MONTREAL — A panicking woman spins in circles and screams for her children. Well-dressed party-goers in the posh hotel lobby are frantic. A uniformed officer is on his knees, trying to pump life back into a dying Mafioso.
These scenes were captured in shaky camera footage, later published by the Journal de Montreal, on the night of May 4 after mobster Salvatore Scoppa was shot dead in a suburban Montreal hotel. Five months later, his brother, Andrea “Andrew” Scoppa, described in news reports as an influential Mafia figure, was shot in the head in a west-end Montreal parking lot — one of 17 organized crime-linked murders in the greater Montreal area this year.
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Organized crime expert, Andre Cedilot, a retired journalist and co-author of the book “Mafia Inc.” about the Rizzuto crime family, said the recent rash of killings is a sign of the power vacuum in the city’s underworld since the death of Vito Rizzuto in 2013.
Rizzuto was able to keep the peace, settle disputes and control warring clans, Cedilot said, but since his death, at least three or four attempts to take over Italian-linked crime circles have failed. And the Hells Angels have taken advantage of the chaos and now control much of the city’s drug distribution network, he said.
The biker gang’s resurgence has not been without a cost. On Oct. 17, a Hells-linked drug trafficker, Gaetan Sevigny, was shot dead outside his home north of Montreal. Another reported Hells Angels associate, Roger Bishop, was murdered Oct. 30 outside a gym just south of Montreal.
