Note: This article is subject to legal complaint by Club 357c

MONTREAL — A vast investigation into corruption in Quebec may have unearthed the swank private club where officials were corrupted, government contracts were rigged and politicians were paid off.

If there were a central plant where the system of corruption and collusion was churned out, Montreal’s Club 357C may have been it. It is an ultra-secret gathering place reputed to have the best cuisine in the country and a membership list that includes Cirque du Soleil’s Guy Laliberté, actor-director Robert Lepage and the crème of corporate Quebec.

“In creating the club, I wanted to bring together business people in the Old Port, the origin of Montreal, and allow them to better appreciate their city,” club owner Daniel Langlois told an interviewer in 2009.

He appears to have succeeded, but in a way he never expected. Now the actions of a few of the 1,000 hand-selected members — namely construction boss Paolo Catania — could taint the reputation of the exclusive club.

Anti-corruption investigators descended on the distinguished four-storey building a short walk from Montreal’s City Hall on Oct. 26. It was just a few days before a former friend of Catania, Elio Pagliarulo, would testify before the Charbonneau Commission about being summoned to a “private club” and handing over envelopes worth $10,000 destined for corrupted city engineer Luc Leclerc, a linchpin in Montreal’s mafia-linked construction cartel that ruled the city for a decade or more.

A short while later, he explained how he arrived at Club 357C in 2006 armed with $100,000 destined for Frank Zampino, head of Montreal’s powerful executive committee.

“I called Paolo and I asked him to meet me close to the entrance,” Pagliarulo recalled. “We walked to the coat room, I gave him the money in a bag or in a box and then I was walking out and as I was walking out I saw Mr. Zampino, Frank Zampino in that room.”

Zampino, Catania and a host of others were arrested in May of this year on fraud, conspiracy and breach of trust charges related to the sale of city-owned land to Catania in 2008.

Commission lawyers said that Club 357C’s meticulous register which dates back to 2003-04 revealed meetings not only with city officials and Montreal engineers alleged to have acted as organizers for the rigged construction contracts, but also with members of the Quebec Liberal Party, which has so far escaped much of the commission’s scrutiny.

The introduction of the club’s registry was brought forward as an urgent matter to be heard before the commission Tuesday morning and a quick intervention by the lawyer for the provincial Liberals asking for a temporary publication ban on information related to two as-yet-unidentified people showed the extreme sensitivity of the information being brought to light.

That damage may have to wait until Wednesday as the inquiry ran out of time dealing with just the first page of the registry, which deals only with meetings between Zampino, Bernard Trepanier, the chief fundraiser for Montreal’s former ruling political party, and Martial Fillion, the chief of staff to former Montreal mayor Gérald Tremblay. There were also meetings between Catania and a series of engineering firms which are alleged to have acted as the matchmakers between corrupted government officials and construction firms.

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