obituary

Gang leader Gerald Matticks controlled the drug trade through Montreal’s port

Lisa Fitterman

Special to The Globe and Mail

 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-gerald-matticks-obituary-west-end-gang-montreal/

On a balmy evening in June 1996, the back room at Mickey’s country and western bar just outside Montreal was smoky and the music, muted. Surrounded by cronies, the bar’s owner, Gerry Matticks, was in his element, sitting at a large, round table and gesticulating with a tumbler of gin while reminiscing about his life to this reporter.

“I inherited who I am from my family,” he said. “We’re not saints. I’m a fast talker and I talk rough, but that’s not my meaning, if you know what I mean.”

Back then, you could find him there every Thursday evening, moustachioed, with a wide grin and the stance of a bull – a garrulous, calculating crime boss who always made sure to give back to his community, be it turkeys, toys or repairs to his Catholic parish church that every other expert the priest consulted claimed were impossible.

One did not say no to Big Gerry, as he was known.

The leader of a loose conglomerate of criminals known as the West-End Gang, he controlled the drug trade through Montreal’s busy port, Mr. Matticks died on Nov. 21 from natural causes. He was 85 years old, a crime boss with street smarts who over decades in the crime business managed to escape serious time behind bars until he was caught in March, 2001 as part of a major biker bust known as Operation Springtime.

Although the priest of the church that needed repairs showed up at his sentencing hearing to testify on his behalf, Mr. Matticks was still sentenced to 12 years behind bars for conspiracy to traffic in narcotics.

“In a lot of ways, Gerry Matticks transcended the underworld and showed us how criminal elements can seep into the cracks of our institutions and exploit their weaknesses,’ said Nick Rose, a Montreal-based journalist and filmmaker who co-wrote the Crave documentary Kings of Coke. “All of those things made him a folk hero but make no mistake, he was feared, and for good reason.”

Yet, his son, Gerry Harris Matticks, painted a different picture. “My dad was an amazing person,” he said in an email to the Montreal Gazette. “The most important things to him in life were his kids and making sure he gave back to the poor. He loved Christmas. He loved driving around with Santa hanging out toys and food. And he loved his farm.”

Gerald Matticks was born on July 4, 1940, the youngest of 14 children in a family of poor Irish immigrants. His father drove a wagon for the City of Montreal while his mother, who spent much of her life pregnant, tried her best to care for her brood. They lived in a cramped apartment in Goose Village, a tiny community nestled against the Victoria Bridge in what is now Montreal’s Southwest borough.

Mr. Matticks claimed he weighed 14 pounds when he was born, and that he quit school at the age of 12, jumping out of a window after he slapped a teacher who was strapping him for some infraction he could not remember.

He admitted he was terrible at reading because he had “that thing, what do you call it, you know, where you can’t make out letters.” He was never formally diagnosed with dyslexia, but a friend of his did have it and so he figured that he did, too.

After leaving school, he worked at a series of odd jobs, including collecting scrap metal for cash. He got married at 17; four years later, he had fathered four children.

By the 1960s, Mr. Matticks, with his brothers John, Fred, Robert and Richard, were running a burgeoning business that revolved around the hijacking of trucks and the theft of their contents.

In 1973, Mr. Matticks and his brother, Richard, were arrested after being caught with several truckloads worth of stolen goods, including frozen meat, alcohol, cigarettes, televisions, audio systems and lingerie, which they were selling on the cheap to people they met in bars, but they were given only light sentences. Four years later, police found stolen jewellery in his home but he was acquitted when the Crown failed to establish that he had stolen it.

Then, in 1984, Mr. Matticks became president of the Cooper and Checkers’ Union at the port of Montreal, thus controlling the hiring of employees who oversaw the loading and unloading of containers from ships docked there. One of those “checkers,” Mr. Matticks’s son Donald, would later testify that his real job was to make sure that containers with drugs were not inspected, period.

Over the next decade, Mr. Matticks, who kept a poster of Marlon Brando from the movie On the Waterfront on the wall of his bar, kept an iron fist on the port and acted mostly with impunity. After all, most of the checkers owed their livelihoods to him directly.

But in 1994, the Sûreté du Québec conducted raids, arresting Mr. Matticks, his brother Richard and five other alleged conspirators for importing 26.5 tonnes of hashish in three shipping containers. It looked like a solid case that would signal the crime boss’s downfall.

Instead, in a startling turn, allegations surfaced that investigators who wanted to put Mr. Matticks and the gang away for good, had planted evidence, namely, three bills of lading with a fax number that was linked to the very police department that had made the arrests.

Lawyer Jeff Boro, who was defending another person charged in the case, recalled a visit with Mr. Matticks in jail to bring him up to speed on what was happening.

“My client asked me to meet with Gerry because his lawyer wasn’t coming to see him,” Mr. Boro said. “He pointed his finger at me and said ‘If you’se guys don’t win, you’se dead.’”

Sure enough, in a blistering decision, the Quebec Court judge threw out the case before it began, and four police investigators were charged with perjury, fabricating evidence and obstructing justice. (Although they were acquitted in 1996, their actions would lead to an inquiry and an overhaul of Quebec’s justice system.)

For Mr. Matticks, the “Matticks Affair,” as it became known, meant an entrée into a new era of criminality, this time allied with the Mafia and the Hells Angels. He was like Teflon; that the charges did not stick made him more powerful and cocky, to the point that he invited this reporter to visit him at Mickey’s, as if he had nothing to hide.

“You’ll notice there are no drugs here,” he said. “I don’t like drugs.”

Julian Sher, who directed the Kings of Coke documentary and wrote three books on organized crime, said: “Here’s this onetime truck hijacker who is now so powerful that the leader of the Hells Angels, Maurice (Mom) Boucher, and the godfather of the Italian Mafia in Canada, Vito Rizzutto, are forced to deal with him because he controls the port they need for the massive amount of drugs they are bringing in.”

But then came Operation Springtime. Evidence presented after his arrest in 2001 showed he had become the main supplier of hashish and a key facilitator of cocaine shipments for the Nomads, an elite group within the Hells Angels.

Police surveillance showed that the bikers used “Boeuf” as a code name to identify Mr. Matticks’s account on their computer banking records because of his meat business. And in a sign of his close relationship to the Nomads leader, he even guaranteed the mortgage on Mr. Boucher’s estate in Contrecoeur, Que., 45 kilometres northeast of Montreal.

The next year, after prosecutors guaranteed he would not be extradited to the U.S., where he would face a much stiffer sentence, Mr. Matticks pleaded guilty to being a major drug supplier to the Hells Angels and was sentenced to 12 years.

At his parole hearing in 2009, he described his role at the port in even more detail: “I was the big guy in there. Without me, it wouldn’t have happened. I was the key man.”

Predeceased by his wife, Christina, in 2016, Mr. Matticks quietly spent his final years at his farm in La Prairie, south of Montreal, out of the public eye. He leaves his children and grandchildren.

It all started when…

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