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'Connections' impressed Couillard

JULIAN SHER

June 6, 2008

 

With reports from Tu Thanh Ha and Ingrid Peritz

 

'I am definitely not a biker's chick," Julie Couillard said in her much-publicized TV interview with the Quebec TVA network, describing herself as "an innocent bystander."

But Stéphane Sirois, her former husband and a long-time outlaw biker, sees things differently.

Ms. Couillard has no criminal record, but she has been in close relationships with criminal characters for well over a decade.

Montreal's La Presse newspaper reported this week that in the early 1990s she was involved with Tony Volpato, a Montreal Mafia gangster connected to the Frank Cotroni clan who was eventually sentenced to six years in prison for smuggling 180 kilograms of cocaine.
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Mr. Sirois said that a few years later he introduced Ms. Couillard to other members of the Cotroni family, visiting their homes and discussing business ventures with them. "She was impressed," he said. "She saw that I had connections."

From 1995 to 1996, Ms. Couillard lived with Gilles Giguère, a loan shark with close ties to the Hells Angels. He was killed in a gangland slaying a week before facing trial for possession of four machine guns and 30 kilograms of hashish.

Ms. Couillard described Mr. Giguère as "my greatest professor ... my best friend, my lover, my partner in life and in business," in an interview with the Quebec weekly tabloid 7 Jours.

Mr. Sirois married Ms. Couillard just over a year after Mr. Giguère's death. They had a whirlwind romance, with Mr. Sirois proposing to her in the summer of 1997.

"She didn't walk away from anybody," Mr. Sirois told The Globe and Mail.

"She didn't walk away from Gilles and she didn't walk away from me when I was doing stuff." That "stuff," according to Mr. Sirois, included illegal real estate flips and a marijuana grow-operation that eventually led to the arrest of Marcel Couillard, Ms. Couillard's father.

Ms. Couillard has been a registered real estate agent since April of last year, although the real estate firm she claims to be associated with denies that she is now or ever was an employee.

Mr. Sirois said he ran a scheme with a crooked real estate agent and a co-operative banker, both of whom got a small cut of the proceeds. The Globe and Mail has independently confirmed that the real estate agent named by Mr. Sirois is no longer licensed and was fined for breaking real estate rules in an unrelated series of transactions.

In Mr. Sirois's scheme, he would find someone who agreed to sign an offer for a home for tens of thousands of dollars under its value; a second person would then buy the property at an inflated price with a bank loan, pay off the first offer and pocket the difference.

He also said he used the proceeds from one of the real estate scams to underwrite a marijuana grow-op. And he found the perfect candidate he could trust to live in the house where the grow-op would be located - Mr. Couillard.

"The first crop wasn't that good, so I didn't make a lot of money," Mr. Sirois said. "I was hoping for a better crop the next time but they busted it."

Mr. Sirois speculated that police were watching him because of his past ties to the Hells Angels. But when the police busted the operation in 1998, the only person charged was Mr. Couillard.

RCMP drug investigators conducted surveillance operations on Ms. Couillard and her father, court testimony revealed.

The officers told the court that they kept watch outside her home and later saw her visit Mr. Couillard's home 10 days before they raided the place and seized cannabis plants and a hydroponic installation.

Ms. Couillard testified that she dropped by her father's place once or twice a week but didn't notice anything unusual. Later, officials considered wiretapping Ms. Couillard's phone, court documents show.

Her father was sentenced to house arrest after pleading guilty to producing marijuana; a trafficking charge was dropped.

- Julian Sher