It was one of the last major acts of violence in Quebec's biker war, but Eric Nadeau says police could have stopped it. Nadeau spent 11 years infiltrating the Hells Angels and Bandidos biker gangs for the Montreal police, Sûreté du Québec and RCMP, rising to become national secretary of the Bandidos. He says his work contributed to 190 arrests, including those of 62 Bandidos in a June 2002 operation that decapitated the gang's Canadian leadership.
In March 2002, Nadeau was in his girlfriend's former gift shop at 214 Bernard Street West when two full-patch Bandidos members walked in. They had spotted Bertrand at a nearby restaurant and wanted to kill him. They got a gun, changed clothes and discussed their plans in the store, not knowing that Nadeau was a police informant and that a surveillance camera had been secretly installed inside.
Nadeau says he tried to warn police about the preparations, but they didn't send anyone until it was too late. "I spoke in my car about it, where there was a police microphone," he says. "I tried to call my controller. There was no answer." He also says he tried to signal police via the hidden camera. The Journal
After the incident, there was another bizarre development. Nadeau was supposed to be the star witness for the Crown at the mega-trial of the Bandidos members arrested in June 2002. The Crown suddenly dropped him as a witness in October 2003 and dismissed charges against five leading Bandidos. One newspaper reported that Nadeau had refused to testify.
But Nadeau says he wanted to testify and that the Crown dropped him because it was afraid he would reveal embarrassing details about the Bertrand shooting and other police wrongdoing. "I said I would tell the judge everything," he says. "I know all the secrets. I have proof of everything - tapes, documents, CDs."
Because he didn't testify, Nadeau says, police refused to pay him $125,000 still owing under his informant contract. He says the police also stopped providing security for him and his family, and haven't given them new identities. The 40-year-old father of four says his family had to move 11 times because of security fears.
"My children are afraid," he says. "My 12-year-old daughter has talked about suicide." He says he is just as afraid now of the police as of the bikers. He is suing the Montreal police for $370,000; his girlfriend has filed a separate lawsuit for $6.2-million.
Nadeau is telling his story in a book coming out at the end of February, called L'Infiltrateur. He is calling for a public inquiry into rampant police wrongdoing he claims to have seen while infiltrating biker gangs. He says cops falsified reports, pocketed money from drug transactions and gave him items seized from police raids, like champagne and a work of art as gifts. He also says police allowed weapons to circulate on the street, including machine guns and bazookas.
In a bizarre twist, Nadeau is getting support from five ex-police officers who have formed the Groupe d'enquête civil indépendant to help him publicize his complaints. "When I started looking at Eric's evidence, I said, 'I cannot believe this,'" says group member Claude Aubin, a retired Montreal police sergeant detective. "This cannot stay unknown by the public. It's that bad. It's disgusting."
Aubin was arrested in 2001 for selling police information to bikers and sentenced to two years in jail. He says he is motivated not by revenge but a sense of outrage about Nadeau's story. "This is going to be one of the biggest scandals in Quebec," he says.
Aubin says he believes two recent suicides of prominent Montreal cops may be linked to Nadeau's allegations, and he worries that more officers may kill themselves when the group goes public with its evidence later this month. "I'm feeling sick about that," he says. "If this is going to happen the way I want, police officers are going to jail."
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