Business or Blood (21 page)

A little more investigation showed that Cortese was wanted by Niagara Regional Police in Ontario for his role in a $15-million marijuana grow-op bust that included cultivating the drug in a former Ukrainian church in nearby Thorold. One of his co-accused in that case was James Tusek, an associate of hit man/restaurateur Salvatore (Sam) Calautti. Cortese was also sought by Halton Regional Police, west of Toronto, following his arrest and incarceration for a complicated multi-million-dollar mortgage fraud that involved inflated property values and falsified invoices and lease agreements. The Justice of the Peace at Cortese's bail hearing in the mortgage fraud case was told by a family member that Cortese was on his way to the courthouse when he fell and broke his ribs. Rather than return to court, Cortese assumed the identity of Vincenzo Sestito and vanished, until his ill-fated Canadian Tire shoplifting bust.

Cortese would later vaguely tell another parole board hearing that he bought the fake identification at a store in Italy, during his two years at large from Canada. He was a self-confessed former heavy drug user with fifty-three convictions, including fraud, breach of trust, assault, robbery, assault with intent to resist arrest and possessing weapons. He'd also had charges withdrawn for armed robbery, possessing unregistered/restricted weapons, sexual assault with a weapon, forcible confinement and assault with a weapon.

Police detectives tend to mistrust coincidences, so it was natural to wonder why Cortese was in Montreal so close to the time of Nicolò's killing. Was it also a coincidence that two of Paolo Violi's relatives had been seen in Montreal the week before the murder? Given all the 'Ndrangheta connections and activity around Montreal at the time, and the inside co-operation that seemed to have been part of the recent killings, it was easy to wonder if Vito had been sold out by Calabrian members of his own crime family.

Cortese lasted one night in Montreal's Bordeaux Prison, where prisoners had treated Nicolò with such respect just a short time before. Cortese then pleaded with corrections staff to be transferred.
Fast
. There were a number of Rizzuto men from the Colisée roundup on the same cellblock range and he wanted to be at a safe distance from them. He was quickly dispatched to safer quarters.

In the hours before Nicolò's funeral, someone left a black box with a white cross taped on it on the steps of Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense church. Fearing explosives or body parts from the missing
consigliere
Paolo Renda, police evacuated the area and summoned bomb disposal experts. Police were relieved to find only a note inside, a cryptic message written in Italian that seemed to allude to the funerals of the Violi brothers three decades earlier at the same holy spot in Little Italy, with words to the effect of: “Let's stop this church being the church of the Mafia and start it being the church of everyone.” To someone with a Mafia frame of mind, it was easy to see the odd message as meaning: “You've suffered the way we suffered. Let's put an end to this sad story.” Or maybe it was just a member of the public, tired of his place of worship becoming widely known as the church of the Mafia.

Inside, Nicolò's funeral was much like that of Nick Jr. less than a year before in the same church. Powerfully built men wearing earpieces and black leather gloves scanned the entrances to make sure no gawkers or enemies tried to enter. Four guards inside the church carefully eyed attendees. Not all of the eight hundred seats in the church were filled, and there were notably no representatives of the Bonanno crime family.

The ceremony was a simple one, in Italian, with no members of the Rizzuto family rising to say a word. There were no personal comments from anyone about the deceased, although the priest did thank those who sent their condolences but did not attend. White roses adorned the altar, with other white flowers on the golden casket. The only ostentation was in the form of some two hundred wreaths, arranged from floor to ceiling. A soaring rendition of “Ave Maria” filled the church. A choir sang hymns in Latin. A single trumpet sounded a tribute. Selections played on the organ, strings and brass ranged from melancholy to uplifting. Finally, the godfather was carried from the church under the eyes of mourners in sunglasses and dozens of police and media. His casket was escorted to St. Francis of Assisi cemetery by limousines carrying stacks of floral tributes, including at least one from a real estate developer.

Libertina looked stoic. Often, mobsters have lovers on the side to help them cope with the stress of their work and the constraints of arranged marriages, but that had not been the case with her devoted Nicolò. Libertina's composure was all the more remarkable in that she was grieving once again without Vito there to comfort her. She knew well how life so often ended in their world, which meant her only son could be next.

Nicolò abhorred sloppiness, and he would have been impressed by the undertaker's job, which had rendered even his wounded neck suitable for an open casket. He would also have appreciated how his family now guarded Mafia Row with private security firms, which used trained bodyguards and discreet auto patrols. Most of the people flooding to the cul-de-sac were gawkers, but the security men took down all their licence numbers anyway. It all seemed too little, too late, but it had to be done.

No one from Vito's group did a thing to avenge the latest bloodletting. His men were all either in prison or ineffectual or they had defected to the other side. Whatever their reasons, their inaction compounded the insult.

While the elder Rizzuto was meeting his fate, Antonio Coluccio quietly slipped back into North America from the United Kingdom with his bodyguard/driver. In November, he arrived in New York City, then travelled to Niagara Falls, NY. His visitors there included an Ontario man specializing in high-level money management who had been close to Vito.

Early in January 2011, vandals firebombed the Complexe Funéraire Loreto in Saint-Léonard. They did little actual damage, but attacking the Rizzuto-owned business was a powerful public statement nonetheless. It was open season on Vito's family.

Just a few months later, Big Joey Massino made history by becoming the highest-level rat in the history of La Cosa Nostra when he testified against his successor, Vincent (Vinny Gorgeous) Basciano. In the course of his testimony, Big Joey calmly explained how he hadn't really wanted to kill Vito's friend and associate George (George from Canada) Sciascia back in 1999, after the Montrealer broke mob protocol and criticized a Gambino family member. Big Joey made it sound as though he was just a worker doing his job. “As much as I didn't want to kill him, I had to kill him.” News of this latest Bonanno defection brought a screaming headline in the
New York Post
: NOMERTA! MAFIA BOSS A SQUEALER. The April 13, 2011, story began: “There isn't a hunk of cheese big enough for this rat.” If anything, it was confirmation that Vito—despite his family's desperate need for friends—had been right in his decision to pull away from the Bonannos.

On March 31, 2011, police found the body of Antonio Di Salvo in his home on Perras Boulevard in Rivière des Prairies. The forty-four-year-old had been a low-profile member in the Rizzuto group, with ties to Francesco Del Balso and
Compare
Frank Arcadi. The assassination occasioned no real surprise, despite Di salvo's peripheral association. How could anyone be shocked by a murder after Nicolò was gunned down in his own house, at the feet of his wife and daughter no less? This was a fight to the death, but it was still impossible to identify all of Vito's enemies. The family's attackers remained in the shadows, and some still posed as friends.

F
ebruary 11, 2011, was shaping up to be a busy day. Toronto and York Regional police intelligence officers, part of the anti–organized crime Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, had plans to stake out the funeral visitation for Cosimo Stalteri, the grand old man of the Ontario 'Ndrangheta. He had just died in hospital at age eighty-six. An original member of the Toronto
camera di controllo
, Stalteri had recently been promoted from the rank of
santista
—the shadowy organization's equivalent of a senior lobbyist with senior mainstream people such as bankers and politicians—to
vangelista
—the 'Ndrangheta version of a respected senior statesman. It was a safe assumption that Stalteri was never in the pro-Vito camp, as he was Calabrian, from Toronto and on good terms with some of Vito's die-hard enemies. At the absolute minimum, Stalteri was a neutral in the hostilities that were surgically disassembling Vito's empire.

Also scheduled for that Friday was surveillance of the fiftieth wedding anniversary celebrations of Paolo Cuntrera at Hazelton Manor in Vaughan. On the surface, Cuntrera would appear to be on Vito's side in the current tensions, as he and his brothers Pasquale and Gaspare were cousins of Vito's recently murdered ally Agostino Cuntrera of Montreal. Paolo and his siblings had garnered considerable interest from Italian authorities for decades. Pasquale Cuntrera was considered a kingpin of
a network that—the late Italian judge Giovanni Falcone estimated—had washed $77 billion in drug money in Canada, England and five other countries. The 1992 murder of Falcone, and that of his fellow judge Paolo Borsellino only months earlier, created pressure for Venezuelan authorities to finally extradite the three brothers (the fourth, Liborio, moved to England in 1975 and died there of natural causes in 1982).

Once back in Italy, Pasquale was convicted on charges of running a drug ring between Italy, Canada and Venezuela. In 1998, the sixty-three-year-old somehow managed to escape custody, even though he now appeared to be confined to a wheelchair. A week later, Pasquale was rearrested in Spain while strolling down a beach with his wife, the wheelchair nowhere in sight. As he went back to prison, his brothers Paolo and Gaspare settled in the Toronto area after their Italian legal difficulties had run their course. Both men were Canadian citizens and the move was entirely legal, although police maintained an interest in them.

Stalteri's funeral visitation came first on the agenda for the surveillance officers. They noted that attendance was solid, as might be expected for a man who was feared, respected and liked for decades. Back in his hometown of Siderno in the Italian province of Reggio Calabria, Stalteri had convictions for assault causing bodily harm, theft and carrying an unregistered revolver, but he received an amnesty from Italian authorities before he immigrated to Canada in 1952. He had no further criminal record in Canada, despite appearing in numerous police reports for his 'Ndrangheta associations.

In 1962, Stalteri was appointed to the
camera di controllo
in Toronto by Giacomo Luppino of Hamilton, Paolo Violi's father-in-law. Also in that governing body were Michele (Mike the Baker) Racco, Vincenzo (Jimmy) Deleo, Rocco Zito, Salvatore Triumbari and Filippo Vendemini. It was a tough group for a tough environment: Triumbari was murdered in 1967 and Vendemini slain in 1969, and neither murder was ever solved. They also didn't take opposition lightly. Zito was later convicted of beating a man to death with a liquor bottle during the Christmas season. Stalteri returned to Italy in 1973 for a visit and killed a street
vendor in an argument over a toy. Italian authorities sought his extradition over the murder, then let the warrant expire when they falsely determined that he had died. He was also believed by police to be involved in alien smuggling and heroin trafficking in Toronto, although neither suspicion was ever proven.

What the surveillance officers saw immediately after the funeral visitation might have shocked even Vito. Stalteri's mourners climbed onto a chartered bus and rode off to the anniversary reception for the Cuntreras.

How could this be possible
?
Weren't they mortal, blood enemies
?

And yet it
was
clearly happening. Members of both the Sicilian and Calabrian factions of Canadian organized crime, including representatives from Hamilton, York Region, Ottawa, Montreal and Sherbrooke, Quebec, were breaking bread together as if they were on some mob version of homecoming week.

Among the three hundred guests were several members of the Commisso crime family. It was no secret that they didn't mix well with Vito, but that wasn't the thing that would have shocked him most about the gathering. One of the welcomed guests at the Sicilian celebration was Salvatore (Sam) Calautti, the hard-core 'Ndrangheta hit man who was the suspected killer of Gaetano (Guy) Panepinto and a prime suspect in four other unsolved mob murders—one of which was the slaying of Vito's father.

The fact that the Sicilians could entertain a Calabrian hit man who was believed to have killed their most esteemed member was breathtaking. That they could sit down and socialize also with Calautti's bosses and confederates suggested a fundamental change in the underworld. Blood ties didn't seem to matter any longer.