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Inside the Hell's Angels - Vancouver Sun Multimedia Special Report


Wetcoaster

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If you ask me, I think this investigation and the success that it had in weakening the HA has actually led to a lot of the gang violence going on lately. If we're going to have drug prohibition, it works best if there's one group with basically a monopoly, enforcing a sort of pax-romana sort of situation. This E-pandora is aptly named because by weakening the HA it put the chum in the water, it let all kinds of other groups start vying for power and position, it opened up a pandora's box of violence in the lower mainland.

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In part three, Plante sets out how his relationship with police began in July 2003. While he started as an informant, he became a police agent, wearing a wire for months as Hells Angels and associates trafficked drugs and committed other crimes. Plante talks about how he met Bob Paulson, then the RCMP inspector in charge of biker investigations in BC (and now the Commissioner of the RCMP) who pushed for Plante's status as a police agent over objections from HQ.

http://www.insidetheangels.com/

Paulson told Plante how much the police wanted to go after the Hells Angels.

“We are going to put everything we can into it. We have a lot of faith in you. And I will put the best guys on,” Plante quoted Paulson as saying.

It was Paulson’s decision to push forward with E-Pandora and get Plante official agent status, a long process that was finally approved by the RCMP’s top brass in Ottawa in early April 2004.

An agent is different from an informant, who simply provides police with intelligence gleaned from the criminal world. By contrast, an agent takes direction from police and must follow a strict set of legal guidelines.

Informants’ identities are kept confidential, while agents are required to testify in court. And agents can break the law while undercover as long as the conduct is pre-approved by police using Criminal Code exemptions.

However Plante had a major problem that was a barrier to his infiltration of the HA - he could not ride a motorcycle and he did not own one. And acquiring one was an issue since he did not have a visible source of income.

Before Plante could really be accepted as an Angel, there were obstacles to overcome. He had never ridden a motorcycle – let alone owned one, which is a requirement for the HA program.

Plante got his Low Rider Harley, which police were to make payments on, from Trev Deeley Motorcycles on Feb. 16, 2004. The total price was $26,388. He also went to Dayton Boots on East Hastings to buy the footwear necessary to complete his costume.

But he still couldn’t ride the Harley and had to take lessons in Ladner.

Plante had to have a good backstory so the bikers knew he had enough money to cover his expensive rides — the Harley and a tricked-out Mustang with a pearl-black paint job, in which police installed high-tech listening devices and even a camera in the trunk to film drug deals.

The Hells Angels believed Plante made his cash as a drug dealer, selling steroids, cocaine and methamphetamine. He certainly had appeared to be connected in the previous few months, helping full-patch Angels get their hands on precursors and meth cooks.

Part way into the operation he and the RCMP had conflicts over procedures which Plante thought were putting his life unnecessarily in danger and he threatened to quit.

Plante was ready to quit. He threatened to punch Shinkaruk. But Plante knew extricating himself would be difficult. Police had eight kilos of meth that Potts had given him. Plante was supposed to pay Potts back $160,000 after a pretend sale.

“I am thinking, ‘If I leave, I can’t even just go back to my normal life,’” Plante recalled.

Finally, police and the agent had a sit-down.

“I said, ‘Listen, we can’t do it this way. This ain’t going to work … If they tell me I got to be at the clubhouse at 9 — I can’t be late,’” Plante said. “‘But you are making me meet you here to pick up a wire.’”

Procedures were adapted as the investigation went along. Some of Plante’s debriefs started happening over the phone. The handlers began leaving the wires in one of his vehicles so he didn’t have to retrieve them each time.

On June 19, 2004, sitting in the New Westminster safe house, Plante signed a second agreement — this one promising him up to $1 million. It said he would get $500,000 at the conclusion of the investigative phase of E-Pandora. Then he’d get another $500,000 at the end of the legal proceedings. Little did he know that would be many years away.

His monthly stipend, which was separate from the award money, was set at $4,000, raised to $5,000 in September 2004 and bumped to $14,000 for the final three months he was undercover.

The strain on Plante was enormous, Shinkaruk said recently.

“The guy was under immense pressure all the time. He was in constant danger,” Shinkaruk said. “I have a lot of respect for him. He is a very brave individual.”

Plante describes several close calls when the wire he was wearing was in danger of being discovered and how he was becoming spooked every time one of the HA began to talk about wires.

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In part four, Plante describes what it was like when he was finally accepted into the Hells Angels program as an "official friend" and how difficult the final months of his dangerous assignment became.

http://www.insidetheangels.com/

Unaware that police agent Micheal Plante was secretly collecting evidence implicating them in drug deals, extortions, and other crimes, the Hells Angels finally accepted him into their fold as an “official friend” in September 2004.

Plante was called into the weekly “church” meeting at the East End clubhouse by David (Gyrator) Giles.

“They are all looking at me. And they say: ‘Tell us why you want to be a Hells Angel,’” Plante recalled.

“I did my speech — ‘Well you know, I have been hanging around you guys. I like the camaraderie. I like what is going on around here. And I really, really want to be part of it. And I want to be part of the bigger thing.’”

Giles asked him about the fact he had studied criminology and told him he’d never be able to pursue the field again.

East End president John Bryce laid out how police would react to Plante now that he was in the program.

“Bryce said something like, ‘You are going to have a lot of heat on you now because they like to pick on us,’” Plante recalled.

Giles made a final joking comment, all captured on the wire Plante was wearing: “You are not going to, like, become a Hells Angel and then quit and write a book about us, are you?”

Plante had his photo taken with the East End chapter to commemorate the event. That photo would be circulated to all Hells Angels in Western Canada to see if any objected to the new East End recruit being part of the notorious gang.

“They gave me a pamphlet from the world headquarters of Hells Angels, right? You read it and then they took it away,” Plante said.

And Plante was detailed by the HA to go pick up and move the weapons arsenal of the East End Chapter. He then turned them over to police but it might be dicey to explain where the weapons had gone so the police made it look like a raid on the new stoarge place.

“I thought I was picking up a couple of pistols. I didn’t know this was the East End arsenal. I always thought it was a myth,” Plante said.

When he arrived at the trailer, Potts’s stepfather saw the bag and wondered if it would be big enough.

“I go, ‘What?! How many guns do you got here?’ So we go to the back of the trailer and he opens this thing and starts pulling out machine guns and other stuff. He says, ‘Be careful, this one has got grenades.’”

Plante couldn’t believe the nonchalance of the senior citizen. He immediately called police.

“I said, ‘You are not going to believe this. I have got the whole arsenal.’”

Of course, police took the guns, which put Plante in a difficult position. For weeks afterwards, John Punko asked about the guns, saying he wanted to go out and shoot targets.

Plante and police worked up a series of excuses he could give to Punko about why he couldn’t get the guns.

“One scenario was that I got them stashed in this guy’s house and he is a long-haul driver and I don’t got the key,” Plante said. “There was one time when me and Punko were driving out to a meeting in Haney and Punko wanted to go try out a couple of those grenades.”

Plante said he thought they might blow up prematurely because they had got wet.

Both police and Plante knew he couldn’t keep up his ruse with the Angels much longer. Sooner or later, others besides Punko would confront him about the guns.

“Yes, it was getting dicey,” said Det. Brad Stephen. “And that’s when you love it. That’s where the risk is.”

Police settled on a scenario to cover the missing guns. They rented a storage locker in Abbotsford, then bought a gun locker to put inside it. They left the gun locker open, with Stephen’s business card on top.

If Potts wanted the guns, Plante was to take him to Abbotsford, then act shocked when it looked like police had raided the locker.

Plante was given a severe beating by members of the UN Gang at a Vancouver nightclub and he seriously thought about just quitting. He disappeared with no contact with his police handlers or the HA.

“The cops didn’t know where I was … The Hells Angels didn’t know where I was. They couldn’t believe I didn’t show up for church. So they are looking for me.”

He eventually went to the safe house to talk to police. They offered to increase his monthly stipend to $14,000. Plante said that was the one time during the operation that money was his primary incentive. He stayed.

But first, he had to explain himself to the Angels, and even apologize to senior Nomad Gino Zumpano because the fight happened in the club he ran. He also had to explain his disappearance to his fellow Angels.

“I had to go and eat crap for the next month – I had to go talk to everyone. I had to get yelled at by Louie (Robinson),” he said. “I had to go stand in the clubhouse, in front of every East End guy and tell my story.”

After it all, the Hells Angels told Plante and Potts to “take care of the guy that I had the problem with. We were supposed to get rid of him, like kill him,” Plante said.

However all the stress was becoming too much and Plante told police he was through.

“Plus I had big arguments with the cops that week. We are butting heads. My anxiety was through the roof. I said, ‘I am done.’”

Even though Plante had threatened to quit before, this time the police believed him.
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A SNAPSHOT OF POLICE CORRUPTION IN CANADA

Vancouver - Vancouver police Chief Jamie Graham fired two officers on Jan. 28 for beating up three people in Stanley Park and suspended four others without pay. The provincial government's police complaints commission is also investigating 59 allegations against members of the VPD made by the Pivot Legal Society. The complaints include torture, illegal search and seizure, use of excessive force and 'starlight tours,' in which officers drive people out of the Downtown Eastside and dump them.

WINDSOR - A 'sickened' Chief Glenn Stannard described it as 'the darkest day of my career as chief' when staff informed him in early December 2003 that a Windsor police department vehicle had been used to ferry stolen property away from a burglarized home-and-garden business.

property, break, enter and theft, breach of trust and public mischief.

Sounds like they could be talking about the hells angels , except these are the people your society employs and trusts to enforce the the LAW

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

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In Part Five, Plante talks about the challenge of preparing for a series of trials and how he felt when it was all over.

http://www.insidethe...notorious-gang/

Once Plante was pulled out he was put up in a safe house under guard and then a vacation in Mexico with RCMP security. On the vacation he had a breakdown on the third day and spent the time in his hotel room. After the vacation he was relocated to an unspecified city in North America so HA could not track him down. The problem was he had no social connections and no support network. He was being prepped for various trials and then shuttled to Vancouver to testify in the various trials that were the outcome of his infiltration.

He couldn’t return to B.C., where the Hells Angels members he had betrayed could find him. So he was plunked down in another city in North America where no one knew his history.

Police set him up in an apartment. They stayed in another suite in the same building for almost two months, taking him to various court cases so he could see what to expect when his own time came to testify.

He would be the key Crown witness in a series of trials of Hells Angels and associates charged as a result of the evidence he had collected in 2004 and 2005 as part of E-Pandora, the undercover investigation targeting the East End chapter.

“They weren’t really keeping an eye on me. They were helping me,” he said.

But then Plante’s police friends returned to Vancouver.

“My anxiety went way up. I just had a major meltdown. They just left me there. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know anybody. I am kind of like — the fog is lifting from my head and I am thinking what the f–k did I just do?” he recalled.

“All of a sudden you don’t have an identity. You don’t have anything. You have a pile of money.

Plante had collected the first $500,000 of a $1-million contract he had signed the previous year for his work on the unprecedented investigation. Police were still looking after Plante’s expenses. He was in the process of changing his identity.

He said he was like a lottery winner who blew a lot of his award money.

“I went on a spending spree. I really didn’t know how to handle myself,” he said. “All of a sudden I have no friends. I have a half a million dollars. I have nothing but time on my hands. You know what I mean? I did stupid things — just stupid things for about a year.”

He had been playing the tough-guy role for so long that he didn’t really know how to be normal. “I still had this Hells Angels crap inside me. I had been a Hells Angel for almost four years. I was used to going to the bars and nightclubs and spending money and yelling.”

After he disappeared the HA searched for him and the weapons arsenal he had turned over to police. He was the subject of a HA manhunt. Six months after he was pulled out the enforcement action began.

Six months after Plante had disappeared, the results of his work with the police came to fruition.

The busts went down on July 15, 2005, a sunny Friday afternoon. (View
http://www.insidetheangels.com/more-images/' rel="external nofollow">
of what police found in the raid and the aftermath.) Police arrested 18 Hells Angels and associates and raided the clubhouse where Plante had spent so much time.

Crown counsel began prepping him to appear as a witness and this went on for many months.

And once in court the issue of Pante's own criminal conduct became a central and preliminary question. The accused HA claimed that Plante was the one behind the criminal activities. How that claim was decided would be crucial and the trial judeudge sided with Plante and the Crown.

In fact, they accused Plante of being the real criminal who engaged in drug trafficking and acts of violence as he infiltrated the East End chapter. Plante was not ready for the attacks.

“I show up for court and they are making me look like an asshole. I was like, ‘What? Are you serious? What’s going on here?’” Plante said. “The court was tough.”

But he held his own on the stand. He explained that he was doing a job for police, in which he had to convince the Hells Angels he was a tough enforcer and that he could help them with their drug deals. How else could he be accepted?

It was an act, by an actor with a major role, he said.

On March 16, 2007, Justice Victor Curtis ruled the evidence would stand and that Plante’s conduct was not illegal because of exemptions in the Criminal Code that cover investigations like E-Pandora.

“I find nothing in the circumstances of this investigation which is not in accord with the community sense of fundamental justice, nothing which offends the principles of fundamental justice, and therefore no abuse of process constituting a breach of the rights of Mr. Lising or Mr. Ghavami,” Curtis said.

It was a key victory in the E-Pandora case and subsequent prosecutions, federal Crown Martha Devlin said recently.

Plante would testify in a series of cases and it seems that defence counsel made a strategic miscalculation, thinking Plante was nothing more than thug and forgetting that he had played a difficult role to infiltrate the HA to gather evidence. While there were individual convictions, Crown did not get the conviction it was seeking declaring Hells Angels to be a criminal organization.

The biggest case Plante testified in was the jury trial of four full-patch Angels — his old friend Potts, Lising, John Punko and Jean Violette. They faced a range of charges, from extortion and assault to firearms and explosives possession. But the biggest charge was that they were part of a criminal organization: the Hells Angels.

potts lising punko violette with caption

Plante was on the stand for months, mostly under gruelling cross-examination.

Vancouver Police Det. Stephen, one of Plante’s handlers during Pandora, said the agent was a solid witness throughout the court cases.

“He did very well in court. They didn’t see him coming. All the high-end lawyers in there didn’t anticipate he would have the memory he had,” Stephen said. “They made a fatal mistake in assuming this guy is just a dumb thug. He was a star in the box. In the end, they didn’t know how to deal with him.”

When the jury came back, all four bikers were convicted on a series of charges. But they were all acquitted on the criminal organization count — a blow to both police and Crown.

Plante was disappointed too.

“Without a doubt they are a criminal organization,” he said.

Shinkaruk agrees. “The Hells Angels are a criminal organization. They are an international criminal organization and the British Columbia Hells Angels for a number of years have been held in high esteem internationally by Hells Angels,” he said.

And in the end? His motivation and what his life has now become?

Plante doesn’t consider the money a huge windfall given that he has spent 10 years of his life waiting for E-Pandora to conclude. “I have actually got 40 years of my life left.”

He never undertook his amazing journey for money, but because he thought it was the right thing to do.

“I am proud of what I did. I have no regrets about what I did.”

And while he is not planning on living in fear for the rest of his life, he has to take special security measures because of the damage he did to the Hells Angels.

“Are they dangerous? For sure they are dangerous. If I was in Brazil and all of a sudden I ran into some Brazilian Hells Angels, for sure they are going to know who I am. I knew who guys were. We had pictures of guys in the clubhouse,” he said.

“But I really haven’t looked over my shoulder. I live the way I have always lived — I kind of scope things. But I don’t let it get to me.

“I am not saying I am this super-strong, super-crazy guy. I am realistic. If it did happen, it happens. But I don’t put myself in harm’s way. I don’t go to Vancouver. I really don’t say anything about it. It’s done, and what’s done is done.”

Plante has already moved on. Just as he had to do so many times as a child, he has adapted to a new city, new friends and a new life.

“I had no problem moving on. I am doing my own thing. I am pretty easygoing when it comes to stuff like that,” he said. “I just want to live my life and enjoy my life like a normal person. I don’t have any regrets. I don’t look back. I look forward.”
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Plante sounds like ever more of a tool with each additional to the series, and the HA sound like they're getting increasingly sloppy about who they allow into the club.

Granted, with the way the HA operate where a few key members make most of the money, and there are limited opportunities for advancement compared to a lot of criminal organizations, they're not going to attact the talent they once did.

Once the old school guys who built the club in this region are gone, they'll be in trouble.

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Plante sounds like ever more of a tool with each additional to the series, and the HA sound like they're getting increasingly sloppy about who they allow into the club.

Granted, with the way the HA operate where a few key members make most of the money, and there are limited opportunities for advancement compared to a lot of criminal organizations, they're not going to attact the talent they once did.

Once the old school guys who built the club in this region are gone, they'll be in trouble.

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I think the police are overstating their success here, the EE chapter was on the verge of fading away regardless because of the age of its key members and their moving on to other things. I think they have too many chapters for the size of this region anyway.

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