Business or Blood (6 page)

“The Rizzutos were under Cuntrera and Caruana at that time,” Scaletta later said. “They were like actors in the sense that everyone should know what they were, they advertise … and at that time to be part of the Mafia was something important … they showed off their affiliation with the Mafia.” The person who seemed to impress Scaletta the most was the matriarch, Libertina. “Who commanded more in the Rizzuto family was the wife [Libertina] … because she was the daughter of a mafioso, a Mafia boss, in the town of origin, which is Cattolica Eraclea. The wife's name is Manno. Her father was the Mafia boss in that area, all the people from Cattolica who went to Canada were funded by Manno. He advanced money for the airfare, airline tickets.…

“Then I gradually discovered that almost everyone trafficked in drugs, with the difference that the Rizzutos moved out money from Canada in the suitcases.… The laundered money returned to Canada because Nicolò had a fake document from the Venezuelan Ministry of Finance showing that he had earned the money honestly, and they returned [the money] to Canada.… Once I carried in a suitcase $300,000.… The Rizzutos told me that I had to bring this money into Canada, but I did not know if it was legal or not.”

The Rizzutos also had the ability to obtain documents from Aruba that stated their money had been legally won in a casino there. Aruba was a popular spot for the Mafia, as it was close to the northern shores of Colombia and Venezuela. It also attracted thousands of tourists, which made it easy to get lost in the crowds and profitable to set up businesses such as hotels and casinos to grab the money visitors were all too happy to throw away.

The slaying of Nick Jr. was Canada's most audacious Mafia murder in a generation. Montrealers expected mobsters to be murdered, and so there was seldom real shock when the guns came out. The last time a gangland hit had generated such attention from the public or within the
milieu
was on January 22, 1978, the evening one of Nicolò's men put a shotgun to the back of Paolo Violi's head. That murder came at 7:32 p.m., a time marked with a floral tribute at Violi's funeral. That pull of the trigger, as Violi sat playing cards with supposed friends at the Reggio Bar at 5880 Jean-in Saint-Léonard, marked the culmination of the Violis' feud with Nicolò and the beginning of the Rizzuto family's era at the top level of Canadian organized crime.

Violi had been cautioned by police well in advance that his life was in danger. Neither Nicolò nor Vito had been in Canada when it happened, but they were still central players in the crime. They also were out of the country when someone turned a shotgun on Violi's
consigliere
Pietro (Zio Petrino, “Uncle Pete”) Sciara, as he walked with his wife from a Montreal theatre playing
The Godfather
in Italian on Valentine's Day 1976. The Rizzutos were still in Venezuela a year later when Violi's brother Francesco was shot dead in the office of his Montreal import-export business.

The last gasp of the war between the Rizzutos and the Violis came in 1980, with the sniper slaying of Rocco Violi as he sat at the kitchen table of his home on Houel Street in Saint-Léonard. Authorities speculated that the assassin was perched on the roof of a nearby building, waiting for a clear shot with his .308 rifle. There had been some twenty murders to that point in the one-sided Mafia war, but no one considered Rocco Violi a mobster. His murder resulted from an abundance of caution by Nicolò. Ever the one for tidiness, Nicolò wasn't taking the chance that Rocco might pursue a vendetta to avenge his two murdered brothers. There was no way of knowing then that the final hit that brought the Rizzutos to power would come back to haunt them when they fell from grace three decades later.

With his figurative housecleaning finished in preparation for his return to Montreal, Nicolò commissioned an actual house, a custom-built mansion on Antoine-Berthelet Avenue in the Ahuntsic–Cartierville
borough, on a tiny cul-de-sac alongside new homes for Vito and other trusted relatives. Their previous Montreal home had been one in a string of cramped semis on Des Vannes Street, Saint-Léonard, near Jean-Talon East and Lacordaire Boulevard. Now, on Antoine-Berthelet, only families who were close to the Rizzutos would live close to the Rizzutos. Vito lived two doors down from Nicolò, with his house registered in the name of his wife, Giovanna Cammalleri. Between the father and son was the home of Vito's sister, Maria, and her husband, Paolo Renda. Soon the little street was called “Mafia Row” by everyone but its residents.

During the summer of 1982, Nicolò, who was still living in Venezuela, was visiting Milan on a business trip with Giuseppe Bono. Bono was boss of the Bolognetta family near Palermo, but lived in New York City at the time. The Rizzutos were setting up their new homes on Antoine-Berthelet, and Nicolò arranged for the shipment of two or three containers of furniture from Italy to Montreal. When the containers landed in North America, initially in New Jersey, a drug detection dog reacted as if there were drugs inside. Police searched the containers but couldn't find the suspected stash.

In 1984, Nicolò left Venezuela and the family's transition back to Montreal was complete. Trusted associate Raynald Desjardins settled into a luxury home in nearby Rivière des Prairies. Desjardins and Mafia Row residents such as Vito and Nicolò didn't bother to erect fences with security gates. They knew that no one would dare take the short walk from the street to their front doors to attack them.

For a quarter century, that confidence seemed enough to keep them safe. The slaying of Nick Jr. changed that. Who might come knocking now was anyone's guess.

T
he hundreds of mourners who filed into Notre-Dame-de-la-Défense church at Henri-Julien Avenue and Dante Street on the morning of Nick Rizzuto Jr.'s funeral passed by a statue that commemorates “victims of all wars” and under a fresco of Il Duce, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, surrounded by fascist dignitaries, saints and angels. It seemed that anyone who was anyone in the Montreal mob was buried out of that ninety-year-old church in Little Italy, beneath the image of a dictator hell-bent on destroying the Mafia tradition. Even the services for the Rizzutos' avowed enemies and victims, the Violi brothers, were held under that idealized portrayal of Italian power from a generation before.

Nick Jr.'s widow and two children sat in the front pews, along with his mother and surviving siblings, Bettina and Leonardo. Nicolò and Libertina sat with their daughter, Maria Rizzuto Renda, and the family's lawyer, Loris Cavaliere. Nicolò's parole conditions were relaxed for the funeral of his namesake grandson; for this day he would not be forbidden from associating with known criminals. Pews filled quickly and many mourners stood in the aisles. Muscular men in trench coats and black gloves acted as security guards, briskly escorting two outsiders from the church. Police filmed those who came and left while hundreds of others took in the spectacle from the sidewalk.
The most notable mourner on the day that Nick Jr. was laid to rest in his gold-coloured casket was the one who didn't attend: his father.

The service was said in Italian, and when it was over, police and mobsters retired to their respective quarters to hone their theories about who was behind the first killing of a Montreal Rizzuto during their entire thirty years in power. Then it would be a race to see who could get to the suspected killers first—for an arrest or another funeral.

Not so long ago, a leaf couldn't rustle in the
milieu
without Vito knowing about it. Now his people were scrambling for any particle of information that might give them a clue to solving his son's death. There was precious little real information to glean from press reports: the killing was precise, as the assassin apparently waited near Nick Jr.'s Mercedes for him to emerge from a building. Witnesses reported a volley of four shots, like fireworks, a pause, and then the final two. Next came the sound of screeching tires, and the killer was gone. The murder weapon was discovered near the scene of the crime. The handgun didn't yield any clues, but none were expected from it. The fact that a black man was seen running away from Nick Jr.'s body didn't mean much, even if he was the killer. Almost all crime groups contracted their killings. The key was to learn who had ordered the hit, not who carried it out.

The murder underlined how little control Vito and his family had left on the streets. Immediately after Vito's arrest in 2004, the man left to sort things out in the crime family's day-to-day affairs was Francesco (
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Frank) Arcadi. He quickly alienated the black street gangs with whom Vito had worked so hard to nurture relationships. Arcadi was then scooped up during the 2006 Colisée raids and remained behind bars, leaving the family's leadership even thinner—though even before Arcadi's arrest some believed leadership in the family to be weaker than it looked.

Doubts had been surfacing in Vito's group about
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Frank's loyalty. Arcadi was Calabrian and the Rizzutos were Sicilian. He was supposed to be the Rizzutos' ambassador to the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta in Ontario, but some worried that he'd become too chummy with the other side. Perhaps, while awaiting extradition in a Montreal jail, Vito
had heard about a weekend in the winter of 2005 before
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Frank's arrest, when he met in Hamilton with members of the Violi family. Even two decades after the Rizzutos' slaughter of their rivals, they and the Violis remained the Canadian mob version of the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the Capulets and the Montagues. So the question naturally arose: what possible reason could
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Frank have for sitting down with Vito's avowed enemies on their home turf? And why would Vito have to learn about it from others and not from
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Frank himself?

With Arcadi locked up, millionaire baker Moreno Gallo might still be on Vito's side and willing to lead the family's operations, but, like Arcadi, Gallo was Calabrian. He was born in Rovito, Calabria, and he had, a generation ago, been close to Paolo Violi. Since then, Gallo had been particularly close to Joe Di Maulo of the Montreal mob's Calabrian wing. And even if Gallo could prove true to Vito's side, after his conviction for murdering a man in the 1970s, his parole conditions made it difficult for him to help in a war, as in typical fashion they forbade him from associating with known criminals.

Nicolò could try to step up his role in the family's leadership, but he was old and tired and preferred his grappa to the hurly-burly of the streets.
Consigliere
Paolo Renda was behind bars for the next few years thanks to Project Colisée. So was adviser Rocco (Sauce) Sollecito, who was a trusted friend, even though he wasn't from Sicily either, but from the southern mainland region of Apulia. The crime family's prospects for filling its leadership vacuum were looking grim.

In the absence of real evidence, plenty of theories emerged about who killed Nick Jr. It certainly felt as though an insider was responsible: someone who knew Nick Jr.'s routines would have expected to see him park his black Mercedes in that area of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce (NDG), near the corner of Upper Lachine Road and Wilson Avenue. It was close to both the home of Nick Jr.'s mistress and the office of FTM Construction, owned by Nick Jr.'s business associate in land development, Antonio (Tony) Magi. Magi had invisible enemies of his own, having survived an ambush the previous year in another section of NDG. The corner was also near a controversial housing development
built by one of Magi's companies that had links to the Rizzutos. The development had raised eyebrows for what appeared to be a series of irregularities between the builders and city officials.

Was the hit arranged because of a business deal gone sour? Perhaps Nick Jr. had grown impatient over money he felt was owed to him and squeezed someone a little too hard, which was not his specialty. A more frightening theory was that somewhere behind the killer stood the 'Ndrangheta. The Ontario 'Ndrangheta bosses were trouble enough for Vito's group, but since its inception decades earlier the Calabrian Mafia had grown to a global breadth the Montreal clan could never match, with interests ranging from drug trafficking, construction, extortion and loansharking to environmental waste disposal scams, weapons trafficking and prostitution. Besides Italy and Canada, the 'Ndrangheta had become strong in Australia, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Colombia, Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. Law enforcement estimated the group was bringing in 44 billion euros worldwide a year.

Despite its extraordinary reach, the sprawling 'Ndrangheta felt more like a ghost haunting Vito's world, a potent force that was often felt but almost never seen. If Nick Jr. was dead at the hands of the 'Ndrangheta, or someone operating with its support, Vito and his family members could expect life to get far worse—and perhaps also shorter.