From Vanity Fair, January 18, 2023:
A Fargo-esque tale of hapless hit men, Mob moles, and two naive pawns who were lured into their web.
On the morning they were arrested for allegedly burning bodies as part of a series of Mafia murders, Marie-Josée Viau and Guy Dion had already finished breakfast and packed their daughter off to elementary school. A hand-drawn Mother’s Day card hung on the fridge next to family photographs. Viau, 44, didn’t have to go to her shift at the roadside poutine restaurant until later that day, so she tried baking something new: blueberry phyllo puffs. The pastries were still on the stove top when police arrived at 9:56 a.m. on October 16, 2019.
“We’re normal people,” Viau swore to the arresting officers, through her tears, after she and her husband were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder. “We didn’t kill anyone.”
Undercover recordings made by investigators told a different tale. The interception division of the Sûreté du Québec had secretly taped Viau and Dion speaking about how they’d disposed of bodies for members of the Calabrian Mafia. By their own admission, they’d incinerated corpses in their yard in a bonfire. “We did what we could with what we had,” she explained, when police questioned her about the cremations.
“But setting the bodies on fire?” a sergeant detective asked. “Was that [idea] from Guy, as he’s a fireman?”
Guy Dion was the tall, burly, 48-year-old fire chief of their small Quebec township. To make ends meet, he moonlighted for a paving company and refereed minor-league hockey games. His wife, Viau, worked as a cook and cashier at a fast-food chain called La Belle Province. Yearning for a way out of that dead-end job, she’d been taking online courses in business administration and freelancing as a building inspector. She had a hard face with sharp eyes and hair as long, dark, and wild as Dion’s was short, thin, and graying. The two lived in the countryside beyond Montreal, in the farming community of Saint-Jude (population 1,326), a village named after the patron saint of desperate cases. That’s precisely the higher power the couple needed when a dozen law enforcement vehicles converged on the property.
Before being taken away in an unmarked cruiser, a visibly shaking Viau requested a moment to switch outfits. She also wanted to know what would happen to their daughter when she got home from school. Officers informed her that childcare procedures were already under way. Outside the front window, the fall foliage had started changing color. The couple’s lawn, shrouded in dead leaves, was cordoned off with police tape. One maple tree stood out from the others, so red and orange that it seemed covered in flames.
The mayor of Saint-Jude told reporters that he fell off his chair when he learned that two seemingly upstanding locals had been accused of such nightmarish undertakings: “It shows you never really know people you think you know.”
Like real-life characters from Fargo, Viau and Dion had gotten all mixed up with killers for hire. What prosecutors wanted to know was: Were the husband and wife merely rubes who’d been duped into participating in the gruesome homicides—or had they cooperated knowingly and willingly? Seeking teeth, bone fragments, and other traces of the victims, investigators started combing through their yard, their garage, and the quiet stream across the street.
THE MURDERCYCLE
Three and a half years earlier, on May 27, 2016, Rocco “Sauce” Sollecito got into his BMW for the very last time. The 67-year-old director of operations for Montreal’s Sicilian Mafia drove through the parking lot of his luxury condo complex, wads of hundreds bulging in his pockets. The Chopard on his wrist caught the morning light, showing exactly 8:30.
From across the street, a lookout on a motorcycle tracked the BMW. His helmet’s dark visor shielded his face. When he saw consigliere Sollecito steering onto the boulevard, the man on the speed bike raced ahead, cuing other members of his crew to get into position. A black Acura then sliced in front of the BMW. At the next stop sign, the Acura braked to a full halt, blocking the way for several seconds, long enough for Sollecito to notice a man with a motorcycle helmet at the bus shelter to his right. The man pulled out a 9-mm Taurus handgun.
Sollecito didn’t try to escape. He didn’t ram the Acura. He simply watched as the man approached and began firing through the passenger side window. “I emptied the loading clip into him,” the gunman later recounted. “He ate it all.” One of the nine hollow-point bullets ripped Sollecito’s heart apart, killing him.
The Acura veered off while the assassin fled around the corner to join the motorcyclist who’d sped by a minute earlier. He jumped onto the bike’s back seat, and the two men headed into the crisp spring air. By the time police and paramedics arrived, the culprits had evaporated.
“It’s not complicated. It’s a Mob hit,” a police spokesperson said in the aftermath. It was clinical: no DNA, no usable clues. But Sollecito was a highly symbolic casualty in the war between Montreal’s Sicilian mafiosi and their Calabrian counterparts. The Calis, as the city’s Calabrese crooks called themselves, were suddenly poised to seize control of a vast underworld operation connected to New York, Latin America, and the old country.
Whoever killed Sollecito would be sure to gain the respect of ‘Ndrangheta: “The most extensive and powerful criminal organization in the world,” as Interpol calls the group. ‘Ndrangheta, based in Calabria, operates in dozens of countries and generates $50 billion per year. Its chief stronghold outside Italy is Canada, where Ontario’s Camera di Controllo makes decisions affecting an entire global network. Montreal, however, had long eluded ‘Ndrangheta’s grasp.....
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Big money.
