NDG coincidence: undercover cop slams car into man who sued the city

    Montreal once had a bureaucrat whose pension was so hefty that they might have sent a cop out to run him over so they would no longer have to pay him.
   Jules Crepeau ran Montreal's City Services Department from 1921 to 1930.
   He came under fire after the Laurier Palace fire, which killed 78 children, as his tireless granddaughter Dorothy Nixon explains on her excellent website.
   Crepeau wasn't to blame for the blaze, nor was he to blame for a scandal within his department by underlings.
  But Mayor Camilien Houde had enough of the guy and pensioned him off.
  Crepeau struck a pension deal that was quickly decried as too lavish, as he remained the highest-paid person in the entire city administration, even though he had retired.
   The pension became even more onerous as the effect of the Great Depression drained city finances.
   The city tried to axe the pension but Crepeau won a 1931 court judgment confirming his pension.
   But on March 22, 1937 the province passed the wide-ranging Montreal Bill which canceled his city pension.
   Crepeau might have been musing about fighting in court once again to keep his pension, we're not sure.
   Regardless, there was another surprise awaiting him.
     About six weeks after the bill was passed Montreal undercover cop L.P. Coulson slammed into the 63-year-old Crepeau who was walking at the corner of Royal and NDG Avenue. breaking his leg.
   Crepeau was hurt badly enough to require hospitalization.
   Crepeau, who lived on Harvard, about seven minutes walk away from where he was struck, died the next summer, and the city's pension headache was solved.