13-06-2025
Project Alliance: Hit man may have played a role in all 6 murders behind Montreal Mob arrests this week
Montreal Crime
By
When the 11 people arrested Thursday in Project Alliance, including alleged Montreal Mafia leaders Leonardo Rizzuto, 56, and Stefano Sollecito, 57, appeared in court, they were charged with a total of six counts of first-degree murder.
The homicides happened over a decade, and it appears that Frédérick Silva, a hit man who turned informant three years ago, had a role in all of them.
Lorenzo LoPresti, Oct. 24, 2011: LoPresti was the son of Giuseppe (Joe) LoPresti, who was close to Leonardo Rizzuto's father, Vito, until LoPresti was killed in 1992 in a homicide that remains unsolved to this day. Both families lived on Antoine Berthelet Ave. in northern Montreal, and Lorenzo LoPresti attended the same high school in St-Laurent as Leonardo's sister.
Throughout 2011, a coalition that tried to take control of the Montreal Mafia from the Rizzuto organization came under attack, and Lorenzo LoPresti was shot on Oct. 24 while standing on the balcony of his condo on Côte Vertu Blvd.
Weeks after LoPresti was killed, Antonio (Tony Suzuki) Pietrantonio was wounded in a shooting on Dec. 13, 2011, near the entrance of a Portuguese restaurant in a strip mall on Jarry St. E. near Chambord St.
At the time, police sources told The Gazette that it appeared LoPresti was acting as Pietrantonio's right-hand man while Pietrantonio was one of the leaders of the group that sought to replace the Rizzuto organization at the helm of the Montreal Mafia.
On Thursday, Leonardo Rizzuto and six other men were charged with the first-degree murder of Lorenzo LoPresti and with plotting with Silva to murder Pietrantonio.
Domenico Facchini, Dec. 21, 2012: Facchini, 37, was killed and Vito D'Orazio was injured after they were shot inside a building tied to Giuseppe (Ponytail) De Vito who, at the time, was serving a lengthy prison sentence for smuggling cocaine through Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.
De Vito had acted as a leader of several airport employees who were part of what was called 'the door' that let cocaine into Montreal. De Vito came to hate the Rizzuto organization because he felt its members lied to him about the quantities of cocaine they were bringing in and thereby holding back on his share in their arrangement.
De Vito became part of the coalition that wanted to take over the Montreal Mafia, but on July 8, 2013, he was found dead in his cell in the federal penitentiary near Quebec City. A coroner later determined that De Vito died of cyanide poisoning.
On Thursday, three men were charged with Facchini's murder and the attempted murder of D'Orazio. One of the accused, Jean-Ismel Zephir, 48, is the brother of Emmanuel Zephir, a notorious street gang leader. In 2022, Sébastien Giroux, who had just pleaded guilty to helping Silva hide from the police for months, was ordered to not associate with known criminals while he was awaiting his sentence. Giroux agreed to follow the order, but he asked for special permission to allow him to communicate with the Zephir brothers.
The other two men charged with the murder and attempted murder are Gianpietro (JP) Tiberio, 52, a convicted criminal identified during the Charbonneau Commission as an associate of the Rizzuto organization, and Patrick Gilbert, 51, of Anjou, who has a lengthy criminal record.
Vincent Lamer, Nov. 3, 2017: During Quebec's biker gang war, a conflict that stretched from 1994 to 2002, Lamer appeared to be a very willing participant in the violence that resulted in more than 160 deaths. Lamer started as a member of the Rowdy Crew, a Hells Angels support club at the time, before he switched to another support club called the Rockers in 2000. Being part of the Rockers brought Lamer directly under Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher and his efforts to monopolize drug trafficking in Montreal.
During an investigation dubbed Operation Springtime 2001, police managed to secretly record meetings held by the Rockers and during one in April 2000, Lamer told the other gang members that they could skip the gang's eight-month probation period if they killed a rival drug dealer.
Lamer ended up with a 10-year prison term when he was sentenced as a result of charges filed against him in Operation Springtime 2001.
Lamer was shot several times while he was inside his sport utility vehicle as he was driving away from a maintenance company where he worked on 55th Ave. in Rivière des Prairies.
Jean-Richard Larivière, 57, a longtime member of the Hells Angels and a member of the Rockers when Lamer was also a member, was charged on Thursday with the first-degree murder of Lamer. He is also charged with conspiring to kill Lamer along with Samy Tamouro, a man tied to the Hells Angels in Quebec who was killed in Mexico near the end of 2023.
Sébastien Beauchamp, Dec. 20, 2018: During 2022, Silva underwent a lengthy trial for the murder of Beauchamp who, like Lamer, was a former member of the Rockers during Quebec's biker gang war.
The hit on Beauchamp was a messy affair. Silva chased Beauchamp around a gas station in St-Léonard on Langelier Blvd., near Robert Blvd. He recklessly fired off several shots and a stray bullet ended up lodged in a gas pump.
Beauchamp's murder is one of the reasons why Silva is now serving four life sentences.
Larivière is charged with Beauchamp's murder, a sign that he allegedly asked Silva to kill him.
Earlier the same year, on Jan. 24, 2018, Jean-Guy Bourgouin, another former member of the Rockers, was shot outside a restaurant in St-Léonard. It appears that Larivière allegedly ordered that shooting, too, as he was charged with the attempted murder on Thursday.
In 2020, Girard Anglade, a close associate of Silva's, pleaded guilty to shooting Bourgouin. He received a six-year prison term.
Gaétan Sévigny, Oct. 17, 2019: During Project Magot-Mastiff, another investigation into Leonardo Rizzuto, Stefano Sollecito and members of the Hells Angels that resulted in arrests made in 2015, investigators learned that Sévigny was tied to the biker gang and that he was very active in drug trafficking in eastern Montreal.
On June 19, 2019, Sévigny was sentenced to a five-year prison term after he pleaded guilty to drug trafficking, conspiracy and gangsterism charges filed against him in Project Magot-Mastiff. He had only a day left to serve behind bars when he was sentenced.
Four months later, he was gunned down in front of his home in Terrebonne.
Larivière is also charged with Sévigny's murder.
Charles-Olivier Boucher-Savard, Dec. 22, 2021: Boucher-Savard was shot multiple times near Lafontaine Park a few months after he was released from a federal penitentiary. He had served two-thirds of a sentence he received for stabbing a person tied to the Luppino family, a Mafia clan based in Hamilton, Ont., in April 2018.
Pietro D'Adamo, 54, the alleged leader of a Mafia clan based in LaSalle, and Davide (Baldy) Barberio, 45, an alleged member of the Montreal Mafia who survived an attempt on his life when he was shot on Sept. 21, 2021, were charged Thursday with Boucher-Savard's murder along with three other men.
