Montreal's Top 10 gangland murders: # 8 Andre "Toots" Tousignant

 Andre "Toots" Tousignant used to tell people that he was a peanut machine vendor. Unlike other Hells Angels he would happily talk to the press and once told me that the guys in the now-demolished biker clubhouse on Bennett liked to listen to classical music. He turned down my request to visit the place to see if it was as spotless as he said.
   In fact Andre Tousignant was a highly-motivated career-climbing biker, who teaches the insanity that people would indulge in simply to get a patch. In 1986 he told a newspaper writer that he aspired to join the Hells, whom his wife Susan Beckett described as "great guys." They even dressed their newborn son up in a leather biker jacket.
   Toots would become one of Mom Boucher’s top assassins in a biker war that would claim 150 lives in the province between 1994 and around 2003. Of course nobody remembers anybody’s names, not even the seven innocent victims.*

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   So Toots went with a low-level Hells biker named Godasse Gagne and tried to shoot up a prison guard. Toots, whose license was suspended until 2050, was too fat for the bike. So they regrouped went back and waited for any guard to leave the RdP prison and eventually managed to shoot a random guard, who it turned out was a woman.
Unbeknownst to Toots, Godasse Gagne got his friend Steve Boies involved and let him in on the secret. Word was out on the street that Gagne was involved and when cops caught Boies with drugs he immediately finked on Gagne. So turned informant.
   Realizing that Toots could easily do the same, Boucher called him over and the unsuspecting Tousignant, the man who had put into action Boucher's insane campaign to undermine all authority in Quebec to the Hells Angels, was killed. His body was found Feb. 27, 1998 in the woods near Bromont. He had been burned, shot and his fingers chopped off.

*1-Daniel Desrochers, 11, Aug. 9, 1995, by shrapnel from a biker-gang car bomb.
2--Guy Lemay, 48, shot Jan. 7, 1997, at his home, as his neighbour was targeted
3-Pierre Rondeau a Rivieres-des-Prairires prison guard shot dead on Sept. 8, 1997.
4-Diane Lavigne, on June 26, 1997, she was a prison guard murdered while driving away from the Bordeaux jail.
5--Serge Hervieux, Aug. 26, 1999, shot at a car-rental agency as bikers sought his boss, also named Serge..
6- Jean-Pierre Fleury, 42, brother-in-law of Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher who died on Sept. 4, 1999 after being shot on Ontario St. E. near the Olympic Stadium.
7-Marc-Alexandre Chartrand, 17, Oct. 20, 2001, by Benoit Guimond, 29, while waiting to get into the Aria after-hours club near the corner of St. Denis and Ste. Catherine Sts.