Free Business or Blood by Peter Edwards

notion of predictability.
    In the absence of Arcadi and Giordano, there was talk that the Mafia offered to share turf with the Bloods street gang but that the Bloods balked. The unprecedented attacks on the north Montreal cafés escalated. Unless something happened soon to stem the tide of disrespect, it was easy to wonder how long it would be until the city’s Mafiosi were reduced to glorified street-gang members themselves.

CHAPTER 7
Gangs
    A midst all the chaos and killing in Vito’s world, street-gang boss Ducarme Joseph set out to sell some high-end women’s clothing. He owned a boutique at 240 Saint-Jacques Street in Old Montreal called Flawnego, short for “Flawlessness Never Goes.” The pillars of century-old banks around Flawnego called to mind the classical architecture of ancient Greece. Less than five minutes up Saint-Jacques was the Palais de Justice courthouse, another classically inspired place all too familiar to Joseph, who was out on $50,000 bail for assault charges related to a beating at the Buona Notte nightclub on Saint-Laurent Boulevard and for possessing a firearm silencer.
    Joseph had come a long way to the world of haute couture since the mid-1980s, when he first appeared on the police radar, and the path to the Flawnego was rumoured to include the murder of Nick Rizzuto Jr. Joseph and Guyanese newcomer Richard Ogilvie (Ritchie Rich) Goodridge had co-founded a street gang called the 67’s, named for the bus route in their Saint-Michel neighbourhood. The 67’s fell upon internal strife, marked by murder attempts, and somewhere along the line Goodridge and Joseph morphed into businessmen and mortal enemies.
    Two decades later, Goodridge and his Blue/Crips street-gang members sometimes sported silver chains with a six-pointed Star of David. There was no great symbolism to the star; it just looked cool. For hispart, Joseph wore a T-shirt with a one percent symbol to show his connection to the Hells Angels’ Montreal Nomads chapter. The Hells Angels didn’t allow black members, but there were no such restrictions for its support clubs such as the Rockers or the Scorpions. The fact that Goodridge and Greg Wooley could belong to both the Rockers and a black street gang at the same time just showed how much more complicated things were becoming in the organized crime world.
    Goodridge wasn’t a huge man, at 175 pounds and standing five foot ten, but he was solid as a linebacker and someone to be taken seriously as he cruised about in his Hummer H2, Range Rover or Mercedes sedan. His clout extended into Ontario, both to the streets of Toronto and to the well-travelled drug-smuggling channel of the Akwesasne reserve on the St. Lawrence River, where Goodridge successfully collected gambling debts. He had been the target of an attempted hit in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough shortly after noon on November 10, 2004, when a black Maxima pulled up beside his silver Mercedes and someone inside opened fire, tearing off part of Goodridge’s finger. Asked by police what had just happened, he dismissed the shootout as a random attack by a stranger who coveted his jewellery.
    Life wasn’t any calmer for Goodridge’s friends. On March 10, 2005, Rizzuto family enforcer Mike (Big Mike) Lapolla dropped by the Moomba Supper Club in Laval’s Chomedey district, a Latin nightspot that prided itself on “sober and chic décor, voluptuous forms and pure lines” and “a zen environment without pretension.” Also there after midnight for some zen-inspired socializing was Goodridge’s associate Thierry Beaubrun of the 67’s.
    There had been tensions between Lapolla and Beaubrun a few nights earlier at another club, and both men carried tough reputations and serious firepower. Lapolla ran a transport company from his home, but his real money came from the Rizzutos. He had been convicted of cocaine trafficking and was considered muscle for the mob