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| Brosseau and Yvorchuk, 1972 |
Holdup squad duo Det.-Sgt. Eugene Yvorchuk and Det-Sgt. Maurice "Bill" Brosseau boasted of shooting 18 suspects, killing five, over 18 months from 1970.
They and two other squad members purportedly apprehended 101 holdup and murder suspects at the scenes of crimes during a similar time span, many of whom were transported directly to hospitals or morgues.
"I've got no choice but to shoot the guy if he ignores our command to give up," Brosseau told Montreal Star reporter Albert Noel prior to his 1972 retirement.
"But sometimes the next day pity sets in and I get the urge to cry. I've never wasted a bullet and I've never hurt an innocent bystander. I've never shot unless I had to." Brosseau said that he killed seven criminals in total.
Yvorchuk expressed less regret. "It's not pleasant to shoot down another human being but a lot of these guys don't give us any choice. We give them more of a chance than they'd give us if we dropped our guard. It's us or them," he told reporter Albert Noel of the
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| Bullet-riddled getaway van from Dec. 1970 |
On 29 December 1970, Brosseau and Yvorchuk rushed to a Bank of Montreal near the Cote des Neiges Plaza only to have their police cruiser riddled with bullets, many narrowly missing them after piercing their windshield. The fearless duo leaped from the car and shot three of the four bandits, killing Claude Lefebvre, 24, who was disguised as a woman and injured bandits Lorenzo Hubert and Ral Favron. An estimated 300 bullets were fired in the exchange.
"The bastards came out of the bank firing. One of the bullets hit the car only inches away from me. It would have hit me only I moved just afraction of a second before it hit," said Yvorchuk.
The partners - who both started as $23-per-week Montreal constables in the early 1940s - practiced their aim at a police shooting range on weekends. Neither sported bulletproof vests, as they considred them too flimsy to offer sufficient protection.
The duo killed two bandits outside the IGA grocery store robbery at 1425 Dorchester E. on 7 January 1971. They also left a third one badly injured.
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| Yvorchuk at left |
On 23 July 1972 the team shot bandit Brian Beamont dead at the scene of a robbery at Household Finance at 6830 Cote des Neiges. A pair of his accomplices were injured.
Then on 7 September Bill and Chuk gunned down Richard Favron, 27, dead outside the CIBC bank at 550 Sherbrooke W. as 10 other armed cops stood outside waiting for the pair to emerge after stealing $6,000 from the bank. They also shot his accomplice Paul Beaupre, 32, three times in the legs for good measure.
In March 1973 Longpre led a room-to-room search at the apartment tower at 3475 St. Urbain after Andre Desbiens, 30, fired shots at a passing police cruiser from the building. They arrested the armed shooter.
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And while the duo blazed their trail of glory, Det.-Sgt. Auguste Longpre - who had partnered with Brosseau until 1966 - outlasted both, as he remained the undisputed king of the holdup squad, serving on the force from 1957 to his retirement in 1977.
Longpre's press clippings - which he curated loving in a scrapbook at home - included articles about his heroic feats. One described his arrest of Jacques Diamond, 19, at his home on Jeanne D'arc Street on a November morning in 1964. Diamond, still lying in bed, aimed his gun at the officers but Longpre and two others leaped on him from all directions and cuffed him.
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| Longpre |
Longpre was at the center of a massive shootout on 2 March 1974 after Martin Beaulieu, 43, was found shot dead at a rooming house at 2102 St. Andre. Police came to question his neigbhbour Maurice Rheault, 28, who opened fire through the door with his .22 semi automatic. Longpre and other cops shot back with their .38s. In all about 100 shots were fired but nobody was hit and the police got their man.
Longpre, whose nickname was "Ti-Coune" or "village idiot," lost an earlobe to a bullet and had a father who served as Montreal's longest-ever serving cop.
Longpre and the Montreal holdup guys weren't limited to the island, as they were often called to other municipalities to help out. On 3 September 1971 Longpre and other cops shot and killed Gilles Labelle, 23, and Gilles Louis-Seize, 24, both of Montreal, as they robbed a bank in St. Basile Le Grand, the town's first-ever bank holdup.
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| Longpre |
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The squad's violent pushback helped lower Montreal's bank holdup total from 224 in 1970 to 163 the next year, as criminals turned to less lethal crimes.Possibly the most intense shootout pitting police against bandits took place on 15 November 1974 when around 200 shots were fired near the Pie IX boulevard Shopping Center as a group of prison escapees from the St. Vincent de Paul Prison took aim at a Royal Bank. Their battle with cops left bandit Jean-Paul Mercier, 28, dead, while Robert Frappier was struck in the leg with a bullet. Prior to getting shot, Frappier came across a police officer who had tripped ont he ground. He shot the cop twice but his gun was empty.
But the squad's halo lost its shine with time, as a 1977 La Presse article referred to the once-celebrated team as as a "death squad," a term later used by criminologist Jean-Claude Bernheim in a book that criticized the shoot-first practices of that era.
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| Frappier |
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| More victims |
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| Longpre, 2nd from left, cuffs St. Urbain sniper |