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Hammadi Kammoun and his wife, Leila M?Rad, emigrated from Tunisia after he was imprisoned for running afoul of the ruling clan.

Long settled in Montreal, Hammadi Kammoun is a long way from the horror he suffered in Tunis, but he still can't shake the family who inflicted it.

Billionaire businessman Belhassen Trabelsi, the clan's eldest brother, landed in Montreal with his own wife and children last week and is living in a posh lakeside hotel a few kilometres from Mr. Kammoun's home. The extended Trabelsi clan has a $2.5-million home in Westmount, perched high above the office building where Mr. Kammoun, once a well-off Tunisian civil servant, now works as a security guard.

At one time a senior bureaucrat in Tunisia's post office and a member of the ruling party, Mr. Kammoun also had a family line that plied the Mediterranean for tuna and swordfish over centuries. He decided in 1994 to buy a tuna boat for $200,000, partly as a retirement investment, partly to keep up tradition. He named the fishing vessel the Radhouan, after his youngest son. Three years later, the vessel caught the eye of Tunisia's tyrannical rulers and would sink his comfortable middle-class life.

While the Trabesli who made Mr. Kammoun's life miserable, Mourad, is in a Tunis jail awaiting a corruption trial, Mr. Kammoun says he will not feel safe as long as even one Trabelsi is free in Canada. Western diplomats have described Belhassen as a notorious figure running a mafia-like organization. Mr. Kammoun couldn't agree more, and has asked the RCMP for protection. His wife, Leila, has stopped sleeping at night.

"They tortured and robbed me, and they're here overnight. It took me six years to convince Canada to let me stay as a refugee," says Mr. Kammoun, who has been cheering nightly accounts of the Tunisian uprising. "We're very happy here, but there isn't a member of this family who doesn't have scars, and it only begins with me."

Long before Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was driven from power earlier this month, Mr. Kammoun knew the wrath of the rapacious siblings of the president's wife, Leila Trabelsi. Reports on members of Tunisia's ruling clan are filled with descriptions of large-scale greed. They've become famous for living with caged lions, travelling with stacks of gold bars, and funnelling billions in state assets into their personal fortunes, while dominating entire economic sectors such as banking, telecommunications and concrete.

Mr. Kammoun was on the wrong side of the kleptocracy, his odyssey captured in detail in a 64-page brief filed with the Immigration and Refugee board. The IRB accepted his refugee claim based on the evidence in 2006.

The harassment, arrest and torture of the would-be fisherman started when Mourad Trabelsi, who held a small stake in the boat, decided he wanted it to himself.

Unwittingly, Mr. Kammoun had stumbled into something the Tunisia's ruling families valued more than a loyal public servant - the perfect small ship to add to a fleet used for smuggling drugs and other illicit goods along the Mediterranean coast.

About three years after the purchase, Mr. Kammoun says he got a call from Mourad Trabelsi, one of 10 brothers of Tunisia's then first lady, demanding he turn the boat over for use in the family smuggling operation. When Mr. Kammoun refused, he says Mr. Trabelsi then demanded the deed.

A few weeks after Mr. Kammoun balked, he was arrested and spent 18 days in prison. For eight of those days, he was starved, deprived of water, beaten and left for hours hanging upside down. He eventually signed the slip handing over the boat.

After Mr. Kammoun was released, he spent the late 1990s pleading with various contacts in the despotic family to get his investment back. In 1999, after he wrote two letters to the president's wife, friends high in the government instead warned Mr. Kammoun his days were numbered.

He cashed in a few favours to slip out of the country with his three children in 2000. Siblings who remained behind were constantly harassed throughout the decade, Mr. Kammoun says. His mother died of a heart attack in 2003, and he blames the torment for her stress and bad health.

He now lives in Laval, a suburb north of Montreal, and works downtown sitting at a desk monitoring security cameras through the evening. It's mind-numbing work, he says.

Jamel Jani, a Tunisian community activist in Montreal who helped Mr. Kammoun with his immigration hearings, said few outside of Tunisia realize the scope of the ruling family's reach.

The president's wife has 10 brothers who all have families to feed. "They started out poor, they were simple people before they married into the presidency, and they've been determined to pillage at all levels, from simple shopkeepers to entire industries," Mr. Jami said. "Mr. Kammoun's story is typical, and most people find it hard to believe. If the owner of a big company can't resist, what chance does a small businessman have?"

The smaller scale corrupt acts that have shattered people like Mr. Kammoun are less well-known.

"They miss nothing, they leave nothing behind," said Mr. Kammoun as he prepared for a shift sitting in front of those monitors, far from his beloved ship. "As they say in English, anything that moved was theirs."

Mr. Kammoun is living all the euphoria and fear of Tunisia's revolution on his quiet crescent in Laval. He was uplifted by the uprising that drove the dictator out and was terrified earlier this week to learn the Trabelsi patriarch, Belhassen, had landed in Montreal.

The family is now torn over the prospect of return. Mr. Kammoun would like to go back once things settle down. His wife and children are less certain.

His eldest son, Rami Kammoun, has a good job, a wife, a new baby and a house in Montreal. Returning to Tunisia doesn't interest him.

"I guess I've moved on," Rami says. But he acknowledges his father has not, and probably never will.

"How do you get over something like that? I just don't think it's possible."

Over the years, Hammadi Kammoun has managed to keep track of his boat through family and the fishermen's grapevine. Last he heard, the boat was working the waters off Libya. It is now owned by one of the sons of Libyan President Moammar Gadhafi.

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