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| Rony Bardales, left, ended up in prison. Marilyn Beliveau, right, is among us now. |
"Prepare your fruze for the booze," said Giuseppe Torre.
That catchy quote is one of countless phrases transcribed from 375 phone calls tapped by police in the Marilyn Beliveau case, summarized at length in an
epic court document.
Fruze, in mafia lingo, means money. Booze, is a Haitian term for whore. The gang was to pay her for her services helping clear their drugs through customs.
The latest in the epic saga of Marilyn Beliveau, the customs guard who gave advice to drug importers is this: in February
she was sentenced to two years minus one day to be served in the community and three years probation.
So her troubles are finally behind her, six years after she was originally arrested.
Here's her timeline: Beliveau was hired at Canada Customs while in her early 20s, in January 2003, a job that paid her $50,000 a year.
She moved in with boyfriend Fritz d'Orsainville, a drug-dealing Haitian Montrealer in October 2005. She maxed out her credit card on new furniture. She was in love with him but it was a stormy affair. She apparently moved back with her parents around Christmas.
One of their fights occurred when Fritz objected to her meeting the mafiosi at their apartment, rather than their usual places, the Moombah or at Steve's Bar in St. Leonard.
Between August 2005 to May 2006 Beliveau worked with a crew of guys including Kamel Aoude, Ray Kanho, Angelo Follano and Giuseppe Torre to help them try to get ephedrine into Canada to make crystal meth.
Her main liaisons with the gang were her high school buddies Rony Bardales and Eric Semino, who she noted had longstanding drug issues. She she considered the two like older brothers.
She was especially chummy with Bardales and he was flirty with her, all the while speaking disrespectfully about her behind her back, calling her "booze" as a reference to the fact that she had a Haitian boyfriend.
Nevertheless Beliveau was in a serious relationship with d'Orsainville and the two discussed how their lives would change once she was paid off. She'd quit her boring job, they'd open a bar in the Caribbean and so forth.
Eric Semino even promised that he'd buy an apartment building and put it under her name and buy her a condo in Old Montreal.
After an earlier series of arrangements to clear shipments to certain designated companies fell through, the modified plan was to pull some administrative strings to ensure the save arrival of shipments from Pakistan that would come to a spice company called Dispo Plus, run by a young Lebanese Samir Salame.
After months of alternately fretting about the course of the shipment and fantasizing about what she'd do with her cash, Beliveau was fired by Canadian Customs in May 2006, as there were stolen goods in an apartment that she rented but didn't live in.
But losing her job was the least of Beliveau's issues. On Nov. 22, 2006, while in New York with her boyfriend, her parents told her to come back because police wanted to arrest her on far more serious charges including fraud, gangsterism and drug importation.
She was released on $10,000 bail after Christmas 2006. In February 2007 she tried to commit suicide, she was hospitalized in a psych ward suffering post traumatic shock.
She found a job, worked a few months but the employer recognized her through media reports and fired her.
Her trial was repeatedly delayed, once for a long time as her lawyer Gary Martin had to recuse himself, as he was also defending another defendant whose interests weren't necessarily the same as hes.
Martin was forced to walk and Beliveau had to hire another lawyer at great costs.
She had a psych relapse and returned to the Louis H. Lafontaine hospital to deal with her profound depression.
Beliveau eventually tried to get the charges against her quashed due to the lengthy delay prior to trial. That attempt failed.
In July 2011 she married Frank Antonio Fernandez, who helped pay her legal costs.
And, of course, in February she was more-or-less set free and was finally able to put her fretful experience behind her.
But the records offer a fascinating inside look detailing the headaches and stress drug importers go through to get their merchandise to Montreal.
