Wanna hear an epic argument between Mayor Jean Drapeau and his former partner-in-crimefighting Pax Plante?An audio tape exists of a never-before-heard squabble between the two in 1972, now it's just a matter of getting its owner Alain Stanke to share it.
Stanke, who turns 82 in June, jokes that he is keeping the tape in his fridge.
Here's the context: in the late 1950s longtime Montreal Mayor Jean Drapeau and his sidekick Pacifique Plante combined to take on the gambling dens, houses of prostitution and eventually sanitized other sticky stuff for which the city was known.
Plante later felt threatened by mobsters and relocated to Mexico. He convinced himself that gangsters were still hunting for him long after any possible danger was gone, and so he never moved back.
But Plante came in 1972 for the launch of Stanke's biography on him.
While in town, Plante decided to ring his old friend Drapeau up. Before fingering that final number on the rotary phone Plante asked Stanke, aka Aloyzas-Vytas Stankevicius - to record the phone call.
In fact Plante insisted that the conversation be recorded, so Stanke simply helped set it up.
Plante told Drapeau that he deserved a bigger pension from Montreal,
Drapeau had other ideas and the two thrashed out a number of other contentious points of view.
Stanke, who says the chit chat is "unbelievable," does not feel that it would be right to release the tape.
Coolopolis urged Stanke long and hard to share it with the world so perhaps he will eventually relent.
Stanke had a long career as a writer and a publisher but the crime articles he wrote for the Petit Journal between 1954 and 1961 are particularly exciting.
At its peak the paper had an impressive circulation of 308,000, partially thanks to Stanke's excellent articles. The Allo Police eventually started up and filled that crime void, and Stanke went freelance.
Some highlights of Stanke's time at the Petit Journal: - When asked to write an article about drug dealers in Montreal Stanke went one better and suggested he got undercover and actually buy some drugs. Cocaine was not around back then but heroin was and its purchase involved a convoluted system of leaving an aluminum packet in a phone booth. Stanke says that he faced danger researching the article for one month in his undercover guise and it eventually led to 12 arrests.
- Stanke wrote about an insane rumble at a beauty contest in Point St. Charles.
- He also wrote extensively about the brutal Dubois brothers, who agreed to be interviewed and spoke about some of their more redeeming qualities.
- His 1958 article describing prostitution on the lower Main is also a must-read.
The good news is that all of these articles can be read on the BANQ site. The bad news is that the old system was replaced by another which is much-more-difficult to navigate and impossible to link to.