Meet Quebec’s ‘Negotiator’
Reporter Claude Poirier has brokered deals with criminals over long career
MONTREAL— After the dramatic helicopter breakout from a detention centre north of Montreal last week, one of the two escapees dialed a telephone number that many in Quebec’s criminal underworld know by heart.
Benjamin Hudon-Barbeau told legendary TVA crime reporter Claude Poirier of the deplorable conditions in an overcrowded facility and of what he believed were threats on his life.
Before long, anyone following the police search knew the 36-year-old who was locked up on gun charges would rather die than go back behind bars.
It was just another layer of emotion added to a dramatic manhunt for the escapee with suspected ties to the Hells Angels that had brought readers and viewers from around the globe.
But fewer would hear about the four or five other telephone conversations that Poirier, 74, and Hudon-Barbeau had over the six-hour ordeal, the most important of which was a call that the television host made at the behest of the police and may have contributed to the manhunt’s peaceful conclusion.
“I told him you are under no obligation to answer, but the police want to know if you’re still in the chalet and if you’re armed,” Poirier recounted in an interview. “He said, ‘I’m not armed and I’m not in the chalet.’ ”
IT IS A ROLE
Poirier has had countless times over his 53-year career, played out with a telephone glued to his ear and a cigarette between his lips.
Poirier’s entry into the grizzly world of crime reporting came in 1960 when he gave a bystander’s account of an armed robbery from a telephone booth in Montreal’s east end. His eyewitness report went live on the CJMS airwaves.
The next day ,he parlayed the news tip into a job that would make him a witness to history.
But it was in the 1970s that Poirier began to make his mark on Quebec journalism and set himself apart from the run-of-the-mill crime chroniclers.
THE LEGEND
began to take shape on June 11, 1973, during a 10-hour hostage crisis at Montreal’s Philippe Pinel In- stitute, a maximum-security psychiatric hospital. Inside, killer Normand Champagne, who believed himself to be Lawrence of Arabia, was armed with scissors and holding three employees against their will. He wanted his freedom and he wanted to see Poirier.
The radio reporter, then 34, exchanged himself for the hostages and he drove the madman away in the highly visible CJMS radio car. Police pounced and recaptured the psychopathic murderer.
The psychiatric hospital incident, for which Poirier was awarded the Governor General’s Medal of Bravery in 1977, was the first tile to fall in a row of cascading dominoes, said Montreal criminal defence lawyer Robert La Haye.
On more than 50 occasions in the ensuing years, Poirier has delivered ransoms, brokered for criminals surrendering to police and helped free kidnapping victims across the province. On a dozen of those cases, La Haye and Poirier have worked side by side.
Through the ’70s, Poirier’s name appears to have littered the newspaper archives as he delivered quotes and after-the-fact commentary on his ordeals for the benefit of his colleagues. A change in police policy, making authorities less likely to give in to captors’ demands in the ’80s, slashed the number of incidents. But Poirier’s reputation as “The Negotiator,” the name of his current daily TV call-in show on the TVA network, had already taken hold.
The calls continued to come in from biker bunkers, detention centres, psych wards and Mafia hangouts.
“When he does interviews with the criminal underworld, he is always respectful in the interview and in what he reports,” said La Haye. “He doesn’t twist their words. That doesn’t mean he is presenting them as angels, but he reports what he understands as the things that they want to say.”
Poirier has his own theories about why he has been so welcomed by the province’s most infamous outlaws.
“I don’t hang out in the police world. That’s the first thing. Secondly, I’m not an informant.”
POIRIER’S WORK
has not always been accepted by the authorities, said former Montreal police chief Jacques Duchesneau, who is now a provincial politician.
In the early ’90s, Poirier was effectively persona non grata at Montreal police headquarters because he had been seen by officers “talking to bad guys” and was deemed to have crossed the thin line that the crime reporter has walked over the course of his career. Duchesneau said he put an end to that unofficial ban when he became chief in 1994.
But the clucking started again in October 2000 when Poirier was one of two journalists called to witness the truce in a deadly biker war between the Hells Angels and Rock Machine.
“That’s the kind of thing that did not please police officers,” Duchesneau said. “It’s one thing to take care of people who are taken hostage, but it’s another thing to be there to plead for two biker gangs who have stopped a war. That’s not part of his job.”
STILL, THE TELEPHONE CALLS
keep coming into Poirier’s TV show’s tip line.
When Richard Bain wanted to talk last month after his arrest related to the deadly shooting at last September’s Parti Québécois victory party, he called Poirier’s phone-in television show.
Poirier showed respect, calling Bain “Monsieur,” but absolutely no indulgence for the accused man’s fanciful political plan to have Montreal separate from the province of Quebec. When after six minutes he couldn’t get Bain to discuss the facts of the alleged crime, Poirier cut the call off.
In November, Poirier was suddenly missing in action. He had been taken to hospital with an ailment that knocked him briefly into a coma and very nearly cost him his life.
When he returned to work in early January, Poirier announced he’d cut out smokes on the advice of his cardiologist.
“He’s a guy who rarely sleeps,” said La Haye of Poirier. “He’s able to chase the news all day long.”