Like the original Kings of Coke documentary back in 2022, two new sequels provide a fascinating snapshot of the West End Gang, the ragtag group of mostly Irish gangsters from Pointe-St-Charles and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce who helped make Montreal the bank-robbery capital of North America in the ’70s.
Both New Blood and The Legend of Rory Shayne debuted on Crave in June.
“The Hells Angels and the Italian Mafia, those are mythologies that are well-known in Montreal,” said Nick Rose, writer-director of The Legend of Rory Shayne and the co-writer with Julian Sher of the original Kings of Coke documentary. “But there’s a more chaotic structureless aspect to the West End Gang that makes them inherently more mysterious. Because they’re not really a gang. It’s more this gig economy of different criminal freelancers and so that’s a great opportunity for finding untold stories or underreported stories.”
Adds Lewis Cohen, producer of the two new documentaries: “Part of the structure of the West End Gang is they don’t have a structure. There’s something very formal about how the bikers work, how the Mafia works, so that’s what made it harder to tell stories about the West End Gang, but it also made them harder to arrest. The other reason they’ve escaped the same kind of media glare as the other gangs is because they’re English. One of the reasons they were able to avoid a lot of police attention was because a lot of the cops didn’t speak English and they didn’t know these neighbourhoods, like N.D.G. and The Point.”
New Blood focuses on Gerald Matticks, the notorious crime boss who controlled the Port of Montreal for decades and was a longtime leader of the West End Gang. But the documentary is also just as much about the deadly biker war between the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine between 1994 and 2002. Matticks was a close associate and friend of Hells Angels head honcho Maurice (Mom) Boucher, and Matticks ended up getting arrested as part of the anti-biker Operation Springtime in 2001 and sentenced to 12 years in prison for trafficking narcotics. Matticks died in November last year.
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Matticks, who came from The Point, was something of a folk hero in his old neighbourhood, helping local families, praised by local priests, even dressing up as Santa Claus at Christmas. All this in exchange for absolute loyalty, the filmmakers say.
“We literally had a researcher going around The Point last year, we thought we’d bring up some of the neighbourhood mythology, and everybody knew Gerry to this day, but no one would go on camera to talk about him,” Cohen said. “It was unbelievable. There’s still a kind of omertà in the neighbourhood. This was just before he died. He died during the edit.”
There’s something about the uniqueness of the West End Gang that inspires a certain fascination, Cohen and Rose say.
“It’s just curious that there’s this gang from Montreal that’s all anglo,” Cohen said.
The Legend of Rory Shayne focuses on an extraordinary character who once pulled off a bank robbery in Montreal in 1979 by commandeering a helicopter, putting a gun to the pilot’s head and forcing him to take them to a strip mall and wait while they robbed the bank. Shayne pulled off the bank job with a submachine gun.
Rose has been fascinated by Shayne for years, writing a feature article on him back in 2018 for Vice Magazine.
“I was just trying to figure out what would possess someone to hijack a helicopter with a female accomplice, land it at a strip mall, (rob a bank) and actually get away with it,” Rose said. “I was interested in the psychology of that. … If you’d put this in a scripted film, people would be like: ‘This is too far-fetched, relax!’”
Rose has a law degree from l’Université de Montréal. Though he’s never practised, he has a long-time fascination with criminal law.
“You realize there’s this entire other world out there,” Rose said. “There’s just these super rich stories. It’s a subculture.”
“What’s fascinating about the criminal world is it’s like a mirror of society, a dark mirror, where you see so many things about human nature, friendship, greed, both darkness and light that get reflected in that universe in a pure way,” Cohen said.
Clearly, Cohen and Rose are fascinated by the history of Montreal’s criminal underworld and they admit they are already thinking of potential further Kings of Coke sequels, notably charting the bloody Mafia wars here in the first decade of this century, including the murder of both Nick Rizzuto Jr. and his grandfather Nick Rizzuto Sr. Of course, it all depends on how many viewers catch these two new documentaries on Crave.