Montreal Mayor Michael Applebaum. Not pictured: a police raid. via.
So. The mayor of Montreal has been arrested.
Investigators with UPAC, the provincial anti-corruption squad, roused Michael Applebaum out of bed this morning at the ungodly hour of 6 a.m. for a trip down to Sûreté du Québec’s HQ on Parthenais street in Montreal and booked him on 14 counts, including fraud, conspiracy to commit fraud, corruption and breach of trust. The operation was conducted discreetly, with only about 20 officers involved.
Whether he’ll continue on as mayor isn’t yet known—but predictably, the opposition is saying he has to step down. Jean-Francois Lisée, Quebec’s minister for Montreal, is saying the same.
Jesus bedwetting Christ.
We know how fucked up Montreal’s political scene is, and we automatically assume politicians are crooked, but it’s still an eye-popping sight to see your mayor behind bars. Especially a guy like Mike—clean-cut, religious, nebbish-y little Mike.
Here’s a guy who swore up and down that his hands were clean, that he was going to put an end to all the rot and filth festering at the sour heart of this crumbling city. That he was a man of integrity, that he had nothing to hide, that he wouldn’t tolerate corruption.
Maybe it’s all bullshit. Maybe—could it be?—a politician lied to us. Big fucking surprise.
If Mike is crooked as cops think he is, he’s in colourful company. He joins Gilles Vaillancourt, the former mayor of the dreary suburb of Laval currently being charged with all kinds of malfeasance, in the ever-extending line of disgraced pols. Gilles’s alleged to have skimmed 2.5 percent off every municipal contract he awarded in a reign that spanned three decades.
Mike got in trouble after news reports in February pointed out some suspicious real estate dealings in Notre-Dame-de-Grace/Cote-des-Neiges between 2006 to 2011, when he was the borough’s mayor. (FYI, Montreal has 19 boroughs, each of them with a council and a mayor, which makes for a seriously top-heavy, expensive and many say wasteful municipal council. It also has a regular city-wide city council and mayor.) They involve zoning changes for building projects with Mafia connections.
Cops had been investigating dealings in the neighbourhood for some time, and in March, a city manager named Robert Rousseau committed suicide after being questioned by the corruption boys. Arrested alongside Applebaum were ex-long-time councillor Saulie Zajdel (who ran for the federal Conservatives in 2011) and a city bureaucrat responsible for zoning and permits—Rosseau’s predecessor.
Mike’s short career as mayor hasn’t been an easy one. He grabbed the top job after his one-time boss, former mayor Gerald Tremblay, stepped down last November amid a slew of revelations of graft and sleaze and mob connections among his top staff. He was one for the first councillors to distance himself from Tremblay and his party (after he was passed over for the party’s leadership), and was duly elected by city council as interim mayor after making overtures to the two opposition parties. He was Montreal’s first Anglo mayor in over a century and its first Jewish one ever. He’s also, apparently, a pretty sneaky little operator.
So what happens now? Who the hell knows? Mike might try to ride it out until November, but it’s hard to imagine that he’ll get much help at City Hall, where his allies are going to be hoping the cops don’t look too closely at their histories.
Precedent suggests that Montreal may be put under provincial trusteeship. That’s what happened in Laval a couple of weeks ago. That meant that a panel of commissioners—in Laval’s case, a former provincial minister, a judge and a lawyer—will oversee all spending and hiring decisions while letting the city council conduct its affairs as more or less usual.
Trusteeship is embarrassing and humiliating. Politically speaking, it’s like having your parents cut off your allowance after they see all the stupid shit you’ve been spending money on.
Montreal’s politicians are hoping that doesn’t happen here, and are now wondering if and when they’ll get yet another interim mayor. While a bunch of city politicians say they need one, with an election just a few months away, others are asking why bother.
Whoever does take the job, either now or in November, has a big old bucket of crap to deal with. Even the cleanest hands are going to get dirty after a while.
Follow Patrick on Twitter: @patricklejtenyi
More on sleazy mayors:
Rob Ford Might Be A Crack Smoker