From: The Montreal Gazette
By Paul Cherry, GAZETTE CRIME Reporter
Antonio Bastone, 51, St-Jean-de-Matha
When arrests were made on June 12, the RCMP described Bastone and his younger brother, Robert, as the leaders of one of two cells they investigated. Despite this, Antonio Bastone’s name has rarely been mentioned in the past in connection with organized crime in Montreal. During a trial of six people heard in Montreal in 2012, Bastone’s name came up in connection with an RCMP investigation dubbed Project Chocolat. The six people tried to smuggle 1,300 kilograms of hashish from Belgium through the Port of Montreal. Bastone was not charged in Chocolat but he and eight other men, including two well-known drug smugglers, were referred to as “subjects of interest” in Project Chocolat in a Superior Court decision related to the probe.
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Gary James Arnold, 45, Elgin
He is currently incarcerated while he serves a sentence he received in July 2012 after quickly pleading guilty to seven charges filed against him in Project Hachoir. Arnold, one of Godmanchester’s volunteer firefighters when the arrests were made in 2012, is not named in the Clemenza indictment. But while his Hachoir-related case was before the courts, he was described by police as having had “a near-monopoly” on smuggling operations carried out on the upper St. Lawrence River and a man with extensive contacts within the Akwasasne Reserve, which joins the Canadian and U.S. border at Cornwall, Ont. His four-year prison term represents the most severe sentence handed down in Project Hachoir so far. The SQ found evidence that during 2011 alone, Arnold managed to bring more than 5,000 cases of contraband cigarettes into Canada. They estimated that amount of cases represented more than $5 million in lost tax revenue for the provincial government. Project Hachoir began shortly after Arnold and two other volunteer firefighters were arrested by the RCMP, on June 10, 2010, while travelling in boat on Lac St-François that was found to be carrying 156 cases of contraband cigarettes.
