With the recent assassination of Nicolo Rizzuto Sr. according to Montréal’s Gazette, an ‘alleged’ Mafia boss, and our city’s retarded fascination with legitimizing (or romanticizing) organized crime, I thought I’d point out a rather infamous event from our dark past.

On November 25th 1984, a bomb was delivered in the form of a VCR to an apartment at the Le Maisonneuve apartment building, killing four and injuring eight. Those killed had themselves participated in the assassination of Frank “Dunie” Ryan twelve days earlier at a no-tell motel on Upper Lachine. Ryan, the reputed leader of the West End Gang, at the time one of the most important crime syndicates in the city. The blast was powerful enough to destroy most of the floor, though mercifully no civilians were killed, and the building didn’t collapse. Of note – the the time, a police station was located across the street at de Maisonneuve and St-Mathieu!

As Montréalers gathered to gawk outside Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense church in Little Italy, I wondered just how bad crime will have to get in this city before the citizens decide to react. The Biker War began to end when a twelve year old was killed by a car bomb, and admittedly, we have extremely low murder rates here in Montréal. But it wasn’t always this way, and the recent string of bombings and targeted assassinations should be considered as a potential harbinger of a larger gang war. But as long as idiots think of people like Rizzuto as akin to Marlon Brando in the Godfather, expect it to get worse. There’s a video posted to the CTV site in which Rob Laurie questions those outside the church as to what they thought – one individual referred to this guy as a ‘historical figure’, while others drew comparisons, endless comparisons to Marlon Brando. Makes me wonder if people are actually capable of discerning fact from fiction…