Monique Beaudin

The last episode of our podcast The Dark North: Gangs of Montreal looks at a stunning Hells Angels court case from 2015 and the fate of the organization since then.

The last episode of our podcast The Dark North: Gangs of Montreal looks at a stunning Hells Angels court case from 2015 and the fate of the organization since then.

This week’s episode of our new podcast, The Dark North: Gangs of Montreal, looks at how the biker war got started, the people who died, and the legacy the brutal war left in Quebec and Canada.

We might not be able to buy food from street vendors,  or buy a copy of the Gazette from a newspaper box in Montreal, but we are ahead of the poor people of Oak Park, Michigan who can’t even grow a vegetable in their front yard.

For the past few weeks I’ve joined in a centuries-old North American tradition — making  maple syrup. But I didn’t have to leave the island and head for the country — I made it here in the middle of the city.

(Paper wasps at work on a nest in Montreal West. Gazette photo: John Kenney.)

I wrote a story for Wednesday’s paper about efforts to eradicate buckthorn, a small tree or shrub that is crowding out native trees and plants in green spaces around the island of Montreal.

As summer holidays approach, many sun-starved Montrealers begin to daydream of frolicking in the waves in Maine, or diving off a dock into a clear blue lake in the Townships or the Laurentians, The Gazette’s Michelle Lalonde wrote this week.

(Paper wasps at work on a nest in Montreal West. Gazette photo: John Kenney.)

Since the Rizzuto family took control of the underworld in the late 1970s, there have been a series of spectacular arrests of people accused of being involved in organized crime.