MISCONDUCT ACCUSATIONS HIT CANADIAN POLICE ON TWO FRONTS

Hit Man Says Police Ignored Drug Killing

MONTREAL -- Quebec provincial police knowingly looked the other way as a drug trafficker was murdered in a settling of accounts, the killer alleges.

In a taped statement from behind bars, former Hells Angels hit man Serge Quesnel made the claim as part of a campaign by former and current informants to get better treatment from the authorities.

The tape was played yesterday at a news conference held by seven former informants wearing masks and sunglasses.  The seven helped police infiltrate organized crime or testified against gang members.

Gathered in a hotel room, they asked that their voices be altered if broadcast and they used pseudonyms even though some reporters knew their identities.

They are part of a formal group of informants, l'Association des temoins speciaux du Quebec, and their complaints range from failure to provide them with new identities to arm-twisting them into making false statements.

The most sensational allegation was Mr.  Quesnel's assertion that the police could have stopped the murder of a drug trafficker in Quebec City in 1995.

While Mr.  Quesnel's credibility has been challenged in court, his allegation fits the common belief that in the early days of Quebec's murderous biker war in the mid-1990s, police were willing to turn a blind eye and to let members of the underworld kill each other.

Asked about Mr.  Quesnel's claim and about the other complaints, Sergeant Richard Bourdon of the Surete du Quebec, the provincial police, said the government has recently set up a special squad of internal-affairs investigators to check the allegations.

Members of the informants association say they want a full-fledged public inquiry because they do not trust police.  They said the lack of help from authorities left them living fearful, secretive existences after they had testified against their former criminal friends.

"We have no life.  We stay home with the windows and the blinds closed, in a city where we know no one," said a woman who would identify herself only as Josee.

She said she had had to relocate after her spouse did undercover work against the Bandidos bikers.

Andrew, an informant who testified against the Rock Machine gang, said the only help he got from his police handlers about changing his identity was a suggestion that he cut his hair and change its colour.

They told him to use a fake name to sign a lease and to get a phone, without providing him with a new identity.  "I was convicted of [impersonation] and now that I've been out for two weeks they wanted me to do that? What kind of a joke was that?"

Past court records show that Mr.  Quesnel got a contract from the Hells Angels in March of 1995 to assassinate an independent drug trafficker named Richard Delcourt.

In his taped statement yesterday, Mr.  Quesnel said he told an accomplice, Michel Caron, he would call for help in the killing, with a pre-arranged signal on his pager.

It was only later, he said on tape, that he learned that Mr.  Caron was already an informant and that, at the time he received the call, he was in the company of two SQ investigators.

"They could have stopped the murder," Mr.  Quesnel said on the tape.  "There are other things I could tell," he added.

Mr.  Quesnel, who admitted to killing five people and plotting the murders of 13 others, is one of the more controversial informants.

In 1995, he signed an informant deal giving him $390,000 over the 15-year life of the contract.

However, his usefulness as a trial witness has been limited and he has failed to help convict several bikers against whom he testified.