| Leonardo "Dino la Terreur" Paccione |
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| Leonardo Paccione, who would later receive the nickname of "Dino la Terreur," was born in the mid 1940s. During his youth, Paccione became associated with members of the Montreal Mafia and even helped Frank Cotroni's crew dig a tunnel under a bank. Paccione's life was forever changed on March 4, 1967. As he made his escape from an armed robbery in Laval, a police officer opened fire, striking him in the vertebrale column. The incident left Paccione with permanent spinal cord injuries and confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Despite being paralyzed, he did not leave "the life" behind him. Instead, Paccione became a go-between for high ranking mobsters and members of the West End Gang. |
In 1984, Paccione was arrested and charged with being in possession of narcotics with intent to traffic. He was convicted and fined $1,500. At the Notre-Dame-de-la-Merci hospital in Ahuntsic, where he lived since the late 1960s, Paccione ruled with an iron fist. Over years, through the use of intimidation, threats, and assaults, he maintained a veritable strangle hold over the medical centre of about 800 employees and 375 patients. One staff member that Paccione reportedly despised was viciously attacked with a hammer as she entered her residence in 1989. Another claimed to see one of Paccione's friends follow him closely in a van as he rode his motorcycle. By the summer of 1990, the hospital staff had had enough of the threats. They filed a complaint with authorities, who then charged Paccione with over a dozen charges of assaulting and threatening to cause bodily harm to Notre-Dame-de-la Merci employees. During the trial, several employees burst into tears when they recounted their experiences with Paccione. Others refused to take the stand all together. Paccione, witnesses said, would occasionally strike his wheelchair into people and proclaimed how that it was for him to find out employees' home addresses, if he wanted to. Paccione was convicted on April 23, 1992. Sentencing was delayed for over a year, since Quebec's prisons were not equiped to handle a prisoner confined to a wheelchair. Finally, on May 4, 1993, Judge John D'Arcy Asselin sentenced Paccione to four months in prison. Dino Paccione, his brother Natalino, and underlings Nicola "Nick" Foresta, Gabriele Taddeo, and Érik "Stone" Légaré were arrested on loansharking charges on April 7, 2000. According to police, the group worked out of the Le Yacht Club bar on Jean-Talon East, lending people money for 5% interest a week. The bust came after one of Paccione's loansharking clients, whose initial loan of $5,000 had inflated to $18,000 because of the high interest rate, was paid a visit and threatened by Taddeo and Légaré. The man, who had already gave the crew $14,000 in interest payments over a ten month period, became frightened and complained to police about the intimidation. |