They are the chilling names of Canada’s most infamous serial killers: Clifford Olson, Paul Bernardo, Robert Pickton.

All of them eventually captured, convicted and condemned to life in prison.

But few people know that Canada’s deadliest killer – a thin and wiry founding member of the Hells Angels in this country who had at least 43 murders to his name – was never caught by police for his crimes, much less suitably punished. Yves (Apache) Trudeau confessed to his rampage in 1985 when he sought police protection from his former biker buddies who wanted him dead.

And the sweetheart deal he got for turning against his former comrades so outraged the public, it ripples to this day throughout our justice system.

As journalists, we have spent years covering organized crime and have seen the failings of the justice system first hand. We sat in the courtroom when Hells Angels leaders like Maurice “Mom” Boucher defiantly walked out a free man after he was acquitted in his first trial for the murder of two prison guards. We have interviewed gangsters who boasted how easy it was to run circles around over-burdened and disorganized law enforcement, and we have followed the dedicated and brave police officers frustrated by laws that didn’t work and superiors who would not listen.

In this election campaign as in most previous ones, politicians are promising they will be tough on crime. With much fanfare, the Liberal government appointed a new drug czar to “move quickly to tackle challenges.” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre this week vowed to bring in an American-style “three strikes you’re out” law to imprison violent repeat offenders for a mandatory minimum of 10 years.

But we need to be smart, not just tough, especially when it comes to organized crime.

Open this photo in gallery:

Yves Trudeau (2nd from right) circa 1969Jean Goupil

For Yves Trudeau, the blood was all business.

Montreal-born and bred, as a Hells Angel assassin he did his job so well, the gang sometimes lent him out to other crime empires in the city. From 1970 until 1985, he used bombs, guns, knives, baseball bats and his own hands to carry out more than 40 killings. His victims were not just fellow criminals, but also girlfriends, at least one mother and innocents who were either killed in error or simply got in the way.

During all that time, he went untouched by law enforcement because, much like today, the authorities underestimated the dangers of organized criminal gangs, did not dedicate the resources needed to combat them and did not have the hard-to-get inside intelligence on what was really going on in the dark underworld.

Eventually, fearful of his own life from rival bikers, Mr. Trudeau turned government informant. But as a witness, he was a disaster. His testimony led to so many acquittals that prosecutors avoided him. The controversial deal he got in return shocked and angered the public: the promise of parole after just serving seven years for all the murders he admitted to, plus – according to later court records – a $40,000 lump sum and $10,000 a year after he was released.

This was not justice. Or, it turned justice into a farce.

Informants into organized crime are never going to be choir boys, but Mr. Trudeau was not the last snitch to backfire badly on the stand. We need a better system where any deals given to informants are contingent on how helpful their testimony proves to be.

No convictions, no deals.

While out on parole in 2004 under police protection at the taxpayers’ expense and living under an assumed name, Mr. Trudeau was re-arrested for sexually assaulting a minor. He was finally released from prison just months before he died of cancer in 2008.

Jacques Duchesneau, the former Montreal chief of police – who famously compared his city to war-torn Beirut when biker bombings and shootings terrorized the streets in the 1990s – says the lessons we can learn from the Yves Trudeau debacle are important today.

“The organized crime that I knew when I was a young rookie and an infiltration agent, they were bums who wanted to make a living with crime,” he says. “Nowadays, the Hells Angels are businesspeople. Police and prosecutors still haven’t figured out how to investigate them.”

The key word when it comes to “organized crime” is the adjective: It’s organized, while all too often, our law enforcement and justice system is not.

Some serial killers might be methodical, but they do not have the sophisticated national and global organizations like the Hells Angels or the Mafia to help them carry out and cover up their dirty work.

We have met bikers and career criminals who have been in the game for decades, knowing that the police they go up against often are forced to move on, get transferred or simply quit.

The RCMP is stretched thin, trying to police everything from traffic violations in rural Manitoba to sophisticated global money-laundering. You can’t do both well.

A new federal policy paper released recently by Ottawa calls once again to split up the RCMP so that the “policing of serious and organized crime [can] benefit from specialized focus and attention.”

“I have been advocating for 15 years that the RCMP must get out of contract policing so we can create a strong federal force committed to tackling organized crime, drug trafficking, cyber-crime and human trafficking,” says Garry Clement, a former RCMP Superintendent and the National Director of Proceeds of Crime Program.

Indeed, it is more than a little embarrassing that some of our biggest organized crime kingpins have been pursued and punished, not here, but south of the border.

Alan (The Weasel) Ross, the notorious leader of Montreal’s Irish Mafia who once hired Mr. Trudeau to kill four people, was one of the leading cocaine traffickers in the country, but he was arrested, tried and sentenced to life behind bars in 1992 in the U.S., where he died.

Vito Rizzuto, the reputed godfather of the Canadian Mafia, went untouched in the country for decades until he was indicted in the United States and then extradited and imprisoned there in 2007 for his role in gangland slayings.

In 2024, Ryan Wedding, a former Canadian Olympic snowboarder, was charged with “leading a transnational organized crime group that engaged in cocaine trafficking and murder” – by the U.S. Department of Justice. Last month, the FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.

Compared to the United States, Canada remains a safe country, while politicians and sensationalist media all too often stir up fears about crime.

Still, according to the latest Statistics Canada report released in February, firearm-related violent crimes have increased 55 per cent since 2013 and overall violent crime has grown 30 per cent. Significantly, gang-related homicides in Canada’s largest cities have almost doubled, according to another government study from 2013 to 2022. Of the 743 homicides analyzed in 2020, 20 per cent were linked to organized crime or street gangs.

It is not hard to imagine that some of those killings were carried out by a hitman much like Yves (Apache) Trudeau, cooly and calmly waiting for his next target.

How many years will go by before we learn the lessons of that missed opportunity to pursue, prosecute, punish and catch a serial killer off the streets?

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Julian Sher and Lisa Fitterman are Montreal-based journalists and the authors of Hitman: The Untold Story of Canada’s Deadliest Killer from which this essay is adapted.

Original article at https://tinyurl.com/bdk2ufta