He killed 43 people in cold blood and now, having wasted his one chance at redemption, Yves (Apache) Trudeau is going back to jail under the double stigma of being both an informant and a child molester.
Mr. Trudeau, a former Hells Angels hit man, was out on parole from a life sentence because he testified in organized-crime trials.
But he got in trouble again: Yesterday, he was sentenced to four concurrent four-year terms for sexually assaulting a young boy.
Because his life sentence is still in effect, there is practically no likelihood of the 58-year-old ever getting parole again.
"Mr. Trudeau, you have a deplorable past and a grim future," Quebec Court Judge Michel Duceppe said in agreeing with the Crown's sentencing recommendation.
The judge noted: "In your lifetime, you have killed more people than the Canadian military did in the Gulf War."
Prison inmates have little love for either informants or sex offenders, so Mr. Trudeau will have to be kept in isolation 23 hours a day, but that is not a mitigating factor, Judge Duceppe said.
"There is definitely a wicked instinct encrusted in your persona," he told the accused.
Blood-soaked and lurid, Mr. Trudeau's life story is remarkable.
One of Canada's first Hells Angels and a founding member of the now defunct Laval chapter, he shot, strangled or bombed dozens of people in the 1970s and 1980s.
However, the Laval chapter was so dissolute and undisciplined that other gang members decided to purge it. Lured to a meeting in Lennoxville, five were machine-gunned. Another was murdered later, and the six bodies, wrapped in sleeping bags and cuffed to cinderblocks, were dumped in the St. Lawrence River.
Mr. Trudeau was in a detoxification centre and missed the Lennoxville meeting. That saved his life. He turned informant when he learned that his former biker brothers had put out a contract on him.
In return for his testimony against the Angels, he got to plead guilty to 43 counts of manslaughter, which officially means that he didn't really mean to kill all those people.
He got a life sentence but, after serving seven years, he was paroled.
Under the alias Denis Côté, he resettled in the Valleyfield area, lived with a woman who didn't know his past and worked in nursing homes, helping elderly people and driving a bus for the handicapped.
He was laid off in 2000 and went on welfare.
Starting around that time, he also had sex with a 13-year-old boy, whom he plied with wine and beer, the court heard.
Mr. Trudeau pleaded guilty shortly after his arrest this spring. Courtroom observers were surprised to find that the infamous killer was a small, aging, bearded man who couldn't find a lawyer willing to represent him.
A life sentence is permanent, and because of the conviction for the sex offences, Mr. Trudeau's parole will most likely be revoked.
Mr. Trudeau told the court he didn't want to go back "inside."
He pointed out that he would end up in solitary confinement because, in jail, informants don't want to be held with sex offenders and sex offenders don't want to be held with informants. Neither wants to be in the general prison population.
He said he wanted to take care of his 84-year-old mother.
"For the remainder of my life, I don't intend to do anything bad. . . . I'm pretty tame now," he said at a previous hearing.