On the fourth of November 1997, Scott Steinert and Donald Magnuson left a mansion on a private island outside Montreal and drove to a meeting with Maurice “Mom” Boucher, the leader of the Quebec Hell’s Angels. Neither man came home. The river kept them through the winter, and when it gave them back, it gave them back one at a time: Magnuson on the twenty-third of May 1998, his hands tied behind his back, wrapped in plastic; Steinert not until the fifteenth of April 1999, nearly seventeen months after he drove to that last meeting. The version of the story most people know is short.
A biker beat the wrong man’s son, and the mafia had him killed for it. That version is clean, and it is incomplete. The record shows a contract on Magnuson that was older than the beating, a police informant who reported every step, and a second victim whose own brothers had reasons to want him gone. To understand the river, start with the man who owned the bodyguard.
Scott Steinert was not from Quebec. He was born in 1962 in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, into a comfortable family. His father was a senior executive at the Bloid Corporation, and in 1970 the company sent him to run its Canadian office. The family moved to Montreal when Scott was eight years old.
The comfort did not hold him. By sixteen he was smoking hashish. By eighteen he had three convictions for selling drugs, and his parents had put him out of the house. He drifted to Vancouver, lived on welfare, and kept dealing.
In October 1985, police arrested him in Sorel, a river town east of Montreal. He had sold two kilograms of PCP to an undercover officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He pleaded guilty and took five years in prison rather than be deported to the United States. His prison file described a charming inmate.
Officials wrote that he answered questions with remarkable openness and had higher than average potential. They also noted the tattoos and his refusal to see the prison psychologist. Paroled in 1987, he started an insulation business with his parents’ money. Within a year, he was charged again, this time as the muscle for a loan shark, beating and threatening a man who owed money.
Officials now wrote about his elastic morality and his taste for luxury. Both phrases would turn out to be accurate. After his release in 1989, Steinert found the organization that fit him. In the early 1990s he joined the Montreal chapter of the Hell’s Angels.
He skipped the lowest stage entirely and entered as a prospect, sponsored by a giant, one-eyed veteran of the club. A Montreal detective later said Steinert started low but gained enormous power once the war began. The war was the reason everything in this story happened. From 1994, the Hell’s Angels fought the Rock Machine for control of the drug trade in Quebec.
It was the deadliest gang conflict in Canadian history. By its end, around 160 people were dead. Bars burned. Cars exploded in residential streets.
Men were shot at gas pumps and in restaurant parking lots. Steinert was built for it. An informant inside the club reported in November 1994 that Boucher handed out the execution orders and that Steinert was the executioner. The same informant said Steinert had bought twenty pounds of C4 explosive and assembled a team of bomb makers.
That month, ten of his bombs were planted around Montreal. All of them failed. The detonators were faulty. On the ninth of August 1995, one of them did not fail.
A bomb in a jeep killed a small-time dealer named Marc Dubé in the east end of Montreal. Shrapnel crossed the street and killed an eleven-year-old boy named Daniel Desrochers, who was playing outside. The RCMP named Steinert as its prime suspect. No court ever convicted anyone of that bombing.
The informant later reported that Steinert, who bragged about everything, never spoke about bombs again. The informant’s name was Danny Kane. He belonged to a support club of the Hell’s Angels, and Steinert himself had brought him in. From October 1994, Kane was also secretly reporting to the RCMP, which paid him for every meeting.
Almost everything known about Steinert’s private world comes from what Kane told his handlers, and Kane saw a side of him that the police file did not. In May 1995, Kane’s wife gave birth to a son. Steinert agreed to be the boy’s godfather. At the baptism, the most feared bomber in Montreal stood in the church in a leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots, holding another man’s child.
That summer, on a trip to Prince Edward Island, Steinert planned to start a fight with a rival biker club from Ontario. Then his motorcycle broke down on the road. The rival bikers stopped and fixed it for him. Kane reported that Steinert was so grateful he abandoned the attack altogether.
It is the only recorded time a favor changed his mind. The money was what made him untouchable. Steinert sold cocaine and hashish across western Montreal, into Ontario, and as far as Winnipeg. A kilogram bought for $35,000 in Montreal sold for $45,000 out west.
Kane reported that Steinert claimed $100,000 a month from his cocaine sales in Northern Ontario alone. He ran a stripper agency that sent dancers into small mining towns, and the dancers reported back on who was dealing there. Boucher did not like him. He kept him anyway.
Kane told the RCMP that Boucher favored Steinert for one reason: he made more money than any other Angel in Montreal. That cocaine came from somewhere. In Montreal, the largest importer was the Rizzuto family. Vito Rizzuto had arrived from Sicily as a boy of eight, and by the 1990s he ran the city’s mafia with his father, Nicolo.
Police called him the Teflon Don because charges slid off him. The Hell’s Angels controlled the streets. The Rizzutos controlled the supply. When Boucher went to jail briefly in 1995, the Rizzutos slowed their cocaine sales to the Angels, and Steinert complained to Kane that his business in Ontario was drying up.
Remember that dependence. It is the hinge of this whole story. In June 1995, Boucher created an elite new chapter called the Nomads. It was the inner circle that would run the war.
Steinert was not invited. Neither was his bodyguard. Donald Magnuson had once guarded Walter Stadnick, the national president of the Hell’s Angels. When one of Stadnick’s projects collapsed in Toronto in 1994, Magnuson switched sides and attached himself to Steinert, betting that Steinert would be the next national leader.
Stadnick did not forget it. Steinert had a second enemy. David Carroll, known as Wolf, ran the Halifax chapter and was one of the founding Nomads. Steinert moved in on the bars Carroll ran on Crescent Street in Montreal and on York Street in Ottawa.
He opened a stripper agency to compete with Carroll’s. He mocked Carroll openly about who earned more. Kane told his handlers the two men hated each other. Then Magnuson gave both of them a reason.
In May 1996, Carroll hosted a Hell’s Angels party in Halifax. Stadnick had spent months courting a Winnipeg club called Los Bravos, hoping to bring it into the Angels. One of its members, David Boyko, was at the party. Magnuson, drunk, killed him.
The killing wrecked Stadnick’s expansion into Manitoba for years. It also broke Carroll’s rule: in Halifax, nobody was killed without his permission. Carroll and Stadnick wanted Magnuson dead, if only to prove to the Western clubs that the Angels had not ordered the killing. In October 1996, together with another Nomad, they offered Danny Kane $10,000 to do it.
Kane took the offer straight to the RCMP. He was afraid of what Steinert would do to whoever killed his bodyguard, and he asked his handlers to warn Magnuson. The record does not show whether anyone ever did. Then Boucher stepped in with a ruling.
A man like Kane from a support club could not kill a full member. Only a full-patch Angel could. The contract was not cancelled. It was simply placed out of reach of the men who wanted to take it.
Between a mafia family and a biker club, nothing is personal, and nothing is friendship. The relationship is a supply line. The mafia sells, the bikers distribute, and both sides protect the flow of money above everything else. Inside that arrangement, an insult is not measured by the injury.
It is measured by what it costs to leave it unanswered. A boss never has to ask for a man’s death. He only has to let it be known that the man makes business harder. The people who depend on him do the rest.
With the war laid out, Magnuson was already a dead man walking in October 1996. A contract existed. A price existed. Only a ruling from Boucher stood between him and the men who wanted it.
Four months later, he gave the Rizzuto family a reason to stop protecting the arrangement that protected him. It happened in February 1997 outside a bar on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, the old strip that divides Montreal into East and West. Magnuson was drunk. Accounts agree that he attacked Leonardo Rizzuto and beat him badly.
No public court record describes what started it. Leonardo was then in his late twenties. Two years later, he would be admitted to the Quebec bar as a lawyer. In February 1997, he was simply the son of the man who supplied the cocaine that paid for the entire Hell’s Angels war.
Danny Kane reported the result to the RCMP. Vito Rizzuto, he said, was furious with Magnuson and wanted him dead. That is an informant’s report, not a finding of any court. No investigation ever established that Vito Rizzuto asked anyone to kill Donald Magnuson.
But according to the informant, the mafia boss’s anger now pointed in the same direction as Carroll’s and Stadnick’s. Three powerful men, for three different reasons, wanted the same man gone. And Magnuson did not walk alone. Wherever he went, he went with Scott Steinert.
Through the spring and summer of 1997, Steinert behaved like a man who believed he could not be touched. He formed a gang within the gang, a group of five that included Magnuson and charged a $100,000 fee to join. It was a direct challenge to the Nomads, a private army answering only to him. He bought the most famous house in Quebec.
It belonged to the Lavigueur family, who had won what was then the largest lottery jackpot in Loto-Québec history, more than $7. 6 million in 1986. Their mansion sat on Île aux Pins, a small private island. Steinert hid his ownership behind borrowed names.
That summer, the mansion became a film set. A Montreal director shot a pornographic movie there called The Babe Angel. Its star was Scott Steinert himself. Meanwhile, the Canadian government was trying to deport him.
He was still an American citizen, and in November 1996 he had received a deportation order. He tried to have himself adopted by a Mohawk family to stay on the Kahnawake reserve. Finally, he married a Canadian woman, and his lawyers argued that sending a new husband and father to the United States would be inhumane. Inside the club, the whispers turned dangerous.
Carroll began telling people that Steinert and Magnuson were police informants. Why else, he asked, had the government failed for so long to throw an American criminal out of the country? The real informant was listening. Danny Kane, desperate to keep suspicion away from himself, encouraged the theory.
When a shipment of marijuana and ecstasy pills sent by Steinert and Magnuson was seized by police, Kane had been the one who tipped them off. He told Carroll that Steinert was to blame. So by the autumn of 1997, the accusation that would condemn Steinert was a lie invented in part by the man actually reporting to the police. That autumn, Boucher was also changing the war.
On the twenty-sixth of June 1997, a prison guard named Diane Lavigne was shot dead while driving home. On the eighth of September, a second guard, Pierre Rondeau, was killed in his prison bus. Boucher was later convicted of ordering both murders. In the autumn of 1997, the Hell’s Angels were at war with the state itself, and a careless, loud, suspected traitor was a risk the leadership no longer needed.
Here is what happened slowly, as one witness later described it. Early November 1997, Steinert was newly married and just back from his honeymoon. On the fourth of November, he and Magnuson left the island mansion. They were told there was a meeting with Boucher.
Sylvain Boulanger, a member of the Sherbrooke chapter who later became a witness for the Crown, said the meeting was fake. He said it was set at the Hell’s Angels clubhouse in Sorel on the St. Lawrence, the same river town where Steinert had been arrested twelve years earlier. The two men drove there together.
Steinert believed he was among brothers. He had a patch on his back that the club gave only to men who had killed for it. He had a mansion, a wife, and a fortune. Boulanger said they killed Scott with a hammer.
He said they threw him into the river. Both men were beaten to death. Their hands were tied behind their backs. They were wrapped in plastic and put into the St.
Lawrence. While the river held them, the Canadian courts finished Steinert’s case. Unaware that he was already dead, the Crown finally won the deportation fight, and a judge ordered Scott Steinert’s immediate removal to the United States. The man the government could not deport for years had already been removed by his own club.
The police had an informant inside the club the entire time. Danny Kane had reported the contract on Magnuson in October 1996. He had reported Vito Rizzuto’s anger in February 1997. Neither report saved anyone.
Kane himself did not last. He went back to work for the police in 1999 under a contract worth up to $2 million. On the seventh of August 2000, he was found dead in the garage of his home near Montreal, an apparent suicide. He left behind a note asking whether he was a biker or a policeman, good or evil.
Mom Boucher was convicted in 2002 of ordering the murders of the two prison guards and sentenced to life. Walter Stadnick was convicted of gangsterism and conspiracy to commit murder. David Carroll disappeared after the police raids of 2001 and has never been found. Boulanger’s account came years later from a man who traded his testimony for protection.
It has never been tested in a trial for these killings. No one has ever been convicted of the murders of Scott Steinert and Donald Magnuson. The beating of Leonardo Rizzuto did not create Magnuson’s death sentence. That sentence was written in Halifax in May 1996, priced at $10,000 in October, and held back only by a ruling from Boucher.
What the beating did was remove the last reason to keep holding it back. A man who had already embarrassed the club in front of its western allies had now embarrassed the club in front of its supplier. Nobody needed Vito Rizzuto to give an order. The Angels depended on his family’s cocaine.
His anger, reported through an informant, only had to be known. And Scott Steinert did not die for Leonardo Rizzuto. He died because he was loud, because he was rich, because he had built a private army to rival the Nomads, and because a rumor that he was an informant, partly planted by the real informant, made him easy to sacrifice. A bodyguard cannot be killed without his boss noticing.
So the club took both men in one night and closed two problems with one meeting. Leonardo Rizzuto went on to practice law in Montreal and Laval. His brother, Nick Jr. , was shot dead in 2009.
His father died of illness in 2013. In 2015, Leonardo was arrested with more than forty others and charged with drug trafficking and gangsterism. In 2018, he was acquitted after the wiretap evidence against him was thrown out. In March 2023, a gunman fired on his Mercedes on Highway 440 in Laval, and a bullet struck him in the leg.
He survived. In June 2025, police arrested him again, this time on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder in a case dating back to 2011. Those charges have not been proven, and he is presumed innocent. The night outside the bar on Saint-Laurent Boulevard lasted a few minutes.
Leonardo Rizzuto lived through it and through everything that came after. The two men tied to it went into the river within a year, and the club that put them there never had to admit that the fight was about money all along. The Hell’s Angels built their war on the mafia’s cocaine.
In the end, the price of that supply was paid in their own members.
