Free Business or Blood by Peter Edwards Page A

family. Beaubrun, a regular at downtown clubs and strip bars, was facing armed robbery and assault charges.
    It was about two-thirty in the morning when the shooting started. Big Mike fell bleeding on the dance floor as Beaubrun and some twohundred patrons rushed to safety. In the stampede, someone in the parking lot opened fire on Beaubrun, making him the night’s second fatality.
    The next day, hidden police microphones at the Consenza caught Rizzuto family bosses trying to divine what had happened. Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito hoped the violence was an isolated incident. His son, Giuseppe (Joe), wasn’t so optimistic, saying the black street-gang members were “not people you can sit down and reason with … they are animals.”
    Skunk Giordano, who had been present at the Moomba the night of the shootings, told the Consenza crowd that Big Mike “had no chance.” Paolo Renda cautioned Giordano to be careful of overdrinking and to avoid shootouts that might “attract attention.” It was clear that things would get worse before they got any better. “There will be blood,” Giuseppe Sollecito said (two years before the Paul Thomas Anderson movie
There Will Be Blood
, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, made the expression a part of popular culture).
    Attacks on the Rizzutos’ crime family escalated. On May 25, 2005, luxury car dealer Frank Martorana was dragged from a Saint-Léonard barbershop on Jean-Talon Street East in broad daylight by four men, pistol-whipped and forced into a sport-utility vehicle. The barbershop was a place where Martorana should have felt secure, as it was just a few minutes’ drive from the Consenza Social Club. Martorana was clearly a Rizzuto man, although not a high-ranking one. He had once pleaded guilty to taking part in a luxury auto theft ring that lifted high-end cars in Montreal, and his record included convictions for rolling back the odometers of used cars for sale. His tastes for the finer things in criminal life also ran to art, and he had another criminal conviction for taking part in the theft of fifteen paintings from a Montreal art gallery.
    It wasn’t the first time someone had targeted the car salesman to make a point with the Rizzutos. In July 2001, Vito’s former drug-smuggling partner Christian Deschênes and an accomplice were arrested by police as they approached the Consenza Social Club, attempting to collect what Deschênes felt was a $2-million debt owed to him byMartorana and Arcadi. Deschênes had learned to weld in prison, and police later learned that he’d put those skills to use constructing zoo-like cages for the two Rizzuto associates. Secretly recorded conversations revealed that Deschênes was even willing to escalate the violence to Vito: “You know, I’m telling you this, you know, even Vito, he could get involved in this.” All of this was well known in the
milieu
, and so an attack on Martorana was a symbolic attack on Vito himself.
    When Martorana reappeared six days after his May 2005 kidnapping, he had nothing to say to police, beyond declaring himself safe and sound. Vito’s people would take care of things on their own, without police interference, but it wasn’t going to be easy.
    The two masked gunmen would have walked past the stylized red LOVE sculpture in front of the neighbouring L’Hôtel around 1:45 p.m. on Thursday, March 18, 2010. The sound of ever-present construction workers creating new condo units on the grand old street may have briefly disguised the noise of the fifty bullets they sprayed into Flawnego, but afternoon shoppers and tourists were quickly sprinting for cover. Falling dead amidst the designer dresses were 27-year-old Peter Christopoulos, one of Ducarme Joseph’s many bodyguards, and sixty-year-old store manager Jean Gaston, Ducarme’s uncle. One of Joseph’s friends and an electrician’s apprentice survived, despite injuries.