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How police tracked down one of Quebec's most wanted fugitives

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As John Boulachanis piloted his small Cessna airplane in for a landing at an airport in southern Florida five years ago, he had no idea that when his wheels touched the ground, the massive lie he was living would come to an end. 

It was June 16, 2011, and waiting on the runway at North Perry Airport in Penbroke Pines, 35 kilometres north of Miami, were members of the U.S. Marshals Service eager to put a long search to an end. With nowhere left to run, Boulachanis would finally have to face allegations of killing 32-year-old Robert Tanguay in Rigaud, back in 1997.

Boulachanis’s first-degree murder trial began in October of this year. The jury began deliberating on Tuesday afternoon.

Boulachanis had managed to avoid capture by creating a series of fake identities. When police searched the apartment on a street lined with small palm trees in Hallandale Beach, Fla., where Boulachanis had been living with an Ontario woman named Amanda Jones, they uncovered a small workshop capable of producing fake identification and credit cards. 

John Boulachanis in a 2006 photo.

John Boulachanis in a 2006 photo.

A warrant for Boulachanis’s arrest for Tanguay’s murder was issued in 2001, shortly after Tanguay’s remains were found buried in a sandpit. On June 15, 2006, the Sûreté du Québec included Boulachanis as one of the most wanted men in the province when it launched a website listing Quebec’s top 10 fugitives. According to court records, by the time the website was launched, Boulachanis had already spent several months in Greece, around 1999, and had moved back to Canada where he lived in Southampton, Ont., for years under the uncreative alias John Smith. 

Court documents detail how Boulachanis lived with Jones for at least a few years before she disappeared in November 2009, following a couple of arguments with her father where police in Ontario were called in to intervene.

Boulachanis came very close to being caught that year, after putting out a distress call when the boat he and Jones were using off the shore of New Jersey had trouble. The U.S. Coast Guard towed it to land, and when the couple was asked for identification, Jones pulled out a Florida driver’s license identifying her as Diana Maiolo — this was her real name at the time; she had it legally changed in 2010. Boulachanis said his name was John Russo, but pulled out a Florida driver’s license identifying him as Konstantinos Georakopoulos (the name of Greece’s prime minister in 1958). 

Amanda Jones, also known as Diana Maiolo, was the girlfriend of John Boulachanis.

Amanda Jones was also known as Diana Maiolo.

The Coast Guard members did database searches on both of the names Boulachanis provided and came up empty. The couple was photographed and Boulachanis was told to report to a police station to be fingerprinted. When he failed to show up for the appointment, police in New Jersey returned to where the boat had been docked and found it abandoned.

The authorities in New Jersey compared the Coast Guard’s photo with photos of Canadian fugitives posted on an Interpol website. That was the moment they realized a man wanted for murder in Canada had slipped through their fingers. But the link to Jones eventually gave the SQ a starting point. 

That lead opened the door to Boulachanis’s secret life as John Smith in Southampton. Jones’s relatives told police that, after 2009, they believed she had moved to Florida. Her father said she only called him a few times after disappearing and refused to say where she was. It appears that an extensive search of her financial records is what helped the U.S. Marshals Service track down Boulachanis in Florida.

A few years after Boulachanis was returned to Canada in 2011, the SQ learned he had spent several months on the lam in Greece in 1999, after having absconded from a heroin trafficking case while he was out on bail. Elias Aivaliotis, a man who used to date Boulachanis’s sister, said he met Boulachanis in Greece in 1999 and that he was involved with a Greek woman named Georgia Marinou. The following year, Aivaliotis was informed that Boulachanis had returned to Canada and was living in Toronto with Marinou.

According to Aivalotis, Boulachanis wanted to remain in Canada as a fugitive and be able to live with Marinou even though she was in Canada on a temporary tourist visa. Aivalotis said Boulachanis’s sister and mother arranged for him to marry Marinou illegally “and that all he had to do was to show up at the wedding and sign wherever he was told to.” On Dec. 22, 2000, Aivaliotis was brought to a courthouse in Toronto where Boulachanis and Marinou married while Boulachanis’s mother and sister looked on. After the wedding, Aivaliotis told the SQ, he never saw Marinou or John Boulachanis again. 

pcherry@postmedia.com

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