Notorious West End gang leader dies in U.S. prison
Allan (The Weasel) Ross, one of the more notorious organized crime figures ever to emerge from Montreal, died of natural causes earlier this week while serving a life sentence in the United States.
An official with the Federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed to the Montreal Gazette that Ross died on Tuesday at a medical centre in North Carolina that is part of the American federal prison system. He was 74 years old and had suffered from serious health problems, including diabetes, for years.
Ross had been at the medical centre a long time while serving the life sentence he received following his 1992 conviction in a major cocaine-smuggling case. Ross continued trying to appeal the conviction that produced his sentence, which included no chance at parole.
He filed several documents in federal court last year while arguing recent amendments in American sentencing guidelines merited a reduction in his life sentence.
“His original guideline range was life and his newly calculated term is also life,” a U.S. District Court judge wrote in a brief decision filed in February last year informing Ross that the amendments did not apply to him.
Ross took over control of Montreal’s West End Gang in 1984 following the murder of Frank (Dunie) Ryan, who was killed on Nov. 13 that same year.
Ryan’s death set off a chain of events that were so violent many in Quebec still remember them to this day. Among them, a television packed with 30 pounds of explosives was delivered Nov. 25, 1984, to a Montreal apartment where Paul April, the hit man believed to have been behind Ryan’s murder, was staying.
The blast killed April and three other men and knocked a massive hole in the building on de Maisonneuve Blvd. W.
According to court documents filed in Ross’s case in the U.S., Ross ordered April’s death and paid for the hit by erasing huge cocaine debts that members of the nowdefunct Laval chapter of the Hells Angels owed to the West End Gang.
Those debts played a role in another notoriously violent event that came to be known as the Lennoxville Purge.
The gang invited five members of the Laval chapter to the Hells Angels bunker in Sherbrooke, in 1985, for what the victims were told would be a party. The five men were shot dead in an ambush. The Laval chapter’s debts to Ryan and the West End Gang created headaches for other Hells Angels who wanted to be taken seriously among Montreal’s organized crime circles.
Before Ryan was murdered, the West End Gang ’s involvement in drug trafficking mostly involved moving large quantities of marijuana and hashish.
As cocaine gained popularity in the 1980s, Ross and Ryan made plans to begin smuggling large shipments into Canada from Florida.
Ross drew the attention of police in the U.S. when he took control following Ryan’s death. Informants told police that by 1984, arrangements were made to have cars outfitted with secret compartments for delivering 15-kilogram packages of cocaine from Florida to Canada on a bi-weekly basis.
By 1986, the amounts being delivered to Ross and his partners increased to between 20 and 40 kilograms every two weeks. Police later learned the cocaine was being supplied by a Colombian cartel operating out of Florida.
The following year, Ross had grown so confident that his deals with the cartel expanded to include shipments of up to 200 kilograms sent to England and Holland.
When Ross was tried in Gainesville, Fla., in 1992, a jury heard evidence that he was involved in a 6,000-kilogram shipment of cocaine that went through the Port of Montreal.
The trial revealed how far Ross’s tentacles had extended internationally. After the prosecution closed its case, Michel Amyot, then a detective with the Montreal police, told the Montreal Gazette: “Nowhere will you find a case where law enforcement from so many places has got together with one common goal.”
Evidence presented during the trial in Florida came from the RCMP, Sûreté du Québec, FBI, U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, and police from the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal.
On May 15, 1992, the jury found Ross guilty of conspiring to import and traffic in at least 10,000 kilograms of cocaine and more than 300 tonnes of marijuana from 1975 to 1989.
He received the life sentence he was still serving 26 years later when he died. The following year, Ross was convicted in a different case, heard in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., of conspiring to traffic in cocaine and conspiracy to commit murder.
The judge in that case sentenced Ross to a 30-year prison term to be served after his life sentence. His lawyer later told the Montreal Gazette that Ross reacted to the sentence by saying: “They can ship (my) body to Florida to start the last 30 years.”
Ross’s criminal record in Montreal dated back to May 8, 1962, when he was convicted of car theft at the age of 18.
One of the first signs of his involvement in drug trafficking came in 1980 when he was sentenced to a 23-month prison term for the possession of a narcotic for the purposes of trafficking.
Nowhere will you find a case where law enforcement from so many places has got together with one common goal.