Alleged West End Gang leader ‘Big Gerry’ Matticks dies at 85

Investigative journalist Julian Sher says Gerald 'Big Gerry" Matticks rose from a poor Irish truck driver to head of a powerful organized crime outfit.

Gerald “Big Gerry” Matticks, the alleged leader of the West End Gang and a prominent figure in Montreal’s organized crime scene, has died.

He was 85.

His son, Gerry Harris Matticks, called his father a “special person with a big heart who loved to just give.”

“To the people that really knew him, he will be known as a great person and a legend, and to the rest of the world, he will be known as a criminal, unfortunately,” he told CTV News.

“I would love for the last part to die with him, and I just want him to be remembered for the good he has done. That would be my wish.”

His family members announced his death on Friday on Facebook. Matticks and his brother, Richard, allegedly became the leaders of the Irish organized crime operation in the 1980s.

Richard died at the age of 80 in 2015.

Matticks came from a poor family of Irish descent and went on to become a notorious crime figure in Montreal who was English Montreal’s answer to Maurice “Mom” Boucher, the former famed leader of the Hells Angels, according to Julian Sher, an investigative journalist and author of three books on the Hells Angels.

“He rose to such power that he controlled the importing of massive amounts of cocaine through the ports of Montreal, which he controlled, and he was then treated on an equal footing with some of the leading Mafia and Hells Angels crime figures. That’s how powerful this poor, Irish thief and truck driver rose to the pinnacle in the crime world in Montreal,” Sher said in an interview on Monday.

While the West End Gang was never an official gang, it was more of an informal clan of Irish gangsters that started off hijacking trucks to steal goods before they moved onto bank robberies. Matticks became the president of the local union at the Port of Montreal and then allegedly took control of the drug trade at the port.

As cocaine exploded in the 1990s, the biker wars were starting in Montreal, and to get the cocaine through the port, the Mafia and the Hells had to go through Matticks, the so-called “King of coke.”

After his arrest in 2001 in Operation Printemps for profiting from illegal drug trafficking, he was convicted and sentenced to 12 years. After serving his time, he retired to a quiet life.

Matticks stood out in the organized crime world in Montreal by the fact that, while he was a major player in the criminal underworld, unlike other figures like Vito Rizzuto and Boucher, he didn’t have ambitions to create a global crime empire, Sher said.

“It meant that they didn’t have a lot of enemies who were going to kill them. They weren’t out to rush every other rival gang. And so that attributed to their staying power, but it also meant when the powerful charismatic leaders of the West End gang, one after another, were either killed or sent to prison, the West End gang kind of crumbles and falls apart because they didn’t have that military structure, that traditional structure that either the Mafia or the Hells Angels had,” he said.

Sher said he was known as a “garrulous, always charming, funny, friendly guy. Despite running a criminal enterprise, Matticks had “this great PR machine,” and, over the years, they were known to hand out turkeys to people in need during the holidays.

Matticks’ family said they are organizing a toy drive in his memory. His son and some friends started the toy drive five years ago and he hopes to continue it for years to come.

“He always told me it doesn’t matter how much money you have, it doesn’t make you better than anyone else and how important it was to give back,” his son said. “He loved seeing the joy on the kids’ faces when he would show up in the Point with his Santa truck. If families were really down and out, they knew that they could go see him and he would do his best to help them out.”

The toy drive will be on Dec. 13 and benefit the St. Gabriel’s Parish, according to the post.