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Weird crime >> Our annual
look at Quebec’s sorriest criminals Stupidity: the hereditary factor While investigating a New Year’s Day crime scene in St-Côme, where a rifle lay on a floor between two dead men, investigators were distracted from the mystery when a drunk slammed his vehicle into their cop car. A few minutes later, another driver came swerving along the same road and she too was arrested. Soon a third suspicious vehicle approached but fled at the sight of the cops. He too was nabbed. All three drunk drivers were members of the same family. Fore! Réjean Benny, 40, was busted August 4 at the Old Port for throwing golf balls at Premier Bernard Landry during a ceremony reenacting the signing of a historical treaty with natives. 2x4 beats bat, who’d have known? In a workplace dispute July 25 in Laval, white supremacist Sylvain Fortin, 35, attacked Karl Ferdinand, 23, who is black, with a baseball bat. After being hit on the arms, Ferdinand grabbed a two-by-four and swung back, killing the man. Fortin’s father later came to the courthouse and shook Ferdinand’s hand and denounced his dead son’s racist views. The ol’ hand-over-the-money-or-I’ll-shoot-you-with-this-here-syringe-filled-with-AIDS thing fails again Claude Haggart, 42, successfully committed five robberies armed with a syringe, but on April 29, a terrified cashier at the Boni-Soir in Fabreville froze under the needle threat. Not knowing what to do, the befuddled stick-up man grabbed a pack of cigarettes and fled, only to be caught minutes later. More proof that the syringe thing doesn’t work Michael Kibbe, 19, tried the AIDS-in-the-syringe stunt at a McDonald’s on Ste-Catherine E. February 8 but was jumped by burger flippers. Cops cuffed him and brought him to the Guy station where he attempted to escape by hopping a small wall. Unfortunately for him the unseen side of the fence hid a 20-foot drop and he died after impact. Let’s dust off the electric chair for this guy Drug-addled maniac Eric Sirois, 22, didn’t know that an innocent couple had moved into a former drug pad at 2190 Dézéry in the east end. On May 4 at 10:30 p.m. Sirois forced his way in and expressed displeasure that the new tenant, Martin Boisvert, 20, and his girlfriend had neither drugs nor money to satisfy him. Sirois murdered Boisvert execution-style before getting arrested a few minutes later. Untucked youth terrorizes cyberworld A youth known as Mafiaboy, whose hacking reportedly caused $1.7-billion in damage, stated that his wayward ways started when he was suspended six times from his high school for failing to tuck his shirt in. While investigators tapped his phones they also overheard his father plan an assault on a business associate. Sounds like an episode of Quincy MD Phillipe Gagné, 27, ingested lots of beer, PCP and antibiotics June 6 in Charlesbourg then decided it was a good idea to raid the room of a 20-year-old woman whose father and two brothers were drinking beer outside. Upon hearing the woman scream, family members apprehended Gagné and administered a solid beating, leading to his quick demise. The coroner decided that the man died of an overdose and not from the beating. Lifestyles of the poor and homeless In April, Roger Ranwez, 34, Donald Dion, 52, and Christian Giguère, 35, were accused of killing Gaétan Ouellette, 57, for sleeping in their spot, a Bank of Montreal ATM lobby at Bleury and Ste-Catherine. The accused were found sleeping soundly at the other entrance when police came to arrest them. The event was caught on tape. Cops turn tables on strip club patron In March, police officer Daniel Vanier was reprimanded for a 1997 search of a man outside a Rigaud strip club. He had ordered the man to remove his pants and boots and underwear and lift his testicles and spread his buttocks. The police ethics commissioner called the search “abusive and illegal.” Message to biker chicks: get working on that soup The Rock Machine’s André “Curly” Sauvageau was taped on the phone explaining the role of women in the gang: “There are no vaginas in the Rock Machine. (Women’s) place is in the kitchen making chicken noodle soup.” What they mean by “differently abled” The city’s first homicide of the year took place when Bob Perusse, 43, leapt out of his wheelchair and stabbed his former acquaintance Pierre Milord, 40, an ex-con gone straight as a cook in a Chinese restaurant. Perusse was possibly still slightly upset from an affair six years earlier in which Milord, Perusse and Perusse’s gorlfriend were attacked by gunmen in a shooting that left Perusse disabled and her dead. The East End knifeman was unable to climb back into his wheelchair and called 911 while sitting on the floor. Media overkill Allô Police crime tabloid recently devoted a full cover and three-page tribute celebrating lawyer Jean-Pierre Rancourt as “the star of the hour” for winning the acquittal of an irate father who beat bus driver/child molester Mario Many. Rancourt also happens to own Allô Police. The wonders of duct tape Before taking off for lunch, Réjean Leclerc, a Rivière-du-Loup nurse with 20 years experience, thought it a good idea to tape a pacifier to the mouth of a six-week-old boy with a heart defect in order to stop him from crying. He was suspended for six weeks. Should’ve taken the deal Réjean Mongeau, an official at police watchdog group Mouvement Action Justice, refused an $8,000 out-of- court settlement offered by local cops after he complained of being arrested for refusing to answer a police officer’s questions four years ago. He was shooting for $30,000 but a judge rewarded him with a mere $6,000. And him too… In January, local lawyer Anthony Daoulov, 46, appealed his eight-year prison sentence for attempting to bring a pound of heroin into a prison and was rewarded with a sentence two years longer than the original. The judge didn’t buy his argument that thugs terrorized him into delivering the drugs. His lawyer Jérôme Choquette thought the sentence should be shorter because Daoulov’s heroin wasn’t very good. A judge that appreciates fine entertainment After their show was deemed obscene by two lower courts, Appeals Court judge Pierre Tessier decided in March that Mélanie Roux and Johanne Comeau’s act at the Amazones strip club was legal. Their performance involved licking cherries and whipped cream off each other’s private parts. Thirsty vampires
strike Chicoutimi Eric “Chuck” Gagné, 23, and his girlfriend
Carole “Wildcat” Charron, 24, went to court this spring after
entering neighbour Serge Harvey’s home at 4 a.m. one morning the
previous summer. The two punched him in the head and attacked him with
a broom and a knife before licking his bloody fingers. They threatened
to kill him if he told the police about the thoroughly fiendish behaviour.
Harvey called 911 as soon as they left. This year’s reasons to kill 1) Benoît Marcoux, 40, of Bonaventure allegedly killed his cousin in a dispute over an electricity bill July 22. 2) In April, Reginald Devaney, 31, of the Point, allegedly killed neighbour James Edward English, 56, because he thought English had placed dog poop on his doormat. 3) Simon Chamberland, 25, is thought to have killed his 78-year-old grandmother at her old-age home in Ste-Marie because he believed it would cure him of mental illness. 4) On August 18, Lasalle resident John Kassian, 55, allegedly killed his neighbour Blair Pitt, 48, with a homemade pen gun for playing loud music. From rope-a-dope to don’t-drop-the-soap World boxing champion Dave Hilton was convicted of sexually assaulting two minors after a tawdry trial in which it is revealed that he also forced the mother of the kids to have sex with his mistress. Oh, and he also forced her to have sex with a black man while he watched. After the conviction, Hilton told a reporter: “I still say it’s a horrible plot against me.” He vowed to appeal the verdict: “I’m not quitting, far from it.” A couple of months later he decided not to appeal. Death by nightclub Among this year’s nightclub mishaps: Mike DaSilva was knifed by an 18 year old in a late-night street altercation on the Main at 4 a.m. on April 22 while celebrating his 19th birthday at the Cathédrale. Marc-Alexandre Chartrand, 17, was killed October 23 by random gunfire allegedly fired by Benoît Guimond, 29, a newly-minted Hells, who was angry at not being allowed into the Aria nightclub. On the same weekend at the Conga on Rachel and the Main, Ricardo Moretta Candelier, 20, was killed attempting to break up a fight between strangers. We got cute, ironic crime Four crooks were busted in March after their attempt to blowtorch open an armoured truck outside the Zellers in Dorval worked so well that they set the truck and the money on fire. In September, the former police chief of Pierreville was busted for having over 4,000 pot plants on his property. Pot growers were nabbed in summertime raids in the Laurentians using second-hand equipment they had purchased from the Minister of Justice. And some grisly ones too In October, Vincent Meloche, 58, who did time for murdering three senior staffers at DuPont 30 years ago, burnt himself to death in the parking lot of the National Bank at Papineau and Bélanger. Provincial bureaucrat Christian Labonté, 40, was caught downloading kiddy porn at work in September, and a few days later his parents found him hanging dead from a tree. In November, Simon Cloutier showed up to his murder trial at Ste-Anne-des-Monts shirtless and bleeding from the neck where he had cut his throat, leading the judge to delay his trial. In January, a man was decapitated after crashing his Ford into an 18-wheeler at Haig and Hochelaga. Ghislain Bolduc, 44, apparently strangled his wife and sat around his Drummondville apartment for two days with her dead body. Not a great year for crime world celebs Vital “Magic Thumb” Lemire, a quack who claims to be able to heal women with his thumb, was declared a dangerous offender. Quebec City lawyer Pierre “Micheline” Montreuil, a pre-op transvestite (and “writer and hostess” according to www.micheline.ca) was again denied in her attempt to be allowed to use her feminine name in court. Gaetan Rivest, a former SQ officer turned maverick police opponent, was again convicted of a smorgasbord of offenses. Sébastien Brousseau, in prison for killing his mother 11 years ago, was again denied in his quest to become a lawyer. Jacques Corneau, an apparently incorrigible pedophile, sought an appeal on the grounds that he had been voluntarily castrated. Jail don’t stop a party girl Karla Homolka, serving 12 years for her role in two sex slayings (her husband Paul Bernardo is in jail indefinitely), bounced around the local Pinel Centre for the Criminally Insane and a Joliette prison, where she had been photographed partying in an elegant cocktail dress. She reportedly plans to live with millionaire bank robber Lynda Veronneau when released in July 2005. Easier to spot
in a police line-up Jean-Marc Lavoie, 43, of Saint-Clément, whose
face is covered in tattoos, was busted for drunk driving twice in four
and a half hours this June. <<
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A burning need to impress
Motel St-Hubert gofer Welly Smith, 28, set five fires at his workplace
in August to try to impress his boss with his miraculous johnny-on-the-spot
dousing skills. Prior to that, his boss Habib Ojeil had considered him
“indispensable” to the motel.