| Pierre Provencher |
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| Pierre Provencher was born around 1950 and grew up in southwest Montreal. He rose through the ranks of the biker underworld to become one of the leaders of the Rockers, the violent Hells Angels puppet gang.
Provencher was said to be active in Verdun and LaSalle, where he raked in $5,000 per month from drug trafficking. He also owned a sugar shack in Saint Norbert, where bikers supposedly sometimes got together for meetings. After a violent turf war exploded between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine in 1994, Montreal became an unsafe place for bikers. Informant Danny Kane told his police handlers that Provencher went to a gym most mornings and carried a gun in a bag as he worked out on exercise machines. |
Aimé Simard, a Hells Angels associate who turned government informant, told police that Provencher and four others linked to the Rockers had helped him plot the slaying of Jean-Marc Caissy, a member of the Rock Machine who Simard gunned down in March 1997. Provencher was arrested at a friend’s apartment in LaSalle on June 18, 1997. The others arrested were Gregory Wooley, Daniel Saint-Pierre, Stephen Falls, and Patrick Pascone. Simard testified against his former friends during the four-month trial, but the jury remained unconvinced. After five days of deliberation, the accused were acquitted. Provencher was arrested again during one of the largest law enforcement operations in Canadian history. In a massive crackdown on the Hells Angels, police swooped down and arrested more than 100 members and associates of the gang in March, 2001. The Rockers and the Hells Angels Nomads Chapter were left in ruins. Provencher was charged with conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking, and gangsterism. At a mega trial of Provencher and other bikers, prosecutors claimed that the accused were part of a criminal enterprise that reaped over $100 million in drug profits per year. Several secretly-recorded recordings were also played for police. In one conversation, Provencher and other gang leaders disciplined Rocker Pierre Toupin for not showing up for guard duty at a Hells Angels party. “I’m 50 years old…I‘m a criminal since the age of 17,” Provencher was quoted as saying. Toupin was suspended from the club for three months and forced to return his biker vest. In another recorded conversation, Provencher explained the sacrifices required to become a Hells Angels: “If you want to be a Hells Angel, it is fuck the business, fuck your wife,” he was reported as saying. Court testimony described Provencher as being part of a group of Rockers given the responsibility of seizing drug turf in Verdun from the Rock Machine, already well-entrenched in the area. Provencher and eight other bikers pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking, and gangsterism in September 2003. The others who pleaded guilty included Nomads members Denis “Pas Fiable” Houle, Gilles “Trooper” Mathieu, and Normand Robitaille. Provencher was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Since the two and a half years he had spent behind bars since his arrest counted as double, he was left with 10 years left to serve. The government also confiscated from him about $17,000 in cash and various gang memorabilia, including a gold bracelet featuring the inscription “Rockers”. |