Chapter 16
The MacAllister Family
The three Irish MacAllister brothers, George, William (Billy) and Peter, grew up during the 1940s in Lachute, Quebec, and the Montreal North area of Ville St. Laurent, in what was described by a 2005 National Parole Board assessment report on Billy as “a dysfunctional family” in which their “father was an alcoholic and abusive.” All three boys went on to become criminals, robbing banks and armored trucks, or importing and trafficking in illicit drugs.
George, the oldest, was first busted at the age of twenty-two in 1960 for passing $444 worth of bad cheques in Ottawa and Cornwall, Ontario, and spent a year in the Ontario Reformatory. He was next charged with holding up the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Branch on Montreal's Victoria's Square in May 1963, but was acquitted on the basis of insufficient evidence. The following year he was arrested again, this time for being part of a gang that included his younger brother Billy and had robbed $73,500 from the same bank three months later. George pleaded guilty and confessed to having received $12,000 as his share of the loot. He served three years in prison. After his release, he was arrested again, this time in connection with a $115,000 fraud. He got another seven years.
At 2:10 p.m. on September 12, 1973, George, Billy and three other West End Gang members, Richard White, twenty-eight, William “Willie” Lyndon, twenty-seven, and Donald “the Duck” McMillan, ambushed a Brink's armored truck while it was making a delivery to a Bank of Montreal branch at 5355 Côte de Liesse Road. During a sidewalk shootout, a Brink's guard, Claude Vienneau, was killed and another guard, Robert Brunette was injured. The desperados escaped with $276,000 in a stolen getaway car, but were arrested separately within days and sent to trial.
George MacAllister, who admitted to having received $40,000 from McMillan for his share in the robbery, insisted that his brother Billy was not present during the heist. In fact, at Billy's trial on November 22, 1974, he was a defense witness for his sibling. Knowing that his testimony could not be used against him, George boasted, “I'm a professional gunman; I make my living with a gun and I'm one of the best.” He added, “I'm tired of all this talk about the MacAllisters. I'm the only MacAllister [criminal].” It was a noble brotherly gesture, but the jury didn't buy it. As for the shooting of the Brink's guard, it was never determined which of the bandits had fired the fatal bullet. During his testimony, George even oddly suggested that the victim was at fault. “We thought he would use his head as anyone else and not go out with his shotgun and open up on us,” he stated. Eventually, all five were found guilty as accomplices in the holdup and death of Vienneau and received lengthy prison sentences. George, now a free man at the age of seventy-two, lives in Hawksdury, Ontario.
Peter J. MacAllister, the youngest and shrewdest of the three boys, managed to avoid arrest until November 16, 1994, even though he'd previously been hauled in for questioning by police with respect to his brothers' activities.
On October 13, 1994, a Port of Montreal Canada Customs official who was spot-checking recently offloaded containers happened across one with ceramic tiles originating from Uden, Holland. Upon closer inspection he discovered that among the 509 cartons of tiles, 34 of them were crammed with 202 kilos of hashish, with an approximate street value of $3 million. The RCMP was alerted and they maintained a 24-hour watch on the container until its contents were picked up by a truck three days later and delivered to the warehouse of Céramique Daniel Thériault, a ceramics tile supplier owned by a forty-four-year-old man of the same name in Montreal's southwest Ville Lasalle district.
The Mounties then surreptitiously tailed Thériault as he distributed some of the boxes of “tiles” to the home of his girlfriend Danièle Berniquez in Saint Placide, near Lake of Two Mountains west of Montreal, to sixty-six-year-old James McArthur in a Ville Lasalle shopping mall parking lot, and indirectly to forty-eight-year-old Peter MacAllister in Piedmont, north of the city. The cops then pounced, arresting all four on charges of conspiracy to import and distribute drugs. Following several trials and appeals, they were found guilty in December 1998, and were later sentenced to between four and seven years in prison.
During the search of MacAllister's home, the Mounties turned up $12,000 in cash, a hashish-processing tool, a weighing and packaging machine, and a bulletproof vest. Peter was clearly a major importer and distributer, and the cops were certain he'd gotten away with more deliveries prior to that. But, unlike his brothers, he had only this one conviction against him, and following his release from prison he wisely quit the drug game. Now, at the age of sixty-four, Peter spends most of his time with his children and grandchildren in Montreal and Bermuda.
In 2002, Peter MacAllister published a semi-autobiographical novel entitled Dexter, replete with thinly disguised references to many West End Gang members. It's actually quite a good read, and in some ways a morality tale. In a July 10, 2005, Montreal Mirror newspaper interview following the book's publication, MacAllister said of his time in prison, “I met young people [who] would come up to me and say, ‘You've been successful. How do you get away with it? We can't seem to get away with it.’ I thought, ‘My God, they don't know what they're doing; they don't know the world they're in.’ That's what inspired me to write the book . . . There's a mythology I want to break for young people attracted to the drug world. Today's drug game is a pure cutthroat capitalistic pursuit. Twenty years ago it was an adventure. Today it's a very harrowing world to live in.”
And then there is Billy MacAllister, a man who has spent more than half of his sixty-eight years in and out of jail and halfway houses for crimes that in quantity and quality far exceeded those of his siblings. His revolving-door prison history is unmatched by any other West End Gang member.
His rap sheet begins at the age of twenty-one, with a car theft and attempted bank robbery conviction in 1963, for which he served less than a year. Then, as previously mentioned, he was arrested while accompanying Dunie Ryan and two others in August 1966 to rob the Essex County Bank and Trust Company in Lynn, Massachusetts. Three years later, after serving only a fifth of his 15-year sentence, he was deported back to Canada. He was next arrested with two other men in 1970 for attempting to enter the United States by car in possession of guns, ammunition and balaclavas—all the accoutrements of a planned bank robbery. For that he served 30 months in the United States and was again sent back to Canada in 1973.
No sooner was Billy home than he pulled off the September 1973 Brink's truck robbery with his brother George and three others, during which a guard was killed. On December 6, 1974, he was given two concurrent life sentences, but was paroled on February 2, 1981. His parole was revoked several times over the next few years when he breached its conditions. In November 1986, while again on parole, MacAllister was busted along with seven others in London, Ontario, for attempting to import 100 kilos of cocaine from Venezuela, and on July 15, 1987, an Ontario court sentenced him to 15 years. He managed to escape from a London provincial holding pen that September but was soon after tracked down by the RCMP in Montreal. When arrested, he was in possession of cocaine and an Ingram machine pistol and silencer, as well as a loaded .357 Magnum handgun and several hand grenades.
He was sent to the federal maximum-security Millhaven Penitentiary in Bath, Ontario, to serve another 30 months on top of his 15-year sentence as a result of his escape and possession of weapons. But, much to the consternation of the RCMP and the prosecuting attorneys, the career criminal was once again let out on parole in July 1992.
By this time MacAllister was fifty years old, and had spent 22 of those years in various U.S. and Canadian prisons. Yet he would have more crime and prison time ahead of him.1
Once out of prison in 1992, MacAllister wasted little time in getting back into the game. But this time he was aiming for what he intended to be his most lucrative score ever, one that could involve the importation of up to 5,000 kilos of pure Colombian cocaine into Montreal via Florida. “In those days,” says Guy Quintal, now a retired member of the RCMP drug squad, “cocaine was going for $35,000 a kilo,” once it was cut and on the street. So the proposed shipment could eventually be worth as much $1.75 billion.
MacAllister's partners in the scheme were Paul Larue, Salvatore Cazzetta, Nelson Fernandez, Ashley Castaneda and Michael Dibben, all experienced drug importers or distributors.
Paul Larue began his criminal career dealing in small quantities of marijuana, hashish and cocaine during the 1970s while working as a bartender and waiter in several St. Denis Street bistros, and then escalated to selling coke by the kilo in the 1980s. His early convictions between 1974 and 1980 included drunk driving, possession of drugs with intent to sell, robbery and breaking probation conditions, for which he received only fines, weekends in jail or further probation. He later became a Billy MacAllister associate and one of his major cocaine contacts.
Salvatore Cazzetta was an original member of the Montreal-based SS motorcycle gang in the early 1970s. During the 1970s and early 1980s he'd been a petty criminal along with his younger brother Giovanni but received only minor sentences for robbery and possession of stolen goods. In 1986, he became a founding member of the Rock Machine motorcycle gang, which eventually led to the 1994–2002 drug turf war between them and the Hells Angels. He was incarcerated, for a few months each time, in 1985, 1986 and 1988 for possession of a handgun and narcotics. In March 1992, he fell in with MacAllister.
Nelson Fernandez, another Rock Machine member, was Cazzetta's right-hand man. In early 1992 he was arrested but later acquitted on charges of threatening to kill two Montreal police officers. He too joined MacAllister later that year.
Ashley Castaneda, a Montreal resident of Colombian origin, and Michael Dibben were also MacAllister associates. MacAllister and his five cohorts had been busy since the summer of 1992 working out the logistics of what, if successful, could amount to the largest Colombian cocaine shipment ever into Canada.
However, they weren't the only ones in a planning mode. Unbeknownst to them, an integrated police task force known as Project Choc was also quietly doing its own investigating and planning. A major sting operation was carefully being crafted, one that would definitely come as a shock to the conspirators. The members of the task force included Montreal police narcotics detectives Kevin McGarr and John Westlake, plus Guy Quintal and Mike Lang of the RCMP drug squad. They later coordinated their investigation with members of the Drug Enforcement Administration in Jacksonville and Gainesville, Florida, particularly with agents Ed Dickey and John Burns. The latter went undercover for nine months, posing as a major drug supplier in order to infiltrate the gang. Throughout this time the cops were busy tapping into telephone conversations between the principals in Montreal and Florida, as well as, via Burns, surreptitiously recording their clandestine meetings. The bait was in place, the mice were eager to nibble and the trap was about to be sprung.
As would later be revealed in court, the face-to-face transactions began in July 1992 when Paul Larue and Burns, posing as a drug-delivery middleman, met at a hotel in upstate New York. Larue gave Burns $220,000 in seed money to transport Colombian cocaine by road from Florida to Montreal. They met again three months later at a bar inside Montreal's Dorval International Airport terminal, this time with MacAllister. Burns and Ed Dickey, another DEA undercover agent, showed them 67 kilos of coke that they said had been hidden in a car that had been driven up from Florida. They were promised that a good deal more could be on its way, as much as 5,000 kilos, in lots of about 1,000 kilos each over the next three months. But Burns insisted that he first needed to show his people some cash up front. MacAllister, convinced that Burns was the real deal, then set about arranging the financing. Within two months he had raised $875,000 U.S., mostly from the Rock Machine and other Montreal biker gangs, for the first installment in the proposed mega-kilo and megabucks transaction.
In January 1993, Larue contacted Burns in Florida and told him they had the money for the first delivery, but they first wanted to check out the quality of the cocaine. “No problem,” said Burns. On March 10, 1993, Larue sent twenty-seven-year-old Ashley Castaneda, a man with a nose for coke, to Jacksonville, where he was taken aboard a yacht being used by the DEA, in order to sample the product. He reported back to the others in Montreal that it was top-grade blow. The deal was on.
On Friday, March 19, Salvatore Cazzetta, thirty-eight years old, and Nelson Fernandez arrived in Florida with a $660,000 payment, which they delivered to Burns in a Jacksonville motel room. The agreed-upon plan was for Burns to drive up to Burlington, Vermont, and deliver the first 1,000 kilos by truck to Paul Larue and Ashley Castaneda at a Denny's restaurant on Shelburne Road in South Burlington in two days' time. It would then be up to them to get it across the U.S.–Canada border and into Montreal.
And that's when the trap snapped!
Early Sunday morning on March 21, Kevin McGarr of the Montreal police and RCMP officers arrested a very surprised Billy MacAllister at his Mont Rolland chalet in the Laurentian Mountains north of the city. He was named in a Florida indictment, charged with conspiring to import 5,000 kilos of cocaine into Canada. Extradition proceedings were immediately begun.
Simultaneously, John Burns and other DEA agents, accompanied by John Westlake of the Montreal police and Guy Quintal of the RCMP, arrested thirty-nine-year-old Paul Larue and Ashley Castaneda at Denny's restaurant on the same charge while the supposed drug transaction was under way.
Kevin McGarr, 2008
“People were coming out of church from across the street and into the restaurant,” recalls Westlake, noting that it was a very public bust, with Larue “totally taken by surprise that Burns was a double agent.” Indeed, Larue could not believe what was happening as he and Castaneda were handcuffed and read their rights by Burns. The DEA officers also stripped him of his $50,000 mink coat and a $35,000 jewel-encrusted Rolex watch, informing him that these had been purchased with the proceeds of crime and they were now the property of the U.S. Government.
“Larue was in total shock,” recalls Quintal. “His English was not very good, so John and I told him in French that he was under arrest, and what for. He was in tears about his fur coat and watch, saying that they were presents from his wife. So I told him that they no longer belonged to him.”
The two culprits were immediately flown down to Jacksonville by the DEA officers, where they were formally booked and committed to trial.
During the same sting operation, thirty-eight-year-old Michael Dibben had contacted Burns from Montreal to place an order for 200 kilos of the supposedly available tons of coke. Dibben sent two associates, Francesco Rubbo, thirty-seven, and Sebastiano Di Maria, forty-six, to deliver $282,000 of up-front money and bring back the shipment. No sooner had Rubbo and Di Maria arrived in Jacksonville and handed over the cash than the DEA agents promptly handcuffed them and transported them to the local jail.
Fernandez and Dibben were shortly after arrested in Montreal and sent to face trial in Florida. Almost all the conspirators were now behind bars. And most, like MacAllister, who was being held at the Parthenais Detention Centre, faced extradition to a Florida court where they knew sentences were much harsher than under the Canadian judicial system.
The Choc sting, which had been more than nine months in the making, dealt a major blow to the West End Gang. It was an operation that could not have been pulled off in Canada, since it involved entrapment and the sale of drugs by law enforcement officers to criminals. “To get them ourselves we would have needed to flash some dope,” says Quintal, “and that would have been illegal,” in Canada. But not so in the United States. The RCMP and Montreal police acknowledge that without the DEA and the entrapment rules that apply in the United States, MacAllister and his cronies would never have been busted.
In 1994, Westlake, McGarr and Quintal were given the International Award of Honor by the American Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association, crediting them with “outstanding performance in Project Choc, a drug investigation into the West End Gang, an organized crime group based in Montreal, Canada.” Those arrested were all facing serious jail time before the U.S. court in trials that would take place over six years in a Jacksonville courthouse.
In May of 1993, Larue pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to import 5,000 kilos of cocaine into Montreal via Florida. It was later revealed that in order to reduce his sentence, he'd become a police informant and testified against the others. His handler was RCMP drug squad officer Daniel Chartrand. Despite his cooperation, Larue was given seventeen-and-a-half years in prison, and all his expensive toys were taken away. Under the Canadian government's Bill C-61 (concerning money obtained through criminal activity), his $400,000 condo in the Tropique Nord complex in Cité du Havre across from the Port of Montreal, his $1 million chalet on Lake St. François in Saint-Anicet near Valleyfield, Quebec, and his $3 million estate in Moulton Hill in the Eastern Townships were confiscated as properties that had been acquired through the proceeds of crime. This was on top of the mink coat and Rolex watch the DEA had seized at the time of his arrest in Vermont.
Salvatore Cazzetta remained on the lam for a year until he was arrested on May 6, 1994, at a pit bull farm near Niagara Falls, Ontario, where he owned two fighting dogs and was still head of the Rock Machine motorcycle gang. He was transported to Montreal, where he resisted being extradited to the United States. But he lost, despite several appeals that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. On March 20, 1998, he was removed from his cell in Quebec's Donnacona Prison and sent in irons to face trial in Florida, where in June 1999 he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and was sentenced to twelve-and-a-half years in prison.
Nelson Fernandez successfully fought his extradition and remained incarcerated on drug charges in Canada. While in prison at Rivières des Prairies in December 2000, he defected from the Rock Machine to the Hells Angels Nomads chapter. But a few months later, at the age of forty-three, he died of cancer while still in jail.
Ashley Castaneda was extradited to Jacksonville in July 1994, to stand trial in the drug caper. He was found guilty and served a seven-year sentence.
A young Billy MacAllister
Michael Dibben, who was arrested in Montreal by Kevin McGarr on April 27, 1993, was extradited to Florida to face charges in connection with the crime. He too was declared guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison.
Minor players such as Francesco Rubbo and Sebastiano Di Maria received light sentences. On June 11, 1993, Billy MacAllister, the kingpin in the planned major score, was ordered to be extradited to the United States to face charges in the drug-import plot. He unsuccessfully fought his extradition through the Canadian justice system. In July 1994 he was taken from his cell in the Donnacona Penitentiary by Montreal detectives Kevin McGarr and Eddie Gravely and turned over to two U.S. marshals, who accompanied him on a DEA private jet to Jacksonville.
His lengthy trial began on July 14, 1994, with over a dozen witnesses from Montreal and Florida, mostly peace officers, testifying against him. On April 19, 1995, he was found guilty and sentenced to 19 years and 7 months by a Jacksonville federal court for his role in the conspiracy. While in a U.S. federal prison for seven years MacAllister continued to fight the verdict in the U.S. Court of Appeals, but lost on November 16, 1998. In January 2002 he was brought back to Canada to serve out the rest of his sentence.
On November 9, 2006, while incarcerated in Laval's minimum-security Montée St-François Institution, MacAllister was granted his first “Unescorted Temporary Absence” from prison, which was renewed several times more, each for a period of a month or two. On April 10, 2007, he gained day parole to live in a halfway house for six months, and on March 20, 2008, he eventually got full parole after having served a total of 14 years for his drug-related crimes. That year he married Martine St-Pierre, a French Canadian woman who loyally stood by his side during future parole board hearings.
But on March 27, 2009, his parole was revoked and he was sent back to prison for having violated various conditions, such as being in contact with known criminal elements during the summer and fall of 2008.
In its summation of that hearing, the National Parole Board stated: “At age sixty-six you are serving, since 1974, a life sentence for attempted murder, armed robbery, theft, attempted prison breach and conspiracy to import narcotics. Your criminal career spans over four decades and your offences are large in scale, requiring a high level of organization. [With] accomplices, you participated in bank robberies . . . holding up armored vans and carrying out drug transactions. A guard was killed, some victims were threatened with firearms and police officers were injured. Numerous firearms, including loaded guns, were involved, and you had various ties to the criminal underworld.” The report noted that from the time of his March 2008 parole, MacAllister had “elected to associate with individuals, at least five or six times, that were interested in similar criminal activities as the ones for which you were convicted in the past.” It concluded that due to “the extreme gravity of your crimes [and] your very poor history . . . you present an undue risk on release, and there is no less restrictive measure than a revocation of your full parole.”2
MacAllister's next hearing was on April 14, 2010, at the Montée St-François Institution. He was denied full parole, but was given a six-month pre-release day parole. On October 20 it was extended for another six months, to be spent in a halfway house and with many conditions attached, such as not hanging out with any past or present bad guys. His notice from the parole board states: “It is forbidden for you to associate, communicate in any way, for any reasons with anyone who has a criminal record or is involved in the drug subculture and organized crime.” Given Billy's background, that definitely limits his circle of friends.
On December 22, 2010, MacAllister was finally granted full parole, again with the above stringent conditions. At his latest hearing, the parole board took into consideration that MacAllister was moving with his wife Martine to a town east of Quebec City, and thus well distanced from the Montreal criminal milieu. “However,” warns the board's report, “William MacAllister will be on parole and accountable for his behavior for the remainder of his life.”
During an extension of Project Choc, Montreal police narcotics investigator John Westlake chalked up the final bust of his career with the arrest of Glen Cameron, a major West End Gang importer of hashish and cocaine into Canada. A tip from the DEA alerted the local cops to Cameron's activities, and the Montreal drug squad, together with the RCMP, began surveillance on him. Cameron, who owned several homes in the Montreal area, as well as a hobby farm in Green Valley, Ontario, just west of the Quebec border, proved to be as elusive as Westlake was persistent. The surveillance even involved a wild car chase which had the bad guy pursuing the good guys.
John Westlake, 1988
Westlake recalls one August night in 1996 when he and fellow Montreal drug-squad investigator Michel Leclerc were in an unmarked Ford Probe coupe, cruising past one of Cameron's houses in the West Island suburb of Beaconsfield to see if he was there and who might be visiting him. “It was twelve o'clock and Cameron was standing in the driveway. We drove by slowly, rounded the block and came to a stop sign. The next thing we know, there's this big fucking SUV barreling down behind us . . . So I gunned it, and he pulled up beside us and I looked and it was Cameron [behind the wheel]. I hit the gas and the chase [east on the Trans-Canada Highway] was along Route 40 . . . He didn't know who the fuck we were. He thought somebody was out to whack him.” (The Hells Angels had previously made two attempts on Cameron's life). “Anyway,” continues Westlake, “we're hitting, 100, 120 miles an hour, and the fucking Probe is shaking like a bastard, and he's coming up the rear with that big SUV tank . . . Then we come up to a big truck and I was able to squeeze past it, and Cameron in his big fucking SUV couldn't . . . So we exit off the ramp on Jean Talon [Boulevard], make a right, make a left, and then fuck off. That was the end of that.” It was a chase scene straight out of The French Connection.3
The investigation, involving surveillance and telephone wiretaps, continued for another year while the authorities gathered incriminating evidence. At dawn on June 20, 1997, thirty-seven-year-old Glen Cameron was arrested at his luxurious Green Valley farm by Westlake, accompanied by the DEA and the RCMP, and charged with importing 45 kilos of liquid hashish, hidden in plastic tubes, from Jamaica to Montreal.
Glen Cameron's 1997 arrest by John Westlake and the RCMP
As Westlake recalls the take-down: “It's 5 a.m. and our SWAT team went through the fields to his house. He had a long driveway that was alarmed, and if he didn't know you, he'd fucking blow you away. Up in his house he had a fucking machine gun beside his bed . . . But we managed to bust him cold.” Westlake adds that as Cameron was handcuffed and led shirtless out of the house, “he says to me, ‘Hey, John, I heard this was the last fucking shot for you; I'm your last guy.’ I said, ‘Well, looks like I'm gonna pack it in; and you too, you fucker!’, and then he wishes me a happy retirement.”4
On May, 8, 1998, Cameron was found guilty and sentenced to 27 months in prison plus a $150,000 fine. On June 22, 2000, the Quebec Justice Ministry and Canadian government seized his various properties in Quebec and Ontario, as well as his collection of rare cars valued at $1.6 million, since it was all purchased through the proceeds of crime. Westlake recalls that a large barn next to Cameron's farmhouse contained “all kinds of fancy cars; Ferraris, Mustangs, you name it. He even had [Jorge] Leite's fucking Mercedes in there.”
In July 2000 Cameron successfully avoided extradition to the United States, where the DEA wanted him on a previous charge of importing 700 pounds of marijuana from Canada to Florida. He is now a free man.
“He was my last bust,” says Westlake today, “but he only did short time.” He ruefully adds that “Cameron is a major crook who never worked a day in his life; and he's active again now—big time.”
1. I first met Billy in the late 1970s while I was coordinator of the Dawson College program at the Leclerc Penitentiary. He was perhaps the most personable and glib prisoner I'd ever met, and an obvious leader who was highly respected by the other inmates. My colleague Greta Nemiroff was then co-director of Dawson's alternative New School, and she invited MacAllister, who was on parole, to come and talk to her students, hoping perhaps that he'd warn them about the evils and repercussions of crime. But as Greta recalls, “He had them eating out of his hand within minutes,” while he charmed them with the derring-do of his personal misadventures. In fact, a 2007 National Parole Board psychological assessment report describes him as “a very articulate person [with] a highly manipulative capacity” to fool others.
2. I attended Billy's 2009 hearing, after which I asked him about the West End Gang. His response was: “There is no such thing as a West End Gang . . . Anyway, I just want to get away from all that stuff; it's all behind me now.” He did, however, acknowledge that since his parole conditions always included not associating with anyone with a criminal record, it was pretty difficult to have any sort of social or family life outside of prison with the people whom he knew. As he admitted to the parole board members, “I'm back here [in prison] for being stupid.”
3. I can well imagine the scene. One afternoon in 1988 while I was researching a CBC fifth estate piece on heroin being smuggled into Montreal from Iran, I was in the back of an unmarked police car with John Westlake at the wheel and his drug-squad partner, Gaston Pitre, in the passenger seat. We were on the crowded Ville Marie expressway on our way to meet with an Iranian informant, and we were running late. John was weaving in and out of traffic, cursing, blowing the horn, and flashing his badge out the window at drivers impeding his progress. It was one of the wildest car rides I've experienced. But we made it on time for the rendezvous.
4. The following year, fifty-eight-year-old Westlake retired after 33 years on the force, with most of that time spent on the drug beat. According to his superiors, during his career he probably made more successful busts of individual narcotics dealers than any other Canadian cop. Having witnessed John in action several times while he arrested and grilled suspects, I can believe it. At six-foot-two and 220 pounds, he takes no guff from those whom he arrests. His distinctive features are his neatly trimmed beard and a toothpick that's usually hanging from his mouth, a habit he picked up decades earlier when he quit smoking. But John's most intimidating feature is his accusatory scowl and intense gaze which pierces into the eyes (and perhaps the soul) of anyone unfortunate enough to be collared and questioned by him. Today, when he's not relaxing by fishing for bass and pike at his cottage north of Montreal, Westlake runs a successful private investigator business with fellow retired cop André Savard of the Brink's robbery fame.