… fraud, because of man peculiar evil,
To God is more displeasing
The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto IV
DANTE ALIGHIERI
Sixty-four-year-old construction executive Nicolò Milioto was already known by a nickname at the Charbonneau Commission before he took the witness stand. He was Mr. Sidewalk. His testimony followed that of Martin Dumont, a former Union Montréal party worker, who testified that he had once badly mispronounced Milioto’s name and was told, “You can call me Mr. Sidewalk.” Dumont told the commission that Milioto had an equally memorable response when questioned about why his cost estimate for a sidewalk project was $100,000 more than a competitor’s estimate. “You know, Martin, my sidewalk foundations are thick and deep,” Dumont recalled Milioto telling him. “You don’t want to end up in my sidewalk foundations.”
When it was Milioto’s turn to testify, it was natural to ask why his construction firm always seemed to land contracts for sidewalk work. Milioto protested his innocence: “If people told you that it was rigged, I’m telling you it wasn’t.… I never rigged a contract.”
He met very often with people under suspicion for doing exactly that. Milioto was picked up by RCMP cameras visiting the Consenza Social Club 236 times in two years. He wasn’t alone in doing so, as vehicles of some seventy-four companies involved in the construction trades, from electrical to landscaping to air conditioning to asphalt, were also seen in the “Coz” parking lot. Milioto provided precious little help in explaining what was happening in the grey RCMP videos, other than the elder Rizzuto stuffing wads of money into his socks. Milioto cast this in an innocent, even folksy light. “It was so the money would not be stolen, or fall out,” Milioto offered. Milioto told the inquiry that he was in the dark about anyone in Canada paying protection money, or pizzo. “I come from Italy, madame, I know what a pizzo is.” But in Canada? In Montreal’s construction industry? “I’m not a member of organized crime,” Milioto continued. “I was the owner of a construction company.”
The very mention of Dumont’s testimony incensed the retired construction boss. “I never told him my name is Mr. Sidewalk. And my name, ‘Milioto,’ is not complicated [to pronounce], even in French.… I swear to you, before God, that I don’t know him. He’s either mixing me up with someone else or he’s a professional liar and more.”
He did admit to having known Nicolò Rizzuto since his boyhood days in Cattolica Eraclea. In Canada, he knew Nicolò as a respectable man and a frequent card player, not a Mafia don. “For me, he was a family father. He was a good person,” Milioto said. The Mafia stuff came from the media and was not something he’d experienced personally. “I knew what the newspapers said. That didn’t affect me.… For me, he was a good person.” He offered an innocent explanation for why he was often seen playing cards with Nicolò: his butcher shop was in the same plaza as the Café Consenza and he often wandered in for a hand or two of cards. What did they talk about during those frequent games? “We talked about cards.”
In one of the videos shown to the commission, Milioto puts money in his socks and walks out of the room. He returns with Rocco Sollecito. Asked about the scene, Milioto said: “I see Sollecito. I call and ask him to return the money to Rizzuto, and my job was finished.” He made it clear it wasn’t his job to ask questions. He was also videotaped taking a wad of money himself, but said it was possible he was just going to buy Nicolò meat, bread and bottled water. “He was eighty years old and I had a lot of respect for him and I could have made him such services.” Pressed further, he said it might also have been a loan of $20,000 to $25,000 for debts or for his house or for the wedding of one of his daughters. Who could remember such details?
Sonia LeBel, the chief prosecutor for the commission, pressed him about Sollecito. “How can you trust Mr. Sollecito to give money to Mr. Rizzuto?” LeBel asked.
“Between Italians, we trust,” Milioto replied.
As for Vito, Milioto professed to be clueless about why he was in an American prison at the time the videos were shot. It wasn’t his concern. What did concern him was respect. “You respect me, I respect you. You abuse me, I can abuse you.” Pressed further, he appeared baffled by talk that the Mafia even existed. “I don’t know, madam. What is the Mafia? People who shoot people? People who sell drugs?”
In his week on the witness stand, Milioto told the commission “I don’t know” more than two hundred times. He still made a contribution to the pursuit of truth, in his estimation. “Me, I’m giving you my truth, my version of the truth,” he said.
If Nicolò Milioto was Mr. Sidewalk, then municipal fundraiser Bernard Trépanier was Mr. Three Percent. A bagman for Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay’s Union Montréal party, Trépanier’s nickname came from the amount he allegedly skimmed from municipal contracts in kickbacks for his party. His own role wasn’t a clearly defined one, but he certainly wielded power. “I was a guy who opened doors,” Trépanier testified. “I helped people get from point A to point B with my contacts.” A self-confessed drinking problem and some memory challenges apparently made it difficult for him to explain as much as he might like. And there were indeed intriguing incidents for him to explain. Alexandra Pion, who had worked for Union Montréal as a receptionist, told the commission how she was asked—and refused—to help Trépanier tally up how much cash was in a full suitcase. Former party staff worker Martin Dumont testified about a time at a fundraiser when Trépanier’s coat was so stuffed with money that he couldn’t button it up. Dumont also recalled the party’s safe being so rammed full of cash that it couldn’t be closed.
Six weeks before his turn on the witness stand, retired Montreal city engineer Gilles Surprenant filled a leather briefcase with $122,800 in kickback money and dropped it off with police. “I didn’t want it anymore,” he explained to the commission. “I wanted to get rid of the money because, as I said, I was always uneasy with the money. It was filled with bad memories.”
While Trépanier was Mr. Three Percent in the city’s corruption pecking order, Surprenant was Mr. One Percent, if you accepted the testimony of former construction boss Lino Zambito. In his testimony, Zambito said that Surprenant demanded a cut of 1 percent of the value of a contract for his bid-rigging services. Then another 2½ percent went to the Mafia and 3 percent to the Union Montréal party. Such were the unofficial taxes of working in Montreal, and these fees, high as they were, could be recouped by hiking up the cost of city contracts.
Surprenant told the commission of an odd personal problem. He had far more money than could be explained by his annual salary of $80,000 for his position as a city engineer in charge of planning and budgeting for public works. There were expensive leisure activities that didn’t jive with his earnings, like $12,000 season tickets for the Montreal Canadiens and exotic southern golfing vacations. Aside for the money and gifts, he also had to deal with a guilty conscience, as he told things. He said he coped with his guilt by gambling heavily at the Montreal Casino. Losing some $300,000 there was apparently his way of pumping money back into the public purse.
Surprenant testified that he spoke openly about corruption to his superiors at work but didn’t take any further action. He might be guilty of a lot of things, but insubordination was not one of them. “I didn’t think it was my role, as a simple bureaucrat, to call the police.”
This was a common refrain throughout the hearings: something was clearly wrong but somehow it wasn’t really the fault of any one person. Certainly no one blamed it all on Vito or the late Nicolò. For his part, Surprenant pointed an accusing finger at Montreal’s construction entrepreneurs for colluding to rig tenders on public service projects such as those to repair dozens of sewers and aqueducts. Yes, he did co-operate, and yes, he did pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars, but in the end, should he really be blamed? “I am not a villain. I am a bureaucrat who was corrupted,” Surprenant testified. “No one at the City of Montreal wanted a system like this.”
In words that Martin Brett could have written for him, Surprenant added: “There was an established system and I was caught up in it.” Corruption was “an open secret” at work, and one that no one seemed eager to stop. “There was no initiative from our superiors to correct the situation … and no initiative on the part of [Montreal’s] executive committee,” Surprenant told the commission.
If Surprenant was indeed a victim, as he suggested, at least he was a well-compensated one. The commission heard that Surprenant pocketed about $706,000 in kickbacks between 2000 and 2008, plus another $25,000 under the table between 1995 and 2000 in the form of golf vacations, dinners, bottles of wine and other handouts from entrepreneurs.
In the end, Surprenant said he would never forgive himself for his role in the city’s corruption. “I bitterly regret everything that happened,” he told the commission. “I must say, for me, the past ten years at the City of Montreal have been catastrophic. It should have never existed. I should have never accepted those sums. I should have never done that.”
Ken Pereira could have been forgiven if, for a time, he thought his boss was Jocelyn Dupuis, director-general of FTQ-Construction. With six hundred thousand members and billions of dollars’ worth of investments in its Solidarity Fund, the FTQ was Quebec’s largest labour federation and a major player in the province’s construction world. At the time of the inquiry, Quebec had a unionization rate of 39.9 percent, compared with 31.5 for Canada as a whole. The rate was 27 percent in Britain and 12 percent in the USA. That meant plenty of dues to collect and invest in Quebec.
The Charbonneau Commission heard of the aforementioned social links between Antonio Accurso, a former construction mogul facing tax evasion and corruption charges, and top FTQ officials such as Jean Lavalée, but also of links between Accurso and Vito Rizzuto. Accurso entertained union chums on his yacht and in private dining rooms of his restaurant, L’Onyx. L’Onyx even hosted FTQ-Construction’s annual Christmas party.
The commission heard that Raynald Desjardins and the Hells Angels had clout in the FTQ between 2005 and 2008, when Vito was behind bars and Desjardins was back on the streets after his prison stretch. When a Chambly strip club owned by a Hells Angels associate burned down, it was rebuilt at no charge by FTQ-Construction. Jocelyn Dupuis, director-general of FTQ-Construction, ran up expenses that included $2,000 for meals in Las Vegas, a $300 breakfast and $30,000 for meals at one restaurant in a single month, Pereira told the commission. He had his suspicions that many expense receipts were fake. In his testimony before the Charbonneau Commission, Pereira said that Dupuis attended Hells Angels’ wet T-shirt parties and socialized with Normand (Casper) Ouimet of the Hells Angels’ Trois-Rivières chapter, before Ouimet was hit with twenty-two murder and money-laundering charges. Pereira also considered the 2008 elections for FTQ-Construction’s executive to be rigged in favour of a Dupuis-backed candidate, and that a rival candidate quit the race after a show of force by the Hells Angels.
Pereira told the Charbonneau Commission that Dupuis wasn’t shy about his rough connections. On Dupuis’s wall was a photo of union organizer Giovanni Bertolo, the former drug trafficker for Vito’s group and the victim of a gangland murder. “He [Dupuis] made it known that the FTQ was his family, but that he had another … the Hells or the Mafia,” Pereira testified.
When Pereira became disenchanted with what he was seeing, he broke into an FTQ accountant’s office and scooped up six months’ worth of expenses filed by Dupuis. He said he was offered a Mercedes for his silence, but declined.
While Vito was in prison, Desjardins seemed to think he was the boss of FTQ-Construction. Perhaps this is what Desjardins meant when, upon his release from prison, he spoke of becoming a construction entrepreneur. Pereira spoke of meeting Desjardins at a brunch, with ten goons standing guard at the door. As he recalled before the commission, Desjardins told him: “Listen, Ken, I don’t know if you know me, but I did eleven years in jail. I kept my mouth shut, I did my time and that’s the way it should be.”
Next, Pereira said, Desjardins addressed the obvious tensions between Pereira and Dupuis, saying that he could get Dupuis removed from his job. Desjardins was intent on ending the union infighting as “we’ve got more important business to do.”
It was then, Pereira testified, that he felt a jolt of fear and clarity: “At that moment, I discovered that Jocelyn Dupuis, who I thought was the boss, wasn’t the boss. Raynald Desjardins was the boss.”
As the Charbonneau testimony ground on, Montreal imposed new ethics codes for city employees. The price of public contracts dipped and new players finally won bids for city work. Still, the construction world hardly seemed a safe place for innocents, and there was talk of intimidation taking the place of bribery.
Certainly, police and government couldn’t be trusted to make things right. Confidence in policing dipped on October 5, 2013, with the arrest of Benoit Roberge, a retired Sûreté du Québec biker expert, after investigators learned he was selling highly confidential intelligence to bikers. Roberge wasn’t just someone who had handled sensitive witness protection files. He was also married to a top organized crime prosecutor and went to work for Revenu Québec in March 2013. Police offices were scanned for hidden microphones. Computer databases and reports were studied to see who had been reading them. A senior SQ officer even voluntarily took a polygraph test to show that he wasn’t an underworld mole.
Good cops fell under suspicion while bad cops remained in the shadows. A veteran Montreal police investigator who specialized in organized crime and who had cultivated a string of informants was quietly transferred away from his organized crime files and computers that could give him access to sensitive cases involving the milieu. That officer had been a witness against major crimes investigator Mario Lambert when Lambert was found guilty of funnelling information from police databases to criminals.
If authorities really wanted to stop corruption, they didn’t have to study the actions just of Vito and his associates. They would have to take a harder look at themselves.