A St-Léonard man who has run youth soccer training camps for years has been charged with threatening and trying to intimidate one of his competitors to shut down his recruiting program.
Giuseppe Recine, 52, appeared before Quebec Court Judge Sylvie Kovacevich on Tuesday at the Montreal courthouse to make his first appearance on two charges filed against him last week following an investigation by Montreal police. He is alleged to have threatened to use violence “compelling Joel Chiarello to put an end to his business related to soccer, which (Chiarello) had a legal right to do.” He is also charged with uttering a threat to cause death or bodily harm to Chiarello. The offences are alleged to have occurred between Sept. 23 and Sept. 28.
Recine was represented by a legal aid lawyer who asked that the charges not be read into the official court record, which meant Recine was not obliged to enter a plea to the charges at this stage.
According to his Twitter account, Recine is a recruiter for a soccer school based in Europe. Over the past few years, he has posted advertisements on websites promoting soccer camps in St-Léonard. In July, he was interviewed by the Montreal Gazette after he and other people in Montreal’s Italian community expressed their objection when a Patriote flag, an enduring symbol for Quebec separatists, was flying in place of the Italian flag in a park in Little Italy.
Chiarello is an experienced soccer player from Trois-Rivières who played at the Triple-A level as a teenager and, in 2014, was invited to play professional soccer in Italy for a team called Trento Calcio. The team went bankrupt shortly after Chiarello began playing for it.
When he returned to Trois-Rivières later that year, he told local media he had plans to start a soccer clinic to train young people. He said at the time that his plan was to travel from city to city offering his services to local soccer teams to help improve their players’ skills. Last year, he registered his own company, Soccer 11 Pro and, according to the company’s Facebook page, it recently offered young players a chance to be scouted during tryouts held in St-Léonard in October with an opportunity, from Chiarello, to be recommended to play in Europe.
The case against Recine returns to court on Dec. 16.
