Murder at Andrew's Pub - who did it?

Lavoie, MacDonald and McLaughlin in a Coolopolis collage

     The Cat's Den, now known as Andrew's Pub on Guy just below Ste. Catherine, has long been a nice place to enjoy a cheap beer and a free game of pool.  
  It was also the scene of a gruesome murder that ushered in a new reign of gunmen in the fabled West End Gang, Montreal's Irish Mafia.
   The image above is a photoshop dramatization of the shooting that took place at the bar on Sunday March 16, 1969.

John Slawvey

   No arrests were made but from our information Dickie Lavoie (left) and Jackie McLaughlin (right) came to shoot down their fellow West End Gang colleague James MacDonald who was enjoying a drink on that Sunday evening.
    The identity of the masked men remains unconfirmed but legend has it that Lavoie and McLaughlin were the shooters, although one newspaper suggested that John Slawvey was one of the two gunmen, as he had a motive and also went into hiding after the shooting.
    The two masked men entered and shot MacDonald 11 times in the head with an M-1 machine gun while about 20 others watched on, some of whom suffered injuries.

Dick Lavoie

   It's believed that MacDonald - also believed to be a killer - was shot by his own gang because they imagined he might turn informant.
   MacDonald had recently been in a $200,000 theft of a cigarette truck at the port which allegedly involved a gunfight between the cops and William Johnston, Philippe Savoie and John Slawvey.
   Slawvey hid, Johnston and the other man were rounded up but MacDonald turned himself in.
   By turning himself in MacDonald became a threat of turning informant, as that logic has it.
   The irony was that the M-1 machine gun employed to kill MacDonld might have been one that MacDonald himself had sold on the black market.
   After MacDonald died, McLaughlin and Lavoie became a new hit-squad for the West End Gang's faction led by Dunie Ryan and Alan Ross. Between them they are believed to have killed dozens, often on impulse. Slawvey likely killed at least three people.
     Slawvey was later shot by police. McLaughlin was stabbed to death by his friend Noel Winters in New Brunswick and Lavoie, a cocaine-sniffing ladies man who lived about the Ye Olde Pub on St. James and Elmhurst, died of natural causes.
      We have much more to say about various other unsolved West End Gang murders but are saving that for another place and time.