A few hours before being arrested in Montreal in February 2019, the hitman Frédérick Silva consulted remotely, with the help of a cell phone, a GPS beacon installed under the car of the chieftain of the mafia Salvatore Scoppa .
This is revealed by evidence filed by the prosecution two weeks ago, but which was covered by a publication ban until Wednesday.
Frédérick Silva, 40, had already tried to kill Salvatore Scoppa at the exit of a restaurant in Terrebonne in February 2017, but he only managed to wound the head of the mafia.
Scoppa was finally murdered by another killer, in front of dozens of witnesses, including children, in the lobby of a Laval hotel in May 2019.
Frédérick Silva was accused of the attempted murder of Salvatore Scoppa, which occurred in Terrebonne in February 2017, and of the assassinations of Alessandro Vinci, Yvon Marchand and Sébastien Beauchamp, committed in the fall of 2018.
But two weeks ago, after almost two months of trial, Silva ended it by saying that the prosecution had presented probative evidence for each of the counts against him.
This twist came when an investigating witness from the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) was preparing to list everything that had been found in the condo at 71, rue Duke, in Montreal, where Silva was located. was on the loose and where he was arrested after two years on the run.
Contact name: camnoir
Cell phones were notably found by investigators in the condo. The analysis of these allowed them to make several links and to strengthen their evidence on the four crimes of which Silva was accused.
Thus, one of the devices found was used on February 22, 2019 – the day of Silva’s arrest – to interrogate a GPS beacon installed under Salvatore Scoppa’s car a month earlier.
The name Silva had entered for the contact associated with this GPS device was black, which corresponds to the black armored Toyota Camry that Scoppa was driving.
Calls or messages made on seized phones also passed through communication towers located near the scene of the Vinci, Marchand and Beauchamp murders on the day of the crimes. Each time, these phones left the area around 71 Duke Street before the murders and returned after the crimes.
He calls a taxi
After Beauchamp’s assassination on December 20, 2018, Silva used a mobile app to reach a taxi company and asked to be driven to 71 Duke Street. Noting his mistake, he called the company and asked to be taken to another address. Silva, who was using the name Michael Vincinni at the time, identified himself as Mike. But the conversation with the taxi company was recorded and kept, and an investigator recognized Frederick Silva’s voice.
The same cell phone found in the condo passed through the communication towers located near the places where Marchand and Beauchamp were killed, on the day of each of the murders.
The police also discovered at Silva a GPS beacon of the same make and model as the beacons found under the vehicles of Scoppa and Beauchamp.
The beacon under Beauchamp’s vehicle was installed on December 17 (three days before his assassination) and interrogated several times on the day of the murder by one of the cell phones found at 71 Duke Street.
The evidence shows that after the murders of Marchand and Beauchamp, Silva researched these events on the internet.
Beauchamp stalked
Silva and an accomplice, Giovanni Presta Jr., used a rented Chevrolet Malibu on the day of Beauchamp’s murder. The police located the car and analyzed its GPS. The analysis shows that the vehicle would have been used to track Beauchamp in the days preceding the murder and that the tracking ceased after the crime.
The weapon abandoned in Alessandro Vinci’s office and one of the three weapons left at the scene of Sébastien Beauchamp’s murder come from the same batch of four weapons acquired in North Carolina in May 2018.
All the weapons used in the three murders were fitted with a handcrafted silencer like those discovered at Giovanni Presta’s house.
His DNA in a mask
According to witnesses, Frédérick Silva was wearing an elderly person’s mask when he killed Sébastien Beauchamp. At Silva’s house, police found an elderly mask containing one of her hair and DNA.
The sleuths also seized a shoulder bag, backpack, coat and gloves containing gunshot residue and Silva’s DNA, and glasses and shoes similar to those he wore during of certain murders.
Life imprisonment
Frédérick Silva acknowledged all these elements presented by the prosecution, but did not admit his guilt, because he wants to retain the right to appeal decisions rendered by Judge Marc David, of the Superior Court, before the trial.
He will be found guilty by the judge on all four counts of attempted murder and murder at the end of January.
Judge David told Silva on Wednesday that he should sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years.
He spoke of the sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole before 40 years pronounced against Alexandre Bissonnette, author of several murders at the Great Mosque of Quebec, then quashed by the Court of Appeal.
The judge clarified that he could not make such a decision under the current state of the law.
To reach Daniel Renaud, dial 514 285-7000, extension 4918, write to [email protected] or write to the postal address of Press.