The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 2

THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL, SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1994 A2 rivers can fessi somtf hinq from the pros in LA, in 1IHIIII.IBIIIIIIIMII Willi -i JOSH FREED PAGE TWO COLUMN by ambulance." With several lanes of high-speed, wall-to-wall traffic, everyone knows that a small mistake can be fatal. To survive, you concentrate on your driving with an intensity that borders on mystical. It is the Zen of driving an out-of-body experience in which you become your steering wheel. In fact, so many Californians claim to have seen God while driving that cars should qualify for a tax deduction as places of worship. Facilitating Los Angeles driving is the condition of the roads, state-of-the-art freeways that make Metropolitan Blvd.

look like a Third World mountain pass. California's asphalt is always smooth, its highway lighting perfect, its road signs flawless. There are no sudden Montreal-style surprises saying: "Centreville exit 10 yards." There are no Montreal-style construction signs visible only when you run into them. Every L.A. exit is clearly marked miles in advance, every ramp as finely banked as a racetrack curve.

If traffic stalls, electronic message boards flash up-to-the-minute warnings, advising you of alternate routes, i "Hollywood exit jammed. Use Cahuenga Blvd. "Attention Bernie Kaminsky your 7-Eleven is closed. Pick up milk on Sunset and Vine." In the words of one author, "L.A.'s road signs are infallible you just surrender to them, and obey whatever they say." If it said "Detour" at a sheer cliff, many drivers would blindly obey and drive off into thin air, assum ing a large cushion awaited them below, courtesy 5f California's Transport Department. If you disobey road signs here, the penalty is harsn.

You must spend an entire day in traffic school or risk losing your license. But with typical California free-choice mania, you can choose from hundreds of different traffic schools -for everyone from vegetarian screenwriters to chocoholics anonymous. Frankly, Montreal's traffic department, and traffic offenders themselves, should be sent to LA. for Remedial Road Warriors 101. Only those who survived would come home.

Our Corvette cowboys wouldn't last an hour. Our highway-honkers would get gunned down in a drive-by. Our traffic engineers might learn to design a highway access ramp where you didn't have to fight your way on to the highway. Like most L.A. drivers, I have developed a love-hate relationship with this city's freeways.

On one hand they are a nightmare symbol of car culture gone mad, liter ally choking the life out of city streets. But they are also the apex of automobile civilization the only place American individualism truly works- At any given moment, a million people are driving the city's freeways, each sealed in their own air-conditioned bubble, each listening to their own stereo system, each striving to get ahead without hurting the next person. And for a change, regardless of age, sex, class or creed, almost everyone gets where they want to go. LOS ANGELES Wow! Pardon my excitement but In feeling very "LA." My pulse is racing, my brain is gping 80 mph and I think I just had a past-life experience. No, I haven't been taking a California workshop on Finding the Inner Beach Within You." I've been driving on the just reopened Santa Monica Freeway the ultimate mind-altering L.A.

trip. I have owned a car for 20 years, but frankly, I never knew how to drive until I got here. Like most Mon-trealers, I was an automobile bumpkin, using my car 'with the finesse of a tractor. Now, I have seen the future, and it is called the San Diego Harbor Freeway Santa Monica East-West Corridor Loop. "To drive on a busy L.A.

freeway is to compete on tr)e Wimbledon of roads, where amateurs are not tolerated. L.A. motorists are the most skilled and disciplined drivers in the world and Montrealers could take some tips: So listen up. Freeways here may have 10 lanes of wall-to-wall traffic moving 80 mph but drivers never tailgate you Montreal-style. No one honks or swerves in front of you; rib one flashes their brights in your rear-view mirror to terrify you into changing lanes.

There are no Corvette cowboys, no stickshift-shifters who confuse overdrive for sex drive. There is not even an official "fast lane," reserved for high-testosterone drivers. Every lane is equal, and drivers weave in and out of them like fighter planes, with astonishing discipline and grace. One reason people drive so well is practice average Los Angelenos spend two to three hours a day in their car and log 100 miles. But another incentive is the punishment for bad driving: The death penalty.

Pass an accident in Montreal, and you'll see two cabbies arguing over whose bumper has a worse scratch. Here, accident victims don't stand around arguing, because they are usually unconscious. In four months here, I have never passed a "fender-bender" but I've seen more flipped cars and grisly accidents than I have in years at home. As writer Fran Leibowitz once said: "There are only two ways to travel in LA. by car or ABBEST Police thought suspect fled to Canada, B0SH1A Canadians reported to have access to pool table, Ping-Pong table and satellite TV Virgilio said the man he knew as Pacheco came to Montreal about six years ago.

In 1990, a grand jury in Bristol County, indicted Vieira in absentia on a charge of first-degree murder in the stabbing of the 30-year-old Arruda. That same year, authorities put Vieira on Massachusetts' list of 12-most-wanted criminals. New Bedford police had suspected Vieira had fled to Canada and was staying with friends and relatives. Vieira and Arruda, first cousins, exchanged wedding vows in what her family described as an old-world, Portuguese-style contract marriage. She was 1 6 years old at the time.

They separated in 1988 after a 14-year marriage. On July 25, 1988, just two weeks after the separation, a man burst into her apartment and stabbed her with a butcher knife and a car jack, New Bedford police said. Arruda, who had three children -two girls and a boy was with a boyfriend. Her boyfriend ran to another apartment to call police. Fatima Cardoso, Armda's sister, said yesterday that she was greatly relieved to learn about Vieira's arrest.

"When they told me at 5:30 that my brother-in-law was arrested, I was very excited and started screaming tears of joy," Cardoso, said in a telephone interview from New Bedford. "I'm so glad it's finally over." Ostiguy said Vieira will appear in court on Monday to set a date for a hearing on his extradition to the U.S. Minutes after the Unsolved Mys teries show aired on Wednesday night on CFCF-12, MUC police received more than a dozen calls from the city's tightly knit Portuguese community. Unsolved Mysteries, whose host is Robert Stack, broadcast a photograph of Vieira and said he enjoyed playing soccer. "After the Unsolved Mysteries show, police forces across Canada received more than 30 calls," Os-tiguy said.

"Police out west got calls and so did we in Montreal. We worked with that information." Tim Rogan. co-ordinating producer for Unsolved Mysteries, said the show has broadcast 235 stories about fugitives since 1987. Following broadcast of those shows, police were able to arrest 92 people. Unsolved Mysteries has also reported on 108 cases of unknown fugitives, airing composite sketches.

Of that number, 1 5 cases have been solved, Rogan said. CONTINUED FROM PAGE A1 it looked like the police had struck out. But acting on another tip, they went to another home in the Plateau at 3:30 p.m. and nabbed a second man. "We've got the right guy now," Ostiguy told The Gazette.

"When police showed up at his house, he surrendered peacefully. After the TV show, he felt cornered. He was aware that everyone in the Portuguese community had seen his photo on TV." MUC investigators contacted the New Bedford police "and we're convinced he's the real David Vieira," Ostiguy said. "He used several aliases, including the name Antonio Pacheco." Vieira worked under that alias -which happens to be the name of a well-known soccer player in Portugal at a fish market on St. Laurent Blvd.

Police found a Massachusetts driver's license in his home. Vieira was also a member of the Sports Montreal Benfica Club. He volunteered as a bartender for the club for the last two years and played goalie for its soccer team. "All of us here are shocked that Antonio is wanted on a murder charge," club vice-president Abrau Virgilio said last night. It was sent to Moore, who will try to pass it on to the captive soldiers, including Guillemin's 22-year-old son, Cpl.

Benjamin Guillemin of Montreal. "What you are doing is tremendous because the hope for peace must be kept alive," the letter reads, "We're thinking about you a lot." In their letter, the families tell the soldiers that their loved ones, as well as all Canadians, are thinking of them. In Geneva, a UN commission on war crimes in the former Yugoslavia completed its final report yesterday, concluding that Bosnian Serbs committed crimes against humanity, and probably genocide, in northern Bosnia. The Commission of Experts, set up in October 1992, formally transferred its database on alleged violations for possible prosecution at an international tribunal set up in The Hague, Netherlands. The commission said it concluded that events in Prijedor, where Serbs waged the first major "ethnic cleansing" campaign of the war in mid-1992, constituted crimes against humanity.

It added: "It would probably be possible to establish that genocide has been committed." ADDITIONAL REPORTING CP. REUTER, GAZETTE naissance aircraft flying a mission over Gorazde was hit in the tail by anti-aircraft fire but returned safely to an aircraft carrier in the Adriatic. Since NATO jets destroyed two Serb tank positions Sunday and Monday, Karadzic and his hardline military chief, General Ratko Mladic, have condemned the UN mission as an aggressor and announced they are severing contacts with the peacekeeping force. The detainees and booby traps set up around UN facilities have provided the nationalist commanders with a human shield they apparently are counting on to deter further air strikes. Major Rob Annink, chief spokesman for the UN contingent in Bosnia, had acknowledged earlier yesterday that the Serbs had likely nabbed UN personnel for their own protection.

"We feel they want to have some sort of deterrence against another use of air force by NATO," he said. John Maclnnis, commander of Canadian troops in the former Yugoslavia, said the captive Canadian peacekeepers were being treated well. "We have had direct, face-to-face contact with representatives of the Canadian group. They are being treated more as guests than as hostages," he said from Zagreb, Croatia. He said the Bosnian Serbs had made no demands in return for the release of the Canadians.

He was optimistic they would be freed soon. The peacekeepers were taken early Thursday near Visoko and were being held in a school in Ilijas. Three UN military observers and their translator were also being held at the school. Mo local negotiations David Moore, commander of Canadian troops in Bosnia, said there were no negotiations going on at the local level for the release of the peacekeepers but the Serbs agreed to allow food to be sent them. "The agreement today was they would allow us to send them canteen supplies pop and chips and things like that.

So that's what we're going to do." Moore said the troops were reported being well treated and had access to a pool table, a Ping-Pong table and satellite TV and were allowed outside under escort. The peacekeepers, all from Quebec, are members of the 1st Battalion of the Royal 22nd Regiment, attached to the 12th Armored Regiment from Valcartier. Maric-HeTene Guillemin, the mother of one of soldiers being held, yesterday faxed a message of hope to Bosnia from the families of the 16 hostages. CONTINUED FROM PAGE A1 was willing to risk a Serb conquest of Gorazde rather than rile Bosnian Serb gunmen who have taken captive more than 200 UN personnel in the country, including the Canadians, in retaliation for NATO air strikes. Gorazde, a refugee-packed town bf 65,000, is one of six UN-designated safe zones for the victims of the 2-year-old Serb nationalist siege.

"The Serbs are on the edge of town. The situation is very serious, t's possible the Serbs will take the town in the very near future," said LJN spokesman Major Dacre Hol-Joway. Split in UN mission Reports from UN and Bosnian officials indicated that an internal Conflict has erupted within the peacekeeping mission, which earlier this week called in NATO air strikes against Serb ground forces for the first time in the conflict. Silajdzic said he had been reliably informed that the UN commander f6r Bosnia, British Michael Rose, had appealed for further "NATO bombings after the two SAS officers deployed as forward air commanders were wounded by the Serb onslaught. But the civilian chief of the UN mission, Yasushi Akashi of Japan, "was at that time in the Serb rebel Stronghold of Pale and chose to pursue Serb promises of a ceasefire instead, according to both Holloway 'and Silajdzic.

At a volatile midnight news conference that was disbanded by Rose "after less than five minutes, Akashi praised the Serbs who had mortally wounded the SAS soldier for facilitating his evacuation. Bosnian Serb nationalist leader Radovan Karadzic assured Akashi that his gunmen would hold their ifire while the United Nations pulled its soldiers and aid workers out, the mission chief reported. But Lt. Romain Kuntz, the French helicopter pilot who flew the evacuation mission, said his Puma aircraft was fired on as it lifted off from Gorazde. He told reporters at the hospital helipad here that he had seen heavy fighting, mortar and artillery fire across a wide arc near the city.

Akashi, who has the final word on the military plans drafted by Rose, denied reports that he had rejected air strikes. He declined to answer when asked if the UN mission has become reluctant to resort to force again because the Serb gunmen ringing Sarajevo might retaliate against UN troops taken captive over the past three days. "NATO's Southern European command headquarters in Naples, Italy, reported that a French recon 1 mm in I r--yr. i i. Wfm BOUTIQUE UFPAKTMENT STORE LENENCHEST IrMBTOI SPRING CLEANING SPECIAL We pay the Q.S.T.

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1-800-461-9595 eVtfafMkis tmrmUmt Li. muMt I 987-2497 We believa In pure air Virtsv and cleanliness for batter environment ill The Gazette, published daily, Publications Mail Registration number 061 9 USA Registration USPS 003556 Second class postage paid at Champlaln, N.Y. 12919 For convenient home defrvwry, cell 987-2400 -1(800)36 1-8478 Ext, 2400 The Gazette is a member ot the Quebec Press Council I 5r.