FINANCES

IN MAY 1970, AT AROUND ten one morning, Mr. Ron Lamoureux, a man in his fifties, Second World War vet, sufferer of what was not yet called post-traumatic stress disorder (“The bombing made him a bit loony, is all”), was standing near a window in the Queen Mary hospital for former combatants, his back to the street, thinking about the uninspired adaptation of Madame Bovary he’d seen the night before at the Jean-Talon cinema, when the window behind him suddenly blew out. At the same time, a deafening roar shook the structure of the building around him and even the air he was breathing. The next thing he knew he was lying on his stomach on the floor, convinced he was back on Omaha Beach on D-Day, at Courselles-sur-Mer, to be exact. Even before making the slightest move to shake off the splinters of glass and the flakes of plaster that covered him, he realized that his sphincter had opened. “Mommy,” he said, very distinctly.

Two kilometres away and exactly fifteen minutes later, in the parking lot of a building belonging to one of the Canadian branches of General Electric (the American industrial giant), a powerful explosive transformed the lovingly souped-up Camaro of Ti-Guy Porlier, a Gaspésian exiled to Verdun, into a mass of twisted metal. For Ti-Guy, his car was his life. He raced it on weekends. The murmur that issued from its exhaust practically made him come in his pants. That of a Formula-1 literally made him faint. When he left the building with a few other employees to check out the damage and saw the smoking wreckage of his car in the parking lot, he simply said, “No . . .”

At the same moment, three hoods armed with machine guns burst into the Credit Union of the General Association of Students of the University of Montreal (GASUM), situated partway up the mountain on boulevard Édouard-Montpetit. They lined up the employees and clients with their faces turned toward the wall and their hands behind their heads, then threw $58,000 into a cloth bag and got the hell out of there.

Shortly afterward, three hooded gunmen showed up at a branch of the Canadian Imperial Bank at the corner of boulevard Saint-Laurent and rue Saint-Viateur. They made off with a cool $51,000.

At almost the same time, the Montreal-North Franco-Canadian Credit Union was hit by, you guessed it, three masked gunmen wearing nylon stockings over their heads. This time, however, Detective Sergeant Miles Martinek had been warned by an informant the previous night and had set up an ambush for the holdup men. In the midst of the prolonged gunfight that ensued, the hoodlums tried to get away by shoving a hostage out ahead of them, a twenty-nine-year-old blonde pretty cashier. Not in the least deterred, Martinek leapt from behind a nearby parked car and laid out one of the thieves with the Thompson machine gun he always used on important occasions. He’d got hold of this beauty during a raid on a gangster hideout. The two other thieves dropped everything — weapons, hostage — and, stepping instinctively away from their fallen comrade, who was pissing blood, raised their hands. Martinek later posed for the Police Gazette photographer who, alerted by a helpful phone call, had been listening in that day on the police radio band. In the photo, we see Miles Martinek, one knee raised, bald head glistening like a full moon, leaning on his rifle like a bwana who’d just shot himself a buffalo. With his free hand, he was picking a pile of blood-stained banknotes from a large pool of blood.

Only the holdup at the university and the two bombs set off as diversions were eventually traced to the FLQ. The two other robberies staged at the same time were put down to simple coincidence, just another day at the office in the holdup capital of North America.

Meanwhile, on the mountain, the holdup men evaporated into the woods that surrounded the university. The cash they’d made off with put a serious crimp in the golf season of Mr. Tim Burroughs, the United States consul in Montreal. The neighbouring cemetery resounded with the song of small birds.