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MONTREAL — “We ask everyone to kindly leave,” said the voice over the loudspeaker in Montreal’s City Hall on Tuesday. Minutes earlier, a fire alarm had gone off — even though there was no fire.

As politicians and city officials filed outside into a gathering snowstorm, dozens of cops from Quebec’s Permanent Anti-Corruption Unit moved in for an unprecedented raid, searching for documents to prove allegations of fraud, misrepresentation and abuse of trust.

At that precise moment, other anticorruption officers were raiding six Montreal borough halls, as well as the headquarters of the former ruling party in the city, Union Montreal. The operations were all part of a sprawling multiyear investigation into illegal party funding that has rocked the city establishment, already claiming one mayor’s head and making his replacement very uncomfortable just months into the job.

According to Transparency International, Canada is tied with the Netherlands as the 9th least corrupt country on earth and ranks easily as the least corrupt in the Americas. But here in Montreal, that squeaky clean image has long been stained by murmurs about the construction contracts coming out of city hall.

For years, journalists had been picking up clues that a small syndicate of firms with links to the mafia were colluding to carve up lucrative construction and snow-removal contracts among themselves, forming an illegal cartel that jacked up costs at the taxpayers’ expense. Many also suspected the racket could only be sustained through kickbacks to well-placed city officials.

After years of stalling, the provincial government finally agreed to set up a powerful and independent commission of inquiry with broad powers to look into corruption. The Charbonneau Commission (headed by the retired magistrate France Charbonneau) has electrified the province for months now, its work unfolding like a movie, as it questions one gangland figure after another and links them to crooked municipal construction deals.

This week the commission released hidden camera footage of one construction entrepreneur calmly counting out piles of cash and divvying them up with Nick Rizzuto, the now-deceased godfather of Montreal’s Sicilian mob. The entrepreneur, Nicolo Milioto — now retired, himself born in Sicily — was nicknamed Mr. Sidewalk, for the lock he’d long enjoyed on municipal sidewalk-construction contracts.

Questioned about the footage, and police logs showing him dropping in on a known mafia hangout 236 times in two years, Mr. Sidewalk described Rizzuto as nothing more than an old buddy with whom he drank espresso, noting that if a friend asked him to help count money, he was only too glad to oblige.

There is a supremely Sopranoesque moment. “What’s the Mafia?” asks Mr. Sidewalk, staring calmly back at the commission lawyer interrogating him under oath. “I can’t explain it to you, I don’t know that.” He adds: “Is it someone who kills? Is it someone who steals? Is it someone who sells drugs? I don’t know.” Twice Charbonneau is heard reminding Milioto he could end up in jail for contempt, never mind corruption.

The Charbonneau Commission has already had one major victim: the three-term mayor Gérald Tremblay, who resigned last November after a key witness testified that he had known about, and done nothing to stop, illegal cash contributions to Union Montreal. At one point, the safe the party kept for dirty cash had become so full, it was alleged, that its door would no longer close.

For years, Montrealers had settled into a kind of learned helplessness when faced with stories of corruption at city hall: a feeling that the people involved just had too much power and too much money ever to be called to account.

The Charbonneau Commission is starting to change that by picking at the local mob’s mantle of invincibility. With power players facing the very real prospect of long prison sentences, the old fatalism is starting to lift.

Come to think of it, maybe Transparency International wasn’t so wrong to put Canada, Montreal and all, on its top-ten list.