The Midnight Slider

Criminal

This episode recounts the 2013 disappearance and presumed murder of Philip Boudreau, a notorious lobster thief on Nova Scotia's Isle Madame. Af

Key takeaways

• Philip Boudreau maintained a 28-page criminal record but was viewed by some locals as a Robin Hood figure who stole from wealthy lobstermen to support himself and neighbors in need.
• Three fishermen—James Landry, Dwayne Sampson, and Craig Landry—shot at, rammed, and ultimately drowned Boudreau after years of cut traps and stolen lobsters targeting their family business.

Main topics

• Lobster theft and rural economics
• Vigilante justice and community loyalty

Notable quotes

"Murder is not something that occurs in this neck of the woods very often."

Conclusion

The episode leaves listeners with a complex portrait of rural justice,

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Support for Criminal comes from FAIR. If you run your own shop, whether it's an online shop or brick-and-mortar, you want your products to be unique. With FAIR, it's easy for independent retailers to stock products from over 100,000 brands worldwide. Perfect for planning inventory for the holiday season. Sign up today and get 50 % off your first wholesale order, up to $100, at faire.com slash criminal. That's F-A-I-R-E dot com slash criminal. Terms may apply. Hi, it's Phoebe. In just a few weeks, I'm going to be heading back out on the road with a brand new live show. But this tour is very different from the ones we've done before. Because this time, I'm telling a story I've never told before. My own. You'll get to hear about my wild family and the secrets I kept for them. It's a show about... not giving up on people. Get your tickets now at thisiscriminal.com slash live. I hope to see you. Speaker 4 (1:06) Around here you know that you don't steal from lobster fishermen. You don't steal from any fishermen. And there are consequences. Speaker 3 (1:15) There's a small island in Canada, in Nova Scotia, called Isle-Madame, where fishermen are up and out on the ocean at 4 a.m., pulling up traps full of lobsters. Millions of dollars worth of lobster. You need a license to fish for them. And the licenses are very expensive. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Speaker 4 (1:36) Someone who has a license that can set 250 traps can stand to make close to $500,000 in the run of a year, give or take. It's quite lucrative. And a lot of people's livelihoods rely on that. And that's really driving the economy and been the cornerstone of it for quite some time. Speaker 3 (1:59) Everybody knows somebody who's involved with lobsters. Speaker 4 (2:03) Oh, absolutely, yeah. They're either related or married into it or they just know them, you know. Everybody knows who the lobster fishermen are. Speaker 3 (2:12) This is Jake Boudreau. He's a journalist based in Nova Scotia. He grew up on Isle Madame, and he says it's a place where many of the people that live there have been there a long time. Speaker 4 (2:25) There's always been that tradition of taking care of families, watching out, looking out for one another. You know, a lot of people are related. A lot of people grew up together. Speaker 3 (2:36) The year-round population of Isle-Madame is around 4,000. When you look it up, you find that most people call it an idyllic place. Rocky coastlines, small harbors, lighthouses that have been called the prettiest in Canada. Jake Boudreau says that despite all that, Isle Madame doesn't get the summer tourist crowds like other parts of the coastline. Speaker 3 (3:00) Jake says people in Isle Madame are used to doing things for themselves. It's always been that way. You're a fisherman, but you also have the skills to fix your own boat, or be a carpenter as well. It's a do-it-yourself kind of ethos, he says. And he says that applies to everything, including handling disputes. He says people on Isle Madame don't trust the police much to help. Speaker 3 (3:27) One morning in the summer of 2013, Jake received word that a boat had been found overturned. The boat was called the Midnight Slider, and everyone knew the man it belonged to. But he was nowhere to be found. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Speaker 3 (3:57) The Midnight Slider belonged to a 43-year-old man named Philip Boudreau. One man on the island said Midnight Slider was a good name for the boat and for Philip Boudreau because he was always out there somewhere, sliding around in the middle of the night, in the woods, on the water. You never knew where. Speaker 3 (4:18) Jake Boudreaux says everyone on the small island knew the name of Philip Boudreaux. They're not related. Jake says there are a lot of Boudreaux's on the island. Speaker 3 (4:28) An Isle Madame resident and journalist named Silver Donald Cameron interviewed a lot of people on the island. People who said they were happy to talk about Philip, but didn't want their names used because it's such a small place. Speaker 3 (4:43) One person described him as a kind of Robin Hood, who'd help you get anything you needed. One said, quote, If I'd have told him that there was something I wanted, he would have went and stole it. Someone else said, you got better deals from Philip than you ever got from Walmart. And another person said, Philip would steal the beads off Christ's moccasins, but then, if you needed them, he'd turn around and give them to you. Speaker 3 (5:12) People described him as a strange genius and said, quote, that he figured out exactly where the holes were in the system. He didn't fall between the cracks. He lived in the cracks. Speaker 3 (5:26) There's a story about Philip Boudreau being chased by police and running right off the end of a dock and into the freezing cold water. He found some seaweed to hide under, and when he had to come back up to get air, his middle finger came up first. Speaker 3 (5:43) Some people tried to help. People offered him jobs. One couple bought him a plane ticket to Calgary to start fresh. Living and working with a family friend, But he just came back to Isle Medaim. Speaker 3 (5:56) Philip even stole from Jake Boudreau's family once. He stole their three-wheeler to go for a joyride and then just brought it back a while later. Speaker 4 (6:06) I didn't know Philip personally. I did have some brief interactions with him. I saw a mild-mannered side to him. But then, you know, you hear stories from other people of a not-so-mild side. There seemed to be two sides to him. You know, and he didn't seem to... fit into any box. Speaker 3 (6:27) Philip Boudreau grew up on Isle Madame. He was one of four kids. One of his teachers remembered that when he was little, about eight years old, there was a day when he kept falling asleep in class. She asked Philip if he was sick, and he said that he hadn't gotten much sleep because it had been his turn to make sure the wood stove stayed lit all night. Teachers remember that he would sometimes come to school with his face cut or bruised. He eventually dropped out of school. Speaker 4 (6:56) I mean, he was known to make trouble in school and wasn't a great student. As far as the thefts and that, you know, I wasn't aware of that as much then. It's something that became known as time went on, you know, as we get into the 90s. And, you know, there was more of that that went on. But, you know, the reputation doesn't take long to get out. Speaker 3 (7:20) As he got older, he was in and out of jail. And while some people thought he was kind of funny, this Robin Hood figure, even sometimes letting him hide from police on their property, Plenty of people on Isle Madame didn't find anything funny about any of it. People said he was a problem and a bully. No matter how many times he went to jail, he just kept coming back, and he just kept stealing. Speaker 4 (7:45) I mean, there was a lot of people who, you know, promised him that if he broke into their house that he wouldn't like what would happen. I mean, you can infer from that what you will. I know there was people who made specific threats that he would get shot if they showed up in his property, or worse, or I don't know, worse than getting shot, or other consequences. There were people who were not happy that he could steal from him or would or had. And then there were others who kind of looked at it in the context of his upbringing and that he did come from unfortunate circumstances. There was some pity for him. And some people felt bad. It was a mixed bag. It just depends on the person. I know there's people who did... catch him stealing or knew that it was him and went to his house, picked him up and took him to where he stole or damaged and made him fix it or replace it. Which he did. Speaker 4 (8:49) Oddly enough, he didn't even deny it and just went about and did what they told him to do. It's a mixed bag of tolerance, I guess, in that case. Speaker 3 (9:00) By the time Philip Boudreau was in his early 40s, his criminal record was 28 pages long. Mostly breaking and entering and theft, but also harassment and assault and making violent threats. He had threatened to sink people's boats and to burn down people's houses. Speaker 3