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Montreal police spokesperson Commander Ian Lafrenière said one of the more surprising parts of the investigation was that it began with Thibodeau. When police officers are revealed to be part of large-scale criminal conspiracies, their roles are usually uncovered at a point when their colleagues are well into the investigation.

“In this case, it was the reverse. Two years ago, information was sent to us from police sources that one of our officers was hanging around with bad people and in investigating, in scratching around, it brought us to our operation today,” Lafrenière said, adding that Bilodeau was suspended without pay as of Thursday.

“It is a way of acting that no one (in the police) tolerates. A lot of people think there is an Omerta (the Mafia term for a code of silence) within the police, that the police don’t report on each other. This is a good example of how that is the contrary.