Officers suspended for 2005 arrest of Anne-Marie Peladeau

Three Montreal police officers will be sanctioned for their behaviour while arresting Anne-Marie Peladeau and Eric Kennedy in 2005. (CP file photo)

Three Montreal police officers have been suspended as punishment for their actions in arresting Anne-Marie Peladeau in 2005.

Roberto Sforza, who made the arrest along with partner Fabio-Nicola Cavaliere, has been suspended for four days without pay in connection with his 2005 arrest of Anne-Marie Peladeau and Eric Kennedy.

Anne-Marie Peladeau is the sister of media mogul and Parti Quebecois MNA and leadership candidate Pierre Karl Peladeau.

The two other Montreal police officers involved, Alessandro Lo Dico and Mike Mezzacappa, were ordered off the job for two days without pay. They are being punished for failing to attend to people traveling in a car that was hit by Peladeau and Kennedy's vehicle.

Anne Marie Peladeau was chased, caught and arrested by police on October 12, 2005 as a suspect in a cigarette robbery and police evasion.

Officers Sforza and Cavaliere were charged but acquitted of assault in 2008 after Quebec Court Justice Martin Vauclair deemed the force they used as "vigorous but not excessive." The judge also described Peladeau as having "problems with sincerity, reliability and credibility."

That same year Sforza attempted to sue Peladeau, alleging that she had threatened him with a syringe.

In spite of the criminal acquittal, Quebec's police ethics committee ruled last year that Sforza used excessive force in shoving Peladeau into a car and hitting her head on the door frame, an image caught on video and shown repeatedly on TV news at the time.

Officer Cavaliere said that he suffered a heart attack in 2006 as a result of the event and suffered health consequences that forced him to walk with a cane. He was not punished due to "health and humintarian reasons," according to the commission.

Peladeau, now 50, battled drug addiction for many years. In 1999 she was went to court against her two brothers in an attempt to regain control of her finances - said in court to be worth at least $21 million -  which had been put into trustreeship in 1992 due to her drug addiction.

While awaiting her trial following the 2005 arrest, Anne-Marie Peladeau was sent to Tanguay prison for allegedly attempting to bribe someone in an attempt to cover up cocaine in her urine sample. In August 2007 police arrested her again for allegedly dealing crack and heroin out of a Montreal condo.

Anne-Marie Peladeau is one of four children of Raymonde Chopin and Journal de Montreal founder Pierre Peladeau. Along with brothers Eric and Pierre Karl, she had a sister Isabelle who died at 55 when her car crashed into Lac Achigan in November 2013.

She also has half-siblings Simon-Pierre and Esther, whose mother was Pierre Peladeau's second wife Lise Parisien. Pierre Peladeau married a third time and had a seventh child.