ANALYSIS
CLEMENZA, THE SHARQC OF THE MAFIA
DANIEL RENAUD
LA PRESSE March 21,2017
On hearing yesterday of the news that serious charges against 36 close to the Mafia are being withdrawn today, former RCMP civilian analyst Pierre De Champlain tweeted that the Clemenza project, under which These people were apprehended, is the new "Italian SharQc", referring to the end in fish tail of the famous operation of 2009 which was aimed at eradicating the Hells Angels, which today are stronger than they Were.

M. De Champlain does not think so. If Clemenza, which was to be an even larger investigation than Colosseum, is now a sword in the water, the release of some thirty people will have other impacts. Several of them will give oxygen to the Montreal mafia, which is in the shambles, weakened by internal struggles for years by Operation Magot of November 2015.

Many of the individuals who will benefit from a halt to the judicial process are not choirboys. They are suspected of being major traffickers and importers with dozens, if not hundreds, of pounds of cocaine. Some of them were accused of controlling a warehouse in which a machine gun, seven submachine guns, laser scanners, silencers, bulletproof vests and explosives were discovered in February 2011 in Montreal.

Others are involved in the kidnapping of a man to whom his captors claimed 1 million and who owed his salvation only to the interception of the text messages of his torturers by the investigators and to the providential arrival of Policemen of the tactical intervention group while being handcuffed to a bed in a Napierville farmhouse.

The individuals released this morning belong to groups that have been at the heart of the Montreal Mafia war in recent years.

If they had not been killed in 2013, clan leader Giuseppe De Vito and his right-hand man Vincenzo Scuderi were reportedly accused in the Clemenza opration. Assassinated Saturday in the district of Anjou, Nicola Di Marco had been arrested and sentenced in the wake of Clemenza. Another who is due to be stopped in the judicial process today will receive his posthumously, as he was killed last January, while a fifth was the victim of an attempted murder in the fall of 2012. Not to mention Marco Pizzi, who is one of the 11 individuals who remain accused and tried to kill last summer.

WHAT ABOUT THE SEQUEL?

The decision announced today will certainly be hard to swallow for public opinion, which sees judicial judgments halt successively since the abrupt end of the SharQc trial in October 2015 and the Jordan judgment on the time limits given by the Court Supreme Court in 2016. The case of Clemenza is also frustrating for the police, some of the released individuals would have been ready to settle after the plea of ​​Raynald Desjardins, but the prosecution would not have seized the pole, we were told .

It may now be asked whether the same fate awaits the 11 individuals arrested in the last phase of Clemenza in May 2016 and still accused. Details of the technology used to intercept the suspects' text messages and their weaknesses, which would involve Research in Motion (RIM) and the United States, and which the prosecution does not want to disclose to the defense, Of the problem. If the rest of the case gives reason to the defense, then how will the fate of the remaining 11 accused be different?

It seems that the RCMP and the prosecution would not have been on the same wavelength in the management of this arm, which would have given rise to some animated discussions.

As if that was not enough, our sources tell us that the protégé of Raynald Desjardins, Vittorio Mirarchi, and his accomplices, who should receive in June their sentence for the murder of the aspiring godfather Salvatore Montagna, would not stay very long in prison.

Like the Hells Angels, believed to be moribund in 2009, the Montreal mafia will rise again.