Violence erupts in Montreal as mafia boss Vito Rizzuto returns
Canadian city sees series of murders, with more expected, after the release of a mafia boss from jail sets off an underworld power struggle
The killings of two close associates of a jailed mobster 11 weeks apart confirmed Montreal's fears that the return of a reputed mafia don has unleashed an underworld power struggle and settling of scores.
The men killed were mobster Raynald Desjardins' associates, and the returned don, fresh out of a US prison, is Vito Rizzuto.
A former ally of the Rizzuto clan, Desjardins betrayed them in a bid for gangland control, mafia experts say.
Desjardins' former brother-in-law and business partner, Gaetan Gosselin, was walking home last Tuesday night north of Montreal when one or more assailants opened fire, killing him. The ambush was reminiscent of one in November where Joseph Di Maulo - also a brother-in-law of Desjardins - was gunned down in the driveway of his home.
The two murders - as well as the killings of a few of the mob's minor henchmen - occurred soon after Rizzuto's October return to Canada, following a six-year term in a US prison for his role in the 1981 murders of three members of New York's Bonanno crime family.
As head of Montreal's mafia for a quarter of a century before his arrest, Rizzuto led with flair and brutality an underworld empire that included lucrative trafficking of Colombian cocaine in Canada and the US.