Two witnesses Greenwood jury didn’t hear from
Police informants played significant roles related to firearm used in crime
A jury that began hearing evidence on Sept. 16 in a trial involving a double-murder carried out in NotreDame-de-Grâce will finally begin its deliberation on Friday morning.
The 12-person jury listened to final instructions from Quebec Superior Court Justice Sophie Bourque on Thursday before being sequestered. For several weeks they heard evidence alleging that Leslie Greenwood, 46, of Nova Scotia, was the getaway driver when Kirk (Cowboy) Murray and Antonio Onesi were fatally shot in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant on Jan. 24, 2010. The Crown’s main witnesses were brothers Robert and Timothy Simpson. Robert, 53, told the jury he killed both men for Jeffrey Albert Lynds, a Hells Angel based in Nova Scotia. Timothy, 50, testified he watched his brother’s back, armed with a shotgun, while the murders were carried out. Both brothers are serving life sentences for the slayings.
Despite the remarkable length of Greenwood’s trial, the jury never heard from two witnesses who played significant roles related to the firearm used in the crime.
Both men turned out to have been police informants, or tipsters, who later became contract informants for the RCMP. And both represented the bookends in how Robert Simpson, got his hands on the firearm used in the murders and how he got rid of it.
Following his arrest for the two murders, Simpson decided to become a collaborating witness for the prosecution and his brother followed suit. They would have testified against Lynds but the Hells Angel committed suicide while he was charged and detained in the same case. While testifying during the trial, Simpson said he sold the 9 mm handgun to a crack dealer who operated near Truro, N.S., and knew Lynds well.
What Simpson did not know was that, at the time, the crack dealer was feeding information to a police investigator. Sometime after he purchased the firearm — and realized its importance when Lynds and Simpson were arrested — the crack dealer provided information to an RCMP investigator that led to the gun being recovered, in a wooded area in East Mountain, a small town in Nova Scotia.
After the firearm was recovered, the crack dealer became a contract informant for the RCMP and helped them in a different investigation, in Nova Scotia, that was dubbed Operation Tango.
The Crown in the Greenwood trial planned to call the crack dealer as a witness to support Robert Simpson’s testimony. During the last weekend of October, the crack dealer was brought to Montreal and put up in a hotel to prepare him for testimony that was supposed to be heard on Oct. 28. But before the jury was called in on that day, prosecutor Richard Audet had a surprise announcement for Bourque. Audet announced the Crown was dropping the crack dealer as a witness because he insisted on being paid for his testimony or he might start forgetting things.
What Simpson was also unaware of, back when he was hanging around with Lynds in the months leading up to the double murder, was that the man who steered him toward the Taurus 9 mm pistol was also a drug dealer who was secretly feeding information to the police.
Louis (Le Gros) Vigeant was supposed to be one of Lynds’ sources for drugs while he tried to re-establish the Hells Angels presence in Nova Scotia, and in particular Halifax. The gang’s ability to control drug trafficking in Canadian cities east of Ontario had been dealt a serious blow by Operation SharQc, a Sûreté du Québec-led investigation that produced the arrests of almost every Hells Angel based in Quebec in March 2009.
SharQc somehow had a significant influence on the gang’s drug trafficking turf in Halifax. Lynds was supposed to fix that while using Simpson as his bodyguard. The plan was to enter bars in Halifax and inform the people running them the Hells Angels were back. Robert Simpson testified that Lynds told him to start carrying a firearm and to wear a bulletproof vest while they did their work. He said it was Vigeant, a Montrealbased drug trafficker, who advised Lynds to visit with Vigeant’s business partner, a Verdun drug dealer named Daniel (Dany) Ponton. Simpson said it was Ponton who supplied him with the gun that was later used to kill Murray and Onesi.
Lynds ended up owing Vigeant at least $40,000. The Hells Angel believed Vigeant’s complaints about the debt are what prompted a Hells Angels chapter based in Ontario to suspend Lynds from the gang and take away his patch. The Crown’s theory is that Murray was ordered, by Lynds, to kill Vigeant but the failed hit only injured him. What no one knew at the time, (outside of the RCMP) was that Vigeant had just agreed to become a contract informant for the Mounties in Project Cynique, a probe into three drug smuggling conspiracies.
When Lynds learned Vigeant had survived the shooting, he asked Robert Simpson to kill Murray because he feared Murray would either talk to the police or the Hells Angels about the hit the gang never authorized.