On Thursday, Richard Goodridge came to the septuagenarian, said he understood everything that had happened to him, and suddenly offered to help him. He told Mr. Manakhov that the accusations against him were “bullshit”. He dangled her that as a friend of her adopted daughter, he could help her get the charges dropped. He tried to lure her aside to chat privately. Mr. Goodridge is neither a lawyer nor a Crown prosecutor. He has been known for a long time in the organized crime scene in Montreal. During the 1990s, he would have been part of the Scorpions, a clique that gravitated in the entourage of the Rockers, a school club of the Hells Angels which has now disappeared. In 1999, he was seen as a bodyguard in a procession in which was the warrior leader of the Hells, Maurice Boucher.
In the mid-2000s, he founded, with the late kingpin Ducarme Joseph, the street gang 67 in Montreal. Over the years, he was pulled over in a car with a gun, was convicted of two charges of possession of a weapon and credit card theft. He was acquitted or benefited from a stay of the judicial process in several other cases.
