St. Michel: examining the former east-side municipality's tradition of blatant bribery and corruption

Lafontaine and Bergeron were happy before they got caught

  St. Michel, a Montreal-island-municipality-turned-borough, once brazenly practiced a most barbaric form of unbridled bribery.
**
    You can feel okay not knowing much about St. Michel.
    It includes a massive former quarry and is bisected by highway 40 and is somewhere amid a soup of east side districts like Montreal North, Ahuntsic, St. Leonard and Rosemont.
   Think of the area between Papineau and Pie IX, not in the gritty area around St. Catherine but up a couple of miles north. .

Lafontaine and Bergeron were less happy later

   Farmers rode nag and buggy down the path at Rosemont Blvd and then  Papineau to the market across from city hall.
   By 1870 St. Michel had sufficient critical mass to host a hotel and schools and the Jodoin store where all St. Michelers gathered to gossip.
   The sleepy village of 6,000 exploded after WWII, rising to 68,000 in 1946 to in two decades, making it the sixth biggest city in Quebec. Residents enjoyed living there and breathing rock dust from the Francon and Miron quarries, which were eventually shut down.
**
   Nine men were elected mayor of St. Michel in elections spanning 1913-1968. Two of them were complete disasters and the rest we don't know much about.
   George Lafontaine, a former prospector, reigned after Feb 2. 1949. He also served on Montreal city council after 1950 and was emboldened after many showed up at a meeting where he grandstanded against bus fare hikes.
    Lafontaine flew to South America to attend a conference of mayors and council refused to reimburse his flashy extravagance and other iffy stuff popped up on his radar in his early days.
   Resident Noel Groleau complained when Lafontaine got  his secretary to purchase city property for him.
  Another resident T. J. Heffernan sought to boot him out for corruption and illegal voting.
  Lafontaine was re-elected in Nov. 1952, in an election which saw a bizarre incident, as prominent reformist lawyer Pacifico "Pax" Plante, in the area to keep an eye out for voting malfeasance, was arrested by the St. Michel police force for carrying a gun. Plante had come into the area to keep an eye out for voting irregularities.  Plante said the cops slipped the gun into his pocket. .
   Cascading complaints led a Superior Court judge to rule Lafontaine ineligible of holding elected office for five years. Lafontaine battled the ruling but th eSupreme Court refused to hear his challenge.
   A judge allowed him to stick around, however, as the municipality hadn't the necessary cash to hold another vote.
   Cinfusion reigned concerning Lafontaine's legitimacy as mayor until he finally quit on 15 September 1953, blaming "jealous people and others seeking to exercise personal revenge."
   Lafontaine further fed the confusion by vowing to run for mayor of Montreal in 1954.
   According to the court judgement he couldn't serve in an elected post. But nothing was stopping him from running for an elected post.
  Little was heard from Lafontaine after he vowed to run against Mayor Jean Drapeau in 1970 but nothing came of it.
***
   Maurice Bergeron was 54 when elected mayor of St. Michel in 1960, a title he held for eight years. He and his councillors would brazenly demand cash bribes at every opportunity.
  When shoemaker Leonido Carretta, 39, asked for a permit to renovate his basement, kleptocratic councillors demanded $375 in kickbacks, almost all of the savings the poor guy possessed.
   Andre Meunier was helping his brother Robert's work search when informed that the city would hire him for a bribe of $500. Bergeron invited the pair up to his cottage at Lake Connolly in the Laurentians where they paid him off and Bergeron made sure Meunier was hired as a cop.
   Bergeron's only clever maneuver perhaps was in 1964 when residents started asking to be annexed by Montreal. Bergeron, to the surprise of all, ordered a referendum and two-of-three residents opted to stay as a separate municipality. Another vote reversed that decision a few years later and St. Michel has been part of Montreal since.
   An inquest heard many more incriminating tales, including one on 11 April 1968 when councillor Roland Lariviere, 52 was told he'd have to bribe councilors for a permit, and Mario Zambino, a St. Leonard contractor was told he'd have to bring a bag with $600, one hundred for each of the elected representatives.
  Constable Patrick Fournierr was told he'd only be promoted sergeant if he paid $500.
   The local arena, named after Bergeron himself, was built by a contractor who paid each councillor $4,000 and the mayor $6,000.
  Bergeron suspended the workers who reported the facts and a councillor offered a huge payment to one not to testify.
   He and four councillors, Maurice Constantineau, Gerard Caron, Louis Patenaude and Wilfrid Rochon, as well as the mayor's brother Jean-Marc Bergeron,were sent to trial for corruption in Mar ch 1968. The arena, named after him, was renamed.
   Bergeron was sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay $5,000. He attempted to appeal to the top but the Supreme Court refused to hear his case.
   Bergeron spent little time behind bars and was to be found in hospital and after a few months a judge allowed him out on the promise he stay at his friend's cottage in the Laurentians.
  Bergeron died in June 1972 when his car slammed into a concrete abutment on a highway in the Laurentians.
***
   So thoughts on this impossibly reckless behaviour.
   People often justify their greed with the dubious claim that they seek to secure a good future for their children. So they claim they weren't greedy, but rather conscientious, in a family way. Their lawless behaviour only harms their families, of course.
   -Each individual in the crooked circle overestimated the will of others in the group to commit the crime. A psychological principle inherent in such group crimes notes that miscreants are often undecided about committing the crime and incorrectly assume that others are far more inclined to follow that illegal course.
- Criminals assumed that they wouldn't get caught. This suggests that they wishfully saw order in what was a chaotic system that displeased many.
- Criminals subconsciously wanted to get caught to validate their own negative feelings about themselves. This is hard to evaluate as it involves considerable psychological speculation.
   -The miscreants assumed that previous administrations routinely practiced the same bribery with no negative consequences but it's difficult to evaluate that claim without evidence.