If you fear your child is being recruited by gangs, call us, Montreal police urge

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Faced with a recent spate of violent crimes and firebombings possibly linked to extortion rackets and involving street gang foot soldiers as young as 14, Montreal’s police chief called a news conference Thursday to reassure the public authorities are targeting the organized crime groups responsible.

Extortion schemes in which restaurants and businesses are shaken down for money in exchange for the safety of their premises are nothing new, police chief Fady Dagher said. But whereas they used to be mainly the purview of the Mafia and biker gangs, now a variety of street gangs using teenage recruits have been getting involved, “which has increased the uncertainty involved.”

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Dagher made a plea to businesses being shaken down and to parents who fear their child might be lured by a criminal element to contact or collaborate with police before it’s too late.

“If we knock at your door, it’s not because we are there by chance,” he said. “It’s because we have information, we have observed things that lead us to believe your child is heading in a wrong direction. There are too many examples, sad, fatal examples that have happened in Montreal where we have knocked on the door and parents didn’t believe us.”

The Old Montreal hostel fire that killed a 43-year-old woman and her seven-year-old daughter last Friday has been deemed suspicious by police and is under a criminal investigation. Security footage shows a man breaking into the ground floor restaurant of the building at 2:30 a.m. shortly before the fire erupted in the building housing 25 people.

Police on Thursday said they could not comment on the cause of the fire that some media outlets have linked to an extortion scheme. They promised results of the investigation would be made public soon.

Late Tuesday, three males, ages 17, 19 and 20, were arrested after at least 16 shots were fired at a building in Old Montreal owned by Emile Benamor, a Montreal defence lawyer who owns the building on Notre Dame St. E. where the fatal fire occurred last week. Benamor is also the owner of the Place d’Youville building in Old Montreal where seven people died in a raging fire in March 2023. That fire is still under investigation.

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Police said Wednesday they arrested seven teens between the ages of 14 and 17 last week who allegedly belong to a gang based in the city’s St-Leonard borough. Police said they are suspected in numerous violent crimes including robbery, firearms offences, arson and extortion. The suspects had been squatting in an abandoned commercial property on Jean-Talon St. E. they were using as a hiding place, police said.

It’s impossible to know what percentage of Montreal businesses are being targeted for extortion, since most cases probably go unreported, police said. Francis Renaud, head of the organized crime unit with the Montreal police, said he had 30 to 40 cases on his desk related to businesses being extorted. Most are in the downtown core, he said. Some of the businesses are involved with organized crime themselves, while others are innocent merchants, Renaud said.

The phenomenon of younger teenagers becoming involved in crime is definitely on the rise, Dagher said, but why it’s happening is difficult to pin down.

“We have theories — perhaps they’re attracted to the money and the glory, to show they succeeded in life by showing they have nice clothes and jewelry and by going out,” he said. “What we really need to look at with social workers is to understand what triggers it. Did it happen at age 10 or 11, who was the person who influenced them to go in this direction? Experience shows it usually comes down to less confidence in themselves, less self-esteem. But we cannot generalize — some young kids who were doing very well in school also went over.”

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Older criminal gang members can sense the needs and feed them, promising children as young as 14 they can make as much in one night as they would in six months working at McDonald’s, Renaud said.

“There’s a lot of dreams told to these children — at 14 years old, you’re a child — and they’re falling for it. That’s the problem.”

Police would not give the names of the gangs involved because the publicity serves as a form of glory for them (police have found press clippings mentioning gangs pinned to the walls of clubhouses) and say the gang names are often changed soon afterward.

Beyond the Eclipse squad of police who visit bars and restaurants throughout the city every night keeping an eye on criminal elements known to police, many of them involved in lucrative telemarketing fraud schemes targeting seniors, the organized crime squad division has been co-ordinating all information gathered on extortion schemes aimed at businesses, Dagher said.

Police are also in favour of stricter penalties for unlawful gun possession, Dagher said.

rbruemmer@postmedia.com

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