Blood in the Water Read online

  Well, said Guy, his own philosophy was, don’t confront Phillip, just go talk him down. It might take you a day or two to get him down, but that way nothing would happen. You have to realize that Phillip knew how to work the system perfectly. If the cops have a complaint against you, for instance, you have a right to know who complained—and once Phillip found out it was you, he could come back and “play a trick” to get back at you. He’d do $10,000 of damage to your property, they wouldn’t catch him, and who would pay for the damage? You would. You’d be the one to suffer.

  Since the cops weren’t going to do anything anyway, what was the point of complaining? The cops claimed they didn’t have the resources to take any real action—and the Fisheries guys said that their budgets had been cut so badly that they had guns but no bullets. And each of them said it was the other one’s responsibility. If Phillip’s stealing lobsters from a fisherman’s traps, that’s theft, and it’s a police matter. If he’s setting traps illegally, that’s a Fisheries matter. So each of them would send you off to talk to the other. In the end you were going to deal with it yourself anyway, so why involve the authorities?

  I had been told that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans called a pre-season meeting of all the lobster fishermen in the district every year—and that every year the fishermen asked “What are you going to do about Phillip Boudreau?” and every year they received bland assurances. Nothing was ever done—and now, amazingly, the minutes of those meetings seemed to have “disappeared.” Guy nodded. He was at the meeting before the 2013 season, just a few weeks before Phillip’s death.

  For Guy, Phillip was simply a fact of life, and you dealt with him as best you could. In effect—though Guy didn’t use these words—Phillip was running something like a protection racket. He’d reportedly driven a pickaxe into the engine block of a boat belonging to a fisherman who’d crossed him—and that served to remind people like Guy of the high cost of displeasing Phillip. Marine diesel engines aren’t cheap, as Guy had reason to know. When we spoke, he had just put a new Cummins into his own boat. The engine cost him $50,000, the installation another $30,000.

  Nevertheless, some of Phillip’s antics were quite amusing. He would board and rummage through one boat after another at the fishermen’s wharf, snacking and browsing as he went. The fishermen didn’t mind that—a few bottles of pop, a bag of chips or whatever, who cares? On one occasion a group of them were having a few drinks aboard a boat and ran out of booze. Phillip offered to go get some, and soon returned with a bottle. A bit later, another skipper came along complaining that he’d been robbed of a bottle. Too bad, said the boys, that’s terrible. Sit down, have a drink.

  “Phillip wasn’t a bad kid,” Guy concluded. “He was quite likable, really.” That said, he was rumoured to be bipolar, so “you’d never know which Phillip you were going to be dealing with. He shouldn’t have been sent to jail all the time; that was no good for him. He should have gotten treatment. He didn’t have much education; he should have been sent back to school. They said he had a mind like a four-year-old. I wonder if he really understood that what he was doing was wrong.”

  ISLAND VOICES

  “You got better deals from Phillip than you ever got from Walmart.”

  “They didn’t have to kill him. They could have boarded his boat, beat the shit out of him, broke his knees, and called the cops. They could have said he threatened them with a rifle. They would’ve got a rap on the knuckles—but with his record, Phillip would have gone to jail for ten years and come out a broken man in his fifties, no threat to anyone.”

  “No. Wouldn’t have worked. Phillip had his own friends, you know. All it would have taken was one phone call: ‘I’ll give you two grand to burn that fellow out.’ ”

  “Phillip was sort of a strange genius, because he figured out exactly where the holes were in the system, and he used them. He didn’t ‘fall between the cracks.’ He lived in the cracks.”

  * * *

  —

  RCMP Staff Sergeant Daniel Parent was posted to Arichat twice, the second time as NCO in charge of the detachment. Now retired, he lives in Auld’s Cove, on the mainland side of the Strait of Canso, and runs a small business doing household maintenance and repairs. He has vivid memories of Phillip Boudreau, whom he refers to as “Phillip à Bowser.”

  “Over the years I’ve investigated him several times,” he said, sitting at his kitchen table one afternoon. “At one point I had twenty-six criminal charges against him, twenty-six to thirty criminal charges. Most of it was property related, but there were also some threats to this one and threats to that one, different people from the area. I was trying to find him, but he just couldn’t be found. He was hiding but he kept committing these crimes, one after the other. He was quite active. A source called me and told me where he was, so I went out there and I grabbed him—I just barged into the house and went upstairs, and he didn’t have the time to move or anything.

  “We got him charged and he was kept in custody without bail, because he kept on doing his things. So we had to put a stop to that. At some point he was being transferred back to Sydney and he asked the driver of the sheriff’s department van to stop so he could go relieve himself—but when he went down the ditch, he just started running again and disappeared.

  “One time he cost us a brand-new Chev. A fisherman had his boat at the wharf, and he had a generator. It was part of his tools, I guess. So one day the generator went missing.” The problem, said the fisherman, was that if he had a breakdown when he was forty or fifty miles offshore, he’d need his power tools—and without the electricity from the generator, the power tools were useless. That changed Parent’s view of the offence. It wasn’t just theft or property crime; it was a crime that put people in danger, so he took it seriously. It turned out that Phillip was responsible.

  “He just unloaded the generator and hid it into another boat,” Parent recalled, “and a few nights later he and some others came back to pick it up. We were watching. We tried to stop them, but they took off.”

  The thieves were in an all-terrain vehicle, designed for beaches, bogs, and dirt tracks. Parent went after them in his brand-new squad car, leaving his lights off. The narrow road to Alderney Point twists and turns, and it’s lined with houses, so he didn’t want to risk a high-speed chase.

  “I would not turn on the lights until I had them some place where I knew that they could not escape. They were heading back toward his family’s place, and there’s a trail there that goes up to Cap Rouge.” The trail is a narrow ATV track that snakes across the moorland near the beach and then rises steeply up the rim of a seaside cliff. “They had a 4x4, and I had the brand-new Chev. So they took off and I took off behind them, and it was like a roller-coaster kind of thing, quite a wild chase.” Pounding over rocks and through ponds, the Chev took a terrible beating, and eventually its transmission failed. That ended the chase, and pretty much ended the Chev, too.

  “But the next day, two guys show up at the office,” Parent said. “They were sorry blah, blah, blah, they had been with Phillip only to go and pick up the generator, and that’s all they were involved in. So anyway we solved that one—but it cost us a Chev.”

  Like Murvin Marchand, Staff Sergeant Parent found the community deeply divided about Phillip. “Half would be hiding him and the other half would be in fear of him,” he said. “Once in the fall when he was on the loose and we were seeking him, older people kept asking, ‘Are you going to get him?’ The big concern was they could not go to pick berries because they were in fear of him.

  “When he wanted to be nice he could put the smile on and just butter you. Those who liked him would fall to his charm, to his stupid joke or whatever. And if they laugh with him, they’re friends. But if they don’t laugh—‘I’m going to get you.’ That’s basically how he was dealing with most people. Especially elderly people. Most of the people complaining at the time we we
re searching for him were elderly people. The younger crowd, the younger generation, some of them could stand up to him. Not that they would always challenge him either, because he was sneaky and could come at you from behind.”

  ISLAND VOICES

  “The lobsters that he stole, there’s lots of people around here bought them. There’s lots of guilt to go around.”

  “You can’t blame a poor man for buying food cheap when he can get it. And somebody else was going to buy it anyways.”

  “I blame the cowards that hired Phillip to do their own dirty work. Now he’s dead, but they’re the ones to blame. How do they sleep at night?”

  * * *

  —

  Marcel Heudes, whose home isn’t far from Phillip’s, was frank about having helped to hide him. Yeah, he said, “I had him hiding in my house for a year, underneath the basement.” Genial, vigorous, and earthy, Marcel is whatever he needs to be, and he gets along just fine. Sometimes he’s a fisherman. Sometimes he’s a construction worker. Sometimes he’s a concrete contractor. Sometimes he’s in Alberta, sometimes in Ontario. Sometimes he’s in Alderney Point. Phillip certainly exasperated him, but he and Phillip were friends all their lives.

  Marcel Heudes is also the only person I’ve met who made a sustained and realistic effort to help Phillip turn his life around. The only time Phillip ever held a steady job was when he worked for Marcel in Calgary for nine months. That sequence of events actually started, Marcel said, when Phillip was in prison. Whatever he needed in jail he would have to buy—like a TV, for instance.

  “He would go and phone his brother or sister or mother,” Marcel recalled. “He’d get nothing. So then he’d phone me. It’s a collect call from Phillip in jail. The guard would say, ‘Do you want to talk to Mr. Boudreau?’ ‘Yeah, sure,’ I’d say. ‘What do you want?’ He said, ‘I’d like to have a small thirteen-inch TV.’ I took the guard back on the phone. I said, ‘How much is your TV?’ ‘Seventy-five bucks.’ So I told the wife to write a money for $80, send it to Dorchester, and get him a TV.

  “A week after, collect call from Phillip Boudreau again. What the fuck now? He says, ‘My TV broke down.’ Then the guard come on the phone—‘No,’ he says, ‘Phillip broke his TV. He smashed it on the floor.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’re not getting another one. Bye.’ But a week after he calls again, says I have to buy him another one. So I bought him another one.”

  Phillip was nearing the end of his sentence then, and the correctional service was looking for someone to help him adjust to life outside. At that time Marcel was living in Alberta, but he was willing to help.

  “I said, ‘Fuck, if he wants to move to Alberta, he can stay with me. I got a house, I own my own company, he can work for me.’ They had one of the correctional centre guys come and check what kind of man I was, if I did drugs, if I drank, whatever. Everything was good—and then he asked me, ‘Do you think Phillip will get after your son?’ I looked at him. ‘Phillip is not a murderer,’ I said. So he came and stayed with me.”

  Every month Marcel and Phillip would visit a probation officer together—a man from Halifax, as it happened. Marcel was paying Phillip $16 an hour, a thousand dollars every two weeks. Phillip had no idea how to handle money, but he opened a bank account for the first time and got a credit card with a $1500 limit. He was also eligible, for the first time, for Employment Insurance.

  “Fuck, was he ever happy!” said Marcel. “He was good, he was good, he was a good worker. But I’m going to tell you what happened to him one day in Alberta. In Alberta if there’s change in your truck or something, they take your change—and your cards, they’ll spread them all around. That’s what happened to me. My cards were all over my lawn. Well, Phillip had left his wallet in the cubbyhole of my truck, and I don’t lock my truck. He gets up and there’s no wallet. We found all his cards from his wallet—and was he ever mad!

  “I looked at him and I said, ‘Now you’re mad, but how do you think the people felt back home when you stole from them, you little prick?’ I said, ‘How do you think they felt when they were getting up in the morning and their three-wheeler was gone and you had it?’ Was he ever mad! I couldn’t believe it.

  “I got all his papers, you know.”

  You do? Could I see them? While we talked, Marcel’s mother went off hunting for Phillip’s records. Eventually she found them, and Marcel handed them to me.

  “Look, this is everything there, all the stuff that the correctional centre gave me, his bank statement, I kept everything he had. Here, you can read it all. This is his first payroll. This is his bank receipts or something. He had $66 left in the bank. I wanted to give all this to the family as a memorabilia, but I said, ‘They don’t give a fuck for this. I might as well just keep it for myself as a memorabilia,’ and that’s what I did.”

  The papers included a couple of documents from the correctional service about Phillip’s transfer to Calgary, and his time there. The first, dated April 14, 2008, was written by a Sydney officer who knew Phillip well, having “supervised him, on and off, throughout the past fifteen to eighteen years.” She reeled off a long list of problems: a dysfunctional family background, an incredibly impulsive nature, minimal stress management skills, functional illiteracy, and so on. The prison sentence he was just completing had been extended by six months because Phillip had threatened a female correctional officer—though the writer noted that he actually had “no history of violent and/or aggressive behaviour.” She feared, however, that if he were sent back to Petit de Grat, the result would be the same as on previous occasions: unemployment, drugs, bad company, more offences, more jail time.

  But she had phoned Marcel Heudes, who clearly knew Phillip well. He and his wife, Kim, had already bought Phillip an airline ticket to Calgary and were prepared to “see to it that Phillip has a flight back home if things don’t work out.

  “The current opportunity to relocate and to live and work with an old family friend represents a ‘once in a lifetime chance’ for Phillip Boudreau,” wrote the parole officer. She noted that Phillip was “expressing a desire to alter his lifestyle at this juncture. He has stated that he is getting older and does not want to spend the remainder of his life incarcerated.” The officer was “not optimistic that Phillip will last in Calgary in the long term,” but she concluded that “if Phillip stands any chance of breaking his long standing offence cycle, this could be it.”

  The second document was filed less than a month later by a Calgary parole officer, who noted that Marcel and Kim Heudes were providing Phillip with “emotional, moral, residential and financial support.” In addition, Phillip was receiving “positive support” from Marcel’s brother Gilles (the officer misspelled the name as “Gil”), who was also working with Heudes Contracting Ltd. The pace and intensity of life in Calgary were sometimes a shock to Phillip; at one point, Marcel remembers, Phillip had a full-blown panic attack in the roaring traffic of the six-lane Deerfoot Trail.

  Small wonder. He had spent almost his whole life in rural Nova Scotia, and, said the Calgary report, “file information suggests that he suffers from ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, and is borderline schizophrenic.” This is the only official comment I’ve seen on Phillip’s mental health, although his sister Maggie said he had been diagnosed as bipolar during one of his prison terms.

  Nevertheless, the Calgary parole officer was generally satisfied with Phillip’s progress. He had been “adjusting well,” had stable housing and employment, was going to counselling, and had taken various steps to integrate himself into community life, like opening a bank account. Although he was still easily frustrated, he had a positive attitude towards the changes in his life and was generally cooperative with his supervision team.

  A handful of documents: the official residue of Phillip Boudreau’s life. Canada Trust. Province of New Brunswick, Correctional Service, Health and Wellness. Canada Revenue. Fading echoes of a troubled li
fe.

  ISLAND VOICES

  “One time my cousin Frankie was down inside the hold of a boat at the Premium wharf, heaving up totes of fish. Phillip comes along. One of the totes is lying in the sun. ‘Hey Frankie,’ says Phillip, ‘you should move that tote out of the sun.’ ‘Yeah,’ says Frankie, but he doesn’t do it. Phillip tells him again. Frankie ignores him. Phillip comes over and starts kicking at his head. Later on Frankie mentions it to his father, that would be my uncle Dennis. Dennis is a big man. He goes looking for Phillip, and he finds him. Phillip was just a shrimp, you know. So Dennis pins him up against a wall with one hand, and he tells Phillip exactly what’s going to happen to him if he does anything like that to anyone in our family ever again. And that was the end of it. He never ever gave any of us one minute of trouble after that.”

  “Phillip was a bully, and a bully is a coward. Phillip was a nice guy when you spoke to him alone. When it was people around, Phillip would make comments, try to draw attention, trying to be a bully, which he was. A lot of times if he saw someone was scared of him then he would bully him.”

  “I’m going to tell you who he knew in jail: he knew Mom Boucher, that really bad bastard from the Hells Angels in Quebec. Mom Boucher used to call him Booboo. So Booboo was his name in jail.”

  * * *

  —

  Omer Boudreau is eighty now and says he’s not the man he was, but he still looks trim, compact, and powerful. He started fishing when he was fourteen years old. I heard he had a memorable run-in with Phillip when he was the captain of his own swordfish boat. I wanted to know if it was true.

  A swordfish is a magnificent animal—a far-ranging, fast-travelling predator found throughout the temperate oceans. Adults are commonly ten feet or more in length, weighing over a thousand pounds and swimming at up to sixty miles per hour. They can dive to nearly ten thousand feet, although they are often found basking in the sunlight at the surface. Swordfishermen often speak of them almost poetically—their beauty, their speed, their energy and agility. They like to swim along the axis of the seas, right inside the waves, and when a big sea forms a wall of water between the fisherman and the sun, the swordfish can be seen surging along as though encased in liquid green glass. When hooked they fight fiercely, and have been known to drive their swords right through the planks of wooden fishing boats.