In February 1997, a drunken brawl outside a Montreal bar set off a chain of events that would end with two bodies in the St. Lawrence River. The fight itself lasted only minutes. The fallout took nearly two years to fully surface.
The man throwing the punches was Donald Magnuson, a Hell’s Angel known as Bam Bam. He was the bodyguard for Scott Steinert, one of the most feared and wealthy members of the Montreal chapter. The man he beat to the ground was Leonardo Rizzuto, the son of Vito Rizzuto, the most powerful mafia boss in Canada.
For nine months, both men went on living as if nothing had happened. Then, on November 4, 1997, Steinert and Magnuson left a private island mansion for a meeting with Maurice Boucher, the leader of the Quebec Hell’s Angels. Neither man came home.
In May 1998, a body surfaced in the river. Its hands were tied behind its back, and it was wrapped in plastic. It was Donald Magnuson. Steinert’s body would not be found for another year.
The popular version of the story is simple: a biker hit the wrong man’s son, and the mafia had him killed. But the record tells a more complicated story. The beating was not the beginning of Magnuson’s death sentence. It was only the final push.
Scott Steinert was born in Wisconsin in 1962. His family moved to Montreal when he was eight years old. By 16, he was smoking hashish. By 18, he had three convictions for selling drugs and had been put out of his parents’ house.
He drifted to Vancouver, lived on welfare, and kept dealing. In 1985, police arrested him after he sold two kilograms of PCP to an undercover officer. He pleaded guilty and took five years in prison rather than be deported to the United States.
His prison file described a charming inmate with higher than average potential. Officials also noted his tattoos and his refusal to see the prison psychologist. After his release in 1989, Steinert found the organization that fit him.
In the early 1990s, he joined the Montreal chapter of the Hell’s Angels. He entered as a prospect, sponsored by a giant one-eyed veteran of the club. A Montreal detective later said Steinert started low but gained enormous power once the war began.
The war was the reason everything in this story happened. From 1994, the Hell’s Angels fought the Rock Machine for control of the drug trade in Quebec. It was the deadliest gang conflict in Canadian history. By its end, around 160 people were dead.
An informant inside the club reported in November 1994 that Boucher handed out execution orders and that Steinert was the executioner. The same informant said Steinert had bought 20 pounds of C4 explosive and assembled a team of bomb makers.
That month, ten of his bombs were planted around Montreal. All of them failed. The detonators were faulty.
On August 9, 1995, one of them did not fail. A bomb in a jeep killed a small-time dealer in the east end of Montreal. Shrapnel crossed the street and killed an 11-year-old boy named Daniel Desrochers who was playing outside. The RCMP named Steinert as its prime suspect. No court ever convicted anyone of that bombing.
The informant’s name was Danny Kaine. He belonged to a support club of the Hell’s Angels, and Steinert himself had brought him in. From October 1994, Kaine was also secretly reporting to the RCMP, which paid him for every meeting.
Almost everything known about Steinert’s private world comes from what Kaine told his handlers. Kaine saw a side of him that the police file did not. In May 1995, Kaine’s wife gave birth to a son. Steinert agreed to be the boy’s godfather.
At the baptism, the most feared bomber in Montreal stood in the church in a leather jacket, jeans, and cowboy boots, holding another man’s child. That summer, on a trip to Prince Edward Island, Steinert planned to start a fight with a rival biker club from Ontario. Then his motorcycle broke down on the road.
The rival bikers stopped and fixed it for him. Kaine reported that Steinert was so grateful he abandoned the attack altogether. It is the only recorded time a favor changed his mind.
The money was what made him untouchable. Steinert sold cocaine and hashish across western Montreal into Ontario and as far as Winnipeg. A kilogram bought for $35,000 in Montreal sold for $45,000 out west. Kaine reported that Steinert claimed $100,000 a month from his cocaine sales in Northern Ontario alone.
He ran a stripper agency that sent dancers into small mining towns, and the dancers reported back on who was dealing there. Boucher did not like him. He kept him anyway. Kaine told the RCMP that Boucher favored Steinert for one reason: he made more money than any other angel in Montreal.
That cocaine came from somewhere. In Montreal, the largest importer was the Rizzuto family. Vito Rizzuto had arrived from Sicily as a boy of eight. By the 1990s, he ran the city’s mafia with his father, Nicolo. Police called him the Teflon Don because charges slid off him.
The Hell’s Angels controlled the streets. The Rizzutos controlled the supply. When Boucher went to jail briefly in 1995, the Rizzutos slowed their cocaine sales to the Angels, and Steinert complained to Kaine that his business in Ontario was drying up.
In June 1995, Boucher created an elite new chapter called the Nomads. It was the inner circle that would run the war. Steinert was not invited. Neither was his bodyguard.
Donald Magnuson had once guarded Walter Stadnick, the national president of the Hell’s Angels. When one of Stadnick’s projects collapsed in Toronto in 1994, Magnuson switched sides and attached himself to Steinert, betting that Steinert would be the next national leader. Stadnick did not forget it.
Steinert had a second enemy. David Carroll, known as Wolf, ran the Halifax chapter and was one of the founding Nomads. Steinert moved in on the bars Carroll ran in Montreal and Ottawa. He opened a stripper agency to compete with Carroll’s. He mocked Carroll openly about who earned more.
Then Magnuson gave both of them a reason. In May 1996, Carroll hosted a Hell’s Angels party in Halifax. Stadnick had spent months courting a Winnipeg club called Los Bravos, hoping to bring it into the Angels. One of its members, David Boyko, was at the party. Magnuson, drunk, killed him.
The killing wrecked Stadnick’s expansion into Manitoba for years. It also broke Carroll’s rule. In Halifax, nobody was killed without his permission. Carroll and Stadnick wanted Magnuson dead, if only to prove to the Western clubs that the Angels had not ordered the killing.
In October 1996, together with another Nomad, they offered Danny Kaine $10,000 to do it. Kaine took the offer straight to the RCMP. He was afraid of what Steinert would do to whoever killed his bodyguard, and he asked his handlers to warn Magnuson. The record does not show whether anyone ever did.
Then Boucher stepped in with a ruling. A man like Kaine from a support club could not kill a full member. Only a full patch angel could. The contract was not cancelled. It was simply placed out of reach of the men who wanted to take it.
Between a mafia family and a biker club, nothing is personal and nothing is friendship. The relationship is a supply line. The mafia sells, the bikers distribute, and both sides protect the flow of money above everything else.
Inside that arrangement, an insult is not measured by the injury. It is measured by what it costs to leave it unanswered. A boss never has to ask for a man’s death. He only has to let it be known that the man makes business harder.
By October 1996, Magnuson was already a dead man walking. A contract existed. A price existed. Only a ruling from Boucher stood between him and the men who wanted it.
Four months later, he gave the Rizzuto family a reason to stop protecting the arrangement that protected him. It happened in February 1997 outside a bar on Saint-Laurent Boulevard, the old strip that divides Montreal into East and West.
Magnuson was drunk. Accounts agree that he attacked Leonardo Rizzuto and beat him badly. No public court record describes what started it. Leonardo was then in his late 20s. Two years later, he would be admitted to the Quebec bar as a lawyer. In February 1997, he was simply the son of the man who supplied the cocaine that paid for the entire Hell’s Angels war.
Danny Kaine reported the result to the RCMP. Vito Rizzuto, he said, was furious with Magnuson and wanted him dead. That is an informant report, not a finding of any court. No investigation ever established that Vito Rizzuto asked anyone to kill Donald Magnuson.
But according to the informant, the mafia boss’s anger now pointed in the same direction as Carroll’s and Stadnick’s. Three powerful men for three different reasons wanted the same man gone.
And Magnuson did not walk alone. Wherever he went, he went with Scott Steinert.
Through the spring and summer of 1997, Steinert behaved like a man who believed he could not be touched. He formed a gang within the gang, a group of five that included Magnuson and charged a $100,000 fee to join. It was a direct challenge to the Nomads, a private army answering only to him.
He bought the most famous house in Quebec. It belonged to the Lavigueur family, who had won what was then the largest lottery jackpot in Loto-Québec history, more than $7.6 million in 1986. Their mansion sat on Île Paré, a small private island. Steinert hid his ownership behind borrowed names.
That summer, the mansion became a film set. A Montreal director shot a pornographic movie there called The Babe Angel. Its star was Scott Steinert himself.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government was trying to deport him. He was still an American citizen. In November 1996, he had received a deportation order. He tried to have himself adopted by a Mohawk family to stay on the Kahnawake reserve. Finally, he married a Canadian woman, and his lawyers argued that sending a new husband and father to the United States would be inhumane.
Inside the club, the whispers turned dangerous. Carroll began telling people that Steinert and Magnuson were police informants. Why else, he asked, had the government failed for so long to throw an American criminal out of the country?
The real informant was listening. Danny Kaine, desperate to keep suspicion away from himself, encouraged the theory. When a shipment of marijuana and ecstasy pills sent by Steinert and Magnuson was seized by police, Kaine had been the one who tipped them off. He told Carroll that Steinert was to blame.
By the autumn of 1997, the accusation that would condemn Steinert was a lie invented in part by the man actually reporting to the police.
That autumn, Boucher was also changing the war. On June 26, 1997, a prison guard named Diane Lavigne was shot dead while driving home. On September 8, a second guard, Pierre Rondeau, was killed in his prison bus. Boucher was later convicted of ordering both murders.
In the autumn of 1997, the Hell’s Angels were at war with the state itself. A careless, loud, suspected traitor was a risk the leadership no longer needed.
Here is what happened slowly, as one witness later described it. Early November 1997, Steinert was newly married and just back from his honeymoon. On November 4, he and Magnuson left the island mansion. They were told there was a meeting with Boucher.
Sylvain Boulanger, a member of the Sherbrooke chapter who later became a witness for the crown, said the meeting was fake. He said it was set at the Hell’s Angels clubhouse in Sorel on the St. Lawrence, the same river town where Steinert had been arrested 12 years earlier.
The two men drove there together. Steinert believed he was among brothers. He had a patch on his back that the club gave only to men who had killed for it. He had a mansion, a wife, and a fortune.
Boulanger said they killed Steinert with a hammer. He said they threw him into the river. Both men were beaten to death. Their hands were tied behind their backs. They were wrapped in plastic and put into the St. Lawrence.
The river kept them through the winter. On May 23, 1998, Magnuson’s body was pulled from the water. Steinert did not surface until April 15, 1999, nearly 17 months after he drove to his last meeting.
In the meantime, the Canadian courts finished his case. Unaware that he was already dead, the crown finally won the deportation fight, and a judge ordered Scott Steinert’s immediate removal to the United States. The man the government could not deport for years had already been removed by his own club.
The police had an informant inside the club the entire time. Danny Kaine had reported the contract on Magnuson in October 1996. He had reported Vito Rizzuto’s anger in February 1997. Neither report saved anyone.
Kaine himself did not last. He went back to work for the police in 1999 under a contract worth up to $2 million. On August 7, 2000, he was found dead in the garage of his home near Montreal, an apparent suicide. He left behind a note asking whether he was a biker or a policeman, good or evil.
Maurice Boucher was convicted in 2002 of ordering the murders of the two prison guards and sentenced to life. Walter Stadnick was convicted of gangsterism and conspiracy to commit murder. David Carroll disappeared after the police raids of 2001 and has never been found.
Boulanger’s account came years later from a man who traded his testimony for protection. It has never been tested in a trial for these killings. No one has ever been convicted of the murders of Scott Steinert and Donald Magnuson.
The beating of Leonardo Rizzuto did not create Magnuson’s death sentence. That sentence was written in Halifax in May 1996, priced at $10,000 in October, and held back only by a ruling from Boucher. What the beating did was remove the last reason to keep holding it back.
A man who had already embarrassed the club in front of its western allies had now embarrassed the club in front of its supplier. Nobody needed Vito Rizzuto to give an order. The Angels depended on his family’s cocaine. His anger, reported through an informant, only had to be known.
And Scott Steinert did not die for Leonardo Rizzuto. He died because he was loud, because he was rich, because he had built a private army to rival the Nomads, and because a rumor that he was an informant, partly planted by the real informant, made him easy to sacrifice.
A bodyguard cannot be killed without his boss noticing. So the club took both men in one night and closed two problems with one meeting.
Leonardo Rizzuto went on to practice law in Montreal and Laval. His brother, Nick Jr., was shot dead in 2009. His father died of illness in 2013. In 2015, Leonardo was arrested with more than 40 others and charged with drug trafficking and gangsterism. In 2018, he was acquitted after the wiretap evidence against him was thrown out.
In March 2023, a gunman fired on his Mercedes on Highway 440 in Laval, and a bullet struck him in the leg. He survived. In June 2025, police arrested him again, this time on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to murder in a case dating back to 2011. Those charges have not been proven, and he is presumed innocent.
The night outside the bar on Saint-Laurent Boulevard lasted a few minutes. Leonardo Rizzuto lived through it and through everything that came after. The two men tied to it went into the river within a year, and the club that put them there never had to admit that the fight was about money all along.
The Hell’s Angels built their war on the mafia’s cocaine. In the end, the price of that supply was paid in their own members.