Business or Blood (32 page)

Just a few months earlier, Applebaum was the man who was expected to deal with the city's potholes. Now he was facing criminal charges and the axle-bending potholes had got worse. The seriousness of the city's deterioration was driven home on August 5, 2013, when a backhoe collapsed into a sinkhole in the downtown intersection of Sainte-Catherine West and Guy. The symbolism of Montreal's decay was impossible to ignore.

Other troubling symbolism came when the Charbonneau inquiry was shown a photo of high-ranking Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec union boss Jean Lavallée and construction magnate Tony Accurso together on a vacation trip to the Virgin Islands in 2005. Lavallée, who ran the FTQ's construction wing, testified that he and Accurso had been friends for three decades. The vacation photo showed the union boss literally getting his back scrubbed by Accurso, as Lavallée stood waist-deep in the water, puffing a cigar. At the time the photo was taken, Lavallée was a board member of the federation's billion-dollar investment fund, which helped finance several Accursoled projects. At the time the photo was shown, Accurso was facing charges for fraud and influence peddling.

Lavallée testified that he saw nothing wrong with taking about a half-dozen week-long trips as a guest aboard Accurso's luxury yacht,
Touch
. He balked at the suggestion that the trips swayed him to grant contracts to his friend.

“I didn't think it was a sin to go on a friend's boat,” Lavallée said.

Martin Brett's writing from the 1950s seemed to echo through the halls of the inquiry, especially his description of the “smirking abnormal” balance between the city's respectable veneer and its underworld, “probably the most subtle organization of its type in North America, tentacles reaching anywhere and everywhere, with pressure all the way.”

It should surprise no one when a yappy cocaine aficionado utters some shocking words at a party. But one day in January 2013, in a high-end Vaughan restaurant, this particular man's voice was perhaps the only strong pro-Vito one in a sea of supporters of Platinum Sports Book, and he didn't even look nervous. Platinum had, of course, once been Vito's fiefdom, before Moreno Gallo ceded control of it to his fellow Calabrians. Now, Vito's man was acting like someone with an unusual level of comfort and confidence, even for a man whose nostrils had been liberally dusted with white powder.

He had said something breathtaking in its simplicity and strength. They were words that affirmed Vito's genius for consensus building, even in these most difficult of times. The man said that Vito wasn't looking for money from them, related to Platinum. They could keep whatever they had made. That was a triviality. And Vito certainly didn't need their love. But Vito did need something from them, and it wasn't negotiable. Vito demanded their loyalty and a clear path to seek justice. For Vito now, revenge and justice were fused into one thing, and nothing short of his own death would stop him from achieving it.

With those magic words, Platinum SB quietly passed back from Calabrian into Sicilian control. It was an easy decision to make. The sports book operators had grown weary of the penny-pinching ways of the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta members, and the murders of Smiling Joe Di Maulo et al. showed that Vito's wrong side wasn't such a safe place to be.

“Whoever wants to switch to us, they don't have to pay money,” was the emissary's message. “They don't have to share.”

Those words had more power than bullets. With their utterance, Vito became once again the most powerful person in Canada's underworld.
His message, and the locale where he chose to have it spoken, was a direct affront to the 'Ndrangheta, who had played a guiding role in the attacks on his family. By the time Vito's man sauntered out of the restaurant, some of the York Region 'Ndrangheta were targets themselves, surrounded by people whose loyalty had just been purchased back by Vito—for free.

The words also signalled that something had changed profoundly about Vito. Before the murders of his father and eldest son, Vito was a man who always put business first. He was the man who created money-making opportunities out of chaos and blood. Now, Vito had all the money he would ever need. But without his eldest son to pass his businesses on to, and without his father to impress, his fortune had an empty feel to it. What could he offer his widowed mother that would make her remaining days less painful? All Vito had left was life in the present, and he didn't want to share a second of that time with his enemies, unless that second was spent killing them.

At the time of the Platinum SB party, the Bonanno family's credibility hung at a historic low, never having recovered from the defection of its former boss Joe Massino. The family's failure to avenge the murder of Salvatore Montagna had called particular attention to their weakness. In Ontario, the New York City crime families with the most influence now were the Luccheses and Gambinos, and to a lesser extent the Genoveses. The old Magaddino family of Buffalo was attempting a revival through loansharking at Casino Niagara on the American border. This revived La Cosa Nostra was more loosely structured now, and more of a network than a tight organization. Contacts, expertise and experience were shared across organizational lines, for mutual benefit. These weren't particularly friendly waters for Vito, but he had navigated far worse.

T
he surveillance team of
carabinieri
caught sight of its target at 9:25 a.m. on Friday, September 14, 2012. They were stepping off the direct flight from Madrid to Palermo's Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino, named after martyred judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, childhood friends who were murdered in 1992 by the island's Mafia.

The police target that day was former Toronto and Montreal resident Juan Ramon Paz Fernandez, a.k.a. Johnny Bravo, Joey Bravo and James Shaddock. The night before his arrival in Sicily, he called his local contact Pietro Sorci, asking him to show up at the airport to give him a ride. Fernandez wanted Sorci to arrive alone. Clearly, there were things he wanted to discuss in confidence.

Fernandez was moving fast and travelling light since his release from prison the previous April, after serving a ten-year term for an assortment of underworld offences around Toronto, including murder conspiracy and drug trafficking. After being deported to Spain, he quickly embarked on a trip to South and Central America, where he had tried to secure cocaine deals with associates of Vito's family. Now, as he landed on the island of Vito's birth, it was easy to think that Vito—a month before his release from Colorado, at this point—had devised an exit plan for him that would allow Fernandez to keep making money for the family.

The
carabinieri
had been tipped off by the RCMP about Fernandez's imminent arrival. The surveillance team followed Sorci's Hyundai Veloster along the only highway from the airport to Palermo. It was the same route that Falcone had travelled two decades earlier, until his armour-plated Fiat Croma reached a spot where the Mafia had hidden thirteen metal drums containing 350 kilograms of explosives in a drain-pipe. From a vantage point high on the white sandhills overlooking the highway, amidst the prickly pear and olive trees and cane thickets, a Mafioso pressed a detonator. With that small movement, he made instant martyrs—
cadaveri eccellenti
, illustrious corpses—of Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards.

There had been a time when the arrival of a Spaniard in Sicily brought terror. The Spanish Inquisition raged for almost two centuries there, beginning in 1592 with Tomás de Torquemada, the First Grand Inquisitor of Spain. So great was the terror that
mi spagnu—spagnu
referring to Spain—means “I have a fear” in the local dialect.

The
carabinieri
weren't fearful of this Spaniard, but they were wary. They kept pace as Sorci turned the Hyundai along Via Tornatore towards Bagheria, a Mafia-ridden town in Palermo province. They lost sight of the car for a brief time and then caught sight of it again, shortly before 10:40 a.m., when Fernandez was dropped off at his apartment at 18 Via Tornatore. At 4:30 p.m., the Hyundai pulled up outside a fruit and vegetable shop on Via Nino Bixio. The shop was run by forty-nine-year-old Sergio Rosario Flamia, who was considered by police to be the treasurer of the Mafia family of Giacinto (Gino) Di Salvo, top Mafia boss in the
mandamento
, or district, of Bagheria, which also included the towns of Altavilla Milicia, Casteldaccia, Villabate and Ficarazzi. Di Salvo's group ran a network of extortion and narcotics. Sorci got out of the car and went inside to talk with Flamia.

The next day, September 14, police overheard Sorci via wiretap in conversation with Carmela Starita, a woman living in Perugia whose husband, Luigi Scuotto, was in prison north of Naples for drug trafficking and possession. Sorci reached her at an unlisted number registered to a Senegalese drug trafficker living in Naples. Sorci talked about “it” and said “it” would arrive in twenty to twenty-five days. In case there
was any doubt about what “it” was, Sorci asked the woman about the market price of
fumo
—slang for marijuana—in Perugia, a city known for rich international students at the University of Foreigners and the most enthusiastic per capita illegal drug consumption in Italy. Starita said she'd ask someone the next day about the going rate for
fumo
.

That evening at 10:33, Sorci and Starita were on the phone again talking about the fierce Spaniard who had just arrived in their midst.

“He is fifty-eight years old,” Sorci said, overestimating Fernandez's age by two years, then added that Fernandez looked much younger.

Indeed, Fernandez appeared a decade younger than his real age, although he was a bit thicker around the waist than during his heyday. His arms were also a little thinner than when he had posed for that photo with Hulk Hogan back in the 1990s. Still, Fernandez remained a fit man and a black belt in karate—not someone you'd want angry at you in an alley.

“Yes, yes,” Carmela said. “He looks more like a forty-year-old.”

As Carmela laughed, Sorci said Fernandez hadn't slept in two days. “He kept me half an hour to talk, then you know what he says?” Before Carmela could answer, Sorci answered his own question: “ ‘Now I'll go to the gym!' ” Sorci expressed his amazement at the Spaniard's energy, using an impossible-to-translate local phrase
—buttana di tua sorella
—meaning roughly “whore your sister,” then explained, “Fuck went to the gym for two hours.”

Fernandez planned to settle down in a region whose name carried connotations of Mafia as strong in pop culture as in reality. Bagheria featured prominently in the
Godfather
movie trilogy, as Al Pacino's Michael Corleone character hid out there under the wing of a politically connected Mafia leader for two years after he killed a corrupt New York cop.

Not surprisingly, Bagheria was also a real-life stronghold of the remains of the Mafia-friendly Christian Democrat Party, which had run Italy for four decades. It sat in the centre of what locals called “the Triangle of Death,” between the mountains and the Tyrrhenian coast. Once a country playground for Palermo's princes, it was a place of fantastical stories of abuses of power, the oddest of which were often true.
One of the city's prime tourist attractions was the baroque Villa of Monsters, built in 1715 for the Prince of Palagonia. It was decorated with hundreds of stone statues resembling handbags, dragons, griffins, hunchbacks, soldiers and centaurs, as well as a particularly hideous one that was said to be a caricature of his promiscuous wife. Chair pillows inside had been spiked with thorns, for the prince's amusement when guests were seated.

Bagheria was also home to Sicily's first “illustrious corpse,” Marchese Emanuele Notarbartolo, an incorruptible director of the Bank of Sicily. On February 1, 1893, two well-dressed assassins stabbed him to death on the train to Palermo. The man behind the slaying was Raffaele Palizzolo, a former Palermo city councillor and a Member of Parliament. Bagheria also had the dubious distinction of being the only town in Italy to name a square after a suspected Mafioso, Pasquale Alfano. Following a public outcry, the square was renamed in 1993 for
cadavere eccellente
Beppe Montana, a police commissioner who was assassinated by the Mafia.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, left-leaning youth began plastering the town with Wanted posters for seventy-three-year-old Mafia leader Bernardo (by then known as The Ghost) Provenzano, who had lived underground there for more than four decades. Police relied upon descriptions from informers and a police Identikit to create a portrait of a thin, grim man with a scar on his neck, who looked like a menacing farmer. Under the sketch the posters read, “Don't Be Afraid, Turn In the Mafia.”

Anti-Mafia prosecutor Pier Luigi Vigna appeared on national television to call Provenzano “the invisible man” and read one of the notes written by the boss to guide his men. In the missive, the invisible man referred to an old nail factory in Bagheria that had once been a heroin production facility for Leonardo Greco, a former local Mafia boss. At the time of the letter's writing, the factory served as Provenzano's execution chamber. Provenzano wrote on the paper: “If you can, see if they've managed to put any cameras at the bottom end of the factory, close in or far off. Tell everyone not to talk inside the place or close to the machines. Even at home, they mustn't talk loudly.”

Much of the slaughter in the old nail factory took place in the 1980s, after Provenzano graduated from being a senior member of the Corleone family to interim
capo di tutti capi
, or overall boss of the Mafia in Sicily. In one court case, former loyalist and one-time school-teacher Antonino Giuffrè called it a “factory of death” and continued: “Horrible things happened there.… Many people went there never to return home again.” Giuffrè described how victims were strangled and tossed into drums of acid, then buried in nearby fields. He wasn't able to forget “the nauseous stench of bodies dissolved in acid.” He told authorities that the Mafia thrived because of corruption, in a description that would have had resonance in Montreal: “It's very simple,” Giuffrè said. “We are the fish and politics is the water.”