Shipping blues

>> A new wave of splashy accusation and denial rock our waterfront

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Photo by Jason Felker

A new Senate report bemoaning the state of affairs at Montreal’s port is turning out to be a black and white issue: where one side sees black, the other sees white.
Liberal Senator Colin Kenny’s 241-page tome, based on nine months of questioning 200 witnesses, warns that every year some of the 300 tonnes of cargo brought into Montreal’s 12-mile inland port gets into the hands of criminal gangs. Kenny’s report asserts that the “relentless efforts to prevent port authorities from exercising control over activities in the port” makes for “fertile ground for terrorist activity, including covert immigration and potentially the covert importation and shipment of weapons and other agents of mass destruction.”

But Dominic Taddeo, CEO of the Montreal Port Authority since 1984, sounds less worried. “I’ve been here 30 years and I’m still alive,” he told the Mirror. “Sure there’s break-ins and there’s an element in this society called a criminal element, but that element reaches everything in our society.” Taddeo says that the port is no hotbed for terrorism and that he welcomes proposals that could tighten up security, which has become a larger issue since September 11. “We’re preoccupied with national security. We’ve collaborated 110 per cent and we will continue to do so.” For the first time, unarmed U.S. Customs agents will be posted at key Canadian ports. Canada will be sending agents to U.S. ports in exchange.
Kenny isn’t the first high-placed official to come out with a page-turning report on criminal activity at our docks. In 1968 Judge Jules Deschenes’ 300-pager described dockers turning to theft to pay off loan sharks after losing waterside dice games. Deschenes reported two attempted murders, three guards hit by cars and 30 arrests for theft. He recommended “moral standards” be set for hiring at the port. Following the report the federal government offered the port to the City of Montreal, which declined the offer.

Two years later Judge Arthur Smith’s probe indicated that 30 per cent of longshoremen hired in the previous eight years had criminal records. Smith described Montreal’s harbour as a “a vast marketplace where everybody was free to enter and depart at leisure, to steal, to get intoxicated, to carry on gambling, to fight and to generally carry on as though the Montreal harbour belonged to no one in particular.”

The more recent Kenny report duplicates that splashy tone by suggesting that much of North America’s drug supply comes through our waterfront thanks to the existence of a “crime family” that manipulates the port to import drugs. The report leaves the alleged culprits unnamed, but local crime press has occasionally referred to St-Hubert meat dealer Gerald Matticks, 62, as a member of the West End Gang and “king of the port.” Matticks’ former accountant Luis Elias Lekkas turned informant last year.

Shaky stats

But Taddeo says that for all the colourful imagery, only 21 of approximately one-million containers passing through the port were broken into last year, and just nine containers have gone missing over the last six years. Taddeo adds that an oft-quoted story from the Kenny report of longshoremen threatening Customs guards by suspending containers over their cars allegedly occurred in Vancouver, not Montreal. But Taddeo can neither confirm nor deny the assertion that, depending on the particular branch of workers, anywhere between 15 and 54 per cent of port workers have criminal records. Hiring is left to the Maritime Employers Association, whose president, Bryan Mackasey, failed to return calls.
But Michel Murray, who led the local longshoremen union for seven years before moving on last year, challenges Kenny’s assertion that so many members have criminal backgrounds. “They gave the same figure last year. Nobody ever knew where they got this statistic. I was at the port for 20 years. I challenge anybody to find one unloader accused of a crime within the Port of Montreal.” Murray describes the notion of a gang controlling criminal activities at the port as “totally cliché” and blames the Canada Customs Union for exaggerating the problems at the port. “They want more money to do their job and the way they’re choosing to get that is to cry wolf.” Union officials from Customs and Immigration could not be reached for comment.

One in 10 Canadians has a criminal record, according to Justice Department stats, and local union rep David Sandborn says Kenny’s worries about hiring ex-cons is prejudicial. “If it’s on that level that we’re going to judge anything, then what is the percentage of Canadian Members of Parliament who have criminal records? George W. Bush is an ex-cocaine addict who got caught drunk driving but he’s the president of the United States and nobody contested he could do that,” says Sandborn. “It’s sad that kind of stat is used to try to prove something.” :