Notorious former leader of Monreal's West End Gang dies a year after serving 18-year sentence

Raymond Desfossés, one of Quebec’s most notorious gangsters, has died, according to multiple media reports.

Once an influential leader in the West End Gang, Desfossés, 73, is reported to have died of natural causes at a palliative-care home in Trois-Rivières.

Last year, he completed an 18-year sentence for cocaine smuggling and hiring a professional hit man to kill six people between 1980 and 2001.

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That prison term came after Desfossés was arrested in September 2004 following a police investigation, dubbed Project Calvette, into his efforts to smuggle cocaine into Canada.

While Desfossés was serving a sentence for those crimes, professional hit man Gerald Gallant became a police informant, admitting to 28 homicides, and telling police who ordered those killings — including those directed by Desfossés.

Desfossés was initially charged with six counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder, but he was able to plead guilty to taking part in a general conspiracy to commit murder. On Feb. 20, 2014, his sentence for the conspiracy was combined with the sentence he was already serving and turned into an 18-year prison term.

Police officers from RCMP, left, Surete de Quebec, Ontario Provincial Police, Timmins Police and the SPVM stand behind a table loaded with money, drugs and weapons confiscated during 2004 raids that dismantled the drug-smuggling ring headed by Raymond Desfosses. — Officers from the RCMP, left, Sûreté de Québec, Ontario Provincial Police, Timmins police and the SPVM stand behind a table loaded with money, drugs and weapons confiscated during 2004 raids that dismantled the drug-smuggling ring headed by Raymond Desfossés. Photo by John Mahoney /Montreal Gazette file

According to the book Gallant: Confessions d’un tueur à gages, the two met in 1975 at the Cowansville Institution, a federal penitentiary in the Eastern Townships. Gallant would later tell police: “Mr. Raymond Desfossés really impressed me. He controlled drug trafficking inside the penitentiary. He was a real big crime boss.”

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During the lengthy investigation into Gallant’s killings, known as Project Baladeur, the hit man told provincial police Desfossés hired him to kill Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher in 2000. The plan was called off because Gallant sensed Boucher was under intense police surveillance following the attempted murder of Journal de Montréal crime reporter Michel Auger.

During Quebec’s biker war, which ran from 1994 to 2002, Desfossés sided with the Alliance, a group of criminal organizations who opposed the Hells Angels. Some of the homicides he paid Gallant for were linked to that conflict, most notably the July 7, 2000, slaying of Robert (Bob) Savard, a loan shark with close ties to the Hells Angels and Boucher.

“Listen, I didn’t walk to trouble. I ran to trouble,” Desfossés told a parole board hearing in 2018.

Desfossés spent much of the 1990s fighting extradition to the United States. In March 1992, he was arrested in Montreal after authorities in the U.S. requested his extradition on several charges, including the May 1985 killing of David Singer, an associate of the West End Gang who was killed in Florida. Desfossés challenged the extradition for years, but was eventually sent to the U.S. In May 1998, he entered a “no contest” plea to the murder charge and was sentenced to a 12-year prison term. His lawyer estimated Desfossés would be paroled within 14 months because of the time he spent behind bars fighting his extradition.

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It was the accidental killing of an innocent person in May 2001 that led to the police investigation that would eventually reveal Gallant’s killings and Desfossés ties to those murders. Gallant’s target was Claude Faber, a former associate of the West End Gang who owed Desfossés $250,000. The hit man claimed Desfossés supplied his accomplice with the wrong licence plate number while providing instructions for the hit, leading him to kill Yvon Daigneault, a bar manager, and wound another innocent person.

In 2017, Desfossés was paroled to a halfway house. Six months later, he challenged that restriction, asking the parole board to allow him to return home to Trois-Rivières, partially because he feared he’d be targeted for revenge.

“I am chained like a dog to a halfway house. So if someone wanted to kill me it is very easy for them to find me,” he told a January 2018 hearing at a federal penitentiary in Laval.

The request was granted, though Desfossés was ordered to wear a GPS bracelet that would allow the parole board to monitor his movements.

In May 2023, months before the end of his sentence, Desfossés was taken back into custody for an alleged parole violation, as part of an RCMP operation that involved series of raids targeting an alleged cocaine ring operating in the province.

The Correctional Service of Canada said Friday that Desfossés was no longer under their jurisdiction and declined to comment further.

During the 2018 hearing, a parole board member asked Desfossés what advice he would give to a young inmate serving a first sentence at a penitentiary.

“(Crime) is not a good choice for a life,” Desfossés said. “Violence brings nothing good. If you can negotiate something, do it. You don’t get medals for what I did.”

Paul Cherry of the Montreal Gazette contributed to this report

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