Gérald Tremblay

When you were in the city of Montreal, the mountain is still called Mount Royal, which was confusing to me when I first got.

Oh, okay.

That's kind of a baller move to like make the entire rest of the city the kind of cuck chair of like Frog of

that.

That's pretty good.

I was in Montreal once, and yeah, we went like we hiked Mount Royal.

And I was like, why is it called that?

And then I, I mean, it hit me like a ton of bricks.

That's the Battle of the Plains of Abraham is why, because

General Wolf didn't die for it to be called Montreal.

Yeah.

The Battle of the Plains of Abraham sounds like some real Bible.

I should say that to like a shop owner in Quebec in order to get kicked out of any business.

And I will.

I've been banned from like 15 ski dude dealerships.

Ski dude?

Ski dude?

Skitless and

that's the hero of skiing.

That's the little mascot of skiing.

I'm very anti-oh, like one of the hosts misspoke because I do be having a speech impediment.

But

I'm not, but in this, I'm sensitive to the Holocaust.

But

in this instance, you have said the word ski dude.

Ski dude?

I mean, yeah, no, the International Federation of Skiing, whatever it's called, based in Paris, Fédération Internationale du Ski or whatever.

Well, no, that's the thing.

This would be their like branding thing to entice more people into skiing in between like banning all trans people from competing would be like we have invented the ski dude.

He represents the values of skiing,

comradeship being having a good time in Zaprotes of skiing.

Sick moves, killers, kick flips, and intuition.

I think that's more like snowboarding.

Like, maybe I'm out of touch.

I picture skiing as being more genteel and snowboarding being the more like bro-coded thing.

That's correct.

I mean, skiing, trans women, of course, we are banned from skiing internationally because my penis may hit the moguls, which are, as we all know, and women's skiing are much higher to account for the women's vaginas.

I've only ever skied one time.

And it was, I was

not known I was trans yet.

So I was just hitting all the moguls and people were fine with it.

They were like, wow,

what a masculine, virile young man that is.

Skiing.

A penis-shaped hole in the top of every mogul.

Like he's supposed to be.

And when there were three tracks behind you, that's where I came down the piece.

Wait, is this like one of those Christian parables?

It's like

when there were three tracks behind you, that's when Jesus was there dick printing the women's focus.

Two skis and then one trench.

Yeah.

Like a foot and a half deep.

I was getting lunch with my friend today, and we were talking about my mission on air.

And he's a listener to the show,

yeah.

And

I mentioned to him very cat, I was like, What you hear on the show is maybe 30% of what me and November are working with.

Tip of the iceberg, a lot like gender in that,

like so much penis hitting the top of a mogul, you only see

hitting the iceberg with the tip of my penis.

Ow!

Youch!

They cut that scene from Titanic.

It was going to be my big brain.

My big brain.

Here's the question.

Could God himself make an iceberg so hard that he himself, with his capital H massive dong, could not punch a hole in it?

Because

I was like pissing off the front of the ship, like where Jack and Kate Winslet were

like yeah

we're doing the thing later on that evening i was pissing off of the front of it and then i kind of like you know my character functionally like is part of the part of the titanic that like rams the iceberg but like dick first and you just hear me going like ow

making a new wilhelm screen that's just you going yes

i'm sorry i i have to say i prefer the idea that you're waiting behind jack and diane tapping your foot like come on hurry up there.

Excuse me.

It's not Diane.

That's the job melon camp.

Yeah, Jack and Diane.

Yeah.

Jack and Diane.

Fuck, the mayor's song is so good.

I'm really happy with it.

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to another episode of No Gods, No Mayors.

It is me, the mayor of this episode, the ski dude, and I'm here

joined by my co-mayors.

Or sorry, my

Metro de Partier.

We have to do this episode bilingually, I'm afraid.

So every sentence...

Is this more CanCon shit for fuck's sake?

Yes.

Well, I thought we'd done too many Anglo-Mayors.

I'd like to say Bonjour hello to all listeners.

Dudes, listennaires.

I don't know.

I don't speak any French.

Des Écutaire, bonjour.

Des écutaire et des écutares.

Yeah, November, every time I talk, can you repeat what I say in French, please?

No, my French is not that good.

Oh my god, you only, November, you speak enough French to be mayor of Montreal.

No vombre, chac foi je pal, uh pouve vous uh reputé uh

oh fuck it.

No, it's completely it's gone wrong.

Can I tell you what's so funny?

Michael Applebaum speaks that much French.

Why did I vouvoyer myself as you as well?

Yeah, I was doing I was doing that on the Titanic and then yeah, the only French I know is from a teacher child how to speak French VHS series that was on TV a lot when I was a child called Muzzy.

And in it, a little girl points to herself and says, j'e sui la chum fie.

And that's the only French I know.

And then I made it come true.

Yep.

I mean, useful, still true.

Magic, and science.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

And before I go on, I wanted to say, before ruining the voyeur on herself, we're going to move on.

We're going to talk about...

He didn't even introduce either of us, by the way.

If this is someone's first listen, they're going to have an interesting time.

Okay, so we have actually so much mayor to get through because Montreal is one of the cities of all time okay and i'm maddie and that's some of the mayors of all time this is maddie in november i'm on the

deputy mayor mayor

this is gonna be a weird one huh

and we're talking this is the first oh look we heard you about the two-parters this is not a two-parter we will be covering the whole mayoralty of gerald tromblé and then in the bonus we will be talking about his successor after he resigned in disgrace, Michael Applebaum.

Two distinct episodes.

It's a sequel.

Yes, that's right.

They're like Titanic and Titanic 2.

So I say this is like a Lido and a Paul.

Gerald Tromblay is the Lido.

The old lady from Titanic's gold.

Titanic 2.

That's right.

Titoonic.

I want to begin our story in the middle.

Titanic, Titanic 2, Mithrigan.

That's right.

It was called a Toonie in Canada.

I want to tell our story beginning in the middle.

With the accession of Michael Applebaum to the position of mayor after the resignation of Gerald Tromblay.

This is from a Globe and Mail article from 2012.

Globe and Mail is like the main newspaper of Canada.

Michael Applebaum has a corner office at Montreal City Hall.

The view from his grand mayor's chambers take in the stately squares and greystones of old Montreal.

Now he is earning his particular place in the city.

This month, Mr.

Applebaum became the first Anglophone in a century, the first Jewish person ever, and the only unicyclist hypnotist enshriner to become the mayor of Montreal.

All at the same time?

It's very hard to make the watch move smoothly on the unicycle.

I'll say.

Yeah.

Sissy hypno-unicyclist.

The thing is, right, this is the kind of thing that guidance counselors tell you that you need to have in addition to perfect grades to get into a good university.

You need to have a compelling story with like at least three

like, you know, interesting extracurriculars.

And I tell you what, the guy did it and one of them has to be a sort of charitable organization that is still for some reason insanely orientalist for reasons i cannot place why they kept it that way the the the last surviving fez wearing organization you know since the tanzamat is is the shriners yeah yeah michael applebaum has gone on record saying he owns and wears a fez like to work like routinely does he drive the little car

yeah he drives the little car does he drive the little car to work well we're gonna find out comparing this to like rob ford struggling and failing to get out of the largest automobile commercially available in canada we go we now go across the country to montreal where the mayor's tiny pedal car is mo is moving very slowly up mount royal i was gonna say it's rob ford uh like on something i'm calling alcohol 2 doing doughnuts in a Mustang.

And then in Montreal, it's this guy in a Shriner car, like bumbling down the cobblestones of Montreal.

Fucking little

there's no suspension on those things.

It's crazy.

Both of them caused exactly the same number of traffic fatalities as well.

All the other little cars in Montreal are spinning off the road.

Mr.

Applebaum.

Mr.

Applebaum narrowly won a vote by his peers to take over from Gerald Tromblay, who stepped down under pressure.

And the new mayor faces giants.

Oh, Tromblay is so French-Canadian.

I have an aunt called Tromblay.

no relation.

Uh-huh.

Well, probably some relation, right?

Because of the French-Canadian part.

Yeah.

And the new mayor faces a giant task: restoring trust in a city shaken by drip-fed revelations of corruption until general elections are held in November 2013.

When I decided to run for mayor of Montreal, he said, I felt that it was necessary.

We've got to put the city back in a proper direction.

Mr.

Applebaum comes with business experience.

Raising hand here.

My understanding of Montreal, correct me if I'm wrong, is that it is somehow, despite its position as like French-Canadian and a bit hipster-y,

also by far the most mobbed-up city in Canada, somehow.

Oh, by, it's, it's like one of the most mobbed up cities in North America.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Providence shaking.

At some point, they went, you know, who couldn't be in the mob is a guy who owns a Fez.

Because the mob guys would never let you hear the end of the Fez shit.

You would be named Johnny Fez.

Yeah, he's got a fedora that's too tall to accommodate the Fez under it.

Unicycling into the basement of the Italian social club.

Look into my eyes.

You are feeling very sleepy.

He's trying to make a martini on the unicycle rocking back and forth.

Hey, look, it's Mikey, the one-wheeled Moroccan.

What do you got for me, Mikey?

The Soprano's edit where nothing changes except Tony's escalators replaced for the unicycle.

Unicycling back home to find AJ killing himself in the fall.

AJ's wearing a little fez, yeah.

He suffers a drive-by while getting onto his unicycle that shoots off one of the pedals.

Hits him in the orange juice.

Crashing through the windshield of my unicycle.

Christopher crashes a unicycle towards the end, and Tony goes and Mercy kills him.

So, okay.

Mr.

Applebaum comes with business experience, honed through jobs ranging from shoe salesman to jeans store owner to property manager.

Really got the whole lower body, you know, just locked up, locked down,

yeah, to property manager and real estate agent.

That's what they mean by vertical integration: you start at the shoes, then you go pants, then you go belt

during his private sector days.

He adhered to a rule, and we need to remember this for the rest of this episode and the next episode.

I won't remember a thing.

Okay, that okay, this is simple to remember: that a dollar found on the floor should be returned to the company.

A credo that Montrealers, cheated out of millions of their taxes, should find reassuring.

Also, reassuring to those who say that the mayor cannot speak French, is that he is studying French.

I say to my haters, accuse me of not knowing French.

Jeffron,

la langue français.

I say to Montrealers, Je sui la chum fi.

Je pron franca,

a la livre.

Every day, Mr.

Applewam says he's reviewing the French conjugation Bible, which he keeps in an adjoining office.

He's working on the verb être to be.

To be fair, those conjugations are a bitch.

Yeah, from here, he has a year to show he can deliver on his cleanup promises to a city wary of scandal.

So let's talk about scandal and Quebecois corruption in particular.

Yeah, this is like the end of the like sort of like pain and gain type movie, right?

We've seen this is the end of the fall as some fez wearing guy has to come and clean up your mess.

And day one, they're like, so how did we get into this situation in the first place?

Flashback.

Record scratch.

How did we get here?

Well, so we're record scratching back to most of the 20th century, where basically what you have to understand.

That's a long record Scratch.

Yeah, it's a big record.

What you have to understand is that the New York Italian mafia has always had like an unofficial sixth family, the Resutos who are based in Montreal.

That's right.

Who are seen either as an individual family or an offshoot of the Bonanos, but like they were a full mob family.

The other thing to know is that Quebec is home to a number of very, very powerful and significant construction companies and engineering firms, some of which have like international reach and have been involved in international scandals because like SNC Lavalin behaves like a mafia, even though it's a construction company that like does work around the world.

Why the hell did the mob end up in Montreal anyway, other than just it's a port?

Well, it's right beside New York.

It's really close to New York.

Okay.

It's like right there.

Send him to the Canadian annex.

Yeah.

Fit him for a pair of maple shoes.

So anyway, corruption,

one of the reasons you'd have an initial family there is it's good to have another part of your organization across a border.

It makes enforcement more difficult, blah, blah, blah.

Right.

I saw Twin Peaks.

Yeah.

So the basic shape also of corruption in Quebec of this type, there's so many types, right?

There's federal, provincial, local.

There's big companies, small companies.

Like, Quebec is astonishingly corrupt.

Like, everything about it, every, every layer of government, like scandals related to like Quebec shenanigans have brought down two separate national governments.

I remember this from the documentary, Bad Cop, Bon Cop.

That's right.

The best movie ever made.

Future bonus episode, quite possibly.

It was so funny when that was released in Canada.

Canadians were legitimately so excited that we had a movie.

that superficially looked like a Hollywood movie if you just glanced at it.

It's really funny to be like, we're bringing Canada to the silver screen and now everything is filmed in Toronto.

Oh, well, it's it's so it's Montreal stands in for New York actually pretty well.

Toronto does not.

It only stands in for Chicago and maybe Detroit.

Yeah, Toronto stands in for like everywhere is the problem.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's not a real, I don't care for Toronto, but the basic shape of corruption in Quebec, at least of this type, is that construction firms and the mafia often also working together with like heavily mobbed up unions.

And also the construction firms and the mafia often aren't like associated businesses.

They're often kind of the same things.

Like in this story, we're going to have people who own construction firms who like contract with the city, like beating people up and shaking them down.

It's not just like, oh, I'm in a construction company.

I have two guys with no show jobs.

It's like, no, I run the construction company.

I have a gun in my desk.

Cool.

So.

They directly pay campaign contributions, quote unquote, often over this like legal $3,000 per person limit to municipal municipal provincial parties with like by finding creative ways to give them cash as well as kickbacks and favors to public officials, civil engineers, everybody, which results in huge amounts of public money being wasted in inflated, no-bid contracts and shoddy infrastructure that falls apart all the time because private developers lean on and bribe politicians who lean on or bribe civil servants.

It's like Quebec has the worst roads in Canada.

Bridge and tunnel collapses are comparable.

Terrible for my little car.

Yeah, terrible.

Yeah.

Bridge, tunnel, and building collapses are like comparatively routine.

Pitching a shitload of unicycles into a ravine.

Yeah.

And also, like, you know, the Olympic Stadium, right?

So

I'm just thinking of those like bike share racks, like those municipal bike share racks, but it's filled with unicycles.

Just a fun little idea.

Yeah, you mean the stadium Olympique?

Yeah, well, the Stadium Olympique, bits of it have been falling off more or less since it was completed.

in like what ended up being the 90s because it took them 40 years to build it.

Yeah, because it was partially built by the mafia or the mafia.

See, bilingualism.

Yeah.

It's because they let mob enforcer Yup build it.

Yupie, that's the exposed mascot.

Yupie, everybody.

Oh, he's adorable.

Yeah, I love Yupie.

He did a horrible job building the stadium.

Yeah.

And his family was clearly in the mob, in the, what was it, the Rosutos?

Yeah.

The Rosuto crime family.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Known associate Yupi.

I think you could call him a soldier, plausibly.

Pursuit of crime family soldier.

Yupie exclamation point.

He's just, he's on the

org chart they're putting up in the hearing.

And he's doing like, he's making like a big like, wah!

You should do more fun bits in your mug shots.

So when the Senate puts you up in a hearing, you just have to look at like the funniest photo you could take on no notice.

Yeah.

Let's do a funny one.

If you do a bunch of mug shots, like if you're like always getting arrested for being a known crime family associate, you should get to do a fun one for like your fifth one.

Just put it in upside down or something.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well, I like the idea that UP, like they actually, he couldn't get made in the Resutos because he was like

Italian.

He's like a Tom Hagen figure.

Yeah, he was, he was a close, he was a close and trusted associate of the top echelons of the family, but he was never formally inducted.

His mother was Irish, yeah.

His father was from Avellino, but it's like, yeah.

So the guy, like an example is the guy who was built, who is like the, who owned the construction company that built the Olympic village, later was picked up in like an Italian

in Italy in a mob sweep.

because of his work on the now abandoned mafia make work project, the Messina Bridge to Sicily.

Like, it's not, like, this is, it's bad.

If the Italian police are arresting you for being in the mafia, you've really done some sloppy work.

They could also easy catch, given that he's walking around with a French-Canadian accent, a French-Canadian-Italian accent.

That is like, there are going to be so many of these guys in the next sort of 45 minutes to an hour.

So many French-Canadians with Italian names.

The other thing to know, and this is a little bit behind this, is in 1994, the Pierre Bourk was elected mayor of Montreal.

And the first thing he did was he basically removed all of the separation between elected officials in the city and civil servants, like everything.

All of the managers and institutions that separated political pressure from like managing the city's money.

He did away with all of it.

Well, this is going to lead to like efficiency.

Well, I think that was, yeah.

I mean, so the other thing is like Bourk was, there are two sort of major political tendencies in Montreal.

There's like a Drepoism, which is Jean Drepot, who was like a Québécois paronist with a vice grip on power.

He's mayor for ages, who's finally gotten rid of by this company.

Implied the existence of a Quebecois evita as well,

who's challenged to the left by the Montreal Citizens' Assembly or RCM,

which governs for like one

term before like Bork comes in to like rerun Drepoism.

And it's like, we're finally going to do what Jean Drepo couldn't, which is give more of the city to developers.

And so, you know, it's very median voter aligned, baffling stuff.

So he comes in and he's responding to this political, provincially imposed mandate to unify the island of Montreal into one city from like 26 mostly English-speaking towns plus a francophone city.

That's crazy because the island is humongous, right?

Yeah, it was like 26.

It's enormous and it contained like many towns, fucking farmland.

And they were like, nope, it's going to be one city.

We're going to consolidate all of it.

And the funny thing is, is that like they just deconsolidate kind of half of it a few years later because they're like, everybody hates this.

We're going to go back to being towns.

And also, I'll note that a lot of the information I'm going to share comes to public in the early 2010s as the Charbonneau Commission of Public Corruption in Montreal and their construction industry holds hearings and publishes reports.

So it's like, we're going to be jumping back and forth between stuff happening and people testifying about it.

And so from civil servants say that they're convinced that the system of collusion and influence peddling that the system found found had its roots in the 1994 election of Bork, who was like, okay, fuck it.

No dividing line between the people.

Also, he lost out on that U.S.

Supreme Court job.

You know, he went north.

Bork.

Bork?

Bork?

It's a Robert Bork joke,

just for any Bork heads out there.

I can only think of Bruins legend Ray Bork.

That's the only one I can think about.

My brain is just trying to formulate a Boston Bruins joke for the last 10 minutes.

We're not going into the just naming sports players for an hour, like we're our dads thing.

Because I will be right there with you.

Like, we can't do that.

Yeah.

All right.

So all of this leads to like, yeah, him, he's elected, abolishes these positions,

like the

city manager, liaison manager, all of that gets abolished.

Everyone works together.

And then

to later testimony, so this is this is in from the Montreal Gazette.

A civil servant

using an assumed name says, now you see where this has brought us, which is that Montreal politicians and city contractors just enjoyed direct contact during the mid-2000s.

Gilles, another form of civil servant who declined to give his name, said it became increasingly common for members of the executive committees to simply walk into civil servants' offices and exert pressure on their recommendations during that administration.

Any case, between 95 and 2000, a different Gilles, this is his real name, called Suprenal,

a city engineer, estimated that later,

while testifying before the Anti-Corruption Commission, that he received one kickback on a kickback on one contract every year until 2000, when he started receiving like dozens a year.

Just like

they used to be like small-time corruption, now huge-time corruption.

Yeah.

When I was a kid, you get one kickback a year if you were lucky.

Kids these days, they're getting two, three kickbacks a month.

Santa came and he would deliver you a kickback in your stocking.

Montreal Santa would give you like an envelope of cash in your stocking.

Yeah.

Bear Noel.

Yeah.

I'm just like,

why are these banknotes so colorful and made of plastic?

But it was not back then.

Fuck.

What happened is, right, it's this small, because the city of Montreal got so huge so quickly, the cost of public works contracts explodes.

And then all of the contracts that they're getting kickbacks from get huge.

But the governance of the city is like terrible because it just like quintupled in size overnight.

I am big.

It's the mayoralty that got small.

Yeah.

And so, like, and so then Supernaw testified that his role was to manipulate a computer system that evaluated the cost of projects to ensure the price met what they wanted to pay.

So he'd just receive a construction company, like that he would choose to win, that they rigged the city a bidding on contracts.

Then before telling him the amount, he would then justify the cost.

What was really funny is that in the hearings later, Giuseppe Borsellino, Montreal construction magnate, said, that's just the first of many,

said,

quote, and I'm quoting him from the Charbonneau Commission.

He says,

my first experience of the system came from an encounter with Gilles Supernatural, who was like a 30-year-old engineer at the time.

Supernault, he said, urged him to partner up in schemes with other countries to set prices.

Borsellino said nothing came of that first conversation, but then Supernatural called all of the construction bosses to a meeting in the mid-1990s and said, come on, guys, work together.

Dinner's ready, you know?

Yeah.

What I find very funny is that the judge, Franz Charbonneau, then said, so what you're telling me is the great mastermind of the corruption of the last 20 years was Gilles Supernova, a 30-year-old engineer.

Maybe he just had vision, okay?

You know, maybe it wasn't all of these mob bosses.

Maybe it was one guy who ran the computers.

It was one child prodigy at being running graft.

Someone had to teach them how to use computers because they're all like Italian-Canadian boomers, you know?

Like, all these guys typed with one finger.

And like, to be clear, that one finger was hitting six keys at a time.

Well, it's weighed down by all their rings.

Supernova.

Supernova said he gambled away a quarter million at a casino and then said he regarded the loss as his repayment to society because the casino is government-owned.

He then lent another $150,000 to a construction boss and never got it back.

He spent the rest of the money on his children and improving his house he received trips hawk hockey tickets concert tickets booze meals and rounds of golf he yeah he got to meet you paid well he he golfed with vito risutto as well the inquiry by the way also showed uh surveillance of vito risutto's father niccolo stuffing cash into his socks at a meeting with other construction industry bosses before being killed by a sniper

like immediately after like he gets shot and does a backflip and like $500 flies out of his socks.

I hate being a mob sniper because every time I try to shoot this one guy, he bends down to tuck more cash into his socks on.

You can't do that now because like now everybody wears those like liner socks that just go up to the ankle.

Everyone's socks are so thin.

They're just doing it on Venmo.

You know, apparently saves your life.

No.

This was after, unfortunately.

Just back in the day, the only ankle support you could get was like a sort of a Nike like mid-level sock stuffed with Canadian dollars.

He's got sock garters like a stripper.

He was killed by a sniper in 2010.

This was a little later.

I really wish it was at the time.

We don't know that he didn't.

He wasn't like socked up at the time.

If that was like a known practice of his.

Looking for guys to kill based on how thick their ankles are.

Oh, like diabetes.

Are you suggesting that he dropped money when you killed him like a grand theft auto character yes yes yes okay good uh supernauts testimony corroborates accusations by the inquiry's previous witnesses former carp construction boss uh lino zambito

lino zambito sounds like a uh a character from a children's book about a mouse that drives a zamboni well

uh Supernault said Monday he was made aware that construction companies paid a 2.5% share of the value of their city contracts directly to the mafia in cash which lino zambito agreed right into the sock like holding holding my sock open to indicate that you have to bribe me

well that use it used to mean that uh now it just means that you like want some attention from somebody it's actually just fallen into normal use

um and the other three percent uh so two and a half percent just think of all this sock watching going on you know like let people earn their money instead of rubbing your fingers together to be like like, you got to pay up, it's like miming putting on a sock very sensually.

That's why it's a Christmas stocking for Kevaqua Santa Claus, you know?

Yeah.

It's just a normal sock, like a normal men's dress.

So two and a half.

I was bad this year.

I've got coal in my sock.

What the fuck?

Oh, I was bad this year.

I've only got $5 bills.

Didn't give me 50s.

So 2.5% goes of the value of the city contracts goes to the mafia.

No, sorry.

I'm still stuck on the

socks thing.

Yeah, because it's like having one of those backup guns that cops have.

So it's like if I need to pay in a restaurant or something and my wallet's empty, I like drop to my knees and I like transition to my SOC money.

You know, it's just ready to go.

Yeah, it's your holdout money.

Yeah, yeah.

So the other 3% then goes to like the political party running the city.

And that political party is Union Montreal, which was the successor to the Montreal Citizens Assembly and the political party of Mayor Gerald Tromblay.

I mean, they may as well call it like Parti de la Corruption at that point.

You know, like, I'm getting only game in town vibes, you know?

Oh, yeah.

Like, this is also just because Quebec politics is so fucking weird.

Like, all of their parties actually have median voter policy mixes.

None of it is like on one or the other ideological spectrum.

It's a random dice roll hodgepodge.

They call that the mafia special.

I love to vote for the radical centrists, Rolls D20, extreme right.

So, Gerald Trumblay is basically the mayor for when this municipal corruption mega gold rush speeds up in the 2000s, even though he is allegedly the left candidate.

So, the well, we can push him left, you know,

the Royal Canadian mounted political party.

Yeah.

Okay, am I the only one who thinks that the R if the RCMP got some guys together, they could form a better political party?

They could form a better Canadian football team, yeah.

I, I, I referenced something when we were talking about t-shirt plans earlier, and I inexplain like the I, the vision came to me of an FBI football team, and I've been thinking about that non-stop ever since.

They're all wearing the big blue windbreakers over the like football body armor as well.

See, I think

we go two different directions on this, right?

You do FBI agent football team.

I do FBI asset football team.

Oh, none of them know why they're there.

They've been given a dummy football by accident.

Yeah.

It's just a bunch of mentally unwell guys who've been tricked into being there.

I don't know that you follow the Jaguars.

Yeah.

So

Gerald Tromblay was elected in Montreal Mayor with Union Montreal, which used to be the Montreal Citizens Assembly, in 2001 against the amalgamation of the city.

And then as soon as he was mayor, campaigned for the city to stay amalgamated before then eventually accepting that partial halfway de-amalgamation in 2005.

He isn't.

I just want to say as a podcast, if we were around then, I would be vehemently anti-amalgamation because it would eliminate 26 mayors.

That's true.

That's true.

We support anything that will increase the number of mayors in the world.

Do you know?

Yeah.

Bring back the Holy Roman Empire.

That's what I'm saying.

Oh, the mayor of the palace?

Oh, you know?

One day.

No, so one of the main characters of our story is actually one of the mayors who became the borough mayors, who then became like a political apparatchik.

But Tromblé is an Ottawa-born lawyer, gets a Harvard MBA, and has a relatively

Quebecois, then.

He's just like, he's just French.

Yeah, I mean,

Ottawa is sort of so bi-provincial that it sort of is kind of fine.

He's from Quebec Plus.

It's the Montreal of Ontario.

Many are saying.

So he has this relatively standard career trajectory for an upper-middle-class Canadian who breaks into the lower reaches of the upper class, working as a financial credit analyst, teaching at the business school.

He starts a perfume company with his wife.

He's on the Division d'Analys de Vibes at Morgan Stanley, you know.

And this is still when Montreal is like the financial center of Canada, right?

In the 70s.

Well, no, that's when it's starting to change.

Okay.

Because that's when Quebec separatism kind of takes off.

Yeah.

Because I know like pre-FLQ, Montreal was like Canada's New York, right?

Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's cool how just like some guys with moustaches and like wide leg jeans got together and like kidnapped a guy and blew up a couple of things and single-handedly changed the political topography of Canada.

Yeah.

They made it so I had to grow up near Toronto instead of of near Montreal, basically, which I will never forgive them for because Toronto sucks.

They pointed to the corkboard as a picture of one remarkable young man

whose life they must change.

Picturing a slightly more francophone, remarkable young man and just being like, well, we could have had, you know?

Yeah.

Un homme remarkable.

Yeah.

It's like my, like my, my dad's from an Anglo-Québecois family.

And yeah, they fucking left Quebec.

Yeah.

I'm like, come on.

Montreal's better than Toronto.

Anyway, he also started a perfume company, Dante Oujardin, which he sold in 1986.

His political career involved serving in the liberal cabinet of Robert Bourassa.

And he was basically seen as this like broad church guy who has a reputation for basically having integrity.

Technocrat.

Safe pair of hands.

Yeah.

He is a safe pair of hands technocrat, and he's very business friendly.

They smell nice from all the perfume.

Or as they call him Le Mans

Safe.

That's right.

That's how you say it in French.

That's right.

Les ma pas dangerous.

A non-dangerous pair.

Yeah, they're so up on language laws that safe sounds too much like English.

They're like, no, c'est pas dangerous.

Nes pas safe.

¿Qués que sé la safe?

Merde.

Tabernac.

Tabernac que listi,

I've been staring at the French translation of Cosa Notre for like 20 minutes, and I'm afraid of pronouncing it.

Well, I'm not going to say it.

Notre trouke.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Anyway, like our thing.

Notre trouke.

Our thing.

Yeah.

The thing.

It's our truck.

I just can't.

I get.

It's no longer your truck.

It's our truck.

Yeah.

So Trumblay basically says, look,

when asked about his mayoralty, he says, look, I inherited the leadership of a city that was completely bankrupt, had massive political apathy, chronic underinvestment in infrastructure, no mass transit, a moratorium on like any kind of green space, and no cultural policy to say.

Everybody involved was in the mob.

They were all wearing like pinstripe slacks, walking around like clicking their fingers at each other.

Yeah.

Standing on the sideboard of old cars firing Tommy guns.

He also inherited Frank Zampino.

Now, Frank Zampino was a chartered accountant and the borough mayor of Saint-Lenar, one of the towns that was incorporated into Montreal.

It's a political ally of Tromblay and was appointed by Mayor Tromblay to preside over the Committee on Finance, Administrative, and Corporate Services and Strategic Management.

If these guys are borough mayors and he's the mayor of Montreal, are they all calling each other like Mr.

Mayor all the time?

Because that sounds like the perfect democracy.

Yeah, when everyone's a mayor?

Every man a mayor?

When everyone's a mayor.

Every mayor a mayor.

I have a question.

Yeah.

Are Lino Zambito and Frank Zampino any relation?

They do work together.

They really like, they really sorted the Italian immigrants alphabetically by city, didn't they?

All right.

It's like reading The Lord of the Rings, and the names are too close to each other.

Maybe it's Sauruman and Sauron.

Just to convince Zampito.

It's like they're enemies in Dragon Ball.

No.

So

he referred to his own position in the administration as part of the, quote, Tromblé-Zampino administration.

So Tromblé was elected in, so remember Zampino.

Tromblé was elected in 01, 05, and 09 and told the court he wouldn't have ever ascended to the mayoralty without Zampino's considerable support, which he rarely questioned.

The other person who came with Zampino was, I love this name.

This is of all of the names, this is my favorite one.

Bracing myself.

I'm rubbing my hands together.

Bernard Trepanier.

The guy who trepans you?

The guy who does the brain surgery to relieve pressure on your brain by drilling a hole in your skull?

That guy?

That's his like name?

Yeah, I guess like that must be what his like great-grandfather-great-great-grandfather did in Napoleon time.

It's like the three jobs you could do in like old-timey French Canada.

Voltageur, guy who trapans the voltage,

and like

fur guy, you know, General Montcalm was with the other one.

I'm running into a real mental block that I'm having with French Canadians now, which is every single one of them reminds me of an NHL player because they all, there's only so many names.

And I was like, oh yeah, Pascal Treponier.

We're doing the sports guard.

Oh, God.

So Treponier was this veteran political fundraiser and was Frank Zampino's chief fundraiser in St.

Lenard and now is chief fundraiser for Union Montreal political party.

So this is like the big scandal that brings down Tromblé.

Starts in 2007.

Probably pretty good at getting money out of you if he's able to like Trepan.

Well, you could hide the money in your head.

I was going to say, I'm keeping all the money stuffed in my necklace.

It goes, sock?

My sock is full.

Oh, well, I guess it has to go in my skull.

Sliding individual dollar bills into my meninges

yeah i they got they're finding guys whose fontanelle never closed so they could easily get cash

this is my stash fontanelle

yeah no those hey hey don't with that guy he's needed for the fbi football team

that's my that's my guy bernard fonton yell

in 2007 the city awarded this like 350 million dollar water meter contract to a consortium of

construction companies owned by a construction magnate with like in the mafia.

How this happens is in 2005, the city tenders to say, okay, we're going to do a water meter project.

And Tromblé just immediately hands all responsibility for it to Frank Zampino, who then personally selects three firms to bid on the contract, including the consortium, Genio, which is comprised of another couple of companies called Dessau and Simar Baudery Construction.

And

it was led by a man named Tony Ocorso.

Cursed Tony.

It was led by Cursed Tony.

I have a question.

Has a consortium ever done anything good?

No.

No.

No.

If you know about any good consortia, let us know.

Tony Ocorso also maintains he was never in the mob, but also his name comes up on the conversation about the Messina bridge with the other guy who was like, I'm not in.

Raising hand.

I've googled Frank Zampino just to see what this guy looks like.

I wasn't expecting it.

I was expecting him to look like an old-timey crook.

Instead, he looks like a kind of gay butler who is engaged in like a torrid but unrequited romance with the master of the house.

The thing to remember about Frank Zampino is that he is an accountant.

Okay, sure.

But the torrid gay butler thing, I wasn't.

expecting that.

Also, it was reported that while overseeing bids for the construction, Zampino vacationed on Tony Acurso's yacht, which was called The Touch.

I'm not going on a boat owned by a guy named Cursed Tony.

Don't call your boat that, bro.

It's so weird.

Would you get to vacation with me on The Touch?

No, no, no, thank you, Cursed Tony.

I don't think I will.

Cursed Tony's touch.

Cursed Tony will remember this.

I'll tell you one thing about Cursed Tony.

He never forgets.

They call it Tony's curse.

Perhaps if you were a little more receptive, you'd receive Tony's blessing.

Yeah, they say Tony's blessing can cure all diseases.

So like you really kind of want it.

The downside is you have to go on the touch.

Yeah, I was going to say you have to receive Tony's touch.

Receive Tony's blessing.

Getting cured of scropiola by going on the touch.

So maybe Craig Sampino, he loved to go on the touch.

He was apparently...

It's the only place to receive Tony's blessing.

Yeah.

He like was on the touch reviewing the water.

company contract tenders like just fully on the touch uh-huh wonderful yeah And

the other company that submits bids is called Catania, which we'll go back to in a little while.

That's not how you spell that, the name of that sword.

That's not how it's spelled.

In 2007, it takes 53 seconds for the city council to unanimously approve that the largest contract in the city's history goes to Tony Ocurso, owner of the touch.

Oh, now Tony Ocurso, this looks like a guy.

This is the type of guy I was thinking of.

Oh, yeah.

Accursed Tony just goes in front of the council holding a single finger aloft.

Every

like profile, like side profile photo of this guy, he's holding his chin out like really far in a way that looks insanely uncomfortable.

Huge fan.

It's called mewing.

He's mewing.

Cursed Tony is look-smaxing.

Yeah, this guy looks like French-Canadian Phil Leotardo.

I love him.

So Tromblé

basically cancels the deal in 2009 after it became like like inevitable that this was a corrupt bidding process.

And while he was seeking a third mandate as mayor, which he won.

He won after it was revealed that Frank Zampino was chilling on the touch working on the water system.

The people don't care about the touch, you know, they just don't.

They care about like, you know, the economy or whatever.

Yeah,

the people threw darts at a dartboard to determine their three political positions, and the one party that matched up was the right one.

It's like, I care about three things, things, maple syrup subsidies, racism, ski-doo accidents.

Does the touch implicate any of those three?

Not really.

Yeah, then hang out on the touch.

Anyway.

He was endorsed by the ski dude.

The police executed 38 search warrants at this point as different parts of investigation dubbed Proge Fronde related to this whole debacle.

So they started by looking into this like water management project, but eventually, just like Project Brazen in Toronto was like, hey, let's look into this one thing.

And then they were like, the mayor's doing what?

It spawned like a much larger investigation.

It must have felt so good to be a Surité de Quebec guy to be like, this could go all the way to City Hall.

And then it does.

So it begins looking into this water management project, right?

And it broadens into an investigation between.

the city, the mafia construction firms, and their fight to inflate bills, allocate municipal contracts, and also to obtain financing for the city to stage the FINA Aquatics Championship in 2005 and again in 2014.

Just all of these guys on the touch thinking about how much they love swimming.

Yeah, that was like the FINA,

the FINA Aquatics Championship in 2005 and 2014 were two of the most mobbed up international sports events that have ever occurred, which I'm aware is a really fucking high bar.

Doing point shaving in the pool.

Yeah.

Just swimming and you're like, why is is there a guy with cement shoes on under there?

It's in the pool.

Yeah.

Just below where the races happen.

We've been advised to just ignore the snitch at the bottom of the pool.

Zampino retired in 2008 to take this lucrative job at another of these construction firms that like contracts with him.

Like he's so corrupt.

Only to be replaced by another hilarious goon as city executive, this guy, Claude Dauphin, who resigned after it was revealed that he was being spied on by the mayor's office because they were worried he was improperly awarding contracts.

And he quit because he was indignant about being spied on by the cop troller.

Nobody spies on Prince Claude.

Nobody.

But he was then replaced by Michael Applebaum, the unicycling hypnotist, as like city

manager.

The unicycling underscore hypnotist.

Riley,

I'm going to ask you something, and I'm going to need you to be honest with me, right?

Because I think after all this time, I'm entitled to an answer.

Is Canada real?

No.

No, it's not a real place.

I kind of always suspected this.

I kind of always knew that you were from like a kind of northern part of the United States and had fancifully invented an entire country.

Every time I go there, I've been like, you know, seven or eight times now.

Every time I go to Canada, it is strange.

Every time I turn around, I see people behind me scrambling to put the set back up because they're breaking it down and building it in front of me as I walk around.

Are you saying that Canada has renter distance?

That's right.

That's an old West house-like set, you know?

Yeah.

So, um, so Michael Applebaum then takes up this position that's like,

if you're at all crooked, is the money spigot that you then just get to have for a while.

He's later elected.

Yeah.

So he's he, anyway, he takes up that position.

So, you know, remember that.

But the biggest scandals in Tromblay's maralty involve Zampino rather than Dauphin or necessarily Apple Bomb.

In his testimony, Tromblé said that he was furious when he learned that after leaving office, Zampino went to go work for Dessau, the firm that won the,

conspired with a Cursos company to rig the water meter contract.

Tromblé said he called the president of Dessau, it's asking him please not to hire Zampino.

But the president of Desau said, no, we hire Zampino.

We will do do it.

You can't make us not.

I mean,

you can't fuck around with these people.

They're willing to have you sniped while you're going into your sock wallet, you know?

Like, that's that's a sacred thing.

Like, you're trying to go into your fucking inventory there, you know?

I will say, for the sort of like graft we've covered, these people are making actual money, it seems like, in a way that I'm very impressed.

Cause a lot of, you know, you say, like, oh, it's going to be like, it's a lot of graft or whatever.

And if this was a lot of cities we'd be dealing with, these guys would be doing this for like, you know, a free tortilla.

But they're really, um, they're really making a lot of money, like a mob amount of money.

And I'm very, you know what?

I respect that kind of hustle.

Yeah.

I mean, it sounds more because it's in Canadian dollars, but yeah.

The other thing to remember is that a huge amount of the money ends up going to like fundraise for the political party itself.

So it's, it's tough to say how much these guys were getting actually paid because direct kickbacks from like mobbed up construction companies were only part of it.

I'm now thinking about how bad every other mayor we've had is at corruption by contrast.

Like you compare this to like Giuliani say or I don't know Rob Ford again.

It's it's really striking how like if we just don't know how some of this worked, that meant that these guys weren't talking to each other in the most surveilled parking lots of like McDonald's's.

Yeah.

So

it's because like paraboliques, Montreal, like Montreal also, like, they've just been so good at this kind of corruption for so long, but it never had the kind of focus on it.

Like, there was no anti-mafia crusade in Montreal, like, there was in New York.

So, it just got to kind of keep going.

But they never had a Giuliani as the thing, you know?

And the, like, the mob wars that, like, wracked New York in the middle of the 20th century only happened in Montreal after this stuff blew up.

So, like, even still, there are guys in Montreal who are found like shot 90 times, right?

Like, that's, that's still going on.

After the first, like, 80 or so of those, it kind of doesn't matter to you, you know?

Yeah, you're just, you're just want to use up all your bullets.

What are you going to do?

Put them back?

Yeah, at that point, I'm kind of, I'm kind of tanking the rest of those bullets.

Like, you can't really do shit to me.

If you don't use them, they go bad.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it's like, so then in the 2010s and early 2020s, that's when Montreal Mafia guys started killing each other a lot.

But I want to use another example.

It's like, it's fucking Canada.

All the trends get there like five years late, you know?

Yeah, these guys are in like 2021, like killing each other and like installing Edison bulbs in their bars at the same time.

Yeah.

These guys are getting shot outside of like cocktail bars that don't have names that serve like, you know, molecular gastronomy and they're wearing skinny jeans.

You have the assassins dressed up like a cocktail guy with a mustache.

You're just about to get into like the national for the first time and you get gunned down.

Up there, they have to call it Le Nacional.

Well,

the nation it's referring to, Quebec.

He's only off in parentheses.

Le Nationale, parentheses, Quebec.

People don't know this, but like the national are actually like deep FLQ guys.

Yeah, it's it's um despite being American, you You know, it's like Americans supporting the IRA.

You know, they think it's a fun activity.

They don't know.

So I want to use another example of how the mafia gets involved.

And this is time, it's with Catania, Paolo Catania's outfit.

And this is the kind of happening around the same time.

And this is what people get criminally charged for.

So this is from more testimony to Franz Charbonneau.

Elio Pagliarulo, owner of Patissari Pagl Bakery.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Sure.

Told the commission on Monday that Frank Zampino received a total of half a million dollars to facilitate just one land deal called the Faubourg Contrecour affair.

Pagli Arulo, again, the owner of a patisserie, testifies that Paolo Catania paid just $5 million for land in East Montreal, valued at $50 million because Frank Zampino basically kept on doing things that would devalue it on paper.

So basically he was like, look, 50 million, I'll pay you 20 million

minus the 15 million it will cost to decontaminate this land that has never had any industry on it, right?

Well, you got to decontaminate it for vibes, you know?

Yeah.

So Catania was able to produce this report claiming it was polluted so we could drive down the cost.

Catania stood to make $80 million in profit over 10 years on development.

I would love to be the corrupt environmental scientist being like, oh, yeah, full of benzene.

You know, it's terrible out here.

Also, because that's the thing, right?

It's like, yeah, in New York, the fire department chief gets a Lamborghini.

In Montreal, like the environmental scientists are getting Lamborghinis.

30-year-olds, like city engineers are getting Lamborghinis.

It's much more equal opportunity.

You know, why does this Maserati have a vanity plate that says benzene?

Surely get a Mercedes, you know?

So Zampino got received three payments of $100,000 in cash, and then he got a kitchen renovation and a wine wine cellar put in his house worth two hundred and fifty thousand and got another five thousand for his birthday oh he's the birthday boy that's so nice also i just like that one of the things he gets from this like mobbed up construction company owner is a kitchen renovation it's expensive i think i think the mob wine cellar is kind of like a mixed bag because if you put anything besides like barolo in it you get like shot 80 times you know and also when the mob does you a favor they're always like you know one day you got to repay it So then you go, you go down there and there's a bunch of mob guys having a meet, you know?

The chillin's poured out.

Yeah, they're, they're drinking my precious Barolo.

You know, they've, they've opened a Molta Porchiano.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, hey, I was saving that Brunello.

It's still got three years before it peaks.

Hey, shut up.

Get out of the wine cellar.

Believe Pagliaruli is here from the pedissary.

So we're having the world's flattest bagel.

Yeah.

Pagliarulo said

that that Paolo and Frank Catania, who were like this major construction and company owners, told him that they said that they told him that they belonged to Vito Rosuto's crime family directly and that the Montreal Mafia took a 5% cut on project.

He then listed along other names of firms that had colluded to hike the cost of construction for the city.

Just incredible threat.

Be like, I am in the mob.

You know who else is in the mob?

I am going to tell you the names of everyone else who is in the mob.

Would you like to take some notes on all these other people who are in the mob?

So, these include Frank Catania and Associate.

Typed it up.

Would you like a list?

Here is a copy of that list in case you accidentally throw the first list into a trash can.

I'm speaking directly into your chest, just in case you're wearing a wire.

So, this was he was testifying at the time.

Eating the macaroon that makes you testify everything you know.

So, just how good a baker was this fucking guy.

So, it's a a Madeline, actually.

I'm filled with a sense of like nostalgia to the point that I have to recount my entire knowledge of the mob.

Yeah, it's making me remember all the guys.

Alan Rochesch du Mob Purdue.

Yeah.

That time my

capo didn't kiss me to bed.

Yeah, the worst part about this, Madeline, is it goes really terribly with a Barolo.

So

there's a a list of like a long list of construction companies, right?

I'll let you laugh it out.

Yeah, I think I do.

Dipping my Madeline in a glass of red wine.

I don't have to say that.

I was like, no, that's too silly.

Riley will be mad at me for derailing it.

Like a glass of Malta Punchiana that has like crumbs of Madeline floating in it.

Hey.

Taking the world's worst Tiramisu.

Sometimes, sometimes you go too far.

Okay.

Talking about...

I'm just kind of tormenting you with that psychic vision, I know.

Yeah.

So basically, every firm that's involved in routinely defrauding the city of Montreal, if you look at who owns it, all of them were founded by people from the same Italian village as the Rosuto family, a place called Catalica Ericleia.

A place called Catholic Hercules.

That's a crazy coincidence.

We don't want to profile people from Catholic Hercules, you know?

Like, it could just be a massive coincidence.

Maybe they're just better at building things.

Isn't Catholic Hercules just called Jesus, November?

But Jesus was really strong.

Theologically troubling, yeah.

He's really more of a Catholic Dionysus, but it's fine.

Using my one question at the Pope's Q ⁇ A to ask him that, just to see what the reaction is.

Wait, everyone gets one?

Yeah, I assume.

Yeah.

I'm the Pope, AMA.

One each.

So he said Catania was known as Mr.

Extra because he was was so good at generating cost overruns.

And the reason that Elio Pagliarulo accuses him is because Catania, like, basically, because Pagliarulo, in addition to being a patisserie owner, was also a loan shark in Catania's mafia organization.

I mean, listen, if you can't handle me at my loan shark, you don't deserve me at my patissia.

So he described, he was described, this is in CBC, described as his best friend and confidant for 15 years until they started fighting in 2008.

He'd run a successful loan sharking business with the Catanias, using his bakery as a front, taking a 65% cut of what he collected and turning 30% over to Paolo Catania and 5% to Frank.

Do we think the pastries were like good or like terrible?

Because this is a thing I often think about with mob fronts that are food related, right?

Is it's got to be like 50-50.

Like even though it's the best thing for like operational security for the food to be mid, it's never going to be mid.

It's either going to be the worst food you've had in your life or it's going to be like unexpectedly, really delicious.

And I don't know.

They're eating there and they want it to be good.

They're eating there.

Probably their

aged grandmother is making it.

Yeah, I think it's the food of the people who are

the front four.

Like ethnically, the food tends to be good.

Like an Italian mob pizza place, pretty good generally.

Yeah.

Italian mob Chinese restaurant, on the other hand.

I'm not interested.

It's called Marco Polo's.

Putting the noodles in the red sauce.

Yeah, like loan shark patisserie.

I don't know if it's like

a French guy named, you know, like Elio Croissant, who's like, you know, also a loan shark.

I want to go there.

So he testified that he basically three borrowers ran off without paying, and Pagliarulo was left owing Paulo Catania $1.3 million.

That seems like a key part of being a loan shark is do not let the guys just leave with your 1.3 million dollars.

You're sort of a mere loan fish at that point, yeah.

If you're American, that's just under a million real dollars.

So, you know, that's quite a bit.

Just fuck, maybe he really was a better petitier.

You know, he was really thinking about how to nail like a mule foie, and these guys just like took him for everything he was worth.

Yeah, you're worrying about your mule foie, not your meal dollar.

Yeah,

that's so real.

He was kidnapped by his best friend, Frank Catania, and beaten for three hours in August 2009.

If you're listening, that's not your best friend.

I'm sorry.

You should not be able to do that.

After that point, no.

Yeah.

I just have a little self-respect.

Call out post for Frank Catania.

Yeah.

Sorry, that's Paolo Catania.

Frank's

for Paolo Catania.

The witness also told the Charmaneau Commission that Catania had once asked Pagliarillo to burn trucks owned by a rival construction company because they were in dispute over the awarding of contracts.

Yeah, little side missions, you know?

Yeah.

So

anyway, anyway, Tromblé was re-elected for a final time in 2009.

Sure, keep this guy around.

But on the 30th of October 2012, when he was called to testify before the Charbonneau Commission, a former Union Montreal party organizer that alleged that Tromblé knew his party was involved in illegal financing practices with the mafia, but did not want to be made aware of them.

Tromblé later would go on to testify against Zampino for his involvement in the scheme.

That's no fun to be like, I don't want to know this.

You know, I like sequester myself from the corruption.

You know, get involved.

Don't be a pussy.

So, and also, as for Catania, Tromblé said that he knew all these guys, these like mafia boss slash construction company bosses.

Yeah, he was weird.

Every time I went into his office, he was like finishing off in a clair.

But they would cross paths at fundraisers, but never spoke about specific projects.

So this is testimony from former organizer Martin Martin Dumont.

By the way, all these people, like, they never got, most of them never got charged because of a lack of evidence.

It should be clear.

Sure.

Former organizer Martin Dumont recounted that during a by-election in Saint-Laurent in 2004, the official agent of Union Montreal, in the presence of the mayor, explained to him that there were two ways of accounting for party expenses, the official one and the unofficial one, which in the system made it possible not to exceed the limit of permitted expenses while taking in money that they weren't allowed to have.

Sounds above board.

Mayor Gerald Gerald Tromblay then stood up to leave two kinds of accounting?

Then stood up to leave the meeting saying, I do not need to know any of that, and left.

Monsieur Dumont recounted at length the circumstances in which Union Montreal would receive envelopes of money.

For example, during a fundraising event in Mercier Auce Laga Maisonneuve, places in Quebec are always called stuff like that.

Mercier, Auche Laga, Maisonneuve.

Because they were all named by like one dying fur trapper stumbling onto the banks of a river, like suffering from eight different kinds of malnutrition and like blurting out the first 18 French words he can think of.

So construction contractor Niccolo Miloto invited Dumont to go to the bathroom with him, saying, come pee with me, he insisted, taking his arm.

Come pee with me.

Pee let's romanticize.

Why do men always go to the bathroom together?

What are they doing in there?

Well, we're going to find out what they're doing in there.

Milioto, a close associate of the Rizuto clan, who heads the Mivella construction company, have been described as an intermediary between the mafia and the construction business.

You stand in front of one urinal, I'll stand in front of this one, said Milioto, allegedly, before handing him $10,000 in cash.

Oh, I gotta start going back into men's rooms.

Wow.

Dumont said he didn't have to be a majority of the.

It's literally the like walking up to the urinal next to you meme, except

in the third panel, there is an exchange of $10,000 Canadian dollars.

So, like $6,000.

Yeah.

Dumont said he gave the envelope to Bernard Trepagnier.

On another two occasions during the evening, entrepreneurs invited Dumont to accompany them to the toilet.

It's where the real party is, you know?

I told them that they should just go with Mr.

Treponier.

So the witness who appeared uncomfortable with this approach, quote, I didn't think this was part of my duties.

Just like, I'm really not enjoying being the kind of bathroom middleman here.

At the end of the evening, I like Bernard Treponier as the one who's clearly having the most fun with it.

Because at the end of the evening, before taking a photo together, Treponier confided in him, quote, I can't close my jacket because it's too full of cash envelopes.

I got it all around my socks.

I'm waddling around like a goose.

I already stuffed my buddy's head full of some of his cash.

Yeah, come into the bathroom with me.

How flexible is your skull lining?

I've got to drill in the car if we really need to get anything in there.

That's why they call him Trepanier, yeah.

On another occasion, Mr.

Trepanier asked Dumont to go to Onyx restaurant owned by Tony Acurso in Laval so the latter could give him, quote, 50,000 documents for a fundraising cocktail event that had already taken place.

50,000 pictures of whoever the fuck is on the Canadian dollar bill.

Yeah, a couple of pictures of Laurier.

If If you're going to be a cursed Tony and you name your restaurant after like the dark mirror to the underworld, I'm definitely going to go in there.

I feel like you should definitely make sure your bag man is okay with being the bagman instead of viscerally uncomfortable with being the bagman and engage it like really stuck in some kind of like button fink style psychic trial about the whole thing, you know?

Yeah, I think Treponier had fun with how much Dumont was uncomfortable with it.

I mean, if your urge to bully overwhelms your

like urge to not get testified on, I feel like you're not a great mafioso.

Well, you're a good low-level mafioso, but you're not good at organizing stuff.

So, faced with Dumont's incomprehension, Treponier allegedly made him understand that it was, in fact, a donation of $50,000 that they simply referred to as 50,000 documents.

They could have called it 50,000 documents.

Just a guy who has complete aphasia for any signifiers of the mob.

He's just like, why are you making me go, you know, do this?

It's the strangest thing.

I found the head of a horse in my bed.

I do not know what it means.

I guess I should close the windows while I sleep.

I did not know they could get in here like that.

Why would I sleep with the fishes?

It seems a very unnatural mental thing.

I don't know.

There's no air down there.

Yeah, just like says, Hey, do you want to sleep with the fishes?

And he's like, No.

To make the chauseux de la semantics

ridiculous.

Yes, they said it would be regrettable if I suffered an accident enfortunal.

And I said, We, it would be regrettable.

We accidentally hired an autistic French-Canadian guy into the mob.

They go back to the boss, and he's like, Did you take care of the thing?

And he's like, No, he blanked us.

This guy, this guy must be some kind of badass.

Hey,

make sure Tony Ocorso doesn't get to New York.

What do you want me to call and cancel the train?

Shall I ask him to stay?

I can hide his ticket.

What if I lit the air out of the tires of his voice, huh?

And then, of course, this guy immediately testifies about everything because why wouldn't he?

They're like so mad at him afterwards.

He's like, I didn't know I should not do that.

Shouldn't you never specify this to me?

They asked me in question.

Do you act?

Why would I not talk to the police?

They asked me a question, huh?

The police, their job is to tell the truth.

I was trying to be helpful.

They seem to really really want to know.

What is pure innocent

mixed up and all this?

It's like beautiful, like being their ass man.

I just wanted to be Fondréser innovative.

And then I'm going around to

the Trepenneur and I'm

being asked to stash money in my socks.

I'm going to bastard with strange men.

I have to go and collect 50,000 documents.

It turns out just to be money from Tor Cosetoni.

Mr.

Dumont.

Mr.

Dumont also recounted in detail the activities he was able to observe at the Union Montreal office when executives from engineering firms came to visit Bernard Trepagnier.

In the office stood a safe that had been difficult to close because it was so overflowing with bundles of money.

My Acme safe is bending when I'm trying to buy its biggest safe that then costs money, which hopefully you can then take some of the money out of the old safe.

I will say, this could also be solved with, it seems like if they're saying $50,000 is $50,000 documents, maybe they have $50,000 single-dollar bills and they should be.

Yeah, $50,000 Wilfrid Lauriers.

You know, you got to trade that up to the like beaver or whatever that's on the $5 notes.

Yeah, we need to get the William Lyon Mackenzie Kings that are on the 50.

Yeah.

It was always the same process, he says.

The door closing, the vertical blinds closing.

He's so literal.

I love the bottom.

First, they put the money in the safe, and then they close the door.

They could have told this guy to like turn and face the wall for all of this, and he wouldn't be able to testify about anything.

He would just be like, yeah, it was a very interesting one, I guess.

So I don't know as they wanted me to look at it.

It was kind of neutral colour.

I was looking at the wall.

It's the building.

It was built in 1983.

It was the old city hall.

It couldn't fit as the new functions of the town.

Incidentally, it has like a perfect eidetic memory, you know, can draw a perfect sketch of the view out of the window.

Anyway, according to Tromblé, by the way, he personally fired Trepony in 2006 immediately upon being told in confidence of a shakedown of a developer for a million dollars that Trepony had attempted by himself using the phrase, quote, in the name of the mayor.

I remember that movie, yeah.

Time to change the name of of the podcast.

Well,

get a coat of arms.

Mayor's Vault.

For the Mayor, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

We could say, like, yes.

I have some ideas.

Well, Niccolò Miliotto was generous with the party, the man who peed, the peeing man.

Uh-huh.

The man who peed.

I love that book.

John LeCar.

John LeCar?

Like, without the accent?

That's like what?

That is the nickname of a Quebec Mafia guy, John Le Carr.

Whatever.

He owns a string of car dealerships.

I can't pronounce any French.

I know Spanish.

Leave me alone.

Uh-huh.

I demand to be left alone on my own podcast.

Was the ski dude there?

Come on.

There's more Dumont here.

Dumont, and again, quoting from the Montreal Gazette.

His voice choked with emotion on the verge of tears.

The witness recounted how he was threatened in 2006 after he became chief of staff to the mayor of Riviere de Prairie Pointe-autremble borough, Cosmo Machiolica.

Sorry.

Sorry,

there's too much Europe in there, you know?

Rivière de Prairie Pointe aux Tremble.

Again, transcribed directly from the mouth of a dying fur trapper.

He'd been mauled by six bears sequentially.

Yeah.

Sorry, sorry, excuse me, the mayor was the mayor of Rivière de Prairie, Pointe autremble was named Cosmo Machiochia.

Uh-huh.

Cosmo.

Macchiochia.

Cosmo Factory.

That's the French name for Cosmo Factory.

They used to call me the Cosmo Machine at Cafe Dumont back in the day.

Dumont had noticed that Milioto's company, Mivela, was charging $100,000 more than the price of another similar renovation contract.

So he asked questions of the director of public works, the borough's chief engineer, had no answers for him.

Instead, Milioto showed up at his office within 48 hours saying, you know, Martin, my sidewalk foundations are very thick and very deep.

You don't want to end up in my sidewalk foundations.

I did not understand what he meant by this.

Naturally, a sturdy sidewalk is a benefit.

He said, I am very sick and deep.

He maybe is coming on to me.

I do not know.

These men keep inviting me into the bathroom.

The other thing I think we have to remember is

who independently theorizes the existence of a homosexual underground in Montreal and completely misses the existence of the mob.

It's an excuse for these guys to hang out with each other.

Under the sidewalk, yeah.

Yeah.

Underground.

You want to be in my sidewalk foundations like pennywise?

So City Hall is awarding these inflated contracts to mobbed up construction companies that are just like fully in the mafia.

Right.

The mafia guys have little bits back to City Hall that tries to suff it in a safe they can't close.

And then they donate so much cash to the Union Montreal Party.

That's such a funny image.

Like these guys taking like running shoulder checks at a safe, trying to

close it on a like a bunch of money.

On the 5th of November, 2012, just after testifying, Gerald Trumblay canceled all of his public engagements and then just stopped showing up for work.

It is called quiet quitting.

Le quit des salon.

I was having men's mental health.

mental jazz.

Someone told him he wasn't supposed to say all that, and he was like, Oh,

Calisa.

Oh, de Bernac.

Yeah, they forgot to tell him after every sentence they told him, don't repeat this.

He

spiritually is the successor of the like Korean like Joseon dynasty scribe who inscribed, by the way, the king fell off his horse and then told me not to write it down.

So wait, oh, you're still talking about Dumont.

This is Tromblay, the mayor.

Okay, okay, sorry, sorry.

So

on 5th November, 2012, just after testifying, canceling all of his public engagements, the mayor, Gerald Tromblay, simply doesn't show up for work.

He just stops.

He's like, well, fuck it.

There is no possible way I'm bringing this back.

I'm just going to stay in my room.

Tromblay then announced that he was resigning as mayor one year before the end of his mandate.

In a speech announcing his departure, Tromblay continued to deny any direct knowledge of corruption.

How you know that you haven't hit anything prosecutorially is the mayor stops showing up to anything and resigns the next day.

Well, I'm fired.

Yeah.

Well, that's the end of me.

Tromblay continued to deny any direct knowledge of corruption within his administration.

He said, I maintain that no mayor could have brought to light an ended collusion as the anti-corruption police and the commission have succeeded in doing.

Yeah, they're the real heroes.

He said this from bed wearing a sleeping cap, refusing to leave, like the mayor and the taking of Columbia.

He said this at decreasing volume with a weird Doppler effect on it.

Like, almost like he was moving further away from me as he answered.

He broke into a run mid-sentence.

Man, that guy's doing great cardio.

I tried to follow him, but the roads were too full of potholes.

Which he dodged effortlessly due to having put all of them there.

He said, I was never willfully blind, but I was also not a police officer with the power to root out wrongdoing.

What am I, A cop?

When I was invited into the bathroom for the 16th time that evening, I just thought that like that was a normal, I thought he needed to pee a lot.

Yeah, what am I supposed to do?

Perform a citizen's arrest on this guy handing me $10,000?

It's crazy.

If you remember, just if you remember, the person being handed the money is Marcel Dumas, fundraiser.

That's right.

This is the mayor who

so far, the only He's spiritually in the bathroom.

The only thing the mayor has done in this episode, really, is get elected and then when told about the corruption, said, I don't want to hear about the corruption and walk out of the room.

Just kind of, yeah, leave.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

So he said, I was never willfully blind, but I was neither, I was also not a police officer with the power to root out wrongdoing.

Quote, I am shocked as you are by the revelations before this commission.

On Monday, this is now from

the Globe and Mail.

On Monday, he was asked about a 2004 report that identified a closed market in Montreal's construction industry and a resulting city committee charged with finding savings for the city.

At the same time, it was estimated that inflated contracts were costing Montreal conservatively $50 million a year.

Mr.

Tromblé said he learned of the situation in February 2005 at a meeting of the city's executive committee and then entrusted follow-up of this issue to Frank Zampino.

Just like, yeah, my most corrupt underling, you should take care of this.

Mr.

Tromblé then said that he never followed up with Zampino how it was going because, quote, the city was in danger of losing the FINA World Aquatic Championship as a result of funding problems, and I was focused on trying to save the event planned for that July.

I was thinking about the swimmers.

And do you think that sounds implausible?

Because I care a lot about the swimming.

I was thinking about my legacy.

They're going to call me the wettest mayor there's ever been

the Gerald Tromple Memorial swimming pool.

I just saw that in my future, and I knew in that moment I had to act.

He's not dead.

Unless it's like a threatening swimming pool where it's like, hey, yeah, we colluded to build the Gerald Trumple Memorial swimming pool.

By the way, think about how you're going to testify at the Sharp and Oak Mission.

There's a statue of you wearing the cement shoes at the bottom of the pool.

Hey, you want to check it out?

Just look at it.

It's just one way the future could go.

It's a speculative statue, you

Why did I ask my most literal underling to help

with the threat?

So

he said, I convinced the managers of FINA to give us back the Aquatic Games.

I became co-president of the organizing committee, and I had to find funding so the games could take place.

They were my entire preoccupation at the moment.

Franz Scharbernow, the judge.

Seems pretty bad.

Like, even if it's not a lie to be like, yeah, when I was mayor of a major city, I kind of got like target

on swimming.

So the judge then, again, because the judge loves to like, Justice Franz Charbonneau is like, kind of has a little bit of like a cocked eyebrow because there are a few of these moments where he's like to Joe Borsellino.

He's like, you're saying that the mafia collusion scheme that robbed the city of $50 million was the brainchild of a 30-year-old engineer.

And Joe Borsellino was like, yes, I'm saying that.

At the same time, again, Charbonneau says to Tromblé, so what I understand is that because you had a preoccupation with FINA, you simply stopped looking after the report.

Mr.

Tromblé said, yes, I was less present at City Hall.

I had the mandate of saving FINA, and I never saw a copy of this report until 2012.

I was working on my backstroke, Your Honor,

not in City Hall.

2012 is the year he testifies.

So he's like, oh, I better

read this report.

I've been putting it off for a better part of a decade.

I guess I should probably look into it.

Interesting that all the links on your sources on your dissertation say opened the day before you sent it in.

Curious.

So he also said he did not see a second report produced in 2006 by the city's internal auditor, which again pointed to the possibility of collusion and listed all the companies

under suspicion until again, 2012.

He said in his defense, Frank Zampino, the city manager, never showed him the report.

You're really relying on Frank Zampino a lot there, you know.

So all he also insists all he ever received was a seat at a Celine Dion concert offered by a provincial cabinet minister and a drinks event before a Montreal Expos came.

All right.

I mean,

that's a pretty good payoff, I think.

He said, I don't play golf and I don't go to restaurants, so I'm immune to such temptations.

I don't go to restaurants?

What is he?

One of those like COVID conscious people?

Is this not a photo of you at Joe Beef, Mr.

Mayor?

It's a little Montreal joke.

Joe Beef is so good, though.

Joe Beef is amazing.

What the fuck's a Joe Beef?

It's a restaurant.

It's like the best restaurant in Montreal is called Joe Beef.

You can suck down a big beef.

They started the bone marrow thing as them.

It's real like maximalist like 2009 food.

It's fucking great.

For November, it's Canadian St.

John.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm willing to do some excess here.

Yeah.

They also have a couple other sister restaurants in the same, in Little Burgundy, nearby,

where they are in Montreal.

It's so good.

It is really funny, by the way,

to be like, yeah, I couldn't be bribed because I don't like things.

And particularly, I don't like the things that people are typically bribed with.

And when I said that I didn't like restaurants or golf,

they kind of ran out of ideas.

know, they're like, oh, this guy is, he's the untouchable.

He's the Canadian untouchable.

I can't be bribed because all of my interests are so abstruse and like difficult to monetize that it's just like, oh, what do you, what do you want?

Like, I like watching swimming and I like not reading reports.

And I love to leave meetings.

Yeah, it's like, we're going to get you the best swimming game in town.

We were already going to do that.

Like, yes.

We'll get you a paper shredder for your reports so you don't have to read them.

I have one of my own.

Justice Charbonneau identified a dichotomy between the standards that Tromblay imposed on himself and his indifference to the behavior of others.

She said, at the same time, you have confidence in everyone around you, yet you did not bother to verify what was going on with the contracts to see what extent it was often the same bidders and who were winning them.

Another time, she said, Mr.

Tromblay, quote, could have informed any of the new city managers about the rumors of bribes at City Hall, going on to say, you should have done that.

Is it good when the judge is like, you should have done this thing you didn't do?

Yeah, that's how you know you're doing well.

Don't do what Gerard don't does.

Yeah.

But of course, this is not Tromblay's last day in court.

He testifies against Zampino in 2017 for that land deal thing and continued to be wiretapped by Project Frond years later, where one day in 2015, he was recorded calling his assistant weeping, asking to stash documents at her house.

Cool.

Does he mean documents or dollar bills?

I think he means normal documents.

I mean, at least it wasn't, it wasn't Dumont, because that guy would have been confused.

So, as conclusion, I want to go, I want to read a short excerpt for an article in 2012 in the Montreal Gazette by Henry Obin.

Michael Applebaum will serve only one short year as Montreal's interim mayor, but he has three advantages that no other mayor in living memory has had.

They can help him create an important legacy if he chooses.

His first advantage

comes from having renounced running in the next mayoral election.

This gives him more freedom of movement than past mayors.

He doesn't have to look at the polls.

The former Union Montreal member's second advantage is that as a now independent, he doesn't have to put the party's interests ahead of the public's.

This gives him more freedom of movement.

And the third advantage is that the public is more eager than it ever has been for reform.

My point is that Michael Applebaum has an opportunity to think big and help pave the way for a truly intelligent set of reform.

Why do I feel like I've just heard the 9-11 plane whoosh?

Let's put that in.

So the plane of reform.

If you want to hear us talk about Michael Applebaum, that will be on next week's premium episode.

We will see what happens with Montreal.

Yeah, you can't say that this isn't a complete story because Gerard Trumble just kind of like disappeared.

What's he doing now?

Oh, what's Gerald Trumble doing right now?

Yeah.

Not much.

He's usually not enjoying going to restaurants.

Oh, heavens.

And not enjoying golfing.

So,

so he basically just was out of public life until 2021, at which point he like kind of mayoral Virgil, Texas.

You're just seeing like cryptid sightings of him.

You're like, yeah,

is that the former mayor of Montreal?

He's still an at Montreal's Twitter header.

It's very strange.

And after being mayor, he just basically is like, well, that's the end of me forever.

And then...

He quit to spend more time with his kickbacks.

10 years later, 10 years later, he comes back and is like, starts talking about stuff like powers for municipalities.

But then people just keep asking him about the corruption.

Oh, they keep asking me about all the questions.

It turns out that if you just leave for a few years, they still remember what the questions were.

If you were Canada's most embarrassing mayor, who was not surnamed Ford,

almost.

Yeah, exactly.

If you were Canada's second most embarrassing mayor somehow,

you're not just, you're not going to get off so easily, right?

I guess maybe he was hoping that the legacy of the FINA World Aquatics games would like inure people, you know?

Yeah, that's what he wanted.

Anyway, anyway, anyway.

So Frank Zampino, Zampino,

I believe.

I feel like I've seen the end titles to Animal House.

I believe

Zampino was killed.

Frank Zampino was killed in Vietnam with like

unrelated in the end, like 2014.

It was like a car accident.

Yeah, so he got off on a technicality last decade, but then the technicality got overturned like last year.

So I think Zampino.

He got on on a technicality.

He got like back on on a technicality.

The technicality giveth and taketh away.

Yeah, Your Honor, this is a double technicality.

This is, that's kind of, I'm trying to think of other times people got back on on a technicality.

Like, like OJ getting like 20 years for drunk driving.

Like, that's, yeah.

Anyway, we've gone so long, but there was so much Montreal.

A lot of guys, you know.

That's right.

We had to find out about Michael Zamboni.

Yeah, I didn't realize how mobbed up Montreal was, but I understand now why the bagels are so flat.

It's because the mob is receiving kickbacks on them.

All right.

Well, well, thank you for listening to this absurdly long episode of No Gods, No Mayor.

Sorry about it.

As always, a blessed Tony to you and yours.

Tony's blessings to all listeners.

May Tony's blessings shine upon you and Tony's curses and Tony's curses steer you clear.

That's all.

May Tony's touch be a blessing unto you and yours this holiday season.

That's right.

The official no gods, no mayors sign-off.

May Tony's touch be a blessing to you and yours this holiday season.

We're not saying Merry Christmas because we're technically like a multi-faith podcast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we're a multi-faith podcast.

So we say, we say, may Tony's touches be Tony's touch be a blessing to you and yours.

I'm stopping my recording now.

Okay.

Bye.

See you on the bonus at the same time with Michael Applebaum.

Bye.