When Montreal acting legend Percy Rodrigues lived the thug life

  You want a crazy, crazy day here in Montreal?    You won't find anything more intense than Aug 8, 1944 which witnessed an over-the-top attack at the offices of a Union National candidate Omer Cote on the north side of St. Catherine just west of St. Denis - where a UQAM campus now stands.
  Dozens of hired goons were arrested for sowing terror and shooting Cote in the leg.
  It's unclear why the goons attacked the candidate, as voter intimidation usually focuses on the ballot boxes and not campaign offices.
   Cote recovered and was elected and served in a high government post.
  The small print reveals that those arrested as the attackers included Percy Rodrigues, a boxer, actor and doorman at the Cafe St. Michel.*
   Rodrigues went on to have an impressive acting career, most notably playing a neurosurgeon in the Peyton Place TV show.
  Rodrigues (sometimes called Rodriguez) was considered a sort of Jackie Robinson of television as he broke a colour barrier in his Peyton Place role. He also had a James Earl Jones-type voice used on the Jaws trailer.

National Union MNA Omer Cote

Percy Rodrigues pre-and post fame

   The very same paper that noted his misdeed would later write a loving tribute to his early success, without reference to the earlier event.
   Such an election attack seems pretty bizarre when seen in the modern context.
   Why would dozens take part in a violent swarm only to end up in the slammer?
   I guess they boys needed the money bad.

Charlie Chase

   In a similar event 11 years later another local black prizefighter named Charlie Chase would participate in a similar attack as the American Bar and the Chez Paree.
   The 1955 attacks were ordered by mobster Frank Petrula and whose foot soldiers included Chase a prizefighter who went on to box well into his 40s.  Chase was not convicted of the accusation, however.

Charlie Chase

  Chase, according to gangster lore, would get dancers from Chez Paree hooked on heroin so he could pimp them out, until Johnny Maguire - said to be the toughest-ever local Irish mobster - beat him severely with a baseball bat.

When there was news 

   The Montreal violence of Aug 8, 1944 also included a fight in Montreal North that saw 100 youths battle in the streets.
   That riot merited a few lines in the local newspaper daily.
  And on that very same day a husband working at a delicatessan on Bleury south of what's now De Maisonneuve grabbed a knife and stabbed his wife to death and then did the same to her brother, right in front of clients.
  That horrifying madness also only got a few lines.
  One can blame a decline in readership for the decline of newspapers and TV news but the real culprit might be the decline in mayhem and crime, as events like that simply no longer happen in our safer and sensible world where water main breaks are the biggest news we usually got.
   *La Patrie Aug. 9, 1944, p. 2