Business or Blood (13 page)

On June 15, 2009, Rizzuto family soldier Dany (Dany Arm) De Gregorio exited a Jarry Street gym in Saint-Léonard into a cloud of bullets. De Gregorio lucked out and survived. There was no such good fortune on August 21, 2009, when old family friend Federico (Freddy) Del Peschio walked from his silver Mercedes in the parking lot of his La Cantina Italian restaurant at the corner of Saint-Laurent Boulevard and Legendre Street. Del Peschio was beginning his work-day and the hit man once again appeared well aware of a Rizzuto associate's habits. It was no great secret where to find Del Peschio; his restaurant was an elegant spot for municipal political fundraisers, and Vito had felt comfortable enough there to use it as a meeting spot for his own business affairs.

Del Peschio had a long and close connection with the Rizzutos. Nicolò, Del Peschio, Montreal discotheque owner Gennaro Scaletta and two others were arrested on August 2, 1988, in Caracas, after authorities found eight hundred grams of cocaine hidden in a belt, much like a tourist's moneybelt. The narcotics were split into five different qualities, and police concluded that Nicolò was about to make a bulk order of several hundred kilograms of cocaine he had selected from the samples. Nicolò had lived in Venezuela on and off since the early 1970s, and it was no secret that he was a major player in the cocaine trade there. What had changed by the late 1980s was the political climate, which explained why he was forced to begin his first prison stint while in his sixties.

Vito paid $500,000 to a Venezuelan lawyer to secure his father's freedom and felt cheated when Nicolò went to prison anyway. When it became clear that his father wasn't getting out any time soon, Vito asked Italian drug trafficker Oreste Pagano to kill the lawyer to gain some level of satisfaction for the family. Pagano ducked out of the request. In his roundabout way of speaking, Pagano later explained to authorities that this meant “avoiding the consequences and reactions from the Rizzutos that I knew could be serious, taking account [of] the fact that a favor requested by him had to be brought to term.”

Nicolò and his associates, including Freddy Del Peschio, were finally freed on parole in early 1993. Four months after that, the parole board granted his request that he be allowed to return to Canada to be treated for a prostate condition. An RCMP undercover officer later heard that this consent was greased by an $800,000 bribe Vito paid to Venezuelan officials.

Libertina couldn't wait for her husband's arrival and flew down to Venezuela with two of her friends so they could escort him back to Canada. When he finally landed at Dorval airport at 4 p.m. on May 23, 1993, sixty-nine-year-old Nicolò was greeted by Vito and thirty other friends and relatives, like a returning dignitary. Shortly after the elder Rizzuto's return to Canada, a former mayor of Cattolica Eraclea paid him and Libertina a personal visit, staying at their home on Mafia Row. The politician's house gifts included copies of Nicolò's birth and
marriage certificates, as if they were valued artifacts marking the life of a great man.

The prison stay didn't appear to have rattled Nicolò too badly. A part of him still seemed to feed off his notoriety. When he and Libertina celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1995 at the Sheraton Centre-Ville among some three hundred guests, the accordionist played “Speak Softly Love,” the theme from
The Godfather
.

Del Peschio's killing prompted some familiar questions. As in the murder of Nick Jr., a black man was seen running away from the scene, again leaving police and the Rizzuto family to wonder if someone from a street gang had been contracted to carry out the hit. Attacks continued against Rizzuto-connected Italian cafés and bars in Montreal. Even the Rizzuto family funeral business, the Complexe Funéraire Loreto, was targeted by firebombers. Was this the way it would end for the family? Picked off by assassins, one by one?

It was around the time of Del Pschio's killing in 2009 that wealthy Montreal café owner and Desjardins protege Vittorio Mirarchi quietly made a trip to Woodbridge, Ontario, to attend the opening of a modest eatery in the heart of 'Ndrangheta territory—territory where his was becoming a familiar face as Desjardins's group sought to firm up its Calabrian connections. The York Region restaurant was the business of a relative of Antonio (The Lawyer, The Black One) Commisso, who might have attended the opening himself had he not been extradited to Italy in the summer of 2005. There, he began a ten-year term for allegedly heading a Siderno-based group that an Italian judge described as “a dangerous, bloodthirsty Mafia association which had for long imposed on the town of Siderno the burden of a permanent criminal presence.” Their crimes included murder, drug trafficking and robbery. (In May 2014, Antonio Commisso won an appeal on the conviction when six other defendants were convicted instead.)

Vito's old
milieu
was changing by the minute. Helpless to staunch the bleeding on the streets or to secure the straying loyalties of his former soldiers, he began legal proceedings to get himself out of the Florence
prison. He wrote Judge Nicholas Garaufis, who had heard his guilty plea in a New York courtroom, and argued he should be transferred from the Federal Correctional Institution in Colorado to a New York State penitentiary, so his family could more easily visit. The judge declined. Then Vito attempted to correct Garaufis's “incorrect calculation” of the length of his prison term. The judge declined to alter the release date.

Next, Vito wrote an appeal to expedite his release. If he failed, he wouldn't be eligible for release until October 2012. He argued to the US Court of Appeals that his sentence conditions should have been those in place in 1981, at the time the crime was committed. That was before laws were toughened, requiring inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their prison terms rather than two-thirds.

There were many who thought Vito was getting off lightly whichever way his sentence was calculated. Less than six years for three contract murders in a death penalty state looked more like an inconvenience than real punishment—a quick prison stint to shrug off responsibility for his murderous past before enjoying the spoils of his and his father's work. But now bodies kept falling in Montreal and Vito kept writing appeals in the Colorado prison. It was at least something to focus on, to keep him from being overwhelmed by the big picture. It was a given that there would be more murders. The only question seemed to be: who would be next?

I
t was natural for Vito to also look south in his search for answers. Americans had considered Montreal their turf since at least 1953, when cigar-chomping sociopath Carmine (Lillo, The Cigar) Galante of New York's Bonanno crime family headed north and laid claim to the city's underworld. The short, stocky, ultra-intense mobster wasn't a particularly bright man—his IQ was assessed in prison to be 90—but he brought a stupid man's single-minded zeal to his job. Where others might have used finesse, Lillo set a new standard for brutality. The diminutive mobster was a suspect in some one hundred murders in the USA and Canada, and once reportedly amused himself at a nightspot by making a barefoot busboy dance on cut glass. Galante's immediate goal was to ramp up gambling enterprises and protection rackets for restaurants and nightclubs. He did that quickly, forging an alliance with local Calabrian mobster Vic (The Egg) Cotroni and Sicilian-born Luigi Greco. More importantly, he tightened up the French Connection heroin-trafficking route from Marseilles to Montreal to the United States, making use of Montreal's natural harbour as a gateway to the New York drug market. In effect, he established a Canadian branch plant for the Bonanno family that endured until Vito's days.

The Rizzutos had a particularly unhappy connection to the United States that predated Lillo Galante's rise to power. Vito's paternal
grandfather, Vito Rizzuto Sr., was the first of the clan to take a run at the opportunities promised by life in North America. Vito Sr. was born on April 12, 1901, in dusty Cattolica Eraclea to Nicola and Giuseppa Marra. The paper trail he left behind suggests early and frequent troubles with authority, long before his move to America. On June 23, 1921, Vito Sr. was sentenced by a military tribunal to two months in jail for theft and spent the summer sleeping in a sparse military jail cell with no more than a plank for a bed.

On March 9, 1923, Vito Sr. married Maria Renda from his hometown. This was a step up in the world for him, although Maria did have baggage. At age twenty-six, she was five years his senior, a widow and the mother of a five-year-old son, Liborio. She had been just sixteen when she married her first husband, Francesco Milioto, on April 9, 1913. At thirty-three, he had been more than double her age. The young bride became a young widow when Milioto was shot dead in San Giorgio, a rural area in Cattolica Eraclea municipality, while trying to steal produce from another farmer.

At the time of her marriage to Vito Sr., Maria was a woman of some status in the area. Her brother was Calogero Renda, an established
campiere
. A
campiere
was at the hub of an old and durable system. He was expected to collect some fifty kilos of grain a year from small farmers as protection money, with the understanding that such payments would save them the unpleasant business of someone destroying their crops and fruit trees, or worse. A
campiere
embodied power; he could ride into the centre of town and select, with a nod or a wave, the men who would be given work that day as labourers and those who would shuffle away with nothing.

Vito Sr. and Maria had just one child of their own, a son. Nicolò Rizzuto was born on February 18, 1924, in the family home near Cattolica Eraclea's Madonna Della Mercede church. Even closer to his home than the church was a severe-looking white concrete house on a boulevard in the middle of the street that was the residence of the local Mafia don, Antonino (Don Nino) Manno. Don Nino was seldom seen, but his presence was as real as the winds or the soil. The Mafia that he represented had been a fact of life in the area long before his birth. Back
in 1828, local court documents referred to an organization in Cattolica Eraclea of more than a hundred people who shared an oath never to reveal the existence of their group, on pain of death.

Nicolò was just ten months old in December 1924 when his father set off for America with a forged passport. It was common at the time for men to travel to the New World to make their fortunes, and then send for their families. Joining Vito Sr. on the voyage were his brother-in-law Calogero Renda and five others, and most likely it was Renda who supplied Vito Sr. with forged travel documents. Although Renda looked like a fresh-faced schoolboy in his passport photo, he was already experienced in the ways of the underworld.

They sailed second-class aboard the masted steamer SS
Edam
from Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, to Rotterdam, Netherlands, and then on to Havana, Cuba, Tampico, Mexico, and finally New Orleans, arriving on January 19, 1925. Vito Sr.'s travel documents declared that he had a cousin named Pietro Marino in New Orleans. There is no record of a relative with any such name, but the lie smoothed his entry into the United States. He also declared that he was an unmarried labourer.

Vito Sr. quickly moved to the Bronx, a magnet for Italian immigrants seeking work. On February 9, 1928, he filled out a form for the US Department of Labor's naturalization service declaring himself to be a patriot of his new country. He signed his name to the statement: “I am not an anarchist: I am not a polygamist nor a believer in the practice of polygamy: and it is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therein: SO HELP ME GOD.” Vito Sr. was an arsonist, but certainly not a polygamist or an anarchist. He left the Bronx and settled in the hamlet of Oradell, New Jersey, forty-five kilometres (twenty-eight miles) from midtown Manhattan.

This was a time in the early twentieth century when the manufacture, sale and distribution of alcohol were all prohibited, which created a massive growth opportunity for gangs to get into bootlegging. Emerging Mafia groups led by newcomers such as Giuseppe (Joe) Bonanno and Charles (Lucky) Luciano all scrambled for money and power, forming a commission to attempt to regulate disputes among criminals. Although
Vito Sr. would become a minor player in the expanding underworld, his first recorded brush with violence in his new country was of a personal, not professional nature, when he survived a shooting in his home on September 25, 1930. Questioned by police in hospital, Vito Sr. said: “I was shot by my best friend, Jimmy Giudice.” He decided not to press charges over the dispute, believed to be the product of an incendiary love triangle.

It was around this time that Vito Sr. hooked up with publisher Max L. Simon, who had a degree in law, a string of newspapers and a deservedly nasty reputation. Syndicated newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler described him as an “inveterate rogue” who had once taken a severe beating that seemed connected to his rackets. “He has maintained files of delicate personal information on individuals in the community who might serve on grand juries and trial juries,” Pegler wrote. Soon, Vito Sr. was involved in a gang with Simon, in a business that thrived during the Great Depression: arson for insurance fraud. Arson was a relatively easy money-maker for mobsters, and decades later in Montreal, Vito Jr. and his brother-in-law/cousin, Paolo Renda, would be arrested for the same offence. Working in Vito Sr.'s gang in New Jersey was Stefano (Steve) Spinella from Cattolica Eraclea, who was related to him through his in-laws, the Rendas.

On October 17, 1931, Vito Sr. and Spinella torched the printing plant of the
Elizabeth Daily Times
in Passaic, New Jersey. The
Daily Times
was one of Simon's newspapers, and he expected a sweet insurance payoff for the fire. He had paid Vito Sr. and Spinella three hundred dollars upfront, with a promise of the rest when the job was done. When Simon reneged on settling the bill, Vito Sr. threatened his life and Simon ran to the police.