On July 1, 2013, Vito Rizzuto took possession of a home in the upscale Sainte-Dorothée district of western Laval, across the Rivière des Prairies from Montreal and, not surprisingly, close to a number of golf clubs. The cut-stone, executive-style residence wasn’t really a step up from the old one on Antoine-Berthelet, but it was a move away from the street with so many sad memories and the unfortunate nickname Mafia Row.
Vito’s new home was originally listed at $1,295,000, but he got it for $874,000. It was registered in his wife, Giovanna’s, name and rumour was he paid in cash. Like the old home, there was no fence around it, so the bold could just walk up to the front door, unlike the bunker-like condos of his rivals by the Rivière des Prairies or the walled compound in King City. His new neighbours anonymously grumbled to the press that they worried their families might be caught in the line of fire if assassins came looking for Vito. Who didn’t recall how Nicolò was shot dead in his own kitchen by a sniper? Vito’s new house didn’t look that much different from others in the neighbourhood. What if the killers showed up at the wrong house and opened fire? Anyone reading the papers knew it was too early to pronounce the Mafia war over.
That said, the move into the new home was a pronouncement of victory. No longer was Vito hidden in a downtown condo, whose address was jealously guarded. Between his release from prison and the time he turned the key to the mansion in Laval, at least five well-placed Desjardins associates had been murdered with surgical precision.
As Vito settled in, however, there were reports that some of his Ontario enemies in the ’Ndrangheta had driven to Hamilton to huddle with Vito’s enemies there. Long-time organized crime reporter Claude Poirier reported that Vito went to a Laval golf club five times a week that July, meeting in a cottage with a small group of trusted associates. Before the month was over, there were reports of an arson at the cottage, and questions about whether Vito had got too comfortable, too soon.
Behind the bars of Bordeaux Prison, Raynald Desjardins was settling into new accommodations of his own, preparing himself for what threatened to be a long legal battle. He had some 3.4 million documents to sift through to plan his defence. For this, he was granted permission to have a laptop computer in his cell. Desjardins did have to pay for the computer and also the costs of disabling it from Internet connectivity, which was pocket change for the millionaire; the public was left with the expense of random checks of the computer. Desjardins’s seventy-one-year-old co-accused, Jack Arthur Simpson, was also adapting to a new home that July. He had been held in isolation as he awaited his eventual trial for first-degree murder. Unlike Desjardins, he wasn’t boning up on court documents to better argue his case. He was just trying to stay alive.
As court proceedings crawled along, intriguing questions emerged about whether the RCMP had managed to infiltrate top levels of the Mafia. If so, were police now taking extreme measures to protect their source? There were even whispers about whether it was being treated as a matter of national security.
Certainly, something felt odd about the pending court case. Court of Quebec judge Maurice Parent gave no explanation for why he limited access to disclosure information for defendants, access that is considered a given right in most trials. Clearly, e-mails and texts from the accused killers and their associates were at the heart of the prosecution’s case. It was understandable if Desjardins, Simpson and the other accused were struggling now to recall exactly what they said in those interminable strings of texts, when they thought they were operating under the cloak of RIM’S vaunted privacy system and when they changed their cellphones fourteen times in one calendar year. Was there a traitor in that lengthy message string?