The RCMP called
it "one of the most important police operations in the history of
So what did
Italians in
By nightfall,
there was still no mention of the raids on the website of Corriere
Canadese,
At Cafe Italia, a
brushoff: "I'm watching it on TV like anyone -
no one's talking about it here," the man on the phone said.
At Cafe Sportif Colosseo, a similar
reply: "What are you asking me for? How should I know?"
And at Elio's Pizzeria, the owner said: "I'm 73 years old and
I still work 100 hours a week. I'm too busy for this."
But from a
"I just got
off the phone with this lady from the Journal de Montreal, and basically she
was asking for the reaction of the community," said Tony Sciascia, president of the congress's
"I've been
in the office since the morning and I haven't seen any reaction from the
community," said Sciascia, 59, a commercial
lawyer in Little Italy.
His caution:
Don't use the arrests to attack the Italian community with old stereotypes.
"If there
are charges that are brought, we'll have to wait and see what happens," he
said. "These are things that happen in every community. You can't
generalize, because the Italian community, usually, is honest-working people
who have contributed tremendously to
As for the
suspects, "this element represents perhaps 0.00001 per cent of the
community," Sciascia said - a tiny fraction of
the 224,460 Montrealers who said they were of Italian
ethnic origin in the 2001 federal census.
As in the case of
former Liberal MP Alfonso Gagliano, "it's the old stereotype that keeps
coming up - we have to be careful," Sciascia
said. "We have many respectable people in the community. We have
professionals, bank presidents - we have them all over the place. It's not
because you have certain people that do certain things that we should throw mud
at the rest of the 300,000 people (of Italian origin) who live here in
"You've got
to be very careful to distinguish - OK?"