Raynald Desjardins

Raynald Desjardins (born October 2, 1953) is a prominent organized crime figure in Montreal, and a former associate of the Rizzuto crime family.

Ireland's Eye was chosen for its natural harbor, the ruins of a town abandoned in the 1960s, and its unused docks.

The new operation began attracting attention on the Newfoundland mainland when local fishermen noticed mysterious convoys of trucks passing through their remote area at night.

By this time, it was police estimated that 90% of the hashish in Canada came from Lebanon.

In December of that year, Desjardins, Rizzuto, and four others were arrested and charged by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) for attempting to smuggle hashish into the country by boat.

The RCMP alleged that Desjardins oversaw the family's relations with the Phalange and was in charge of the entire Lebanese hashish smuggling operation.

Among these was the "Lebanese connection", a drug smuggling pipeline from Lebanon to Montreal, which the Rizzuto family took over during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

In the 1970s, they began trading arms for hashish with the Phalange, a right-wing Lebanese militia fanatically committed to upholding Maronite Christian supremacy in Lebanon.

The Rizzuto family was one of the group's main suppliers during the Lebanese civil war.

The hashish was brought by ship from Beirut to the Atlantic coast of Canada, where it was transferred to smaller boats and offloaded in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

From there, it was brought to Montreal by truck.

Desjardins' smuggling route was intended to avoid dealing with the Irish-Canadian West End Gang who ran the Port of Montreal.

To supplement his income, he started selling hashish and heroin for his employers, and was first convicted of drug trafficking in 1971.

During the following decade, Desjardins was close to Cotroni crime family member, Joseph Di Maulo, so much so, that the men became brothers-in-law.

Desjardins was one of a small number of French-Canadians who became a senior member of the Montreal Mafia.

Di Maulo's marriage to Desjardins's sister had given him a unique status within the organization despite being a non-Sicilian.

In 1973, Desjardins accompanied Di Maulo and Paolo Violi to New York for the election of Philip Rastelli as the acting boss of the Bonanno family.

When asked to go, Frank Cotroni, apparently suspecting a trap, refused and instead sent Di Maulo and Violi as his representatives.

Desjardins served as the men's chauffeur.

Di Maulo and Desjardins later became a part of the Sicilian Rizzuto organization after the Rizzutos replaced the Calabrian Cotronis as the dominant organized crime group in Montreal.

The boss of the Rizzutos had a policy of co-opting Cotroni family members in order to avoid disrupting existing operations and networks, most notably those with the Bonannos.

By the mid 1980s, law enforcement saw Desjardins as a major figure in Montreal drug trafficking.

He was considered the "right-hand man" to Rizzuto family leader, Vito Rizzuto, and was once described by authorities as "the supplier of drugs" for the Montreal Mafia.

Desjardins began his career in his teenage years working as a waiter in a Mafia-owned nightclub in Montreal.

In 1980, the FBI discovered that the Rizzuto family had been smuggling US-bought M-16 assault rifles and ammunition to Montreal for export to Lebanon.

The investigation started after the Rizzuto family hired a band of local criminals to break into a National Guard armory in Boston.

The burglary itself was unusual, but the smuggling of guns bound for Lebanon from the United States into Canada, was not.

In the spring of 1984, Desjardins and Rizzuto went to Milan to meet with Lebanese suppliers.

It was agreed that from then on, they would deal only with the Rizzuto family.

Later that year, Italian police intercepted 3.5 tons of hashish on a ship from Beirut bound for Montreal.

Onboard, they found a pager registered in Desjardins's name.

The Rizzuto family had prior ties to Lebanon.

In 1987, on the advice of a Newfoundland criminal named Michael Hiscock, Desjardins decided that the ghost town of Ireland's Eye, located on a remote island off the coast of Newfoundland would be used for the operation's hand-offs.

The case against them was eventually dismissed in 1990 by the Newfoundland Supreme Count after it was discovered that officers of the RCMP had tried to record conversations between the accused and their lawyers during the trial.

In the early 1990s, Desjardins was reportedly given the task of handling relations with the Hells Angels whose Montreal Nomads chapter was headed by Maurice Boucher.

In 1991-1992, Desjardins was the target of another RCMP investigation, Project Bedtime, alleging that he had imported 50 tons of hashish from Libya, which was intercepted at the Port of Montreal following a tip, but no charges were ever brought against him.

In 2010, he was part of a violent effort to take control of the Rizzutos' operations.

He is currently serving a 14-year prison sentence for his role in the 2011 murder of the acting boss of New York's Bonanno crime family, Salvatore Montagna.

The French-Canadian Desjardins has been described as "the most influential non-Italian in the Montreal Mafia since William Obront and Armand Courville".

Despite sharing the same surname, Desjardins is not related to André Desjardins, a notoriously corrupt union boss turned loan shark.