Salvatore Cazzetta

Salvatore "Sal" Cazzetta (born 1954), also known as "La Barbe" ("the Beard"), is a Canadian former outlaw biker and gangster who founded the Rock Machine Motorcycle Club and later joined the Hells Angels following the Quebec Biker War. He was also a longtime associate of the Rizzuto crime family of Montreal. The SS was disbanded in 1984, and the Cazzetta brothers and Porter, along with others, chose not to join the Hells Angels. Instead, they founded the Rock Machine in 1986. When Boucher was released from prison the same year, he was offered membership in the Rock Machine by the Cazzetta brothers, but he declined the offer in favor of joining the Hells Angels.

Elements of the Hells Angels' Montreal chapter had become convinced that five senior members of their club had been embezzling club profits, and so they lured them to a meeting and killed them in an event known as the Lennoxville massacre of 1985. Times were profitable for the Rock Machine, enough so that Cazzetta purchased a mansion worth $2 million in L'Épiphanie.

In January 1993, West End Gang associates William "Billy" McAllister and Paul Larue were in talks with Cazzetta to put together another large deal for the two groups and had been speaking with a contact named John Burns in Florida, who had agreed to supply a large amount of cocaine. The pair did not have enough money so they were reliant on the Rock Machine and other aligned motorcycle clubs to provide most of the $875,000 (modern equivalent of $1,847,546) in U.S. currency needed for the initial purchase. On 10 March 1993, the exchange was officially set. On 19 March 1993, Cazzetta and fellow high-ranking Rock Machine member Nelson Fernandez traveled to Florida. With them, they brought the Rock Machine's contribution to the deal, which amounted to $660,000 (modern equivalent of $1,393,577). The two exchanged the money with Burns at a hotel. The plan was for them to take the initial portion of the shipment to two others who would be in charge of smuggling the drugs across the Canadian border. The amount that they were paying for the cocaine seemed too good to be true and it was. On 21 March 1993, McAllister and Larue, along with several others, were placed under arrest by Quebec police in relation to the importation of narcotics. Burns turned out to be an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent who had purposely lured McAllister into the sting. Cazzetta and Fernandez returned to Canada before being arrested.

Both the Rock Machine and the Hell Angels remained on peaceful terms for years, a situation to which there were multiple factors; Cazzetta and Boucher were "longtime friends" and possessed a great amount of respect for one another. The Cazzetta brothers also had business dealing and ties with Italian-Canadian Mafia groups in Quebec, particularly the Sicilian Rizzuto family. As the Rizzuto family imported large amounts of narcotics through the port of Montreal, the Rock Machine acted as one of the Mafia's distributors by supplying their product to street-level operations to be sold. Cazzetta was particularly involved with the Mafia, being friends with several high profile Mafiosi. These operations gained the club considerable notoriety and influence in Quebec's criminal underground.

According to Parker, another possible theory the Hells Angels would not instigate any issues against the Rock Machine were out of concern the powerful Rizzuto Family would directly intervene on their behalf. It was said that the Cazzetta brothers were related to a member of the Rizzuto family. Cazzetta was imprisoned in Quebec until 1998, when he was extradited to Florida to serve the remainder of his sentence. In June 1999, he pled guilty to narcotics charges, and was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison. The then Rock Machine national vice president and "right hand man" of Cazzetta, Fernandez was arrested in Montreal and was able to serve his time in Canada because he won his extradition case.

With Cazzetta imprisoned, the Hells Angels began attempting to gain a monopoly over the street-level drug trade in Montreal, bringing them into direct conflict with the Rock Machine.

On 22 November 2022, Éric Thibault and Félix Séguin of Le Journal de Montréal reported that Cazzetta had been forced into retirement in "good standing" from the Hells Angels after falling out of favour with other senior members of the club.

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