Sam Fasulo, 37, died Sunday after being shot several times while he was driving in a sports utility vehicle in Montreal North

Sam Fasulo, 37, died Sunday after being shot several times while he was driving in a sports utility vehicle in Montreal North on Friday afternoon. No arrests have been made in the shooting and investigators are trying to track down a pale coloured sports utility vehicle that is believed to have been used in the homicide. Several shots were fired into Fasulo’s Jeep. Montreal police Constable Laurent Gingras said investigators have little in terms of a description of a white man who witnesses saw inside the suspect vehicle before it sped away. Fasulo only recently finished serving a four-year sentence he received in 2004 for his leading role in a major drug trafficking ring that sold crack cocaine and heroin out of Italian cafés in St. Leonard and St. Michel. When police carried out search warrants in the 2003 operation dubbed Project Espresso they seized a large quantity of drugs but also uncovered a cache of weapons that included automatic and semi-automatic firearms.
According to National Parole Board decision prepared when he was granted a full release in 2005, Fasulo was considered the leader of the highly organized drug trafficking ring that brought in $100,000 a week. The Montreal police had evidence it had operated quietly for years. It was busted after residents who lived near the cafés began complaining that the drugs sold out of the cafés brought problems like prostitution and used syringes to their neighbourhoods. One of the parole decisions notes “(A) police report also indicates a tie to traditional Italian organized crime, which (Fasulo denied).” Despite the denial, the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit investigation Project Colisée uncovered links Fasulo had with Francesco Arcadi, the mob boss with the Rizzuto Clan. In 2002, Arcadi was recorded giving orders to Fasulo to resolve a problem after a drug dealer with ties to the mob was roughed up inside a Montreal bar. Arcadi was recorded telling Fasulo to go immediately to the bar but to not start punching right away. Instead, Fasulo was told, their adversary should only get a warning. “You tell him: ” Don’t you touch this fellow or I will slit your throat like a goat,” Arcadi told Fasulo.
Subsequent wiretapped conversations suggested Fasulo solved Arcadi’s problem in under an hour. Arcadi, 55, is currently serving a 15-year prison term he received in October after pleading guilty to conspiracy and gangsterism charges filed against him in Project Colisée.