Five men receive sentences for Mob-related murders
Five men who pleaded guilty last week to conspiracy charges involving the murders of two of the Rizzuto organization’s rivals received sentences on Wednesday that left them with prison terms ranging between four and 11 years.
Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer agreed with the sentence recommendations presented to him last week after the five — Édrick Antoine, 29, Olivier Gay, 34, Stanley Minuty, 33, Kevin Tate, 33, and Léonard Faustin Étienne, 37 — admitted they were part of a conspiracy to kill Gaetan Gosselin, 70, who was shot in front of his home in St-Léonard on Jan. 22, 2013.
Gay also admitted he was part of a conspiracy to kill Vincenzo Scuderi, 49, who was shot nine days later.
Gosselin was a longtime friend of Raynald Desjardins, a former close associate of Vito Rizzuto who apparently was unwilling to cede the power he had established within the Montreal Mafia while Rizzuto was incarcerated in the U.S. Gosselin was also a business partner of Desjardins. At the time, police sources speculated Gosselin was killed to send a message to Desjardins while he was detained and awaiting a possible trial for the murder of Mafioso Salvatore Montagna.
Project Clemenza, an RCMP investigation into drug trafficking, revealed that Scuderi took orders from Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito while De Vito was behind bars for cocaine smuggling. De Vito despised the Rizzuto organization and died of cyanide poisoning inside a federal penitentiary months after Scuderi was killed.
Vito Rizzuto was the head of the Montreal Mafia for decades before he died of natural causes in December 2013.
The five men who pleaded guilty last week are alleged to have ties to a Montreal street gang called Unit 44. Gay was left with the longest sentence of the five because of his role in both murders. His overall sentence is 18 years, but with time served he was left with a prison term of 11 years and 10 months.
Minuty was sentenced to an overall sentence of 16 years because there was evidence he was the person who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Gosselin. Minuty was left with a prison term of nearly 10 years to serve starting on Wednesday.
Faustin received an overall sentence of nine years because the evidence related to him was the weakest in the Gosselin murder.
Tate’s sentence — an overall prison term of 15 years — takes into account that he has already been convicted in connection with a homicide in the past. He killed a friend of his by accident during a fight in a bar in Laval more than a decade ago. He was convicted of manslaughter in that case. Antoine was also sentenced to an overall prison term of 15 years, and was left with a sentence of nearly nine years.