Proof negative

>> Former cop gets out of jail and demands the force show its evidence against him

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

When 32-year Montreal police veteran Claude Aubin, 54, was sent to prison last spring, he balked at an offer of private protection. “It was 23 hours a day in your cell and you get one hour to do something for yourself. I said, ‘No, thank you very much.’ They put me in a wing with 60 guys. There was one guy serving 25 years, another serving 18. We became good friends,” says the recently released ex-cop. “I met several people that I had arrested. They came and shook my hand, we talked, we had fun. Only one guy came up and said, ‘Hey, you arrested me!’ So I asked him, ‘Did you get the sentence you wanted?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Did you wave to me at the end of the trial?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘Did I take care of your dog?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ So I told him, ‘Then say, ‘Thanks Claude.’’’ He was all right with me after that.”

Before Saturday, April 14, 2001, Aubin could never have dreamed that he’d end up behind bars. Aubin joined the force at age 19 in 1967, and rose to Lieutenant-Detective before a series of squabbles with brass led him to take his pension in 1999. He then launched his private investigation firm Agence AGC with a partner.
That April, Aubin was charged with illicitly obtaining police information from Aubin’s former squad partner, Det.-Sgt. Alain Desrosiers, a 23-year vet. The custom of offering private police information to old buddies might be presented as both benign and common on private detective TV dramas, but Montreal cops were less thrilled with the practice.

Speaking at a press conference following Aubin’s arrest, Commander André Durocher told reporters that Aubin had resold illegally obtained private police files to Eastern European crime gangs. Police chief Michel Sarrazin denounced the situation as “revolting.”

Guilty, but

In a closed-door plea bargaining session on the weekend of April 14 in Laval, Aubin agreed to plead guilty for accessing the police databanks as well as charges of illegally possessing 25 firearms in his Plateau home. Aubin, now on parole after serving one-sixth of his two-year sentence, doesn’t deny the weapons charges. “I have a coin collection, a book collection and I love guns,” he says. “Most of them are in decorative wooden boxes.” He also confesses that he carried one with him as a private detective, but only because he was told that the Russian mob had put a contract out on him in 1997.

However, Aubin insists he never sold information to mobsters and has taken his complaint to the Police Ethics Commission, a prelude, he hopes, to a civil suit against the force for what he claims was a false accusation. Aubin will also report the details of the extreme conditions he says he suffered following his arrest.
The circumstances around Aubin’s plea bargain upset others too. Civil rights lawyer Julius Grey, who wasn’t involved in the case, urged the provincial Public Security and Justice Ministers to publicly examine the claims police made that Aubin had sold secrets to gangsters. Respected Université de Montréal criminologist André Normandeau also urged local police chief Sarrazin to get to the bottom of the claims. The Montreal Gazette echoed the call.

Now Aubin is also demanding to see the evidence that allegedly demonstrates he ciphered info to the mob, and has filed an Access to Information request to examine the transcribed wiretaps that led police to accuse him of dealing with gangsters. “I’ve already asked for it,” he says. “The police say they have 13 boxes of evidence that they don’t want to give me. But I’m patient. I can wait.”

Interpretive evidence

Montreal police refuse to comment on the affair, including Aubin’s charges that the squad disobeyed a parole board subpoena to provide the information. The parole authorities needed the evidence to decide whether to grant Aubin’s release. “The police didn’t show up with the file. They didn’t care that there was a court order to provide it,” says Aubin.

The closest anybody has come to describing the substance of the claim that Aubin sold police secrets to the underworld was Crown prosecutor Jean-Pierre Boyer, who said last year that the claims were based on an “interpretation of certain telephone conversations.” Boyer also conceded that Aubin agreed to the plea to help his former partner Desrosiers avoid criminal charges.

Aubin confirms that he agreed to the plea in order to help his former partner Desrosiers avoid jail time. Under the deal, Desrosiers was fired from the force but stayed out of jail. “It’s me who made the final deal,” says Aubin. “I was going to detention and he was going home. That was the deal.”

In an unexpected twist, Aubin turned down an offer to serve two years less a day, instead preferring to serve a two-year term. In Quebec, those sentenced to less than two years serve their time in provincial institutions, a place Aubin preferred to avoid. “Provincial prisons are somewhere you don’t want to go. The difference between provincial and federal is day and night,” he says.

Airing dirty blue laundry

Aubin’s difficulties with the squad date back to when he was perceived as a maverick on the force, which he describes as unrewarding to those ambitious to attack crime. “I’ve always been a rebel. I always worked my own way, always been in jeans, always had a lot of success but no necktie, no suit, so I had to fight like hell all my life against my bosses. I was not only fighting against crime,” says Aubin. The former cop questions various aspects of local police bureaucracy, including the system of advancement, which he says depends on “how good a golfer you are.” He also claims police manipulate descriptions of crimes to make it appear that the crime rate is decreasing. And community policing has proven ineffective, he says, as it makes for tiny countertop stations; each with their own hierarchy, and, as a result, “we have more chiefs than Indians.”

Aubin says his days on the force were dogged with controversy, as he was deemed overly communicative with the media. He says he opted to retire after being severely reprimanded for talking to TV journalists about a clone-phone ring he helped smash.

The one-time handler of West End-based police informant and convicted rapist James Medley now collects a $50,000 pension from the force while he works on “two or three books.” A few weeks ago, the father of two received a package from his former employers at the constabulary. To his surprise, the package contained diskettes complete with his unfinished novels, as well as what he claims is all the supposedly controversial information that had been earlier confiscated from his home and threatened as evidence against him. He sees it as smoking-gun proof that the diskettes never contained anything too controversial. “I figured they’d erase everything, but I got every piece of info back. The police ethics people said they can’t believe it, but it’s all signed by the cops,” says Aubin. He plans to mention it in his upcoming legal battles. “I like to fight. I’ve always loved it. I don’t start wars but I don’t walk away from them.” :