Inside Look at Mafia Activity in Montreal
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| In November 2010, Nicolo Rizzuto went for his final reward. |
In the back room of the Cosenza Social Club, a strip mall café in an Italian neighborhood of Montreal, the city’s top mobster held court over piles of cash.
Hours of surveillance video captured by the RCMP, Canada’s national police, show the since-assassinated godfather of Montreal’s powerful Mafia, Nicolo Rizzuto, in variations of the same scene: counting bills, pausing only to lick his fingers, and stuffing the bundles in his knee-high socks.
No one is surprised that the mob conducts its illegal activities in cash. Shocking many, however, are revelations about the source of the money — a Mafia-controlled scheme that rigged bids and dispensed bribes on Montreal public construction contracts.
The scam, revealed in an ongoing corruption inquiry in Montreal, added an estimated 30 percent to the cost of municipal construction projects in Canada’s second-largest city — a corruption tax paid, in the end, by the city’s taxpayers.
The scheme reached deep inside city hall, and on Monday night it led to the downfall of Montreal’s long-serving mayor, Gerald Tremblay. He announced his resignation while insisting he would eventually be cleared of wrongdoing, and blaming the scandal on political allies and close associates....
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