Montreal's Irish "Mafia"

I blogged about this book before, but I'm plugging it again today because tomorrow is Saint Paddy's Day. Okay, so it may not seem like the best way to celebrate everything Irish, but if like me you like to know the darker side of a culture and love true crime history, this is one you cannot miss: Montreal's Irish Mafia. It's like reading an epic crime novel, except you know it's not fiction. But talking of fiction, it really is a great source of inspiration for crime fiction. We often forget that organised crime is not always Italian. Every year on Saint Patrick's Day, I take it out and I read a few pages.

Irish crimes

Because of St Paddy's Day yesterday, which I could not celebrate fully, I decided to give my readers a bit of reading suggestion. Not Irish literature, but literature about Irish people: Montreal's Irish Mafia. Under the title: The true story of the infamous West End Gang. I blogged about it before, but then I had not read it. Since then, I did. And I can tell you it is an amazing book, maybe my favourite book about Montreal's crime history. In spite of its title, it's not so much about the Irish mafia, which never formally existed in Montreal anyway (one of the big ironies about it), as it is about Montreal's organized and sometimes disorganized crime, through its Irish criminal elements. But it goes beyond the Irish community to show Montreal crime life through its various gangs and national groups, marked by their alliances, tensions and sometimes wars. The motto of the city is Concordia Salus, which means Salvation through Harmony. This book shows the dark, ironic twist of the motto. Montreal's Irish Mafia is an epic, true crime saga that has enough material for a few crime novels.

Santa Claus is a bank robber

The title is freely inspired from the title of this French movie, which ironically enough I haven't seen. Anyway, it is Christmas in less than a month, so I decided to blog on a little anecdote about Montreal's crime history I read recently in Montreal's Irish Mafia. I mentioned the book here, but only started reading it this month. And it reads like a crime fiction. A fascinating, epic, sinister crime novel. But it is history. There are a few chapters on bank robberies, as Montreal was considered once the bank robbery capital of North America, no less. You probably have seen this scene in many movies and TV series, where a man disguised as Santa Claus, or a bunch of them, armed with machine guns and other heavy firearms and rob a bank. Well, between 1961 and 1962, there was a real bank robber using this very modus operandi. His name was Georges Marcotte and he used to walk in banks wearing his Santa Claus disguise, being all cheerful like a real Santa impersonator would be, using this apparently harmless persona to surprise both clients and personnel and do his evil deed. His bank robberies sadly ended up in blood, as he murdered two police officers. I found very little baout him on Google, except this article. I thought about him as Christmas is coming and because the evil Santa is now almost a cliché in action, horror or comedy movies set during Christmastime. Well, my city had a real one once.

Montreal's Irish Mafia

The title of this post is also the title of this book. Written by the journalist D'Arcy O'Connor and Miranda O'Connor. It is a little known book of an often forgotten but important part of Montreal's crime history: the contribution to crime in general and organised crime in particular of the Irish community. I am not reading it just yet, as I read many books at the same time and still reading another crime history book. But I am eager to read this one, to further my (amateur) knowledge of crime history and learn more about our Irish community, even though it is its darker (and even bloody) side.

Crime history is also, as I mentioned (again) here, a source of inspiration for crime fiction. The Italian mafia has been maybe not quite done to death, but certainly used too often (I am not the only one thinking it). In Montreal, the mafia has been widely featured, in our TV series especially. Yet it is the Irish mob that traditionally controls the port of Montreal. Reading real crime stories, I wish some of them could make their way into fiction.