View from the top of the Mounties

Canada's top police officer worked hard to earn his rank from humble roots. But now he's at the centre of the biggest RCMP crisis in decades, and his job is at stake

JEFF SALLOT , TIMOTHY APPLEBY and COLIN FREEZE

There are lots of horses but few real Mounties hanging around the Musical Ride stables on weekends when the tour buses in Ottawa stop by. The small museum and equestrian complex includes Mountie mannequins decked out in historic RCMP gear. The walls are adorned with sepia-toned photos and oil paintings of the force's exploits in the Northwest Territories of the 19th century.

A retired Mountie, a salty Newfoundlander with a love of horses, acts as the guide for the tour groups visiting Canada's capital from as far away as Taiwan. On this particular Saturday, the cameras come out as the group moves from the tack room to the stable proper. Some visitors hold their noses because of the smell. But most just smile as they pose next to one of the tall, dark horses.

There is only one active-duty Mountie around, an officer working with his horse in the indoor arena. He is RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, 59, a bright and ambitious Italian immigrant who grew up in Montreal and went on to became Canada's top cop.

He is now at the centre of the biggest crisis to hit the force since the national police were last enmeshed in security-intelligence investigations three decades ago. A judicial commission of inquiry reported this week that his poorly trained and inexperienced anti-terrorist investigators passed along raw and inaccurate intelligence to the United States that very likely led to Canadian Maher Arar's deportation and torture in Syria as an al-Qaeda suspect. Even worse for Mr. Zaccardelli, the inquiry found the RCMP tried to cover its tracks by misleading senior government officials about the force's early involvement in the Arar case.

How long can Mr. Zaccardelli survive in his job after such a damning report? The minority Conservative government is not going out of its way to defend the Commissioner from opposition calls for his head. And the man himself is staying out of sight.

Last summer, Commissioner Zaccardelli was still riding high and proud for the tourists.

He is the quintessential Mountie, proud and steeped in RCMP lore. In his riding gear he looks ready to lead a horse patrol through a mountain pass in pursuit of the bad guys. But his career path has been decidedly more urban, first as a white-collar crime investigator and then in charge of organized crime.

In fact, Mr. Zaccardelli did not learn to ride until late in his career. He took it up only after he was named commissioner in 2000. He felt it was important for the image of a force that began as a paramilitary horse regiment for its leader to be able to take a salute from the Musical Ride from a saddle rather than the grandstand. He bought fancy tailor-made leather riding boots for $1,064 for such occasions.

In the navy blue business suit he sometimes wears for appearances before a House committee, he's just another pale-faced Ottawa mandarin. But at state events and other formal ceremonies, where he wears his red serge tunic and his service medals, he glows. Politicians and senior officials go out of their way to say hello.

It's important not to underestimate this man's pride, say people who have worked closely with him in government. He comes from proverbially humble immigrant roots and worked his way to the top. He's married, and has no children.

"And there is some sorrow there," a friend said. "He's made the RCMP his entire life. It would be tragic for him to have to leave under a cloud."

Another old friend, retired RCMP superintendent Ben Soave, says he's never met anyone who is so proud of his job: "Anything that tarnishes the image of the force would hurt him tremendously."

There were several possible candidates for the top job six years ago when then prime minister Jean Chrétien was looking for a replacement for Philip Murray, who was retiring. Mr. Murray had been seen as a bit of a pencil-pusher, good with administrative details and excited by managerial theories. His style was to run a decentralized operation, but many in government felt he took that too far, that there was a breakdown in accountability.

Mr. Chrétien was not a big fan of the Mounties, with good reason, say former Liberal government officials who were around at the time. He had seen how relatively low-level investigators ran amok in the Airbus case, leading to a costly legal settlement in former prime minister Brian Mulroney's defamation suit against the government.

Mr. Chrétien blamed the Mounties for security lapses that allowed an intruder to break into 24 Sussex Dr. while he and his wife, Aline, were sleeping. And then at a country fair in Prince Edward Island on a steamy day in mid-August, 2000, a man in a heavy coat got close enough to hit Mr. Chrétien in the face with a cream pie.

Within days, Mr. Chrétien had a series of job candidates out to his cottage in Quebec for informal chats. Mr. Zaccardelli, then the deputy commissioner in charge of the organized-crime branch, charmed the Chrétiens.

"Aline was very impressed with the language skills and the sensibility of Zack," said Canadian organized crime expert Antonio Nicaso, who has heard the commissioner recount the story.

Mr. Zaccardelli and Mrs. Chrétien both speak Italian, his native tongue and her third language.

On Aug. 30, 2000, Mr. Zaccardelli was named Canada's top cop. Mr. Chrétien called his choice for commissioner another "little guy" from Quebec, a scrapper who fought his way up.

Mr. Zaccardelli had arrived.

By most accounts, Mr. Zaccardelli's first year was a success. His force became more cohesive and disciplined; his reputation as a sophisticated manager unscathed. The force's major objectives — organized and white-collar crime — were his specialties. He began devoting a lot of time to building better ties with international police forces.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. Among the many things that changed after the terrorist attacks in the United States was the mandate of the RCMP. Suddenly, fighting organized crime was no longer the government's top priority. National security was.

After Sept. 11, the Mounties were thrust back in the intelligence game, big time. That's when things began to go wrong. Years before, the RCMP had been stripped of the responsibility of gathering intelligence on national-security matters. After a number of scandals in the 1970s, intelligence gathering was given to the new Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Intelligence work was like chess. A CSIS agent's job was to gather raw intelligence, analyze it and choose what to pass on to other international agencies and what to pursue at home. Once intelligence was gathered and analyzed, it was passed on to the RCMP to pursue.

But police work was like playing football; its officers like players rushing down the field.

What happened in the Arar case is that the RCMP, the linebackers of law enforcement, handed raw intelligence to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation without having it checked out by the chess players. The Arar inquiry report strongly suggests that if CSIS and its Garry Kasparovs had been running the case, Mr. Arar would not have spent a year in a tiny and filthy Syrian prison cell.

Commissioner Zaccardelli has always talked of holding Mounties to the highest possible standards. "I see accountability as the cornerstone of both a personal and organizational badge of honour," he once wrote, in an autobiographical speech. That sense of honour, he said, had been shaped by "early life experiences and the values I was called to live by as a small boy from Prezza, Italy."

That village, population 1,200, is located in one of the most sparsely populated regions of Italy. It was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War, and Mr. Zaccardelli has said that, before he was born, his mother fled the village to live in the fields during the Nazi occupation. Many villagers left after the war.

In the 1950s, the Zaccardellis arrived in Canada with little more than their Old World values and all the suitcases they could carry. "Zack," as he is known to colleagues, was 7.

"If I had to name the single most powerful effect being an Italian immigrant to Canada in 1954 has had on me, it would be the impact of watching my parents carve out a new life," he would later say. "They worked hard, so hard. My father put his head down, took whatever jobs there were to be had."

The labourer's son started delivering newspapers when he was 8. During his teens, he worked in restaurants. He always liked the pictures of Canadian police in their uniforms, ones just as red as the uniforms worn by his beloved Montreal Canadiens. By high school, he knew he wanted to be a Mountie.

Having read history and philosophy didn't pay off when he tried to enter Loyola College (now Concordia University). The school's history program rejected him.

"The dean of arts suggested I go down the hall to the commerce department where he said they'll take anyone," Mr. Zaccardelli would recall.

After Loyola, he went to the RCMP training centre in Regina.

Cadet Zaccardelli was an odd duck in the police academy. Very few prospects were not Canadian-born. He was one of only a handful college graduates. His father felt the Mounties would not accept an immigrant. The son believed he would get in, but not necessarily rise in the ranks. "I never thought I'd even make corporal let alone get a commission," he said years later.

But his quiet ambition and commercial expertise enabled him to work in every region of the country. In time, he rose through the ranks.

A few years ago he returned to Prezza as a celebrity. According to an account published in the Canadian Legion Magazine of this 2002 visit, shops and schools closed as the village welcomed Mr. Zaccardelli. A band played the Canadian and Italian national anthems for the joyous occasion. The altar boy who had left a half-century ago had come back as the "Commissioner of the Red Jackets."

"It is this place that shaped you into the person you are today and taught you to read and write, and more importantly the family values and respect of others," the local mayor said upon Commissioner Zaccarelli's return.

His Italian heritage is a big part of his personality, says Liberal MP Maurizio Bevilacqua, an old friend.

Italian criminals could expect far worse treatment from Zack because of where they were from, says another friend, former Toronto police chief Julian Fantino.

And values are a staple of the commissioner's speeches, which he usually writes himself. "At the RCMP, we don't want to only pay lip service to values — we know them, we live them, and when they are violated there are consequences," he has said. "I believe that law enforcement — perhaps more than any other area of public service — has a higher calling to be accountable."

Mr. Zaccardelli added: "We exercise tremendous power, able to deprive individuals of freedom and property. We have no choice but to operate in a transparent, open and accountable manner."

His old friend, Mr. Soave, gives him high marks for trying to make the force more transparent.

"The force has gone back and forth on this. It used to be, 'Don't talk to the media.' Then it was everybody talking to the media. People were doing it without training and mistakes were made."

The RCMP is one of the biggest, most complex law-enforcement organizations in the world. Commissioner Zaccardelli has pointed out that the 19th-century version of the force once consisted of 300 officers preoccupied with stopping "whisky-toting claim jumpers and horse thievery." Today, more than 21,000 people work for the RCMP, which sprawls from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean.

On any given day, any given Mountie might find himself arresting a drunk in a remote community, or handing out traffic tickets on B.C.'s Lower Mainland, or doing a forensic analysis of complex financial crimes in one of Canada's largest cities, or dealing with international forces on child pornography. The force's leaders have to be versed in a mind-boggling array of statutes, techniques, regions and methods.

Mr. Zaccardelli is a stickler for solid investigative work and once got testy when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation indicted hockey impresario Alan Eagleson. It took the RCMP two more years to lay charges in Canada and the Mounties took heat for being inept.

Mr. Zaccardelli, then deputy commissioner, hated that perception. "This illusion has been created that the Americans did this great investigation and that the Mounted Police did nothing," he said at the time. "With all due respect to the American authorities, they don't have one shred of evidence.

He explained: "The only evidence that the Americans had and used at the grand jury was 100 per cent what we provided from our investigation."

As deputy commissioner, Mr. Zaccardelli was in charge of the RCMP's organized-crime investigations. This was a coup for him because organized crime was the big issue of the day. With an eye on the top job, he began using his post as a platform for the theories that would become his mantra: All crime ties back to organized crime, which is by nature transnational. "There are no more borders," he told a newspaper. "That means policing must have no borders."

In December, 1999, Algerian Ahmed Ressam was caught by U.S. border guards in Washington State. The Montreal resident had travelled to British Columbia to cook up a bomb, which he plotted to use to kill random Americans at the Los Angeles airport.

After Mr. Ressam's arrest, police on both sides of the border discovered there was a whole group in Montreal with similar ideas. "This is much bigger than just Montreal," deputy commissioner Zaccardelli told reporters at the time.

Within days of the Algerian's arrest, the Mountie travelled to the Washington, D.C., to reassure the head of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney-General that Canada could contain the growing threat of terrorism.

It was still about two years before Sept. 11, when the terrorist attacks would throw the Mounties into disarray. Two years before sloppy police work would lead to Mr. Arar's torture, a judicial inquiry and the damning report that threatens Mr. Zaccardelli's tenure at the top.
Political masters liked what they saw in Mr. Zaccardelli when he was deputy commissioner. In the late 1990s, there existed a perception that the RCMP had drifted off-course and he could steer things back in the right direction.

Mr. Zaccardelli was disciplined and would be sure to know how to take charge. He would bring in smart people. He would modernize the RCMP. He would restore accountability. And his background made him perfect for the trend of international co-operation.

In his five years at the top, Commissioner Zaccardelli has acquired many admirers in the international law-enforcement community. The FBI liaison officers in Canada speak highly of his professionalism and that of the force.

But he has also made a few enemies, including Shirley Heafey, the former chair of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission. She says Mr. Zaccardelli made her job impossible, withholding information that she said was vital to her investigations of police conduct.

That secrecy has been the other side of Mr. Zaccardelli and the police force he leads. While he says police have to live up to high standards, he has also stated he has never very much liked "the cult of accountability" that has led the public to lose faith in police.

"This change has been fed by a scandal-mongering media, the immediate availability of facts without interpretation or analysis as a result of Internet," he said. The results, according to Mr. Zaccardelli, is a lot of time and money is spent scrutinizing police, officer morale takes a hit, and detectives become averse to risk for fear of generating a bad headline.

Secrecy is a huge part of the RCMP culture. After four Mounties were killed by a lone, crazed gunman in 2005, one high-ranking Alberta Mountie gave a speech that is still making rounds among the Mounties via e-mail. He cautioned colleagues that publicly second-guessing the force was unforgivable.

"After we lost our four members in March of this year, even a veteran of the RCMP added his voice to the cold and timid voices who so eagerly wanted to point their fingers at others as the cause of this loss.

"Their conduct and their words will never be forgotten or forgiven."

Like many of his colleagues, Commissioner Zaccardelli has sometimes made a career of being bland. "How can you pick Zack out of a room full of Mounties? He's the stiff, watchful one," he once quipped in a speech.

Being stiff has its advantages. Often Commissioner Zaccardelli's red coat appears to have been made of Teflon. And he has proven highly adept at riding out crises over the years.

Mr. Zaccardelli has weathered maybe a dozen storms during his five years at the helm. He has been accused of being extravagant by buying a jet for work use and for his hospitality expenses, of being slow to implement guidelines for riot squads on the use of non-lethal force. And some think he's been too close to the Liberals.

In fact, many Liberal politicians can hardly utter his name without spitting. They say he is partly to blame for Paul Martin's loss of the last election. In the middle of the campaign, with the Liberals fighting to shake off the political effects of the sponsorship scandal, Mr. Zaccardelli dropped a bombshell in the form of a letter to an NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis. It said the RCMP had opened an investigation into her complaint of a possible criminal leak of insider information about income trusts from then finance minister Ralph Goodale's office to Bay Street traders.

Mr. Zaccardelli's friends in the law-enforcement community say he faced a Hobson's choice: If he hadn't disclosed the investigation in a timely fashion he could have been accused of withholding information to favour the Liberals in the campaign.

With his own career now under fire, Mr. Zaccardelli does not have many champions of his cause on Parliament Hill. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and other ministers have not come to his defence, saying they will not be making any precipitous decisions on RCMP personnel.

Mr. Zaccardelli may have one more chance to explain what went wrong if he appears before a parliamentary committee. MPs want to see whether he's tough enough to publicly finger the culprits within his force in the Arar affair, and hand them walking papers.

The inquiry found that Mr. Arar was the victim of inaccurate RCMP intelligence reports and deliberate smears of his reputation. Mounties ignored their own policies — policies intended to protect Canadian citizens from injustice — to help their U.S. counterparts. Mr. Arar's wife and two children were put on a terrorist watch list. Mounties misled the government's most senior officials in the Privy Council Office about what they had done to help the Americans.

Just several months ago the RCMP scored one of its greatest national-security triumphs with the arrests of 17 terrorism suspects in the Toronto area. By 2006, the force and CSIS seemed to have regained their respective roles as football and chess players, with CSIS doing all the intelligence work and the RCMP handling on-the-ground law enforcement.

To some it looks like Mr. Zaccardelli has regained management control. But the question of his future really hangs on the force's behaviour in the frantic period after Sept. 11, 2001, when the force strayed back into dangerous territory and the man brought in to impose discipline apparently failed to do so.

From Saturday's Globe and Mail – Sept. 23, 2006