Authors Lisa Fitterman and Julian Sher [Gazette photo by Dace Sedaway]
Julian Sher and Lisa Fitterman didn’t want their book about Yves (Apache) Trudeau to be biker porn.
They wanted to chronicle the life and times of a guy that they describe as Canada’s most prolific killer and that’s exactly what you’ll find in the just-published Hitman: The Untold Story of Canada’s Deadliest Assassin.
Trudeau was a Hells Angels murderer but he wasn’t above selling his services to other outfits, notably east-end gangs and the Irish mob in the west end, if the price was right. In all he killed 43 people, by his own admission.
He made the confession when he became a police informant in 1985 and in return for becoming a Crown witness, he pleaded guilty to 43 charges of manslaughter, not murder.
As Sher and Fitterman point out in the book, he was a disaster as a witness for the Crown in various biker trials and so essentially got off light without particularly helping the cops put bikers behind bars.
“I’m not interested in true crime in the sense of whodunnit,” said Sher, in a recent interview alongside Fitterman in the condo they share on the Lachine canal just around the corner from the Atwater Market. They are a married couple.
“The books I’ve written are always why-done-it,” continued Sher. “Why did something happen? When I did my books on the Hells Angels, it was why did the Hells Angels get away with murder for so long? Then I realized Hitman is the story of Canada’s deadliest killer. There’s nobody that killed more people than he did in Canada’s history and he literally got away with murder. He was never caught. He turns himself in, confesses, doesn’t get much of a punishment… it’s all about the failings of the justice system.”
Sher has co-written two previous books about biker gangs, Angels of Death and The Road to Hell. He also co-wrote and directed the hit 2022 Crave documentary feature Kings of Coke about the West End Gang.
Fitterman is a former Gazette reporter who has written extensively about biker trials. The odd thing about Hitman is even after reading all 237 pages, you still don’t fully get who Trudeau really was. He died of bone marrow cancer at age 62 in 2008, so they couldn’t talk to him and since his murders happened decades back, it was difficult to find first-person testimonials.
“I always saw him as a cypher,” said Fitterman. Adds Sher: “That’s what makes him fascinating. We’re trying to do a portrait of evil and, as in any good book, you want there to be surprises. You want people to say ‘Oh he’s not this cartoon villain. He’s much more complex.’ Then you discover he didn’t torture cats as a kid. He didn’t come from a broken family. By luck, he ends up getting a job at a bomb-making factory. If you’re going to be a future assassin,it’s kind of useful to work in a bomb factory.”
In fact, his most famous murder was a bombing. In November 1984, he agreed to kill Paul April, who was suspected of having killed West End Gang boss Frank (Dunie) Ryan. Trudeau said he was hired by Ryan’s successor, Allan (The Weasel) Ross.
The bomb Trudeau built was delivered to April’s downtown apartment and the blast killed April and three other men, while at the same time blasting a huge hole in the side of the apartment on de Maisonneuve Blvd., just east of the Forum. Police investigators search the rubble for clues after a bomb exploded in a ninth-floor apartment at 1645 de Maisonneuve W. on Nov. 25, 1984.
They write in the book that Trudeau’s bloody career in a way paved the way for the murderous biker wars that followed. Without Trudeau, you wouldn’t have had Maurice (Mom) Boucher, the notorious Hells Angels boss and murderer who died three years ago, said Fitterman.
“Trudeau set the stage for bikers to realize ‘Hey, I can kill with impunity, I can do what I want,’” said Fitterman.
Neither Sher nor Fitterman ever met Trudeau or attended his trials, which is one reason why they interviewed current Gazette crime reporter Paul Cherry, who covered the National Parole Board hearing in 2008 when Trudeau, 62, with just months to live, was freed from prison. He was serving a four-year sentence for sexually abusing a young boy.
Cherry told the authors Trudeau was a shadow of his former self: “I thought there was no way this guy could literally hurt a fly, let alone another human being. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. The monster was gone.”
When Sher’s agent first called to say HarperCollins wanted him to do a book on Trudeau, Sher said “No. I don’t want to do another biker book.” But then he said, “What about if I do it with Lisa?” They have been together a quarter of a century but they had never collaborated on a book before.
“Lisa had covered the biker trials,” said Sher. “In fact, when we started dating she was covering the biker trials. I was investigating the Hells Angels. So it was like going back to our roots. Then both our agents contacted us and said,
‘This could be a bad idea, this could lead to disputes.’ So, only with some trepidation did we start but it turned out to be a blast.”
Original article at https://tinyurl.com/bdk2ufta