The brazen daylight killing of a prominent Quebec gang leader inside a suburban Starbucks in the outskirts of Montreal this week could signal a new, more chaotic and brash environment when it comes to organised crime, observers say.
The arrests of alleged senior, older members of Montreal’s mafia in June has potentially left a chasm – meaning newer, younger gangs are attempting to gain a foothold.
Police said at a news conference that they were called to a Starbucks in Laval, Quebec, which is a suburb of Montreal, at about 10.30am on Wednesday because of reports of a shooting inside the coffee shop. One man was killed and two others were injured.
While police have not confirmed the victim’s name, multiple Canadian media outlets have said the man killed was the convicted drug trafficker Charalambos Theologou, 40, also known as “Bobby the Greek”. Theologou was the leader of a gang called the Chomedey Greeks.
Ian Lafrenière, Quebec’s public security minister, said: “Everything points to it being an act linked to organised crime.”
Laval’s police chief, Pierre Brochet, told reporters Wednesday that while he could not comment on the investigation, he knows the man killed due to his “reputation”. “He is connected to organised crime,” he said.
Surveillance footage obtained by Radio-Canada shows two men entering the Starbucks and then exiting quickly after the shooting.
Theologou was first connected officially to criminal activity in 2005 when police in Montreal arrested him and six others in a drug trafficking investigation, according to the Montreal newspaper the Gazette. He ended up pleading guilty on drug-related charges and was sentenced to two years in prison.
According to the Gazette, Theologou was arrested for a second time in 2009, again for drug trafficking, and was subsequently sentenced to another five years in prison.
Valentin Pereda, an assistant professor at the the University of Montreal’s criminology school, said that organised crime in the area used to be characterised around exercising restraint over public violence and relied on a clear hierarchical structure.
An audacious daylight murder at a coffee shop chain indicates there may not be a major player keeping order – as violence could affect business when it comes to drug trafficking, said Pereda.
He said it was possible that the group which targeted Theologou simply “did not care” about the public display of violence in order to kill the gang leader.
But Pereda said he believes more likely is there has been a loss of structure and control within organised crime in Montreal, related to major arrests of the alleged heads of Montreal’s mafia made in June.
After a three-year investigation, police took into custody the alleged mafia leader Leonardo Rizzuto and charged him with first-degree murder and other related offences. Rizzuto is the son of the late mafia boss Vito Rizzuto, the CBC reported at the time.
Vito Rizzuto, whom the Globe and Mail referred to in 2008 as the “top mafia boss in Canada”, was imprisoned in the US from 2007 to 2012 after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and racketeering related to killings that had occurred in New York City in the early 1980s. He died in 2013.
The Rizzuto crime family has long been notorious – and the arrest of Rizzuto was considered the final “nail in the coffin” for the Montreal mafia, said Pereda.
It has left a hole that younger street gangs are looking to fill. Wednesday’s shooting was an indication of an unstable, fluid situation, Pereda said. “There is kind of this plethora of small, not super well-organised gangs … that are vying for control,” he said.
