 Welcome to the original gangsters podcast. I'm your host Scott Bernstein. We're going to go once again back up to the great white north. We're going to give a little bit of a history lesson, a little context and and kind of color up the root of the Leonardo and Hell's Angels feud. To the naked eye, it looks like this thing all kind of just broke out on the last handful of years. We all know there was a long time alliance between the Rizzuto mob and the Hell's Angels. Watch each other's back did a lot of very, very profitable, lucrative business together for 3040 years until it went the other direction. But you can specifically trace Leonardo Rizzuto who is the reputed mafia Don of Montreal right now, who is one of his father's successors his dad veto Rizzuto is the one who forged this alliance with the Hell's Angels. The guy that the Hell's Angels all revered. And then when he died about a decade ago, roughly, things started to fray and fall apart. Leonardo didn't take power until 2016 but, you know, things were already headed in a bad direction there with the Hell's Angels and only got worse. But a lot of this can go all the way back to the 1990s and specifically an incident in a tavern in Montreal. In February of 1997, where Leonardo Rizzuto got into a fight with a prominent Hell's Angel and Forcer a guy that was known as a hit man is very feared very capable. He was kind of a knuckle dragger type not somebody that had a lot of brains a lot of brawn though and his name was a Donnie Bam Bam Magnuson and Leonardo Rizzuto and Bam Bam Magnuson got into a nasty fight. In 2007 where Bam Bam Magnuson allegedly beat Leonardo Rizzuto to a pulp left him unconscious in a Montreal bar. This, you know, caused a lot of problems and veto Rizzuto at that time the most powerful mob figure, you know, maybe in the history of Canada at that time He demanded retribution and reached out to Mom Boucher who was a leader of the Montreal Hell's Angels faction at that point and, you know, kind of to break it down into a nutshell. He got his retribution, but it didn't happen right away. And it was something that might have not really had anything to do with the Leonardo Rizzuto fight and had more to do with politics within the Hell's Angels and Bam Bam Magnuson. And this being a bit of a not a bit to being a lot of a crazy wild cowboy that needed to be reigned in. But it's interesting to look at the timeline here. And from talking to some of my sources in Canada, this really colors up what Leonardo Rizzuto feels and thinks about the Hell's Angels. There's always been questions about him respecting them, they perceiving him snubbing his nose at them, which was the opposite of what his dad did his dad could get at their level get on their level and and the big Hell's Angels and his followers of the 80s 90s and 2000s didn't feel like veto was judging them or looking down on them. And that's what a lot of the Hell's Angels have felt since Leonardo Rizzuto took power about eight years ago. But this is all traces back to February 97 that bad blood, I'm told it has never been extinguished and it really kind of foreshadowed his, what he needed to have relations with them when he took over the family and where those relations, you know, how those relations have evolved. So Bam Bam Magnuson was the right hand man and bodyguard and for the top enforcer for a very powerful Hell's Angel from Montreal in the 80s and 90s a guy named Scott Steiner was somebody that originally was in kind of the inner sanctum and then started to kind of forge his own group within a his own kind of subcrew of the Hell's Angels that he called the group of five, basically trying to take power away from Mom Boucher and Bam Bam Magnuson was the guy that was doing a lot of the heavy lifting in in that he upset a lot of people couple months before the Leonardo fight Bam Bam Magnuson did where he killed a Winnipeg biker in a some type of social function. Hell's Angels were looking to scoop up some of Winnipeg and patch over some clubs that were going to help them in their in the great Quebec biker war at that time that was going on and Magnuson lost his mind kills a guy in a biker war or biker fight and that prevents good business from from happening between the group that they that this biker came from I think it was called Los Bravos he was the president of that group that was looking to patch over and it never happened because of that. But by the end of 97 with a lot of pressure coming from the rizudos mom Boucher deciding that Bam Bam Magnuson and Scott Steiner were, you know, being subversive and needed to be gotten rid of they put a contract on these guys heads. Steiner had bought kind of a famous mansion in Quebec in 96 97 was shooting porn videos there, moving drugs women, loan sharking a lot of that a lot of really down and dirty criminal activity. And the last time Steiner and Bam Bam Magnuson were seen was leaving that mansion going to a meeting with mom Boucher they never came home from alive that was November 4 1997. Their bodies were both found floating in the St. Lawrence River, badly beaten battered and bound them told they were both killed with hammers to the head. They were found in the coming months and years, but that is where really the feud between Leonardo Rizzuto and the Hells Angels started back in the winter of 97 in a fight with Bam Bam Magnuson. OG pod Scott Bernstein.