Criminal gangs have a long history in Montreal
The Hells Angels and similar gangs are in the news from time to time. Yet criminal gangs are not a recent arrival in Montreal, even if the depredations of modern ones are carried out on an unprecedented scale.
We’ve had gangs at least since the early 19th century, and probably before. In 1824, for example, Montreal’s most notorious gang was run by a desperate character named Joseph Bellerose. One day a man was out walking in the countryside west of the city and came upon a cave. Inside were Bellerose and his men, cleaning some of their loot. The man ran back and informed the authorities.
Bellerose’s crew was a fearsome bunch, and the unarmed and mostly elderly men of the Watch, Montreal’s peacekeepers before the city had a proper police force, wanted nothing to do with them. A detachment of soldiers from the local garrison had to be called out, and so the gang was captured. Bellerose was hanged for burglary on Sept. 29.
Some two decades later, on William Street in Griffintown, a gang set upon prominent druggist Benjamin Lyman and a warehouse owner named Michael Babcock as they returned home from a church meeting. Though he was struck a few times, Lyman managed to escape, but Babcock, according to a witness, “was nearly murdered.”
In the 1870s, Montreal’s waterfront was home to several criminal crews, among them the Jurors Street gang, the Joyce gang and the Deroy gang, but the most notorious was the Black Horse gang. Members specialized in accosting pedestrians and shaking them down for money, “and when the money was not forthcoming,” one newspaper reported, “and sometimes when it is, they ill-treat the victims who have unfortunately fallen into their hands.”
Late in May 1875, half a dozen Black Horse toughs set upon a man variously known as Francis Gabriel and Gabriel Wren; there is even a suggestion he was a member of the gang himself. It was near the intersection, now long gone, of St-Timothée and de la Commune streets. Wren was badly beaten and died from his injuries.
Witnesses at the inquest were no help. One was “too much under the influence” to remember what happened. A man living opposite where the beating took place “generally answered in monosyllables,” claiming he “heard no disturbance.” A woman standing nearby “professed entire ignorance on the subject.”
No one should have been surprised. The gang ’s members were notorious for intimidating potential witnesses into silence.
Their malign influence extended to the coroner’s jury examining Wren’s death. Jury members blithely accepted the gang members’ testimony that Wren had died after playfully running along de la Commune; he tripped, they said, and fatally struck his head against an exposed timber. No charges were brought against them.
Yet it didn’t always go the Black Horse gang’s way. In October 1876, Joe Beef threw four members out of his well known tavern for rowdiness. When one of them had the cheek to try suing Beef for injuries he’d supposedly received, he got nowhere.
And in July 1877, Black Horse members began harassing a volunteer soldier named Frank Fitzpatrick. Just 18 years old, he was on guard duty in front of the army barracks a little to the east of the Champ de Mars. Curses were thrown at him, then stones.
As it happened, one of the gang members, John McKeown, was an older brother of two of Gabriel Wren’s attackers two years before. McKeown tried to grab Fitzpatrick’s rifle. The soldier resisted, and in their struggle McKeown was “progged” — that is, bayonetted. He staggered off toward the harbour, fell to the ground and died some 10 minutes later.
Like Wren’s killers, the soldier did not face charges. Unlike them, it was not through a dubious application of justice but rather because “Fitzpatrick only did his duty.”