After months of relative peace within Montreal’s Mafia circles, one of its members was fatally shot in a restaurant in Rivière-des-Prairies Monday afternoon.

Police sources have confirmed that the city’s latest homicide was Tonino Callocchia, 53, a man who survived an attempt on his life in February 2013 and has been described in past parole decisions as “an active member of the Italian Mafia.”

Callocchia was pronounced dead at the scene of the Monday afternoon shooting, at around 1:30 p.m., at Bistro XO Plus on Henri-Bourassa Blvd. E. near the corner of LJ-Forget Ave.

“He was a big player (within the Mafia). That is certain,” said one police source on Monday.

Montreal police spokesperson Raphael Bergeron said the victim was struck by several bullets fired by one gunman or possibly more. The shooter, or shooters, fled the scene before police arrived and, as of late Monday afternoon, the Montreal police had not released any descriptions of possible suspects.

Callocchia spent most of the 1990s behind bars serving a 21-year aggregate sentence for a series of offences related to drug trafficking and money laundering.

His known ties to the Mafia date to the 1980s. In 1994, he was charged, and later convicted, in a money laundering case that linked him to Vincenzo (Jimmy) Di Maulo, the brother of Joseph Di Maulo, an influential Mafia boss who was killed, at age 70, in front of his home in Blainville on Nov. 4, 2012. That was a slaying police sources have theorized was a response to the many attacks on the Rizzuto organization in the years preceding it.

According to the provincial business registry, Callocchia was the owner of a numbered company, 9166-3807 Quebec Inc., that was involved in real estate management and another company called Construction T.D.P. It was his involvement in both of those fields that saw Callocchia charged, in May 2013, with extortion and uttering threats to a woman who was close to Raynald Desjardins, an influential Mob figure awaiting trial for the murder of Salvatore Montagna, a man who tried to take control of the Mafia in Montreal before he was gunned down in November 2011.

A hearing in the extortion case was held late last month at the Montreal courthouse and Callocchia’s preliminary hearing was set to be heard in September 2015.

He was also reportedly a close associate of Roger Valiquette, a loan shark who was killed in Laval in 2013 in a homicide that remains unsolved.

According to provincial court records, one of Callocchia’s first arrests came in 1985, along with four members of the Armeni Clan, a group of well-known drug traffickers tied to the Mafia. He was acquitted in that case, but was arrested again, in 1990, by the Montreal police and charged with conspiracy and possession of cocaine. He ended up pleading guilty to both counts and received an eight-year prison term.

In 1994, Callocchia was arrested along with 56 other people as part of a major RCMP investigation that targeted several people tied to the Rizzuto organization who were involved in large-scale drug trafficking and money laundering. Following a lengthy trial before a jury, Callocchia was found guilty of acting as an intermediary for Vincenzo Di Maulo, who was laundering drug money through businesses.

Callocchia ended up with a four-year sentence in the money laundering case and soon after he learned federal authorities had been holding back on another case, dating to 1994, where the RCMP had evidence he tried to smuggle more than 160 kilograms of cocaine into Canada through an airport in Toronto.

Callocchia waited about a year before pleading guilty to conspiracy and other drug smuggling-related charges, in 1998, and ended up with a 10-year sentence. With everything combined, he ended up having to serve an aggregate sentence of 21 years in all.

When he appeared before the Parole Board of Canada in January 2001, he was described as and intelligent, well-structured and “an active member of the Italian Mafia. The offences you have committed are large-scale and they required organization and planning at a level that only a highly organized group can hope to execute.” He was also accused of having committed several crimes, related to contraband, while behind bars.

He also took college-level business administration courses while serving the sentence after being granted permission to take unescorted leaves from a penitentiary. The courses were seen as a step in a positive direction, but Callocchia frustrated his parole officers by refusing to be transparent about where he actually went while on some of his leaves.

When he was granted full parole, in 2002, he told the board that he had no financial concerns because of an inheritance from his grandfather and the sale of a large piece of real estate that belonged to his mother. He also told the board that, at that point, his wife had run a profitable business for the previous six years. By then, he had convinced the parole board that he was motivated “to follow the rules of society” and that the financial situation that awaited him on the outside would steer him away from a life of crime.

The homicide was the 24th reported in Montreal this year.

Anti posted this in one of the Montreal threads. We've been discussing it