to get a jogging track repaired at his own expense and somehow secured a truck filled with three thousand dollars' worth of seafood. It was "a spectacular way to show your strength and power within the institution," the parole board said in a ruling, commenting on the exercise facility. He also managed to gain control of prison refrigerators and telephones and secure a computer for his cell. He and his cellblock cronies made daily calls to conduct business, even though that was obviously against prison policy.

By the end of 1995, Desjardins's conduct was deemed so bad that he was transferred to maximum-security Donnacona Institution, about forty kilometres west of Quebec City, because of concerns for the safety of staff and inmates. Generally, prisoners are transferred from medium- toParthenais Street morgue.

The working police theory was that the senior Lo Presti had trusted his killer up until the final instant of his life, when someone put a small-calibre bullet in his head. Whoever he met in a downtown restaurant that day had likely set him up for murder, and perhaps also drove him to his death, since Lo Presti's Porsche was found parked outside the restaurant. Perhaps that so-called friend even fired the fatal bullet. Did Lo Presti suspect anything was wrong as he left the restaurant? The killer left some four thousand dollars on the body, a sign of either arrogance or respect. The execution remained unsolved, but it was widely accepted by police that Vito's hand guided the crime.

One theory concerned five kilograms of heroin