The Dark North Postmedia Network

It was pure coincidence but the Hells Angels opened their first Canadian chapter in Quebec just seven weeks before Nicolo Rizzuto took control of the Montreal Mafia. 
Those events in 1977-78 kickstarted a violent decades-long struggle to control the criminal underworld in Montreal.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Montreal's underworld has gotten rich — very rich — from sneaking cocaine into the city by car, by air, by boat, and inside people, packages and shipping containers.
In this episode we go back to the 1980s, when cocaine really took off in Montreal.
Montreal's main criminal gangs — the Rizzuto-led Montreal Mafia, the Hells Angels biker gang and the West End gang — worked together to bring immense amounts of cocaine into the city. It's a partnership that lasted for years.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was snowing in Montreal on the night of Nov. 13, 1984.
West End Gang leader Frank Ryan, better known by his nickname, "Dunie", was at one of his usual hangouts, Nittolo's Garden Inn, a seedy restaurant and motel in west-end Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.
Dunie Ryan, at age 42, was a very rich man. He owned a yacht, and a house on the West Island. He gave away fur coats, and money to gang members who needed cash. People called him the King of Coke because of the money he was raking in smuggling drugs.
On that November night 35 years ago, one of his fellow gang members asked to meet him in one of the rooms at Nittolo's. A few minutes later, Dunie Ryan was lying on the motel room floor, shot to death.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Montreal's street gangs have grown from groups of teenagers banding together in the 1980s for protection to, at one point, being the Montreal police department’s top crime-fighting priority.
They work with other criminal gangs to traffic drugs, weapons and sex.
As he was being extradited to the U.S. on racketeering charges in 2006, Montreal Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto warned the police street gangs were going to become a force to be reckoned with. A prediction that appears to have come true.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was summer vacation, and a group of boys was playing in front of the Saint-Nom-de-Jésus school in Montreal's east-end neighbourhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve.
At 12:40 p.m. on Aug. 9, 1995, a man got into his Jeep parked across the tree-lined street from the school.
A powerful explosion sent the Jeep flying into the air. The blast was so violent it shattered nearby windows. Pieces of metal flew everywhere.
One of the pieces of metal struck one of the boys playing on the street, 11-year-old Daniel Desrochers. Desrochers, who was supposed to start Grade 6 in a few days, was hit in the head and died four days later in a hospital.
The bombing was tied to the biker war that had rocked Montreal for the previous year. Police said Desrochers was the first innocent victim of that war.
The Hells Angels, under the leadership of Maurice (Mom) Boucher, had taken on a group of criminal gangs called the Alliance. Boucher wanted total control of drug-trafficking turfs in Montreal.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode we take a closer look at Vito Rizzuto, the man who ran the Montreal mafia for decades.
While the New York crime families are more famous, the Montreal mob under Rizzuto had an international reach.
Besides drug smuggling, it ran loansharking and bookmaking schemes, and even illegal casinos.  
But by the early 2000s, Vito Rizzuto’s reign was coming to an end. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices