On the morning they were arrested for allegedly burning bodies as part of a series of Mafia murders, Marie-Josée Viau and Guy Dion had already finished breakfast and packed their daughter off to elementary school. A hand-drawn Mother’s Day card hung on the fridge next to family photographs. Viau, 44, didn’t have to go to her shift at the roadside poutine restaurant until later that day, so she tried baking something new: blueberry phyllo puffs. The pastries were still on the stove top when police arrived at 9:56 a.m. on October 16, 2019.
“We’re normal people,” Viau swore to the arresting officers, through her tears, after she and her husband were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder. “We didn’t kill anyone.”
Undercover recordings made by investigators told a different tale. The interception division of the Sûreté du Québec had secretly taped Viau and Dion speaking about how they’d disposed of bodies for members of the Calabrian Mafia. By their own admission, they’d incinerated corpses in their yard in a bonfire. “We did what we could with what we had,” she explained, when police questioned her about the cremations.
“But setting the bodies on fire?” a sergeant detective asked. “Was that [idea] from Guy, as he’s a fireman?”
Guy Dion was the tall, burly, 48-year-old fire chief of their small Quebec township. To make ends meet, he moonlighted for a paving company and refereed minor-league hockey games. His wife, Viau, worked as a cook and cashier at a fast-food chain called La Belle Province. Yearning for a way out of that dead-end job, she’d been taking online courses in business administration and freelancing as a building inspector. She had a hard face with sharp eyes and hair as long, dark, and wild as Dion’s was short, thin, and graying. The two lived in the countryside beyond Montreal, in the farming community of Saint-Jude (population 1,326), a village named after the patron saint of desperate cases. That’s precisely the higher power the couple needed when a dozen law enforcement vehicles converged on the property.
Before being taken away in an unmarked cruiser, a visibly shaking Viau requested a moment to switch outfits. She also wanted to know what would happen to their daughter when she got home from school. Officers informed her that childcare procedures were already under way. Outside the front window, the fall foliage had started changing color. The couple’s lawn, shrouded in dead leaves, was cordoned off with police tape. One maple tree stood out from the others, so red and orange that it seemed covered in flames.
The mayor of Saint-Jude told reporters that he fell off his chair when he learned that two seemingly upstanding locals had been accused of such nightmarish undertakings: “It shows you never really know people you think you know.”
Like real-life characters from Fargo, Viau and Dion had gotten all mixed up with killers for hire. What prosecutors wanted to know was: Were the husband and wife merely rubes who’d been duped into participating in the gruesome homicides—or had they cooperated knowingly and willingly? Seeking teeth, bone fragments, and other traces of the victims, investigators started combing through their yard, their garage, and the quiet stream across the street.
Three and a half years earlier, on May 27, 2016, Rocco “Sauce” Sollecito got into his BMW for the very last time. The 67-year-old director of operations for Montreal’s Sicilian Mafia drove through the parking lot of his luxury condo complex, wads of hundreds bulging in his pockets. The Chopard on his wrist caught the morning light, showing exactly 8:30.
From across the street, a lookout on a motorcycle tracked the BMW. His helmet’s dark visor shielded his face. When he saw consigliere Sollecito steering onto the boulevard, the man on the speed bike raced ahead, cuing other members of his crew to get into position. A black Acura then sliced in front of the BMW. At the next stop sign, the Acura braked to a full halt, blocking the way for several seconds, long enough for Sollecito to notice a man with a motorcycle helmet at the bus shelter to his right. The man pulled out a 9-mm Taurus handgun.
Sollecito didn’t try to escape. He didn’t ram the Acura. He simply watched as the man approached and began firing through the passenger side window. “I emptied the loading clip into him,” the gunman later recounted. “He ate it all.” One of the nine hollow-point bullets ripped Sollecito’s heart apart, killing him.
The Acura veered off while the assassin fled around the corner to join the motorcyclist who’d sped by a minute earlier. He jumped onto the bike’s back seat, and the two men headed into the crisp spring air. By the time police and paramedics arrived, the culprits had evaporated.
“It’s not complicated. It’s a Mob hit,” a police spokesperson said in the aftermath. It was clinical: no DNA, no usable clues. But Sollecito was a highly symbolic casualty in the war between Montreal’s Sicilian mafiosi and their Calabrian counterparts. The Calis, as the city’s Calabrese crooks called themselves, were suddenly poised to seize control of a vast underworld operation connected to New York, Latin America, and the old country.
Whoever killed Sollecito would be sure to gain the respect of ‘Ndrangheta: “The most extensive and powerful criminal organization in the world,” as Interpol calls the group. ‘Ndrangheta, based in Calabria, operates in dozens of countries and generates $50 billion per year. Its chief stronghold outside Italy is Canada, where Ontario’s Camera di Controllo makes decisions affecting an entire global network. Montreal, however, had long eluded ‘Ndrangheta’s grasp.
According to Italy’s anti-Mafia brigade, for decades Montreal has been “the key that turns the lock of America.” Since 1980 or so, the kingpins with the keys had been the Stitches, as the city’s Sicilian faction is known. Before then, going back to the era of Lucky Luciano and the so-called French Connection, Calabrians ran the books. But in the late 1970s, they’d been forced to hand things over after a blood feud with the Stitches. And wiping out Sollecito was part of a vendetta intended to reverse that defeat. As Sollecito’s murderer would later explain, “The goal of the Calabrians was to get rid of all the Sicilians, take the power, and prevent them from getting back on their feet.”
That hit man’s name has been under a court-ordered publication ban since he became an informant and entered witness protection in 2019. His street name, though—the Frenchman—refers to the fact that, despite working for the Mob, he isn’t Sicilian or Calabrian; he’s a weed-blazing Quebecer.
The Frenchman’s undercover recordings have shed lurid light on the Mafia’s worldwide narco-trafficking networks, revealing battles between clan members stretching from the hilltops of Southern Italy and drug production regions to cities across North America—even to rural homes like Viau and Dion’s. For this story, Vanity Fair was granted access to those shocking audio files, portions of which are reproduced verbatim. The evidence collected by the Frenchman and touted as a “major breakthrough” by the Canadian justice system—as well as courtroom testimony and investigators’ tape recordings—have so far resulted in two life sentences, with more trials to come.
Alongside Viau and Dion, the other star defendant has been the alleged motorcycle driver from the Sollecito escapade: a 41-year-old capo for the Calis who dated Viau’s younger sister during the crime war. The Frenchman describes him as “the big cockroach.” That capo’s name has also been under publication ban, so for the purposes of this story he will be called Foti. But court documents and local French-language media have referred to him by the alias that he gave when he signed up for a burner phone right before Sollecito’s death: “Brad Pitt.”
Foti and the Frenchman bolted away from the blood-soaked BMW on the motorbike. Cop cars, meanwhile, barreled past them toward the crime scene. Looking up, the two riders spotted helicopters in the sky. They braced against the wind, certain they’d get caught, but no one stopped them.
Earlier that morning, in fact, the duo had a close call with police at a garage in the suburbs north of Montreal. Around 5 a.m., as they’d been preparing for the hit at their stash house, they were picking out guns—“toys,” as they called them. Foti started posing with a piece like De Niro in a Scorsese film. “Don’t do that,” the Frenchman growled as Foti pulled the slide and aimed at some imaginary target. Losing patience, the Frenchman told him again to stop playing around. At that moment, the gun accidentally went off and a bullet blasted into the wall.
“Idiot,” the Frenchman seethed, opening the garage door. They rolled out the motorcycle and revved the engine. Just then, a patrol car coasted by, windows open. It slowed so that two cops could look them over in the dawn light. The hit men stood there in the driveway, trying to act normal. Gunfire at that bleary hour? In a quiet residential neighborhood? No matter. Seemingly satisfied that the sound had conceivably been a motorbike backfiring, the officers went on their way.
According to prosecutors, Foti was, at that point, a getaway man. His cohorts saw him as calculating, with commendable skills in manipulation and flattery. But he tended to be shaky in stressful situations. Yes, Foti claimed he’d previously killed someone “on the street.” And yet his higher-ups wanted him to make his bones—to be the gunman in a premeditated hit. Once he did so, he’d be promoted to capo. He’d been psyching himself up when the toy went off. He spoke with a bro-inflected North Shore accent, punctuating his comments with cusses like mannaggia (“damn”) or minchia (“male sex organ”).
The Frenchman, on the other hand, swore in Quebecois blasphemies: Tabarnak! (an expletive that literally means “tabernacle” but serves as the equivalent of the F-word). He consumed steroids and stupendous amounts of marijuana, often two ounces or more per day. Despite living with myriad conditions (bipolar II, severe attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder), his mind could focus under pressure. Diagnosed with an antisocial personality marked by narcissistic grandiosity and paranoia, he saw himself, as he would state in one tape-recorded conversation, as a chess player and not a “lobotomized partridge.” He talked ridiculously fast. Foti, too, was a motormouth.
Together, their lingo was full of references both filmic and gnomic. To them, a contracted killing, such as Sollecito’s, was code-named a “cannoli,” in homage to a now classic scene from The Godfather. To assassinate someone was to “eat” them, or “pepper” them. A hired gun pulling the trigger was a “squeezer.” The list of foes to be drilled, with specific price tags on their heads, was “the menu.” “When we do a hit, we say we’re gonna go eat, go to the restaurant,” testified the Frenchman. “That’s what the menu was for us.”
Menus were shared among the gang via encrypted devices called “boxes,” usually BlackBerry pagers. These to-do lists came from “the Table,” composed of senior Mafia members. The job that morning had been advertised as a $300,000 meal. But collecting payment for cannolis isn’t simple—as Foti and the Frenchman were about to learn.
DUPES OR DUPLICITOUS? Guy Dion and Marie-Josée Viau were alleged to have incinerated corpses in their yard, at the Mob’s urging.Illustrations by NICOLE RIFKIN.
After ditching the bike in the stash-house garage, the two drove Foti’s car to Viau and Dion’s backwoods home in Saint-Jude, an hour away. The mobsters went there to wash up, lose the murder weapon, and burn their clothes. The couple in the woods had only gotten to know Foti recently, but he was already luring them into his web.
They met through Viau’s two younger siblings. Her brother, Martin Viau, had been in jail with Foti and the Frenchman (conspiracy, gangsterism, and drug trafficking for Foti; aggravated assault for the Frenchman). Foti was looking for a woman on the outside, someone who could help him start over. Martin suggested to his sister, Stephanie Viau, that she might make a good match for Foti. Stephanie began visiting him in the slammer. When he got out, they dated and moved in together in the late summer or early fall of 2015.
The couple spent time hanging out with Viau and Dion. They talked, dined, enjoyed each other’s company. Foti soon made his move: He asked them if he could borrow $10,000, offering to pay back $1,000 a month plus $1,000 for interest. “This doesn’t smell good,” Viau told her husband. Despite their apprehensions, they loaned Foti the funds in February 2016. The bad smell soon turned fetid.
At the outset, Foti paid the monthly $1,000. He stopped doing so by May, the month of Sollecito’s murder. He then altered the deal’s terms: He would give them an extra $1,000 a month to store “tools” in the crawl space above their sprawling garage. Those tools ended up being hockey bags full of pistols, submachine guns, explosives, and ammo. Foti got them a dedicated BlackBerry pager. His contact name in the device was “Bag of Nails.”
The arsenal in the garage soon became so extensive that, when Viau prepared an inventory, it ran to 36 pages. “I could have gone to war with that, man,” she marveled.
They could have also tried to back out. Many times. But, incredibly, as Viau explained in the undercover recordings, she harbored aspirations of being part of this outlaw life—of actually joining the Mafia in some capacity. Torn between trepidation and excitement, she’d imagined an escape from a lifetime of drudgery. “I want to be around the Table,” she confided to the Frenchman, bringing up her Italian heritage. “I was raised that way, by my grandmother…. We’re Fantallonis and Garalusis. My family had honor. I want that honor to be reestablished.”
On the day of Sollecito’s murder, Dion wasn’t home. But as Viau originally told police—and as the Frenchman testified in court—she was there and assisted the killers, building a fire in a metal canister on her lawn. The two men burned their outfits, including shoes and helmets. Foti then jumped into the above-ground pool while the Frenchman showered, rinsing off any gunshot residue. After changing into fresh clothing, they promised her they’d return soon to sell some of the contents of the hockey bags. When news of the murder broke on TV, the two men high-fived. It was time to get paid.
Salvatore Scoppa greeted Foti with a tight hug. “More to come!” he bellowed, laughing, as he always did when his henchmen killed someone. A hulking muscle head known to his cronies as Mental, Sal Scoppa was big in the Calabrian Mob. His brother Andrew Scoppa would soon be considered by law enforcement as “the presumed acting boss of the Montreal Mafia.” It was Sal, however, who’d ordered that morning’s cannoli on Rocco Sollecito—and he congratulated Foti and the Frenchman.
They were gathered at Piatti, a marble-strewn pizza-pasta spot near the intersection where Sollecito had been slain hours earlier. Also at the table was the Acura driver, a quiet, skinny Calabrian squeezer nicknamed “Sigmund.” (He lived with his mother.) In the lead-up to the crime, the group had contemplated dressing up as postmen or pretending to direct traffic. But the Frenchman had vetoed those scenarios: “We don’t do no cowboy stuff.”
At Piatti, Scoppa, pleased with the result, told them that he had an offer to make. They could either split $100,000 in cash—or they could take $50,000 and 10 percent of his territory. That turf was worth $2 million in annual drug sales and pizzo (“protection money”).
The Frenchman couldn’t believe it, contending they’d been promised much more for the job. “You’re a fucking pig!” he snarled, standing up at the table and reaching for a steak knife. “It was supposed to be $300K plus 10 percent for [killing] Rocco.”
“Shh, shh,” replied Scoppa, as the others tried to get the manic Frenchman to sit back down.
The Frenchman was losing it, spiraling. He’d thought that peppering Sollecito would provide a rush of release. Instead, he could feel the whole deal slipping from his grasp. Scoppa, he believed, was stiffing the gang, plain and simple.
In the Frenchman’s courtroom accounts of that moment, everything became a blur, a Hitchcockian dream sequence, violin stabs and all. By sheer cosmic coincidence, another wiseguy in the Stitches, “Tony the Florist”—whose name was on the Calabrians’ menu (for an upcoming cannoli)—just happened to be seated across the room. The Frenchman—known for habitually smoking too much hashish—lost his focus. He pivoted his attention toward Tony the Florist and the purported $150,000 bounty on his head.
The Frenchman started talking about getting a gun. “I killed one person today,” he ranted, “and I’m gonna kill another right now, I don’t give a fuck.” He was ready, then and there, to plant geraniums in the Florist’s cranium.
As the Frenchman would tell the tale in court, it seemed like an act, as though he were in some kind of stage troupe—putting on a Paulie Walnuts–like performance. Echoing tropes from the gangland movies they loved, the others reminded him, in whispers, that, even if he did pluck the Florist’s petals, he’d have to share the $150,000 with them. As accomplices, they’d all be “eating from the pie.”
“Italians are the masters of betrayal,” piped up Sigmund, the Acura driver. “Treachery: It’s the DNA.”
Sal and Andrew Scoppa, both of Calabrian extraction, came up in Montreal’s Sicilian Mob under godfather Vito Rizzuto, whose decades-long reign ended when he passed away in 2013, evidently of natural causes. Rizzuto had hailed from the Cosa Nostra hotbed of Sicily’s Agrigento province. He led Montreal’s organization known as the Stitches, or the Sixth Family, due to its interconnectedness with New York’s Five Families.
Italian court documents depicted Rizzuto as a global superboss who created “a transnational society” linking Italian clans with “overseas cells.” Clandestine recordings of mafiosi in Palermo captured discussions of how Rizzuto, in Montreal, “makes the fucking rules.” An associate in Sicily, conveying his proximity to Rizzuto, was recorded as saying, “I sit at the right hand of God.”
Rizzuto used humbler terms. “People come to me to solve disputes,” he told one Quebec journalist. Able to broker peace between rivals, he saw himself as a mediator. In reality, he was a dapper underworld diplomat whose conflict-resolution skills had far-reaching consequences.
In 2005, when a $6 billion suspension bridge connecting Sicily to Calabria was set to be built, Italy’s Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia revealed that the consortium bidding to finance the construction was covertly being overseen by Rizzuto. The bridge was never built. Nor was his Italian arrest warrant enforced, as he would soon be extradited to the US for participating in the 1981 murders of three Bonanno family captains. During the six years he spent in a Colorado supermax prison, numerous members of his circle, including his father and his eldest son, were killed.
The Scoppa brothers remained loyal to the Rizzuto family throughout Vito’s imprisonment. And shortly before his release in 2012, the New York Post reported that Rizzuto’s stated aim was “to be Godfather of the world.” Upon returning home, the don conferred with Andrew Scoppa, who hoped to become his right-hand man, according to a recent book, Inside the Montreal Mafia, by Eric Thibault and Félix Séguin. But the Stitches decided on a new management structure, with Rocco Sollecito’s son and one of Vito Rizzuto’s sons at the top. Andrew was out.
Andrew’s brother Sal stayed on as one of the Stitches’ squeezers. (His signature move, the Frenchman testified, was to submerge foes in a bathtub full of acid and watch them melt.) In the summer of 2015, the Sicilian Table decided that Sal, however, had become a snitch and had to be liquidated. When Sal found out, he vowed revenge, with Foti as his operations guy.
Their first hit came in September 2015, when they killed an up-and-coming member of the Stitches. Six weeks later, before the Sollecito-Rizzutos could respond, their leaders were arrested in a crackdown. Police wanted “anyone tempted to take their place” to know they were being monitored. The Scoppa brothers didn’t care. They were a new ‘ndrina, as Calabrians call a blood-related unit that rises to take over a city. And they had declared war.
Viau and Dion, meanwhile, were getting on with their lives in Saint-Jude, and Foti was increasingly becoming “part of the decor,” as Viau put it. Foti would come over for occasional dinners. One time, they all attended a tractor-pulling event somewhere in the sticks. Another time, Foti showed up in a panic because he’d somehow messed up and angered his bosses in the Calabrian Mob.
Dion kept up his firefighting job while taking on occasional asphalting projects. He was a steady-state, steak-and-potatoes homebody—happiest when doing repairs around their 100-year-old house or tooling around on his ATV. At one point, Foti arranged for Dion to be Sal Scoppa’s bodyguard at the boss’s son’s baptism, a $500 gig. Then came the ill-fated $10,000 loan, which was steep for Viau and Dion. (When they’d purchased their $7,000 hot tub, they’d had to save up for 18 months in order to afford it.)
Viau, despite a degree in civil engineering, couldn’t manage to land a skilled position. Instead, she was resigned to working night shifts at the restaurant, finishing at 7 a.m. before driving an hour back to Saint-Jude. She’d considered opening a bar, but that fell through. When Foti met her, she’d been constantly questioning herself over her lack of options. “What am I doing?” she asked her husband at one point, wondering if she was having a midlife crisis—at 41. She felt like a pawn, which is exactly how the Calis would end up using her.
It’s impossible to say with certainty how much she understood of Foti’s world. But Mafia books were found in her possession, so she obviously knew she was flirting with fire. As her younger sister, Stephanie, Foti’s girlfriend, reminded her: “If you want to play in the big leagues, there are consequences.” Marie-Josée brushed those concerns aside.
At that point, the Frenchman was still in prison. When he came up for parole, an evaluation deemed him a significant risk for recidivism. The authorities recommended he be kept under observance at a halfway house.
The day before his transfer, two fellow inmates jumped him. Badly beaten, he showed up to the transitional home with stitches on his face. The probation agent assigned to his case turned out to be an attractive 22-year-old officer called “Noemie” (under Canadian law, her real name can’t be published). “She comes to bring me my clothes, my box, and she stares me down, right in the face,” he testified. “She bends down without even leaving my eyes… So I say, Uh-oh: trouble.” Noemie’s duties included physically escorting him outside the grounds on errands, like shopping for groceries.
The two soon began seeing each other, discreetly. He’d only had one serious girlfriend before, whereas Noemie—so he claimed—was a hypersexual swinger. Their relationship continued—until another detainee, who happened to be the same height and build, was gunned down outside the home. The Frenchman had been the target, as retribution for a crooked deal involving the Sinaloa Cartel. But they’d sprayed the wrong guy. In the ensuing investigation, when police discovered the Frenchman had been sleeping with his intervention officer, his parole was revoked.
Locked up again, he asked Noemie to collect money owed to him by Foti. She did. And Noemie and Foti then apparently started an affair, without the Frenchman knowing.
When the Frenchman finally got out for good, in April 2016, he moved in with Noemie. At that time, Foti introduced the Frenchman to Sal Scoppa, suggesting he be the boss’s driver and bodyguard—his “salami,” in their parlance. The Frenchman said he’d do whatever Scoppa wanted. “I’ll be loyal to you like a Taliban to his faith,” he told him. “To the end—I’m all in.” He became a squeezer. And after they’d terminated Sollecito, Scoppa told Foti it was time that he too became a proper hitter. If he did a good job, Scoppa promised, he’d make Foti his underboss—his capo.
The list of people the Scoppas wanted dead was long. It included figures like lieutenant Lorenzo “the Skunk” Giordano and others in the Stitches. “The Calabrese wanted to clean them all out,” the Frenchman explained under oath. “In the type of jungle they’re in, you eat them all—or you eat nothing.”
Next up on the menu were two brothers in their 20s, Joey and Vinny Falduto. Vinny had just gotten out of jail and, according to Calabrian intel, was a hit man working for the Sicilians. The brothers were reputedly pursuing a crook known as “Fatso” with a $400,000 sticker on his forehead. Since both the Calis and the Stitches wanted Fatso dead, Foti offered to help the Faldutos do the job as a means of trapping them. The idea was to bring the brothers to Viau and Dion’s farmhouse to sample the goods in the hockey bags—and then whack them both.
Viau and Dion supposedly knew nothing about the whacking. All they’d been told, they would later claim, was that prospective buyers for the gun stash were coming over to fire off test rounds before agreeing on a deal for the merchandise. The couple had been instructed to make a racket so that neighbors wouldn’t hear any gunfire.
On that day in mid-June 2016, Viau had music blasting. Dion was on his tractor. First, the Faldutos perused the cache: Glocks, .357 magnums, .22 caliber rifles. They then went outside and started shooting into the ground next to the garage, which was Foti’s signal to do the deed. Instead, he seized up. The Frenchman glared at him, but Foti couldn’t go through with it.
After some awkward talk, Foti decided to lend them his car—so they’d have a pretext for seeing each other again. The Faldutos also took a MAC-10 with a silencer—a “sausage,” they called it—for Fatso.
THE KILLER RETURNS After three years of silence, the Frenchman shockingly reappeared at Viau’s out-of-the-way restaurant.Illustrations by NICOLE RIFKIN.
Two weeks later, on June 30, 2016, the Faldutos returned to Saint-Jude. The couple, as agreed, was making the usual din. The day before, according to the body-pack recordings, Viau had brought Foti four boxes of hollow-point bullets from the hockey bags. The Frenchman relished hollow points, which flare open on impact. “They mushroom,” he noted. “They don’t pass through the body—they stay in.”
When the two cars pulled into the driveway of the country home, the radio was outside, hanging from a tree, its volume knob cranked to the max. The tractor was running in the background, and Dion was cutting down trees with a chain saw. “It’s like a B movie,” the Frenchman would recall.
The Faldutos entered the three-door garage. Viau watched through her front window. Walking in, the Frenchman looked pointedly at Foti: Let’s do this. Foti just stood there, frozen. He had his gun, but, again, he couldn’t pull the trigger. The Frenchman, seeing Foti choke, whipped out his piece. He shot Vinny first, in the head, then Joey, in the back, as he tried to run. The Frenchman jumped over the trunk of the car to finish Joey off, then turned back to Vinny. A hollow point was “coming out of half his face like a fucking thing from a Halloween movie.”
When the gunshots died down, Foti started crying. They’d killed two young men, for nothing, for some money. Dion rushed in, alarmed by the commotion. They got him to fetch a roll of plastic. Viau brought cleaning supplies. The Frenchman instructed her to sponge the blood rather than wipe it up: “Otherwise, the blood residue will stay.”
Foti looked at him, trembling. “How are you staying so calm?”
“If we get excited, we’re going to make mistakes.”
As he and Dion rolled one of the corpses onto a sheet of plastic, it suddenly moved. The Frenchman jumped. But it was just dead nerves causing electrochemical twitches. Dion, who lived around farm animals and abattoirs, continued wrapping the bodies in disconcerting silence.
Foti then told the dumbfounded couple they would need to get rid of everything. How? They’d figure it out. They were to bring the car to a guy named Guidou. He’d scrap it.
And like that, the two hit men left. Dion looked at his wife. What were they supposed to do with the bodies? She wasn’t sure. Had she, or they, said something about making them disappear? She tried the Bag of Nails pager. Foti didn’t respond. Nor did he contact her that evening, or the next day.
In the end, Foti never came back and never brought them another penny. They were stuck—with the debt he owed them and with the bodies. A double double. They’d known something was going to happen, but not like this, not in their garage, not with the Mob ghosting them. As Viau put it: “There was no after.”
Three years later, on July 4, 2019, the Frenchman pulled up to a rural La Belle Province restaurant at sunset. He ordered a poutine and a double cheeseburger, then asked the cashier if she recognized him. His face said something to her, but she wasn’t sure what. He’d lost weight, he conceded. He’d started dyeing the gray out. “It’s been a while since then, with the fireman,” he offered. “I was at your place a few times with [Foti]. The Italians…”
“Oh! Lord,” she gasped.
Viau had closed that chapter of her life. Dion and she never spoke about it. Someone had come, at some point, to take the weapons and the Bag of Nails box. And that had been that. She’d kept on making hot dogs and fries. But now the killer had suddenly reappeared—“like a hair in the soup,” as she put it.
The two sat in a booth and talked for two hours. He’d had a rough time since they’d last met. “Knives in my back from every direction,” he said. She understood. In the intervening years, she said, she hadn’t spoken to Foti or her sister Stephanie.
Foti had officially been promoted to capo after the Falduto brothers were murdered. As the Frenchman explained to Viau at La Belle Province, and as he would later testify at her trial, Foti then tried to kill him several times, to silence him. According to the Frenchman, the Calis had always missed—or bungled things. “The gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” he called them. Noemie, even though she’d lived with the Frenchman then, had been in on the assassination attempts, he claimed, and conspired with Foti to do him in. Whether or not Noemie was actually involved in any plot, this much was certain: She left the Frenchman on Christmas Night, 2016. Stephanie and Foti had also broken up by then.
At first, it looked like the Calis had accomplished their goal. After the Faldutos ambush, they’d wrested control of the city’s Mob operations—and Sal Scoppa promptly flew to Calabria for meetings. That fall, Canadian law enforcement learned that the Scoppas had received the backing of Italian crime syndicates and were “the current leaders of the Montreal Mafia.” Their hold on power, however, was far from secure. In September 2016, Andrew Scoppa was recorded by police telling his driver: “It’s hard to stay on top.… It’s a new world champ, everybody wants to take your belt.”
A month later, when Andrew was arrested on narcotics charges, the Calis imploded. They turned on each other, from the top dogs to the flunkies. “A scrumble,” Foti called it on one of the body-pack recordings. “Everybody was paranoiding with each other, nobody went to see nobody, everybody became crazy.”
It was during that time that Foti allegedly added the Frenchman to the menu. According to the Frenchman, Foti also wanted to kill Viau and Dion and burn their property down. When his underlings botched a hit, mistakenly slaying a Stitches’ father instead of the son, Sal Scoppa put Foti in the hospital. “Like a Ping-Pong ball he was throwing me,” was how Foti put it. “The chandelier got ripped down; he’s hitting me with the chandelier.” Per the Frenchman’s account, Foti then did his best to shut Sal’s lights. When a rival hit man shot at Sal in the winter of 2017, injuring but not killing him, Foti was on the premises.
On that summer evening at La Belle Province, the Frenchman’s stories had the effect of making Viau open up about the Faldutos. Her shoes had been drenched in blood, she disclosed. To clean the garage, she’d emptied eight containers of bleach. “Our eyes were burning,” she said. They’d used three sets of saw blades to grind the murder weapons into tiny pieces, which they’d tossed while driving around the countryside. They dumped the loaner car with the man named Guidou and never heard from him again.
What about the bodies?
“I did everything like a good soldier,” she assured him. “We burned everything.” It had taken six cords of wood—enough to heat a large home for an entire Canadian winter—and four cans of gas. The bonfire raged for an entire day. They’d even needed to cut down more trees in the middle of the night. “You don’t understand,” she went on. “They weren’t burning, man. I took the pickax, with the shovel, to go in. Listen: My heart was bawling. The pickax—to open them up… Guy’s seen people burn because he’s a fireman—he never burned anyone.”
Even so, the two of them got it done. “Me, I’m the brains,” she said. “He’s the muscle.”
In the aftermath, they dug up that section of the ground, one foot deep, “because of the oils and the this and the that,” then refilled it with other soil. They threw the cinders and whatnot into the river. She’d known how to take care of business: “Deal with it, thank you good night, don’t talk about it again, it’s over.” But what did they get for it? “Fuck all,” she said. “Not even a visit. Nothing, nyet, nada.”
Over the next two months, the Frenchman visited Viau and Dion several times. He also reconnected with Sigmund, the Acura driver, who’d been hiding out with his mother. Foti, to their knowledge, was also underground.
But then, on September 10, 2019, the Sûreté du Québec released photographs—from three years earlier—showing Sollecito’s two killers on their motorcycle. They broadcast the images on social media and news outlets, requesting assistance in identifying the suspects. That morning, the Frenchman found Sigmund at his usual hangout, Café Redrum, having breakfast.
“Did you see the news today?” He thrust his phone toward his compare. “Look at this, asshole.”
Sigmund squinted at the screen. “If they’re asking the public for help, it means they have nothing,” he argued. “They’re fishing.”
“No—this is the fucking game they do: It’s catch and release,” countered the Frenchman. “They have info.”
He knew Foti still had the motorcycle. He also knew that he and his father were laying tiles at a Sheraton just north of Montreal, not far from Sollecito’s murder site. It was the same hotel where, several months earlier, Sal Scoppa had finally been cannoli’d, shot dead in the crowded lobby on the night of his son’s first holy communion.
“We’re going to talk to [Foti],” the Frenchman decided, despite the handful of times Foti had supposedly tried to have him killed. “Tell him: You have to get rid of the bike. Chop it. They’re looking for the fucking bike.”
He and Sigmund beelined it to the Sheraton. The Frenchman had made it a point to wear a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops—so nobody would worry about getting whacked. “If they see me all geared up, they’re gonna think I’m the fucking messenger of death,” he told Sigmund. They arrived around 9:30 a.m.
“What’s going on?” Foti’s father asked, flustered.
Foti looked up from his work as the two hit men approached. “We’re all cool?” he asked, nervously. “No contract on me?”
“You’re safe, Jesus Christ,” said the Frenchman, gesturing to his outfit, then bringing out the police notice. “Come on, look at this.”
“When did that come out?” Foti asked.
“This morning, bro,” replied the Frenchman, adding that it was all over TV and Twitter.
Seeking privacy, they huddled at the hotel’s rear loading-dock area. “But why now, this thing—why now?” Foti wanted to know.
Telling each other not to freak out—“none of us are hot”—they examined the facts: The cops were looking for two unidentifiable individuals and a motorcycle.
“You know how many motorcycles there are?” argued the father.
Foti conceded that he still had the bike—but he’d changed its parts, so no cops would be able to identify it.
“Are you a ding-dong or what?” asked the Frenchman.
“You have to destroy it,” Sigmund insisted.
Foti tried to reassure them. “This is the triangle right here, right? As long as we keep our mouths shut, we’re good.”
There were others, though—namely, the fireman and the clean-up woman. He’d paid them, right? “I don’t have that kind of money,” Foti protested. “Sal never gave it to me. What am I supposed to do?”
What about the weapons from their garage? “I swear on my mother’s head I have every bullet and every fucking gun,” Foti said. As they spoke, he suddenly realized the urgent need to get rid of them too. “Pa!” he cried out. “It’s all under my name, Pa. Imagine something goes wrong? They’re gonna put me away for 100 years.”
They decided the Frenchman would retrieve the hockey bags from Foti’s storage locker and sell whatever he could. “We split everything,” he said, “Me, you, him, and Marie-Josée. Everything down the line, fair and square.”
The two assassins drove off and debriefed. Foti would trash the bike; they would move the weapons. “[Foti] was a different person,” the Frenchman told Sigmund. “He knows he made a mistake with you and me.”
“He got more relaxed as we started talking,” Sigmund said.
“He was honest about a few things—except about him trying to whack me.” (Foti had, that morning, denied being behind those attempted hits.)
“Yeah,” mumbled Sigmund, who remembered when the Calis had asked him to take out the Frenchman. “The only reason you didn’t go down is because of me,” Sigmund confessed, explaining that he too had been part of the plan to whack the Frenchman. “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t understand it. It’s breaking a code within me.… To start betraying each other in the gang? No. No, no, no.”
The Frenchman, it so happened, had been betraying the gang for months.
He’d approached the police to become an informant, and when they first heard his tale, it seemed so extraordinary, full of so many ludicrous blowups, they scarcely believed it. A sergeant detective named Dacky Thermidor spent weeks cross-referencing related murders to corroborate the facts. Thermidor determined that the Frenchman’s claims were true.
As an undercover agent, the Frenchman agreed to wear body-pack equipment to capture others inculpating themselves. Thermidor oversaw the transcriptions of those conversations, portions of which read like dialogue from a Coen brothers screenplay. After the Belle Province encounter and the Sheraton summit, Thermidor’s colleagues retrieved the cache of weapons from Foti’s storage locker. More than 100 officers worked on the case, which was dubbed Project Premeditate.
On October 16, 2019, police arrested Foti, Sigmund, Dion, and Viau. Five days later, Andrew Scoppa was killed, shot in the face in a strip-mall parking lot. Based largely on the body-pack recordings, Sigmund was sentenced to life on two counts of first-degree murder and of conspiracy to commit murder. (He has appealed.) In those tapes, Sigmund spoke of the fate he saw awaiting Foti—“an ugly death,” as he put it. Andrew Scoppa, before his own grim demise, shared that opinion: “It’s not gonna end up good.”
The Frenchman, despite three murders and a lifetime of crime, got a handsome haul to turn state’s evidence: $450,000 plus lodging and a weekly stipend, ostensibly for his marijuana consumption. Pressed about his drug usage on the stand, he admitted having a $1,000-per-week habit. He also testified that he occasionally microdosed hallucinogenic mushrooms, claiming they relieved his flashbacks: “I’m in the middle of reliving each experience I describe here. I dream it as though it were the moment itself.”
Compared to the others, he seemingly had it made. But, for all that, the Frenchman couldn’t help ending up back in jail—in this case, for allegedly harassing members of the police as well as Noemie. Convinced that she and Foti had tried to have him killed, he’d wanted her arrested for attempted murder. He grew obsessed, claiming the police had promised to investigate her as part of his compensation package. They refused to charge her. Noemie had a restraining order placed against him. He then ended up being the one charged, for making death threats. When a defense attorney implied that he might be an unreliable witness because of payments he received, he snapped: “This was for vengeance—it wasn’t for money. You understand English? Or French? I did it for the fucking vengeance.”
Viau and Dion’s trial took place in a high-security judicial center attached, via underground tunnels, to Montreal’s Bordeaux prison. Throughout the winter of the trial, as cross-examinations stretched on, snow squalls turned the sky the same grayish white as the icy ground, creating the effect that the courthouse was floating in a kind of mist.
Viau and Dion both chose to testify, insisting that, fearing for their lives, they’d lied in those scabrous recordings. They hadn’t actually burned the bodies, they told the court. They’d made that up so the Mafia wouldn’t think they’d made mistakes. In reality, they said, they’d driven the car—with the plastic-wrapped corpses in it—to Guidou’s house and promptly left.
The prosecution undermined that account, asking why, if Viau was afraid, had she looked out the kitchen window during the murder of the Faldutos? Why had she brought bullets to Foti? Why had she suggested having drinks with the Frenchman when he resurfaced? Why had she tried to hook him up with a friend—or considered going into business together? She wept throughout the trial, folding and unfolding tissues, rotating them clockwise, over and over.
Dion, for his part, told the court that his now 18-year-long relationship with his wife had improved as a result of the homicide charges. “The fact that you were arrested for two murders is what improved [your relationship]?” the incredulous prosecutor asked him.
“Yes,” Dion replied, explaining that the ordeal had helped them start communicating more openly.
Those born on New Year’s Day, like Viau (1975, in her case), are said to be lucky for life. But, in the end, the jury found her guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and second-degree murder, bringing an automatic life sentence. Dion was unexpectedly acquitted. She had claimed, after all, that she had been the brains. Dion, ever the strong and silent type, hadn’t said much on the recordings—whereas she had said far too much. Her testimony, the judge noted, “strengthened the prosecution’s already overwhelming evidence that established her involvement in the conspiracy to commit the murders and her participation in the murders by aiding and/or abetting them.”
After the verdicts, Vanity Fair interviewed crown prosecutor Isabelle Poulin. Even if Viau were an accomplice to murder, did she really deserve life behind bars while the actual squeezer walked free? “We believe justice followed its course,” the prosecutor replied.
Viau and her defense lawyer, Mylène Lareau, disagreed. They have appealed, but the court has yet to decide when (or even if) she will be retried. In yet another twist, Viau has been granted conditional liberty pending those proceedings. As she poses no security risk, the Court of Appeal ruled, and may ultimately be found innocent—a scenario the presiding judge described as “realistic”—she is presumed to be living, once again, at the family home in Saint-Jude.
Last fall, Foti stood trial for the 2016 murders of Rocco Sollecito, the Falduto brothers, and yet another member of the Stitches. When the Frenchman testified against Foti, he couldn’t hold back from calling his former partner names: “rat,” “imbecile,” “cockroach.” Moreover, he accused him of various other crimes, the precise details of which are under publication ban. Foti’s defense team seized on the fact that the Frenchman presented inadmissible testimony in a prejudicial manner. The judge, for his part, declared a mistrial. A second trial for Foti is tentatively scheduled to begin in March.
Whatever the ultimate verdicts, Foti undeniably led Viau down a tragic path. She has already been found guilty of murder, a conviction that will hang over her, Dion, and their family for the rest of their lives, whether or not her appeal is successful. Still, it seems fair to wonder which version of her is the real one.
At one point, while divulging the grisly details of the Falduto murders to a man she believed to be an underworld associate of the Frenchman’s—actually, an undercover cop—she leaned in and told him, while the tape machine was running, “You’re stepping into the secret of the gods. You know your life is in danger? You know that I can do it? Don’t be scared.”
But since her arrest, Viau has pleaded otherwise. “Christ, when I run over a baby cat, it takes me four days to get over it. I wouldn’t go murder someone!”
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