Police snap photos at Montreal mob boss's funeral
Police took photos of funeral-goers as about 70 people attended the service for reputed Montreal mafia boss Salvatore Montagna on Monday.
The ceremony for Montagna was in Italian and took place at Notre Dame de Pompei Church, in the eastern part of the city’s Ahuntsic-Cartierville borough.
Montagna's body was found along the banks of the Assomption River in Charlemagne, northeast of Montreal, on Thursday morning. He had been hit with at least one bullet.
On Sunday, people trickled into an east-end funeral home for the viewing, but police surveillance appeared minimal.
That contrasted with Monday's ceremony, at which plainclothes officers snapped photos of mourners as they entered the church.
Montagna, born in Canada and raised in Sicily, once ruled New York state's Bonnano crime family, according to the FBI, before he was deported to Canada in 2009 following a minor criminal conviction. Because he was a Canadian citizen, the government could not block his entry in the country.
He was seen as a possible contender to take the reins of the Montreal Mafia as head of the Rizzuto mob family. The Rizzutos have been crushed over the last two years by the November 2010 fatal shooting of patriarch Nicolo and the slaying in December 2009 of his grandson Nick Jr. Vito Rizzuto, who the RCMP considered the godfather of the Montreal mob, has been in a Colorado prison since 2007.
Montagna, 40, was married and had three daughters. His death is just the latest in a series of Mafia-related killings and disappearances in Montreal.