"If you ate a hot dog or hamburger at Expo '67, it probably was putrid."That devastating lead went into wire copy newspaper articles published across the world on June 2, 1975.
One could not imagine a worse public relations disaster, particularly one year before the Montreal Olympics.
One month later another article twisted the knife into Montreal's reputation: “In a city that advertises itself as the gourmet capital of North America one man's meat literally has become another man's poison.”
It was a field day for writers with an open range to blast away at Montreal's corruption.
"Crooked suppliers unloaded tons of carrion at the St. Lawrence River extravaganza," as one journalist noted.
The tainted meat – cut from animals that were either diseased, crippled or had been dead for some time – went mostly into sausages, hamburger and pizza ingredients, the scandal has caused noticeable drops in business in even some of the city's better steakhouses.Details of the tainted meat scandal emerged during one of the endless 70s crime probes held in Montreal.
Montreal Mafia chiefs Paolo Violi and Vic Cotroni were at the centre of the scandal, as the meat their Reggio Foods supplied to Expo '67 and the Quebec 1973 Games was not even fit for animals.
The inquiry led to fraud and other charges against 10 distributors, notably Federated Packing of Magog, which sold 95,000 lbs of bad meat, simply putting into into packages labelled Quebec Approved.
They paid 40 cents per pound and then sold it for 50 cents a pound. Company representative Andre Smith confessed that he was not proud of what he did but just got greedy.
Athletes at the August 1973 Quebec Games in Rouyn were fed 1,200 lbs of horse meat disguised as beef, leading 40 athletes to become ill.
And 500 lbs of bad meat was sold to Expo '67, meat that came from sickly or already-dead animals. That meat is usually sold to pet food companies. Those companies became aware that something crooked was up when they found it increasingly difficult to purchase their supplies from the usual sources.
The scandal was at its worst between 1971 to 1974 when Quebec imported lots of tainted meat from Ontario.
But the scandal was ongoing on from at least 1958 when a butcher in Three Rivers was selling decaying animal flesh to butchers.
Quebec only had four meat inspectors, so there was a massive under-staffing issue which led to the abuse.
Nonetheless the provincial health ministry dismissed reports of the bad meat in 1962 as Health Minister Andre Pelletier said that reports of 30 tons of tainted meat distributed from Three Rivers was unlikely.
The minister noted that 95 percent of the meat came from large companies and only about five percent of Quebec's meat comes from farmers near Three Rivers.
Reports suggested that consumers were quickly over the shock and it did not cause any long-term changes to their meat consumption patterns.