The victim, a homeless man, was once a dangerous gang leader
The 49-year-old man stabbed to death on the night of Monday to Tuesday in Westmount is Kevin White, a former Jamaican gang leader who has long ruled the roost in downtown Montreal.
White was reportedly homeless at the time he was discovered, at the corner of Atwater Avenue and Sainte-Catherine Street West, shortly before midnight.
The circumstances of the murder are unknown at this time. No one has yet been arrested. Major Crimes investigators from the Montreal City Police Service (SPVM) will also try to establish the motive for the crime. Since at least the late 1980s until the early 2000s, White and his gang controlled crack trafficking around the Jeanne-Mance homes, located in the area of ??De Maisonneuve and Saint-Laurent boulevards.
During the 1990s and 2000s, shootings broke out in this area because White and his group allegedly did not want to obtain drug supplies from the Hells Angels and one of their subordinate gangs, the Syndicate.
At first, White didn't want to associate with the bikers and there were several shooting events. It was all over the Jeanne-Mance plan. White and his group were living targets. We attended several meetings on surveillance sites and there was finally an agreement,” says a former SPVM Anti-Gang police officer. The headquarters of White's group was in a now-defunct hotel on Sherbrooke Street. They also had a cache in the southwest. “Kevin White was wiretapped and when contacts in the United States called him, he answered in English: KT International , as if his traffic was international,” continues the ex-police officer.
White used family members to do his accounting.
In 2002, SPVM police officers dismantled his network, arrested 22 people and seized more than 1,000 rocks of crack. In 2016, White sued the state for $1.5 million after he was acquitted of attempted murder of a woman who was shot in the face. In 2019, White was sentenced to six years in prison for stabbing a man downtown. Having become itinerant, he would have died in the same circumstances.
