When he arrives at Duty, when sitting down at his desk, journalist Jean-Pierre Charbonneau puts his gun next to him. Pistols, he has two. A big magnum, “a .38”, as he says. And a smaller, lighter, more discreet one. A weapon still capable of sending, with great velocity, untimely .22 caliber projectiles.
After being shot in the arm in the middle of the newsroom of the Duty, Charbonneau spent three weeks in the hospital. Three bullets were fired at him, almost point-blank. The attacker, a young man with a past as a mafioso, his face partly hidden by glasses, left the scene running, through a service door, without asking for his rest. The scene lasted less than a minute. Fifty years later, Jean-Pierre Charbonneau recalls, in an interview with Dutythe attack that targeted him on Tuesday 1er May 1973.
As a young journalist, Charbonneau had made the world of gangsters, after studying criminology, his specialty. Why did we try to kill him? He disturbed. Quite simply.
The duty to disturb
“I think real journalism is still disturbing. Investigative or combat journalism, that type of journalism, will always be at risk. Its actors will always be in a situation of vulnerability. And this journalism, we need it! We need these journalists who work for days, weeks, months, who take risks to get to the bottom of things, to analyze them. It is not the social networks that do and will do this work! »
At the Montreal courthouse, some time before the attack, Charbonneau had seen Frank Cotroni, a mafia capo, approach him, well surrounded by his henchmen. Cotroni had given up, while looking down on him: “Charbonneau, is that you? »
“That’s the only warning I got!” Basically, it meant: “We’re watching you, Charbonneau.” Frank Cotroni, he said, was a rebellious character, “much like the character of Sonny in the first film of the series The Godfather “. Santiago Corleone, known as Sonny, a fictional character, was certainly not shy, nor was this Cotroni. “Frank Cotroni, like Sonny, was drooling, rebellious, with a puzzling temperament. It was the arm guy, as they say. He spawned with the stars and the journalistic milieu. Me, I wrote a lot of articles on the Cotroni…”
carrion
At the time, the simple fact of being able to speak of Frank Cotroni as one of the leaders of the Montreal mafia was not self-evident. Quite the contrary.
“Cotroni had even sued the magazine Maclean’s for a million dollars because he had been identified as the head of the main underworld organization! recalls Jean-Pierre Charbonneau.
The work and hearings of a huge Commission of Inquiry into Organized Crime, the CECO, have finally revealed that Cotroni was one of the key figures of this criminal organization.
Thanks to the CECO, the public learns, day after day, what organized crime is plotting behind its back, in defiance of collective interests. The hearings are followed with passion by the public. The revelations multiply.
How not to have a retching in front of all these mafiosi who, for years, orchestrate for example a vast market of spoiled meat? People are amazed to learn that huge amounts of unfit meat have nevertheless been sold to them at high prices. Thousands of tons of carrion were sold for human consumption during Expo 67. How long was that? Meat, in truth, is just one tip of a huge iceberg. Drugs, gambling, political financing, prostitution, you name it. These stories dampen public trust in institutions.
Before and after
For Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, there is a before and an after the attack. “If the killer hadn’t missed me, I would never have been a Member of Parliament, or Speaker of the House, I would not have gone to Africa and many other things. I often think about it. And I don’t think about it anymore now that it’s been 50 years…”
What exactly happened? On the evening of 1er May 1973, the Montreal Canadiens play the second game of the Stanley Cup Final. Jean-Pierre Charbonneau has already submitted his article of the day. At the request of the editorial staff, he remained at the newspaper to help a colleague at the time of collecting the reactions of the police, on the sidelines of the traditional workers’ demonstrations of the 1er may. In the meantime, Charbonneau follows the hockey game…
At 9:20 p.m., a comrade told him that he was wanted at the door of the newspaper. “Jean-Pierre, there is someone for you at the entrance. Charbonneau will see. In the crack of the door, the individual who comes to him points a weapon and orders him not to move. He shoots. Missed. The surprise effect is great.
“He fired a second shot. I saw a jet of flame coming out of the barrel. I had done judo. I dived, kind of rolling towards filing cabinets. He fired again. Again failed. »
A single bullet, the second, hit him in the arm. In short, death is over. And Charbonneau dodged it.
Under the effect of adrenaline, the 23-year-old journalist does not immediately feel pain in his arm. “I didn’t want to pass out. I didn’t pass out. His colleagues lead him to the side of the newspaper’s management, waiting for the police and the ambulance to arrive. The secretary of Claude Ryan, the director, is very upset. Jean-Pierre Charbonneau takes the phone himself to contact his companion. A few minutes later, an ambulance drove him from the premises of the Duty to Saint-Luc Hospital.
The next day, all the media are talking about this attack perpetrated against one of the journalists of the Duty. On the cover of the May 2 edition of Duty, the story naturally takes up most of the space. Under this headline, readers can read an account of the protests from 1er May and see a photo of the statue of Maurice Duplessis, stored for twelve years in a basement of the police offices of the Sûreté du Québec. But all attention is focused on the attack on Jean-Pierre Charbonneau.
Who wanted to kill a journalist from Duty ? His name is Tony Mucci. He will claim that he acted alone, that no one asked him anything. According to him, he would have landed like that, for nothing. On a whim, he says… When Charbonneau identifies him, he has become the bodyguard of Paolo Violi, one of the figures of the Cotroni clan.
“I never held a grudge against this guy,” says Charbonneau. The essential, for him, was elsewhere. We had to continue the investigative work and find ways to reform society. “I was 23 years old. What did they believe? That I was going to stop? »
However, Jean-Pierre Charbonneau regrets not having received any help. “Overnight, I had to go back to the Duty. The concept of post-traumatic shock hardly existed at the time. »
He did not live without fear. “I was always wondering if someone was going to shoot me again, if my car was going to explode…I thought, without thinking too much, if I had a gun on me, I could defend myself… In fact, it was above all a way of managing my stress. It wasn’t a good idea. But that’s the one I got! He will also be, for a time, under police surveillance.
Montreal, at that time, still looked a bit like the Far West. “When I arrived at the newspaper, when I put my gun on my desk, it always made a strong impression on my colleagues,” recalls Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, laughing.