A feature article I wrote in 1999 about homicides in Montreal.
Dino Bravo. Frank Shoofey. Sidney Leithman. Miss Strip 1976. Four famous unsolved cases illustrate how the MUC homicide squad keeps a tight lid on unsolved murders
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
About 15 years ago, several murdered children between 10 and 14 were found in south-west Montreal. Eventually, the MUC homicide squad caught the serial killer. Yet there was no perp walk down a line of exploding flashbulbs.
No trial, no arrest. Today the murderer works with the public in a job which takes him all over the city. "They just couldn't get the evidence on the guy," says a police insider. "The police attention seems to have made him stop, but cops try to keep this stuff quiet because they don't want the public to panic."
That's one of hundreds of morbid secrets kept tightly within our homicide squad, whose shady world of information-control mirrors the dark world they police.
So, the new spirit of community policing has prompted you to ask questions about the methods of the 20-officer squad? Keep 'em to yourself. Want an update on a case? Use your imagination. Access to information? Access denied. Who's watching the detectives? Their only required report is an annual update to the provincial Justice Minister.
Even other cops grumble. "It's a cloak-and-dagger-type section who perceive themselves, rightly or wrong, as the elite," says a cop. "They want information, but they're not willing to share what they've got and only unless they're dealing with a joint task force. Unless they have to share, they won't."
The official explanation for putting a lid on morbid facts is that killers will somehow use the information to their advantage. And there are other, less official ones. "They occasionally get wackos confessing to murders they didn't commit," says a veteran crime journalist. "If the nutcase had that information, the cops wouldn't know whether he was for real or not."
Up until the '80s, Montreal police were famous for juicy press leaks, particularly to the splashy crime press. The strategy was tailored to create a public groundswell for larger police budgets. But the police no longer need public fear to raise their budgets: last year the police budget was hiked 2.4 per cent to $390 million in spite of declining crime rates. However, most of that money has gone towards police salaries.
"They don't want the public to realize that they don't solve all that many murders," according to one officer. (Last year there were 41 murders in Montreal, 13 remain unsolved.) "Of the three basic homicides, the family quarrels and the heat-of-the-moment street-fights are relatively easy to solve. Those raise their solution rate. But the professional hits remain very hard to solve."
For the homicide squad, secrecy remains one of the few potentially useful weapons. The much ballyhooed use of DNA testing remains costly and has only resulted in a few convictions, most notably that of the Tara Manning case. The use of informants met its Waterloo when Mom Boucher's accuser had his credibility stripped clean. And if you ever dreamed of hitting the jackpot turning in that guy you know who-they-say-killed-somebody, wake up: our police offer no cash rewards, and those offered by private groups or individuals are often aimed at sex slayings, which is generally useless because sex predators tend to keep their secrets.
In cemeteries all over, victims lie sleepless in their caskets, waiting for somebody to bring their killers to justice. Here are some of our biggest unsolved murder mysteries, the full details of which, years later, are still kept tightly under wraps despite prying by journalists.
Dead men can't defend their honour
Adolfo Bresciano, 44, was a family man from Vimont, Laval, who doted on his 6-year-old daughter and was known to be friends with plumbers and bus drivers he grew up with in Rosemont. He was also Dino Bravo, a star 20-year veteran of professional wrestling circuits around the globe. To this day, fans still recall his famous battles, which included a nearly victorious title fight against Hulk Hogan. Bravo's scissor kicks, speed, showmanship and powerful arms--which could bench 500 pounds--are still fondly remembered around the world.
But on March 11, 1993, he was just another fan watching the Habs play the Islanders on TV. He wouldn't see the end of the game, nor the Stanley Cup parade a few weeks later. Two gunmen, one wielding a .22 calibre, the other a .380, sprayed 17 shots in his living room, hitting him in the head seven times.
According to the Journal de Montréal, an unnamed Laval police officer claimed to have found evidence of Bravo's involvement in cigarette smuggling on the scene. All of the press picked up on the rumour and the wrestling hero suddenly became, in death, a lowly cigarette smuggler, in spite of the absence of a trial, conviction or witnesses.
"What the papers printed was bull," says Gino Bresciano, the wrestler's younger brother. "I feel rage in my heart, it really makes my blood boil. I never heard from the police since that day, yet I live for the day they catch his killer. I always wonder who really did it, a jealous husband, an old wrestling rival, maybe someone at the top of the wrestling world--that's a multi-billion dollar industry. There's no way of knowing. I'm powerless in this and I really miss him."
The missing briefcase
Sidney Leithman didn't have to wake up at dawn to defend underworld characters. But he did. The 54-year-old defence attorney had two teenage daughters, a mansion in Town of Mount Royal and enough cash for a few lifetimes. But none of that caused him to hesitate to jump up at the sound of his alarm on May 14, 1991, to defend yet another drug dealer, this one a Cuban pilot with links to the Colombian cartel. The fast-talking McGill graduate had drummed up his first business pounding the marble floors of the courthouse, eventually defending such underworld all-stars as Frank Cotroni, the Dubois brothers and Dooney Ryan.
"He was a likeable guy, a real wheeler-dealer," says one crime journalist. Another remarked on his tendency to put a price on everything: "If he'd buy you lunch, he'd make sure you knew how much it cost. If you complimented him on his tie, he'd tell you how much he paid for it."
As Leithman warmed up his Saab 2000 convertible at 6:40 a.m. he probably tossed some packages into his backseat. After a couple of blocks a Jeep cut him off at Jean-Talon and Rockland. A man about 5'7" shot six shots into the car, breaking the window with the first two, then hitting him four times.
Two clear bags of white power were found on top of Leithman's briefcase in the back; packages which witnesses believe were tossed in by the gunman. However, another item, believed to be Leithman's briefcase, was off-limits for detectives. Although they had a potential gold mine of clues, the detectives were forced to seal the bag and hand it over to the Quebec Bar. The most persistent rumour pins responsibility for the hit on a Colombian drug lord upset with Leithman for failing to get his girlfriend acquitted.
It helps to be loved
Robert Morin was a man from St-Jérôme who moved to the city, changed his name to Carole Jean, got a sex change and became a stripper named Saria. And she did that well, well enough for the 21 year old to beat 100 hopefuls in a contest at Bar Robert for the title of Miss Strip 1976. In the hours before the midnight which would start her reign, Carole was at her Viau street apartment, watching TV with the person she called her sister, Claude "Claudia" Jean, 21, a pretty pre-op transsexual, five years into the process of becoming a woman.
Somebody entered, without any sign of force, and around 9 p.m. the two shemales were both stabbed to death. There was no discernible motive, although Carole's presumed stash of cash she'd earned as a stripper throughout the province was gone, as was the killer.
"Back then gays were killed with impunity," says community spokesman Michael Hendricks. "Until 1992 being a homosexual was a reason to get murdered." In the 1990s, when a series of murders in the gay community started occurring, Hendricks and others aggressively demanded information from the homicide squad. "We told them that the victims often didn't have much in the way of family. It took a year, but we finally persuaded them to show us photos of the crime scenes and such."
Although the homicide squad discourages publicity, Hendricks believes it was precisely that which led to a greater awareness in the community concerning safety issues. Of the 14 local gay murders from the early '90s, only two are officially thought to be the work of a still-unapprehended serial killer. But another chilling rumour in police circles has it that the homicide squad secretly believes the number to be much higher, a fact they have sought to mute in an effort to avert further panic.
King of the rumour mill
It was one of those rare ho-hum moments in Frank Shoofey's day. Whether organizing a criminal defence for one of his many high-powered clients, plotting his entry into the provincial Liberals or fielding one of the many calls he loved to answer, the 44-year-old lawyer had few quiet minutes. As he entered the hallway outside his office at 1030 Cherrier, on October 15, 1985, to comb his elaborate mop of a hairpiece, a gunman shot him in the head four times at close range. The much-loved lawyer's body fell to the ground in the exact spot where one of his clients had been killed six years earlier.
Within hours, the city was buzzing with rumours about the murder; citizen sleuths knew that Shoofey had received death threats and that the killer needed a key to enter his building. They spoke of his newly dissolved contract with the boxing Hiltons, an unusual deal in which the lawyer received half of their earnings, as a hedge against their father blowing the money on booze. Shoofey bragged of never keeping a cent of the Hilton cash, spending it instead on a huge Rigaud home for the clan. And you didn't need a Whisper 2000 to hear the talk about the American boxing promoter Don King, who had recently incurred Shoofey's wrath by allegedly getting Dave Hilton Senior drunk before getting him to sign an exclusive contract for his boxing sons.
Yet in spite of the cold-blooded killing, Shoofey's son Dominique, who was 13 at the time, didn't hesitate to enter to follow his father into criminal defence law. "I don't think what happened to my father was really related to his practice, it was more an exception to what happens."
But one veteran crime reporter says that the homicide squad are barking up an entirely different tree. "They got an idea on who shot him, he's in and out of jail, they've tried everything to get him to make a mistake and get him to court. They put a guy in his cell and everything, it didn't work. It's banal, it's punk stuff, it's just a client who wasn't happy with Frank. Maybe he needed money off him for a fix or something."
And if, God forbid, you were murdered? In death you'd become the compliant client of a team which sits behind closed horizontal blinds in the glass and steel offices above the Place Versailles cinema, far in the city's east end.
Unlike other homicide squads, most notably that of Baltimore--which welcomed a writer to observe their day-to-day operations for a year "with no adverse reaction" in the name of "our partnership with the community," as a detective from that city put it--your murder detectives work in secrecy and darkness. And if, in the icy grave of a murder victim, you are one of the one-in-three homicide victims whose killer walks free, try to summon some blind hope that your case won't be mishandled. And be patient, you'll be dead long enough.
Dino Bravo. Frank Shoofey. Sidney Leithman. Miss Strip 1976. Four famous unsolved cases illustrate how the MUC homicide squad keeps a tight lid on unsolved murders
by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR
About 15 years ago, several murdered children between 10 and 14 were found in south-west Montreal. Eventually, the MUC homicide squad caught the serial killer. Yet there was no perp walk down a line of exploding flashbulbs.
No trial, no arrest. Today the murderer works with the public in a job which takes him all over the city. "They just couldn't get the evidence on the guy," says a police insider. "The police attention seems to have made him stop, but cops try to keep this stuff quiet because they don't want the public to panic."
That's one of hundreds of morbid secrets kept tightly within our homicide squad, whose shady world of information-control mirrors the dark world they police.
So, the new spirit of community policing has prompted you to ask questions about the methods of the 20-officer squad? Keep 'em to yourself. Want an update on a case? Use your imagination. Access to information? Access denied. Who's watching the detectives? Their only required report is an annual update to the provincial Justice Minister.
Even other cops grumble. "It's a cloak-and-dagger-type section who perceive themselves, rightly or wrong, as the elite," says a cop. "They want information, but they're not willing to share what they've got and only unless they're dealing with a joint task force. Unless they have to share, they won't."
The official explanation for putting a lid on morbid facts is that killers will somehow use the information to their advantage. And there are other, less official ones. "They occasionally get wackos confessing to murders they didn't commit," says a veteran crime journalist. "If the nutcase had that information, the cops wouldn't know whether he was for real or not."
Up until the '80s, Montreal police were famous for juicy press leaks, particularly to the splashy crime press. The strategy was tailored to create a public groundswell for larger police budgets. But the police no longer need public fear to raise their budgets: last year the police budget was hiked 2.4 per cent to $390 million in spite of declining crime rates. However, most of that money has gone towards police salaries.
"They don't want the public to realize that they don't solve all that many murders," according to one officer. (Last year there were 41 murders in Montreal, 13 remain unsolved.) "Of the three basic homicides, the family quarrels and the heat-of-the-moment street-fights are relatively easy to solve. Those raise their solution rate. But the professional hits remain very hard to solve."
For the homicide squad, secrecy remains one of the few potentially useful weapons. The much ballyhooed use of DNA testing remains costly and has only resulted in a few convictions, most notably that of the Tara Manning case. The use of informants met its Waterloo when Mom Boucher's accuser had his credibility stripped clean. And if you ever dreamed of hitting the jackpot turning in that guy you know who-they-say-killed-somebody, wake up: our police offer no cash rewards, and those offered by private groups or individuals are often aimed at sex slayings, which is generally useless because sex predators tend to keep their secrets.
In cemeteries all over, victims lie sleepless in their caskets, waiting for somebody to bring their killers to justice. Here are some of our biggest unsolved murder mysteries, the full details of which, years later, are still kept tightly under wraps despite prying by journalists.
Dead men can't defend their honour
Adolfo Bresciano, 44, was a family man from Vimont, Laval, who doted on his 6-year-old daughter and was known to be friends with plumbers and bus drivers he grew up with in Rosemont. He was also Dino Bravo, a star 20-year veteran of professional wrestling circuits around the globe. To this day, fans still recall his famous battles, which included a nearly victorious title fight against Hulk Hogan. Bravo's scissor kicks, speed, showmanship and powerful arms--which could bench 500 pounds--are still fondly remembered around the world.But on March 11, 1993, he was just another fan watching the Habs play the Islanders on TV. He wouldn't see the end of the game, nor the Stanley Cup parade a few weeks later. Two gunmen, one wielding a .22 calibre, the other a .380, sprayed 17 shots in his living room, hitting him in the head seven times.
According to the Journal de Montréal, an unnamed Laval police officer claimed to have found evidence of Bravo's involvement in cigarette smuggling on the scene. All of the press picked up on the rumour and the wrestling hero suddenly became, in death, a lowly cigarette smuggler, in spite of the absence of a trial, conviction or witnesses.
"What the papers printed was bull," says Gino Bresciano, the wrestler's younger brother. "I feel rage in my heart, it really makes my blood boil. I never heard from the police since that day, yet I live for the day they catch his killer. I always wonder who really did it, a jealous husband, an old wrestling rival, maybe someone at the top of the wrestling world--that's a multi-billion dollar industry. There's no way of knowing. I'm powerless in this and I really miss him."
The missing briefcase
Sidney Leithman didn't have to wake up at dawn to defend underworld characters. But he did. The 54-year-old defence attorney had two teenage daughters, a mansion in Town of Mount Royal and enough cash for a few lifetimes. But none of that caused him to hesitate to jump up at the sound of his alarm on May 14, 1991, to defend yet another drug dealer, this one a Cuban pilot with links to the Colombian cartel. The fast-talking McGill graduate had drummed up his first business pounding the marble floors of the courthouse, eventually defending such underworld all-stars as Frank Cotroni, the Dubois brothers and Dooney Ryan.
As Leithman warmed up his Saab 2000 convertible at 6:40 a.m. he probably tossed some packages into his backseat. After a couple of blocks a Jeep cut him off at Jean-Talon and Rockland. A man about 5'7" shot six shots into the car, breaking the window with the first two, then hitting him four times.
Two clear bags of white power were found on top of Leithman's briefcase in the back; packages which witnesses believe were tossed in by the gunman. However, another item, believed to be Leithman's briefcase, was off-limits for detectives. Although they had a potential gold mine of clues, the detectives were forced to seal the bag and hand it over to the Quebec Bar. The most persistent rumour pins responsibility for the hit on a Colombian drug lord upset with Leithman for failing to get his girlfriend acquitted.
It helps to be loved
Robert Morin was a man from St-Jérôme who moved to the city, changed his name to Carole Jean, got a sex change and became a stripper named Saria. And she did that well, well enough for the 21 year old to beat 100 hopefuls in a contest at Bar Robert for the title of Miss Strip 1976. In the hours before the midnight which would start her reign, Carole was at her Viau street apartment, watching TV with the person she called her sister, Claude "Claudia" Jean, 21, a pretty pre-op transsexual, five years into the process of becoming a woman.
Somebody entered, without any sign of force, and around 9 p.m. the two shemales were both stabbed to death. There was no discernible motive, although Carole's presumed stash of cash she'd earned as a stripper throughout the province was gone, as was the killer.
"Back then gays were killed with impunity," says community spokesman Michael Hendricks. "Until 1992 being a homosexual was a reason to get murdered." In the 1990s, when a series of murders in the gay community started occurring, Hendricks and others aggressively demanded information from the homicide squad. "We told them that the victims often didn't have much in the way of family. It took a year, but we finally persuaded them to show us photos of the crime scenes and such."
Although the homicide squad discourages publicity, Hendricks believes it was precisely that which led to a greater awareness in the community concerning safety issues. Of the 14 local gay murders from the early '90s, only two are officially thought to be the work of a still-unapprehended serial killer. But another chilling rumour in police circles has it that the homicide squad secretly believes the number to be much higher, a fact they have sought to mute in an effort to avert further panic.
King of the rumour mill
It was one of those rare ho-hum moments in Frank Shoofey's day. Whether organizing a criminal defence for one of his many high-powered clients, plotting his entry into the provincial Liberals or fielding one of the many calls he loved to answer, the 44-year-old lawyer had few quiet minutes. As he entered the hallway outside his office at 1030 Cherrier, on October 15, 1985, to comb his elaborate mop of a hairpiece, a gunman shot him in the head four times at close range. The much-loved lawyer's body fell to the ground in the exact spot where one of his clients had been killed six years earlier.Within hours, the city was buzzing with rumours about the murder; citizen sleuths knew that Shoofey had received death threats and that the killer needed a key to enter his building. They spoke of his newly dissolved contract with the boxing Hiltons, an unusual deal in which the lawyer received half of their earnings, as a hedge against their father blowing the money on booze. Shoofey bragged of never keeping a cent of the Hilton cash, spending it instead on a huge Rigaud home for the clan. And you didn't need a Whisper 2000 to hear the talk about the American boxing promoter Don King, who had recently incurred Shoofey's wrath by allegedly getting Dave Hilton Senior drunk before getting him to sign an exclusive contract for his boxing sons.
Yet in spite of the cold-blooded killing, Shoofey's son Dominique, who was 13 at the time, didn't hesitate to enter to follow his father into criminal defence law. "I don't think what happened to my father was really related to his practice, it was more an exception to what happens."
But one veteran crime reporter says that the homicide squad are barking up an entirely different tree. "They got an idea on who shot him, he's in and out of jail, they've tried everything to get him to make a mistake and get him to court. They put a guy in his cell and everything, it didn't work. It's banal, it's punk stuff, it's just a client who wasn't happy with Frank. Maybe he needed money off him for a fix or something."
And if, God forbid, you were murdered? In death you'd become the compliant client of a team which sits behind closed horizontal blinds in the glass and steel offices above the Place Versailles cinema, far in the city's east end.
Unlike other homicide squads, most notably that of Baltimore--which welcomed a writer to observe their day-to-day operations for a year "with no adverse reaction" in the name of "our partnership with the community," as a detective from that city put it--your murder detectives work in secrecy and darkness. And if, in the icy grave of a murder victim, you are one of the one-in-three homicide victims whose killer walks free, try to summon some blind hope that your case won't be mishandled. And be patient, you'll be dead long enough.
ReplyDeleteFrank Shoofey has Gene Simmons hair.