Montreal's Irish Mafia: The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang

306 Pages·2011·2.24 MB·English

by  D'Arcy O'Connor

Montreal’s Irish Mafia
The True Story of the Infamous West End Gang
D’Arcy O’Connor
with Miranda O’Connor
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: The Irish Invasion
Chapter 2: “Most of His Children Turned Out to Be Thieves”
Chapter 3: Calabrians and Sicilians
Chapter 4: Montreal's Jewish Mafia
Chapter 5: The Emergence of the West End Gang
Chapter 6: The Murderous Decades
Chapter 7: Bank Robbery Capital of North America
Chapter 8: Digging for Treasure
Chapter 9: The Crime of the Century
Chapter 10: The Rubber Duck Squad
Chapter 11: Follow the Money
Chapter 12: An Uncommon Thief
Chapter 13: The King of Coke
Chapter 14: The Death of Dunie Ryan and Its Fallout
Chapter 15: The Emperor of Coke
Chapter 16: The MacAllister Family
Chapter 17: Gerald Matticks: King of the Port
Chapter 18: The Bloody Biker War
Chapter 19: The RCMP's Largest Drug Seizure
Chapter 20: The Gelding of Montreal's Italian Mafia
Chapter 21: Tobacco: The Mob's Latest Addiction
Chapter 22: Montreal's Modern Street Gangs
Epilogue
Bibliography
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
DEDICATION
To Mouse: Whose patient suffering and assistance in my lack of computer skills
was worth as much to me as her incredible research skills.
PREFACE
To refer to Montreal's West End hoodlums as either a “gang” or as the city's
“Irish mafia” is somewhat of a misnomer, since, even if there are several familial
ties, few of the subjects you'll read about here are bound to one another by a
down-from-the-top hierarchy, or by any code of omertà.
Nevertheless, all of these characters do have one thing in common. They are
a collection of petty thieves, bank and armored-truck robbers, shakedown artists,
safecrackers, truck-hijackers, drug importers and distributors, money launderers,
fences, loan sharks, protection racketeers, enforcers, hired killers and other
assorted thugs who operate mostly in the downtown and southwestern part of the
island of Montreal. And, for the most part, they are of Irish descent and are
English-speaking in a city that is today 70 percent francophone.
When these Irish gangsters first began their criminal activities in the mid-
1950s, they were nicknamed by the French media as Le Gang de l'Ouest. And
the name, along with its English translation, has since stuck in newspaper, radio
and TV accounts, police reports, crime commission hearings, etc. So, whether
the appellation is accurate or not, Montreal does indeed have a “West End
Gang,” albeit consisting of a somewhat loosely knit and rather disorganized
bunch of fraternal families and individuals. Their exploits, as well as their shady
business relationships with the city's French, Italian, Jewish, and biker-gang
fellow mobsters, is a story that has never before been fully explored.
The West End Gang's heyday was from the 1970s through the early 2000s.
Nevertheless, their roots precede that, and their criminal activity is, if to a much
lesser extent, ongoing today.
My introduction to some of these characters began quite serendipitously in
1979 when I moved to Montreal from New York where, as a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal, I had written a feature article about Montreal being, during
the late 1960s, “The bank robbery capital of North America.” One of the first
jobs I got on my return to Montreal was as an administrator and teacher in a
Dawson College program at the federal Leclerc medium-security penitentiary in
Laval, just north of Montreal. And because the program involved Leclerc's
English-speaking inmates, I was soon meeting some of the so-called West End
Gang—guys I'd never heard of before. I found some of them and their stories
fascinating.
Now, three decades later, I am still intrigued by their exploits, their screw-
ups, and the fact that those Irish mobsters (many of them long-since killed, and
others now rather long in the tooth) can still generate headlines.
In recent years, there has been much written about Montreal's Italian mafia
families, biker gangs and young ethnic street gangs. Yet relatively little attention
has been paid to these “Sons of Erin” who for several decades brought crime and
mayhem into the southwest corner of the city. This book is about these men and
their exploits.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book owes much to my ability to access the files and source-support of the
RCMP (especially their Quebec “Division C”), the Montreal Police Service, and
the Sûreté du Québec (Quebec Provincial Police). It also relies heavily on access
to and documents obtained from the Palais de justice de Montréal (the
Courthouse), Cour du Québec (the Court of Quebec), Cour d'appel du Québec
(Quebec Court of Appeal), Cour Supérieure du Québec (Quebec Superior
Court), Bibliothéque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Canadian National
Parole Board, the McGill University Law Library, and the Concordia University
Library. Many individuals in those organizations were helpful in providing
information, as well as guiding me through the labyrinth of voluminous files that
had anything to do with the West End Gang.
More importantly, there are the cons and ex-cons, cops and ex-cops, various
Irish gang hang-arounds and know-abouts, bar owners, bar tenders and barflies,
hookers, pimps and drug-dealers, plus others who allowed me to interview them
(either on or off the record), and helped me get a handle on the fascinating
history of Montreal's so-called “Irish mafia.”
But the most helpful of all were my chief researcher, Miranda O'Connor, as
well as John Westlake, André Savard, John Phillips, André Potvin, William
Morgan, André Bouchard and Paul Cherry, without whom I'd still be lost trying
to figure out all the various connections between the “bad guys” and those who
pursued them. There were also many others who granted me interviews in my
quest for details about growing up in Irish neighborhoods, as well as the
machinations of the West End Gang.
Finally, there are the various “munchkins,” especially Julie Lewis, who did
most of the tedious work of translating from French to English the hundreds of
court documents, police files, crime commission and coroner reports, National
Parole Board hearings, and francophone media articles. And it was mostly
Miranda who transcribed dozens of audio-taped interviews onto paper. Any
factual errors that may appear in the book are entirely my responsibility, and not
theirs.
As for getting the book finally written and finished, I could not have done it
without the enduring patience and support of my editors Don Loney and Pauline
Ricablanca at John Wiley & Sons.
CHAPTER 1
The Irish Invasion
During the mid to late 19th century, primarily between 1846 and 1850, an
estimated three million Irish immigrants fled The Hunger or, as it was also
known, the Great Potato Famine, a fungal infection that ravaged their native soil.
Most sailed across the Atlantic in order to take up roots in North America where,
they were assured, there was arable land to be tilled, sown and harvested. In
addition, they were counting on ample employment in the burgeoning urban
areas. For the most part, these desperate people arrived with little more than the
clothes on their back, and some with a brood of malnourished children, to
establish new roots in cities like New York, Boston and Montreal.
The bulk of these émigrés chose the United States as their landfall, and most
were processed through Ellis Island off the southern tip of Manhattan. Once
cleared, they either settled into Manhattan's Lower East and West Side, or else
made their way north to Boston, south to New Orleans, or west to Chicago and
Kansas City, all of which were growing urban centers of opportunity and blue-
collar jobs.