[1] Courville was a leading star in the wrestling promotion run by Sylvio Samson, holding the Quebec and Canadian mid-heavyweight championships.

[5] The Canadian journalists André Cédilot and André Noël wrote: "Proudly mustachioed with a head planted between two massive shoulders, Courville was a man who literally took the law into his own hands, keeping bothersome individuals at bay with his fists and buying off politicians, city councilors, and policemen who threatened to close down his many gambling dens and speakeasies".

The political connections that Courville and Cotroni forged via their work in the "baseball bat elections" ensured their relative impunity for decades afterwards as the Quebec government, whatever it was under the control of the Parti libéral du Québec or the Union Nationale had no interest in seeing either men charged.

[7] Cédilot and Noël wrote that Courville and Cotroni were "hired indiscriminately by both the Liberal Party and the Union Nationale, the two goons drove voters out of the polling stations with baseball bats".

[8] The Faison Doré was also the place where a number of French-Canadian stars such as Roger Baulu, Raymond Lévesque, Denise Filiatrault, Fernand Gignac and Monique Leyrac began their careers.

[9] The Faison Doré had the seating capacity for 600 people at any given moment, and the clientele included "office workers and taxi drivers, judges and lawyers, university professors and doctors" as both Courville and Cotroni had a reputation for promoting la chanson française at a time when many French-Canadians felt that their culture was being denigrated.

[11] Cotroni and Courville soon attracted the attention of "the Commission" of New York as both Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lanksy made it clear that they wanted a share of Montreal's rackets.

[9] For their part, Cotroni had forged an alliance with a number of French gangsters, most notably Antoine D'Agostino to smuggle heroin from Marseilles into Montreal.

An alliance was soon made with the New York Mafia where in exchange for heroin being smuggled into the United States, a share of the profits from the Montreal rackets would go to "the Commission".

[15] In 1967, Courville became notorious as one of the gangsters responsible for supplying the tainted meat that was sold in the concession stands for the visitors to Expo 67, through he was never charged despite the outrage about the damage the scandal did to Montreal's reputation.

[21] In 1977, Courville testified at the Commission d'Enquête sur le Crime Organisé: "If the Mafia exists in Montreal, it's probably like the Knights of Columbus".