The Pacific Plants

Pacifique Plant (1907 - Mexico, 1976), called Pax Plants , was a Policier and a lawyer. He is famous for his actions against the crime with Montreal during the Années 1940 and the Années 1950, particularly his fight against corruption in the municipal administration.

Biography

Lawyer of formation, it becomes Greffier at the municipal Court of Montreal in 1937. It then notes the crawling corruption which prevails in the municipal services. The situation had been denounced in 1934 by a police report which declared that Montreal was one open city for marketed defect , as the organized crime then was called. It prevailed in the shape of illegal houses of play, of clandestine prostitution network and bars centered on the district of Red Light.

In 1945, a League of social vigilance, supported by the archbishop of Montreal, Monseigneur Joseph Charbonneau, started to assert the behavior of an investigation on corruption in the police service. Plant started, at the same time, to make pressure so that continuations are brought in way serious against the owners of the organized crime. In 1946, the assassination, in full day, king of the play Harry Davis, created an agitation in the general public. The director of the executive committee of the city, J. Omer Asselin, then named Pacifique Plant, that the public called “Pax” (Latin word meaning peace), chief of the section of morality. It manifestly was corrupted of the police service.

Plant undertook a series of spectacular descents in the clandestine establishments. It invited the press there to give the maximum of publicity to the operations and to make known the faces and the names of the culprits. Some stopped customers were being of the known personalities. It remained in item 18 months and was congédié with crash, the chief of police force pretexting the misconduct of an agent of the section. The population saw a political dismissal there.

Plant was then put to publish, in the daily newspaper the Duty , a series of articles entitled Montreal, city open , in which it described the modus operandi various networks of Bookmaker S, Souteneur S and Bootlegger S of the city. The articles, published during the years 1949 and 1950, showed that all these networks could exist only with the complicity of the authorities.

Doctor Ruben Lévesque founded in March 1950 the Committee of public morality. This committee, with the assistance of a young lawyer of the name of Jean Flag, and using the information piled up by Plant, asked and obtained for Superior court of Quebec, a public survey. The Charon investigation, of the name of the judge who chaired it, presented his report/ratio on October 8th, 1954. Charges were carried against 20 police officers who were continued and congédiés. The same day, Jean Drapeau announced his decision to be presented in the form of a candidate to the town hall at the time of the next municipal election, planned for on October 28th. He founded the civic Party which benefitted from the Charon effect and, with a programme of “cleaning” of the city, became mayor of Montreal. At once, Pacifique Plant found the post of head of the section of morality.

An intense wave of repression against the houses of play, the Brothel S and the bars clandestine (“blind pigs”) followed. The medium did not intend however to be let make: in 1955, one lapidated the house of the mayor, the shots were drawn towards Plante, without reaching it however and Ruben Lévesque was attacked and beaten. A certain gutter press attacked the administration violently and, in 1957, after an election irregular, Drapeau was évincé town hall and was replaced by Sarto Fournier.

Plant was congédié again. It had to leave the country and it lived in a semi-clandestinity with the Mexico the remainder of its life. The activities of the organized crime continued in a changing context, in the middle of frequent and fatal wars of gang. In 1960, Drapeau returned to the capacity and it remained there more than two decades. The organized crime was muzzled with variable degrees, but ever éradiqué. Plant returned to Quebec only once, to testify at the time of the Board of inquiry into the organized crime (CECO), in the years 1970. He died in Mexico in 1976.

External bonds

Pax Plante faces the underworld , files of Radio-Canada
Lutte against the underworld: the joke starts again , Pax Plante, article in the Duty of November 1949
the Duty under Gerard Filion: The business Pax Plante - Which will write these stories abracadabrantes? , Gerard Filion, article in the Duty of March 2005

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