[2] Giovanni acknowledged during his trial that he had spent his younger years "basically raising himself", and that he had made a conscious decision to take up a life of organized crime for monetary gain.
[5] Salvatore and Maurice "Mom" Boucher were leaders of the SS, which had been labeled an anti-immigration group and which was under consideration for an invitation to join the Hells Angels.
[6] When the SS was disbanded in 1984, Giovanni and Salvatore Cazzetta, Paul "Sasquatch" Porter and others chose not to join the Hells Angels.
According to true crime author RJ Parker, the massacre was met with distrust within other elements of Quebec's underworld.
[9] The Rock Machine flourished under the leadership of the Cazzetta brothers, and throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the club began to use their contacts in the West End Gang to purchase large and import amounts of narcotics through the Port of Montreal.
There were multiple factors to this; Salvatore Cazzetta and Boucher were "longtime friends" and possessed a great amount of respect for one another.
The Cazzetta brothers also had business dealings and ties with Italian-Canadian Mafia groups in Quebec, particularly the Sicilian Rizzuto family.
As the Mafia imported large amounts of narcotics through the port of Montreal, the Rock Machine acted as one of their distributors, supplying drugs to street-level operations to be sold.
[6] The Cazzetta brothers' detention triggered Boucher to attack the Rock Machine to instigate the Quebec Biker War.
A man from Calgary had attempted to purchase 15 kilos of cocaine from Cazzetta (valued at $585,000, adjusting for inflation the modern equivalent is around 1.1 million in 2022).
[14] The drug mules who delivered the cocaine to the informant, Frank Bonneville and Donald Waite, were arrested and the narcotics seized by police.
Rock Machine national vice president Gillies Lambert was arrested alongside Cazzetta and received three years for narcotics trafficking.
Other defendants in the case, Maria Cazzetta, Giovanni's sister, and Suzanne Poudrier, received one year conditional sentences.
During that time, he returned to leading the Rock Machine and began to sell large amounts of narcotics for the club.