(CBC News) – A convicted drug dealer who helped carry out a Hells Angels-ordered shooting nine years ago claims the RCMP could have prevented the murder.
Paul Joseph Derry testified against his friends after the murder of Sean Simmons in Dartmouth. He now has a new name under the witness protection program.
Derry was a crack cocaine dealer and fraud artist through much of the 1990s — and a paid police informant. He doesn’t duck his guilt in the October 2000 shooting.
“I am guilty as, you know, according to the Criminal Code, and I do take responsibility for my actions in it. I tried to stop the murder before it happened. I wasn’t there intentionally to have Sean killed, although it may seem that way,” Derry told CBC News.
Derry helped convict Neil Smith, a member of the Hells Angels, for ordering the murder, as well as three others who helped carry it out.
He claims he tried to sell information about the killing to police before it happened. In his book, Treacherous: How the RCMP Allowed a Hells Angel to Kill, he says the RCMP has to accept some responsibility for the shooting.
“I told them that I would be driving the car, that Neil Smith had ordered the murder, that Wayne James, who was my partner at the time, had taken the contract from Neil to do the killing,” Derry said.
“So they knew for sure who the players that were going to commit the murder and they knew that we were all looking for this person.”
Derry said he told two RCMP officers about the plan during a secret meeting in Bedford just days before the murder. He did not give them the name of the victim.
Simmons, 31, died Oct. 3, 2000, after he was shot in the head while in the lobby of an apartment building in Dartmouth. Derry drove the getaway car and hid the gun. In exchange for his testimony, he was never charged.
Smith, James and two others were later convicted of first-degree murder.
The RCMP admits its officers met with Derry before the murder, but says his information was vague and they did not believe him. The officers were cleared of any wrongdoing following a review.
“We did an internal investigation, and that was completed in 2001. It certainly showed that there was no wrongdoing on behalf of the RCMP,” said Sgt. Mark Gallagher, spokesman for Nova Scotia RCMP.
Gallagher said he can’t comment specifically on Derry because of the Privacy Act.
Derry said he hopes his book leads the RCMP to change some of its policies. Officers need better training in dealing with police informants who are also career criminals, he said.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court of Canada turned down an appeal by Smith and James, who argued the jury should have been told that Derry had a reason to lie.
The Supreme Court found the trial judge had instructed the jury appropriately and had outlined Derry’s criminal history and ties to police.
Lifetime “rat” eh? 17 years of ratting out cohorts is most certainly to be believed in this instance. Methinks he is angling for more money.
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RCMP accused of failing to stop Hells hit
Geoff Nixon, Canwest News Service
Published: Tuesday, June 02, 2009
The Windsor Star
A former RCMP informant is stepping out from the shadows to tell the story of his nearly two-decade-long undercover career and involvement in a Hells Angels contract killing nine years ago.
Paul Derry is a former drug dealer whose testimony helped send four men to jail for the murder of Sean Simmons, a dockworker who fell afoul of the biker gang’s Halifax chapter.
It’s a case that current RCMP Assistant Commissioner Mike Cabana — and Derry’s closest police contact — once warned could tarnish the force’s reputation were it ever to become public.
That’s because Derry, who now lives under a new identity in the federal witness protection program, tried to warn police about the murder less than a month before it happened.
“They let a man die and tried to play it off like it was nothing,” Derry, 43, said in a recent interview.
In a new book, Treacherous: How the RCMP Allowed a Hells Angel to Kill, he gives his account of how Simmons came to die.
It was September 2000 when Derry first learned full-patch Hells Angels member Neil “Nasty” Smith was planning to kill someone.
Derry had been in the Halifax area since the summer, looking for some business he could sell to the RCMP.
By fall, he was working as a driver for Wayne James, a violent drug dealer who was married to Derry’s cousin and worked for Smith.
Derry found himself immersed in meetings where James and Smith would talk shop.
“It was during these meetings that I learned of a murder being planned,” Derry writes in Treacherous. “I also learned that Wayne would be doing the hit and I would be driving.”
Derry called his longtime handler, Cabana, then an inspector and now an assistant commissioner (and who only a year later would lead the anti-terrorist investigation against Maher Arar) to tell him what he knew.
Cabana helped set up a meeting between Derry and Halifax RCMP on Sept. 12, 2000.
When the meeting ended, the officers said they would be in touch. A few days later, when Derry still hadn’t heard back from them, he called Cabana, who checked on the situation. He told Derry there was a problem.
According to the RCMP’s files, Derry was marked down as “treacherous.”
“It means: Don’t touch. Don’t go near,” Derry said, explaining the term that prohibits officers from working with such informants.
It’s a bureaucratic black mark he was stamped with in 1991, about halfway through his 17-year career as an informant.
It was a mistake, later reversed, which had caused him trouble for years. But with a potential murder on the horizon, Derry said he did not think the RCMP would let paperwork get in the way.
The Halifax RCMP officers would later say they could not reach Derry prior to the killings, a claim he finds hard to believe considering that he had “two pagers, two cells and a home phone.”
Some years ago I saw a program on the CBC “Fifth Estate” about an informat the RCMP used out of Ontario and paid 100,000 dollars a year, they said was to get information on drug dealers in the Fredericton area, even though he himself was one of the bad ones from Ontario.
What I found interesting and I hope the CBC “Fifth Estate” will air this case again someday was that the informat murdered someone while employed for the mounties in Fredericton – he killed a brother of a Fredericton, N.B. lawyer who went forth and exposed what happened through the “Fifth Estate”.
They moved him to Halifax where he continued to deal drugs and live like he wanted in his field with the blessings of the RCMP in the Maritimes.
This case is dejavu and it really doesn’t surprise me in the least.
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