One month left to make a case
Defence motions caused delays, but prosecution lacks smoking gun
When the Contrecoeur fraud trial, which has occupied room 3.05 of the Montreal courthouse for the past 15 months, resumes on Tuesday, it will have just one month left on its “lease” to produce the spectacle that was promised when Quebec’s anti-corruption squad made the stunning arrests in the case in 2012.
It was five years ago last week that the Unité permanente anticorruption, or UPAC, rounded up Frank Zampino, a one-time seniorranking politician at Montreal city hall, former municipal contractor Paolo Catania and seven others in what the squad alleged was a bidrigging scheme dating back to the mid-2000s that defrauded taxpayers of $1 million. A representative of UPAC at the time told the media that Zampino was the “ringleader” of the alleged scheme involving the 2007 sale of city-owned land known as Faubourg Contrecoeur to Catania’s construction firm for a fraction of its municipal evaluation.
But five years on, the trial, which is scheduled to wrap up on June 23, has yet to offer what Montrealers who are used to watching political thrillers on a movie screen might consider “damning evidence.” There are no whistleblowers, turncoats or double agents testifying for the Crown, no tearful breakdowns to admit guilt, no bank statements suggesting a trail of bribe money, no compromising secret tape recordings and no single photo or document that screams “conspiracy.”
To be fair, the Contrecoeur case, which is being tried by judge alone, spent its first 13 months dealing with 26 motions, most of them filed by the defence to have the Crown disclose more evidence and, on two occasions, in an unsuccessful attempt to have the charges against any of the accused stayed.
It was only in March of this year that the trial finally heard the Crown’s opening statement and began hearing from witnesses.
In the meantime, former interim Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum, arrested in 2013 on corruption charges in connection with unrelated matters, has been tried, convicted and sentenced.
In that case, the Crown paraded an ally-turned-witness — Applebaum’s former chief of staff — who described meetings to negotiate bribes with developers and who collected the boodle in DVD cases which, he claimed in his testimony, he split with Applebaum.
By contrast, Montreal’s only other political corruption trial is playing out in courtroom 3.05 in slow-motion fashion without the convenience of an informant who can testify about the plot from beginning to end.
The Crown in the Contrecoeur case is presenting a series of dots that it’s trying to show in forensic manner are connected — such as a questionable study that jacked up the cost to decontaminate the land at the city’s expense, visits to city hall by the bagman of the party in power at the time and the fact that associates of the team running city hall at the time sat on the selection committee that chose the winning bidder for the Contrecoeur land and helped secretly orchestrate the privatization of the municipal agency that sold the land.
It will be up to Quebec Court Judge Yvan Poulin, who is presiding over the trial, to agree if the dots are connected, and in the way the Crown suggests.
The competing view, from the defence lawyers, is that the Contrecoeur land sale was a legitimate business deal and that none of the witnesses can place any of the accused in a room when there was a question of skulduggery.
Of the nine people arrested in connection with the Contrecoeur land deal, one died before the case reached trial. Martial Fillion was director of the Société d’habitation et de développement de Montréal (SHDM), the city real-estate agency that sold the Contrecoeur land.
And it is his name that most of the witnesses have spoken in connection with irregularities.
Another accused — Daniel Gauthier, an urban planner who was brought in by Fillion to oversee the call for bids for the land — pleaded guilty to fraud at the start of the trial in February 2016.
However, Gauthier is not on the Crown witness list, and the reason seems obvious.
At his sentencing hearing, Gauthier defended the other accused.
“It’s not Catania’s fault,” Gauthier told the judge, who sentenced him to house arrest, “but (the firm) had information the others didn’t have.”
In fact, Gauthier blamed all on Fillion, who is no longer around to defend himself. Fillion inexplicably changed his mind and decided to hold a call for bids to sell the Contrecoeur land for development after initially deciding it would be a one-to-one negotiated sale, Gauthier said.
As a result, the Catania firm, which had been party to discussions about project costs with Gauthier and engineering and architecture firms hired by the SHDM, had more information than other bidders when the process switched to a call for bids, Gauthier said.
The Crown is about halfway through its 50-plus witness list. And so far, its choices seem baffling.
For example, former Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay, who made Zampino his right-hand man by appointing him chairman of the powerful city executive committee after their election in 2001, was questioned for barely an hour by the Crown, which didn’t even ask him about the conspiracy involving the Contrecoeur land. Tremblay is not charged.
Tremblay resigned from office in 2012, claiming to be the victim of collaborators who betrayed him and pleading for an opportunity to testify and tell all.
At the Contrecoeur trial, however, he told little.
Testifying in early May, Tremblay told the court that Zampino was an “exceptional” right-hand man who helped oversee his election promise to build thousands of units of housing on the island.
Another witness, former engineering firm executive Michel Lalonde, testified in April that Zampino, former executive committee member Cosmo Maciocia and Bernard Trépanier, the exchief fundraiser for Tremblay and Zampino’s party, Union Montreal, issued a message at a political fundraiser in 2005 that Catania’s construction firm was their choice to win an eventual call for proposals for the Contrecoeur land deal.
The message was reiterated at a lunch with Zampino, Maciocia and others in February 2006, Lalonde added.
But Lalonde, who was a star witness at the Charbonneau commission in 2013 for detailing a system of collusion and political kickbacks involving Montreal municipal contracts in the mid-2000s, admitted under cross-examination that Zampino didn’t attend meetings where collusion and bribery were discussed.
Meanwhile, three other witnesses, who along with Gauthier made up the four-person selection committee that chose Construction Frank Catania et Associés Inc. as the winning firm for the Contrecoeur land deal, testified separately in May that there was no pressure on them to select the firm.
There was “absolutely no pressure” on the members of the selection committee to choose the Catania firm, Jean-François Bertrand, who was associate executive director of SHDM under Fillion, swore in court. “I can tell you I would have withdrawn.”
Marc Deschamps, Union Montreal’s treasurer, and Mario PaulHus, a legal adviser to Union Montreal, gave the same answer.
The Crown has questioned several witnesses at length about the now-deceased Fillion, including former SHDM clerk Jacqueline Leduc, who was the last to take the stand before the trial took a break last week. He flouted rules, bypassed the SHDM’s board of directors and approved a generous loan to the Catania firm, they testified.
How does that dot figure in the overall plot?
Some of the witnesses have sworn that Fillion claimed to them that he would seek Zampino’s help whenever problems arose in the Contrecoeur project, albeit no witness has said they saw or heard Zampino doing so or agreeing to do so.
Former city councillor Benoit Labonté testified by video from Philippines that Trépanier, who is being tried separately in the Contrecoeur case, used to make weekly visits to the city hall office of Sammy Forcillo, who was a member of the executive committee, and walk out with confidential civil service reports under his arm.
But Forcillo, like Maciocia, is not accused. The two are also not on the witness list, something the Crown hasn’t explained.
But there is still a month of evidence to come.
One of the next witnesses expected is former city manager Claude Léger, who testified at the Charbonneau commission in 2013 that he had the impression that Zampino pressured bureaucrats to speed up the sale of the Contrecoeur land.
Moreover, prosecutor Pascal Lescarbeau has not yet addressed all 13 themes he said in his opening statement in March would be covered during the trial. Two themes that apparently remain to be addressed are the destruction of documents and a trip that Zampino, Catania and Trépanier took to Miami in March 2008 and that was paid by Construction Frank Catania et Associés during the time that the firm was working on the Faubourg Contrecoeur project.
They will be more dots in a trial that has dribbled dots.
If anything, the slow pace and un-Hollywood tediousness of the Contrecoeur case may speak to how complicated it is to prosecute corruption in a province where the Charbonneau commission has already shown that such conspiracies are perpetuated by a vast number of stakeholders over many years, with rarely a whistleblower to unmask them.
Prosecutor Pascal Lescarbeau has not yet addressed all 13 themes he said in his opening statement in March would be covered during the trial.