Luc Leclerc testifies about vacationing with Rizzuto, taking bribes, overseeing city work.
Retired engineer returns $90,000: ‘It’s a poison gift’
For the second time in as many weeks, the Charbonneau Commission inquiry has heard a former municipal engineer calmly admit to accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash bribes and lavish gifts from construction entrepreneurs in exchange for favours that allowed those entrepreneurs to cheat the system for awarding public works contracts.
Luc Leclerc, who until two years ago worked as an engineer for the city of Montreal, took the stand on Wednesday afternoon and testified that between 1995 and 2009, he pocketed about $500,000 in kickbacks. His cut, Leclerc told the commissioners, usually represented about 25 per cent of the total value of false “extras” added to contracts; extras that he would help inflate and then get approved by his superiors.
Leclerc said that as of about three weeks ago, he had about $90,000 of the cash left. He has since given that money back to the city of Montreal, he said. A photograph of a plastic bag filled with cash was entered into evidence.
“If someone gives you $500,000, you try and spend it,” Leclerc said of the money. “It’s not easy. It’s a poison gift.”
The engineer did, however, find some use for his ballooning bank account. In addition to spending $50,000 on improvements to his own home, he said he gave $75,000 to one of his children for two different home renovation projects, and invested an additional $75,000 in another child’s restaurant.
The kickbacks came in envelopes and always in cash, he said, with amounts varying between $500 and $10,000. In one exceptional case, he said, he accepted a “$20,000 to $25,000” kickback from Dominico Aloisio of Construction ATA Inc.
The money, however, was just the tip of the iceberg. Several construction entrepreneurs (heads of Construction ATA, F. Catania & Associates and Mivela Construction, among others) offered to help build his home for free, Leclerc testified, and over the years, he would be handed bottles of wine, hockey tickets, golf vacations, gift certificates to high-end restaurants and even, bizarrely, a ham.
“There were lots of different kinds of gift,” he said. “Some of (the entrepreneurs) had quite the imagination.”
Having the various bosses offer to build his home partly on their own dime was a particularly big perk, he said, and it gave him “a sense of power.” Asked how he justified accepting the gifts and cash rewards, Leclerc said that over the many years he worked for the city of Montreal, public sector salaries stalled while private sector paycheques soared.
“You tell yourself that you’re not being recognized for your full worth,” he said, adding that he wasn’t trying to “make excuses” for what he did.
The former public servant’s testimony in many ways mirrored that of his former colleague and close friend, Gilles Surprenant, who was on the stand for several days last week. For his part, Surprenant admitted that he pocketed around $730,000 in illegal kickbacks, and said Leclerc probably knew he was getting paid off, but that the two men did not discuss the matter openly.
Leclerc explained on Wednesday that his own role in the collusion schemes was not to inflate the estimates on contracts before they went to tender (as Surprenant said he did), but to embellish the “extras” on a contract, and get those extras approved once the work was completed. There were always extras that were completely legitimate, Leclerc told commission lawyer Sonia Lebel, but then there were those that could be subtly manipulated; a socalled “grey area.”
Charge for an extra truck here or an extra 10 hours of labour there, he said, and pretty soon the bill to the city was much higher than it should have been, with the construction boss taking home the additional profits.
One thing he would never do, Leclerc said, was invent extras that were unrealistic or bizarre.
“It wouldn’t just ring alarms,” Leclerc said. “The invoices would have to be signed by (Leclerc’s superiors at the city Gilles Vézina and Robert Marcil). It would have been treating them like imbeciles to pass them something like that. I would have lost all credibility.”
Leclerc also confirmed on Wednesday that in 1997, he took a weeklong golf holiday in the Caribbean with Surprenant, Conex construction boss Tony Conte and Montreal Mafia boss Vito Rizzuto. Leclerc described Rizzuto, who was recently released from a U.S. prison, as a charming and humorous “gentleman.” It would be only one of many holidays that Leclerc would take with Conte and other construction entrepreneurs.
Asked if he believed that the corruption that took root in Montreal was also occurring elsewhere, Leclerc answered without hesitation.
“I think this goes much further than the city of Montreal.”