After 19 long days of deliberations, a mobster accused of having murdered two senior Italian organized crime officers as part of a settling of scores, has been found guilty on all counts.
• Read also: Murder of mafioso Rocco Sollecito: “He was riddled with bullets”
“Guilty,” repeated juror number 4 four times yesterday at the Gouin Judicial Services Center in Montreal.
These words thus sealed the fate of the mafia killer Dominico Scarfo. Eyes wide open, he took a long breath, as if to cash in on this verdict which will automatically earn him life in prison, without the possibility of parole for 25 years.
Scarfo, 49, was charged with the first-degree murders of Lorenzo Giordano and Rocco Sollecito, killed in March and May 2016. He was also found guilty of planning the killings with accomplices.
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Lorenzo Giordano was killed by five bullets in the head and neck, in Laval, in March 2016, in his vehicle and in front of his horrified spouse.
Giordano was an important lieutenant in the Montreal Mafia, while Sollecito had once been the most important lieutenant in the Rizzuto clan.
Agent d’infiltration
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It was with this weapon that he was killed, in the context of a war between clans of the mafia.
If Scarfo could be charged, it was thanks to a hitman who turned his back. Having become a civil undercover agent for the Sûreté du Québec, which had earned him a certain immunity, he had succeeded in obtaining incriminating statements from Scarfo.
It is this same civil agent who had led to the conviction of the cleaner of the mafia Marie-Josée Viau, for having let her shoot two men at her home in Saint-Jude, in Montérégie. She then erased all traces of the crimes.
At Scarfo’s trial, several tapes were presented to the jury, including one indicating that the defendant was allegedly paid $17,500 for the murder of Giordano, riddled with five bullets in the head and neck as he came out of a gym. The assassin then fled in a car driven by an accomplice.
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Sollecito later suffered the same fate, in broad daylight, in Laval, while driving his white BMW.
“His eyes were convulsed, there was nothing to do,” said a witness to the scene, while another said that “the time to realize what was happening [le tireur] had already fled.
According to the Crown, the two men were murdered due to a mafia clan war. These murders would have been ordered by the mobster Salvatore Scoppa, assassinated in turn in 2019.
►Scarfo’s case will return to court at the end of the month, to give the relatives of the victims time to address the court, if they so wish.