Maurice “Mom” Boucher has pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill well-known crime figure Raynald Desjardins.
Boucher entered the plea at the Gouin courthouse Tuesday morning.
By doing so, he avoided having a jury trial that was supposed to begin with jury selection next week.
The case will enter the sentencing stage on May 11.
Boucher shouted “guilty!” when Justice Éric Downs asked him to confirm that he was pleading guilty to the conspiracy. This was because a microphone in the prisoner’s dock where Boucher was seated was not on when he first responded.
According to a summary of facts entered into the court record Tuesday morning: “The plan, proposed by Maurice Boucher, was to assassinate Raynald Desjardins at the Ste-Anne-des-Plaines penitentiary after he would be obligated to transfer to the regional reception centre (where new federal inmates go through a sorting process before they are assigned a penitentiary). It should be noted that Mr. Desjardins had pleaded guilty on July 6, 2015, to a charge of conspiring to assassinate (Montreal Mafia leader) Salvatore Montagna who was killed in November 2011. According to the information available, Mr. Desjardins was supposed to be sentenced in December 2015.”
What Boucher apparently did not know was that the sentencing stage of Desjardins’s case would be plagued by delays and he was only sentenced one year later than expected. That meant his transfer from the Montreal Detention Centre to a federal penitentiary was delayed much longer than anyone following his case in the media would have expected.
This story will be updated.