April 15, 2021 – Montreal street gang boss Harold (Harry Up) Mytil ordered the murder of Italian mafia associate Gaetan Gosselin in 2013 and was then murdered himself shortly thereafter. The 70-year old Gosselin was connected to the hierarchy of the Rizzuto crime family and then a renegade group that splintered off and faced off with the Rizzutos for control of the Quebec rackets. Harry Up, a high-ranking Haitian crime lord, backed the Rizzuto clan in the blood feud.
Gosselin was the right-hand man of Rizzuto syndicate “underboss” turned rival Raynald Desjardins, who had attempted to seize power from Godfather Vito Rizzuto when Rizzuto was locked away in an American prison. The conflict has caused massive bloodshed, spread across Canada into Ontario, and has yet to slow down some 12 years later, despite Rizzuto being long dead from a bout with cancer and the French-Canadian Desjardins being incarcerated for the better half of the past decade.
Desjardins once acted as Rizzuto’s right-hand man and second in charge, the most powerful non-Italian in the history of Italian organized crime according to experts. His business relationship with Rizzuto began to fray in the mid-2000s, beginning with Rizzuto placing a murder contract on the head of a close friend of Desjardins and having it carried out despite his No. 2’s strenuous objection.
Mytil headed the Unit 44 crew of the Bo-Gars Haitian street gang. He green-lit the Gosselin hit, allegedly on behalf of the Rizzuto crime family, which had deeply-forged ties with various ethnic factions and criminal groups in the Montreal underworld and was known to use the area’s Haitians gangs for drug dealing and muscle. Unit 44 is a narcotics trafficking, robbery and extortion outfit under the Bo-Gars street gang ba
Gosselin was gunned down in front of his home in St. Leonard on January 22, 2013 by a five-man hit team dispatched by Harry Up. All five men pleaded guilty in the case.
The getaway driver in the Gosselin hit, Unit 44 crew member Edrick Antoine, was denied parole last week. Desjardins, 67, is scheduled for release this spring after a 2016 conviction for conspiracy to murder 40-year old Sicilian-raised New York mob boss Salvatore (Sal the Ironman) Montagna, deported to Montreal from his home base in Brooklyn two years prior.
Montagna and Desjardins joined forces to oppose Rizzuto, but the alliance soon fell apart and Desjardins ordered Montagna murdered. The 40-year old “Bambino Boss” was slain on November 24, 2011, shortly following an attempt by Montagna to have Desjardins killed in a brazen shooting involving a masked gunmen on a jet ski coming ashore and opening fire on Desjardins and his bodyguard.
Desjardins didn’t wait long after Gosselin was in the ground to seek revenge on Harry Up for clipping his best friend and “chief of staff.” Mytil, 34, was shot to death inside his garage in Laval on the evening of April 16, 2013, less than three months removed from Gosselin’s slaying.
Almost exactly ten years before that, Harry Up led a brutal home invasion targeting defense attorney Alain Dubois in May 2003. RCMP records name Harry Up as a close confidant to Bo-Gars street gang boss Chenier Dupuy, slain behind the wheel of his SUV in a hail of bullets near a shopping mall in 2012.