Cosa Nostra News

Undated photo of Desjardins. The RCMP launched a 16-month surveillance operation against Raynald Desjardins and seven associates one day after the murder of Salvatore Montagna, the former Bonanno crime family street boss. "The Iron Worker" had been shot three times, allegedly by elderly gangster Jack Simpson with whom Montagna was meeting, and died on a snowswept river bank outside Montreal. At the time of the murder, Desjardins was warmly ensconced in his alibi, eating breakfast with his daughter.

SEE  PART ONE In the fall of 2011 at around 3:30 p.m. a black BMW X5 pulled into the Tim Hortons' parking lot on Montreal's Lafontaine Boulevard. A black-and-grey Ford Flex was seen nosing its way into the parking lot a short time later. The SA Sûreté du Québec -- the Quebec Provincial Police -- had put a surveillance team there specifically to watch whoever participated in the meeting, called following an attempt on Raynald Desjadins' life. Montagna dared to make a huge power play. The tempers of many violent members of a once-solid Mafia faction were inflamed after an alliance was torn asunder; the result weakened a syndicate formed solely to mount a hostile takeover of the Montreal Mafia from loyalists of Vito Rizzuto , who was absent from the milieu to serve a prison sentence for his role in a brutal triple homicide that set the course for New York's Bonanno crime family.

Simpsons was heading to his house in Charlemagne, an off-island suburb of Montreal, Quebec, where a deadly rendezvous had been planned.