‘Paintball guns’ with silencers linked to Mob hits, GTA crimes
MONTREAL— A Montreal factory owner has been found guilty of illegally manufacturing pistol-sized submachine-guns — some of which were used by Toronto criminals — after claiming he thought he was making paintball guns.
“It had to look as real as possible,” Jean-Pierre Huot, 61, owner of Perfection Metal Inc., testified in court.
Huot was found guilty by a jury on Saturday of six counts of making prohibited firearms and silencers. He was acquitted of two charges of possession of an unloaded weapon with easily accessible ammunition.
Between 2014 and 2018, Montreal police connected more than 30 of the illegal TEC-9style guns produced by Perfection Metal to major investigations. Eighteen of the guns were found at crime scenes throughout Quebec and Ontario, including four in the GTA, a Crown attorney told the Montreal Superior Court.
A La Presse investigation found that some of those crimes included murders and attempted murders involving outlaw bikers and mobsters.
One of the semi-automatic as- sault guns was used in the Nov. 13, 2016, robbery of a brothel on Bonis Ave. in Scarborough, near Sheppard Ave. E. and Birchmont Rd., according to Quebec court documents.
Huot argued at his trial that he intended only to make imitation guns for paintball. If lethal weapons were made by his company rather than paintball guns, it was done without his knowledge, Huot testified.
He told court, “I have too big fingers and I do not have the dexterity to assemble a TEC-9,” and added, “For me, paintball, there is nothing criminal.”
Court heard the handguns, which sold for $800 each, were capable of firing a blast of 32 bullets and were equipped with silencers.
Awitness, who was not identified in court, testified Huot told him the guns required silencers “because the customers were playing paintball at night and did not want the guns to make too much flash and noise.”
No one was injured in the Scarborough brothel robbery, in which seven people were ordered to the floor at gunpoint, court documents state. The heist netted two robbers, two cellphones, $650 in cash and a jacket worth $2,400.
The La Presse investigation found one of the guns was used in the unsolved murder of a mobster who was a bitter enemy of the late Montreal Mob boss Vito Rizzuto. Rizzuto died in December 2013, reportedly of cancer — although questions remain about his death.
In another trial, court heard one of the guns was used in the unsolved murder of Montreal gang leader Ducarme Joseph, a foe of Rizzuto, on Aug. 1, 2014.
Joseph was shot several times in the head in northeast Montreal. Two of the knock-off TEC-9-type guns were found at the murder scene, along with three dozen cartridges.
One of the guns found by police was used in the murder of convicted sex offender Mario Bourgeois, who was shot several times outside a halfway house in the east Montreal neighbourhood of Rosemont on Feb. 11, 2015, according to the La Presse investigation.