The reign of the last leader of the Montreal mafia ended in a climate so explosive that the police even asked him to "calm the game on the ground."
This is what is learned in the judicial documents of Operation Magot, which broke up an alliance formed by the Mafia, Hells Angels and street gangs to share the drug market three years ago. .
Publication bans on the details of the investigation were lifted after gang leader Gregory Woolley was sentenced to eight years on Friday. The alliance was undermined by dissension within the mafia, led by Stefano Sollecito, who had succeeded godfather Vito Rizzuto, who died in 2013.
On November 6, 2015, the Regional Joint Organized Crime Squad was apprehensive of an outbreak of violence by warning Sollecito and the son of the late godfather, Leonardo Rizzuto, that they were being targeted for murder of rivals.
The police also seized a "black list" of mafiosi names whose head was priced during a raid on relatives of a motorcycle gang associated with the Hells, the Devils Ghosts.
Oil on the fire
Two other crimes had thrown oil on the fire of these internal tensions.
On September 29th of that year, the building housing the offices of former Rizzuto clan lawyer Loris Cavaliere was the target of a Molotov cocktail on Saint-Laurent Boulevard. It was here that Sollecito, Rizzuto and Woolley had been spied by the police a month earlier.
This arson attempt coincided with the funeral of Claudio Marco Campellone, a young mafia gangster shot in front of his home in Rivière-des-Prairies.
Campellone, the father of Stefano Sollecito, Rocco, and four other identified mafiosi police surveillance operations in the Magot project were killed between 2014 and 2018.
Stefano Sollecito and Leonardo Rizzuto were finally released from charges of gangsterism and conspiracy last February because they were illegally wiretapped in the offices of lawyer Cavaliere. Nobody has officially succeeded the first to head the mafia.
♦ Rizzuto is still accused of illegally possessing cocaine and two semi-automatic guns found at his home during his arrest. His trial is scheduled in three weeks.