Robert Ménard (10 June 1934 – 16 August 2016), better known as "Shotgun Bob", was a Canadian policeman. In 2016, the journalist Tu Thanh Ha described Ménard as a "legendary" policeman in Montreal famed for his intelligence and toughness.
From delinquent to policeman Ménard was born in Sherbrooke, Quebec into a working class French-Canadian family, the son of Hector Ménard and Cécile Robidas, and grew up in Cookshire. As a youth, he was frequently in trouble with the law owing to his petty crimes. Ménard's father served in the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War and was killed in the line of duty. His widowed mother worked in a variety of jobs in Montreal to support her children. At the age of 12, Ménard planned to rob a bank, which led him to be placed "in care" at a Catholic reform school. Ménard recalled that the beatings and whippings he endured from the Catholic priests led to a change in attitude as he stated: "You had the choice of either remaining a little punk or shaping up. I chose to shape up." Ménard afterwards served in the Canadian Army and then worked for the Canadian National railroad.
In 1958, he applied for the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal and was refused under the grounds of his criminal record. Ménard then asked for the help of his Catholic priest teachers, a Brother Julien, who was able to persuade the police to accept Ménard. In the spring of 1959, Ménard joined the Montreal police as a constable. He was assigned to station 14 in the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighborhood. On his first shift, he arrested two automobile thieves after a chase down the streets.
In 1960, he was assigned to the intelligence section of the police and used for undercover work. Ménard's first undercover mission was to infiltrate an illegal gambling house. Menard was assigned to infiltrate a Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) cell in the 1960s, and found himself being subjected to numerous political Marxist discussion meetings alongside readings of the poems by Charles Baudelaire, whose poetry the FLQ adored, but which Menard hated. Ménard said of Baudelaire's poetry: "I fucking hate that stuff." The working class Ménard described the FLQ members he knew as a group of intellectuals-turned-terrorists whose fondness for poems by Baudalaire and Marxist tracts he found difficult to endure. Ménard's alias of a hippie poet led to the arrest of the FLQ cell, who were planning several bombings. During Expo 67, Ménard adopted the guise of a cab driver to foil a FLQ bombing plot. Over the course of his police career, Ménard adopted 17 different identities. In a 2006 speech, Ménard stated about undercover work: "You have to be a good actor to do this job. You have to have the instinct of the hunter and control your fear". Ménard married Carolyn Galloway, by whom he had two children, Joelle and Marc. His marriage ended in divorce.
The Violi assignment In December 1970, Ménard was assigned to infiltrate the Cotroni family by renting an apartment just above the Reggio Bar owned and managed by Paolo Violi, the underboss of the Cotroni family. Ménard brought along an attractive blond buxom woman who played the role of his "wife" who was actually the girlfriend of a policeman. Ménard's "wife" served to distract the lecherous Violi who kept staring at her breasts. After starting suspiciously at Ménard, Violi agreed to rent the apartment to him largely because he liked his "wife". Ménard who used the alias Robert Wilson was supposed to go undercover for three months, but instead served undercover for about five years and paid $125 per month for a small apartment just above the Reggio Bar. Ménard recalled about the bugs he installed all over the Reggio Bar: "Violi couldn't go anywhere in the building without us hearing what he said." The wiretapes planted by Ménard showed that Violi viewed him as a "big, dumb mook". The police gave "Robert Wilson" a false criminal record with convictions for numerous petty crimes to avoid attracting the suspicion of Violi. Ménard described himself in a 2012 interview as playing a "slightly silly" electrician, which served to disarm any suspicions that Violi might hold against him.
Ménard under his Wilson identity hardly spoke at all to Violi during his first two years as his tenant and was most surprised when Violi wanted to speak over a meal of pizza and wine in 1972. Peter Edwards, the crime correspondent of The Toronto Star newspaper wrote: "Imagine Gene Hackman with twelve cups of coffee in his system and you have a pretty good picture of Bob Ménard. You would never catch Ménard saying he liked Paolo Violi, although it is clear he had a certain respect for him." Ménard described Violi and his fellow Mafiosi as a better class of criminals than the French-Canadian bank robbers who shot off most of his leg during a failed robbery attempt in 1985. Menard stated that Violi's eyes had "intelligence, but ruthlessness. Total ruthlessness. Paolo would kill, but he'd do it in a much more intelligent way....You want to know the difference? They [French-Canadian bank robbers] will kill you indiscriminately, for no reason, while Paolo would kill you if he had to for power and for position and for advantage. That's the difference...They'll [French-Canadian bank robbers] kill because they don't like you having a toothpick in your mouth. That's the difference here. Goddamn animals. Nothing else...Paolo would use killing as a means to an end, a method. If you kill someone that you're trying to gather money from-unless you want to use him as an example-what the hell's the use use of killing a source of revenue?...That's not businesslike. Real smart guys don't kill until it absolutely has to be done."
Ménard usually talked with Violi every Saturday mornings over numerous cups of coffee. Menard learned that Violi was a staunch federalist who detested Quebec separatism. Riots had erupted in September 1969 when the St. Leonard school board changed the language of instruction for Italian-Canadian children from English to French. Several Italian-Canadian school teachers who continued to teach in English received death threats, and Violi told Menard that he provided bodyguards to the teachers. Ménard recalled: "God, he hated the PQ party! I think he hated them more than the cops. He just hated them! He thought they were destroying Canada... He was very nationalistic. He spoke English a lot." Menard reported that Violi was an ill-tempered egoistical braggart, but that his company (along with his coffee) was far preferable to discussing turgid Marxist tracts and Baudelaire poems, which had been the case with the FLQ. In a 2012 interview, Ménard stated: "My goal was not to join the gang. It was to record the conversations and to develop good relations with Violi so that he did not suspect anything. We had cappuccinos together. We were talking about football because he was sponsoring a team. He hated the PQ, and so did I. We were talking about all that, but we weren't talking about crime. He liked me because I didn't stick my nose in his business".
Ménard recalled that Violi was the neighborhood leader in St. Leonard as he recalled: "There was some fear. He was like the don. He was like the godfather. I can remember some old people going over and kissing his hand...I guess it was a mark of respect. He was always bowed to. I'm not saying it was grandiose. It was little things." Violi received a steady steam of visitors at the Reggio Bar, mostly from New York and Hamilton. Ménard stated: "There would always be some big cars from the States and there would always be somebody there. All the time. It was like a parade. It was like a doctor's office with patients. You know, he'd be receiving in the afternoons. A car from New York. A car from New Jersey. A car from Ontario. God, all kinds of big, huge cars. They'd be parked. The guys would come in. Sometimes he'd greet them at the door. And they'd be on their way after a bit." Ménard made a point of writing down the license plate numbers of all of Violi's visitors. The recordings made by Ménard revealed much about the operations of the Mafia in not only Canada, but also the United States and Italy as well as Violi spoke very frankly about his criminal activities with his guests.
In 1971, long-standing tensions between the Sicilian faction of the Cotroni family led by Nicolo Rizzuto vs. the dominant Calabrian faction led by Vic Cotroni and Violi started to emerge. On 15 September 1972, one of Ménard's bugs recorded Vic Cotroni, the boss of the Cotroni family, tell Violi that he was considering expelling Rizzuto as he declared: "Me, I'm capo decina [the captain of the Montreal branch of the Bonanno family]. I got the right to expel". To resolve the dispute, two Mafiosi from the New York, Nicky Alfano and Nicola Buttofuoco, were sent to Montreal to mediate. Another of Ménard's bugs recorded Violi saying to Alfano and Buttofuoco: "I told him [Rizzuto] he goes from one thing to the other, here and there and says nothing to nobody. He does things and nobody knows nothing".
Ménard's bugs recorded Cotroni and Violi discussing "getting rid of" Rizzuto and make him "disappear" from Montreal forever. To prevent the Cotroni family from breaking apart, another Mafiosi, Giuseppe Settecase, was sent from New York to Montreal to mediate the dispute. At one point, Settecase and another New York Mafiosi were recorded by one of Ménard's bugs in the Reggio Bar engaged in a long nostalgic discussion about their past crimes in New York. Mario Latraverse, the chief of the Montreal police anti-gang unit, stated in 1990: "They came out with all the latest murders that occurred in New York City. They explained everything, everything. 'What happened to such and such?' 'Well, he died because of..'. And they painted the whole picture of organized crime in New York. Well, we called the New York authorities and they were flabbergasted...But they were here to mediate the request of Violi to kill Rizzuto. In that conversation,, there was proof that the Montreal family was a subfamily of the Bonanno family...And it was said then that money on a weekly basis was leaving Montreal...every Monday to go to New York". The request to kill Rizzuto was refused by "the Commission" (the governing board of the American Mafia), but Rizzuto in 1974 left Montreal to avoid testifying at the Commission d'enquête sur le crime organisé hearings for Venezuela, which had no extradition treaty with Canada.
Violi played the role of a community leader within the Italian-Canadian community in Montreal, serving as a banker, judge and community mediator. He was known for providing free ice cream to children at the Reggio Bar, and he would never permit anyone to swear in front of children. However, his apparent generosity was self-interested as any favor he provided such as a loan or resolving a business dispute came with the understanding that he was entitled to favors in return. Ménard discovered much to his shock after the owner of a pizzeria saw him talking with Violi in the street that he refused to charge him for the pizza he just purchased, saying that any friend of Violi's was entitled to permanent free pizza from his pizzeria.