05/03/2020
OMG Ceo owner of Iwantclips Jude Hudson is famous gangster. He is also husband of Bratty Nikki
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/news/national/a-dejected-widowers-unwitting-slip-into-gangland/article18180520/?__twitter_impression=trueI
He is famous for murder gun smuggling drug smuggling theft and scam.
John Butcher, a 64-year-old grandfather and amateur blues singer, had always been a heavy drinker and, by August, 2004, his need had grown.
Perhaps that's why Christopher Hudson nudged elbows with Mr. Butcher as they stood in line at a pub in Barrie, Ont. Perhaps that's why he struck up a conversation about music and their roots in England. Maybe he could sense the desperation.
"I think he actually liked me and, quite frankly, I liked him. He was an interesting cat," Mr. Butcher would later recall of his first encounter with Mr. Hudson.
"He was more Rolling Stones than Muddy Waters, where I'm more Muddy Waters than Rolling Stones."
But Mr. Butcher soon learned that Mr. Hudson's interests went beyond guitar licks, swilling beer and nostalgic recollections of their British hometowns. Within three months, Mr. Hudson asked Mr. Butcher if he wanted to make some money by doing some driving for his son, Jude.
Mr. Butcher didn't know it yet, but by forging a friendship that night at the Beefeater Arms, he had attached himself to a notorious street gang that terrorized a neighbourhood more than 100 kilometres from his home. His relationship with Mr. Hudson, who was in his early 50s, would earn him a firsthand look into the lucrative underground trade that keeps Toronto homicide detectives hopping: gun smuggling.
This is how Mr. Butcher, a white-haired widower without a criminal record, became an accidental gun runner for the violent street gang known as the Malvern Crew -- and why he may have pleaded guilty to a crime he never committed.
Suddenly, Mr. Butcher felt like he was back in high school. Before hitting the bars of Barrie, he and his new friend would sip martinis and primp. In spite of their weathered skin and thinning hair, each night on the town represented another chance to meet a mate. Their batting averages were dismal, however, and they let each other know it.
Mr. Hudson called Mr. Butcher "the old fart." Mr. Hudson was "Shagnasty."
Their rapport -- no matter how crude -- was a nice respite from the sadness that had smothered Mr. Butcher for nearly 20 years, said Mr. Butcher's daughter Andrea, who had been forced to take her father into her house.
The various psychiatrists who treated Mr. Butcher over the years disagree about whether he suffered from clinical depression, but they all agree that he was really down, and it could all be traced back to the illness of his wife, Iris.
She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis -- the disease that attacks the central nervous system and plays havoc with mobility, speech and stamina -- in 1985. There was a five-month period in 1990 when she stopped speaking and developed psychosis. By 1994, Mr. Butcher was helping her go to the bathroom between five and seven times a night. "He also claims to cry at least three times a week," Dr. Joseph Berger wrote in a 1995 assessment.
Distracted and unmotivated, Mr. Butcher was fired from his job as a financial planner, the very job that had brought his family to Canada in the first place. His cottage on the outskirts of Barrie was repossessed. A onetime professional cricket player in England and rugby referee in Ontario, he was up to a pack of ci******es a day. In 2001, Iris died and John was broke. About the only thing going right in his life was his blues band. When it came to songwriting, Mr. Butcher's life offered loads of material.
The introduction of Mr. Hudson didn't help his substance-abuse problems, but it did lift his spirits.
The newcomer was charming and lively. He had a flattened nose and faint scars about his eyebrows -- two facial features that he said he earned during a stint in the Royal Navy, where he trained as a boxer. He became so friendly with the Butchers that he started car-pooling with Andrea's husband to his office north of Toronto, where Mr. Hudson claimed he worked in advertising.
But Andrea couldn't help but wonder whether there was more to this sharply dressed man. There were times when he went away for weeks and the absences were always chalked up to "business." And what deliveries was her father doing for him exactly?
The phone would ring and Mr. Butcher would jump to answer it.
"I knew that my dad was doing a run . . . down to Niagara Falls," she says. "We knew he was going for Christopher. We didn't know what it was for."
When Mr. Butcher made his first run to Niagara Falls in December, 2002, he was accompanied by Mr. Hudson's son, Jude. They drove southwest along the Queens Expressway in Mr. Butcher's beat-up 1991 Pontiac Sunfire, while the hum of Sonny Boy Williamson's harmonica spit out of the car's speakers. Mr. Butcher weaved around flurries while Mr. Hudson dodged questions.
"Most of the answers were 'don't ask,' " Mr. Butcher recalls. "I began to realize at that point that it was something really heavy."
The only assurance he received, he says, was that he wasn't bringing back anything illegal or dangerous, such as guns. When Mr. Butcher's conscience started to revolt, he would quash it by thinking about his finances. "I wasn't really happy with myself or it, but when you've got nothing you'll do anything to get something."
He dropped Jude off at the casino on the Canadian side and crossed the bridge. Before getting down to business, he stopped at an outlet mall and bought a Christmas present for his granddaughter, a remote-control convertible car from the hit children's movie Stuart Little.
His instructions were to sit at the bar in Applebee's and wait. He only had enough time to finish two-thirds of his pint when a man approached him.
"Are you John?"
"Yes."
"I've got nothing for you."
And that was more or less the routine for the next two years. He would make nearly 10 more trips like this one -- sometimes to Detroit, sometimes to Buffalo and sometimes to Niagara Falls. Only three trips resulted in actual deliveries, always a foolscap envelope filled with cash, Mr. Butcher says. He'd take the cash back to Christopher Hudson in Barrie and make about $500, he says. When there was nothing to deliver, he only made $200.
He was never given a proper explanation about why they would send him when there was nothing to pick up.
Mr. Butcher knew he had involved himself with some shady people, but he didn't know how bad it was about to become.
Back in Toronto, detectives were picking up some unusual chatter on one of their wiretaps. A rash of shootings between two Scarborough gangs, the Malvern Crew and the Galloway Boys, had prompted them to launch two related investigations: Who was doing the shooting and where were the guns coming from?
Police had narrowed the supplier down to Mr. Hudson's son Jude and a friend of his named Shaun Falls. On Jan. 10, Mr. Falls seemed antsy and he deviated from the guarded language he usually used when speaking on a phone line that wasn't secure. He was talking to Jude Hudson, and kept referring to "the old man." He wanted to know what it would take to get "the old man" to "do it right now."
If Andrea Butcher could have heard the wiretaps, her suspicions would have been confirmed. Jude Hudson made a reference to his father, Christopher, and explained that Christopher is "using the old man."
The March 22, 2004 trip to Detroit started like all the rest, with a phone call from Christopher Hudson. When Mr. Butcher arrived at his destination, a U.S. burger chain location, one of the restaurant's servers had a message for him. He probably wasn't going to be taking anything back, the server told him, but someone would come in a few hours and give him some cash to cover his expenses.
Mr. Butcher sat down, took his keys out of his pocket and placed them on the bar. He ordered a few martinis and talked shop with another patron who was a jazz musician. A few hours later, a woman walked into the restaurant. Mr. Butcher immediately recognized her because he had seen her with Jude Hudson on one of his runs to Buffalo. He also remembered her because she was, in his assessment, quite sexy. Her low-cut sweater revealed a yellow bra and ample cleavage.
She told him she had to make a few phone calls, and that she'd be back in 15 minutes. When she returned, she passed him $120 (U.S.), bent over and told him that his car keys had fallen on the ground. After looking back on that day, and everything that was about to unfold, Mr. Butcher now suspects that she swiped the keys when she first walked in.
When he reached the guard's kiosk, he was told that an ion scan of his permanent resident card had picked up traces of co***ne. Mr. Butcher says he isn't a drug user, though he did place the $120 he received from the woman into his wallet right next to his permanent resident card. He suspects that before the bills were given to him, they were used to snort the drug.
When the guards pulled him aside and searched his trunk, they discovered 23 guns, including semi-automatic handguns, hidden in the wheel well. Mr. Butcher was placed under arrest and charged with numerous counts of conspiracy to import fi****ms.
"I went into shock because I'd been so stupid," he says, recalling the first few moments in his holding cell. "When you think back, it was just one setup after another, gradually deepening me into the plot."
Like any well-oiled corporation, the gang went into damage control.
Andrea Butcher received a call from Christopher Hudson. He told her not to worry, she recalled, and said he had already hired a Toronto lawyer, Patrick Metzler, to handle her father's case. Mr. Hudson assured her that Mr. Metzler was "a hotshot," she says.
Mr. Butcher's age and the nature of the charges quickly caught the attention of the media. The Toronto Sun ran a photo from one of his album covers and a headline that played on his stage name -- "Rockin' Johnie B's busted." Word was out, and Mr. Metzler couldn't convince any of Mr. Butcher's friends to act as a surety for his bail application.
Mr. Butcher spent the next 13 months in jail, bouncing between cells in Toronto and Windsor, keeping a diary and trying not to get noticed. Finally, in the winter of 2005, Mr. Butcher asked Mr. Metzler to see if he could cut him a deal. The lawyer came back with an offer from the Crown of 2½ years -- a federal sentence.
This was not what Mr. Butcher had in mind. He wasn't a Canadian citizen, so wouldn't this result in deportation? Couldn't the lawyer convince the Crown to knock it down a bit?
Although Mr. Metzler refused to discuss the case with The Globe and Mail, Mr. Butcher says his lawyer gave him an ultimatum -- take the deal or find yourself a new lawyer.
Eventually, he caved and gave Mr. Metzler signed instructions to enter a plea of guilty. It was a decision that Mr. Butcher would come to regret.
Mr. Butcher was out of jail by the summer of 2005 because the court recognized his pretrial custody as double time. He rented a bachelor apartment, resumed his post on Barrie's barstools and tried to forget about what he had done. He certainly wasn't going to be reminded by Christopher Hudson; "Shagnasty" is nowhere to be found in Barrie.
He had more pressing problems to deal with now. Citizenship and Immigration Canada began a deportation proceeding against him, and when his increasingly yellow skin finally scared him into visiting his doctor, he was diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. Doctors estimated he had less than a year to live. Hope was scarce.
So when he received a subpoena in the mail, he had no idea that it would bring the only good news he had received in a long time.
In August, he was ordered to testify at the trial of Sara Villella -- the woman with the yellow bra and b***y figure who had paid him $120 that day in Detroit. A few months after Mr. Butcher's arrest, police raided homes across Ontario and charged almost everyone associated with the Malvern Crew: the underlings on the street corners, accused murderers, Shaun Falls, Jude Hudson and Ms. Villella. Mr. Falls has since been convicted.
Mr. Butcher got on the stand and recounted how he had been duped and slowly drawn into the underworld. By October, Ms. Villella had been found guilty on the smuggling charges and was to be sentenced. However, Ontario Superior Court Judge Brian Trafford didn't just stick to Ms. Villella; he delved into Mr. Butcher's case as well.
First, he called Mr. Butcher an "honest witness." Then he delivered two lines that would prompt Mr. Butcher to start sobbing.
"On my findings of fact, based upon his testimony at this trial, Mr. Butcher was not guilty of any crime in those circumstances. He did not know, or suspect, that there were any handguns in his car," the judge said.
The judge's reasoning was straightforward. Mr. Butcher's lawyer, the Crown and the judge who sentenced him had overlooked the definition of possession. Section 4 (3) of the Criminal Code states that in order to be convicted of possessing something that's illegal, the holder must "have knowledge of what that thing is."
When Mr. Butcher pleaded guilty, the court had recognized, in an agreed statement of facts, that he did not know the guns were in the car. But no one recognized the implication of that -- that he couldn't be guilty of a crime.
Shaun Falls and Christopher and Jude Hudson's involvement in the plot was also detailed by Judge Trafford in his decision in the case against Ms. Villella.
Unfortunately for Mr. Butcher, Judge Trafford's words won't remove the criminal conviction attached to his name. And though the judge's words would surely be powerful ammunition to help strip his conviction, getting his case to the Ontario Court of Appeal has proven difficult. He can't afford a lawyer and, when he applied to Legal Aid Ontario, the association turned him down. It deemed the likelihood of success too low.
Mr. Butcher contacted the Association in Defense of the Wrongfully Convicted, the powerful group of lawyers who have freed Guy Paul Morin and other men wrongfully convicted of murder, but it only assists accused murderers.
When The Globe first contacted Mr. Metzler to discuss Judge Trafford's finding and why Mr. Butcher had pleaded guilty, the lawyer said he couldn't discuss the case without permission from his client. Later, after Mr. Butcher called Mr. Metzler and instructed him to speak about the case, Mr. Metzler still refused to talk.
"I don't think I'm going to comment on the matter in this stage," he said. When a Globe reporter persisted and asked him to respond to some of Mr. Butcher's complaints, Mr. Metzler said: "John's entitled to say what he wants, but . . . I'm not going to comment."
Meanwhile, one of the ringleaders of the plot, Jude Hudson, was granted parole only a few months after Mr. Butcher's release. The only conditions of his release are that he disclose his financial records and stay away from criminals.
Christopher Hudson was also arrested during the Malvern Crew raids and charged with assaulting a police officer. That charge was dropped and Mr. Butcher hasn't heard from him since. Neither Hudson, the son or the father, could be reached by The Globe for comment.
"Maybe it's best not to be innocent, eh? Because then you don't know the workings of the ways," Mr. Butcher muses, comparing his predicament to those of the men who, he says, manipulated him.
Mr. Butcher has also been forced to face the possibility that, on all those border runs when he believed there was "nothing for him," there actually was something for him -- dangerous weapons that had been hidden in his car while he was waiting at the bar. The lock on the driver's-side back door of his old Sunfire was broken and made his vehicle easy to access, a feature that his friend Christopher Hudson knew about, Mr. Butcher says. If that did happen, and Mr. Butcher was responsible for handguns making their way into the hands of teenagers on the streets of Scarborough, Mr. Butcher says he would be devastated. "I couldn't live with myself," he says.
His only source of camaraderie now is his blues band, which is still playing shows despite the tumour buried beneath his stomach. He's left to wonder if his old counterpart was at all genuine. His daughter suspects that Mr. Hudson moved to Barrie with the intention of finding a lonely, needy person like her father; Mr. Butcher still likes to think that at least part of their bond was the real thing.
Still, it's not a relationship he wants to revive. Asked what he would do if he ran into his old friend, Mr. Butcher replies: "I'd run like hell."
Encounter in bar led to gun-running
