Claude Savoie

Joseph Philippe Claude Savoie (1943 – 21 December 1992) was a Canadian career policeman and senior anti-drug officer in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), while simultaneously a co-conspirator with the West End Gang of Montreal and its leader Allan "The Weasel" Ross. Savoie died by suicide in his office at the RCMP headquarters in Ottawa after his links to organized crime were exposed by investigative journalists from The Fifth Estate television program. The exposure of Savoie shattered the Canadian people's image of the Mounties as an incorruptible police force and was described by the Canadian scholar Steven Schneider as "the biggest case of police corruption in Canada for years".

Police career Savoie was born in Montreal and joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1965. The French-Canadian Savoie worked as the RCMP's liaison officer at the Canadian embassy in Paris until 1986. In 1986, he had become one of the most senior officers working in the RCMP's anti-drug squad in Montreal. Upon his return to Montreal, Savoie experienced financial problems. Burke stated in a 2008 interview: "I was on drugs then and I was fucked...I found out about it from one of the drug traffickers I knew. Savoie was corrupt. He was taking money from one of the biggest drug traffickers in Canada". In 1992, The Fifth Estate aired an episode that exposed the close links between Savoie, Ross, and Leithman. The episode revealed that Savoie had met Ross at an Italian restaurant in Montreal and at Leithman's office. The episode also revealed that Savoie had repeatedly phoned the Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to ask what the DEA knew about Ross and was always refused under the grounds the DEA simply did not trust the RCMP anymore. The U.S. federal prosecutor at Ross's trial in Florida, David McGee, was interviewed and stated he had seen evidence that Ross had a source inside the RCMP.

On The Fifth Estate, Savoie was interviewed where he stated: "Allan Ross, for us from '86 to '91, was not one of our problems. Allan Ross – everybody says he was head of this. People were saying this. But I must say that in my work, I wouldn't be able to say that. And we were not sure, we never had him pinned". In a follow-up interview on another show of The Fifth Estate, Savoie stated: "I know with Allan Ross, there's no doubt that was word always you know that he had access to somebody and you know maybe he did...And I gather from you wanting to talk to me that you feel maybe I was one of those people on the list and that's fair game I guess...Sometimes people make mistakes. What can I tell you?" Savoie claimed that he was trying to persuade Ross to work as an informer, and then changed his story to say that was trying to work out a plea bargain to spare Ross from being imprisoned in the United States. Savoie went to these meetings alone and without telling his superiors, both of which were major violations of the RCMP's rules. When asked by Burke about these violations of the rules, Savoie could give no explanations for his actions. Burke recalled of the interview in 2011: "He sounded like a man backed into a corner. Very worried." Savoie, who had been the subject of an internal police investigation for several months, killed himself the day before CBC aired another Fifth Estate program on drug trafficking which further implicated him, alleging that he had warned Allan Ross that U.S. authorities were preparing an indictment against him.

He was buried on Christmas Eve 1992 with no honor guard of the Mounties as is usually the case with an RCMP officer who has died. A Montreal police detective, John Westlake, who had known Savoie explained his suicide: "He had no choice but to kill himself because of the circumstances of his family and the disgrace of going to jail. Have you ever heard of an inspector in the RCMP going to jail? Very rare. They'd kill themselves before that". Corporal Jean-Pierre Boucher (no relation to Maurice Boucher) of the RCMP who had known Savoie stated in 2007: "He became as bad as the guys he was after. It was a terrible shame, because Savoie was a good man. In a moment of weakness, he went bad. That's all it takes, you know. When Savoie took one envelope, he was finished. As soon as you take one, they've got you and you're done". MacLeod stated that Savoie was very similar to Patrick Kelly, saying: "To me, the Savoie case has a lot in common with the Kelly case. They're both examples of what can happen to someone who gets too close to the bad guys and the big money. You gotta to be able to handle that. But some guys can't and it ruins them". Burke stated about Savoie's suicide: "For all I know, it may have been a choice his colleagues forced him to make because they didn't want him to reveal further corruption. I don’t know. All I know is that I didn’t feel fucking bad about it." In 2022, Sher stated: "I didn't kill him, I didn't load the gun, I didn't put the gun to his head. He made his choices. I'm not responsible but if Dan [Burke] and I had decided not to do the story, if we had not covered this stuff, would he be alive? He might have decided to kill himself when the RCMP investigated him...The lesson I learned from that is the consequences of our work. For many of the people we tell stories about, it's their lives and sometimes their deaths." In December 1993, the RCMP presented a 75-page report about l'affaire de Savoie that was so embarrassing that the Solicitor General Herb Gray only allowed a 2 page summary to be published. The full report was only obtained by Paul Cherry, the crime correspondent of The Montreal Gazette, in 2022 and even today much of the report is still redacted.

The journalist Yves Lavigne wrote: "No one knows how many police officers in all levels of law enforcement were recruited by Inspector Savoie to provide information to drug smugglers and sabotage investigations, or whether these moles are still in place. No one knows how case or informants have been compromised. Inspector Savoie had unlimited access to files and the heads of the world's criminal intelligence services. He kept more secrets in death than he did in life and his legacy may still haunt the RCMP today, as his hand-picked moles gnaw away at its effectiveness in the war against drug-rich criminals".