crime

We are in the middle of a mob war in Montreal. There have been two mafia-related shootings in less than 24 hours as “Zio Vito” Rizzuto carries out his revenge project. He’s out of jail and back from his so-Quebecois winter trip to the Dominican Republic. His followers are clearly more numerous than we were led to believe during his incarceration, when his father and son were killed, and his brother-in-law neatly “disappeared”, leaving the door of his car open and that night’s fresh fish in a package on the seat. (His wife’s plea to the court to have her husband declared legally dead –”he would never leave the family like this”–fell on unsympathetically deaf ears.) The incarcerated don was depicted in the press as impotent and broken, having lost his magic criminal potency as his rivals took over and cut a swath through his nearest and dearest with impunity. Impunity time is over; Vito is obviously back with a phalanx of efficient hired guns at his disposal, directing them from his secure fortress in an isolated luxury condo building which house/d many of his ilk (thank you La Presse) in a setting worthy of a fortified medieval town: only one road in, so you can see anyone coming for miles, in particular any cops trying to tail you; guards in the garage to tip you off when the police are on their way up with a warrant, presumably so you can flush any evidence down the toilet.

As the deaths and near-misses play out with methodical regularity, possibly on a schedule, I have to say that I really don’t care –not even in the abstract– if these people shoot each other. So far everything seems to be in the hands of professionals, and there doesn’t seem to be any “collateral damage”, although I don’t suppose I would have liked to be eating my eggs benedict at the breakfast restaurant in Laval where today’s victim was shot –several times– in the parking lot. I console myself that most of these events seem to take place in the suburbs, where the moderately-to-greatly successful mafiosi live. Crime where I live, in Park Ex, is on a more basic and desperate level.

Last week the Prince Jewellery store, a multi-barred place on a convenient corner for automobile getaway, was hit in what degenerated into a gruesome event. If you take a look in, you can see why they have all the bars: the entire back wall is a back-lit display of multi-tiered necklaces in that dark gold Indian women wear. I assume these are wedding sets: elaborate and expensive. Two “street-gang members” on the verge of middle age , and who thus have obviously been in the crime field for at least twenty years, attempted to stick up the Prince. There were four Indian men inside, in their fifties and sixties. The store is probably the mainstay of several families. The employees resisted the robbery, the aging gang members started stabbing , and the employees turned the tables by throwing acid on the would be thieves, scarring one and causing the other to lose an eye. The employees apparently kept a jumbo supply of jewellers’ acid under the counter for just such an eventuality. The four employees went to hospital, one seriously hurt; the cops arrested the two acidified thieves, and the general feeling on the street is: good. This has raised the Indian merchants’ stock in everyone’s eyes, and should have a reciprocal protective effect on all the sikhs, hindus and moslems operating little stores in the vicinity: don’t mess with us ! Try as I might, I cannot generate any outrage about this episode of self-defense. Prince Jewellers reopened the next day.

The closest we have come in Park Ex to the overt presence of the mob was an incident at the now-defunct Albano bar on Jarry, a concrete basement with a rudimentary bar serving a very restricted menu of drinks, several video poker machines, and a giant screen. (They did once open the place in a clandestine manner at 7AM so we could watch Italy lose a World Cup game). The demise of Albano started the day a regular patron parked his jaguar outside, sat down at the bar, laid his multiple cell phones down on the counter.. and was killed point blank by a man wearing a balaclava, who quickly vanished, never to be seen or traced. The waitress went into hysterics, needless to say, but there was no other spillover. The cops towed the jaguar. A professional job on another “professional”, in the proverbial phrase, “known to the police.” Albano bar’s minimal appeal waned after that, and the place quietly closed.

Ancient history

Back in the late seventies, I used to shop at the Steinberg’s store on Cote des neiges and Queen Mary Road. One day, I was startled to see Camil Laurin, at the time a Quebec cabinet minister known as the “father of Bill 101”, dropping cigarette ash all over the dairy aisle. Yes, he was smoking, which is what stirred my ire, and it was completely legal! And remained so for a long time, until the PQ’s eternal antagonist, the Quebec Liberal Party, brought in a comprehensive no-smoking law.

Laurin was a beady-eyed, thin-faced guy whose shiny black hair accentuated his pallor, and a universal bogeyman of the English community. As I glared at him disapprovingly (that column of ash dropping onto the butter…) the switch in the human brain that tells us someone is looking at us obviously activated, and he stared quite insolently back, pretty much daring me to say something about his presence / politics / ash dropping into the food. I hastily averted my gaze, as I was clearly no match for what I interpreted as his steely malevolence. I thought the grocery-store smoking was gross and irresponsible, but I desisted; he had probably been on the receiving end of lots of invective, and he looked like he might relish a dust-up. I felt like a bit of an inadvertent wacko when I ran into him again ten minutes later, sprinting into the liquor store. He was being chauffeured around in a government limo by a large member of the Surete du Quebec, who kept the engine running.

Strangely enough now, many of us anglos are pretty happy with Bill 101, or at least reconciled: it brought our fabled “social peace” and probably righted some wrongs in channeling immigrant kids to French school (the overwhelming majority of them still learn English pretty efficiently) and forcing French signage (photos of Ste Catherine Street in the early 60s show almost monolithic use of English). Those of us who stayed here sent our kids to immersion or into the French system, creating as a by-product a mobile, bilingual elite that may not have been what Laurin intended.

As for public smoking, despite prognostications that the anti-smoking law would never stick, it was and is almost universally obeyed.

Laurin died, lauded, a few years back.

And Steinbergs unfortunately died too, a proud company with a history; started by the matriarch on the Main, built into an empire by the legendary Sam, then fatally damaged by his successors. Taken over by the Caisse de depot, which was desperate to keep the grocer out of the hands of non–Quebecers, it was driven into the ground by the “businessman” on whom the company was bestowed. The S logo used to be everywhere; now it’s a retro fetish on T shirts and tote bags.

political clearinghouse

Every time I go to the bus stop, I wave at the window of the barbershop around the corner, where George holds court.  His place is absolutely strategic if you want to know which way the wind is blowing in Park Ex, but it’s a throwback to our village roots; when George goes, this will be lost. His business place is his living room, as he tells me, where he will discreetly serve friends a small libation at the back of the store; it’s also the local political epicenter, visited by a long succession of local MPs and MNAs and city councillors and candidates for all three governments in their quest for support and a touch of the neighbourhood jungle drums. Justin Trudeau even had his moustache shaved there.  George took the straight razor to him under the watchful eye of a CBC TV personality in a post-Movember stunt. George recently received a visit from a minion of the Office de la langue francaise, letting him know that a complaint had been laid about the objectionable language of his interior decoration:  several framed cuttings about the Cinderella Greek soccer victory and a copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In English.  Unfortunately, while arguing with this innocent functionary – in excellent French– George dealt a fatal blow to his cause by ranting about the quality of French in Quebec: just a patois, you don’t even know how to speak correct French, etc.  So not exactly fodder with which to launch an indignant appeal to reason through the local English TV station. Even if the cry of alarm about the low quality of spoken French is heard in other quarters, like Lysiane Gagnon’s column in La Presse, it is obviously in much more politically correct form.  George awaits the letter from the Office.  His window sign in Greek lettering which reads “Greek barbershop” was not judged to objectionable by the anonymous complainant.

another planet?

On the way to the gym, I reflected on the fact that some of the extra terrestrial type elements of life in my neighbourhood hardly even strike me as weird anymore:  the Westen Union poster with the photo of Shah Rukh Khan winningly eyeing one of the many interchangeable Indian screen goddesses, exhorting passersby –In French–to send money and make loved ones’ Diwali wishes come true.  Another poster with the candy colours usually seen in portraits of Ganesh the happy elephant god – pink, yellow- and lots of squiggly writing around the face of the deceased former leader of the Tamil Tigers. This is officially a terrorist group according to our government, but apparently OK with the five or six merchants who stuck this poster in their windows. In the only writing I was able to read, two gatherings, possibly commemorative and certainly money-making,  are referred to, in Toronto and Montreal. When this guy was killed, there were a lot of posters around announcing something related to him, presumably of funerary nature.  He was depicted wearing a business suit, beneficently smiling in the middle of a kind of pink cloud, with flaming candles.   I would like to know whether the merchants display this stuff out of solidarity or fear of being harassed. I would also like to know if they are also being shaken down by the Tigers, reputedly a fearsome fundraising machine for the struggle back home, but possibly a nascent mafia.  Why don’t they leave this at home? or maybe, why can’t they?

Why live in the city?

…because in the space of an hour you can enter into discordant worlds, and encounter things both ephemeral and tragic.

Yesterday was a surprise last chance to do some biking before the snow comes, so we headed to the Iles: Ste Hélène and Notre Dame.  Lots of people were there seeking a little escape into nature (or the nearest approximation) where you can be out of the city but still keep an eye on it just across the river .

We started out from Habitat 67: Surf’s Up!   Shades of the Beach Boys: two guys in full wetsuits carrying boards emerged from the trail that leads to the standing wave where you can actually surf on the St. Lawrence.  I discovered this several years ago when curiosity led me to follow a stream of people who were heading along the slippery path between the fence behind Habitat and the cliff leading down to the river.  Apparently a spot well known to cognoscenti in the surf community (even appearing in a New York Times article a few years back), the standing wave has spawned several businesses that offer surf lessons.  I know from seeing people surfing in the Atlantic in December that surfers are a relentless lot, not easily deterred, even when miles from the sand and sun you might think were necessary conditions for the sport.  Not so ! for hardy Montrealers. For all I know, the surfing continues all winter.

Next, taking pleasure in wheeling around the place where million dollar cars screech and crash one weekend a year, something moved at the periphery of my vision, and I caught sight of a fox standing alertly on the grass verge, not at all afraid. I first saw only his  hairless, dark legs…topped off by luxuriant, puffy red fur.  This is not the first time I have seen a fox around there, and I like to think there is a small pack of them leading a  sheltered and comfortable life on the island; real wild animals (as opposed to squirrels) persisting in the shadow of the tawdriness of the casino.

The most jarring sight of the day was a train crossing the Victoria Bridge, carrying dozens of tanks and military vehicles.  Where were they coming from ? probably Afghanistan.  Unless you know someone in the Forces, or who comes from that country, this war hardly crosses your mind here in Montreal.  Was this parade of combat heavy equipment a sign of our withdrawal from Afghanistan?   Was this just a fraction of the materiel we sent over there, and would there be more coming out?  Where were all these tanks going: to the home of the Van Doos?  Petawawa?  A sobering reminder of war and death that we are, largely, so happily spared.

An hour in the city: a hot ocean sport that we have adapted to our cold river; wild animals whose descendents could take back their territory in a minute if humans suddenly disappeared; a reminder of a war that we have been able to  push to the periphery of our consciousness.

Skinny pants

This morning the flyer from the Bay arrived, with its panoply of Xmas party clothes.  I see that the trend for “optical illusion” slimming dresses has jumped from those who might “benefit” from them (basically size 2 and up) to land on a pair of pants worn by a model whose thighs are already about the size of my calves.  The pants reduce her already wan leg silhouette by about half, which is, tiresomely and obviously, the desired end.  These clever garments have been hailed for making normal size people like Kate Winslet look skinny, and it is unpleasant to note that they seem to have been pioneered or at least enthusiastically embraced by a woman designer, Stella McCartney.  So it’s not OK to wear leather shoes, but it is OK to contribute to the ambient mania about female body size.  Not coincidentally, on the bus yesterday I saw perhaps the skinniest anorexic woman I have ever seen, and I have seen a few through the years, especially exposing their concentration camp bodies in frightening stages of undress in various gym locker rooms. Anyway, bus girl’s legs were thinner than those of the gangliest pre-teen; they literally could not have been thicker than my lower arms, all the way from ankle to what is left of her trunk.  Sad, and ghoulish.

Giant sucking sound

Every time I walk through the Quartier des spectacles, which is often, as I use the #80 bus, I think about vacuums.  This is because last August, La Presse revealed the apparently little known fact that a giant vacuum system has been constructed under the Quartier des spectacles, to suck garbage out of the cans in the site and into a receptacle,  just like your central vacuum at home.  Many many taxpayer dollars have been spent on this great leap forward to 21st century garbage removal!  Not so fast Montreal! The “heart” of this system, the giant vacuum cleaner canister, as it were, does not exist!  Imagine your home vacuum, a  hose sucking up dust, attached to ..nothing!  What a mess, right?

Apparently no agreement was ever concluded with the owners of Complexe Desjardins, where this receptacle was supposed to have been located. However, the vacuum tubes were cemented immovably into place under the site, all running to…a dead end, as La Presse noted.

After I finished ranting about this phantom garbage system, I was interested to note that the story sank like a stone upon publication. No followup, no irate letters to the paper.   Everyone just shrugged their shoulders.  This vacuum cleaner is a barometer of how inured we Montrealers are to waste and stupidity.