Brute force

>> In which ex-cop Bob "Trigger" Ménard, a member of the notorious Night Patrol, looks back on the bad old days of Montreal policing

By KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

It was a cold twilight that fell over LaSalle on March 28, 1985, as Bob Ménard emerged from a car cradling a shotgun in his familiar black leather gloves. He and his partner on the MUC Police Holdup Squad had spent the day following a pair of bank robbers through the city. "We were waiting for them to do something. It became like, 'Hurry up and choose a place,'" says the 66 year old.

The bandits were members of the brutal east-end Bouchard clan. "It was run by their mom, she was a real bitch," says Ménard. "Most crooks try to get in and out as fast as possible, but this gang took pleasure in beating on innocent people." After the armed thieves entered a bank on Shevchenko, Ménard lowered his sights and raised his aim.

"I had them lined up, but there was an old man sitting in a car blocking my angle. I went around back and waited." Soon Ménard was face to face with the robbers and guns were drawn. "I could hear the bullets whizzing by my ears. From 10-, 15-feet away I was shooting this guy repeatedly but he's not going down--he was wearing body armour. Next thing I know I feel something like a baseball bat and I see blood spurting out of my chest. I looked down and thought, 'What the hell is that?'"

It turns out Bob Ménard was shot three times. He recovered from his injuries, but his days as one the city's leading take-no-prisoners officers was over.

Black and white and blue

Ménard's days in blue brought him regularly face to face with some of Montreal's most brutal and armed criminals of the '60s and '70s, the decades when bad-egg boomers brought the highest toll of violent crime the city has seen. His souvenirs from the battle include nine disabilities, including one lost lung, hearing damaged by the blast of his gun, a metal plate in his hip and both knees equipped with braces.

In light of the Quebec government's recent proposal to ban biker gangs, Ménard bristles. "When I hear [provincial Public Security Minister] Serge Ménard saying that the justice system is 'helpless to fight crime,' I have to wonder what the hell's going on. How would I feel if I was a little old lady and I heard the top guy who's supposed to be protecting citizens talking like that?"

In conversation, the boisterous ex-cop makes references to the Toopes, the elderly couple sadistically murdered by teens in their West- Island home; the murderous Karla Homolka "living in a setting better than most could afford"; and "that 12-year-old boy killed by a biker bomb." He suggests a return to a system in which criminals think twice and innocent citizens can feel safe. But if the clues to Ménard's prescription lie in his policing career, then it's not a plan for the squeamish.

The phony mobster

As a child growing up in the Eastern Townships, Ménard had an appetite for action. "I was a real bad little shit," he says. Ménard was sent to a Montreal reform school and when he reached adulthood he served in the Korean War. But his return to civilian life was rocky. "I worked for CN Rail but it wasn't steady. They kept laying me off."

In 1959, Ménard was accepted into the Montreal Police and joined the Social Security Squad, "a quasi-intelligence squad--we were called the SS." He was sent undercover into the dens of iniquity that made the city famous. "You have to be a real good actor to enter a room full of people who don't trust you and want nothing to do with you and gain their confidence."

Ménard became an important secret agent in Drapeau's war against the Mafia-controlled gaming dens and all those other places where cold-blooded killers battled for control of the city's dark underbelly. In the nightclub age mobsters were big news, as people gossiped in the street about whether Louis Greco put Mob rival Frank Petrula through the meat grinder at his Décarie restaurant (Greco himself was eventually found burnt alive). "Violence, threats, intimidation, murder, coercion, breaking bones--it's their business and these are their tools," says Ménard of the people he infiltrated. "They don't take it personally, they're predators who use the system against us."

In spite of an unusually long undercover career in which he assumed 17 undercover identities, including a seaman, a priest and a taxi driver during Expo '67, Ménard never had his cover blown. "It almost happened once when cops raided a gambling den and one started saying 'Hey Bob,' but he caught himself and stopped halfway through. He slugged me in the face to make sure nobody suspected."

In 1973, Ménard infiltrated the top brass of the local Mob, controlled by the ponderous Vic Cotroni and the fearless Paolo Violi. "We were trying to figure a way in and noticed a 'For Rent' sign in the window of Violi's Café Reggio near Lacordaire. I posed as Wilson, an electrician, and took the room upstairs."

For three years Ménard lived a careful life. "I used to put a hair on the door so I'd know whenever they entered my place." He had scant dealings with his family as he collected wiretaps and took notes of the comings and goings of Violi's visitors. "There were always details, like I couldn't sneak out to visit my wife during a snowstorm because they'd see that there was less snow on my car and they'd have known I had been out."

One day Violi asked his ersatz electrician-tenant to repair a faulty light. "I knew nothing about electrical work so I went to see my brother, who's a master electrician, and got him to teach me as much as he could in one day. I remember the last thing he said was 'Check the bulb.' So with Violi watching my every move, I was trying to fix the light and nothing was working. I was getting worried until I remembered what my brother had said. It was just a burnt-out bulb after all."

The two would sip cappuccinos together on weekends. "We both hated the PQ, we talked about that a lot." But eventually Ménard's information put Violi behind bars. "One of Violi's men, Jimmy-Rent-a-Gun, wanted to whack me but Violi wouldn't authorize it," says Ménard. Eventually Violi was shot by two gunmen at his restaurant. "He knew they were coming. He just sat there at a table in the back, he didn't even move."

The Night Patrol

In the mid '70s, Ménard joined the Night Patrol, a roving team of about 10 cops who dealt with nighttime crime all over the island. "My approach to the job was that all of the respectable people were in bed at three in the morning. If I see you in the streets, my question is: What the hell are you doing out in the city when all of the law-abiding citizens are in bed sleeping? We had a solution rate of about 90 per cent. It's the highest of any force that I ever heard of."

But another veteran police officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, says, "These guys would put a metal garbage pail on the heads of suspects and hit it so hard the guy would pass out. And those stories about the cops putting a phone book on a suspect's head and hitting it with a big flashlight were true.

"People would confess to crimes they didn't even commit, just to stop what can only be called brutal torture," says the police source. He also describes the following Night Patrol interrogation: "An officer's talking to the suspect. He shows him a starter's pistol and says, 'Here take a look.' The guy picks it up and looks at it and hands it back. The cop says, 'Thanks, now I've got your fingerprints on the gun. If you don't confess, I'll blow your head off and say you came at me with it.'"

Ménard hasn't been directly linked to such acts but he concedes that, "I did a lot of fighting in my day as a cop." He points to a scar in his palm. "We were responding to a domestic dispute between a gay couple. I was trying to calm one of them down and he put a meat cleaver right through my hand. That'll teach me to be a nice guy."

The unit was disbanded in June 1979, after members of the St-Henri-based Dubois gang--one of the city's most brutal crime groups in the '70s--complained of a beating laid on them by the Night Patrol. Ménard says that the Dubois brothers initiated the conflict. "They had come to the station and roughed up one of the desk officers pretty bad."

Armed and ready

Ménard then joined the Holdup Squad and became a constant fixture at armed robberies throughout the city, earning the nickname "Trigger" for his talent at putting a permanent end to the careers of armed robbers. "It costs $75,000 a year to house a prisoner. A bullet costs only 65 cents," he explains.

But he refuses to reveal how many armed bandits he shot down. "I'm no butcher, but I empathize with the victim," he says, adding that since retiring he has helped and personally supported victims of crime on the West Island.

The MUC Police's approach to armed conflicts changed after Ménard was felled by bandits and he concedes that, "I might have had something to do with it." Most would argue that it was a change for the better. Says Pierre Gauthier, chairman of the Police Tech program for John Abbot, of the old-style gung-ho approach: "If I had any hair left, it would stand up just thinking about that way of doing things. If police wait for the robbery to occur, it's almost criminal--the officer could be charged with risking people's lives," says Gauthier.

Today, police officers are instructed that when they suspect an armed robbery is about to occur, they should arrest the robbers before they commit the crime. SWAT teams, huge cordoned-off expanses and negotiations for a peaceful resolution have also become standard tools in the police response.

But Ménard says that circumstances often dictated swift and daring action. "One time we were at Metcalfe and Ste-Catherine around lunch hour, thousands of people are walking by and these guys are robbing a bank. So we went out back and blocked the alley with the car and I shot from inside the car." The bullet went through two windshields and injured the robber. "We made the arrest," says Ménard, "but me and my partner lost a lot of our hearing from the blast of the shotgun."

At any rate, the age in which the police force equated brute force with gritty determination is gone forever, according to officer Pablo Palacios, who faced considerable flack after vigorously fighting the drug trade in Little Burgundy a decade ago.

"Even if you wanted to, you couldn't duplicate that era," says Palacios. "Today there are more independent agencies, there are more lawyers involved. Judges are more savvy and there are so many commissions of inquiry. The rules have changed. The Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] became law in 1982. It took about 10 years to really seep into policing, but it has been the number-one factor for change.

"Back in those days the Police Commission would recommend suspensions and the chiefs would toss the report straight into the garbage. They can't do that anymore."

Palacios also notes that the out-of-control policing style never succeeded in wiping out organized crime anyhow. But if he could, Ménard would be happy to give it a try.

"I miss policing a lot." But it's not the status or the community role that he misses. "No. It's more primal than that. It's the hunt."