Business or Blood (31 page)

In their search for Gosselin's hit men, police investigators soon zeroed in on the Reds street gang. The Reds were believed to operate under the umbrella of the Syndicate, especially since the murders of leader Chénier (Big) Dupuy and his lieutenant, Lamartine Sévère Paul, on August 11, 2012. The widely accepted explanation for their murders was that they had refused to be part of the Syndicate, with its Hells Angels and mob ties and control of the city centre. Such a move towards consolidation would help pave the way for Vito's resumption of control on the streets.

The investigation pointed to a thirty-three-year-old known on the streets alternately as Dirty Harry and Harry Up. His real name was Harry Mytil. His criminal history included a three-year prison sentence for his role in a 2003 home invasion in the Vieux-Longueuil condo of a defence lawyer. He had also been convicted for the gunpoint robbery of a drug dealer, with charges pending for reckless driving and failing to stop at the scene of an accident. He appeared to have acted as a talent scout in the Gosselin murder, picking the hit men and paying them.
Before police could move on Harry and his associates, they were called to his Laval home on April 16, where they found his body sprawled in his garage, pockmarked by several bullet holes. The door of the garage was still open. If there were links between Harry and Vito, they were suddenly as cold as the night Gosselin was murdered.

T
he Charbonneau Commission soldiered on, reputations and occasionally people falling dead along the way. Few people in the general public knew of Robert Rousseau, head of the Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce borough department of permits and inspections, until he sat under the bright lights of the inquiry. He was interrogated for hours in March 2013 by Quebec's anti-corruption unit about the construction of condos on Wilson Avenue by Tony Magi and Nick Rizzuto Jr., near the spot where Nick Jr. was murdered. He faced pointed questions about zoning changes, and also about a demolition permit approved by Rousseau for the site. Hours after the probing ended, the father of two children killed himself in his Châteauguay home.

That March, the city was faced with a difficult decision. After the snow and ice of a Montreal winter, plenty of potholes needed repair, but there were few companies with clean reputations to fill them. Mayor Michael Applebaum announced that the city had qualms about granting $5.2 million in road repair contracts to seven companies when at least three of them were accused of corruption at the Charbonneau Commission.

Giuseppe Borsellino knew plenty about how business got done in the world of Quebec construction. As president of Garnier
Construction, his company had won millions of dollars in public infrastructure contracts. As he told the Charbonneau Commission, city works engineer Gilles Surprenant was the prime mover in the wave of slime that coated the industry. Borsellino argued that the contractors were the victims and not the villains in the drama. The commission heard that Borsellino and two other major construction bosses paid the city thousands of dollars in cash from the 1990s on for what Borsellino called “tips.”

“What I didn't like is the power that those people [at the city] had acquired,” Borsellino said. “It became apparent that [the contractors] were in a system we couldn't get out of.”

Justice Charbonneau wasn't impressed, saying “there are limits” to her credulity. “So you're telling me the great mastermind of all of this was Gilles Surprenant, when he was thirty years old?” Charbonneau asked.

“Yes,” Borsellino replied.

Asked to comment on why he attended a Rizzuto family wedding, Borsellino told the commission that his parents were from Cattolica Eraclea, the same village as the Rizzutos. He explained that he didn't go to Rizzuto family events as a general practice. If he did attend the wedding of one of Vito's sons, it was probably after he was invited by the bride's family. Who could be sure of such things? “I think I was invited to one of the weddings,” he said. “But I'm still not sure. And I knew it coming here, that maybe if we get to that, I wouldn't be able to confirm. But probably was invited to one wedding. And it's probably because the bride, I knew the parents of the bride. But I'm still not sure. And I'm not sure if I went.”

Borsellino found conviction when speaking in more general terms about the mob, testifying that he had never had any business dealings with anyone associated with organized crime. “I'd rather hand over the keys to my business” than pay the Mafia, he said. “My parents came from Sicily,” Borsellino continued. “[The Mafia is] something you hear about, you feel … it's never clear.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of his testimony concerned a 2009 beating from three men that forced him to undergo seven hours of facial reconstruction surgery. Borsellino said he wasn't sure about the
motive behind the attack, although it might have been for a construction project or unpaid debts. He admitted he did not report the assault to police.

Prosecutor Simon Tremblay offered two theories of his own to explain the pummelling. One was that Borsellino's actions might have forced a top official in the city's public works department to resign, when it was learned that Borsellino had paid the official's way to Italy. The second hypothesis was that Borsellino didn't pick Raynald Desjardins's firm, Énergie Carboneutre, for decontamination work at one of his construction sites. Domenico Arcuri Jr. also had an ownership share in the company.

For his part, Borsellino wasn't able to clarify anything further about the beating. He did say he had once been a political contributor, but halted his donations in the late 2000s.

“It was not ethical,” he explained.

Accountant Frank Zampino spent twenty-two years in municipal politics, rising to become executive committee chairman under ex–Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay. That made him the second most powerful official in Montreal's civic government. Before this, he had been mayor of Saint-Léonard. In the course of his mayoral functions, he was invited to some fifty weddings a year and attended many of them, including the July 6, 1991, union of the son of Frank Cotroni to the daughter of Joe Di Maulo. “It wasn't the most brilliant decision of the century to go to the marriage,” he testified. “Perceptions are worth more than facts in politics.” Commission prosecutor Sonia LeBel asked if he could recall a photo being taken of himself with Vito Rizzuto. Zampino replied that he did not know.

The commission's mandate didn't include a foray into federal corruption. National NDP leader Tom Mulcair told reporters of a conversation with police back in 1994 after someone tried to slip him a suspicious-looking envelope following a meeting between himself and Gilles Vaillancourt. At the time, Mulcair was a rookie provincial politician and Vaillancourt was five years into his six-term career as
mayor of Laval, the municipality across the Rivière des Prairies from Montreal.

By the time Mulcair went public about the incident, in 2013, Vaillancourt was facing a dozen criminal charges, including influence peddling, breach of trust and gangsterism for directing a criminal organization. He had resigned after twenty-three years as mayor of Laval, pledging to devote his energies to proving his innocence. By May 2013, the City of Laval was placed under a trusteeship in hopes it would help contain the political mess.

Shocking as all this was, none of these public grillings and confessions felt like the inquiry's main event. Desjardins and Vito were still expected to take the witness stand. The inquisition was far from over.

G
oing home for supper was now a life-threatening activity in the
milieu
. Everyone seemed a little quicker to settle things with a gun. Saint-Léonard neighbours of Vincenzo (Vincent) Scuderi called 911 at 6:10 p.m. on January 31, 2013, after hearing a volley of shots outside his home on Robert Boulevard. Police arrived to find a handgun beside the forty-nine-year-old's lifeless body on the sidewalk. He had ties to Ponytail De Vito, Raynald Desjardins and Giuseppe (Closure) Colapelle, suggesting his killer might be from Vito's camp.

Scuderi's old associates needed less than a day to respond. At 10:10 a.m. on February 1, fifty-one-year-old residential building contractor Tonino (Tony) Callocchia was felled by gunshots in a parking lot between two restaurants on Saint-Martin Boulevard West in Laval. Callocchia's history with Vito's group ran deep. He was busted in massive cocaine-smuggling and money-laundering cases in the 1990s by the RCMP. “You have … been identified on several occasions as an active member of the Italian Mafia,” his parole hearing panel wrote him in 2001. “The offences you have … committed are large-scale and they required organization and planning at a level that only a highly organized group can hope to execute.”

Good luck spared Callocchia's life that day in the parking lot. Bleeding heavily from several bullets to the torso, Callocchia managed to stagger
into a restaurant. The gunman chose to drive away rather than venture inside and finish the job. There would be plenty more chances.

As the bodies continued to drop, Vito seemed to be pulling ahead in the undeclared Mafia war. Secretly bunkered still in his downtown Montreal condominium, he ventured out only in the company of guards and rode in his armoured car, nothing like the lithe and open Ferrari he sometimes drove in the salad days of the early 1990s. As a possible omen of good fortune, someone finally made an offer to purchase Vito's Mafia Row mansion in March 2013, almost two years after it went on the market. The offer was for $1.275 million, and it sold for almost three-quarters of a million under the original price. The new buyer would be a pioneer of sorts for Mafia Row, as listing broker Leon Derestepanian noted to the press that they were from a large family without organized crime connections. The Montreal
Gazette
had fun with the story, headlining it,
THE OFFER VITO RIZZUTO COULDN'T REFUSE
. Reporter Allison Lampert's account began, “Vito Rizzuto's former home in Ahuntsic has finally sold, but it appears the reputed Montreal crime boss has taken a hit.”

Some members of the 'Ndrangheta in Ontario now quietly pined for the big money they used to make while working with Vito in the 1990s and early 2000s. So much blood had been spilled; whatever opportunity had once tempted them was now long gone, replaced by loss and confusion. Baker Moreno Gallo was an exile of sorts in Acapulco, where a friend owned a hotel, and where he was close to other significant Calabrians in the underworld. His wife and sons had never left Montreal, even though he had sold his $1.2-million home, and he retained construction interests in the city. While Acapulco was warm and exciting, Gallo remained a Montrealer at heart, and a homesick one at that.

He filed papers in May 2013 with the Canadian immigration board, arguing he had a right to be in the country even if he wasn't a citizen. He still had resident status, and he argued that this meant authorities didn't have the right to push for his expulsion. He further argued that it wasn't fair for him to be deported for serious criminality, since the murder for which he was convicted was committed before the Immigration Act was revised in 1978. His application included a
letter of support from the Mammola Recreation Association, a six-hundred-member group of Montrealers of Calabrian background. Included in his appeal package was an affidavit from the association's president, Francesco Ierfino, praising the frequency and generosity of his charitable donations. Like Vito and Di Maulo, Gallo had a civicminded side and his largesse included financial support for the Montreal Children's Foundation, the Breast Cancer Foundation of Maisonneuve, the Rosemont hospital and the Canadian Multiple Sclerosis Association.

Before any sort of meeting was scheduled with immigration authorities, Gallo had a hearing before Vito Rizzuto. He was summoned to meet Vito on vacation in the Dominican Republic, along with a group of other Canadians. Gallo knew that his next round of golf with Vito could be a life-altering or life-ending event. For those in the
milieu
, a round on the links served as a performance review, and men like Gallo knew there wasn't much point trying to hide from Vito's invitations, as his reach was long.

Gallo didn't seem nervous about trying to come back to Montreal. Did he think Vito hadn't detected the depth of his betrayal? He was too smart and experienced a man to truly believe that. Did he feel he might somehow be forgiven for transferring Vito's sports book in the Toronto area to the Calabrians during his absence? Other sports book operations had been turned over to Montagna. In Vito's world, betrayed accounts were closed with bullets. Gallo knew all of this, and yet he agreed to the meeting in the Dominican.

As Quebec's criminal body count rose, so too did the political body count. At dawn on June 17, 2013, Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum's day began with an event that wasn't written into his itinerary: he was arrested at his home on fourteen corruption-related charges, including fraud, breach of trust and conspiracy. Pundits recalled how Applebaum had presented himself as a cleansing force for the scandal-plagued city when he replaced former Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay the previous fall, after Tremblay had resigned amidst construction bid–rigging
allegations. “I solemnly vow that I will erase this stain on our city,” Applebaum had promised, eight months before he was taken into custody.

His arrest was news around the world, coming at the same time accusations first surfaced that Toronto mayor Rob Ford was videotaped smoking crack cocaine with street-gang members. Suddenly, the mayors of Canada's two largest cities had become punchlines. The
Atlantic
magazine headlined its report “What the Heck Is the Matter with the Mayors of Canada?” and opened it with the line: “So a Canadian mayor was arrested Monday and, no, it was not the one you expect.”