had turned on his former allies such as Desjardins, Savard and the Craigs and was systematically killing them off. Carroll told Kane in July 2000 that Boucher "controls all of it's his city".

Reflecting his mainstream status, during the wedding of Hells Angel member René Charlebois on 5 August 2000, Ginette Reno, one of the best-loved folksingers in Quebec, attended, sang, and posed for photographs with Boucher for the Montreal tabloid Allô Police, saying to the Allô Police journalist that she was honoured to meet such an outstanding man like Boucher. Also attending and performing at the wedding was another well-loved French-Canadian folk singer Jean-Pierre Ferland who also posed for photographs with Boucher, saying it was a great honour to meet him. Both Ferland and Reno later claimed that they were unaware that the Hells Angels were one of the most feared criminal syndicates in Quebec at the time they attended the wedding. However, critics noted that both Reno and Ferland were paid $1 million for performing at Charlebois's wedding, suggesting that was the real reason for their willingness to associate with the Hell's Angels, instead of their professed ignorance. Reno stated in her defence: "Jesus hung around with bad people. Are they killers and criminals 24 hours a day? You can't be rotten from morning till night".

The Auger assassination attempt and the truce On 13 September 2000, Auger was shot five times in the back while opening the trunk of his car in the parking lot of Le Journal de Montréal, and was almost killed. In the summer of 2000, Auger had written several articles linking Boucher to the murder of Desjardins, and the attempt on Auger's life was remarkably similar to the murder of Desjardins. The attempted murder of Auger sparked protests by journalists in Montreal demanding the federal government pass an anti-gang law similar to the RICO act in the United States. Vito Rizzuto, the boss of the Rizzuto crime family, was terrified of a RICO type act being passed in Canada and in a striking demonstration of the power of the Mafia in Montreal ordered a truce in the Quebec biker war. On 27 September 2000, Boucher met with Frédéric "Fred" Faucher, the leader of the Rock Machine, in a courthouse in Quebec City to agree to the truce. However, the truce did not stop the violence by the Hells Angels. In October 2000, a bar owner in the town of Terrebonne named Francis Laforest refused to permit the Rowdy Ones, a puppet club of the Hells Angels, to sell drugs in his bar. As Laforest was walking his dog, he was attacked in broad daylight by three masked men who beat him to death with baseball bats. Led by Auger, a protest took place in Montreal to honour Laforest with Auger saying of Quebec's murderous outlaw bikers: "They believed that they are on [...] top of the world. The criminals had built up a system so sophisticated that they are above the law [...] We are the only country in the world where [...] gangs [get] a free ride".

On 8 October 2000 to celebrate Thanksgiving, Boucher and Faucher had dinner together at Bleu Martin restaurant and while a photographer from Allô Police tabloid recorded the scene, the leaders of the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine exchanged handshakes, hugged and broke bread together (a common symbol in French-Canada of reconciliation). To seal the truce the biker leaders then went to Super-Sexe, at the time a well known strip club in Montreal, with photographers from Allô Police in tow. The truce was more of a public relations gimmick. The Canadian journalists Julian Sher and William Marsden wrote that by the fall of 2000 "the Hells Angels had achieved their goal of controlling the drug trade in Quebec."

On 10 October 2000, a Montreal appeals judge overruled double jeopardy, declaring that the Crown had presented credible evidence that the 1998 trial of Boucher was marred by intimidation of the jury and that Justice Boilard's instructions to the jury were defective, and as such, Boucher should be retried for the murders of Lavigne and Rondeau. The court of appeal accepted the argument of Crown Attorney France Charbonneau that Justice Boilard had displayed such an outrageous pro-defence bias that a new trial was required.

After the appeals judge undid double jeopardy, Commander Bouchard had Boucher arrested leaving a restaurant to be charged once again for two counts of first degree murder for the killings of Rondeau and Lavigne. Bouchard stated that Boucher "was pissed off," recalling that Boucher swore continuously at the police when he was taken in, as he never expected double jeopardy to be undone. Boucher was denied bail and held at the Tanguay jail prior to and during his trial. He refused to eat the prison's food out of fear of being poisoned, instead subsisting on a steady diet of chocolate bars. Boucher's lawyer, Robert Lemieux, who was renown in Quebec for his role defending members of the FLQ during and after the October Crisis of 1970, announced that his client had launched a $30 million lawsuit against the province of Quebec, alleging wrongful prosecution. Unfortunately for Boucher he wrote the letter of complaint himself, sparking widespread ridicule as his writing was full of spelling and grammatical mistakes. The discovery that high school dropout Boucher was incapable of writing a proper French sentence damaged his public mystique some, lending him a somewhat oafish image. Boucher hired lawyer Alan Gold to challenge the appeal court's decision before the Supreme Court, arguing that the decision to overturn double jeopardy violated his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but to no avail as in December 2000 the Supreme Court sided with the Crown.

More seriously for Boucher, on 24 January 2001, Sandra Craig, who had been hunted by the Angels for several months turned herself in to the police, and turned Crown's evidence. Craig, who was an active drug dealer in partnership with her late husband, possessed much information in the form of spreadsheets and invoices about the sale of drugs in Montreal, testifying she and her husband had arranged the sale of 1,700 kilos of cocaine to the Hells Angels between 1998 and 2000. Commander Bouchard, Boucher's nemesis, in the meantime had used Kane's reports about the murders committed by the Angels and the Rockers as the basis for a list of suspects and then had two detectives, Louis-Marc Pelletier and Michel Tremblay, thoroughly reexamine all of the forensic evidence from all of the murders that Kane had listed. After much work, Tremblay and Pelletier discovered four pieces of previously undetected DNA evidence such as skin flakes and saliva from Kleenexes found at the crime scenes. Using Kane's list of killers, Bouchard had the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal seize DNA evidence left in the "open" by the Hells Angels or the Rockers such as uneaten food at restaurants or discarded cardboard coffee cups as the basis for DNA testing. In this way, the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal'' linked four Angels/Rockers, most notably Boucher's bodyguard, Gregory Woolley, to the murders. On 28 March 2001, Boucher learned from his jail cell of Operation Springtime, which saw the arrest of 142 bikers including 80 of the 106 "full patch" Hells Angels and almost the entire Nomad chapter plus every member of the Rockers and the Evil Ones.

Conviction During the intense war between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine, Boucher ordered the murders of Quebec correctional officers Diane Lavigne and Pierre Rondeau in 1997. Both officers had been chosen at random. Besides the blow to the judicial system in Quebec, Boucher wanted crimes committed by bikers that would be so serious that prosecutors would not want to make deals to turn bikers into informants.

In 1998, a jury acquitted Boucher of having ordered those murders. He was then closely followed by the police. In 2000, an appeals court dismissed the earlier acquittal, and he was arrested again. He was convicted of the murders with the help of a police informer in May 2002. The Crown Attorney prosecuting Boucher, France Charbonneau described herself as: "I am a woman of conviction. I don't play". During the trial which began on 26 March 2002, Charbonneau regularly received death threats. The key witness for the prosecution was Stéphane Gagné, nicknamed Godasse (Old Shoe), who was involved in both murders. He testified that Boucher ordered him to carry out the killings and was later congratulated by Boucher himself. Besides for Gagné, Serge Boutin also turned Crown's evidence. In February 2000, Boutin killed another drug dealer and police informer Claude Des Serres in a skiing chalet in the Laurentians mountains. As Des Serres was wearing a wire at the time Boutin tortured and killed him, the police listened in to the last minutes of his life. Facing a life sentence, Boutin cut a deal with the Crown where he plea-bargained to pleading guilty to manslaughter and serving seven years in prison in exchange for testifying against Boucher. One of the witnesses at the first trial, Nancy Dubé, who testified that she saw Gagné set his get-away car afire after killing Rondeau, refused to testify at the second trial. Boucher had visited her furniture store in downtown Montreal where she worked as a clerk and gave him menacing looks as he pretended to browse. Charbonneau stated: "She almost died of fright".

The most damning evidence came from beyond the grave as the reports that Kane had submitted to the RCMP were presented as Crown's evidence. Shortly before committing suicide in August 2000, Kane had stolen the financial records of the Nomads, which showed that over the course of the first 8 months of 2000, the Hells Angels had made a profit of $111,503,110 in Quebec, and which were presented as evidence for the Crown. During the trial, Charbonneau had such a ferocious courtroom demeanor that Boucher's lawyer, Jacques Larochelle, was visibly upset at dealing with her. When Larochelle started to refer to Boucher as "Mom" in the courtroom in order to make him seem lovable to the jury, Charbonneau objected every time, saying he should be referred to as Monsieur Boucher; she was so effective in her objections that finally even Larochelle took to describing his client as M. Boucher. During his cross-examination of Gagné, Larochelle noted that there were inconsistencies in his first confession to Sergeant Pigeon, leading for Gagné to reply that he had not slept for almost 24 hours and was tired. Larochelle sneeringly told Gagné: "I've seen the video and you don't look tired". Charbonneau rose up to announce: "Let's see the video". The video was played where a clearly exhausted Gagné almost falling asleep several times during his confession, which Charbonneau used to almost put Larochelle on trial, accusing him of being a pathologically dishonest lawyer who would say anything to win the case.

After 11 days of deliberation by the jury, Boucher was found guilty of one count of attempted murder and two counts of first-degree murder on 5 May 2002. Boucher displayed no emotion as the verdict was announced besides for "a slight pursing of his lips". Boucher received an automatic life sentence, with no possibility of parole for at least 25 years. On 5 May 2002, Commander Bouchard was playing golf when he received a phone call from Charbonneau reporting that Boucher had been convicted, recalled: "She was crying on the phone. They had a party at her house. We were all invited to go down and have champagne". Bouchard himself stated he felt very peaceful and content on hearing the news of Boucher's conviction. After his conviction, Boucher was replaced with Jacques "Isreal" Emond as the new Quebec Hells Angels leader.

Life behind bars Boucher was detained in the only Canadian Super-Maximum security penitentiary, located in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, north of Montreal. In May 2002, Boucher was held in the prison's E-block section where other Hells Angels were housed. In the spring of 2002, Boucher played volleyball with his fellow Angels in the prison yard, and for reasons that remain unexplained on 25 June 2002 signed up for career counselling despite his life sentence. In the summer of 2002, Boucher was transferred to the Special Handling Unit where his neighbours included the serial killers Clifford Olson and Allan Légère. While Boucher was described as being jovial when housed in E-block, he appeared rather depressed in the Special Handling Unit, and prison cameras repeatedly document his looking around carefully when venturing out of his cell. On 13 August 2002, an Indian Posse inmate attacked Boucher with an improvised knife. Boucher was described as being "depressed, cantankerous and aggressive" in prison.

In September 2002, the Indian Posse, a criminal gang made up of First Nations people active on the Prairies, tried to kill Boucher by firing a bazooka at his cell. The Hells Angels only accept white men, and have been involved in bloody disputes with First Nations criminal groups in the Prairies, which led the Indian Posse to try to kill the most infamous Canadian Hells Angel. In the summer of 2002, at the Stoney Mountain Penitentiary in Manitoba, a member of the Zig-Zag crew, a Hells Angel puppet gang, had injured an Indian Posse member by throwing him down a flight of stairs, leading to a member of the Indian Posse stabbing a Zig-Zag Crew member in revenge. Danny Wolfe, the leader of the Indian Posse ordered Boucher killed as a way of demonstrating the power of the Indian Posse.

Commander Bouchard later told the media in 2011 it was rumoured that the American leadership of the Hell's Angels wanted Boucher dead, saying: "We've heard that [Hell's Angels leadership] in the United States got together and [decided] to take the fucker out. They say this is the guy who caused all the trouble." Whether or not a jailhouse contract on Boucher existed at the time, on 23 October 2010 Boucher was wounded during an attempt on his life when another prisoner stabbed him. The man who attacked Boucher was a First Nations criminal who had wanted to join the Hells Angels, but was refused as the Angels only accept whites. Boucher's attacker repeatedly referred to the Angels' whites only acceptance policy when stabbing him with a dining knife before other prisoners stepped in and put a stop to it.

In April 2014 it was reported that the Angels had expelled Boucher outright from the organization.

On 3 November 2015, Boucher and another inmate, René Girard, were accused of attempting to murder another prisoner, Ghislain Gaudet, stabbing him repeatedly with improvised knives. Girard, a man of limited intelligence who during an alcohol and cocaine binge in 1986 had sex with a man whom he mistook for a woman, and killed him in his fury when he noticed his lover had a penis, was described as an immature man prone to extreme violence who is easily manipulated. Boucher and Girard were charged with the attempted murder of Gaudet.

Boucher's former bodyguard, a Haitian immigrant named Gregory Woolley, has been described as a major player in organized crime in Montreal. On 19 November 2015, Boucher and his daughter, Alexandra Mongeau, were charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Shortly before his trial was due to begin, Boucher pleaded guilty on 17 April 2018 for conspiring to murder Raynald Desjardins. According to the summary of facts agreed to before Justice Éric Downs, Boucher on 21 July 2015 told his daughter during a visit to him in prison: ""Euh. In the affairs of the Mafia … OK? If he comes here I know someone who can kill him, if he wants. Because, to me, (Desjardins) will be brought here (at Ste-Anne-des-Plaines). If he comes here, we can kill him."

On 10 July 2022, La Presse reported that Boucher died while receiving palliative care for throat cancer. He was 69 years old. His ashes were scattered in a wooded area on Saint Helen's Island in the presence of a small, private group of family members, under the remote surveillance of the Sûreté du Québec (Quebec provincial police force) and the curiosity of the media who took a few pictures from the distance. In accordance with his last wishes, no members of the Hells Angels were present at the ceremony.