The second informant to testify in the trial of a man accused of being the getaway driver in a double murder in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce had a low opinion of the Hells Angel who ordered the hit.
Timothy Simpson, 49, is the younger brother of 53-year-old Robert Simpson, the first informant who testifiedat the Montreal courthouse in the trial of Leslie Greenwood, 45, of Nova Scotia. Robert Simpson was the man who pulled the trigger in the Jan. 24, 2010, murders of Kirk (Cowboy) Murray and Antonio Onesi in the parking lot of a McDonald’s restaurant.
Timothy, who was armed with a shotgun, watched his brother’s back while the slayings were carried out. Both brothers have pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and are serving life sentences. Both have testified Greenwood was imposed on them as the driver by Jeffrey Albert Lynds, a Hells Angel based in Nova Scotia who was part of a Nomad chapter in Ontario.
While testifying before the jury on Friday, Timothy Simpson said he had serious doubts about Lynds shortly after he first met the Hells Angel in 2009. He and his brother Robert, a career criminal, were introduced to Lynds by Brian Patrick McGuire, a LaSalle resident who Timothy Simpson was good friends with.
A plan was hatched to have Lynds purchase drugs from a drug dealer named Louis (Le Gros) Vigeant and sell them in Nova Scotia while using Robert Simpson as protection. The first deal involved the purchase of two kilograms of hashish and 70 pounds of speed. Lynds decided to send the speed by train to Nova Scotia and asked Timothy Simpson to bring it. Simpson said on Friday as he approached the train station where he was supposed to get off — and meet a person he had never met before — he started to panic. Both of the Simpson brothers were on the lam from halfway houses and Timothy Simpson was worried he’d be caught and returned to a penitentiary. Simpson said during the train ride he wondered about Vigeant and Lynds because of their odd behaviour. His concerns grew to the point he didn’t get off at the train station Lynds had asked him to. Instead, he got off at the next station, in Truro, N.S., and took a taxi to deliver the speed to Lynds’ house.
“I liked (Lynds) a lot, but for a full-patch Hells Angel, I just didn’t know. Especially for a Nomad — these guys are supposed to be able to go into any province and set up (drug trafficking turf) and not have to ask for permission (from other Hells Angels). The Hells Angels I knew while serving time in the pen, those were really serious guys. They would work out in the gym all day. They were businessmen,” Simpson said. “Jeff was using drugs. He smoked crack and he always seemed to be scrounging for drugs. (The Hells Angels) I knew could pick up a phone and get drugs easily.”
Timothy Simpson said he raised his doubts about Lynds’ competence to his older brother at one point before Murray and Onesi were killed. But Robert Simpson asked his younger brother to have faith in Lynds.
“I was more suspicious of Jeff than Rob was. He (wanted) to believe in him. He says to me ‘he’s a good guy He just has problems. I’ve had problems, too,’ ” Timothy Simpson said.
According to Timothy Simpson, Greenwood was to be paid $3,000 by Lynds for driving the brothers to Montreal and returning them to Nova Scotia. He also said Greenwood had to tune up the car they used for the hit because it had been left unused on Lynds’ property for weeks during the winter and was “frozen to the ground. (The murder plot) was a real rinky-dink operation.”
Like his older brother had said earlier in the trial, Timothy Simpson alleged Greenwood knew what the purpose of the trip was for.
The trial resumes on Tuesday.
