On this day in 1975 Richard Blass met his end at the age of 29. He was a Canadian mobster who during his short-life survived at least three assassination attempts and a police shootout. In 1975 Blass was on the run, and the Police eventually found him in a chalet. This time he wasn’t so lucky, in a controversial stand-off Blass was shot 27 times within a few seconds and died on the spot.

Richard Blass, one of Canada's most audacious and elusive criminals, met his violent end on January 24, 1975, cut down in a hail of bullets at just 29 years of age. Though not a mobster in the traditional sense of the American organised crime families, Blass operated with a reckless ferocity that made him one of the most feared and notorious figures in Québec's criminal underworld during the early 1970s, a period when Montreal's streets were already simmering with tension between rival factions and established crime networks.

Born in Montreal in 1945, Blass developed a criminal career characterised by brazen violence, daring escapes, and an almost supernatural ability to cheat death. He survived no fewer than three assassination attempts throughout his short life, each time slipping away when lesser men would have perished. His reputation on the streets was formidable — a man seemingly impossible to kill, impossible to cage, and impossible to predict. Twice he managed to escape from custody, including a dramatic breakout from Bordeaux Prison in 1974 that sent shockwaves through Canadian law enforcement and cemented his near-mythical status among Montreal's criminal circles.

The weeks before his death were among the most chaotic of his life. In January 1975, Blass and his associates carried out a massacre at the Gargantua bar in Montreal, murdering thirteen people in what remains one of the bloodiest single criminal incidents in Canadian history. The sheer scale of the killing triggered an unprecedented manhunt, with authorities determined to bring him in at any cost. Blass went into hiding, eventually taking refuge in a chalet in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal.

On January 24, police finally tracked him down. What followed was a confrontation that has been debated and scrutinised ever since. When officers stormed the chalet, Blass was shot 27 times within a matter of seconds, dying instantly. Critics and observers questioned whether the shooting constituted an extrajudicial execution rather than a legitimate use of force, given the sheer volume of rounds fired in such a brief moment. Authorities maintained that Blass had been armed and dangerous, and that officers had acted in accordance with the threat he posed.

Richard Blass left behind a complicated and deeply troubling legacy, remembered in Québec as a symbol of unchecked criminal violence during a turbulent era. His story has since been dramatised in film and television, ensuring that the name of Canada's most wanted man remains etched in the dark corners of North American crime history.