In the violent underworld of 1980s Montreal, a swift and brutal act of vengeance culminated in the death of Paul April on November 24, 1984. His demise was not a simple shooting but a calculated bombing that instantly killed him and three other men, shaking a de Maisonneuve Boulevard West apartment building to its core. The explosion was the final, bloody punctuation mark on a brief but brazen power grab that began only days earlier.
Paul April, a man with a history of loan sharking and
a prison record for a bank heist, had made himself the city's most wanted man in criminal circles. On November 13, 1984, April and his associate, Robert Lelièvre, lured the powerful leader of the West End Gang, Frank "Dunie" Ryan, to a room at Nittolo's Motel. Their plan was to erase a significant debt owed to Ryan by killing him. After the murder, April reportedly boasted that he had killed the king and was now the new king, a claim that sealed his fate.
Ryan's successor, Allan "The Weasel" Ross, wasted no time in seeking retribution. He allegedly offered a $200,000 contract to one of the most feared men in Canada, Yves "Apache" Trudeau, a prolific hitman for the Hells Angels motorcycle club. Trudeau, known as "The Mad Bomber," had a particular expertise with explosives, a skill he had honed working at an explosives plant in his youth. He was the first Canadian member of the Hells Angels to earn the "Filthy Few" patch, an award for those who had killed for the club.
The revenge plot was both deceptive and devastating. On November 24, just eleven days after Ryan's murder, Trudeau's associate Michel Blass arrived at the ninth-floor apartment where April was hiding out. He delivered a television set and a VCR, promising it contained a VHS tape about bikers. Inside the television, however, Trudeau had packed a powerful bomb. At approximately 4:10 a.m., the device was detonated, tearing through the apartment. The massive blast killed Paul April, who was 42, Robert Lelièvre, 63, and two other men, Gilles Paquette, 27, and Louis Charles, 54. The explosion also injured eight other people in the building. Initially, police suspected the men had died while constructing their own bomb, a theory that was later corrected by an informant.
The man behind the bombing, Yves Trudeau, was one of Canada's most prolific serial killers, responsible for at least 43 proven murders between 1973 and 1985 using methods that included shootings, beatings, strangulation, and bombings. His reign of terror, however, came to an end not long after April's murder. Fearing for his own life after a bloody internal purge within the Hells Angels known as the Lennoxville Massacre, Trudeau became the first full-patch member to turn police informant in August 1985.
In exchange for his testimony, which implicated dozens of individuals and helped solve numerous murders, Trudeau struck a deal with the Crown. He pleaded guilty to 43 counts of manslaughter and received a life sentence, but with parole eligibility after only seven years. He was eventually released, given a new identity, and lived quietly until 2004, when he was arrested and convicted on sexual assault charges involving a minor, for which he received a four-year sentence. Trudeau died of cancer in a medical facility in 2008. The man who ordered the hit on Paul April, Allan Ross, was never convicted for the bombing but was later sentenced to life in a Florida prison for drug smuggling and died in U.S. custody in 2018.
