OTTAWA — The mayor of Montreal was arrested at his home early Monday by a special anticorruption police squad, at the same time that a 20-month-old public commission has uncovered widespread corruption in Montreal’s construction industry linking politicians and organized crime.
The police said the mayor, Michael Applebaum, was facing 14 charges related to bribery involving hundreds of thousands of dollars. They declined to provide further details, saying that the investigation was continuing and that more arrests were likely.
Television networks showed Mr. Applebaum arriving in an unmarked police car at the Montreal headquarters of the Sûreté de Québec, the provincial police force.
A spokeswoman confirmed the detention of two of Mr. Applebaum’s former associates. One, Saulie Zajdel, was an unsuccessful Conservative candidate for Parliament who was given a created job that had no obvious defined responsibilities. He stepped down after a storm of controversy over his actions as an unelected but de facto member of Parliament.
Mr. Applebaum became the mayor of Montreal, the country’s second-largest city, in November, after his predecessor, Gérald Tremblay, resigned as the corruption inquiry began implicating his closest associates. Mr. Applebaum is the first English speaker to hold the post in 100 years.
On Monday, the police said Mr. Applebaum’s arrest related to two real estate deals between 2006 and 2011 in the largely English-speaking Montreal borough of Côte-des-Neiges-Notre-Dâme-de-Grace, a period during which he served as that borough’s mayor. The anticorruption police squad raided the borough’s offices in February.
The corruption inquiry, led by Justice France Charbonneau, was set up by the province of Quebec in October 2011 after a damning series of reports by Radio-Canada.
Last month, the anticorruption police arrested 36 people, including Gilles Vaillancourt, the longtime mayor of Laval, a Montreal suburb. The charges facing Mr. Vaillancourt include abuse of confidence, fraud against the government, conspiracy, municipal corruption, money laundering and gangsterism.
That came after testimony at the Charbonneau Commission indicating that almost every member of Laval’s city council, including the man appointed interim mayor, had been linked to illegal political donations. All of the council members and all of Laval’s school board trustees are members of Mr. Vaillancourt’s political party.
Evidence collected by the Charbonneau Commission suggested that the donations were bribes used to secure municipal construction contracts in a process that also required contractors to pay off known organized crime figures.
Early this month, the province of Quebec placed Laval under the control of three trustees.
Separately, Rob Ford, the mayor of Canada’s largest city, Toronto, also remains under siege after reports by The Toronto Star and the Web site Gawker that they had viewed of video of him smoking crack cocaine. Last Thursday, sweeping raids in Toronto and two other cities led to the arrest of people associated with that video and the seizure of cocaine and guns.
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