Married to the Mob?
Kevin Steel - Monday, 23 January 2006 - Western Standard

Canada has a certain innocence when it comes to political assassinations. You'd have to go back to the 1970 murder of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte by FLQ terrorists, and then all the way back to 1868 and the shooting of radical MP D'Arcy McGee, to find the only assassinations in our national history. Those sorts of things may happen elsewhere--but not here.
Nor have we ever had to confront the unpleasant spectre of the infiltration of organized crime into our politics, the way Americans have with John F. Kennedy's curious ties to Chicago godfather Sam Giancana, or Italians with their prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who once employed convicted Mafioso Vittorio Mangano. Or the way the Russians have with, well, pretty much every politician. Mobsters in bed with Ottawa's most powerful, you say? Never.
But are Canadians simply in denial? On Nov. 24, Opposition leader Stephen Harper accused the federal Liberals during question period of "breaking every conceivable law in the province of Quebec with the help of organized crime." The Liberals demanded an apology, threatening legal action (they didn't get one and Harper's words are protected by parliamentary privilege), and columnists tut-tutted the tactless assertion. CanWest's Don Martin called it "over-the-top," while author and pundit L. Ian MacDonald, writing in The Gazette in Montreal, said the accusation was a "mistake." Was it? Truth is, the Liberals have a lot of strange connections to organized crime in their past. Canadians may not want to think about it, but it doesn't take much digging to find them.
Weeks before Harper's accusation, an alleged drug trafficker testified before an Ontario court that mobsters had put out a hit contract on Paul Martin in November 2003, just before he won the Liberal leadership and became prime minister. The allegation was just the latest in a long string of peculiar links between the most powerful political party in the country and the seedy criminal underworld. Canadians may not be comfortable with questions such as those posed by Harper, but it's hard to blame the guy for wondering.
The tale of the hit contract came from Vincent Brown, during an abuse of process trial on Nov. 22. After being arrested in 2003, first on charges of smuggling cocaine, and then, soon after, on weapons offences, Brown offered to spill the beans about the hit on Martin, in exchange for a deal. According to Brown, there were three meetings. In the third one--which was unrecorded--Brown claims he met "a tall, white-haired man who said he was from national security, and another who said that he was from some police service there on the weapons charges" (he can't remember the authorities' names), says Sam Goldstein, Brown's lawyer (who is also running as the federal Conservative candidate in Toronto's Trinity-Spadina riding). "This white-haired man said if you give us the name of who hired you to kill Paul Martin, then we would stay all the charges against you, but first we want you to take a polygraph test," says Goldstein. During the lie detector test, Brown alleged that a loan shark named Augustine D'Souza had approached him around Dec. 16, 2002, with two separate contracts on Martin's life, worth a total of $300,000. He passed the test--though the charges were never stayed, and police accused Brown of concocting the story, noting he owed D'Souza money, leading Brown to bring the abuse of process application. Still, police appeared to take the threat seriously enough that nine days later, a Canadian Press journalist reported that the prime minister's security detail had been noticeably beefed up--though police did not say why.
But, from there, the plot only gets fishier. The day before Brown took the lie detector test, a man by the name of Augustine Mario D'Souza tried to run over an aide to federal cabinet minister John McCallum in Newmarket, Ont. Identified as a paralegal from Markham, on May 30 this D'Souza was arrested for the attempt and, during his trial, the court heard that the man had been harassing McCallum for months, for unspecified reasons, leading to the termination of D'Souza's wife, who was working for McCallum. D'Souza was convicted of dangerous driving and banned from all Liberal party offices and functions. On Nov. 13, 2003, he was arrested again when he attempted to enter the Liberal party convention at Toronto's Air Canada Centre, the night Paul Martin was elected leader. D'Souza was jailed for six days.
Neither Toronto police nor the RCMP confirm whether this Augustine D'Souza is actually the loan shark that allegedly told Brown about the contracts on Martin, and no charges have been laid as a result of Brown's astonishing testimony. Reporters, including this one, have not been able to locate the D'Souza of either story.
But some Liberal cabinet ministers themselves have been linked directly with the mob--and in one recent case, accused of being a top-level Mafioso. In 2004, New York mobster Frank Lino told investigators that Alfonso Gagliano, the former federal public works minister, and a key player in the sponsorship scandal, was a "made" member of the Mafia. Lino alleged that he had run into Gagliano at an exclusive meeting attended only by made members of the Brooklyn-based Bonanno crime family, held in Montreal in the 1990s. Before entering politics, Gagliano, who was born in Sicily, had worked as a bookkeeper for known mobster Augustino Cuntrera and, in the eighties, RCMP had tracked a drug smuggler to Gagliano's offices. Gagliano's office also assisted in helping a well-known Italian hit man, Gaetano Amodeo, who was on Interpol's most wanted list, get into Canada in 1999 using the immigrant investor program. Amodeo was extradited back to Italy in 2001.
No other party has anything close to the number of strange links to organized crime as do the Liberals. Some of it has to do with the party's unparalleled success in politics, notes John Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute, a Toronto-based security think-tank, and an expert on organized crime. All over the world, criminals try to cultivate relationships with those in power. "[The Liberals] are even more exposed because they court the immigrant vote," says Thompson. "Many gangs form along ethnic lines." Many saw mob fingerprints on the sponsorship scandal, after testimony at the Gomery inquiry revealed that Liberal organizer Giuseppe (Joe) Morselli, one of the key characters in Adscam, had been the target of a car bomb. André Gosselin, a Montreal public relations executive and sponsorship beneficiary, testified at the inquiry that Gagliano's chief of staff told him that his "adversaries" would "break your jaw" if he didn't cut the Liberals in for a larger piece of his take. Alain Richard, an ad agency executive, alleged that shortly before he was to testify before Parliament on the sponsorship scandal, he awoke at 4 a.m. to a ringing doorbell and a "message on my doorknob, saying, if I talk too much, I'm going to die," Richard said. Other witnesses, too, said that at certain points in their involvement with the Liberal sponsorship scandal, they felt their lives were in danger.
And some of the party's brushes with the underworld appear--at least on the surface--to have nothing to do with government business. In June of last year, one of the ships owned by Canada Steamship Lines, the firm formerly owned by Martin but transferred to his children in 2003 after pressure over Martin's conflict of interest, was found to be carrying two duffel bags stuffed with 83 kilos of cocaine--with an estimated street value of $14 million.
"If [organized criminals] were asked to invent a country, it would look exactly like Canada," says Antonio Nicaso, one of the country's pre-eminent authors on organized crime. The conditions are ideal, he notes. Soft sentences for drug trafficking, and anti-gang legislation and proceeds-of-crime laws that rarely get dusted off (except in Quebec's war on biker gangs), are "why every major crime syndicate in the world has a branch here," Nicaso says. The Liberals may sound like they're tough on crime--witness Martin's latest plan to ban handguns, following a rash of Toronto shootings--but, behind the scenes, the party is sitting on its hands. "Unfortunately, the Liberals are not doing enough to keep the criminals at bay," says Nicaso. "That's the bottom line." Then again, if Harper's allegation that the Liberals are in bed with the Mob is correct, it's not hard to see why.