Montreal fraud artist of the month- Theodore Aboud

   In 1973 convicted swindler and bookie Theodore Aboud, 53, was put on a crime probe stand where he spilled some beans on a horse race in 1961 that he had allegedly fixed.
   He recounted many details but retracted when a jockey named Elliott flew back from Hong Kong to vehemently deny the story.
   Aboud also said the he got a tip that goaltender Glenn Hall had gambled a big sum against his own team one night in 1961 and so he too put some money against Hall's team that game and won a bundle.
   Hall - who teammates say never even bet on the ponies - angrily denied the charge.
   Aboud also said that Montreal mobsters put up half a million dollars to get Mayor Jean Drapeau re-elected in 1960. Drapeau, I think you guessed it, denied everything.
   Aboud was testifying at a crime commission because he had a lot of free time. He had been stewing in prison at this time for his role in a simple fraud scheme where $1.5 million of forged certified cheques were used to buy and sell bonds and then transferred to a Cayman Island bank.
   Aboud was found in Brazil in 1970 where he said that double-crossing allies left him in a dungeon.
   He agreed to come back, although you can see him ducking the airport newsparazzi above.
   Aboud's testimony in 1973 also gave a fascinating portrayal of the brutish world of loan sharking, which he considered the lowest of all crimes.
   He said that the worst local loan sharks were the team of John Brady and Paul April, whose willingness to bully and brutalize legitimate businessmen helped turn a $2,000 business into a huge operation.
   But the absolute worst was a guy named Teddy Yanovitch, who Aboud suspects of having killed his friend Sammy Klians for telling him to "go to hell."
   Yanovitch, a loan shark, almost choked Aboud to death as punishment for an NSF cheque. Yanovitch, aka, Teddy Young scared a young banker into writing fake loans that landed the poor banker into a three year prison sentence.
   Yanovitch was found dead in the trunk of his car at the Rockland Shopping Center in 1971 with a bullet to the head.
   A police investigator later had his home bombed and this was seen as a suggestion not to put too much effort into investigating the Yanovitch murder.