Big Gus made his way into the halfway house’s foyer, bleeding from bullet wounds to his back and stomach. Paramedics were summoned, but he was pronounced dead on arrival in hospital.

He was just one week away from completing his time at the halfway house.

It could be said Alevizos had been living on borrowed time for the seven years preceding his murder — ever since more than $500,000 in cash belonging to Montreal’s Rizzuto crime family went missing. Other mobsters suspected he took it, so, in 2001, Mississauga's Juan Ramon Fernandez, a.k.a. Joe Bravo, handed an associate a sock containing a .357-calibre pistol and ammunition and ordered the big man dead.

Lucky for Alevizos, it didn’t go according to plan. The would-be hit man turned out to be a police informer wearing a wire, and Bravo was arrested and sent to prison for 12 years for conspiracy to commit murder.

Bravo was still behind bars when Alevizos was murdered in Brampton on that Jan. 30, 2008, but knowing the reach some convicts can have from inside their prison cells, he was deemed a “person of interest” in the killing.

Despite police suspicions, Bravo was never charged with Alevizos’ murder. Bravo was a Spanish national and had already been deported twice before the attempted assassination in 2001, but he had slipped back into Canada each time. He would be deported one more time, after his final release from prison, and was gunned down in a mob hit in Sicily in 2013.

Alevizos had other enemies, too. There was talk he was fearful of retaliation from an Asian organized crime group he had supposedly double-crossed.

Police were hopeful they could track down those responsible, but as the months turned into years, no arrests have ever been made.

There is still no answer to who ordered Big Gus dead, or who carried out the hit.

Anyone with information can call Peel police homicide bureau, at 905-453-2121, ext. 3205, or Peel Crime Stoppers anonymously at 1-800-222-TIPS (8477).

With files from Torstar Network