The ANNOTICO
Report
RCMP Commissioner
Giuliano Zaccardelli is
under fire because RCMP passed along raw and
inaccurate intelligence to the
Zaccardelli was from
In the 1950s, the
Zaccardellis arrived in
The labourer's son started delivering newspapers when he was 8.
During his teens, he worked in restaurants. He always liked the pictures of
Canadian police in their uniforms, ones just as red as the uniforms worn by his
beloved Montreal Canadiens. By high school, he knew
he wanted to be a Mountie.
Having read history
and philosophy didn't pay off when he tried to enter
After Loyola, he
went to the RCMP training centre in
But his quiet
ambition and commercial expertise enabled him to work in every region of the
country. In time, he rose through the ranks.
View from the
Top of the Mounties
Canada 's top police officer
worked hard to earn his rank from humble roots. But now he's at the centre of
the biggest RCMP crisis in decades, and his job is at stake
There are lots of
horses but few real Mounties hanging around the Musical Ride stables on
weekends when the tour buses in
A retired Mountie, a salty Newfoundlander with a love of horses, acts
as the guide for the tour groups visiting
There is only one
active-duty Mountie around, an officer working with
his horse in the indoor arena. He is RCMP Commissioner Giuliano
Zaccardelli, 59, a bright
and ambitious Italian immigrant who grew up in
He is now at the
centre of the biggest crisis to hit the force since the national police were
last enmeshed in security-intelligence investigations three decades ago. A
judicial commission of inquiry reported this week that his poorly trained and
inexperienced anti-terrorist investigators passed along raw and inaccurate
intelligence to the
Last summer,
Commissioner Zaccardelli was still riding high and
proud for the tourists.
He is the
quintessential Mountie, proud and steeped in RCMP
lore. In his riding gear he looks ready to lead a horse patrol through a
mountain pass in pursuit of the bad guys. But his career path has been
decidedly more urban, first as a white-collar crime investigator and then in
charge of organized crime.
In fact, Mr. Zaccardelli did not learn to ride until late in his career.
He took it up only after he was named commissioner in 2000. He felt it was
important for the image of a force that began as a paramilitary horse regiment
for its leader to be able to take a salute from the Musical Ride from a saddle
rather than the grandstand. He bought fancy tailor-made leather riding boots
for $1,064 for such occasions.
In the navy blue
business suit he sometimes wears for appearances before a House committee, he's
just another pale-faced
It's important
not to underestimate this man's pride, say people who have worked closely with
him in government. He comes from proverbially humble immigrant roots and worked
his way to the top. He's married, and has no children.
"And there
is some sorrow there," a friend said. "He's made the RCMP his entire
life. It would be tragic for him to have to leave under a cloud."
Another old
friend, retired RCMP superintendent Ben Soave, says he's never met anyone who
is so proud of his job: "Anything that tarnishes the image of the force
would hurt him tremendously."
There were
several possible candidates for the top job six years ago when then prime minister Jean Chritien was
looking for a replacement for Philip Murray, who was retiring. Mr. Murray had
been seen as a bit of a pencil-pusher, good with administrative details and
excited by managerial theories. His style was to run a decentralized operation,
but many in government felt he took that too far, that there was a breakdown in
accountability.
Mr. Chritien was not a big fan of the Mounties, with good
reason, say former Liberal government officials who were around at the time. He
had seen how relatively low-level investigators ran amok in the Airbus case,
leading to a costly legal settlement in former prime minister
Brian Mulroney's defamation suit against the government.
Mr. Chritien blamed the Mounties for security lapses that
allowed an intruder to break into
Within days, Mr. Chritien had a series of job candidates out to his cottage
in
"Aline was very impressed with the language skills and the
sensibility of Zack," said Canadian organized crime expert Antonio Nicaso, who has heard the commissioner recount the story.
Mr. Zaccardelli and Mrs. Chritien
both speak Italian, his native tongue and her third language.
On Aug. 30, 2000,
Mr. Zaccardelli was named
Mr. Zaccardelli had arrived.
By most accounts,
Mr. Zaccardelli's first year was a success. His force
became more cohesive and disciplined; his reputation as a sophisticated manager
unscathed. The force's major objectives ? organized and white-collar crime ? were
his specialties. He began devoting a lot of time to building better ties with
international police forces.
Then
came Sept. 11, 2001. Among the many things that changed after the terrorist
attacks in the
After Sept. 11,
the Mounties were thrust back in the intelligence game, big time. That's when
things began to go wrong. Years before, the RCMP had been stripped of the
responsibility of gathering intelligence on national-security matters. After a
number of scandals in the 1970s, intelligence gathering was given to the new
Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
Intelligence work
was like chess. A CSIS agent's job was to gather raw intelligence, analyze it
and choose what to pass on to other international agencies and what to pursue
at home. Once intelligence was gathered and analyzed, it was passed on to the
RCMP to pursue.
But police work
was like playing football; its officers like players rushing down the field.
What happened in
the Arar case is that the RCMP, the linebackers of
law enforcement, handed raw intelligence to the U.S. Federal Bureau of
Investigation without having it checked out by the chess players. The Arar inquiry report strongly suggests that if CSIS and its
Garry Kasparovs had been running the case, Mr. Arar would not have spent a year in a tiny and filthy
Syrian prison cell.
Commissioner Zaccardelli has always talked of holding Mounties to the
highest possible standards. "I see accountability as the cornerstone of
both a personal and organizational badge of honour,"
he once wrote, in an autobiographical speech. That sense of honour,
he said, had been shaped by "early life experiences and the values I was
called to live by as a small boy from
That village,
population 1,200, is located in one of the most sparsely populated regions of
In the 1950s, the
Zaccardellis arrived in
"If I had to
name the single most powerful effect being an Italian immigrant to
The labourer's son started delivering newspapers when he was 8.
During his teens, he worked in restaurants. He always liked the pictures of
Canadian police in their uniforms, ones just as red as the uniforms worn by his
beloved Montreal Canadiens. By high school, he knew
he wanted to be a Mountie.
Having read
history and philosophy didn't pay off when he tried to enter
"The dean of
arts suggested I go down the hall to the commerce department where he said
they'll take anyone," Mr. Zaccardelli would
recall.
After Loyola, he
went to the RCMP training centre in
Cadet Zaccardelli was an odd duck in the police academy. Very few
prospects were not Canadian-born. He was one of only a handful college
graduates. His father felt the Mounties would not accept an immigrant. The son
believed he would get in, but not necessarily rise in the ranks. "I never
thought I'd even make corporal let alone get a commission," he said years
later.
But his quiet
ambition and commercial expertise enabled him to work in every region of the
country. In time, he rose through the ranks.
A few years ago
he returned to Prezza as a celebrity. According to an
account published in the Canadian Legion Magazine of this 2002 visit, shops and
schools closed as the village welcomed Mr. Zaccardelli.
A band played the Canadian and Italian national anthems for the joyous
occasion. The altar boy who had left a half-century ago had come back as the
"Commissioner of the Red Jackets."
"It is this
place that shaped you into the person you are today and taught you to read and
write, and more importantly the family values and respect of others," the
local mayor said upon Commissioner Zaccarelli's
return.
His Italian
heritage is a big part of his personality, says Liberal MP Maurizio Bevilacqua, an old friend.
Italian criminals
could expect far worse treatment from Zack because of where they were from,
says another friend, former
And values are a
staple of the commissioner's speeches, which he usually writes himself.
"At the RCMP, we don't want to only pay lip service to values
? we know them, we live them, and when they are
violated there are consequences," he has said. "I believe that law enforcement ? perhaps more than any
other area of public service ? has a higher calling to
be accountable."
Mr. Zaccardelli added: "We exercise tremendous power, able
to deprive individuals of freedom and property. We have no choice but to
operate in a transparent, open and accountable manner."
His old friend,
Mr. Soave, gives him high marks for trying to make the force more transparent.
"The force
has gone back and forth on this. It used to be, 'Don't talk to the media.' Then
it was everybody talking to the media. People were doing it without training
and mistakes were made."
The RCMP is one
of the biggest, most complex law-enforcement organizations in the world.
Commissioner Zaccardelli has pointed out that the
19th-century version of the force once consisted of 300 officers preoccupied
with stopping "whisky-toting claim jumpers and horse thievery."
Today, more than 21,000 people work for the RCMP, which sprawls from the
Atlantic to the Pacific to the
On any given day,
any given Mountie might find himself arresting a
drunk in a remote community, or handing out traffic tickets on B.C.'s Lower
Mainland, or doing a forensic analysis of complex financial crimes in one of
Canada's largest cities, or dealing with international forces on child
pornography. The force's leaders have to be versed in a mind-boggling array of
statutes, techniques, regions and methods.
Mr. Zaccardelli is a stickler for solid investigative work and
once got testy when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation indicted hockey
impresario Alan Eagleson. It took the RCMP two more
years to lay charges in
Mr. Zaccardelli, then deputy commissioner, hated that
perception. "This illusion has been created that the Americans did this
great investigation and that the Mounted Police did nothing," he said at
the time. "With all due respect to the American authorities, they don't
have one shred of evidence.
He explained:
"The only evidence that the Americans had and used at the grand jury was
100 per cent what we provided from our investigation."
As deputy
commissioner, Mr. Zaccardelli was in charge of the RCMP's organized-crime investigations. This was a coup for
him because organized crime was the big issue of the day. With an eye on the
top job, he began using his post as a platform for the theories that would
become his mantra: All crime ties back to organized crime, which is by nature
transnational. "There are no more borders," he told a newspaper.
"That means policing must have no borders."
In December,
1999, Algerian Ahmed Ressam was caught by
After Mr. Ressam's arrest, police on both sides of the border
discovered there was a whole group in
Within days of
the Algerian's arrest, the Mountie travelled to the
It was still
about two years before Sept. 11, when the terrorist attacks would throw the
Mounties into disarray. Two years before sloppy police work would lead to Mr. Arar's torture, a judicial inquiry and the damning report
that threatens Mr. Zaccardelli's tenure at the top.
Political masters liked what they saw in Mr. Zaccardelli
when he was deputy commissioner. In the late 1990s, there existed a perception
that the RCMP had drifted off-course and he could steer things back in the
right direction.
Mr. Zaccardelli was disciplined and would be sure to know how
to take charge. He would bring in smart people. He would modernize the RCMP. He
would restore accountability. And his background made him perfect for the trend
of international co-operation.
In his five years
at the top, Commissioner Zaccardelli has acquired
many admirers in the international law-enforcement community. The FBI liaison
officers in
But he has also
made a few enemies, including Shirley Heafey, the
former chair of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission. She says Mr. Zaccardelli made her job impossible, withholding
information that she said was vital to her investigations of police conduct.
That secrecy has
been the other side of Mr. Zaccardelli and the police
force he leads. While he says police have to live up to high standards, he has
also stated he has never very much liked "the cult of accountability"
that has led the public to lose faith in police.
"This change
has been fed by a scandal-mongering media, the immediate availability of facts
without interpretation or analysis as a result of Internet," he said. The
results, according to Mr. Zaccardelli, is a lot of
time and money is spent scrutinizing police, officer morale takes a hit, and
detectives become averse to risk for fear of generating a bad headline.
Secrecy is a huge
part of the RCMP culture. After four Mounties were killed by a lone, crazed
gunman in 2005, one high-ranking Alberta Mountie gave
a speech that is still making rounds among the Mounties via e-mail. He
cautioned colleagues that publicly second-guessing the force was unforgivable.
"After we
lost our four members in March of this year, even a veteran of the RCMP added
his voice to the cold and timid voices who so eagerly wanted to point their
fingers at others as the cause of this loss.
"Their
conduct and their words will never be forgotten or forgiven."
Like many of his
colleagues, Commissioner Zaccardelli has sometimes
made a career of being bland. "How can you pick Zack out of a room full of
Mounties? He's the stiff, watchful one," he once quipped in a speech.
Being stiff has
its advantages. Often Commissioner Zaccardelli's red
coat appears to have been made of Teflon. And he has proven highly adept at
riding out crises over the years.
Mr. Zaccardelli has weathered maybe a dozen storms during his
five years at the helm. He has been accused of being extravagant by buying a
jet for work use and for his hospitality expenses, of being slow to implement
guidelines for riot squads on the use of non-lethal force. And some think he's
been too close to the Liberals.
In fact, many
Liberal politicians can hardly utter his name without spitting. They say he is
partly to blame for Paul Martin's loss of the last election. In the middle of
the campaign, with the Liberals fighting to shake off the political effects of
the sponsorship scandal, Mr. Zaccardelli dropped a
bombshell in the form of a letter to an NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis.
It said the RCMP had opened an investigation into her complaint of a possible
criminal leak of insider information about income trusts from then finance minister Ralph Goodale's office to
Mr. Zaccardelli's friends in the law-enforcement community say
he faced a Hobson's choice: If he hadn't disclosed the investigation in a
timely fashion he could have been accused of withholding information to favour the Liberals in the campaign.
With his own
career now under fire, Mr. Zaccardelli does not have
many champions of his cause on Parliament Hill. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and other ministers have not come to his defence, saying they will not be making any precipitous
decisions on RCMP personnel.
Mr. Zaccardelli may have one more chance to explain what went
wrong if he appears before a parliamentary committee. MPs want to see whether
he's tough enough to publicly finger the culprits within his force in the Arar affair, and hand them walking papers.
The inquiry found
that Mr. Arar was the victim of inaccurate RCMP
intelligence reports and deliberate smears of his reputation. Mounties ignored
their own policies ? policies
intended to protect Canadian citizens from injustice ? to
help their
Just several
months ago the RCMP scored one of its greatest national-security triumphs with
the arrests of 17 terrorism suspects in the
To some it looks
like Mr. Zaccardelli has regained management control.
But the question of his future really hangs on the force's behaviour
in the frantic period after Sept. 11, 2001, when the force strayed back into
dangerous territory and the man brought in to impose discipline apparently
failed to do so.