Montreal has a long history of spirited efforts to shine light on its underworld. In 1909, a Royal Commission into municipal wrongdoing heard the head of the Light, Heat and Power Company testify that an alderman had leaned on him for ten thousand dollars in campaign contributions. Less than two decades later, Supreme Court of Canada justice Louis Codèrre conducted a probe of the city’s police force and found it sorely lacking. “Vice has spread itself across the city with an ugliness that seemed assured of impunity,” the justice concluded. The failed experiment with Prohibition only made things worse, enriching the underworld and semi-legitimizing it in the eyes of the public. During Prohibition days, the Montreal Customs House was used as a criminal terminal of sorts, where smugglers unloaded American tobacco, silks and narcotics to the point that a Crown attorney called it “one of the greatest clearing houses for stolen goods in Canada.” In the 1930s, French police ranked Montreal as the world’s third “most depraved” city, behind Port Said and Marseilles. Vic (The Egg) Cotroni was at the time a part-time professional wrestler who worked on “baseball bat elections,” mustering voters to support whatever candidates paid him.
Vito’s family hadn’t yet landed in Canada when crime-fighting prosecutor Pacifique (Pax) Plante probed corruption in Montreal’s municipal politics and police force with a Dick Tracy–like zeal during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In a series of articles written for Le Devoir with journalist Gérard Filion, Plante catalogued how police “protection” buttressed certain figures in the underworld. Future Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau was a junior member of Plante’s camp, as Plante’s crime-busting appealed to both the younger man’s puritanical streak and his political ambitions. Together, they gathered information that led to the arrests of several police officers.
Try as they might, their fevered efforts weren’t nearly enough to stem the river of sleaze. Martin Brett wrote in his potboiler novel Hot Freeze in 1954 about the enduring reach of the city’s organized crime establishment: “The Syndicate was probably the most subtle organization of its type in North America, tentacles reaching anywhere and everywhere, with pressure all the way.” Brett, the nom de plume of CBC Radio announcer (Ronald) Douglas Sanderson, described Montreal through the eyes of his protagonist, private detective Michel Garfin:
“It makes me puke,” I said savagely. “Look at it. An illuminated cross stuck up on the mountain, street after street full of the reverend clergy, a self-congratulatory city council, pious editorials in all the newspapers, and as much vice and aberration and corruption as any city this side of Port Said. One level stinking and the other level smirking, and in between a layer of supposed public servants trying to stuff their greasy pockets with graft. Oh sure, we have a vice probe every decade or so. It goes on and on, year after year, and then finally it peters out under the sheer dead weight of its own evasive evidence. A few honest officials are disgraced, a few more get eased gently out of their jobs, a couple of writs for slander are issued and settled out of court, and everyone sighs with relief and goes right back to smirking abnormal.”
That pretty much captured the tenor of things in the generations between the days of Pax Plante and Vito’s time. More huffing and puffing about cleaning up Canada’s underworld was heard in the mid-1960s, when the stench of corruption again became too rank. Some of this came from embarrassing revelations about the actions of long-time Montreal mobster Lucien (Moose) Rivard. His underworld contacts ran to Vic (The Egg) Cotroni’s younger brother Giuseppe (Pep) Cotroni and a network of Corsican heroin smugglers who later became known as the French Connection. Rivard also had strong Cuban criminal connections. In 1956, Rivard moved for a time to the island, working both the Communist and capitalist sides of the political spectrum as he supplied guns for Castro’s revolutionaries while also running a nightclub.
By March 1965, Rivard was in Montreal’s Bordeaux Prison on fresh narcotics charges. He somehow managed to escape, after someone on staff let him outside onto the facility’s grounds and provided him with a garden hose to flood the skating rink. Suspicions naturally arose, as his ice-making duties took place on a warm spring day and the hose he was issued was strong enough to allow him to scale a jail wall. A jail employee told the Toronto Star that this could only be done with inside help, and that the going rate for such assistance was ten thousand dollars.
The press jumped on the story, dubbing Rivard the “Gallic Pimpernel.” Rivard basked in the attention, writing Prime Minister Lester Pearson from wherever he was hiding: “Life is short, you know. I don’t intend to be in jail for the rest of my life.” The full story was never disclosed, but a 1965 inquiry surprised no one when it concluded the justice department should have investigated reports that he tried to corrupt several key members of the Liberal Party.
Corruption remained a constant, and former Liberal cabinet minister Pierre Laporte was notorious for his relations with mobster Francesco D’Asti until Laporte was murdered by FLQ terrorists in 1970. In October 1974, Paolo Violi “invited” a political candidate to his ice cream shop, where he was successfully convinced that it would be best for all concerned if he abandoned his campaign to become mayor of Saint-Léonard.
Brett’s mid-century observations about the stinking, smirking nature of vice in Montreal, and its reliance on “a layer of supposed public servants trying to stuff their greasy pockets with graft,” rang true through the 1970s, when then Quebec premier Robert Bourassa called upon Robert Cliche to head up a public inquiry into construction violence. Cliche was assisted by thirty-six-year-old lawyer Brian Mulroney, a future prime minister of Canada. Cliche’s report, released in May 1975, spoke of “an organized system of corruption without parallel in North America,” with tales of ex-con union organizers who taught underlings how to break legs and goons willing to strangle the pets of people who stood in their way. Union leaders and cabinet ministers were discredited, as Cliche concluded that construction union corruption would not be so rife without active government support. Cliche’s final report contained a paragraph that was eerily reminiscent of Hot Freeze: “The work that this commission has done will matter little, even if the undesirables are purged from the positions they hold, even if the laws governing the construction sector are improved, if those who make the laws do not have the will to apply them and see that they are respected.”
Vito’s public profile was still low in the 1970s, when a parade of Montreal underworld figures was called to appear at another series of crime commission hearings. When Paolo Violi refused to testify, he was sentenced to a year in jail for contempt. Violi’s status was undermined by revelations that he had lowered his guard and inadvertently allowed undercover police officer Robert Menard to live above his ice cream parlour for years, secretly recording conversations of the mobsters downstairs. That created the opening Nicolò Rizzuto needed to move against him. The world of vice described so well by Brett survived the inquiry, but it did spell the beginning of the end for the Violi brothers. Small wonder that Nicolò had chosen the seventies to take his family to Venezuela, where he was close to his cocaine contacts in the Cuntrera family and far from the guns of his rival Violi and the spotlight of the public inquiry.
Now, as Vito settled back into life in Canada in the fall of 2012, Quebec was awash in fresh stories of corruption. The revelations of a former Montreal chief of police and a series of investigative stories from Radio-Canada’s award-winning Enquête program set the stage for the public hand-wringing of yet another commission. The City of Montreal was awarding some $1.4 billion in contracts annually, providing plenty of opportunities for graft. Public confidence in the system was at a nadir. A Montreal Gazette reader wrote, with more than a little sarcasm, that perhaps Vito should run for mayor now that he was back in town:
Think of just some of the benefits:
No need for city councillors and the like; he has his own organization.
He has extensive experience with high finance.
He’s very familiar with Montreal’s infrastructure and construction needs.
There would no longer be a need for bribes, payoffs and the like; middlemen would be eliminated.
He might even give the blue collars’ union an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Essentially, I think Vito Rizzuto would run a much more efficient operation at city hall and probably save the taxpayers a pile of money in the process. What have we got to lose?