The 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.