Gérald Gallant

The fourth of five children, Gallant was born in Saguenay, Quebec and dropped out of school with a fifth-grade education.[5] He became involved in crime and, in 1975, began associating with senior West End Gang member Raymond Desfossés, who he first met while they were incarcerated together at Cowansville.[6] Gallant was taken under the wing of Desfossés, for whom he performed his first contract killing on 30 January 1980. Gallant's victim in this case was Louis Desjardins, a drug dealer who Desfossés suspected of cooperating with authorities. Desjardins was lured to a tyre garage owned by Gallant in Port-Cartier, where he was shot in the head. Gallant continued killing for Desfossés throughout the 1980s and 1990s, performing a contract roughly once every two years, for which he was paid $10,000 to $12,000 per murder.[5] On 16 February 1984, he killed Marcel Lefrançois in Sainte-Foy. Lefrançois had refused to pay Gallant for the contract killing of André Haince, who was executed two years earlier.[7] Although Desfossés did not order the hit, he provided a driver, Réjean-Claude Juneau, for the murder.[6] In one instance in October 1985, Gallant refused to kill Gilles "Balloon" Côté because Côté had a child with him, although he fatally shot Côté the following day when he was alone.[5] On 28 May 1990, he killed Montreal strip club owner Salvatore Luzi in Lorraine in a contract again given by Desfossés. Police believe the motive for the killing involved money lost in Luzi's strip club by West End Gang leader Allan Ross.[6]

Throughout the Quebec Biker War of the 1990s and early 2000s, Gallant was employed by Michel Duclos, leader of the Dark Circle, and he was also contracted several times by the Rock Machine. He was hired by Frédéric Faucher seven times; other Rock Machine leaders Giovanni Cazzetta and Claude Vézina also hired him on numerous occasions between 1994 and 2002.[8] In 1998, Gallant's most prolific year as a hitman, he killed five men, including Paul Cotroni Jr., the son of deposed Cotroni crime family boss Frank Cotroni.[5] In 1999, he fatally shot Luc Bergeron, a private detective who happened to be living in an apartment formerly occupied by his intended target, a Hells Angels associate.[9]

During the 7 July 2000 assassination of Robert "Bob" Savard, a loanshark linked with the Hells Angels, at a restaurant in Montréal-Nord, Savard's associate Normand Descôteaux and waitress Hélène Brunet were also shot and wounded by Gallant. He later expressed remorse for the shooting of Brunet.[5] Gallant also planned a hit on Hells Angels leader Maurice Boucher on behalf of Desfossés in 2000. The plan was called off, however, because of the intense police surveillance Boucher was under at the time.[6] On 30 May 2001, Gallant killed bar manager Yvon Daigneault and wounded Michel Paquette in a case of mistaken identity in Sainte-Adèle.[5] According to Gallant, the actual target was Claude Faber, a former associate of the West End Gang who owed $250,000 to Desfossés. Desfossés supplied Gallant with the wrong licence plate number while providing instructions for the hit, however. Gallant left his DNA on a beer bottle recovered by police at the crime scene, an error which was pivotal to the police in launching Project Baladeur, an investigation that revealed Gallant killed 28 people in all.[6] His last murder, of Christian Duchaine, was committed on 12 March 2003.[10]

Gallant was first arrested in 2006 by Swiss police, who arrested him in Geneva for credit card fraud.[11] During the interrogation for the Swiss arrest, he admitted to the murders in Canada and was quickly extradited.[11] After his arrest, Gallant became a police informer, providing information that led to the arrest of ten others involved in the murders and attempted murders.[12] In March 2009, he accepted a plea deal from Canadian authorities and pleaded guilty to 27 murders and 12 attempted murders.[13][14] He received 48 life sentences with no eligibility for parole until 2033.[15]

He was the subject of Gallant: confessions d’un tueur à gages, a 2015 non-fiction book written by Éric Thibault and Félix Séguin.[16] The book was adapted by director Luc Picard and screenwriter Sylvain Guy for the 2021 film Confessions of a Hitman (Confessions), starring Picard as Gallant.[17]