Pubdate: Mon, 18 Sep 2000 Source: New York Times (NY) Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company Contact: 229 West 43rd Street, New York, NY 10036 Fax: (212) 556-3622 Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Forum: http://forums.nytimes.com/comment/ Author: James Brooke WELL-KNOWN CRIME REPORTER IS SHOT OUTSIDE QUEBEC NEWSPAPER After years of listening to death threats on his answering machine, Michel Auger learned to live the elusive life, varying routes to work, sleeping in hotels, listing his office address as his home address. But, deep down, Mr. Auger, a seasoned, 56-year-old reporter, always believed he was protected by his work, printed under the best-read byline in his city's best-read paper. But Mr. Auger's luck ran out last Wednesday morning. As he opened his car trunk to remove a laptop computer, a gunman approached him from behind in the newspaper parking lot. As three surveillance cameras filmed and a silencer muffled the shots, the assailant fired six times, missing only once. Doctors removed five bullets from Mr. Auger's back; he is in serious condition. The setting was not Colombia, but Quebec. And the city was not Marseille, but Montreal. "All Canadians are shocked at what took place in the parking lot of Le Journal de Montreal," Canada's justice minister, Anne McLellan, said, referring to the attack on Mr. Auger. Widely respected as the best-informed reporter on Montreal's underworld, Mr. Auger was regularly interviewed by visiting Canadian and American journalists, most notably last December when an Algerian resident of Montreal was arrested and charged with carrying explosives into the United States. Wednesday's attack came the day after Le Journal de Montreal published a two-page report by Mr. Auger, under the headline "Chaos Among the Bosses," outlining the latest killings in a turf war between two rival drug gangs, the Hell's Angels and the Rock Machine. Over the last five years, the drug war has spawned 153 murders, 172 murder attempts, 130 arson attacks and 85 bombings. Muting public outrage over this violence, the Montreal police say 95 percent of the victims have been gangsters. On Thursday, Noella Gingras, 41, was charged with making death threats against Mr. Auger. According to the police, Ms. Gingras left a death threat on Mr. Auger's answering machine hours after reading an article that mentioned her boyfriend, Francois Gagnon, who was killed in June. Mr. Auger wrote, "Despite his 350 pounds of bulk, Gagnon was a pathetic little crook." Ms. Gingras is not a suspect in the attack on Mr. Auger, and the police say they have made no arrests. On Friday, as protesters in Quebec and Ottawa carried bilingual signs, "Non a la intimidation - No to intimidation," advocates for the news media noted that while physical attacks on reporters in North America are rare, attacks by criminals on journalists are on the rise worldwide. "We have seen over the last decade an increase in assassinations and assassination attempts by organized crime figures and drug lords," said Ann Cooper, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a organization based in New York. "It is rare in the United States and Canada, and much more commonplace in Colombia and the states of the former Soviet Union." Canadians often see themselves as caretakers of the kinder, gentler corner of North America, a place where strict gun control goes hand in hand with low crime. Now they are wrestling with issues of self- censorship and impunity, worries that are normally the preserve of rougher parts of the world. "There is a danger of self-censorship," Helene Pichette, president of the Professional Federation of Quebec Journalists, said. "If it is not the journalists who become more cautious, maybe it will be the people close to them who urge them to be more prudent." As yellow police tape cordons off Mr. Auger's desk in the newsroom, a sense of menace hangs over the normally feisty news media of Montreal, a city with four competing dailies, three in French and one in English. By consensus, newspapers are not publishing photos or the names of Mr. Auger's family members, or the name of the hospital where he is recuperating under a 24-hour police guard. Anne-Marie Dussault, host of a television talk show, says she now understands why Mr. Auger and many other journalists declined to appear on her Sept. 8 show, which focused on the gang war. She told Le Journal de Montreal: "It gives me shivers to realize that some people could be risking their lives by going on the show." Although Mr. Auger was able to call 911 on his cell phone as he lay bleeding in the parking lot, he has not spoken publicly since the shooting. In his absence, French-language television repeatedly broadcast last week snippets from an interview he gave a few hours before he was shot. Alluding to fear, he said: "When you cover a biker war that has killed 150 people in Quebec, obviously you think about it, you talk about it." Noting that in the last years, gang members once shot a Quebec reporter in the arm and another journalist in the legs, reporters see the Auger shooting as a clear escalation. The shooting has so angered Quebec politicians that the ruling Parti Quebecois, which advocates separating Quebec from Canada, has proposed suspending the right of association for criminal gangs, a step that outraged separatists the last time it was taken, in 1970, to break up violent separatist groups. Membership in certain gangs would be outlawed for five years under the latest proposal, which has won support in Ontario, Canada's most powerful province, and Manitoba and Saskatchewan, two Western provinces with gang problems. Despite fears of crimping civil liberties, some believe freedom of the press overrides those concerns. Michel C. Auger, Le Journal de Montreal's political columnist, who is no relation to the crime reporter, wrote that faced with choosing "between the freedom of association of `les Hells' and freedom of the press, a democratic society should not need to hesitate for long." - --- MAP posted-by: John Chase