Gangster pleads guilty to murder of former Bonanno boss in Canada during power struggle

Gangster pleads guilty to murder of former Bonanno boss in Canada during power struggle

  July 07, 2015    Dapper_Don

---

Raynald Desjardins has pleaded guilty to taking part in a conspiracy to murder Mafia boss Salvatore Montagna.
The 61-year-old Desjardins entered the plea on Monday, said Jean-Pascal Boucher, a spokesperson for the Directeur des poursuites criminelles et pénales, the office that represents Quebec’s prosecutors.
The plea means Desjardins will avoid what was expected to be a lengthy first-degree murder trial. Through his lawyer, Marc Labelle, Desjardins had filed a series of motions challenging several aspects of the case brought against him. The motions were in the process of being heard, before Superior Court Justice Michael Stober, at the Laval courthouse when Desjardins’s plea put an abrupt end to the case against him.
Boucher said a sentence hearing will be held on Dec. 21 before Superior Court Justice André Vincent.
Seven other men are charged in the same case but an unusual publication ban currently prevents the publication of their names. One of Desjardins’s motions involved a request for a separate trial. Six of the other men face charges of first-degree murder and a conspiracy charge and one man is charged with being an accessory after the murder.
‎Reached by phone, Desjardins’s lawyer, Marc Labelle said very little was said during the brief hearing on Monday. This is because very few details of the investigation can be made public, due to the upcoming jury trial of the co-accused.
The trial is scheduled to begin in January.
Desjardins was known to be an associate of Vito Rizzuto, the now deceased Mafia boss whose organization faced a crisis in 2011 while Rizzuto was jailed in the U.S. But Desjardins was also a known associate of some of the people who challenged the Rizzuto organization while its leader was absent.
Montagna, a dual citizen of Canada and Italy, was the leader of a Mafia clan based in New York before he was removed from the U.S., in 2009, because of his criminal record. He was killed on Nov. 24, 2011 after having been shot inside a home on Île aux Trésors, a small island east of Montreal in Charlemagne. Just two months earlier, a lone gunman using an AK47 had tried to kill Desjardins.

http://montrealgazette.com/news/raynald-desjardins-pleads-guilty-to-murder-conspiracy