[2][3] Desjardins went to work as an apprentice plumber at the age of 14, and had a long criminal record as a young man, doing several short stints in prison.
[4] Desjardins recruited men with criminal records to serve as his officials or "soldiers" as he called them, and rose up rapidly using violence and intimidation.
[5] Desjardins ran his loan sharking business from the Café Évangéline, and was so successful that he lent money to other criminals in Montreal, most notably Eugene Lafort, Gérald Fontaine (who was the father of Hells Angel Paul "Fon Fon" Fontaine), and members of the Devils Disciples outlaw motorcycle gang.
[3] The Canadian journalist Michel Auger described Desjardins as a "strong man" who frequently beat anyone who displeased him, and who was much feared in the construction industry in Montreal in the 1960s.
[5] Henri Masse, the president of the Quebec Federation of Labor, told the journalist Jerry Langton about Desjardins: "He was a tough guy.
[2] Desjardins was well known for his lavish lifestyle, which went beyond a union official's salary, wearing a large diamond ring, owning a white Cadillac and frequently taking vacations in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
[3] Desjardins had "soldiers" in every union local, who were expected to engage in intimidation and violence, and other criminal activities like drug dealing and extortion.
[9] As the Liberal Premier Robert Bourassa had promised in the 1970 election that his government would create 100,000 jobs in the construction industry with the James Bay Project, there was much violent competition between Desjardin's Conseil des métiers de la construction and the rival Confederation of National Trade Unions (CNFU) to have their workers engaged in the project.
[9] Besides for the James Bay Project, Desjardins's union played a major role in causing the $1 billion cost overrun on building the facilities for the 1976 Olympics in Montreal, which nearly bankrupted the city.
[11] The French architect Roger Taillibert and the Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau discovered that various "delays" on building the Olympic stadium were caused by the Conseil des métiers de la construction, and the two tried hard to win over Desjardins, buying him a lunch at the exclusive Ritz-Carlton hotel in a vain attempt to end the "anarchic disorder" on the Olympic stadium construction site.
[10] On 21 March 1974 as part of an extortion attempt against the sub-contractors working on the James Bay Project who refused to fire two workers belonging to the rival CNFU union, workers belonging to Conseil des métiers de la construction union destroyed the LG-2 construction site, causing $35 million in damages.
[1] In response to the violence at the LG-2 site, which confirmed long-standing rumors about thuggish practices on the part of construction unions, the Premier of Quebec, Robert Bourassa, appointed a commission consisting of well-respected judge Robert Cliche, prominent Montreal labor lawyer Brian Mulroney and vice-president of the Centrale de l'enseignement du Québec Guy Chevrette to investigate corruption in the construction industry in Quebec.
[12] The columnist Peggy Curran wrote that the Cliche commission uncovered: ...tales of nepotism, bribery, sabotage, blackmail and intimidation; charges of union organizers with criminal records who gave lessons in how to break legs; thugs-for-hire who would happily beat up a rival union organizer's teenager or strangle their dog.
It emerged that Bourassa's special executive assistant, Paul Desrochers, had met Desjardins to ask for the support of his union in helping the Parti libéral du Québec win a by-election in exchange for which the province would guarantee that only companies employing workers from the Conseil des métiers de la construction union would work on the James Bay project.
[13] Intercepted phone calls by the Sûreté du Québec showed that Desjardins had ordered a set of illegal strikes in the summer of 1974 as a bid to pressure the government not to have him testify before the Cliche commission.
[2] The commissioners grilled Desjardins over his association with members of the Mafia, and his denials of not being involved in organized crime proved to be ultimately unconvincing.
The commission very sincerely hopes that when our work is finished the workers in the construction industry are going to find leaders who are capable of honor, dignity and truth".
[15] the deposed union leader is a close friend of notorious criminals including Francesco Fuoco, organizer of a robbery and a "soldier" of the mafiosi Vincenzo Cotroni, Jean-Louis Robinson, shot in a settling of accounts and Eugene Lefort, nicknamed the "boss from the South Shore" The Cliche commission's report concluded Desjardins had frequently used "threats, violence and intimidation against both workers and management", that too many construction companies had given into him rather than stand up, that his status as le roi de la construction had allowed him to corrupt politicians, and his passion for money and power "... controls him to the extent of destroying his moral sense.
In his last years, Desjardins, who become one of the leading loan sharks in Montreal, become very close to Maurice "Mom" Boucher, the president of the Quebec branch of the Hells Angels.
[6] After having breakfast at Shawn's on the morning of 27 April, while getting into his automobile, Desjardins was shot in the back 11 times by an unknown gunman who used a semi-automatic handgun equipped with a silencer.
[3] The assassin left the weapon at the crime scene and was picked up by a van in the Shawn's parking lot immediately after he killed Desjardins.
[25] With a noticeable lack of emotion, Boucher told Commander Bouchard that it was a "sad thing" that his friend Desjardins had been murdered and would call him at once "if he heard anything".
[25] Langton argued that Boucher had chosen to use a case of an Italo-Canadian struggling with an unpayable loan as an excuse to eliminate Desjardins without arousing the suspicions of his nominal ally, Vito Rizzuto.
[25] The journalists Julian Sher and William Marsden wrote that Desjardins's murder was not "an isolated killing", but rather "the beginning of a new era of consolidation of the Hells' now massive drug empire, which extended throughout Quebec and the Maritimes and was fast spreading into Ontario and western Canada".
[30] The reforms that the Cliche commission had recommended were supposed to have ended the influence of organized crime and corruption within Quebec construction unions.
But after a number of buildings collapsed in 2010–2011 due to poor construction, in 2011 Quebec premier Jean Charest appointed the Charbonneau Commission headed by Madame France Charbonneau, which discovered the same sort of rampant corruption and Mafia influences in Quebec construction unions that the Cliche commission of 1974–75 had discovered, suggesting that the reforms had failed to achieve their purpose.