Business or Blood (20 page)

Known in the
milieu
as “The Seigneur of Saint-Léonard,” Cuntrera must have felt he was being punished for doing exactly what had been expected of him since childhood. He was born in 1944 in Siculiana, close to the Rizzutos' home village of Cattolica Eraclea. Siculiana's population took a dive in the 1950s and 1960s, dropping from twelve thousand
to five thousand, with a diaspora spreading to Canada, Belgium, Germany, England, Venezuela and Brazil. Agostino Cuntrera immigrated to Montreal in 1965, joining his cousins Pasquale, Gaspare, Liborio and Paolo. The four brothers later moved to Caracas, Venezuela, where another cousin had established a Mafia base. This move allowed them to sidestep a Mafia war raging in Italy over shares of the worldwide heroin market and the police crackdown that accompanied the hostilities. Venezuela was also a major transit point for Colombian cocaine heading to Europe and the Port of Montreal.

Several of Paolo's relatives later settled around Toronto. Agostino remained in Montreal, establishing a string of food services companies. The family profited from Canada's trusting banking laws, which didn't require suspiciously large transactions to be reported to authorities, as in Italy and the United States. One of Agostino's enterprises was a submarine sandwich restaurant on Pie-IX Boulevard. When a Pizza Hut opened nearby in 1990, the franchise was hit with a wave of fires and bombings. Juan Fernandez was suspected in the attacks but never charged.

Agostino Cuntrera was himself long a suspect in the eyes of police for drug trafficking, but never caught. Police also believed that a business couldn't open in Saint-Léonard without his approval. In 1987, authorities wondered how his tableware company somehow managed to have $1.3 million pass through its accounts between February and August, all of it presumably through selling plates and cutlery. It did help his business that thugs forced restaurant owners to buy supplies from his firm, but that was still a lot of plates to sell in such a short time.

As befitted a modern-day seigneur, he now lived in a 5,214-square-foot, marble-lined château that was more opulent than most hotels or even the homes of Vito and Nicolò It was splashed with hardwood and marble-panelled walls and imported Italian chandeliers. One wall of Cuntrera's wine cellar had room for more than a thousand bottles, with a tasting area that would make any sommelier tingle.

It was far grander than the sturdy home in Lavaltrie on the St. Lawrence outside Montreal that Vic Cotroni had built in 1959, when he reached the pinnacle of the local mob. The Egg's home was also awash in oak
and marble, but on a far more modest scale. Like its owner, the exterior of the Egg's house was tidy, solid and unspectacular, while Cuntrera's called to mind a mini Versailles.

Despite the ostentation at home, Cuntrera preferred to travel quietly and stay out of the press. One embarrassing failure to do so followed a police raid on his office. He referred them to his accountant, who turned out to be Liberal member of Parliament Alfonso Gagliano, also born in Siculiana. Gagliano had founded the Siculiana Association of Montreal and Cuntrera had served as one of its directors.

The RCMP also noted with interest that Agostino Cuntrera appeared in downtown Toronto with Vito in April 1995 at the Sutton Place Hotel, at the wedding of the daughter of his cousin Alfonso Caruana, drug smuggler and new head of the Cuntrera–Caruana clan. Also joining the festivities were
Compare
Frank Arcadi and Rocco Sollecito.

Perhaps the Seigneur had once entertained thoughts of heading the Rizzuto crime family, but if those days had ever existed, they were long gone by the time Vito went to prison. By 2010, as he enjoyed the quiet comforts of his kitchen and wine cellar, or sunned himself in the landscaped confines of his backyard pool, Agostino Cuntrera knew perfectly well that ambition brings unwelcome pressures and responsibilities. Haggling on the streets with the brash likes of Ducarme Joseph, Richard Goodridge and Salvatore Montagna couldn't have held much appeal. Many felt he lacked the charisma to be a street-level mob boss anyway.

Cuntrera also knew the risks. There's a Sicilian truism that a man forewarned is a man half saved, but there's also a North American saying that there's no point turning around if you're already halfway across a river. He had got his hands bloody in his younger days as one of the men who helped clear the way for the Rizzutos' rise to power. He did five years in prison for plotting Paolo Violi's murder, and his culpability would never be forgotten or forgiven in certain quarters of Hamilton, York Region and Montreal. Even all these years later, Cuntrera would be a logical and slow-moving target for anyone wanting to exact revenge.

Cuntrera's preference might be for his wine cellar, but his rough
trade forced him into an alliance with the likes of Raynald Desjardins and Hells Angels bikers such as Michel (L'Animal) Lajoie and Marvin Normand (Casper) Ouimet. He recognized that Desjardins wasn't the man he had been in the 1980s, when he was like Vito's little brother. The francophone had become his own man, and a frightening man at that, not softened by age or prison. It seemed that no one in Vito's group could reason with Desjardins, save perhaps Vito himself.

The biker Lajoie, also known as Michel Smith, Mike Smith-Lajoie, Michel Lajoie-Smith and Michel Lajoie, had been wanted since 2009 for twenty-two murders as well as gangsterism and drug trafficking. He had strong Central American connections and was known to spend time in Panama. His Hells Angels clubmate Ouimet was no gentler. He was also wanted for twenty-two murders between 1994 and 2002, when the Hells Angels were locked in a war over Quebec drug turf. The Sûreté du Québec also said that Ouimet was now trying to muscle into Quebec's bricklaying industry to launder drug proceeds, and that the biker was once linked to a company involved in renovations on Parliament Hill. Business with such men was enough to make anyone pine for his wine cellar.

Did Cuntrera recognize the face of his assassin on the afternoon of June 30, 2010? Perhaps, for all the old man's attempted vigilance, he didn't even notice him. The gunman moved so quickly that bodyguard Liborio Sciascia could do nothing but absorb a bullet and collapse to the pavement outside the Seigneur's business, Les Distributions John & Dino. A heartbeat later, Cuntrera was cut down too, with a close-range shot to the head, just paces from his armour-plated car. There was so little time between Cuntrera stepping out the door and the bullet crashing into his skull that it was impossible not to think the hit was an inside job, with someone alerting the killer exactly when to strike. How else could one explain why the streetwise bodyguard was caught so clearly off guard or why the killer vanished without being seen?

More than six hundred people filled the Notre-Dame-du-Mont-Carmel church in Saint-Léonard for the Seigneur's funeral. His casket was closed for the service, as even the skills of the family undertaker couldn't disguise the bullet's damage to his head. On the casket was
a photo of him, which was wrapped in rosary beads, while white flowers were set about the chapel. The hearse carrying his body was trailed by three limousines with large floral arrangements, the grandest of which was a copy of the Ferrari logo. Another said
Nonno
, “Grandfather.” Heavily muscled security men looked on while mourners hugged and attempted to console one another. Attendees and police surveillance alike must have noticed how many members of the Mafia avoided the funeral, at a time when their presence would have been a public show of support for Vito's clan. One of the few with an excuse was Nicolò, whose parole conditions forbade his associating with criminals.

Cuntrera's murder got people talking again about the slaying of Paolo Violi back in 1978, the killing against which all Montreal gangland slayings were measured. It was also difficult not to dust off that hackneyed expression about revenge being a dish best served cold. Like Agostino Cuntrera, Paolo Renda had been one of the suspects in the Paolo Violi murder, and now one of them was dead and the other presumably the victim of
lupara bianca
. In the Mafia there is no statute of limitations for revenge. If Cuntrera and Renda died as the result of a vendetta, then it only made sense that Vito and Nicolò were also targeted for death.

Agostino Cuntrera's murder came six months after the still-unsolved assassination of Nick Rizzuto Jr. and just one month after Paolo Renda's disappearance. Some commentators speculated that this most recent loss marked the end of the Rizzuto family's grip on Canada's underworld. Their pronouncement may have been premature, but the death watch was on.

The Rizzutos lost a little more clout on September 29, 2010, when someone turned a gun on thirty-six-year-old Ennio Bruni outside a café in a small strip mall in Laval. Bruni was also part of Vito's push into Ontario in the early 2000s, and he was just the type of man Vito's group badly needed now. Colisée tapes revealed Bruni as someone who transported money from Rizzuto family gaming houses in Laval and also provided muscle to the clan. Bruni had survived an attempt on his life just ten months earlier, after being shot four times while leaving a Laval restaurant. He refused to provide a statement for
police and under Frank Arcadi gamely returned to the streets—and the firing line.

On January 31, 2011, it was time for Antonio Di Salvo to exit the scene. He had been valuable to Arcadi for his work in the drug trade, and perhaps that was why he was dispatched with a bullet to the head in his home on the Rivière des Prairies. Now there was talk that drug traffickers were looking for other outlets to market their product, as Vito's group wasn't as reliable as it had once been. The brief era of the Seigneur of Saint-Léonard's leadership was over. What era would succeed it was anyone's guess.

T
he woods behind Nicolò's home offered plenty of cover. It was dark enough at 5:40 p.m. on November 9, 2010, that the intruder was not noticed among the trees and the shadows, close to the statue of the Madonna. So much would depend on the gunman's ability to concentrate over the next few minutes. There was a wind of twenty-six kilometres per hour, which wasn't enough to affect a close-range shot, especially when the power of the rifle was factored in. The gunman held a .300-calibre hunting rifle, capable of bringing down a moose or a bear. It was certainly more than enough firepower for an octogenarian mobster suffering a laundry list of medical complaints.

From a distance, he could see Nicolò as he stepped into the solarium kitchen and gazed outside towards the backyard bushes. He could see Zio Cola move close to his wife, Zia Libertina, and their daughter, Maria. She had lost her husband, Paolo Renda, only a few months earlier and didn't want to eat alone.

The assassin tapped his finger less than half an inch. The bullet dipped slightly as it punctured the solarium glass, catching the old man in the jaw rather than the skull. However, a bullet fragment tore down into his aorta, and that was enough to make the assassin's job a success. Zia Libertina went immediately into shock as her husband of more than six decades collapsed to the kitchen floor at her feet.

The hit harkened back to the death of Paolo Violi's younger brother Rocco in October 1980, when he was struck in the chest by a sniper's bullet as he sat reading a newspaper at his kitchen table. Rocco's death marked the last time anyone could recall that the Canadian mob executed one of its own with a hunting rifle as he sat at home in front of his family. It showed a rare lack of respect for the victim's family. Certainly Zio Cola hadn't been venturing out much recently, but the assassin's choice of location was almost surely meant as a reminder of the morning Rocco Violi slumped over dead. If that murder had secured the beginning of the Rizzuto era, Nicolò's was undeniably intended as an emphatic pronouncement of its end.

Prison authorities monitored Vito's reaction to the news. “Why do they go after an old man?” he asked family members in Italian during wiretapped telephone conversations. He had to vent, his voice filled with fury. There had always been much affection between Vito and his father. The transfer of power between them had been so seamless that it was impossible to say exactly when it happened. They had always presented themselves as a team, and now Vito was very much alone. For all his anger, Vito's reaction was different from when he'd learned of the murder of Nick Jr. He didn't seem to think anyone would ever do such a thing to his son. His father's death was painful too, but less of a surprise. For all of Vito's adult life, people had sought to murder his father. It was a tribute to the old man that he had lived as long as he did.

There had been eighteen gangland murders, sixty-seven arsons, eighteen attempted murders and two disappearances in Montreal since the start of 2007. Vito had predicted his removal from the country would mean increased chaos in the Montreal underworld. His words now bore a nasty ring of truth.

Four days after Zio Cola's murder, a Canadian Tire security camera in Montreal picked up a middle-aged blond man wearing a Rolex stuffing merchandise into his coat pockets. The store was about five kilometres from where Nicolò was slain. Among the filched items were a black balaclava, a handgun holster and a pouch for ammunition. When staff moved in to apprehend the thief, one was shoved and another was bitten in the hand. The employees eventually won the
struggle, which caused the would-be shoplifter to drop a roll of more than three thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills.

Once subdued, the man identified himself as Vincenzo Sestito, the name that appeared on his Italian passport, issued the previous July, as well as on his temporary Ontario driver's licence, current international driver's licence and debit card. The identification seemed genuine. When his fingerprints were run through a police database, however, the results showed he wasn't Vincenzo Sestito but rather forty-six-year-old Nicola Cortese of Halton Region outside Toronto, a cousin of Toronto-area Calabrian mob boss and convicted killer Vincenzo (Jimmy) De Maria. De Maria was on lifetime parole for second-degree murder after shooting a man to death in 1981 over a debt. De Maria's parole conditions forbade him from associating with Cortese.