Canada’s most prolific killer is the hitman Montreal created

Yves “Apache” Trudeau doesn’t fit the Hollywood mould of a contract killer: He wasn’t towering or magnetic, he didn’t have a menacing presence—if anything, he was an unremarkable and surprisingly forgettable person, which is exactly what made him so dangerous. At least that’s the way he’s described.

In Hitman: The Untold Story of Canada’s Deadliest Assassin, veteran investigative journalists Julian Sher and Lisa Fitterman dive into the life and legacy of a man who killed 43 people for the Hells Angels (and other local gangs) and got away with it over and over again.

A story with sharpened perspective

Set against the backdrop of a Montreal in the 1970s and ’80s, Hitman is a true crime exposé that dissects the systems that enabled Trudeau to thrive: police forces that failed to connect the dots, prosecutors who leaned too hard on catastrophically unreliable witnesses, and organized crime networks that quietly became part of the fabric of Quebec’s underworld.

“This is our city. This is Montreal. It’s a crime city. It’s a murder capital,” says Sher.

“It’s got heroes and bad guys and bombings and intrigue and lots of characters. It’s why I can write so many books based in Montreal.”

While working on a book about Lincoln, Sher was asked by his agent if he wanted to do another biker book. “I said, only if I write it with (my partner) Lisa,” he says. 

The result is the couple’s first co-authored project—a rare collaboration that weathered more than a few creative disagreements, but ultimately sharpened the book’s perspective.

“Julian’s great with structure. I’m more literary,” Fitterman says. “And we both came at the story with different obsessions. His was systemic failure. Mine was the victims.”

Already gaining traction, Hitman has already been optioned by the same team behind Kings of Coke for a documentary adaptation and will also be released as an audiobook, as well as being published in both English and French.

But while 43 murders leave a lot of blood in their wake, the interest in Hitman doesn’t comes from how it doesn’t shy away from the gore, or that it’s what Sher calls ‘biker porn’. There’s no fetishizing of violence, no glamorization of gang life. Instead, the book opens with Darlene, a woman still shattered decades after her brother was killed by Trudeau. She’s one of many left behind. 

“The victims aren’t just the dead,” Fitterman says. “They’re the living. The families. The ones who never got justice.”

The hitman himself

Trudeau himself is a study in contradictions: A factory-trained bomb-maker turned assassin who didn’t even own a motorcycle when he joined the Popeyes, a biker gang that would later evolve into the Quebec wing of the Hells Angels. 

He stumbled into his first murder almost by accident before realizing he was good at it. Efficient, precise, methodical, and useful in the eyes of his employers.

From there, he was loaned out like a rental car to other crime syndicates like the Dubois brothers and the Irish mafia—whenever someone needed a body dropped and no questions asked.

He evaded arrest for over a decade, but not because he was a mastermind. It was more because, well, nobody was really looking. 

“The police just assumed it was criminals killing other criminals,” says Sher. “They didn’t care. No one connected the dots. And Trudeau kept getting away with it.” 

Even when he finally did turn himself in—largely to escape being killed by his own gang—his testimony as a Crown informant was such a disaster it torpedoed multiple prosecutions.

“He was a terrible witness,” Sher says. “Unreliable, unrepentant, and incapable of showing any real remorse.” Fitterman goes one step further: “He was a people pleaser. He told the Crown what he thought they wanted to hear, and they didn’t verify it. Rookie mistake.”

Still, his story is foundational to understanding how organized crime gained such a foothold in Quebec.

“There wouldn’t have been a Maurice ‘Mom’ Boucher without Yves Trudeau,” Fitterman says. “He showed the gangs they could operate with near total impunity. That the cops wouldn’t—or couldn’t—stop them.”

Crime is a dark mirror

Montreal is a central character in Hitman. Its contradictions as an elegant but gritty city that’s divided yet strangely cohesive mirrors the world Sher and Fitterman expose. Peeking into dive bars and courtroom backrooms, surveying bombed-out storefronts to suburban cul-de-sacs, the book maps a city that enables a killer and helps him thrive.

And while the events of Hitman span the ’70s and ’80s, their reverberations are anything but dated. “Organized crime hasn’t gone away. It’s just gone quiet,” Sher suggests.

“The Hells Angels are still here. They’re just better at staying under the radar.” 

The same can’t always be said for the justice system. “There’s a lot of tough-on-crime talk in politics right now,” he continues. “But what we need is smart-on-crime. And we’re still not there.”

That urgency is part of why Sher and Fitterman believe now is the right time for this story. 

“Crime is a dark mirror,” Sher says. “It reflects who we are, what we let happen, and what we pretend not to see.” 

Fitterman puts it more bluntly: “There’s never a wrong time to tell the story of the victims.”

And the reflection of that dark mirror isn’t confined to the past. Trudeau may be gone, but the systems that protected him—the indifference, the broken institutions, the myth of the lone bad apple—are still very much in play. No matter how you digest it, the story lives as a taut, chilling account of the killer next door, and the city that helped create him. 

In that sense, Hitman reopen old wounds, forcing a reckoning with how easily those wounds were covered up in the first place. It isn’t a book about closure, but a reminder that crime can echo louder in silence, and that justice—if and when it finally comes—doesn’t always arrive with handcuffs or headlines. 

Sometimes it looks like two journalists refusing to look away.