MONTREAL -- The murder of Rocco Violi, brother of one-time Montreal 'godfather' Paolo Violi, was probably the work of a professional assasin hired to wipe out a potential underworld police source, police said Saturday.
Violi, 40, was reading a paper Friday night in his kitchen when a marksman using a high-powered .308-calibre rifle with telescopic sites punched a clean hole through his heart from a neighboring building.
'It certainly looks like a professional job because the rifle had telescopic sites and was so powerful that the one shot made a hole the size of a dime through the window,' Montreal Urban Community police Const. Charles Poxon said.
'The suspect cut a neat hole through glass plate to rest his barrel on a ledge and had a slightly angled view into the duplex opposite,' he added. 'It seemed to be very well-planned.'
Violi, married with at least two children, had suffered multiple gunshot wounds to his face and neck last July while driving through suburban Montreal.
His brother Paolo, who took over the Montreal underworld from Vincenzo Cotroni, was gunned down in a restaurant January, 1978, less than a year after Francesco Violi was shot in his northend office.
Poxon said investigators were awaiting fingerprint tests on the rifle and telescopic sites, left behind by the assasin in the third-floor of a vacant office block which looked onto Rocco's home.
'His association (with Paolo) probably made him a target,' Poxon said. 'They may have wanted to get rid of would-be sources of information on underworld to the police.'
A chart of underworld organizations drafted by Canadian and American intelligence reports linked the Cotroni-Violi ring, which reportedly covered much of eastern Canada, to New York Mafia chieftain Carmine Galente.
'There haven't been these kinds of killings from that element of the underworld this year,' Poxon said. 'Most of the killings this year have not been related to underworld activity except some minor incidents among drug dealers.'
Rocco's twin brother Guiseppe, who emigrated to Canada from Italy in the 1960's, died in a car accident in 1970. The fifth brother, Sylvio, 41, survives with his father, Dominico, 76.
