A BIG PART OF THE DRUG TRADE

Vanier Beatings Drug Ripoff Gone Bad

Police say it was a drug ripoff gone horribly wrong that took the lives of
Neil Nadeau and Rose Bannerman.

How wrong did the ripoff go? How violent did it become? Police say Rose
Bannerman, a woman described as beautiful by all who knew her, and who was
simply at Neil Nadeau's apartment at the wrong time story of her life,
apparently, luck like that police say Rose Bannerman was so savagely
beaten she was identified only by her dental records.

And Neil Nadeau? The target of the ripoff? How wrong did it go for him?

Nadeau was a standup guy, say his friends, who themselves are standup
guys. No criminal record. Bluecollar background. Was married once, worked
and paid taxes, then the marriage went south and Neil pretty much followed
it, ended up selling cocaine on Montreal Rd. Probably the kindest,
gentlest, leastpreparedforthelifehechose cocaine dealer you would
have ever met.

A month ago his old friends were shocked when Nadeau showed up with
70stitches on his face.

"Neil, what are you doing?" asked those friends. "What are you doing living
in a basement apartment in Vanier, doing coke all the time, just falling
apart like this. What are you DOING?" Nadeau either didn't listen, or
didn't care. The new life, I suppose, kept him from thinking about past lives.

"I had a job, I had a girl, I had something going, mister, in this world."
You can almost hear Springsteen playing in the background of this story.
Neil Nadeau. Rose Bannerman. They could have been on Nebraska.

That's how wrong it went. That's how violent it became. You don't hear
much about drug ripoffs, they rarely hit the newspaper, not the sort of
crime that gets reported. Only the extreme ones, the deadly ones, ever come
to the attention of the public. In March 1994, JeanLouise Couture was
murdered in his Lees Ave. penthouse apartment. He was a drug dealer.
Someone came all the way from Toronto to rip him off. He put a bullet in
his head and stole his coke.

Alphonso Diedrick was arrested, charged and ultimately convicted for
killing Couture. It's a mystery how he ever thought he would get away with
it. The apartment was filled with people at the time of the murder.

"Sometimes it just escalates and you don't know when to stop," says Staff
Sgt. Randy Brennan of the OttawaCarleton Police service. "You start
ripping off prostitutes, dragging them in a back alley and taking their
money and their drugs.

"They never report the crime and you get away with it and you keep on doing
it, going after bigger and bigger targets. You start to think you can get
away with it forever."

It's a big part of the drug trade, ripoffs, even though you rarely hear
about them. The guns that are now such a prevalent part of the drug
business, that's the whole reason they're there. The guns aren't for show.
They aren't a prop, something that's dragged out so petty crooks can
pretend they're George Raft when they conduct a drug deal.

The guns are there to prevent a ripoff. Or to start a ripoff. Sometimes to
collect debts, certainly, but protecting yourself from a ripoff, that's a
big part of the reason there are so many guns on the streets of Ottawa
these days.

Neil Nadeau didn't own a gun. What's more, he lived in a basement
apartment, in a poorly lit house, built on a knoll in Vanier, the backyard
dropping away toward Montreal Rd., you had to enter the basement apartment
from the backyard, someone could stand there all night and never be seen
from the street.

If Nadeau had a neon sign advertising free drugs it couldn't have attracted
drug thieves any better.

And yet he never saw it coming.

Yesterday, Marc Landriault and Lee Baptiste were charged with firstdegree
murder in the deaths of Nadeau and Bannerman. It took the cops less than a
week to make an arrest in this case, and they worked double shifts, tossing
Vanier up and down, to pull off the feat. A good job. Sad story. As I
said, it could be a Springsteen song.