CANADA - Unlikely Hero: Animated documentary tells dark story of biker boss Maurice ‘Mom’ Boucher

OFF THE WIRE
Graeme Hamilton
 news.nationalpost.com

"Everything about them fascinated me," Danic Champoux recalls in his animated documentary Mom et Moi about growing up near a Hells Angels bunker.

MONTREAL — Maurice “Mom” Boucher was the ruthless leader of a criminal gang whose drive to control Quebec’s drug trade set off a deadly biker war. As a younger man, he was convicted of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl at gunpoint; now he is back in prison serving life sentences for the murders of two prison guards. In short, not your typical cartoon hero.
But in a new documentary drawing praise in Quebec, a filmmaker who grew up across the street from the Hells Angels main bunker offers a comic-book take on the biker boss.
In Mom and Me, Danic Champoux uses animation to portray a childhood spent idolizing his rowdy neighbours. Instead of cowboys and Indians, he played cops and Angels. When he had to give an oral presentation in school, he talked about growing up to be a full-patch biker. The glow eventually wore off, but his story helps explain the grip the once mighty gang held on the public imagination.
“It’s funny, because there is part of me that has remained a child and who still sees them as knights perched on their motorcycles gleaming in the sun,” Mr. Champoux, 35, recalled in an interview this week. “There is something that I still find beautiful, that I find romantic in that.

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Boucher outside the funeral of a friend in 2000.

“At the same time, with what we know today, we cannot be happy to see Hells Angels out of prison. It was proven beyond a reasonable doubt on numerous occasions that murders were committed, and in the name of what? In the name of the import and export of drugs.”
He said he chose animation to recreate the child-like wonder with which he watched the bikers from his home in Sorel, northeast of Montreal.
“I used to spend hours watching them,” Mr. Champoux, says through a narrator in the film. “I was able to tell which bikers were arriving just by the sound of their bikes. Everything about them fascinated me: their dogs, their swimming pool, the kids, their weapons, their mullets … It was like I was watching television, and the Hells Angels were my favourite show.”
He was 11 when he first met Boucher at a fair in Sorel, and he would become friends with Boucher’s son, Francis, who was his age. “I immediately started looking at Maurice Boucher the way a young guy in a Western looks at Billy the Kid,” he says in the film. “My sole ambition was to be just like him.”
The film blends interviews with biker experts and Sorel residents with the cartoon depictions. And as it progresses, there is no denying just how perverse the worship of the bikers is. Former Sûreté du Québec investigator Guy Ouellette rhymes off the toll of the war between the Hells Angels and rival biker gangs: 165 killings, including nine innocent victims, 181 attempted murders, nine men still missing and presumed dead.
Mr. Champoux’s plan to become a full-patch Hells Angel by age 18 stalled; he never made it farther than dealing drugs for one of the gang’s so-called puppet clubs. Spurred by the concern of his grandmother, he managed to break away from the lifestyle and was turned on to filmmaking after winning a contest to make a documentary.
His Sorel friends were less fortunate. In the film, Mr. Champoux’s mother describes how he is the only one of the eight kids who used to hang around together still living. The others died from suicide, overdoses or murder.

Handout

A scene from the animation Mom et Moi depicts a crazed-looking young Maurice Boucher during a hold-up.

Still, Mr. Champoux’s fascination with Boucher was hard to shake. When the biker’s first trial in the prison-guard murders ended in an acquittal in 1998, he “jumped for joy,” and he was not alone. Boucher “was a star of the streets,” crime reporter Michel Auger says in the film. “Some people saw his acquittal as a victory for the little guy.”
By the time a new trial was ordered and Boucher was convicted in 2002, Mr. Champoux had seen enough. “Everything I used to admire had turned dark,” he said in the interview. “I needed to cleanse myself.”
He sees the film as part of that ongoing cleansing. Mr. Ouellette, who is now a Liberal Member of the National Assembly, thinks it could have a broader impact by bringing aspiring gang members to their senses.
“It’s not a film to glorify Maurice Boucher,” Mr. Ouellette said in an interview. “What it shows is the daily life of young people in poorer neighbourhoods who think this could be the life for them but realize along the way that it’s very artificial.”
Mr. Champoux also sees his story as cautionary. “I would hope a teenager who sees it will want to stay quiet at home,” he said. “Forget about the big muscles and gang patches.”
National Post
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— The original French version of the film Mom et Moi will be shown Dec. 7 at a documentary festival in Quebec City. A version with English subtitles exists, but so far no dates have been set for its screening.