Those who knew Gabriel Wortman stunned by news of shooting spree
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Nova Scotia mass shooter began preparing for attack over a year in advance, documents show
The gunman behind the mass shooting in Nova Scotia was assembling the pieces for the fake police cruiser used in his rampage more than a year before the deadly attack, newly released court documents say.
A heavily redacted RCMP application for a search warrant reveals how Gabriel Wortman used an online PayPal account to purchase equipment for the mock RCMP vehicle he drove in the April 18-19 killings that left 22 people dead in the province. An RCMP officer subsequently killed him at a gas station in Enfield.
The court documents were released Monday through a continuing legal effort from The Globe and Mail and other media outlets.
The documents also include more warnings from witnesses – and the gunman himself – about his paranoid behaviour in the early days of the global pandemic, as the 51-year-old denturist began stockpiling ammunition and significant amounts of cash.
In one e-mail obtained by the RCMP that was sent in March, about a month before the worst mass shooting in Canadian history, Mr. Wortman said he was preparing for the worst because COVID-19 would make people desperate “once the money runs out." He’d personally withdrawn $475,000 from the bank in preparation for what he thought would be the collapse of the financial system, one witness told police.
“Thank God we are well-armed," Mr. Wortman wrote. The grim comment is contained in the court documents that offer revealing insights into the gunman’s activities and behaviour. According to the RCMP, Mr. Wortman’s March 19 e-mail “talked about how the virus was huge and people have not dealt with something as big as it was.”
The court records also show that the gunman crossed the New Brunswick-Maine border multiple times in April and May of 2019, apparently to pick up police gear such as a siren, light bar and battering ram, which he had purchased online and had delivered to a U.S. postal box. He used companies such as Amazon, Kijiji and eBay to make his cruiser look as real as possible.
There’s also more evidence that warning signs surrounded Mr. Wortman long before his attack. The documents include statements from an unnamed friend of Aaron Tuck, one of the gunman’s neighbours and first victims. After the shootings, the friend told police that Mr. Tuck described violent altercations involving Mr. Wortman when he was drinking, and said he “would terrorize people.”
The man also described seeing a look-alike police vehicle in the man’s garage in 2019. Mr. Wortman told the man he was fixing up the fake cruiser to be used in “parades,” according to the document.
The RCMP have released few details about the firearms Mr. Wortman used during his 13-hour rampage, which started in the village of Portapique, N.S., on the night of April 18.
Having killed 13 people in the village, most of them friends and neighbours, he fled the area disguised as a Mountie and driving a vehicle that looked exactly like an RCMP cruiser.
The Mounties earlier confirmed that the killer had two semi-automatic handguns and two semi-automatic rifles, but they declined to release further details owing to their continuing investigation.
Gun-control advocates have said details about the firearms are important to the discussion about the federal government’s recent move to ban 1,500 types of military-style assault weapons.
However, the Mounties have confirmed that the gunman had a fifth firearm, which he took from RCMP Constable Heidi Stevenson after he rammed his vehicle into her cruiser and then fatally shot her in an exchange of gunfire.
The RCMP warrant application includes fleeting references to the acquisition of weapons, but the redactions make it impossible to decipher how he obtained the four other weapons.
The documents say Mr. Wortman did not have any firearms registered on the Restricted Weapons Registration System, the Canadian Firearms Information System or something called the Cognos client application system.
The court records also contain references to e-mails between the gunman and Peter Griffon, the man who helped the killer create the decals for the mock RCMP cruiser.
Excerpts from e-mails found on Mr. Griffon’s cellphone indicate that on the morning of April 18, the day the killing started, Mr. Wortman told Mr. Griffon that he was going to go for a drive with his partner, whose name is redacted, to celebrate their anniversary. He also refers to unspecified work the two men would do the following day.
On July 26 and July 31, 2019, Mr. Griffon sent photos to Mr. Wortman showing a white car with RCMP decals on it. Previously released information confirms that the vehicle Mr. Wortman used to evade police on April 18-19 was purchased on July 3, 2019.
Mr. Griffon, who was on parole from prison at the time, later provided a statement to police describing how he had made the decals for Mr. Wortman’s vehicle. Previously convicted of possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking in 2017, Mr. Griffon’s parole was revoked when the National Parole Board found out about his work with Mr. Wortman.
With a report from The Canadian Press
https://thetarnishedbadgecom.godaddysites.com/f/and-then-we-got-duped-by-paul-palango
And Then We Got Duped By Paul Palango
Rob Doucette aka Rob the Carpenter
FRANK MAGAZINE JULY 12, 2022
…. And then we got duped.
By Paul Palango
A 34-second snippet of audio tape showed that Gabriel Wortman was considered to be a person of interest in the still-unsolved murder of a Dartmouth man in 2004, according to a long-time friend of the mass killer’s.
It looked like the perfect story.
The dead man’s name was Kevin James Petrie. He was 50 years old when he was bludgeoned on March 17, 2004. He died 11 days later. He lived in the same Dartmouth neighbourhood where Wortman had his denturist office and once owned a house. He was a thief and sold things to Wortman. He was into motorbikes, just like Wortman. He used to be a bumboy for local Hells Angels boss Randy Mersereau before Mersereau was whacked back in 1999.
There was that seductive, irresistible audio tape from 2004 in which two 'RCMPdetectives' questioned Wortman as a person of interest and told him that Kevin was dead. They didn’t actually utter the name Kevin, but Robert Doucette, Wortman’s carpenter friend, said he turned on his trusty tape recorder at the first mention of Kevin and caught some of the conversation. He assured us he was there and the conversation was exactly as recorded. It went like this:
'Wortman': “Ohhhh god.”
'Mountie': “You don’t seem too surprised to hear that. Why is that?”
'Wortman': “I had a vision that it was so.”
'Mountie': “So when was the last time you saw him, I mean, other than your dream?”
(At this point there is a six to seven second delay as 'Wortman' considers his response and then he does what might be described as an almost disembodied mantra. He goes on for about six seconds in a sing-songy fashion.)
Four of us were in the room listening to this and bought the story, but in retrospect there were clues that should have set off alarm bells.
Doucette started playing the tape to us before we had even settled into the room and after he played it, we all but ignored it moving onto other aspects that we wanted to explore.
Doucette said he had given the tape to RCMP investigators but they had done nothing with it.
We took a copy of the tape and afterwards we listened to it carefully. It seemed so real, even if the quality of the recording seemed more professional than something captured on a hidden, old-school tape recorder concealed in a pocket.
The timing also fit with something I had written in my recently published book, 22 Murders:
In the summer of 2003, Wortman threatened to shoot a neighbour, John Hudson, if he stepped onto the Portland Street property to help (Lisa) Banfield with her luggage. Later, the incident would be described as an example of Gabriel’s extreme jealousy. But his cartoonish defence of his possessions and property was starting to look like something more prosaic than jealousy. He was acting like a prototypical criminal who was leery of and unnerved by other criminals – or the police – getting too close to his stash. He mounted surveillance cameras around his business in Dartmouth and his properties in Portapique.
We were in a bit of a quandary. It was the kind of story you couldn’t just go out and have verified. We already know that the RCMP has been playing games galore on this file, so we couldn’t go to them. After all, we had published documents showing that the RCMP was destroying documents in the case back in the summer of 2020. That’s verified.
The other reality was that trying to dig into this story was like maneuvering through a den of snakes. Hardly anyone will co-operate on the record be they family, friends, neighbours, politicians or police. Everyone is afraid of everyone else.
The decision was made to throw it into the public forum and perhaps spark some interest in the Petrie murder, for which the Province of Nova Scotiahad put up a $150,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. It would also raise the issue of whether Wortman was a suspect in other unsolved murders.
Yeah, we were doing a public service.
Frank Magazineran the story. It put the tape on its website and we all lit up a congratulatory, if not metaphorical cigar, and quietly enjoyed our scoop, such as it was.
On Sunday night, July 10, Jordan Bonaparte and I did our regular Nighttime Podcast segment and talked about the story.
Monday morning, I was awakened early by every telecommunications device in my home dinging and pinging.
Something was going on.
Yikes! Yikes! Yikes!
An enterprising listener to the Nighttime Podcast was bothered by the tape. To him, it all sounded so scripted, like something he had heard before. After he got up that morning, he entered the phrases into his search engine and came up with a perfect match. It was from an episode of the ninth season of the television series CSI.
There was no doubt about it, but what to do?
I tried calling and texting Doucette, but he wasn’t picking up. I knew that he had a court appearance in Dartmouth at 1:30 p.m. for a trial on domestic assault charges which were ultimately withdrawn.
Frank editor Andrew Douglas and I made it our mission to meet there.
I got there early. I couldn’t help but notice that directly across the street from the Provincial Court facilities was the house at 269 Pleasant Street where Petrie had been beaten in a suspected home invasion.
As I turned the corner to the front door, there was Doucette standing alone.
“Hey, brother,” he said, seemingly oblivious to the havoc he had caused.
“What the hell did you do?” I asked.
He genuinely seemed flummoxed.
I played the audio of the CSI scene for him and said: “You said you taped this. It’s from a CSI episode.”
“It sounds similar,” Doucette said.
“It’s not similar,” I said. “It’s exactly the same.”
Doucette said he couldn’t explain what had happened. He said that he had played the tape for RCMP officers during his first interviews with them on April 19 and 23, 2020.
He said the Mounties took both his cell phone and the recorder and didn’t return them to him for 10 days. In an earlier interview with him, he did say that he thought things were missing from his telephone when he got it back. He had never mentioned the tape recorder until that moment.
“I thought the original tape was longer, but I hadn’t listened to it for years. It was in my drawer,” Doucette said.
“Are you suggesting that the RCMP deleted the original tape and replaced it with a conversation from CSI?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
“So, the question remains,” I asked: “Did two RCMP detectives really come to Wortman’s denturist office when you were there and ask him about Kevin Petrie?”
“They did,” he said. “I was there when it happened. I can’t explain what happened on the recorder.”
Neither can we, but the fact remains that we should have done better. (Regrets, we have a few… - ed.)
In regards to questions about what this episode does to Robert Doucette’s credibility on other matters involving Gabriel Wortman, well, it doesn’t help, certainly. But considering how long this man was friends with the killer, and how much of his information has been corroborated elsewhere, I would argue this unfortunate episode doesn’t completely hinder his credibility either. We’ll let you be the ultimate arbiter.
--
Andrew Douglas
Frank Magazine
phone: (902) 420-1668
fax: (902) 423-0281
cell: (902) 221-0386
andrew@frankmagazine.ca
www.frankmagazine.ca
Gabriel Wortman and the 2004 cold case murder of Kevin Petrie
FRANK MAGAZINE JULY 7, 2022
THIRD OF THREE
Gabriel Wortman and the 2004 cold case murder of Kevin James Petrie
by Paul Palango
A 34-second snippet of audio tape shows that Gabriel Wortman was considered to be a person of interest in the still-unsolved murder of a Dartmouth man in 2004, according to a longtime friend of the mass killer’s.
Court records show that at the time of his murder Kevin James Petrie was a 50-year-old career criminal who had been charged more than a dozen times with drug trafficking, various thefts and assaults between 1993 and 2000. Police believe Petrie had been assaulted during an apparent home invasion at 269 Pleasant Street in Dartmouth. He died 11 days later after being found in medical distress at 7132 Spruce Street near the intersection of Joseph Howe Drive and Highway 102 in Halifax.
An autopsy showed he had died from the effects of blunt force trauma to the head. In March 2019, the fifteenth anniversary of Petrie’s murder, the Nova Scotia Department of Justice offered a $150,000 reward to help solve the murder.
Robert Doucette, who worked as Wortman’s carpenter and sidekick for almost 20 years says he was with Wortman at his denturist business at 193 Portland Street in Dartmouth when two plain clothes RCMP investigators walked through the door and introduced themselves.
The Mounties were likely assigned to the Halifax Regional Police/RCMP Integrated Major Crime Unit. Doucette said the mood was casual and informal.
They said they had come to ask Wortman about a person whom they described as “Kevin.” At the time Doucette said he knew of “a booster” named Kevin who did “business” with Wortman but didn’t know Kevin’s last name. “Kevin was just a little common thief … that used to hang around with us quite a bit. He used to pop in and sell stuff to Gabriel,” Doucette said in an interview with myself, Nighttime Podcast host Jordan Bonaparte and citizen investigators Chad Jones and Ryan Potter.
“The only time I ever seen Kevin was when I happened to be there and he would come and sell stolen stuff for 40 per cent of the cost. He sold meat for half the cost. I always wondered what happened to Kevin, myself.”
At one point during their estimated 35-40-minute conversation with Wortman, the Mounties honed in on the big question all murder detectives ask: when did you last see the victim?
It was at this point Doucette reached into his pocket and activated the mini tape recorder he always carried with him. He captured only about 34 seconds of what was being said before he thinks he accidentally turned off the device hidden in his pocket. He captured an exchange between the detective and Wortman, just after the police mentioned Kevin’s name:
Mountie: “….he’s also dead.”
Wortman: “ohhhh god.”
Mountie: “You don’t seem too surprised to hear that. Why is that?”
Wortman: “I had a vision that it was so.”
Mountie: “So when was the last time you saw him, I mean, other than your dream?”
(At this point there is a six to seven second delay as Wortman considers his response and then Wortman does what might be described as an almost disembodied mantra. He goes on for about six seconds in a sing-songy fashion.)
Wortman: “Oh --godohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod”
There is brief laughter, and then a final indecipherable last comment - possibly “yes, but Stephen and I…” - after Wortman’s chant at which point Doucette believes he accidentally turned off the tape in his pocket.
Even to the untrained ear, Wortman appeared to zone out – dissemble – when asked about Petrie, like a child being caught stealing from the cookie jar.
After Wortman’s killing spree in April 2020, Doucette says he was interviewed up to seven times by Mountie investigators about what he knew about Wortman, whom he had known for almost 20 years. At one point Doucette said that he played the tape for RCMP but that the Mounties showed no interest in pursuing its possible importance. It doesn't appear anything about the tape has been released to the Mass Casualty Commission investigating Wortman’s deadly rampage which left 22 Nova Scotians dead.
The revelation that Wortman was either a person of interest or a suspect in a previous murder flies in the face of previous denials from the RCMP that it had ever encountered him in a criminal case. It is also another example of the RCMP’s faulty institutional memory about Wortman, including allegations about domestic violence, possession of guns, having and driving a replica police car and his alleged threat to kill a police officer.
Doucette, who was living near Shubenacadie at the time, does not know if the police conducted further interviews with Wortman.
It appears apparent, however, that the timing of the spring 2004 meeting coincided with Wortman’s move to beef up his security. I described what was going on in Wortman’s life around that time in my recent book, 22 Murders: Investigating the Massacres, Cover-up and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia.
In the summer of 2003, Wortman threatened to shoot a neighbour, John Hudson, if he stepped onto the Portland Street property to help (Lisa) Banfield with her luggage. Later, the incident would be described as an example of Gabriel’s extreme jealousy. But his cartoonish defence of his possessions and property was starting to look like something more prosaic than jealousy. He was acting like a prototypical criminal who was leery of and unnerved by other criminals – or the police – getting too close to his stash. He mounted surveillance cameras around his business in Dartmouth and his properties in Portapique.
That the Petrie murder investigators appeared to think of Wortman as a person of interest or suspect seems to provide additional context and support about Wortman’s inner world during that period.
For example, at this point Wortman was in the early stages of a personal relationship with Halifax Regional Police Constable Barry Warnell. Warnell, the longest serving active member of the force, has stated in interviews provided to the Mass Casualty Commisison that he was friends with Wortman due to their mutual interest in real estate. Warnell also purchased the house Wortman had lived in on Pine Street in Dartmouth after Wortman’s first marriage ended.
Doucette claims that Wortman told him that the deal with Warnell wasn’t as straightforward as it might have seemed. Doucette says that Wortman told him that he had returned money from the sale to Warnell for some reason.
Another interesting twist, Halifax police sources say, is that while Warnell was one of the highest paid officers on the force because of his penchant for pulling overtime, until 2007 he had been active in undercover roles. That raises the question of whether Warnell’s contact with Wortman had been personal, professional or a mix of both. Wortman’s common-law wife, Lisa Banfield, entered Wortman’s life around 2001 after the end of her first marriage to Michael Wagner. Throughout the early stages of the relationship there was much volatility. At one point Banfield’s father, Gilbert, offered to move her out of Wortman’s house. Over the years, she told various people that Wortman was difficult to live with and that she feared for her and her family’s life, if she left him.
One potential line of questioning for her July 15 testimony before the Mass Casualty Commission: Did you know about the Petrie murder or investigation, and did that play a part in your almost leaving him in the spring of 2004? (While we're on the topic of potential questions for Lisa B: During an email exchange between Banfield and Wortman from May of 2019 released to the commission, she welcomes him to "the cult". What's that all about?)
Robert Doucette, meanwhile, sees his old friend Wortman in an even more sinister light. He spent a lot of time with him and heard and saw things that disturb him to this day.
“I really think he might have been a serial killer,” Doucette says. “He had barrels of lye and sulphuric acid underneath his deck. Him talking about the best way to get rid of bodies.”
Doucette said Wortman never talked about killing anyone in particular, but more about how to get rid of a body – the theory of the perfect murder, as it were. He used to tell him that the foremost obstacle to getting rid of a body were teeth.
“Teeth don’t burn,” he used to say. “All you gotta do is smash them.”
Fires were Wortman’s specialty, though, Doucette said. “Gabe was a fire bug. The bigger the fire the better.”
Wherever Wortman went, timely fires seemed to follow, providing insurance cash or, as in the case of a building next to his Dartmouth office in the early 2000s, a way to create a desired parking lot.
“I didn’t think much of it at the time, but after all these murders were committed, I figured he might be part of the missing people. I think he was killing people, especially native women,” speculated Doucette.
He cited a strange moment he observed during the six months he lived in a trailer at 136 Orchard Beach Drive in Portapique while building Wortman’s warehouse. It was the middle of the night – around 2 or 3 a.m. – when he was awakened and looked out a window. “He backed his truck down there 300 yards – maybe 500 yards,” Doucette recalled. “He was down there maybe 20 minutes or half an hour. He’d bring the truck back then get in his loader. He went back and moved the whole brush pile maybe 20 feet and then set it on fire.” It was curious behaviour and Doucette learned over the course of his precarious life not to get too curious when in the company of potentially dangerous people.
“Was Wortman a hitman?” Chad Jones asked.
“Hit men don’t get rid of their bodies,” Doucette replied.
“Was he a cleaner?” Ryan Potter asked, wondering if Wortman, with his mortician pedigree, would be a likely person the bad guys might hire to dispose of a body.
“That’s possible, too,” Doucette said.
The answers to those questions are all unknown.
The important thing to note is that the Mass Casualty Commission appears to be all but allergic to finding those answers, dismissing anything about Wortman’s criminal activities as unimportant in the search for the truth.
All that matters, it seems, is to make Lisa Banfield and any others who may know the real story feel comfortable.
Now, these new revelations from Robert Doucette places an enormous elephant in the room which begs another obvious question: Was Gabriel Wortman a person of interest or suspect in other murders?
Paul Palango is author of the best selling book 22 Murders: Investigating the massacres, cover-up and obstacles to justice in Nova Scotia (Random House).
https://thetarnishedbadgecom.godaddysites.com/f/future-mass-killer-part-2-by-paul-palango
When the Future mass killer shunned his friend Part 2
FRANK MAGAZINE JULY 5, 2022 2ND OF 3 STORIES
When the future mass killer shunned his friend Carpenter Rob for shooting his friend the bear
By Paul Palango
Meet Robert Arthur Mitchell Crowdog Taylor Doucette, otherwise known as Rob the Carpenter, Gabriel Wortman’s right-hand man for almost two decades.
He wears his greying hair tied back into a tight, single braid, and has been described as “scary” by some who have come across him. He admits that’s true – but says he’s not as scary as he looks.
He likes to wear a leather vest with patches on it, but the vest is a handed down family treasure that his great, great grandfather began wearing in 1897. Then there is a moose leather jacket that is 120 years old.
“People think I am a biker when all I am is a fucking Indian,” he said at one point during a series of interviews.
“I look like a pretty intimidating guy. I’ve looked this way since I was 16 years old. People see me coming and they cross the street but that’s not who I am. It’s just my protection. I’m totally the opposite. I go to work. I come home. I do crafts. I carve peace pipes. I do leather work.”
Crowdog, as he likes to be called to acknowledge his proud Mi’kmaqheritage, was born and raised in the Yarmouth, N.S. area, spending much of his brutal childhood in the foster care system.
“I spent my first 14 years living in a wire dog cage,” he recalled.
“By the time I was 10, I had spent more time in hospital than most people do in their entire lives. I didn’t learn to read as a child because I was always working. I finally taught myself to read when I was 26.”
He met his birth father when he was 15, who soon led him into the wider underbelly of the world, much of which Doucette refuses to discuss.
He even has policing in his blood.
He says his maternal grandfather was the notorious Verdun Mitchell, Halifax police chief in the ‘50s and ‘60s, who himself was a suspect in the still-unsolved 1955 murder of Halifax businessman Michael Leo Resk. Mitchell committed suicide in a washroom at Halifax police headquarters in 1968. Another relative was a police chief in Saskatchewan.
Doucette was working in 1999 or 2000 as a bouncer at the Ship Victory bar and restaurant in Dartmouth. He remembers the moment as if it were yesterday. It involved a member of the Rock Machine motorcycle club, the enemies of the Hells Angels in the Quebec biker war which was ongoing at the time.
“Somebody came in wearing a Rock Machine T-shirt,” Doucette recalled.
“I told him to take it off. He wouldn’t take it off so I took him outside and took it off him. Gabriel praised me when I came back into the bar.”
“Are you a Hells Angel?” I asked.
“No, I am not a Hells Angel, but I do have acquaintances who are Hells Angels.”
In the ensuing years Doucette had a hand in building everything Wortman owned in Nova Scotia – his log cabin cottage and warehouse/man den in Portapiqueand his denturist office on Portland Street in Dartmouth.
They drank and partied together. Doucette was on the inside of just about everything in Wortman’s life until they had a falling out in the fall of 2018.
After the massacres, a photograph circulated of Wortman feeding Tostitos out of the bag to a full grown wild black bear off the deck of his cottage at 200 Portapique Beach Road.
“It was going after somebody else’s dog … so I killed the bear,” Doucette said.
But before that falling out, Doucette accrued a thousand stories about Wortman, enough knowledge to compel him to call 911 on the morning of April 19, 2020. He had heard on the news that the police had named Wortman as the man who was dressed as a Mountie and driving a replica Mountie cruiser while killing people – eventually 22 in all.
It was 10:12:15 a.m. when he called 911.
“I’m just wondering if you guys are aware of what weapons he has,” he said, all but discombobulating the 911 operator.
“Ahm, can you ah, why, how you, how would you know sir, how many weapons he has?” the operator nervously asked.
“I know he has an AR-15, he has a Barrett 50 caliber sniper rifle. I know he’s got a Glock 40 and he’s got an assault 12-gauge shotgun.”
“Do you know if these are all legally obtained?” the operator asked.
“No, they’re all brought across the border. He’s been smuggling out of Maine for probably the last 20 years,” Doucette said, adding a few seconds later: “He also has two cases of nail grenades.”
Doucette also told the operator that Wortman had a stockpile of official decals from the RCMP, Halifax Police, fire chiefs and postal vans.
“I was warning them to look out for the others,” Doucette said afterward.
“(RCMP Constable) Heidi (Stevenson) was still alive when I called. I knew they were approaching (Wortman) with caution, but I was saying that they should be approaching with even more caution.”
Doucette said he called 911 because he was trying to save lives.
That’s not the image of him stored in police data banks.
On December 20th last year, Doucette was visiting a female friend who owned a vicious Serbian Rottweiler, a dog with a massive head and enormous biting power. Doucette said the dog attacked him and he had to fight it off. He still has puncture wounds on various parts of his anatomy.
Halifax police showed up and the owner of the dog, fearing that the animal would be seized told the police that Doucette had attacked her and that the dog had intervened.
The police charged Doucette with assault. His trial is scheduled for July 11.
But nothing in that matter is as it seems.
We met the woman in question a few weeks ago. She drove Doucette to a book signing event at Chapters in Dartmouth. She looked presentable and once had an impressive job, but something was not right about her. We soon learned that she had serious psychiatric issues, but the police didn’t want to hear that, apparently. The disclosure documents provided to Doucette’s lawyer described him as being “a police hater” and “an associate of Gabriel Wortman” and “violent.”
“I may look like a violent guy, but I’m a peacemaker,” Doucette said.
“They call me an associate of Wortman’s. I was trying to save lives and they (the police) make it look like I was fucking involved. They call me a police hater, but one of my best friends is a cop in Toronto.”
Also in Toronto, his older brother David Doucette tragically died in a suicide-by-cop incident outside a Spadina Road rooming house in 2015.
Back in Nova Scotia, it appears to be a police strategy to minimize, discredit and even make disappear anything that Doucette has tried to offer up about Wortman and his life. In many ways it is similar to what happened to Portapique resident Leon Joudrey.
Joudrey took in Wortman’s common-law wife Lisa Banfield at 6:34 a.m. on April 19. Joudrey, a woodsman, didn’t believe Banfield’s story about being in the woods for more than eight hours on a freezing night. The RCMP not only ignored him but eventually had Joudrey charged and locked up in a psychiatric facility.
Although he doesn’t hate the police, Doucette doesn’t trust them either. That’s one of the reasons that over the years he carried a mini recorder that he could switch on when times became interesting for him.
Over the years he enjoyed one of the clearest windows into Wortman’s wild world.
Through a woman he was dating in 2000, Doucette met denturist Gina Goulet.
“My company name was the Horseman’s Hammer. I built every horse barn between Windsor and Truro.”
The Registry of Joint Stocks says the Horseman’s Hammer General Contracting, a sole proprietorship, operated out of Nine Mile River for several years beginning in 2004.
Doucette said his girlfriend had him build fences for Goulet.
“Gabriel went with me to do the estimate. I had the impression that (Wortman and Goulet) knew each other. They didn’t say that but I thought that.”
Goulet would become the 22nd and last of Wortman’s victims.
He said Wortman was on a never-ending hunt for sex.
“Gabriel would chase everything from 18 to 80,” he said.
“He was a pig that way. He would just go up to women and say: “I would like to fuck you.”
He described attending hot tub parties in the Portapique area, including those at Brenda Forbes’s house on Portapique Beach Road.
“He’d just go with a bunch of booze, strip off and climb in the hot tub. Everybody else would just shoo …. and get out of the hot tub. Gabriel was built like a donkey. Wasn’t a whole lot of women who wanted that near them,” he said, indicating with a chop of his hand that Wortman’s penis hung halfway down to his knee.
Doucette said that Lisa Banfield didn’t like him hanging around, but that he wasn’t all that fond of her either.
“To my mind she was the controlling one,” Doucette said, echoing comments made by others, as reported previously.
“She didn’t like anyone hanging around that Gabe liked. One time Gabe, me and some guys were sitting around having a beer and Lisa marched in and said to Gabe: ‘You, come with me, right now.’ He jumped up and went with her.”
Doucette said that he witnessed moments of friction between the two but didn’t ever witness Wortman hitting or abusing Banfield. He did see him jack up her Mercedes, remove all the wheels and throw them into the river in one fit of pique.
Another time he heard Lisa say through a closed door: “Don’t you ever put a gun to my head, again.”
On the other hand, the day after one row between the couple, Doucette said that it was Wortman who was sporting a black eye.
From Doucette’s vantage point, Wortman was a complicated character, driven by money, sex and his love of his Portapique property. He wanted to own the entire area. The people he liked he liked a lot, almost to the point of taking ownership of them. He would give dentures away to people who needed them but if he thought a customer could afford to pay, Wortman wanted every last cent owing to him.
“One time we were in his office in Dartmouth, near where Lisa usually sat, and Gabe saw a customer go by who owed him $20 for a $3200 set of dentures,” Doucette remembered.
“Gabe rushed out the door and took the teeth right out of the guy’s mouth.”
Yet Doucette described Wortman’s affection for an elderly couple who lived across the road from his cottage. In the last stages of the man’s life, the Victorian Order of Nurses would tend to him. Wortman would often be there overseeing what was going on. When the man died at age 93 or so, Wortman irrationally blamed the VON nurses for killing him.
Ironically, it seems, Wortman’s 18th and 19th victims were VON nurses Kristin Beaton and Heather O’Brien.
Everything about Wortman was confounding, Doucette says. He was addicted to criminal behaviour. His warehouse was filled with stolen goods. He was at one and the same time dodging the police and pretending to be them – or was he pretending?
“That’s a good question,” Doucette said. “I really wonder.”
NEXT: Doucette’s tape recorder tells a riveting story
https://thetarnishedbadgecom.godaddysites.com/f/wortman%E2%80%99s-outlaw-biker-ties
Wortman’s Outlaw Biker Ties
FRANK MAGAZINE JULY 5
On Wortman's outlaw biker ties, where he stashed his secret phone, and Lisa's history of ammo buys
Border officials knew mass killer smuggled guns, but was allowed to keep his NEXUS pass
By Paul Palango
A Halifax-area man who was close to Gabriel Wortman for almost 20 years says the RCMP failed to turn over full transcripts of his interviews in disclosures to the Mass Casualty Commission.
Robert Doucette told the police tales about, among other things, Wortman’s cell phone, his cache of grenades, a curious incident at the Canadian border and how he was there when Wortman’s common-law wife Lisa Banfieldfired off some rounds from a Glock 40 handgun and had been purchasing ammunition for Wortman for almost a decade.
Frank Magazine recently provided Doucette with copies of his statements released by the Mass Casualty Commission. After reviewing those documents, Doucette said that his statements appear to be strategically edited or sanitized to remove his recollection of some of the criminal and other potentially controversial behaviours by Wortman.
Until recently, Doucette, 56, had largely been known as the mysterious Rob The Carpenter, who helped Wortman build his cottage on Portapique Beach Road, his warehouse on Orchard Beach Drive and his denturist office on Portland Street in Dartmouth, among other things.
Doucette has never been interviewed by the media. After a series of preliminary interviews, Doucette agreed to a three-hour filmed interview which was conducted at an undisclosed location on the afternoon of July 1 by myself, Nighttime Podcast host Jordan Bonaparte and citizen investigators Chad Jones and Ryan Potter.
In Doucette’s estimation, somewhere between a third and one half of what he told police in those interviews never made it onto the public record. He said he recently provided his lawyer with the interviews from the MCC website.
“I just gave her a copy as reading material. I didn’t tell her anything was missing… She told me there must be a lot missing because you get sentences and then there is a comment. There just seems that there’s something missed out."
Doucette said his interviews published by the MCC on its website are very misleading.
“The statements appear to indicate that I spoke with them two or three times. In fact, investigators came to see me seven times. They came so often that I was kicked out of my apartment In Halifax by my landlord. He had some tax issues and the neighbour across the street was a cocaine dealer who complained to my landlord about all the police hanging around.”
The smuggling runs
Wortman had been smuggling cigarettes, drugs and guns across the border since his days at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton from 1987 to 1991.
According to government documents released by the Mass Casualty Commission he had been targeted for investigation on numerous occasions beginning in at least 2008 and over the subsequent six years. Nevertheless, he was granted a NEXUS trusted traveler pass on April 1, 2015. Eight months later, Wortman was again targeted by customs officers. Afterward, he was not targeted again. The NEXUS pass was reevaluated in 2018, but not revoked by the CBSA.
A heavily redacted CBSA internal communication on the MCC website — an email dated October 22, 2020 with the subject line ‘(Heads Up) Nova Scotia shooting’ — notes that ‘He was a NEXUS member’. In Wortman’s ‘client profile’ (contact information, DOB, etc), his NEXUS status is listed as ‘cancelled’. Although no date is given, one can assume it was a postmortem revocation of privileges.
Doucette said he accompanied Wortman on two smuggling runs from Houlton, Maine to Woodstock, N.B.between 2016 and 2017. Doucette didn’t cross the border either time. Although the Nova Scotia-born and raised Doucette said he lived in the United States in the past, he had once smuggled into Canada a case of six M-16 rifles stolen from the U.S. military which placed him in jeopardy with U.S. authorities.
Doucette said that in the first run he got out of Wortman’s vehicle on the Canadian side and had to wait “a day and a half to two days” for Wortman to return. He was vague about what he did killing time during that period.
“I was just there. I can hang out anywhere,” he said.
When they got back to Portapique, Wortman showed him the AR-15 assault rifle that he had smuggled. It was hidden in a false exhaust that Doucette said he had constructed under the truck.
“The truck looked like it had dual exhausts but one of the exhausts wasn’t an exhaust. It looked like it went into the engine and came out the back of the truck. The middle looked like it was under a skid plate but that was just an empty compartment.”
On the second run to the border, Doucette said that Wortman returned in about two hours with another AR-15 and a 50-calibre Barrett sniper rifle, a weapon that currently retails for about $5,000. But something strange happened.
“He drove right past me and went somewhere else for an hour and a half. He then came back and picked me up,” Doucette said.
Wortman never explained the purpose of the side trip and Doucette was not about to ask him.
“That tells me that he had more in there and sold it somewhere,” Doucette said.
“If he was a (police) agent they’d have to photograph it all,” I said, repeating what I had been told by police sources familiar with such situations.
“I would imagine that,” Doucette said, adding that he didn’t know whether Wortman was working with the RCMP, but considering what had happened it was not beyond the realm of possibility.
In her statements to the RCMP, Banfield said that Wortman hid smuggled goods on the bed of his truck, under the tonneau cover.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Doucette said dismissively.
It is not known what happened to Wortman’s black Ford 150 Platinum.
A call from the Canadian Border Services Agency
About six weeks after Wortman had smuggled the Barrett sniper rifle into Canada, Doucette said he received a call out of the blue from a CBSA agent, whose name he didn’t recall.
Doucette said he had no idea how the CBSA knew his name, phone number or details about Wortman’s smuggling run.
“He asked me about the two guns (the Barrett and AR-15),” Doucette said. “I have no idea how they knew about them.”
The conversation didn’t go far, Doucette said, but it raises questions about what law enforcement knew about Wortman’s activities during that time period.
In the earliest days after the massacres, Nova Scotia RCMP commanding officers Chris Leather and Darren Campbell indicated that Wortman was never on their radar for his criminal activities – at least not in Nova Scotia.
However, it should be noted that in 2016 the RCMP’s J Division in New Brunswick initiated three major operations focused on the Hells Angels and its expansion into the Maritimes. Projects Trident, Thunder and Thunderstruck were joint forces operations involving, among others, the Fredericton and Halifax police departments as well as Border Security. The primary targets of the multi-agency investigation were Hells Angels Nomads Robin Moulton and Emery “Pit” Martin who were arrested and charged in 2017 and 2018 respectively, and imprisoned.
Moulton resided near Woodstock, NB and when arrested was found to be carrying a 9mm Beretta handgun, a model that Wortman was known to have smuggled into Canada around that time.
Wortman’s cell phone
The RCMP and Lisa Banfield have insisted from the start that Wortman did not use a cell phone and that all calls to him were handled by Banfield.
Robert Doucette says otherwise.
He first brought up Wortman having a cell phone on April 19, 2020 at his first interview with police, which was conducted by Halifax Detective Constable Anthony McGrath. Doucette said the interview took place at RCMP headquarters at 80 Garland Avenue in Dartmouth.
In the 40-page transcript, Doucette is quoted as saying, “He can watch every one of his properties from his phone.”
Although the time of the interview isn’t given, it’s clear we are very early in the proceeding, as Doucette at least isn’t even aware that Wortman’s rampage had come to an end. So only a few hours, at most, had elapsed since Lisa Banfield (allegedly!-ed.) emerged from the woods in Portapique and told Const. Terry Brown that Wortman didn’t have a cell phone of his own.
Four days later on April 23, Constable Dayle Burris and Corporal Kathryn MacLeod conducted a follow up 31-minute interview with Doucette.
“Rob, every little detail is important,” Burris said at one point. “Don’t leave anything out.”
But the meandering line of questioning didn’t include any attempt to find out more about the phone.
Meanwhile, in his interview with us, Doucette said that over the years Wortman was disciplined about his secret phone, the number to which he never gave out, even to Doucette.
“He hid it in the door panel of the truck. It was always in silent mode,” Doucette said.
“Lisa didn’t even know about it. I saw it. It was an Android phone like a Samsung. He never called me on it, and I didn’t know the number to it.”
Others who have since gone on the record as saying Wortman didn’t have a phone — statements happily parroted by police — include neighbours Dana Geddes and Cyndi Starrett, among others.
Doucette said Wortman used to monitor his home, business and warehouse security cameras on the cell phone.
The issue of whether Wortman had access to a cell phone has persisted since the massacres. At some points on Sunday April 19, it appears that someone was calling into the RCMP with information that was designed to throw off the Mounties.
For example, there was a call at around 10 a.m. about a dead woman in a car at the Hidden Hilltop Campground, just north of Masstown. It came just as the police thought they were closing in on Wortman on the Fisher family property just to the south of the campground. There has never been an explanation given for the dead woman in the car saga.
Likewise, if Wortman had a phone, a call from him about the police car parked at the Onslow-Belmont firehall might explain the strange behaviour of the two Mounties who shot at one of their own members and an EMO worker that morning.
The RCMP has denied that Wortman had a phone, but its statements must be weighed against the fact that the force was destroying evidence in the case in the months afterward until it was finally ordered to stop doing so in the fall of 2020.
Prior to the interviews with Doucette, two different police sources told Frank Magazine that they strongly believed that Wortman had a police-issued undercover cell phone.
Lisa Banfield – ammunition and guns
In December 2020 Lisa Banfield, her brother James and brother-in-law Brian Brewster were each charged with illegally supplying ammunition to Wortman, some of which he used in the 22 murders that were committed that weekend.
His finances exhausted by the legal battle, James Banfield eventually pleaded guilty to a charge. Earlier this year, as her case was set to go to trial, Banfield’s case was transferred to Restorative Justice, as was Brewster’s. This meant everything would be hidden away in a closed and odd process, considering the facts. Restorative justice means the two sides in a crime come together, talk things over and work out a resolution, as if it were a dispute that could ever be resolved.
Doucette said he told the MCC investigators that Banfield had been purchasing ammunition for Wortman “since around 2010 or 2011. She wasn’t around Portapique all that much but when she did come up, I saw her bring ammunition. I don’t know if she had a PAL (Possession and Acquisition Licence). She got ammunition for everything except the Barrett. I don’t think it’s easy to get .50 calibres in Canada. I think Gabe brought a bunch of those in from the States.”
Doucette said he and Wortman used to shoot the guns, especially at the warehouse property with its long, cleared fields.
He said Wortman liked shooting the Barrett but wasn’t a very good shot at first. Doucette said that after he coached Wortman “he could take the top off a beer bottle from 500 yards or so.”
Doucette said he twice saw Banfield firing a Glock 40 pistol outside the cottage at 200 Portapique Beach Road. He said she was inexperienced at the time and that the gun was too much for it.
“She almost lost the gun over her head … and she handed it to me and shook her head,” Doucette said.
The grenades
Lost in the shuffle over the past two years of stalling and deflections by the RCMP and the Mass Casualty Commission was the story of Wortman and the grenades.
Originally, the RCMP had blacked out mention of grenades in their Informations to Obtain a Search Warrant. Police sources told me the blacked-out word was grenades – possibly phosphorous grenades.
Eventually the word was unredacted in a mass release of information and lost in the deluge as stories considered sexier overwhelmed the news flow of the day.
But Wortman and the grenades are likely vital to the underlying story – Wortman and his relationships with biker gangs and his possible role as a Confidential Informant or police agent.
Of all the secret compartments that Doucette built for Wortman, one was in his warehouse at 136 Orchard Beach Drive under a work bench. That’s where he stored grenades.
Doucette said that Wortman had smuggled two cases of grenades across the border and that they came in a green U.S. military case with yellow lettering.
They were not phosphorus grenades.
“He showed them to me and asked me exactly how they worked,” Doucette recalled.
“They were nail grenades. They were about as thick as a pen refill. Double headed. No ends – 3 ¼ inches long. Each one holds between 75 and 100 of these nails. All you do is twist these grenades, a quarter of a turn, and throw it. It will land in a room, bounce and then it will wobble. It will stand up straight up and down like an egg and when they go there is nothing in this room that wouldn’t be hit.”
While anything to do with Wortman’s activities with criminals is constantly being downplayed by officialdom, the existence of the grenades may well be the key to what was really going on in Wortman’s world.
The police hunt for grenades featured largely in search warrants issued to Trident, Thunder and Thunderstruck investigators in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Ontario, according to court records and sources.
In the underworld, shrapnel grenades are an exotic item most suited to the tastes of a select group outlaw motorcycle clubs, the only likely buyers. Wortman’s possession of the grenades raises obvious questions: Was he working with the bikers and supplying them with guns and grenades or was he working with the police to set those bikers up?
Doucette said he doesn’t know to whom Wortman was selling grenades, but conceded that it was at least his understanding that Wortman was selling guns and other paraphernalia to a number of Nova Scotia motorcycle club members over the years. These included the Darksiders and two Colchester County clubs – The Highlanders and the Mountain Men Rednecks. Police sources added that the Red Devils, a Hells Angels support club, were also likely Wortman customers.
A police source says that Wortman was a frequent visitor to the old Darksiders’ club house near his denturist clinic on Portland Street.
“The door to the right was for members while the door to the left was for associates and friends of the club,” the policeman said.
“I’ve been told that Wortman always went to the left.”
Doucette concurred, saying that Wortman was accepted by some of them as “a friend of the club” because he provided them with products they needed.
Law enforcement sources and others interviewed by Frank Magazine say each of the above assertions by Doucette raises serious and concerning unanswered questions about Wortman, police operations and the approach being taken by the Mass Casualty Commission investigating Wortman and the RCMP response.
Doucette, himself, is skeptical about the Mass Casualty Commission: “From what I can see, they are not trying to get to the truth.”
NEXT: The man who shot Wortman’s pet wild bear.
https://40gallonsandamule.blogspot.com/2020/06/tracking-gabriel-wortman-mountie-ci.html
Saturday, June 13, 2020
tracking the Gabriel Wortman, mountie CI claim though public online obits
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| the Hells Angel-Prison Guard angle - Paul droppin’ bad acid - or what ? |
In fact, if you are like me, you feel more than ordinarily trapped behind a computer screen inside your home - thanks Covid !
How then do you get a sense that the media reports you hear have any truth to them ?
What I do first and foremost when reading a news story is to put the names I come across - particularly names that seem unusually rare - into a google search combined with the words “survived by” or “visit the grave of”. Searching for online obits.
Basically I am using the skills of genealogy 101 to do a little amateur detecting on a mass killer’s life.
Author and RCMP critic Paul Palango was on the Rick Howe radio show on June 11th, detailing his theories that the unstable and violent GW was given a lot of slack by the RCMP because he was a CI (informant) to the New Brunswick RCMP with regards to the Hells Angels and Mexican drug cartels etc.
Heavy stuff - is Paul just dropping bad acid and spinning this stuff out of his butt —- or what ?
He mentions an NS born Hells Angel called Peter Alan Griffon. I google that unusual name and “survived by” and get the obit of Tom Kavalak of Springhill NS.
Kavalak is survived by Joanne (Alan) Griffon of near by Portapique and Audrey McLeod of near by Truro. Audrey’s son is called Sean. Same name was one of GW victims. I google Sean McLeod and survived by Audrey Truro and a Chronicle Herald obit confirms the Portapique Hell’s Angel and the Hunter Road murdered prison guard are cousins.
About the same time, Paul is making that same point on the Rick Howe Show.
On this particular claim, a minute googling confirmed Paul was indeed ‘telling the truth’.
Now was that so very hard - for me - or any ordinary citizen - to do ?
Friday, June 19, 2020
Wortman, CI - mounties move anti-biker operations to NB - suicide staff sergeant Bruce Reid
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| What connection - if any - between his tragic death & Wortman story ? |
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Library Catalogue
Dispersing the fog : inside the secret world of Ottawa and the RCMP / Paul Palango.
Location
Public Safety Canada Library
Resource
Books & Reports
Alternate Title
Inside the secret world of Ottawa and the RCMP
Call Number
HV 8157 P35d 2008
Authors
Publishers
- Toronto : Key Porter Books, c2008.
Description
544 p. ; 24 cm.
Summary
This book examines the recent history of the RCMP, arguing that Canadians should be concerned about its mandate, its performance, and its too-close relationship to government and politics. It gives an overview of the politically-charged investigations that have shaped the relationship between governments of Canada and the RCMP since the 1980s, such as the Income Trust scandal, Airbus, Project Sidewinder (a joint RCMP-CSIS investigation), the RCMP pensions and insurance scandal, and the Maher Arar case, concluding that the federal and provincial governments have re-shaped the RCMP over the past three decades for their own political purposes and that this influence has damaged both the RCMP as an organization, and undermined national security.
Subject
Contents
1. A typo: the key to a monumental intrigue. -- 2. Jean Chrétien and Giuliano Zaccardelli. -- 3. The emperor commissioner. -- 4. The invisible hand of Stephen Harper. -- 5. Maher Arar takes the stage. -- 6. The Mounties charge into the fog. -- 7. The crowing of an influential man. -- 8. My attempts to interview Maher Arar. -- 9. Arar reconsidered. -- 10. Behind the typo: CIM 2000 Inc. -- 11. Arar's travels. -- 12. The Canadian candidate and the scapegoat. -- 13. A convenient diversion. -- 14. The lost guardians. -- 15. The Arar gatekeepers take over the RCMP. -- 16. Shades of truth. -- 17. The secret armies of the RCMP. -- 18. The four horsemen of the apocalypse. -- 19. All the dead young saints. -- 20. Federal policing - the biggest scandal? -- 21. Airbus I - le cercle of disturbing benefactors. -- 22. Airbus II - lyin' Brian and his media "enemies". -- 23. Project sidewinder: the "power" behind the throne. -- 24. Canada's undermined national security. -- 25. The Australian model: constant evolution. -- 26. The lurking dangers of "integrated policing". -- 27. A not-so-invisible hand, after all.
Items
| # | Call Number | Status | Location | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HV 8157 P35d 2008 | On Shelf | PS-Circ |
Was Maher Arar linked to the FBI?
A journalist who has written three books on the RCMP says a typographical error in a federal commission of inquiry report led him to discover a great deal about Maher Arar’s past. Paul Palango, author of the new book Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP (Key Porter Books, $32.95), told the Straight in a phone interview that he wonders if Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer, has had a long-standing relationship with the FBI. Palango also said he thinks that the federal government made former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli a fall guy, possibly to cover this up.
Zaccardelli resigned in 2006 after revelations that the RCMP shared information about Arar with U.S. authorities, who detained him at an airport in New York. “They had to have a scapegoat to hammer home this Arar story,” Palango said. “And he was made a scapegoat.”
A commission headed by Ontario associate chief justice Dennis O’Connor had a mandate to report on the period between Arar’s detention in the United States on September 26, 2002, and Arar’s return to Canada in October 2003. O’Connor determined that Arar was shipped to Syria by the Americans and tortured, even though he posed no threat to national security. Prime Minister Stephen Harper later announced a $12.5-million settlement (including legal fees) for Arar, who never testified under oath to anyone about his experiences.
Palango, a former national news editor at the Globe and Mail, said he had originally planned to write one chapter on Arar as an example of RCMP bungling. But it mushroomed into a much larger portion of the book as he learned more about the case. He noted that the O’Connor commission report provided very little information about Arar’s past.
“I didn’t know who he was,” Palango said. “If you asked the basic questions of journalists—who, what, where, when, why, and how—he’s like an invisible man.”
Palango discovered that the O’Connor commission report misspelled the name of a company that was listed as part of Arar’s employment history. In one place, it was identified as “CIM21000 Inc.”, and in another, it was written as “CIM2000”.
Palango later discovered that Arar had set up a company with a slightly different name, CIM 2000 Inc., which was registered between 1997 and 2000 in the name of his former sister-in-law, Parto Navidi. At the time, she and her ex-husband, Mourad Mazigh, were living in a house owned by an arms dealer named Pietro Rigolli. Rigolli was later jailed for violating a U.S. embargo on selling military hardware to Iran. Palango reports in his book that search warrants were executed on Navidi’s house and at a building at a Montreal airport, but that the affidavits to support the search warrants disappeared from a Montreal courthouse in 2000. In the book, Palango notes that it’s unclear whether Arar lived in the house with his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law’s then-wife.
Palango said that if in fact Arar was living there, “In light of the Rigolli investigation, which was conducted on both sides of the border in 1999 and 2000, Arar and his family would have been identified as being the tenants of Rigolli’s house. And all of those connections would have been made.”
In 1999, Arar went to Boston to work for a company called MathWorks, which Palango said was a contractor for the CIA and the U.S. defence department. Palango said that Arar appeared to have no difficulty obtaining work permits for the U.S., adding that it’s unlikely Arar was ever linked to terrorism.
“You can only infer from this that there is a special relationship between the U.S. government and Arar that had to be protected,” Palango maintained. “So what is that relationship? And why I lean towards the American angle is because of his access into the States. He can renew his work permits. He goes to work for MathWorks. You know, it seems all orchestrated to me.”
In a 2005 article citing unnamed CIA sources, the Washington Post reported that of 39 people who were sent to jails overseas through a process known as rendition, about 10 were later found to be innocent. Palango said that they all shared similar stories, which increased his suspicions about the true nature of the Arar case. As well, he claimed, all later got involved in left-wing politics. Arar’s wife, Monia Mazigh, the sister of Mourad Mazigh, ran for the federal NDP in the 2004 election. “So where does the FBI or CIA or U.S. intelligence want to be?” Palango said. “Where do they want information? It’s from the left wing.”
The Straight left a message for Arar through his publicist; Arar did not return the call by deadline.
Charlie Smith
Charlie Smith has been editor of the Georgia Straight since 2005. Before that, he was the paper's news editor.
Dispersing the Fog
Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP
- Publisher
- Key Porter Books
- Initial publish date
- Oct 2008
- Category
- General
Description
Dispersing the Fog is an unprecedented and explosive report compiled from an investigation into the politics and justice system of Canada, focusing primarily on the relationship between governments of Canada since the 1980s and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Until recently, no institution in Canada has enjoyed such admiration and respect as the Mounties. They were beloved. They were trusted. They were respected.
From its humble beginnings in 1874, the Mounties have evolved into a hugely complex police force with almost 16,000 officers and nearly 10,000 civilians with an annual budget of $4 billion. There is no police service in the world like it, and for good reason. For more than 35 years the RCMP has found itself mired in a seemingly unending litany of organizational, legal and political controversies, the kinds of scandals that would have ruined a similar-sized corporation.
How did it all go so wrong?
In Dispersing the Fog, Paul Palango provides answers to questions that have long simmered in the consciousness of Canadians. Why was Ottawa so anxious to settle in the Maher Arar case? What were the roots of the Income Trust scandal that helped to get Stephen Harper elected Prime Minister of Canada? Was Brian Mulroney an innocent victim of biased journalists in the ongoing Airbus imbroglio? Why did governments cover up the truth in Project Sidewinder, a joint RCMP-CSIS investigation?
Palango builds on the powerful and influential arguments made in his first two RCMP books, Above the Law and The Last Guardians, to show Canadians why they should be concerned about the RCMP, its mandate, its performance and its relationship to governments and politics.
No other author knows the subject matter better than Palango. Dispersing the Fog is not just a book about the RCMP, but a story about the political and justice systems in general and a wake-up call for any Canadian concerned about the security and integrity of the country.
Dispersing the Fog is an elegant, thorough and conclusive debunking of the many myths of the RCMP and the Canadian way of policing. It shows clearly how the federal and provincial governments have encouraged and nurtured the RCMP over the past three decades for their own political purposes. It takes the reader on a step-by-step, virtually invisible process whereby one prime minister after another toyed or parried with the RCMP in pursuit of his own respective agenda.
In our post-9/11 world, Dispersing the Fog addresses the role played by RCMP leaders, politicians and the media, who have all collectively failed to recognize and address the very real and articulate concerns of Canadians from coast to coast who have long questioned the ability or willingness of the RCMP to carry out its duties.
No one who cares about democracy and the health of the country's guardian institutions can afford to ignore this book.
CORRECTION
Dispersing the Fog written by Paul Palango and published by Key Porter in 2008 incorrectly identified Julie Van Dusen as the source of a question posed by a member of parliament at the ethics committee into the Mulroney-Schreiber affair. Ms. Van Dusen reported on the proceedings but was not the source of any questions.
Key Porter and Paul Palango apologise for this mistake.
About the author
PAUL PALANGO was born in Hamilton, Ontario and earned a degree in journalism from Carleton University. He has worked at the Hamilton Spectator (1974-1976), covered the Toronto Blue Jays in their first season for the Toronto Sun (1977), and worked at the Globe and Mail from 1977 to 1990 as City Editor and National Editor—where he was responsible for the supervision of investigative journalism done by Globe reporters across the country. In 1989, on behalf of the Globe and its staff, he was selected to accept the Michener Award from then Governor-General Jeanne Sauve. After leaving the Globe, he worked as a freelancer, writing a city column for eye weekly magazine in Toronto for almost five years. In 1993, he began work as a fraud investigator for a leading forensic accounting firm, which allowed him to see the justice system from a unique perspective. In that capacity, he traveled extensively around North America investigating fraud, including an arson investigation in Saskatchewan, in which he helped the Mounties there focus on the likely perpetrator, who eventually was convicted and went to prison. He has worked on investigations for the Fifth Estate—including a case involving links between Hamilton mobsters and then Deputy Prime Minister Sheila Copps—as well as investigative journalist pieces for Saturday Night, MacLean’s, Elm Street, Canadian Business and Hamilton Magazine, among others. His books include, Above The Law (McClelland & Stewart) and The Last Guardians (McClelland & Stewart 1998).
Other titles by Paul Palango
22 Murders
Investigating the Massacres, Cover-up and Obstacles to Justice in Nova Scotia
- Publisher
- Random House of Canada
- Initial publish date
- Apr 2022
- Category
- General, Organized Crime, Law Enforcement
Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A shocking exposé of the deadliest killing spree in Canadian history, and how police tragically failed its victims and survivors.
As news broke of a killer rampaging across the tiny community of Portapique, Nova Scotia, late on April 18, 2020, details were oddly hard to come by. Who was the killer? Why was he not apprehended? What were police doing? How many were dead? And why was the gunman still on the loose the next morning and killing again? The RCMP was largely silent then, and continued to obscure the actions of denturist Gabriel Wortman after an officer shot and killed him at a gas station during a chance encounter.
Though retired as an investigative journalist and author, Paul Palango spent much of his career reporting on Canada’s troubled national police force. Watching the RCMP stumble through the Portapique massacre, only a few hours from his Nova Scotia home, Palango knew the story behind the headlines was more complicated and damning than anyone was willing to admit. With the COVID-19 lockdown sealing off the Maritimes, no journalist in the province knew the RCMP better than Palango did. Within a month, he was back in print and on the radio, peeling away the layers of this murderous episode as only he could, and unearthing the collision of failure and malfeasance that cost a quiet community 22 innocent lives.
Editorial Reviews
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
PRAISE FOR PAUL PALANGO:
“Why isn’t the Nova Scotia mass shooting a national scandal? It may well turn out to be if Paul Palango has anything to say about it.” NOW (Toronto)
Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP
Paul Palango has a lot of material to work with in his new book about the ineptitude, incompetence, and, in some cases, outright corruption of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Having drifted far from the public image of probity that the Mounties have cultivated – and, Palango contends, have come to rely on to maintain their popular support – the force is in need of major changes.
Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP covers everything from the RCMP's mishandling of the Air India investigation – due in part to the force’s ongoing rivalry with CSIS – to its role in the Maher Arar affair. Along the way, Palango points out more pedestrian examples of backwardness, such as the force’s outmoded training system and the shockingly long list of recent casualties. After all of this, the RCMP comes off worse than the Baltimore Police Department of David Simon’s TV series The Wire.
The RCMP’s investigations of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber offer all sorts of material for Palango, but he goes off in an improbable direction, discussing shadowy groups Le Cercle, the Bilderberg Group, and the Trilateral Commission. He even throws in brief mentions of Opus Dei and the Bavarian Illuminati.
This is the stuff of poorly researched conspiracy theory websites. While there may be something reassuring and even entertaining in invoking nefarious organizations to help explain away some of the political events of the last quarter-century, it is ultimately unconvincing. Palango is on much firmer footing in his second chapter on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair, which focuses on the efforts of reporters to uncover details in the face of institutional roadblocks.
Aside from the drift into conspiracy theory, Dispersing the Fog is a useful catalogue of the many flaws and shortcomings of the RCMP, complete with interesting suggestions for improving their situation.
- SENIOR EDITOR Cassandra Drudi
cassandra.drudi@stjoseph.com - PUBLISHER/ADVERTISING SALES Alison Jones
ajones@quillandquire.com - ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/BOOK REVIEWS Attila Berki
aberki@quillandquire.com
Paul Palango: Democracy and accountability are an illusion
By Paul Palango, straight.com
December 04, 2008
�Aren�t you afraid?�
That is a question I�ve been asked hundreds of times over the past two years as I researched, wrote, and published my latest book, Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP.
The question has been asked of me by curious politicians, bureaucrats, police officers, a judge and an ex-judge, my friends and acquaintances, and members of my own family.
The very fact that it is asked suggests that Canadians are not entirely comfortable in their own country. We think we live in a safe, open society, but at the same time so many Canadians seem to believe that it is dangerous to ask questions or raise issues that might strike at the heart of something darker going on within the country.
Am I afraid?
No and yes.
In my career as a journalist and author, I�ve seen how power is wielded in the shadows.
In the early 1980s, as a reporter at the Globe and Mail, I undertook an investigation into the Urban Transportation Development Corp., an Ontario Crown corporation. The UTDC, as it was known, was the baby of then-premier William Davis, who had received international recognition for promoting the company�s linear-induction train technology. I found that the technology was extremely expensive and would not likely sell in a competitive market without enormous government subsidies.
The UTDC never sold another train after that article.
Back then, Davis took aim at me both personally and professionally. He called me a traitor to Ontario and complained privately to the publisher of the Globe and Mail about my �biased� reporting.
A few weeks later, while I was stopped at a traffic light on University Avenue in Toronto, a reporter for the Toronto Star pulled up beside me, rolled down his window, and said: �I hear you�re going to sports.�
And so it happened. Three weeks later, I was a sports reporter, but the sidetracking did not deter me. A year later I was the sports editor, then city editor and, finally, national editor at the Globe and Mail.
Nevertheless, I continued fighting to the end, driven by the belief that journalism was a calling, not a profession.
Over the years, I witnessed the gradual transformation of newsrooms. New reporters had better and more elaborate pedigrees. I remember one time when then�Globe editor William Thorsell posted the biography of a new young reporter on the bulletin board as an example of what we should all aspire to be. The reporter, Mark Kingwell, had multiple degrees and was an accomplished pianist. As it turned out, he wasn�t much of a reporter, but he turned out to be a notable pop philosopher and author.
Pedigree and university degrees became more important than instinct in the news business. Newsrooms, once rowdy and noisy, became like insurance company offices: neat, tidy, and lifeless. It was no surprise, therefore, that the stories emanating from these newsrooms became just as predictable. News decisions were replaced by business decisions, and the news business still wonders why it is not so highly regarded by the public.
In the 1990s, I wrote two books about the RCMP: Above the Law and The Last Guardians. The first book was widely praised; the second was all but ignored by the mainstream media. I think the reason for this was that I had begun to focus on the unseemly political realities of Canada, for example, the politicization of the bureaucracy and the lack of checks and balances built into the system.
At one point in the mid-1990s, I began to investigate the Vancouver Stock Exchange and the influence and activities of members of the Church of Scientology. Nobody would publish the piece, mainly because Time magazine was facing a $500-million lawsuit after having written a slice of that story.
In 1996, I became involved in an investigation in Hamilton, Ontario, of a waste-management company. By just asking questions, I attracted an $11-million lawsuit and death threats
In that investigation, I was among the first�if not the first�to uncover and recognize large-scale accounting fraud. I mistakenly believed that government, police, the banks, and the accounting industry would rush to the rescue, but I had not come to appreciate how much the world had changed in such a short period of time. The mainstream media, fed to the point of satiation on news releases and marketing by governments, business, and themselves, did not want to hear the story. In fact, they were more interested in attacking me.
I was made out to be the enemy, even though the company in question had hired private investigators to conduct surveillance on me and my family. Attempts were made to steal our trash. Someone tried to poison our dogs. My family lived in fear, and our circumstances were severely reduced, but we wouldn�t give in. It took me a decade to fight that lawsuit off and win a favourable settlement.
The two books I had written during this period were not published because of the outstanding litigation. The roaring tigers of the media and publishing world had been reduced to cowering kittens and stenographers.
By the time I came to write Dispersing the Fog, I was battle-hardened. That doesn�t mean I was not fearful, but I was careful and cautious, particularly so when I stumbled into the underlying story of Maher Arar.
The official Arar story was that he was an innocent man who was betrayed by incompetent RCMP and CSIS officers and shipped by the Americans to Syria, where he was tortured for a year. The O�Connor Commission held hearings and the Harper government awarded Arar $10.5 million in compensation in February 2007, and another $2 million for legal fees. I had publicly bashed the RCMP for what it had done on numerous occasions on radio, on television, and in print.
However, as I researched the book, there was much about the Arar story that did not make sense to me, especially after I began to dig deeper into the official story. An apparent typo in the O�Connor Commission report eventually led me back into Arar�s past to a convicted arms dealer. The timing and the circumstances of the arrest of the arms dealer, as well as the fact that documents about the case went missing from a Montreal courthouse in 2000, were extremely suspicious.
As I pursued the Arar story in the fall of 2007, each step I took was measured and thought out in advance. I didn�t want to talk to too many people I did not know, because that could be dangerous. The entire Arar affair had been hidden under the veil of national security. Reporter Juliet O�Neill and the Ottawa Citizen had already been raided by the police after having written stories about Arar�s past, based on tips from anonymous sources. I felt I had to fly under the radar and get my story out before anyone realized what I was doing.
However, strange things did begin to happen. By October 2007, my sources were telling me that the government and the RCMP had issued strict orders that no one discuss the Arar case with me.
In November, my computer started acting weirdly. I found that it was heavily infected with viruses. I installed a new computer on a Wednesday afternoon. It had a Windows firewall and another firewall on its router. The next morning, my brand-new computer was barely functioning. A technician from my Internet provider, Eastlink, worked over the phone with me for more than an hour trying to determine what was wrong. Finally, a technician came to my house. He discovered that overnight someone had hacked into the system and deposited 1,105 copies of viruses and Trojan horses on my hard drive. Eastlink security said that whoever had attacked me had targeted me and was �extremely sophisticated. You should call the police.�
I did not do that. I just changed computers and used my laptop. The next week, my laptop wasn�t working. Someone had managed to get into the registry and flip off my product code.
�Whoever did this must have been in your house,� a security technician from Eastlink told me. �You should call the police.�
I was certain that no one had been in my house, but I asked Eastlink to record both situations in its logs.
I had one more attack similar to the others. I called Halifax police chief Frank Beazley and asked him for advice. He told me to complain to the RCMP about it, but I declined to do so. I knew how the RCMP might try to use something like that against me by suggesting that I was paranoid. I asked Beazley to note my call and concerns in his diary.
So I just soldiered on, changing computers and improving my defences but never going off-line and working on a computer unconnected to the Internet. Call it doublethink. I believed that if I had done so and tried to hide what I was doing, I might have invited an intrusion by whoever was interested in my work.
�Are we in danger?� my wife, Sharon, asked me.
�Maybe, I don�t know,� I told her. �But I may have to go to jail for a while on some trumped-up charge. Will you visit me?�
Things seemed to settle down after that, but when I told my editor, Jonathan Schmidt, at Key Porter Books what had happened, he was stunned. �Our computers have been down for days,� Schmidt said. �Our technicians can�t figure out what happened.�
Maybe there was a connection and maybe not. Maybe it was all just a coincidence, but I had to take whatever was happening seriously.
My phones and computers were always acting up. As I reported in the book, I was mysteriously blocked from some Web sites while probing possible connections to Arar. Nevertheless, I talked openly on the phones and through e-mails and made it clear that copies of my stories were regularly being sent to my publisher, agent, lawyers, and others, including two working journalists. I kept these people in the loop at all times because the dumbest thing for a vulnerable freelancer to do is try to protect an explosive story alone. Ask Danny Casolaro. He ended up dead in August 1991 in a West Virginia motel bathtub, and his file on the �Octopus�, as he called it, went missing forever.
I did not flinch in pursuing this story because I see myself as merely the agent of the story, and the story demanded that I go as far as I possibly could to tell it.
Should I be afraid for my life? It seems like such an unreasonable proposition to even consider, but that�s the way Canadians seem to think. Like a vast colony of J. Alfred Prufrocks, far too many of us are afraid of our shadows, of making a scene or getting peach juice on our clothing. We are caught up in our creature comforts, our ATVs, iPhones, and scripted reality television, willfully oblivious that everything we have can be taken away at a moment�s notice, because no one really seems to believe in anything but the easy life.
Dispersing the Fog is more than the story of Maher Arar; it is an investigation and analysis of the past 30 years of Canadian politics. It conclusively shows, based upon hard and irrefutable evidence, that we have lost control of our own country. There is an appearance of democracy, but real democracy and accountability are an illusion. There is no will at the highest levels to incorporate checks and balances in the system that would serve to protect us all. I guess that�s too dangerous an idea to be discussed openly.
I love Canada. I want Canada to be fair, progressive, and governed by the rule of law. It is a battle worth waging for everyone, even if it means in the short term being personally smeared by politicians, police, and members of the media who are all too cognizant of their own culpability.
That�s the only thing to fear in Canada. You don�t get killed for being on the cutting edge in Canada; you either are ignored or shunned, or get heaps of mud thrown at you. Over the past few weeks, I�ve experienced all three.
I was booked to do a number of shows on national television�CTV�s Canada AM, the CBC�s Sunday Morning�and the CBC radio syndicate, among others. Each cancelled at the last minute. Why? We can�t find out. My public-relations person, Pat Cairns, says she has never seen a media response like that. She�s astonished. It�s clear that not only my well-researched Arar story but everything else in the book�about the RCMP, Jean Chr�tien, Brian Mulroney, Stephen Harper, and the state of Canada�is making too many people nervous.
Although the media is aware of what I have written, no one, to my knowledge, has bothered to confirm or refute what I report. To do so would only open a can of worms that no one�the government, political parties, or, especially, the mainstream media�wants to touch.
Instead, the official Arar story is perpetuated ad nauseam as if I had written nothing. The CBC�s Anna Maria Tremonti was almost in tears in early November while interviewing Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, about her recently published memoirs.
An executive producer for The Hour said George Stroumboulopoulos wasn�t interested in my story, and a week later, on November 27, Stroumboulopoulos interviewed Arar and Mazigh again, promoting Mazigh�s book without ever popping a meaningful question about Arar�s mysterious past.
I have been tarred as a conspiracy theorist�the lowest of the low�which is the Canadian way of shooting the messenger. I�ve even heard reporters say that my Arar story is not credible because I do not have �official sources� confirming it, as if the government would admit to what it has done. Many of the facts I dug out were unknown to the original RCMP investigators in the Arar case, hidden from them by their own force. The great irony is that the Canadian media got sucked into the Arar story because it relied religiously only on official sources who manipulated it into a box. The facts speak for themselves�the emperor is in the buff.
Those who have read it tell me Dispersing the Fog is a powerful and important story about the way Canada works and who is pulling the strings.
My brave publisher at Key Porter Books believes Dispersing the Fog is a landmark work�an elephant in the room that cannot be ignored forever. Just how long it will take to break through this journalistic blockade is anyone�s guess.
Thank you for letting me take this shower in public. And no, I have no problems sleeping at night.
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