Senior Sleuth
Active Member
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2024
- Messages
- 93
- Reaction score
- 172
Former boss of illegal Ottawa gambling ring target in shooting outside Meadowlands gym
(please see link for full news story)Highlights:
At around 6:30 a.m., Ottawa police received multiple 911 calls reporting a shooting in front of the Movati Athletic at 1395 Meadowlands Dr. East. Police and paramedics arrived to find Manasseri, bleeding from the chest and mouth, with no shooter in sight.
His brother Charlie Manasseri is a convicted killer whose case dragged through the justice system for years before he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2017 for the 2005 beating death of a 22-year-old man who aspired to be a police officer.
Benny’s children, too, have had a former business — a Greco gym they owned and operated in Little Italy — hit by gunfire, though police believe they weren’t the intended targets.
Manasseri was arrested in 1987 when the RCMP drug squad seized six kilos of cocaine — three in the trunk of a car with Ontario licence plates and another three during a raid in Quebec.
In 1989, Manasseri, along with Domenico (Dominic) Arecchi, started a carwash business called “Proshine” with a flagship outfit operating in Westboro. They would come to be known as “the car wash guys,” according to court records.
In 2001, Manasseri, then 37, was charged alongside Arecchi and others in connection with an illegal gambling ring tied to the Rizzuto crime syndicate, one of the country’s largest organized crime families. The ring controlled a $200-million-a-year bookmaking operation in Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal. The top rung of the organization was in Ottawa, police said.
Former boss of illegal Ottawa gambling ring target in shooting outside Meadowlands gym
Officers set up a perimeter around the crime scene and were continuing to investigate.
