The following programme contains strong language, strong violence,
Downloaded from YTS.MX
and adult themes from the start.
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
(TRAIN HORN)
RADIO: Ten songs in a row and a better mix of music
on the official radio station of summer.
C'etait Soul II Soul, Keep on Moving, en souvenir de CKMF.
It is 24 degrees in Montreal.
I'm John Moore and this is a 980 Hits information update.
Twist and Shout from the Beatles, 97.7 FM in Montreal, Good Morning!
What a morning!
(TENSE MUSIC PLAYS)
(CAR HORN BLARES)
(GUN COCKS) (GUNSHOTS)
TV REPORTER: Sidney Leithman died early this morning
in his luxury imported convertible on his way to a health club
in this middle-class Montreal suburb.
Police believe an accomplice in another car blocked Leithman's path
while the assassin, a professional,
carefully fired six bullets into the sitting target.
MAN: Sidney Leithman was the most successful criminal lawyer
in the city.
He was really at the top of his game.
He loved what he did. He loved to perform in court.
I'd rather be pleading, than waiting for a verdict.
Defence lawyers tended to stick to one mob.
He represented the Mafia,
the Columbians. And he had the West End Gang.
All of these organised crime groups battled to control
the cocaine industry in Montreal.
By then, we should have, hopefully,
some idea of the nature of the proof, if any.
The killing of Sidney Leithman was not just the death
of Sidney Leithman, it gave life to a whole new story.
When the police start going through Sidney's clothing,
in one of his pockets they find a hand-written phone number.
That phone number was the key that opened the door to the power
of the drug trade and the massive corruption that it had created.
(MAIN THEME PLAYS)
(ELECTRIC GUITAR PLAYS)
Montreal is a very sexy, appealing, seductive city.
It became perhaps the most criminal city in North America.
A lot of us became acquainted with the criminal element,
the criminal character of Montreal at a very early age.
You're a kid and you're going to the candy store
and up there is Allo Police, a weekly crime tabloid.
What other city has a weekly crime tabloid?
Well, in fact, Montreal had two weekly crime tabloids!
And in Montreal, criminals can be heroes.
When I was a kid, my father was a city columnist for
The Montreal Star and he covered the waterfront.
I remember one time he had a desk at home and there were all these
mugshots of the West End Gang.
So I was fascinated by these mugshots.
The West End Gang was legendary.
Dunie Ryan was a very, very, very sharp criminal operator.
Very intelligent guy. He's at the top.
MAN: Allan Ross was Dunie Ryan's right hand man.
He was considered a nasty piece of work.
MAN: Gerry Matticks was like a toll booth through the Port.
He could get your big shipment of cocaine through
but that came with a price.
The West End Gang is great because it's actually not a gang,
it's a network of people. It's very flexible.
You also don't give the police a structure to look at.
TV REPORTER: ...26 tonnes found at the port of Montreal.
On board 200 million dollars of pure cocaine.
The West End Gang was an extraordinary surprise to us.
You've got small time hoods that rose up and had the initiative
to go down and meet personally with Colombian Cartel guys
- that's ambition, that's gutsy too.
Those are dangerous people.
They became an organisation with global power,
an organisation that imports tons and tons of cocaine
into the United States and into Canada.
Montreal had pretty solid divides with its various gangs.
On the East end, you would have the French Canadian Gangs.
In the North End you had the Italian Mafia.
And in the West, you had the West End Gang -
the Irish neighbourhood gangsters.
When I was a kid, the West End neighbourhood was a perfect
breeding ground for that gang to rise up there.
Everybody knew someone, a family member, a close friend,
who was in some way absolutely connected to the West End Gang.
When my dad was in his early 30s he went into the police department,
but then he saw a side that he didn't like,
that he realised they weren't necessarily the good guys.
And the gangs were the bad guys.
So he was disillusioned and he eventually left.
Later on as a kid, I heard him being referred to as "the enforcer"
and I asked my mother about it and said "Mom, what does that mean?"
and she just pretended she didn't hear me
and never did answer the question.
The members of the West End Gang, they grew up poor. All of them.
And it was a hardscrabble life.
They were tough, Irish, working-class kids
who grew up with similar backgrounds
and that made them very tough criminals.
(GUNSHOTS) (ALARM RINGING, YELLING)
(GUN COCKS, GUNSHOT)
How old were you when you robbed your first bank?
Fourteen.
Fourteen? Yeah.
Pulling out the gun, jumping up on the counter
doing like they do in the movies, you know,
and wanting the money and they could see it.
REPORTER: Welcome to Montreal!
It's just another normal day in the bank robbery capital
of North America.
The West End Gang had the best safe crackers,
had the best armed robbery guys.
This is one of about 800 bank holdups in the city every year.
Montreal has more of these little scenes than any other city
on this continent,
more than Chicago, more than Los Angeles,
more even than New York.
They got all the bases covered.
They got locksmiths, they got communications guys
and electricians and truck drivers, inside guys to do a job.
Bank robberies in the sixties and seventies,
it was like going to bingo. It was super popular.
It was an easy, quick way to get some money.
One of my uncles, "Uncle Richard" was a huge bank robber at the time
and was considered a handsome,
smiling guy because he was always very polite.
He used to say there is no point in scaring them.
He would be very polite about it.
Wells Fargo guards with revolvers drawn stood guard outside
the Sun life building.
According to the Police,
at a quarter to 12 Wells Fargo men entered the building...
We used to rob a minimum of three banks a week, some twice.
That's how open they were.
Everybody was robbing banks, it was in and out,
it was quick, it was easy.
Like, one manager knew it was me again!
Back in those days, things were really, really happening
in Montreal. You say to yourself: "Imagine this happening today?"
It was a crazy, crazy time. Everybody was a bank robber.
Dunie Ryan was a kind of punk.
By the time he was 19,
he had already been in juvenile detention homes a couple of times.
He was well immersed in that life. He was a thief.
He was robbing jewellery stores.
If you opened at nine, they were there with a gun to your head
to help you open up the store, you know, and take what you had.
In his 20's he's involved in armed robberies.
He goes on a trip to the U.S. with some guys
and they are going to do a string of bank robberies
and they get jacked.
They get caught in Lynn, Massachusetts, near Boston.
He was in a penitentiary for five years in the U.S.
Now 30 years old, he comes back to Montreal
and that's when he forms what would be known as the West End Gang.
In 1961, I was 22 years old
and I decided to join the police force.
You made yourself a reputation, you know,
and I was glad of my reputation.
You know, don't fuck around with Savard.
Andre Savard -
top of the cop list in Montreal.
Would do anything to make an arrest within the boundaries of the law.
He took crap from no one.
My first job, standing guard at the Botanical Garden.
You know, I'm armed with a gun and I'm a police officer
and don't step on the flowers, you know.
If you do, well, who knows what's going to happen.
So I needed some action, some real police work.
(SIREN BLARING)
The hold up squad was busier than at any other time,
because the capital of robbery was Montreal.
That started the whole thing with me working at the Holdup Squad.
The West End Gang were considered good 'bad guys' in the sense that
initially they were not dealing drugs, they had not killed anybody.
There was a guy John Slawvey, that was part of the Gang.
They called him Big John, Big John Slawvey,
because he weighed something like 240 pounds
and he also was really mean.
He hated cops with a vengeance.
BURKE: Dunie was close to Slawvey and he was a big guy.
Dunie liked him a lot.
There was a cop that was doing traffic, he was in front of Simpsons
and he was writing a ticket
and John Slawvey with two other guys came out of the Simpsons Building
because they just committed an armed robbery.
They could have left,
the cop was writing a ticket - he wouldn't see this,
they were in the back of him. So he yelled at the cop, Slawvey,
so the cop turned around...
(RAPID GUNSHOTS)
..almost cut him in half, you know, with a machine gun.
It didn't take long for police to find out from their informants
that John Slawvey was the killer,
but they didn't have enough evidence to arrest him.
Later on we heard about him, that he was glad at what he did,
it was like a trophy for him.
He used to go shoot at some target and write" police" on top,
you know, just shoot him.
(FRENCH RADIO)
For a long time, the West End Gang was just a bunch of guys
from the Irish neighbourhood.
It wasn't until they started killing people that they became a threat.
They are frightening people.
They would kill you as soon as they looked at you.
They just don't care.
(CHURCH BELLS RINGING)
The eyes of the world were all on Montreal in 1976
because of the arrival of the Olympics.
Law and order suddenly became critical in presenting
a clean image to the world.
Unfortunately the reality basically whacked them in the face.
It was a crime that stunned the Montreal police
because of its audacity.
(TENSE MUSIC)
REPORTER: The Brinks truck arrived at the bank to pick up currency
in all denominations.
Gunmen in a white van backed up behind the truck,
blocking the alley.
And when the door was flung open, the remaining guard faced this:
a 50 calibre anti-aircraft gun.
The driver of the second vehicle got out and went to the door
of the Brinks truck. 'Open the truck.'
Those were the only words said during the whole affair
and they were said in English.
The gunmen escaped with the largest holdup haul in Quebec history:
$2.8 million dollars.
SAVARD: It was definitely the West End Gang.
Because nobody else could be involved in such a robbery.
We knew that the Irish organised crime in Boston and Montreal
are connected.
Who is gonna be able to get a 50-calibre machine gun?
But of course it comes from the States, you know,
and who's got those contacts?
Police say they know who is responsible, they just don't have
enough evidence to make the charges stick.
I went to see my boss, the inspector, at the time.
I asked him, "Why don't you let me do something."
He told me "Yes you can do it, Andre, but be careful.
Don't overdo it." I had a tendency of overdoing it.
"Don't be a Dirty Harry," that's what he was telling me.
In order to shake the organised crime,
the best way we could, legally, was to do some things that weren't done.
You were stepping out of the rule book a little bit, you know.
(KNOCKING) Police! Open the door.
O'CONNOR: They went about rousting people they thought might be members
of the West End Gang.
Hands up police. Come on. Open up.
Night after night after night, they would go to different places
where they knew West End Gang members would hang out
and they would find guns, they would find money
but nothing directly connected to the Brinks robbery.
We hit all these places.
Nittolo's, Peg's - every motel we hit them, you know.
We're bothering the West End Gang.
Dunie Ryan did not take kindly to the fact that they were being rousted
night after night by Andre Savard.
I'm patrolling near Motel Peg with one of my men,
and that's what we did before we're going to hit some place.
I was driving the car and passing Motel Peg's, we heard a loud bang.
(CRASHING)
I didn't know what it was, so I swung and hit the fence.
(TYRES SKID)
A couple of rifle bullets went through the back window
of their unmarked car.
Within a week or so Savard found out that Dunie's friend John Slawvey,
who was the cop killer, was going around boasting to the other guys
how he had shot at Savard
because of the problems he was causing the West End Gang.
I knew who the guy was so we went to arrest him -
there was no way we were going to take any chances.
And that's when they laid a trap to arrest Slawvey
at his apartment building.
I got two cops with me, young cops.
They were never involved in any shootings.
So they gonna be nervous, you know, especially a guy like that.
He killed a cop. He doesn't mind killing cops.
So we waited in the garage till he got in, you know,
just like an old movie.
You hear the car going in.
It takes a long time, you don't hear anything - what's going on,
you know?
And then we start hearing steps.
The guy is walking, I can hear him.
So when he comes I yell at him "Police" and then he stops
and looks at me and he said: "I'm not armed, I'm not armed",
so I move forward, you know.
Then all I can remember and I seen something shiny in his coat,
right here and then he made a move.
Well I had to make a decision and it was a quick decision.
I don't know if it's a gun, you know. I shot him.
(GUNSHOT)
And then I heard... (RAPID GUNFIRE)
My two partners - they shot him, so he fell down.
They put something like 27 bullets into John Slawvey.
His girlfriend later said he was reaching for his cigarettes.
That he didn't have a gun with him.
The investigation found that there was a gun lying beside Slawvey's body
but another cop told me "Of course there would be a gun there.
It probably was a throw away."
But I know it was, because I was there.
There can be many different suspicions, you know,
maybe you shouldn't have shot him,
maybe a lot of things I shouldn't have done
but I didn't take a chance.
I'm alive and he's dead. I did what I had to do.
I would have been stupid to do anything otherwise because
I would have been killed if not there somewhere else,
maybe another cop would have been killed.
I've got no regrets.
Dunie and Slawvey were great pals and people in the West End Gang were
really upset by the way he died,
they felt he was murdered by Savard. That was a bad scene.
Then there was a $50,000 contract put out on Savard's life.
Dunie Ryan certainly wanted our heads.
And Savard himself had to be protected.
I had a .44 Magnum which Dirty Harry had.
I always put my .44 Magnum under the bed.
We are not easy targets, you know.
So we are not going to let ourselves get killed
without defending ourselves.
Montreal had Allo Police - a weekly crime tabloid.
I was fascinated by it.
The Head of the West End Gang.
My father got me a job at The Montreal Gazette as a copy boy.
As a journalist, I veered into crime
and became an investigative crime reporter.
I did a magazine story about Dunie Ryan.
And this was a really interesting figure because what he was doing
was fairly sophisticated.
That story was important to my career and it led to
other stories unfolding.
I have never seen these photos before.
It took a long time to find small pieces of information about Dunie.
Because he was a very evasive criminal.
That's what he needed to be.
That was part of what made him great at what he did.
O'CONNOR: In the 1980's,
the West End Gang was getting involved in more serious crimes
that just robbing a bank here and there.
Dunie Ryan realised the big money to be made was in drugs.
I think the secret of the West End Gang is that an opportunity
came and they saw it.
They are the right people at the right time in the right place
and they realise this, and that was the key.
(DANCE MUSIC THUMPS)
In the 80's it was like everybody was suddenly selling
and doing cocaine.
There was, like, an explosion of it.
Everybody loved coke. The dark side of cocaine hadn't kicked in yet.
(MUSIC CONTINUES)
This very, very desired product was coming in containers
and everyone had to get it through that Port and they had to ask
permission from the West End Gang.
REPORTER: 26 tonnes found at the port of Montreal.
Quebec Police investigators determined it belonged to a group
of suspected drug traffickers known as the Matticks clan.
Well, the Matticks family has been interesting every police department
ever since we're police officers.
The Port of Montreal was controlled by the Irish Mob
and Gerald Matticks was in charge of hiring people.
He was the lynchpin.
Everyone knew Gerry Matticks and Dunie Ryan worked hand in hand together.
I've covered Hells Angels leaders in trials, I've covered Mafia leaders.
Gerry Matticks was different, Gerry Matticks had personality
that I never saw in any of the other criminals that I have covered.
He had a sense of humour. He had charisma.
There was something about him that made you smile even though
you knew that he could stick a shiv in your back as easily as not.
What Matticks would later say is, on any given day I could just touch
the side of my nose and a container that was up on a crane could go on
the right truck that would get out of the Port without being inspected.
The port of Montreal was the first choice for many drug traffickers
because once it lands in Montreal, it's a real launching point
to where you wanted to distribute your cocaine.
The open door to the importation of narcotics in Canada
and in the United States.
It passes through Montreal to go to New York.
MARSDON: Cocaine changed what were formally small gangs.
And that's why the West End Gang suddenly came to light
as a major player in the Montreal underworld.
The battle amongst all of these organised crime groups to control
the cocaine industry exploded into gangland slayings
and corruption seemed to creep into every aspect of the city.
(CHURCH BELLS RING)
TV CLIP: Montreal...
These days a city of many coffins.
By Victoria Day, a hundred murders in Quebec.
Things got so bad that the government was forced to set up
a public inquiry into organised crime
and suddenly the ugliness just came to the surface.
It's a frightening picture of underworld operations
and the operators.
REPORTER: A nightly TV show in Quebec featuring a police inquiry
and starring a host of lawyers and gangsters.
Underworld figures whose faces were barely known are becoming as
familiar as the Montreal Canadiens.
It was a big hit, you got a Crime Commission that's filming
testimonies of gangsters. Yeah, it's a hell of a reality show.
They hauled Dunie Ryan and Gerry Matticks
in front of the Commission
but they see them as truck hijackers, bank robbers
and money launderers.
They miss the fact that they have now become the biggest drug dealers,
far out shining the Mafia and the French Canadian gangs.
When Dunie was called up to testify,
he said, "I bury my money in the ground," and in fact he did.
So obviously they don't have enough evidence to charge him with anything.
So they slip away into their own dark area without anybody
really understanding that the status of these gangs is now altered
to a point where real power is with The West End Gang.
The Italians and the biker gangs had been the main distributors of cocaine.
These upstart Irish guys started muscling in on their territory.
There were threats made for them to stay out of the business.
The Irish wouldn't take that lying down.
They just continued to expand the business.
This flood of cocaine poured into the Ports...
..a huge challenge for the RCMP because we are dealing with
international drug smuggling of a serious drug
that is bringing unbelievable amounts of money in
and exiting out of the country.
REPORTER: Half a ton of cocaine was introduced as evidence at the trial.
500 kilos that came all the way from South America destined for
the New York market.
The cocaine never got there - the RCMP got their hands on it first.
And the man who was at the head of this investigation
was Claude Savoie.
We all have different theories on things but until you see something.
This proves that large quantities do come in -
500 kilos, again, is the largest seizure ever made in Canada.
He was considered a good cop, a clean cop
and he was respected by the people who worked for him.
Everybody liked him, good guy, backed you up, all the rest of it.
I met Savoie, we started a joint project with
the Montreal Police Drug Squad and the RCMP.
And I found Savoie to be a good guy, a comfortable guy to be with.
They've got this small little gang that suddenly pops out
and becomes a major player in cocaine and now Claude Savoie
has to be looking at Dunie Ryan.
The power and reach of the West End Gang was growing quite significantly
so they made sure they had the kind of lawyer
with the brazen talent
and connections within the justice system
they needed to help protect their criminal empire.
And that man was Sidney Leithman
I can't say that,
it's not because a warrant is issued that the man is guilty.
The first time I saw Sidney Leithman,
I was in a courtroom and he walked in and suddenly the room was
full of Sidney Leithman.
I mean this guy was sort of a pastiche of some kind of
Brooklyn mob Lawyer with the aviator glasses.
Sidney Leithman was my lawyer.
I got found not guilty on a few cases. Great lawyer.
He was a fixer.
He had a lot of judges, having judges makes cases a lot
easier for you.
You're saying he had judges in his pocket?
Yup. Oh for sure, for sure, for sure.
We knew at some point that Leithman was very friendly with one judge.
He was renting apartments for him every once in a while,
he even had a girl, ya know, a prostitute.
And eventually, he became the lawyer to a major Montreal crime boss,
Frank Cotroni.
At the time, the Cotronis were the most powerful Mafia family
in Montreal.
Whatever he has done in the past, he has paid for that
and it shouldn't affect him today.
If you were caught and you were a member of the underworld of Montreal,
they cry would go out "Get me Leithman".
He represented the Italian mafia guys, the Hell's Angels guys
and the West End Gang.
I don't know what the right answer is?
Sidney became the corporate lawyer for the West End Gang.
He was always there for them, any time, 24 hours a day,
seven days a week. That was Sidney Leithman.
Dunie Ryan appreciated him so much that he gave him an Irish Claddagh ring.
Dunie Ryan really wanted to create a bond among the people
who worked underneath him and he made each of them a Claddagh ring.
It's a symbol, it's a heart and it's two hands pulling on either side
of the heart.
Leithman said,
"I'm probably the only Jew in the city that is wearing one of these rings."
He was very proud of it and he used to show it to everybody in court.
He was like a made-man with that ring.
For him to give that ring to Sidney Leithman,
to me it's a sign that a) I trust you,
b) it's possible that Mr Leithman was facilitating his crimes.
He got involved in levels of drug dealing that he should have never
ever been a part of.
And once you do that, you are caught by this group now.
You are no longer their lawyer, you're their slave.
The Brinks robbery was something that ate at Andre Savard for years.
Andre would not let go of it.
I'm mad at them like hell,
so I am going to put them in jail, arrest them. That's my vengeance.
REPORTER: After the Brinks hold-up police combed the city for clues.
Police killed suspect John Slawvey in a shootout.
Four years later police raided this house on Greene Avenue.
Under these floorboards they found almost $290,000,
believed part of the Brinks loot.
Slawvey lived at the Greene avenue house.
That was one crime that really got under his skin.
Eight years later,
he finally caught most of the perpetrators of the Brink robbery.
REPORTER: The indictment charges five persons with conspiracy
and armed robbery about $3 million.
Only the small fry who were involved in it get tried and sentenced.
The leaders of the Brinks robbery, the guys who put it together,
get off scot free.
Not guilty? Tabarnac, not guilty?
That was worse than the O.J. Simpson case.
This was unbelievable.
What the hell do you want, you know?
So...
So in 1984, after the Brink's investigation,
I decided that it was time for me to go to the top job
where I think being a homicide cop was at the top.
Many years ago, my mother had to send me to an orphanage.
I always had a tendency to stand up for the little guy.
I had to defend them, you know, somehow.
Being a cop, the best way to do this would be to stop people from
killing each other.
And it became like an obsession.
Dunie Tyan would operate and hold court in various motels
in the West end of Montreal.
He spends a lot of time hanging out at Nitillo's on Upper Lachine Road.
When I was 15 years old, I got my first real job
as a busboy at Nittolo's.
And it was a very respected place
but there was also a criminal element to it.
That's where members of the West End Gang,
most of them Irish guys, would come and pay homage to Dunie Ryan.
He was very generous with his cohorts.
And if they got out of jail Dunie right away would give the guy money
to buy new clothes, a couple of grams of cocaine.
And he would keep their loyalty that way.
What made him, Dunie, a good crime boss?
He had a good gang.
He just had good people around him that supported him.
Dunie is running this powerful business.
He has a very nice home,
and a 30-foot power yacht where he entertained his cronies.
The money had become almost a joke to the guys.
It was that much money, that was the legend.
I think there was always the idea that
"Hey you could be living this dream, you could be living this life."
They sold that dream very well and the younger people who were
at the bottom looked up to them and thought they were so cool
and be like them one day and they bought the lie.
They lived the high life in every way.
And meanwhile none of that trickled down back to the people
who were working for them.
Wow, it hasn't changed. My bedroom was right up there.
They didn't share any of that wealth.
They got to live this lifestyle that the people in The Point
could only dream of.
Dunie Ryan might have been an honest thief,
as a lot of people called him,
however if you crossed Dunie, there could be hell to pay.
Patrick McGurnaghan was a mid-level member of the West End Gang.
He owed Dunie about 200,000 bucks and every time Dunie tried to collect,
McGurnaghan would blow him off.
Dunie hired Apache Trudeau who is a Hells Angels guy
also known as the Mad Bomber.
He was basically a psychopath.
But he was very handy to be hired if you wanted somebody killed.
Apache Trudeau planted a bomb underneath McGurnaghan's car
with a radio device that would detonate the bomb.
(ENGINE STARTS)
McGurnaghan gets in his car and starts driving...
..turns the corner near a park and a school.
(EXPLOSION)
REPORTER: The white 1977 Mercedes Benz was travelling south about
quarter to one this afternoon.
Suddenly a loud explosion, the car blew apart and came to stop
off the side of the road 150 feet away.
The man just fell out and his arms and legs were blown off.
And that was the end of McGurnaghan.
Dunie had made an example of him. And the word was out very quickly -
you do not fuck with Dunie.
In that period of time, I was a homicide cop
and I was involved with an informer that the West End Gang
was trying to kill.
The West End Gang had a lot of power, complete power,
because people in The Point knew there was no line
they wouldn't cross.
Because we were so close to the tracks we could see them bringing
a body that they would be able to distribute along the train track
because the train can do a lot of damage to a body
and get rid of the parts.
When I was a kid, I came to look after the train had gone by
and lying on the dirt not far from the track,
I wasn't sure at first what it was,
and then I realised it was a hand and sort of kicked it
a bit with my foot and thought "Wow".
I mean the fingertips were still attached,
it was a complete hand that hadn't even been crushed.
Violence like that, it breeds more violence.
By 1984, Dunie Ryan is looking over his shoulder,
wondering how safe his perch might be,
because he knows people are jealous of him.
Dunie had worth between 50 and 100 million
and he did express his concerns about his own safety
and he was worried about his kids being possibly kidnapped.
The West End Gang was splitting in some ways, you know?
Everybody wanted to take over. That's the way criminals are,
you know. They want to take over.
In that world, it's a vicious world. It can come from anywhere.
Dunie rides to meet up with some members of his gang
in the bar at Nittolo's.
That was where he hung out, did business,
he wouldn't think twice about something happening to him there.
As Dunie is sitting there, a fellow by the name of Paul April
approaches his table.
And he owes Dunie Ryan $200,000
and he's scared.
He invites Dunie to a room at the motel
where he says he's going to pay him, give him the money.
Dunie says "OK, let's go." And off they go to Room 40.
They walk in there and out of the bathroom
steps a friend of Paul April's with a shotgun in his hand.
Dunie knows he's doomed unless he gets out of there.
He's gotta fight his way out of there or he's finished.
So he picked up the chair and smashed it into the window
to make a break for it.
He went down swinging.
One of Paul April's henchmen blasts Dunie Ryan in the chest,
blows him away.
(TV REPORTER) 'Reputed West End cocaine dealer Peter Dunie Ryan
was shot to death in a motel on Upper Lachine Road.
Who did it is anybody's guess, but it had to be someone Ryan trusted
for a killer or killers to get so close to him
with a 12-gauge shotgun and a .45 calibre pistol.'
He died at 42. It's a very young age.
Dunie wanted to "Live Fast, Love Hard and Die Young."
If that was his motto in life, then all three wishes came true,
unfortunately.
Dunie's funeral was here.
Just not too far away was where he was killed
and where he did a lot of business.
Dunie Ryan for me was close to home.
I worked at Nittolo's as a kid.
I shot pool as a teenager at Smitty's, a big hangout of his.
There's more of a familiarity, a character
that you're reporting on, when they've covered the same turf as you.
The loveable anti-hero. Maybe he struck that chord in me.
One of the things about the West End Gang that I think is terrible
is how much we want to romanticise them.
I always thought they were pieces of shit.
I don't know why people looked up to them. I would look at them
and think, "Fuck you. You're not the hero that you think you are,
or that you want to pretend you are."
They were bullies who were just taking advantage of people
who were vulnerable.
A lot of them are not nice people.
The criminal world is a fucked up world, there is no doubt about it.
When Dunie Ryan was killed,
Allan Ross, just by the vacancy,
the vacuum of power, swung in.
'Allan Ross started out running errands for Dunie Ryan.
He spent a lot of nights at this West End motel
watching Ryan collect millions from drug-running.'
You could stop Allan Ross on the street and you could see
the hate in his eyes for police, you could see it
while talking to him. You know, that scar he had on his face
and his beady eyes looking at you.
He was a violent human being and if he wanted something,
I believe he would have killed you for it.
Allan Ross would destroy you if you're not careful.
He was considered a nasty piece of work.
His nickname was The Weasel.
Some say it's because he looked like a ferret.
He tried to get away with everything, he tried not to be
involved in things and if he was involved he'd be in the back.
They called him The Weasel for a reason, you know.
Paul April is out in the East End at a bar bragging about it
with his buddies, saying, "The King is dead.
Dunie Ryan is dead and now I'm the king."
I mean, it's laughable. Who are you?
Allan Ross knew who was involved in Dunie Ryan's murder
and he set about getting them.
Paul April was staying with his gang in the apartment on De Maisonneuve.
They knew that the gang was looking, especially Allan Ross
was looking for him to avenge Dunie Ryan.
It's four in the morning.
Paul April and three of his cronies are holed up in this apartment.
They're doing coke, they are having a good time.
There's a knock on the door
and who's at the door but Apache Trudeau?
He's got a gift for Paul April. It's a video recorder...
..with a tape called 'The History of the Hell's Angels in Montreal.'
Aren't you a little suspicious about this at four in the morning?
That it's Apache Trudeau, for heaven's sake.
You know who this guy is...
... this legendary mass bomber for the Hell's Angels.
Paul April puts the VCR down and Apache Trudeau leaves.
A little while later he turns on the VCR.
They put the tape inside. It's been wired by Apache Trudeau
so that after it's played for a couple of minutes...
(RAPID BEEPING) (EXPLOSION)
The windows come screaming out onto the street.
Half the floor is gone.
(TV REPORTER) 'There was so much damage, firemen had to use an aerial crane
to remove the four bodies.'
'They are now saying that a full-scale gang war
may now be underway, because two of the four men
in room 917 when the ten-pound dynamite bomb exploded
were believed to be part of the Ryan organisation.'
It's a huge bomb, a lot of C4 packed into it
and it blows the occupants of the apartment to smithereens.
Paul April's face is gone, most of his body is gone.
At the time they didn't really know
what had happened and they thought
that because his chest was blown away
he had been making a bomb that was going to be strapped to his body.
(TV REPORTER) 'Yves Apache Trudeau took part in 43 murders
as a Hell's Angels hitman in the '70s and '80s,
sometimes with guns, sometimes with bombs.
A violent man, even by biker standards.'
Police confirmed from Apache Trudeau that he was hired by Allan Ross
to plant that bomb in Paul April's apartment.
Luckily for Allan Ross, he was never charged for that murder,
because it was really Apache Trudeau's word against Allan Ross's word.
I got in touch with Allan Ross to find out his take on the story
of what happened and whether he was involved and so on.
He wrote me back. "There was only two things that could happen
when Dunie got killed. I was gonna get killed
or the people responsible for Dunie's death were gonna get killed.
Paul was in a tavern bragging that he had killed the king
and Paul was looking to see which way the wind was blowing.
And 13 days later, it was blowing him to hell. Ha-ha!!"
So one by one in a very systematic way,
Allan Ross took out everybody involved in Dunie Ryan's murder.
Because as the saying goes,
three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead.
This was bound to happen because there was war
inside the gang itself.
The organised crime groups,
they destroy themselves.
They don't care about anybody but themselves.
And at the end of it all,
Allan Ross had finally secured his own position
as the new king of the West End Gang,
with his own people, his own structure
and his own way of doing business.
'Ross went on to make more, much more.
Under his command the West End Gang forged a partnership
with the Sicilian Mafia and Colombia's cocaine cartels.'
I became the lead attorney for the organised crime task force
in north Florida. At that time every big criminal organisation
on Planet Earth was in drugs coming out of Colombia.
We worked the Colombian cartels hard and the cartel
that I was primarily interested in was better armed
and in greater numbers than the Colombian army.
So we're watching everything they do
and lo and behold there's this guy from Montreal that shows up,
Allan Ross. It's like, "What the heck is going on with that?"
So we start digging.
'By the mid 1980s, Florida drug agents
began secretly investigating Ross.'
For a Canadian to go down and make direct contact with the Colombian Cartel guys,
I had never seen that before.
We indicted Allan Ross for being the lead figure
to traffic in illegal drugs in the United States, Canada
and elsewhere. You seal the indictment
so they don't know you are coming for them.
'Narcotics worth hundreds of millions have been seized in Montreal
during the past 11 months, but no-one has been arrested.
Inside the container, agents found a fortune in narcotics,
but no-one claimed it, perhaps because the dealers knew
or suspected that they were under police surveillance.'
Ross knew how to play the system.
He was able to stay ahead of the justice system in Canada.
It was embarrassing and you had to ask yourself
what was wrong with the Canadians that they couldn't get this guy?
He's been around for 20 years doing drugs in Montreal.
Nobody had the answer at the time.
And nobody believed at the time that it could possibly be
who it ended up being.
'Sidney Leithman, lawyer, and specialist in defending
against major crime charges.'
'Does any one of you know of a murder that hasn't happened yet?
Somebody who is a victim that, in your opinion,
is going to be killed?'
'I'm not going to answer that.'
'If you wanted a lawyer killed, how much do you think
you would have to have in the bank to get it done?'
'I wouldn't even think. I wouldn't know.'
There's a basic rule for journalists and lawyers
when dealing with underworld guys, you don't get too close.
Nothing is personal here, you don't go out and drink with them.
You don't get involved in anything they are involved with,
that sort of thing. You keep your distance. You do it
for your own safety. And, uh, Leithman didn't understand that.
We look for the crooked lawyers, we look for the crooked cops
and Leithman was in our sights.
He was an important appendage to Ross's organisation.
He's the guy that told witnesses to keep their mouth shut,
he's the one that made the deals with witnesses, that if you keep your mouth shut
you'll get paid, the guy that advised Ross, when he had a problem, who was talking.
He is no longer a defence lawyer, he is a felon
conspiring to obstruct justice.
'He made headlines taking on Colombian cartel characters
as clients and usually got them off.'
He was very well liked by the cartels down in Colombia.
He liked the fact that they would fly him down,
provide him with money, drugs
and women, whatever he wanted.
I think that Leithman got sucked into a couple of files
with the Colombians for the money, then he got too deep.
There were rumours that he was doing coke himself
and if you have an addiction to any kind of drugs, you become less trusted.
'Police intercepted a cargo plane from Medellin, Colombia.
It contained half a ton of cocaine.'
By 1989, the Colombians were starting to lose faith on Leithman.
He was losing cases.
They were blaming Leithman for the fact
they had lost millions of dollars in the cocaine being seized.
His dealings with those types of people,
I mean, if you're doing court cases, you'd better win them.
And he wasn't winning them.
There was this sense with him of making promises he can't keep
and just a man who you could no longer trust.
And in that world, if you can no longer trust somebody,
that's the end.
'Sidney Leithman was just five blocks from his house
when he was shot in the head this morning. Family members were on the scene quickly,
shocked, standing barefoot in the street.
Investigators found some shell casings on the ground
and they found a bullet in the grass opposite the car.
They say it went through the passenger side car window,
hit Leithman, went through the driver's side window
and then came to a scorching stop in the grass.'
To this day, we have no idea who killed Sidney Leithman.
This was a man who was involved with so many different underworld figures in his life.
You never know when or where or from whom
the bullet is going to come.
He'd been involved with the Columbians, with the Mafia
and with the Hell's Angels.
And of course he was also deeply involved with the West End Gang
and Allan Ross.
Did he offend somebody, did he go too far?
Was he working too much with the competition?
You just never know, that's why it's the underworld.
So unless somebody actually comes out and confesses,
I'm not sure we will ever find out what the real story is
behind Sidney Leithman's death.
In the summer of '92 I was working for the CBC TV programme
'The Fifth Estate.'
It's the Canadian equivalent to '60 Minutes,'
it's a great investigative TV show.
My job was to develop stories and there were some interesting developments going on
with the drug trade and the West End Gang.
Dan has great contacts with the police,
but he also has great contacts with the crime community.
So when Dan Burke comes to me and says, "Hey, we should do
the story on the West End Gang, it was a natural
for us to work on it together.
How is it that Allan Ross gets away for so many years
being one of the most powerful drug traffickers in North America?
It doesn't take Dan long to begin to hear whispers.
Everybody knew Allan Ross was a criminal and a crime boss.
The question was, why wasn't he getting arrested?
And the key there was Sidney Leithman.
So then the question was, who did Sidney Leithman have
in the police and the judiciary?
When big boys don't get arrested, it's because they have friends.
It was standard fare for us. It wasn't a big question mark.
The question mark was who, not if.
You can probably investigate Montreal for corruption
at any point in history and have several stories.
But I was left with the impression that it was unusual
how they were operating at the RCMP drug squad in Montreal under Savoie.
'So this confirmed to us, because you have to have
some evidence to believe something...' Claude Savoie for many years
was the head of the RCMP drug squad.
So we're journalists, we go wherever the leads lead us.
Claude Savoie and I met at an office
at the RCMP headquarters. And I had a two-hour conversation with him.
I got the sense that he was a little nervous,
a little exasperated.
Under pressure.
Well, everybody in the world knew Allan Ross was a problem.
And this guy is telling me "Well, Allan Ross isn't a problem."
Jeez. You don't even have to be a cop to know that.
So if Allan Ross isn't a problem,
then maybe Claude Savoie is a problem, you know?
'This is RCMP Inspector Claude Savoie in late 1990
when he was head of the RCMP drug squad in Montreal.
He's talking about why the police were losing ground to drug dealers.'
'Well, I am not sure I can answer that question.
Because if I could answer that question, we could probably solve the problem
and unfortunately we're not doing a good job at solving the problem right now.'
Not a doubt in my mind that Claude Savoie would do anything
illegal or hurt the RCMP or hurt law enforcement, period.
He had a family and he was just a good guy.
We start meeting with police sources,
who are careful, because they are police.
But they encourage us to keep digging.
I asked Savoie about his relationship with Leithman.
Well, he does acknowledge the relationship
with Sidney Leithman, because that was true.
They were strange bedfellows.
We keep digging and we find out that Claude Savoie
meets in a downtown restaurant with Allan Ross and Sidney Leithman.
Then we find out from a source that right above that restaurant
is Sidney Leithman's office and Claude Savoie meets alone
with Allan Ross.
I know the guy is not going to confess to me, there is no way.
So I try to find out if he's lying,
if I can prove that he's lying about something.
And I asked him, "How many times did you meet with Allan Ross?"
and he told me once.
And I said to him, "Just once?" and he said, "Yeah, just once."
I knew it was two times,
so he's lying.
Why is he lying? It's a symptom of corruption.
The lie is a symptom of corruption.
What access to information that gave Allan Ross!
That was astounding.
I mean, I've seen lots of corrupt cops
in the United States, but I've never seen anyone at that level.
That was something. That was extraordinary.
Allan Ross has a base in Florida.
He's got a condo down there, he's got a yacht.
He conducts business down in Florida.
He has to know what the Americans have on him.
But by May 1991, Sidney Leithman gets whacked,
so Allan Ross doesn't have a choice. He's gotta deal directly
with his man inside the RCMP, Claude Savoie.
He is Allan Ross's friend inside law enforcement.
And Savoie calls out of the blue asking us all these questions,
and he's asking questions he should not be asking.
He's trying to find out information on a grand jury indictment
which is secret. It is sealed by a court.
He was trying to use his status as a Mountie to get information
from federal agents in Florida.
Claude Savoie tells Allan Ross the Americans are looking for him.
Yet Ross still goes down to Florida. Why would he do that?
He was arrogant.
He thought he could get away with it because he had gotten away with it so many times.
We got our guys in Montreal watching him to alert us
when he actually does come down.
And sure enough he came to Florida. Huge mistake.
'This US Marshall shows us how on October 7th 1991,
he arrested Canada's biggest drug baron.'
'I came behind him like this with my gun out here, advising him,
"Broward Sheriff Office, put your hands on top of your head."
As we were just about to the Marshal's office where I was taking him,
he told me or he said to me, "Well, it would sure be nice
if I could give you like $200,000 and you'd let me go."
Not that I would. He said it in a way that I couldn't get him with bribery,
but I had no doubt if I had said OK, I'd be $200,000 richer right now.'
The trial is one of those classic scenes.
We're trying him in a small federal court
in Gainesville, Florida. We had looked at Allan Ross's history of violence
and we brought in a special team from the U.S. Marshall service.
We've got dogs, dope dogs, bomb dogs,
we've got snipers on the roof of the courthouse
to make sure that he does not interrupt this trial.
When you're in the courthouse seeing a guy who is responsible
for ordering numerous murders over the years,
you sort of go in there and you're looking for something,
something in the man's face in a way that will reveal
this person in his full gangster glory
and you're always disappointed.
There's nothing there, there's just nothing there.
'Ross was found guilty of conspiring to import and traffic
over 10,000 kilos of cocaine and 300 tons of marijuana.'
It's Monday, December 21st, 1992,
just a few days before Christmas, there is snow on the ground,
you got Santa Claus all over the streets,
and the lights and the Christmas trees,
and two internal investigators of the RCMP show up
at Ottawa headquarters. They want to speak to Claude Savoie.
The RCMP knows we're going to air on Tuesday, they know
what we're investigating and on Monday morning, of all the days in the year,
of all the time they are investigating Savoie,
they go meet Claude Savoie on the Monday before we go to air.
They go into a room and they want Savoie to come into that room.
You know, the room is ready to tape, video, the whole thing,
for this interview.
Savoie doesn't show up. They get a little impatient,
they walk down to his office,
they open the door...
.. and they find Savoie sprawled across his desk with a bullet in his head.
He had shot himself with his service revolver
which he had wrapped in the sleeve of his jacket
to muffle the noise.
And that was the end of Savoie.
'Savoie killed himself shortly before he was supposed to meet with
internal affairs investigators at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa.
The CBC's 'The Fifth Estate' had been preparing
an investigative report on the failures of the Montreal drug squad.'
Wow. That was big news to me,
you know. It was a hell of a development.
At The Fifth Estate we had an expression, "the smoking gun."
Well, that might have been the first time ever we had a literal smoking gun.
For you, his suicide was proof of Claude Savoie's guilt?
Yeah, without a question. I mean,
obviously the guy couldn't face the music.
And that's how it ended for him.
You don't feel any guilt in that? We were doing our job
as reporters, but if you and I hadn't started the story,
hadn't investigated the story, Claude Savoie would be alive.
Do you ever feel any guilt about that?
No, not at all.
It may seem cold-blooded, but...
.. yeah, I'd be faking it if I said I felt bad about it.
He made his own bed and, you know... and that's how he decided to lie in it.
He couldn't face it. He just couldn't face it, you know?
I was shocked at what he did. His guilt, his guilt.
Just too much.
Did he get money off of Leithman, did he put other cops' lives
in danger? Obviously he did.
He betrayed me, because I was a cop and a friend of his.
'This is how the Mounties react to allegations of corruption
within their Montreal drug squad and the suicide of its former commander,
a press release saying they are looking into the matter.
No questions accepted.'
They were investigating Claude Savoie. We didn't know that.
And they were closing in on him
and they were worried about our investigation.
'Suspicion first fell on Inspector Savoie
after the May, 1991 murder of Sidney Leithman,
a Montreal lawyer known for defending and socialising with Colombian drug barons.
When the police go through his clothes, in his back pocket
they find a handwritten phone number...
.. to the guy who heads the RCMP drug squad in Montreal,
Claude Savoie.
So Savoie is dead, the RCMP continue their investigation
for another year, they bust into his bank accounts,
his safety deposit boxes. They find $200,000.
They concluded he had been paid off over time by the West End Gang
for information.
The West End Gang felt they were above the law.
They were corrupting police, corrupting lawyers.
And in the process they were corrupting the whole system.
The thing with drug organisations, it's not just the drugs,
the major problem is the power they get from the money.
These people produced enormous amounts of money.
Money on this planet is power and power corrupts.
A lot of the guys who worked for Dunie Ryan are dead.
All the guys who killed Dunie Ryan are dead.
Sidney Leithman is dead, Allan Ross is in jail in the United States.
There's been a cleansing, a pretty bloody cleansing
of the West End Gang, and the man who rises out of that pool
is Gerry Matticks.
Either he must have felt really lucky or he felt invincible
and he's operating now at the highest levels,
he is talking to the highest people in the Hell's Angels and that I think was his downfall.
'Police fanned out across the province,
swooping down and arresting 120 bikers and their associates.'
'560 police officer involved in 70 raids across the province
in 24 municipalities.'
The police arrested Gerry Matticks in 2001.
'We believe with these arrests, the West End Gang
is mainly out of order for a while.'
The guys still around that I interviewed from the West End Gang,
they were kinda sad. They were kinda sad,
because a large part of their life had been spent in prison.
They were not happy people.
They would say, "Yeah, that was exciting at times,
but it wasn't worth it. It was not worth it."
It was a world that I think a lot of people got messed up with.
Yeah, of course. A lot of individuals.
It's a sad story. A lot of sad stories.
You know, it's sad, there are no more old guys any more.
They are mostly all gone. Most of the guys are gone.
I walked away and never went back.
I knew that if I ever went back I would stay there.
I became a drug addict.
But I might have become a drug addict anyway.
It's been a roller-coaster, my life. But look at me now.
I could beat the devil.
Yeah, I did my bit, and that was being a responsible journalist.
And, uh...
Looking at it now, I realise there was so much violence,
but I wasn't thinking that when I was growing up.
I'm OK.
Pursuing education became my ticket out of poverty
and then I became a writer and ended up writing two books
about growing up in the neighbourhood.
Some of the gang members found out about the book
and were really upset and were sending me
all kinds of threatening emails. I thought, "Kiss my ass."
Was it worth it, what I did, was it really worth it what I did?
I don't think so.
It's worth it for some people, if I succeeded in helping some people,
then that's what the worth is all about. The rest, you won't change the system.
They don't want somebody like me.
The system doesn't give a shit about me, you know.
That's what I think. It doesn't care.
When it comes to the underworld, this is the way the story always ends,
all the people are either dead or in prison.
If there was anything special about the West End Gang,
it is the speed at which they rose and the speed at which they fell.
Through their own hubris, through their own violence,
they fell just as fast as they rose.
And it happened almost overnight in the annals of crime history.
The West End Gang thrived because of powerful leaders
like Dunie Ryan, Allan Ross, Gerry Matticks.
They needed those kinds of leaders who had the connections,
the violence, the willingness to do anything to hold on to power.
When those leaders were gone, you still had some Irish gangsters
working at the port, but they could never recapture that old glory.
When you have a city that has a major port,
you're always going to have one crime gang that's gonna rise to the top.
It's just a matter of who's the king.
Nobody wins a whole war in organised crime.
There is no winner in that. Nothing has changed.
'Most illegal drugs coming to Canada
flow through Quebec.'
'... ce qu'il fait du port, l'endroit ou la crime organise est le plus actif au Quebec.'
'Former Montreal police officers say they found evidence
of police corruption within the force
and tried to report it.' 'The charges are very serious,
gangsterism, breach of trust and obstruction of justice.'
'This network allegedly imported 1.4 tonnes of cocaine.'
# SHANE MURPHY: 'Dirty Work'
AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk