Rogue cops once broke into the Montreal courthouse and stole a giant amount of drugs

Louis Morel - was he involved?

 Unidentified thieves - said to be rogue police officers - stole a massive amount of cocaine, morphine and heroin from the Montreal courthouse on 22 December 1920 but were never arrested or charged with any crime. 

 Several police officers were eventually fired following the affair but their identities were never revealed and nobody was arrested or charged in connection with the affair. 

Coolopolis has linked this affair to Louis Morel, a heroic cop who wound up getting fired from the force and later hanged for a lethal robbery.

 During the night of 22 December 1920 thieves broke through the plate glass in the door at the east side of the Montreal courthouse, next door to city hall. The door was routinely employed to welcome new convicts as the police paddywagon backed up to it to bring prisoners in.

 The thieves then entered another unlocked door and opened a vault full of evidence of all sorts from wheelbarrows, jewellery, suits and cheese. The prisoners were after a large supply of illicit drugs.

 According to one insider, the thieves included four men who drove a large Packard. One white man and one "colored" man stole the drugs and left with two large trunks. Two other accomplices, both white, waited outside. 

 Few knew about the presence of the drugs, which had been seized from a pair of women charged with transporting the supply. It was assumed to be an inside job.

 The drugs were valued at $70,000, what would now be almost $1 million. 

 Some of those drugs were supplied to a black drug dealer named Budder Harris who dealt from the Standard Club on St. Antoine Street, across from what's now the Bell Center.

 Harris was a known troublemaker who had shot another black man, Rufus Andrews, in the leg in an altercation at his home on Sanguinet Street two years earlier. The victim Andrews had previously been charged with loitering. Andrews' wife Marguerite had been charged with attracting men to a home on Cathedrale and then robbing them. 

 On 31 April Harris entered a taxi with three men and their driver Rodolphe Belanger, 46, drove them all to the Back River near Gouin. All seemed normal and the men exited the car with Harris. All seemed in good spirits.

 That was the last time Harris was seen alive, as his body was later found in the river with hands tied and rocks in his pockets.

 An autopsy revealed that Harris had cocaine in his system at the time of his death so it might have been a situation where a vendor ended up being his own best customer and was unable to pay his supplier money owed. 

 Harris, whose wife was white, did not report him missing until the day before he was found. She was unable to collect on his life insurance because Budder Harris had failed to keep up the payments. 

 Both the murder and the robbery went unsolved but The Montreal Star of 8 September 1921 reported that two RCMP police had been dismissed, as had a Montreal city police detective.  The article reported that the disgraced RCMP officers were the two most active in the narcotics squad investigating the courthouse robbery and that they were disliked by colleagues. One of the RCMP officers was a big drug dealer and two were frequently drunk and spent time at "houses of ill-fame." 

 As for the Montreal police detective involved in the case, one possible suspect comes to mind: Louis Morel, a glamourous and handsome high-profile detective who was also an accomplished athlete.

 And indeed a newspaper report published on 4 June 1921 stated that police brass had suspended Detective Morel for his involvement with the Budder Harris case. 

 Morel's feats in wrestling and his triumphs at the annual Montreal Police Games earned him many newspaper mentions. He quit the force after being involved in a failed union bid in September 1918 and was rehired. He was later dismissed for undisclosed reasons and turned to crime.

 Morel's criminal incliminations were made clear on April 1, 1924 when he organized a robbery that led him and his three cronies to be hanged at Bordeaux Prison.   

 

                                                                    Morel