Where have all Montreal biker bunkers gone?

Huron Street home of the Rock Machine

   Steel doors, bulletproof windows and video cameras were once a thing on some houses in Montreal, as biker gangs transformed normal homes into fortresses built to withstand bombs and bullets of rival groups.

   The Hells Angels-affiliated Rockers moved into their Angus Yards-adjacent Rosemont bunker at 2887 Gilford in 1993 where resident biker Toots Tousignant told journalists, with an entirely straight face, that the boys would listen to classical music while lounging around the premises. 

   He omitted the cash weighing, cocaine cutting, beatings that also took place, as well as the time he once picked up a bomb left outside, calmly defused it and tossed it into a field. 

   Police routinely inspected the home and harassed bikers entering and exiting but were ultimately helpless to do more, until a bomb exploded outside in March 1995. 

   Biker bunkers took a public relations hit later that summer when two Rock Machine operatives were blown up planting a bomb at the rival Jokers bunker in Saint Valiers.

Gilford 

   The intended victims kept bones of their attackers inside the clubhouse as a keepsake. 

   So when Rock Machine bunker on Huron near Papineau and St. Catherine was attacked by bomb in October the Montreal fire department declared it, as well as the place on Gilford, as safety hazards and padlocked them. 

   The logic was that firefighters needed to be able to access any home in an emergency. 

   Two years later the province passed a law which made it possible for municipalities to ban residents from turning their properties into fortresses. The Huron Street clubhouse was rumoured to have extensive tunnels below but no sign of them was evident when the building and surrounding structures were demolished in 2001 for the creation of a new green space near the Jacques Cartier Bridge. 

   The bunker on Gilford was turned into condos, the longtime clubhouse Satan's Choice clubhouse at 546 Sebastopol in the Point also lost its bikers some time before and the Outlaws gang clubhouse at 4805 Cazelais

Cazelais

was felled by fire and is now a vacant space known by neighbours who hold barbecues there as Bikers Garden. 

Sebastopol

   Provincial gangsterism legislation made it difficult to set up gang clubhouses after that although the Montreal Hells Angels are said to have a safe haven in their Sorel digs, well upriver. An estimated 165 people died and 180 were injured in the biker war that lasted from 1994 to 2001.

*This is a draft of an excerpt from my upcoming book which I hope to find a title for and finish soon.