Free Jerry Langton Three-Book Bundle by Jerry Langton Page B

different, they contended, from the way all business was conducted in Montreal.
    But an alternative emerged. In the working-class neighborhood of Saint-Henri, nine of a French-speaking bartender’s ten sons began to throw their considerable weight around (the other lived his life as a government employee, and was never accused of any crime). The Dubois brothers — Raymond, Jean-Guy, Normand, Claude, René, Roland, Jean-Paul and the twins Maurice and Adrien — formed a cohesive group of toughs who eventually expanded their individual efforts into organized crime, rivaling the most powerful Mafia families in reach and scope.
    It started in the 1950s, when the four oldest brothers — Raymond, Jean-Guy, Normand and Claude — began leaning on local bar owners for protection money and other forms of extortion. They were very good at it, each individually acquiring a few bars by the end of the decade. But they were so good at it that they developed swelled heads. The Quebec Police Commission described them as “ruling like feudal lords.” All four were charged with the murder of a waiter who had the nerve to argue with them about their dinner bill, but a lack of evidence and suddenly reluctant witnesses led to their subsequent acquittals.
    After that, the Dubois brothers expanded their empire. They had a simple — actually, a crude — business plan, but it was truly effective. A Dubois brother and his cronies would start frequenting a bar. They’d show up every night. At first they’d be friendly. Then they’d start picking fights with other patrons, harassing the staff, vandalizing the establishment and assaulting the owner. It got progressively worse until the owner invariably gave in. Most of the time, they settled for $100 a week. That may not sound like much, but $100 in the early ’70s is more like $1,000 today, and each Dubois brother was collecting from literally dozens of bars.
    And they did more than that. After the Dubois brothers got their claws into a business, they forced the owner to hire gang members and associates. Of course, they would steal the establishment blind and work for the bar intermittently at best. And they would also operate loan-sharking, gambling, fencing and drug-trafficking businesses from the establishment while they were on the payroll.
    Their expansion wasn’t always easy. Early in their careers, the Dubois brothers recruited three old friends — Pierre, Jacques and André McSween — to work for them. The francophone Irish-Canadian brothers proved very effective, performing a number of burglaries, truck hijackings and stickups for the Dubois brothers.
    But the McSweens were nothing if not ambitious. By the early 1970s, they no longer worked for the Dubois. Instead, they had recruited their own gang and controlled an area bordering their old bosses’ territory. They took what they had learned from the Dubois brothers about extortion and loan-sharking and set up those businesses in their own territory. They even had a deal with the official scorekeeper for the Montreal Canadiens under which he would alter game statistics to ensure the McSweens would always collect on bets.
    As they got rich, both the McSweens and the Dubois brothers saw that the highest profits came from drug trafficking. And the best drug to traffic, they soon found out, was methamphetamine. It was cheap and easy to make and highly addictive. Once a user was hooked, he or she would give anything to get more.
    By 1973, the competition was too much for the Dubois brothers to tolerate. After a McSween dealer named Real Lepine insulted Adrien Dubois by refusing to sell his drugs, the Dubois brothers declared war on the McSweens. The resulting “West End War” left nine members of the McSween gang — including Jacques McSween — and five Dubois associates dead. With their brother dead, the surviving McSweens surrendered and quickly went back to work