Business or Blood (9 page)

The assassins bolted down the cobblestone streets of the old quarter. They had doffed their masks and slowed down by the time they passed the nearby Intercontinental and Westin hotels, perhaps not realizing their movements were captured by video surveillance cameras as they continued on towards Saint-Antoine Street. Video cameras also recorded images of the black Dodge Caravan van in which they drove off.

Within ninety minutes, Joseph was huddling with trusted associates—including a reputed assassin nicknamed “Gunman.” The meeting alone gave police enough to arrest Joseph; like so many of his
peers in the
milieu
, he was out on bail conditions that forbade any association with gang members. In his pockets, police found what they considered to be a to-do list and some voodoo prayers. A priority task on the list was finding photos of the men Joseph believed were trying to kill him.

Jean-Claude Gauthier, a Montreal police street-gang specialist, told Joseph's bail hearing that Joseph was suspected of a quarter century of misdeeds that included attempted murder, arson, assault, sexual assault, obstruction of justice, identity theft and inciting prostitution. Joseph only smiled when asked if he was worried for his life, replying “It's part of life and there's nothing I can do about that.”

Police speculated that the attempted hit on Joseph was some sort of Rizzuto-sponsored payback for the murder of Nick Jr. There were some holes in that theory—which presumed that Joseph had either masterminded the hit on Nick Jr. or co-operated with the killers—but it was plausible. Hit men working for the Rizzutos were generally more efficient, economical shots than whoever sprayed Joseph's Montreal boutique. Shoddy marksmanship was more of a Toronto street-gang thing. Also, Joseph had plenty of problems of his own that didn't necessarily involve Vito and which made him eminently killable in the eyes of many others in the
milieu
who had little or nothing to do with the imprisoned godfather.

Chatter emerged that Agostino Cuntrera would step in and try to calm things down. The Cuntreras had the reputation of being great moneymakers but not so good at the muscle end of crime. Sixty-six-year-old Cuntrera understandably preferred his mansion's massive wine cellar to the chaos of playing street boss amidst the volatile likes of Joseph and Goodridge. The last time the public had seen him, he was a disco-age mobster, appearing in court wearing an Edwardian suit with an open shirt and a white man's Afro, pleading guilty to conspiring to murder Paolo Violi. He was a tired senior citizen now, but someone had to stand up for Vito. Perhaps Cuntrera could at least gather some useful information and staunch the bleeding. In a world where information was power, Vito and his family were flying in the dark.

W
hen Raynald Desjardins finally walked free on statutory release in June 2004 after a decade in prison for drug trafficking, he grandly announced to the press that he was no longer a criminal. From this point onwards, he was a “construction entrepreneur.” How he had mastered the building trades while behind bars was left unsaid, but there was no question that the former waiter had the money to launch a new career.

By that time, Vito was already behind bars in Quebec, fighting extradition to the United States. Many years had passed since their golden days in Italy's fashion capital of Milan, when the two men arranged multi-tonne drug deals for eye-popping sums of money. Desjardins and Vito had been like brothers, but now they didn't even speak.

Also walking free that summer was Desjardins's old associate Salvatore Cazzetta, one of the few outlaw bikers without a nickname. Cazzetta was a founder of the Rock Machine Motorcycle Club, along with his younger brother Giovanni. Even with his greying ponytail and ZZ Top–style goatee, Salvatore Cazzetta had a keen business sense and natural leadership ability. He also had very few enemies for an outlaw biker leader, especially one whose club had waged a bloody, prolonged war with the Hells Angels in the late 1990s and early 2000s
for control of the downtown Montreal cocaine trade. He had spent most of the war behind bars in Florida, meaning he hadn't been trying to kill Hells Angels and Hells Angels hadn't been trying to kill him.

Cazzetta had been close to Quebec Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher in the early 1980s. Back then, both were members of the SS, a small outlaw biker gang that cast a big shadow in the east end of the island of Montreal. Boucher moved on to the Hells Angels, and
les Hells
would have been happy to give Cazzetta one of their winged skull “death head” patches as well, but he declined. Cazzetta may have been dissuaded by a dispute between the Lennoxville and Laval charters of the club. The Lennoxville Angels suspected the Laval bikers of partying hard with drugs that were meant for sale. So Lennoxville invited members of Laval to a party—and then beat them to death with ball-peen hammers. Two months later, the decomposing bodies of five Laval Angels surfaced in the St. Lawrence River, wrapped in sleeping bags. Cazzetta reportedly considered the slaughter of fellow members to be an unforgivable breach of the biker code of brotherhood. To his mind, biker brotherhood was a forever thing, and his Rock Machine wore rings bearing their motto, À La Vie À La Mort, roughly translating to, “As We Live, So We Shall Die.”

As Cazzetta returned to the
milieu
, Boucher—who had never lost his respect for Cazzetta—was gone and Vito was leaving. Cazzetta had a lot in common with Vito. He had strength, charisma and contacts. He had the diplomatic skills to find consensus between groups that gladly killed over trivial differences. And most of all, Cazzetta thought big when it came to money-making.

The bust that kept him out of the Quebec biker wars in the nineties stemmed from his role in a ring that tried to import 4,900 kilograms of cocaine into Canada through the States at a rate of 998 kilograms a month. A member of Cazzetta's ring turned police agent and introduced the biker to an undercover drug enforcement officer in Florida, who posed as an intermediary for Colombian cocaine traffickers. The undercover officer arranged to show Cazzetta and his confederates 1,000 kilos of cocaine, which he offered for $10,000 per kilo. Even on Florida's drug-washed streets, that was a first. Never before had so
much cocaine been shown to suspects in a sting. Such a tactic would have been considered entrapment, and illegal, in Canada.

When the arrest warrants were drawn up, Cazzetta was nowhere to be found. He remained that way for fourteen months, before police finally caught up with him in May 1994 at a pit-bull farm in Fort Erie, Ontario, along the American border near Buffalo. Police actually had him in their grasp a month earlier, when he was pulled over in the Niagara Region for suspected drunk driving. It wasn't until police later checked his fingerprints that they realized who had just slipped through their grasp.

Cazzetta was transferred back to Quebec from Florida in 2002. When he was deposited at Archambault penitentiary, he quickly got involved in the drug trade, although, to his credit, he didn't use intimidation or threats. His prison file stated that he wasn't a particularly impulsive or aggressive person, but displayed anti-social traits such as narcissism and passive-aggression. In a description that could apply equally to many of us, his prison file also said he valued personal gratification over the greater social good. All of this made him a strong candidate to reoffend.

In June 2004, Cazzetta was up for automatic release from prison. It must have felt good, since Florida authorities had sought a life term for him less than a decade before. On his way out the door, he told the parole board that he wasn't a violent man and that his Rock Machine wasn't intended to be a criminal organization, but simply a group of entrepreneurs who sold clothing and biker accessories in boutiques. He vaguely told the board that he now intended to go into business, and blamed his involvement in the drug trade on his own personal chemical problems, when he took “a little of everything and alcohol.… I wanted to get rich quick. That's what got me into trouble.”

In June 2005, another of Desjardins's associates was released from prison after a decade behind bars for his own cocaine-smuggling plot. That month, Desjardins attended a party at the Jaguar bar for Giovanni (Johnny) Bertolo. Like Cazzetta, he had proven solid in the face of serious prison time. Before his cocaine bust, Bertolo had worked with Desjardins's brother Jacques as a loan shark, putting out money on the
street with 10 percent weekly interest to struggling business people and degenerate gamblers. He didn't soften after he was the target of a murder plot in the 1990s, and his would-be killer was arrested before he could do the job. When Bertolo felt the cold steel of handcuffs on his wrists two days before Christmas 1992—busted for a scheme to import fifty-eight kilograms of cocaine—he could have pointed a finger at men whom police would much rather have had in their net: Raynald Desjardins and other higher-ups in the Rizzuto food chain, Vito included. Instead, Bertolo quietly took the fall, as a solid guy does.

Upon his release, Bertolo was shocked to learn that his old drug turf was gone. Frank Arcadi had handed it over to someone else in Vito's organization. That was understandable. Business had to continue. Addicts want their drugs. Mobsters want their profits. What shocked Bertolo was the news that he wouldn't be getting it back. So much for loyalty. So much for keeping his mouth shut and protecting Vito. Compounding the insult, Arcadi made no accommodation to give him something else in return. No one said life in the underworld was fair, but sometimes it sucked more than others.

Bertolo's criminal record didn't stop him from finding work as a union representative for a district council within the Fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du Québec (FTQ). A cynic might quip that the nasty criminal record looked good on his curriculum vitae in the building trades. (Quebec is hardly a distinct society in terms of corruption, though it might be unique in Canada in its willingness to expose corruption and use anti-gang legislation to fight it.) Bertolo's new job involved dropping in on construction sites to make sure collective agreements were being respected. By all reports, he was good at the job and put in long hours. Still, the feeling that he had been cheated festered inside him, and soon there was word that Bertolo was moon-lighting by moving drugs on his old turf, in defiance of Arcadi.

On August 11, 2006, Bertolo was leaving a gym on Henri-Bourassa Boulevard East in Rivière des Prairies. The forty-six-year-old had plans to fly to Italy with his son later that day. Before he could step into his black BMW X5 SUV, a hail of bullets ended his life. The hit was clearly a professional job, carried out by three men who fled in a stolen Mazda
Protegé. It was abandoned on Marc-Aurèle-Fortin Boulevard, torched in typical Montreal gangland style.

There was some talk that Bertolo's murder had been ordered by Vito's group but carried out by Colombians. It did have a certain Colombian signature, with a spray of bullets to the legs followed by fatal shots in the chest and throat. The Colombians were freer with their lead distribution than old-school Montreal mobsters, who often did their deadly jobs with three shots or fewer. Shortly after Bertolo's death, a representative of the New York Bonanno family arrived in Montreal. Whatever that meant, it was hard not to see the hand of Vito's organization in Bertolo's hit, as the body wasn't handled by the Complexe Funéraire Loreto funeral home, as befitted a good soldier for the family.

News of the murder enraged Desjardins, who considered Bertolo a personal friend. It was also an ear-popping wake-up call. If this was the treatment a once-solid soldier could expect from Vito's group, what sort of man wouldn't fight back?

V
ito had been in custody awaiting extradition for only a few months when things started to go horribly wrong in Toronto. As if being locked up in a Montreal jail wasn't trouble enough, he was about to endure more grief, and much of it would arrive through the misbehaviour of Sicilian mobster Michele (The American) Modica and Toronto restaurateur Salvatore (Sam) Calautti.

Wherever he landed, Modica proved to be a big money-earner and a consummate management challenge. In the 1980s, he worked for the Gambino family while living illegally in the USA, until he was pinched for drug trafficking. He faced deportation in 2000 after his prison stint and the Gambinos tried hard to find a way to keep him in their ranks. Some men can quietly hide, but Modica was too loud, well known and abrasive to fade into the background. So the Gambinos worked out an arrangement with the Sicilian mob in Toronto and Modica headed north, where he would live for a year under the names Carlo Martoni and Antonio Reta. Vito's associate, blue-eyed Peter Scarcella of York Region, just north of Toronto, took him under his wing and floated him $300,000. The idea was for Modica to put the money out on the street for loans, and things would have gone swimmingly had Modica simply stuck to the plan. Instead of pumping his grubstake into loansharking, which promised a stable monthly return of $30,000, Modica
invested in the drug trade, with potentially much higher rewards but equally higher risks.

Eventually Modica had screwed over Scarcella and most of his other Canadian hosts, as was his way. Bit by bit, he muscled his way into debt collection, drug trafficking and running illegal gambling machines, and seemed to think it was his birthright to rip off and even slap some small-time local mobsters.

Understandably, few tears were shed across the GTA underworld when Modica's Canadian adventure went sour. On June 19, 2001, police charged him with possession of stolen property. He volunteered to go back to Italy at his own expense in return for a stay in proceedings of the outstanding charges.

To all concerned, Modica's compromise seemed too good to be true. It was. In April 2003, he snuck back into Canada using a forged passport and quickly re-established himself with Michael Marrese, a round-faced, avuncular-looking man who specialized in stealing people's homes through mortgage fraud. Modica also felt a bond with Sam Calautti, and the feeling was mutual. Calautti had a split personality of sorts. Diners at his Italian restaurant on Dufferin Street in west-end Toronto would have been shaken to learn that the same soft-spoken man who gloried in serving them such tasty comfort food was also a hit man who revelled in inflicting extreme pain on the streets.