CANADA, BIKERS ARRIVE

PART THREE: BIKERS ARRIVE
By GALEN EAGLE

This is the third in a series of exclusive articles by Examiner reporter Galen Eagle who interviews a local drug dealer who became an agent for the local police and brought down a circle of people in the Peterborough drug trade.
They didn't hijack the City Hall flag poll and hoist their trademark "death head" patch to announce their presence and most city residents were likely unaware they were even here.
But the arrival of the Hells Angels in Peterborough in the early 2000s drastically changed the local drug game, says Merv Monteith, 48, who was a local drug dealer and later a police agent.
A group of local dealers and suppliers who monopolized the sale of cocaine had been taken over, he said.
Monteith said he watched the courtship between members of his inner circle and the biker gangs with trepidation. While he says he hung around the Satan's Choice who were in Peterborough when he was 19 and was a striker for them until he was about 24, he says he was never made a full-patch member and those members kicked him out of their inner circle in the 1980s when he was a young man. But bikers were to play an important part of his life again in the new century.
It was local drug dealer Brian Burrett and Steven Deal, of Cavan, who opened the doors to the Hells Angels, he said.
(Deal, a 34-year-old who police had identified as a Hells Angels member, pleaded guilty in Lindsay Jan. 11, 2008 for attempting to hire an undercover police agent to murder a rival drug dealer and got 42 months in prison. He is now out of prison).
Burrett and Deal had a relationship with Toronto's Last Chance Motorcycle Club, which was absorbed by the Hells Angels in 2000, Monteith said.
Former Peterborough resident Sean Boshaw, who was a full patch member with the London Hells Angels chapter, came back to Peterborough and took control of the local drug trade, court records show.
"Once the Hells Angles are involved, it's like, this is our town. You are selling it for us. You are selling our product," Monteith said. "You don't work with them. You work for them."
Monteith likened the bikers arrival to a hostile corporate takeover. All of a sudden there were new bosses and new rules.
It wasn't the good ol' boys anymore," Monteith said. "It was more regimental. It was more like a business."
The violence associated with the drug trade escalated too, he said.
"When it was just you, you were a little more lenient with people who owed you money. You'd give them time, you'd work with them," Monteith explained.
"Once the bikers came in, if you owed them money, well, you didn't want to owe them money, let's put it that way."
Dealers like Monteith had to ramp up their collection methods to avoid owing the biker echelon money, he said.
"I wasn't taking a beating for somebody else," he said.
It didn't take long before the new biker presence attracted a new police presence.
"We had an idea that it was all happening. People were saying that they recognized cars following them," he said.
"You get different information that comes down that grapevine that there is different police around."
But for nearly a decade the dealers in Peterborough saw the local police as ineffective, so many had become complacent by mid-2000, Monteith said.
"Because of so many years of a free-run...they (the dealers) get to the point where they think they are invincible," he said. "They just become stupid, is the best word for it. They don't look over their shoulder. They talked on the phone without giving it a second thought. They got lazy."
And they paid for it.
On June 2, 2005, Project 4, a joint operation among city officers and the provincial Biker Enforcement Unit among others, unleashed 100 officers in armed takedowns, executed at dawn in Peterborough and other cities.
Boshaw, then 32, was arrested as the principal controller of the local drug trade while Burrett and Deal were named in court as two of his three lieutenants.
In addition, 25 others who police called Hells Angels associates, including Monteith, were arrested.
Boshaw pleaded guilty and got 4 1/2 years in prison. Burrett pleaded guilty and got two years and three months in prison. After lengthy delays, the federal Crown ended up staying Deal's drug charges in 2008 after he pleaded guilty to attempting to hire a hitman in an unrelated case.
Despite being charged with two counts of conspiracy to traffic in a controlled substance, Monteith's charges were stayed after about a year.
As the dust settled on Project 4, the local drug trade was in disarray, Monteith said.
"It basically broke everything up. Everything was out in the open. Nobody was untouchable anymore," he said. "People were named. It showed what was really going on behind the scenes."
Meanwhile, having spent his money on lawyer fees, Monteith says he hit skid row.
"The party was over. The biker presence was gone. It was tough going," he recalled.
During the year following Project 4, Monteith and his fellow dealers began seeing an old face in the body of the Simcoe St. courthouse.
Robert Pammett, then in his 50s, a former Peterborough bar owner and the owner of a McNamara Rd. home, began making his presence known again, Monteith said.
While Pammett had maintained ties in Peterborough throughout the years, but had mainly stuck to Welland, Ont. where he operated a hotel, Monteith said.
Another trend was beginning to take root at the time too, Monteith said.
Powder cocaine, a drug people could be addicted to while still functioning at some level, was no longer the drug of choice on Peterborough's streets.
Crack cocaine, which police said up until about 2001 had virtually no presence in the city, was about to change the market.
It took 10 minutes for an undercover city officer to find someone who would sell him crack cocaine on the streets of Peterborough in the fall of 2006.
City police laid 129 charges against 45 people in what was dubbed Project Crackdown.
Like any dynamic industry, the drug market responds to demand. When crack became the drug of choice, dealers responded, Monteith said.
Faced with a choice of purchasing a gram of powder for $100 or 0.2 grams of crack (more than enough to get one high) for $20, it was an easy decision for most drug addicts, Monteith said.
"That's why (dealers) converted to crack," he said. "Nobody wanted the powder anymore. You either give them what they want or you're out of business."
With no particular group having a monopoly over the local drug trade anymore, police prepared for the worst.
In March 2007, the city police criminal intelligence unit warned of a pending drug war between a Bandidos outlaw motorcycle club member and members of organized street gangs from the GTA.
By then, Monteith said Pammett and these Toronto drug dealers shared the drug trade locally.
Meanwhile, life was going poorly for Monteith. He claims he struggled with regret and shame for the life he had lived and wanted better things for his wife and daughter.
An idea was brewing in the back of his mind. Monteith's and Pammett's fate were about to intertwine.

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